Chapter 1[1]

Why Do People Commit Genocide and What Can We Do To Stop It?

Dr. Gregory Stanton[2]

Abstract

The first chapter, emanating from the keynote lecture at the 2012 conference, addresses the ten stages of genocide, noting how the commission of genocide requires individuals to become willing and able to kill fellow human beings.  It describes, both in generic terms and in reference to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsis, the process by which individuals did so, and the social and political forces that facilitated that transition.

Kigali, Rwanda – 18 December 2012

During the twentieth century, over a hundred million people were murdered by their own governments.  That is more deaths than from all wars combined. Deaths from genocide and political mass murder were only exceeded by deaths from pandemic diseases like malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, yellow fever, and influenza.

We should treat genocide like a disease. We now have studied its epidemiology. We know where and when it is most likely to break out. And we know the stages by which it develops and kills a society.  We are beginning to learn how to prevent it.

Genocide is committed by people who have lost sight of our common humanity. All humans belong to one family. The same God made us all.

But we are born into millions of social groups, speak thousands of languages, belong to hundreds of nations, and have scores of religions.

We think there are many races, but God made only one race: the human race.

Genocide is committed by us because we become ethnocentric, racist, nationalistic, or religiously intolerant. Genocide is idolatry. We worship our ethnic group, or race, or nation, or religion instead of the God who made us. We build golden altars and sacrifice human beings upon them.  Instead of blessing all humans as God’s creations, we bathe our weapons with their blood.

Countries at Risk

Statistical studies by social scientists have now outlined the epidemiological risk factors for genocide:[3]

1. The most predictive is whether a country is engaged in an ongoing civil or international war.  War and genocide are not mutually exclusive.  Most genocides occur during wars.

2. The second most predictive factor is whether a country has experienced a genocide in the past that has gone unpunished. Such impunity leads to three times the likelihood of genocide in the future.

3. The third factor is whether the country is governed by an ethnically exclusive elite.  Does one ethnic group exclude others from full citizenship in the country?

4. The fourth factor is whether the ruling class has an exclusionary ideology, such as Nazism or Communism or Islamic fundamentalism, in which only a small elite have the right to rule.

5. The fifth factor is whether the regime is autocratic. The more autocratic, the more likely it is to commit genocide.  Totalitarian regimes are the most likely to commit genocide.

6. Sixth, is closure to relations with the outside world. Hermit kingdoms like North Korea, China under Mao, or Cambodia under Pol Pot are much more likely to murder their own citizens.

7. Since developing her six factor model, Harff has added a seventh factor: massive violations of human rights such as widespread torture, extrajudicial killings, and arbitrary arrests and imprisonment.

We know the seven risk factors. The anti-genocide movement should work against war and for punishment of perpetrators. We should press for broadly-based democratic governments. We should oppose ideologies of racial or class superiority. We should favour free trade and free speech.  We should strongly oppose violations of fundamental human rights by any regime.

But these factors cannot tell us when genocide is likely to happen, and therefore are of limited use in prevention.

That is why I developed a model of the genocidal process in 1996 that I called “The Eight Stages of Genocide.” Since then I have added two more stages. Genocide is a process that develops in ten stages that are predictable but not inexorable. At each stage, preventive measures can stop it. The process is not linear.  It is important to remember that in most genocides, many stages operate simultaneously.  (The most common misinterpretation of this model is thinking of it as linear.) This is a logical modal that is useful for thinking about the genocidal process and what we can do to prevent or stop it.

Today in our panel discussions we will be concentrating on how we can combat three of the most important of these stages: Classification, Dehumanization, and Denial.

The Ten Stages of Genocide[4]

The Ten Stages of Genocide are Classification, Symbolization, Discrimination, Dehumanization, Organization, Polarization, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, and Denial.

1. CLASSIFICATION: All cultures have categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality: German and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi. Bipolar societies that lack mixed categories, such as Rwanda and Burundi, are the most likely to have genocide. The main preventive measure at this early stage is to develop universalistic institutions that transcend ethnic or racial divisions, that actively promote tolerance and understanding, and that promote classifications that transcend the divisions. The Roman Catholic Church could have played this role in Rwanda, had it not been riven by the same ethnic cleavages as Rwandan society. Promotion of a common language in countries like Tanzania has also promoted transcendent national identity. This search for common ground is vital to early prevention of genocide.

2. SYMBOLIZATION: We give names or other symbols to the classifications. We name people “Hutus” or “Tutsis,” or distinguish them by colours or dress; and apply the symbols to members of groups. Classification and symbolization are universally human and do not necessarily result in genocide unless they lead to the next stage, dehumanization. When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups: the yellow star for Jews under Nazi rule, the ethnic identity card for Rwandans. To combat symbolization, hate symbols can be legally forbidden (swastikas) as can hate speech. Group marking like gang clothing or tribal scarring can be outlawed, as well. The problem is that legal limitations will fail if unsupported by popular cultural enforcement. Though Hutu and Tutsi were forbidden words in Burundi until the 1980’s, code-words replaced them. If widely supported, however, denial of symbolization can be powerful, as it was in Bulgaria, where the government refused to supply enough yellow badges and at least eighty percent of Jews did not wear them, depriving the yellow star of its significance as a Nazi symbol for Jews.

3. DISCRIMINATION: Hierarchies dominate social status in the society. The ruling class, caste, or ethnic group excludes “inferior” groups from full rights. Laws are passed segregating and separating disfavoured groups in housing, schools, transportation, hotels and eating places.  In Apartheid South Africa blacks were not permitted to live in White neighbourhoods and had to carry “passes” when they left black areas. In segregationist America, the black Olympic champion Jesse Owens could not find a single hotel in New York City where he could stay after winning four Gold medals at Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics.  Jews were fired from all professorships and civil service jobs in Hitler’s Germany in 1933. They were stripped of their German citizenship and were forbidden to marry “Aryans” by the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In Rwanda, the Hutu Ten Commandments published by the Hutu Power newspaper, Kangura, prohibited marriage of members of the Republican Guard with Tutsis. Quotas were imposed to limit Tutsi access to places in Rwandan medical schools and the civil service.

Discrimination is best opposed by laws that outlaw it, such as the 13^th and 14^th Amendments to the US Constitution, and the 19^th Amendment that finally gave all American women the right to vote in 1920. Constitutional prohibitions must be enforced by laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, enforced by independent courts. Laws should create private rights to sue, so that citizens can go directly to court to defend their rights and not depend on government authorities to do so. The international community can impose sanctions, as it did on South Africa, but they take many years to work, and if not targeted, can hit the general population as well as leaders.

4. DEHUMANIZATION: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases. Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder. At this stage, hate propaganda in print and on hate radios is used to vilify the victim group. In combating this dehumanization, incitement to genocide should not be confused with protected speech. Genocidal societies lack constitutional protection for countervailing speech, and should be treated differently than democracies. Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable. Leaders who incite genocide should be banned from international travel and have their foreign finances frozen. Hate radio stations should be shut down, and hate propaganda banned. Hate crimes and atrocities should be promptly punished.

5. ORGANIZATION: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, often using militias to provide deniability of state responsibility (the Interahamwe). Sometimes organization is informal (local militias of Interahamwe) or decentralized (terrorist groups). Special army units or militias are often trained and armed. Plans are made for genocidal killings. To combat this stage, membership in these militias should be outlawed.  They are criminal gangs. Their leaders should be denied visas for foreign travel. Their assets should be seized under laws like the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act[5] that has broken the back of Mafia families and drug gangs in the US. The U.N. should impose arms embargoes on governments and citizens of countries involved in genocidal massacres, and create commissions to investigate violations, as was finally done in post-genocide Rwanda.[6]

6. POLARIZATION: Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction. Extremist terrorism targets moderates, intimidating and silencing the centre. Moderates from the perpetrators’ own group are most able to stop genocide, so are the first to be arrested and killed. Prevention may mean security protection for moderate leaders or assistance to human rights groups. Assets of extremists may be seized, and visas for international travel denied to them. Coups d’état by extremists should be opposed by international sanctions.

7. PREPARATION: Plans are made by perpetrators for the “final solution”: genocide.  Meetings are organized by leaders, such as the notorious meeting on 20 January 1942 at the Wannsee House in Berlin where Nazi leaders, led by Heydrich and Eichmann, planned “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” [Note that even here a euphemism was used to cover plans for mass murder.]  Of course, the mass extermination had already begun with the mass murders of Jews by the Einsatzgrupen during the Nazi conquest of Eastern Europe. The Akazu, led by Theoneste Bagasora and President Habyarimana’s wife, began meeting in 1992 to plan the Genocide against the Tutsi.  In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge drew up detailed plans for immediate evacuation of all cities, murder of all intellectuals and members of the Lon Nol regime, abolition of money and private property, and conversion of Democratic Kampuchea into an agrarian forced-labour society.

Military preparations are made, including the building up of large stockpiles of weapons, sometimes as simple as 500,000 machetes shipped from China to Rwanda in January 1994, or in Germany the rebuilding of a massive war machine in direct violation of the Versailles Treaty.  Genocide may be preceded by acquisition of former territories, like the Rhineland, Sudetenland and building of alliances such as the Anschluss into Austria, and treaties with the Soviet Union to divide Poland.

8. PERSECUTION: Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim groups are forced to wear identifying symbols. Their property is expropriated. They are often segregated into ghettoes, deported into concentration camps, or confined to a famine-struck region and starved. At this stage, a Genocide Emergency must be declared. If the political will of the great powers or regional alliances can be mobilized, armed international intervention should be prepared, or heavy assistance provided to the victim group to prepare for its self-defence. Otherwise, at least humanitarian assistance should be organized and private relief groups prepared for the inevitable tide of refugees to come.

9. EXTERMINATION begins, and quickly becomes the mass killing legally called “genocide.” It is “extermination” to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human. When it is sponsored by the state, the armed forces often work with militias to do the killing. Sometimes the genocide results in revenge killings by groups against each other, creating the downward whirlpool-like cycle of bilateral genocide (as in Burundi).

At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Refugee escape corridors should be established with heavily armed international protection. (An unsafe “safe” area is worse than none at all.) Regional forces should be authorized to act by the U.N. Security Council. For larger interventions, a multilateral force led by a major power such as France, the UK, the US, or NATO must take the lead. It should seek authorization from the U.N. Security Council under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. But if the U.N. is paralyzed, regional alliances must act anyway. It is time to recognize that the international responsibility to protect transcends the narrow interests of individual nation states. If strong nations will not provide troops to intervene directly, they should provide the airlift, equipment, and financial means necessary for major powers working with regional states to intervene.

The mandate of an intervention force must include protection of civilians and humanitarian workers. Enough troops must be authorized and supported for the intervention force to stop the genocide.

The Mandate must include a No Fly Zone to neutralize the genocidists’ air power.  This can be accomplished through provision of Stinger missiles to fighters against the genocide, or use of cruise missiles to destroy the genocidists’ airplanes after they have returned from their bombing and strafing runs.

The Rules of Engagement must include prevention of killing, not just in self-defence, but of all civilians. “Observer missions” are too late when genocide is under way.

The major military powers must provide leadership, training, arms, logistics, airlift, communications, and financing to those opposing genocide.

10. DENIAL is the final stage that always follows genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.

The tactics of denial are predictable:

• Attack the truth tellers as being morally disqualified because their ancestors or compatriots have also committed crimes.
• Deny or minimize the evidence or statistics.
• Blame natural forces such as famine.
• Blame civil or international war; claim that genocide and civil war are mutually exclusive; when in fact most genocides occur during war.
• Blame the victims – a disloyal minority that had to be eliminated during a time of war.
• Deny that the facts fit the legal definition of genocide.  The most notorious revisionist redefinition of the Genocide Convention is in the Schabas and Cassese requirement of “specific intent. ” In the travaux, the Convention’s framers referred to “specific intent” only twice. They treated intent as that required to prove first degree murder.

Unfortunately, Prof. Schabas’ treatise, Genocide in International Law,[7] was published before most of the trials for genocide by the ICTY.  Schabas misinterpreted crucial elements of the Genocide Convention – insisting for example that “ethnic cleansing” (forced displacement) can never be “genocide”, when in fact, acts committed in Bosnia often included both crimes.  Relying on Schabas, the ICTY under Judge Cassese acquitted many defendants of genocide.  The common appeals chamber of the ICTY and ICTR has wrongly acquitted many defendents convicted of conspiracy to commit genocide by the trial chambers of the ICTR. “Specific intent” was imported into the law of genocide by the ICTY, presided over by Cassese, which refused to convict anyone of genocide until he had left the Presidency.  The law of genocide should be returned to the ordinary intent meant by the framers of the Genocide Convention.

• Claim that reference to “genocide” will harm the “peace process,” or “reconciliation.”
• Avoid using the word “genocide” because it would be contrary to current arms sales, maintenance of a military alliance or airbase, etc.

The best response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal, a national tribunal with international participation, or national courts. At the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, 47 of the highest ranking perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi have been convicted and are serving their sentences following their appeals, and another 16 are awaiting the outcomes of their appeals after convictions. But the ICTR has cost the United Nations $US 1.7 billion dollars.  Rwanda has employed one of the most extraordinary adaptations of a national judicial procedure ever used, the Gaçaça courts.  In Rwanda over 100,000 Gaçaça trials have been held at a total cost of $US 50 million dollars. They have been a major factor in Rwanda’s recovery from the genocide.

With such trials the evidence can be heard, and the perpetrators punished. Tribunals like the Yugoslav or Rwanda Tribunals, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia now trying the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia, or the International Criminal Court, may not deter the worst genocidal killers. But with the political will to arrest and prosecute perpetrators of genocide, some may be brought to justice. The world’s mass murderers may learn that they will eventually pay for their crimes.

Rethinking Genocide Prevention

I am a lawyer, trained by Myres McDougal and Michael Reisman at Yale Law School. They trained me that law and policy are not two separate realms: that law is concretized policy, and law should be evaluated as policy. I am also a cultural anthropologist, trained by Victor Turner, Marshall Sahlins, and Leo Kuper. They trained me to look beneath the surface for the deeper structures and schisms that underlie societies and conflicts.

Today, I would like to do an anthropological analysis of lawyers.  It may help us understand why the Genocide Convention has thus far failed to prevent genocide.

The Genocide Convention was born toothless, and lawyers have kept it from ever outgrowing its baby teeth.

First, the training of lawyers creates a backward-looking, adjudication-oriented view of genocide. At a conference at Cardozo Law School in 2011, my colleague Jens Meierhenrich put it this way, “The convention was meant to adjudicate an individual’s criminal responsibility.” That is certainly one purpose of the Convention: to punish genocidists.

But if that is all it is, and if we rely solely on courts and a theory of judicial deterrence, we have forgotten the very name of the Convention: the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention was meant to be forward-looking and preventive, not just a law for punishment.

Why hasn’t the Genocide Convention prevented genocide?

1. Courts cannot work without police forces. Today, there is no effective international police force. We lack a police force to arrest those who are already indicted for genocide, depending on national police forces that may refuse to cooperate for many years. But more importantly, we lack police forces to prevent genocide. When New York put twice as many beat cops on the street under Mayor Giuliani and President Clinton’s programs to hire more police, the crime rate for violent crime in New York was cut in half. In cities that cut back on their police forces when that program ended, the crime rate has climbed back up.

Can we depend on national police forces to play a similar role in preventing genocide?  Probably not, because so often genocide is perpetrated by the state that controls the police.

So we need international police. But injecting them into a nation-state is considered a violation of national sovereignty by many governments, especially genocidal regimes. The emerging international norm of The Responsibility to Protect may be invoked to answer such arguments.  But how many nations will be willing to send their police into other countries to face heavily-armed national military forces determined to keep them out? The answer can be seen in the difficulty the UN has in recruiting troops for its Peace Keeping Operations, especially from countries with powerful militaries like the US, UK, France, Russia, and China. If the UN can’t muster the forces, other means must be found.

One way to create an International Police Force would be to pass an Optional Protocol to the Treaty of the International Criminal Court to create one. It would have authority only to execute arrest warrants for persons charged by the ICC with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Canada and other countries have suggested a “mid-sized state” solution, in which Canada, Australia, Argentina, the Nordic countries, and others would provide the volunteers for peace-keeping. Regional forces are also being created. NATO has intervened in Kosovo and now Afghanistan.  The European Union has created its Rapid Response Force and used it in the Congo; ECOWAS has intervened in Liberia, Sierra Leone and other conflicts in West Africa; and the African Union has sent forces into Darfur. Unfortunately, as we have seen in Darfur with UNAMID, such forces often lack the mandate, rules of engagement, arms, aircraft, and logistical, communications, and financial support to stop genocidal violence.

Under Chapter 8 of the UN Charter, such regional forces may take preventive action without waiting for authorization from the UN Security Council, though they must then submit their actions to UN appraisal.  The best way to restore “Prevention” to the International Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide will be to rely much more heavily on well-equipped regional forces to intervene in situations where genocide is near or has already broken out.

2. Genocide requires popular participation. As many as 200,000 people actively participated in the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.[8] Churches in Rwanda could have played a powerful role in creating a culture resistant to genocide in Rwanda, because many Hutus and Tutsis are Roman Catholics and attended the same churches. But the church was as ethnically divided as the rest of Rwandan society, and some priests and nuns even participated in the killings.

In re-thinking genocide prevention, we should pay special attention to the “bottom-up” dimension of genocide.[9]  How can anti-genocidal cultures be built? Religion has far too often been a cause of genocide. What if every major religion regularly affirmed the core principle in all religions: that all human beings belong to one race – the human race?

We need to spark the efforts of people at the grass roots in seminaries, churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples all over the world.

3. We must create the political will to prevent genocide. Many people have said that the problem in the Genocide against the Tutsi and in Bosnia and Darfur was not the absence of early warning of the coming catastrophe. It was the absence of political will to prepare for and prevent it.

Political will is not a mystery. It is not mumbo-jumbo that cannot be analyzed and understood. Anyone who witnessed the triumph of the political campaigns of President Barack Obama should understand that.  Political will can be built from the ground up.

It is time that we hold our leaders to account, that we do not accept their excuses.  President Clinton’s pathetic “we did not know” speech in Kigali after the Genocide against the Tutsi was a case in point.  Of course he knew!  I have read the classified cables that reached him in April 1994.

It is time to build an international anti-genocide movement on the scale of the anti-slavery movement. When I first founded Genocide Watch thirteen years ago, there was not a single organization in the world devoted to the prevention of genocide. That is why I also founded the International Alliance to End Genocide. Now there are hundreds of organizations. We share the same vision. It is especially important to build anti-genocide organizations in countries at risk of genocide. That is why we must work closely with organizations in Rwanda.

I will end with the true story of how a prayer group of market ladies brought down one of the most vicious killers in Liberian history.

“A Crazy Dream”[10]

January 31, 2009

By BOB HERBERT

The New York Times

In the documentary film “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a woman whose family had endured the agony of civil war in Liberia talks about a dream she had in 2003 in which someone urged her to organize the women of her church to pray for peace.

“It was a crazy dream,” she said.

Prayer seemed like a flimsy counterweight to the forces of Charles Taylor, the tyrannical president at the time, and the brutally predatory rebels who were trying to oust him from power. The violence was excruciating. People were dying by the tens of thousands. Rape had become commonplace. Children were starving. Scenes from the film showed even small children whose limbs had been amputated.

The movie, for me, was about much more than the tragic, and then ultimately uplifting events in Liberia. It was about the power of ordinary people to intervene in their own fate.

The first thing that struck me about the film, which is playing in select theatres around the country now, was the way it captured the almost unimaginable horror that war imposes on non-combatants: the looks of terror on the faces of people fleeing gunfire in the streets; children crouching and flinching, almost paralyzed with fear by the sound of nearby explosions; homes engulfed in flames.

It’s the kind of environment that breeds feelings of helplessness. But Leymah Gbowee, the woman who had the crazy dream, would have none of that, and she should be a lesson to all of us.

The filmmakers Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker show us how Ms. Gbowee not only rallied the women at her Lutheran church to pray for peace, but organized them into a full-blown, all-women peace initiative that spread to other Christian churches — and then to women of the Muslim faith.

They wanted the madness stopped. They wanted an end to the maiming and the killing, especially the destruction of a generation of children. They wanted to eradicate the plague of rape. They wanted all the things that non-combatants crave whenever the warrior crowd — in the U.S., the Middle East, Asia, wherever — decides it’s time once again to bring out the bombs and guns and let the mindless killing begin.

When the Liberian Christians reached out to “their Muslim sisters,” there was some fear on both sides that such an alliance could result in a dilution of faith. But the chaos and the killing had reached such extremes that religious concerns were set aside in the interest of raising a powerful collective voice.

The women prayed, yes, but they also moved outside of the churches and the mosques to demonstrate, to protest, to enlist all who would listen in the cause of peace. Working with hardly any resources, save their extraordinary will and intense desire to end the conflict, the women’s initial efforts evolved into a movement, the Liberian Mass Action for Peace.

Their headquarters was an open-air fish market in the capital, Monrovia. Thousands of women responded to the call, broadcast over a Catholic radio station, to demonstrate at the market for peace. The women showed up day after day, praying, waving signs, singing, dancing, chanting and agitating for peace.

They called on the two sides in the conflict to begin peace talks and their calls coincided with international efforts to have the two sides sit down and begin to negotiate.

Nothing could stop the rallies at the market, not the fierce heat of the sun, or drenching rainstorms, nor the publicly-expressed anger of Mr. Taylor, who was embarrassed by the protests. Public support for the women grew and eventually Mr. Taylor, and soon afterward the rebel leaders, felt obliged to meet with them and hear their grievances.

The moral authority of this movement that seemed to have arisen from nowhere had become one of the significant factors pushing the warring sides to the peace table. Peace talks were eventually held in Accra, the capital of Ghana, and when it looked as if they were about to break down, Ms. Gbowee and nearly 200 of her followers staged a sit-in at the site of the talks, demanding that the two sides stay put until an agreement was reached.

A tentative peace was established, and Mr. Taylor went into exile in Nigeria. The women continued their activism. Three years ago, on Jan. 16, 2006, in an absolutely thrilling triumph for the mothers and wives and sisters and aunts and grandmothers who had worked so courageously for peace, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was sworn in as the president of Liberia — the first woman ever elected president of a country in Africa.

Liberia is hardly the world’s most stable society. But “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” reminds us of the incredible power available to the most ordinary of people if they are willing to act with courage and unwavering commitment.”

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