Twenty-First Century Militarism: A Historical-Sociological Framework

Posted: September 12, 2012 in war and peace
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I have contributed a chapter, ‘Twenty-First Century Militarism: A Historical-Sociological Framework’, to Militarism and International Relations: Political economy, security, theory, edited by my Sussex colleagues Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, and published by Routledge in the Cass Military Studies series. The book contains 12 chapters grouped under Theorising militarism, Militarism and security, and The political economy of militarism, with strong coverage of a range of thematic and area issues by authors with varied theoretical perspectives.

My chapter reviews the historical vicissitudes of the concept of militarism, its emergence in the 1980s and the strengths and weaknesses of the work done on it in that period, outlines a historical-sociological framework and a theory of recent historical change in militarism, and concludes with reflections on militarism in the era of global surveillance war. An earlier draft of this chapter can be found here.

Genocide in Latin America during the Cold War: book review

Posted: August 15, 2012 in genocide, genocide reviews
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Draft of my review of Marcia Esparza, Henry R. Huttenbach, and Daniel Feierstein (eds.), State Violence and Genocide in Latin America: The Cold War Years. London: Routledge, 2010.
To appear in Democracy and Security, September 2012.

Latin America was the site of much political violence in the Cold War period but – apart from the mass killing in Guatemala in 1982 – the growing field of genocide studies has paid little attention to the continent’s recent history. This volume aims to change that, with chapters on Argentina (3), Chile (2) and Colombia as well as Guatemala (2), framed in a perspective which is both continental in scope and focused on Latin America’s relationships with the United States (to which three chapters are devoted).

The existence of ‘genocide’ literature on Guatemala, but not other countries, may be partly explained by the fact that the majority of victims there belonged to the indigenous population and can be seen as targeted because of their ‘ethnic’ identity as well as their social movements and links to armed and political opposition. The apparent problem for a genocide perspective on late twentieth-century Latin America is that in the other countries, most civilian victims of violence seem to have been targeted because of their political rather than ethnic identities, and the United Nations Genocide Convention does not cover attacks on ‘political groups’.

This is widely seen as a problem with the Convention’s definition, and although some genocide scholars argue that the definition should be upheld, the majority believe that (in this respect at least) it is incoherent, and should be superseded by a more inclusive formulation. Several authors in this book are not content, however, to rely on existing authorities for the fact that violence against political groups can be counted as genocide, and devote a lot of space to this question. This seems to reflect a goal, manifest in some contributions and indeed in the volume as a whole, to have recent violence counted as genocide in legal and political as well as in social-scientific and historical terms. The final section of the book is devoted to studies of concealment, justice and reconciliation in the legacies of genocidal violence.

The difficulty of the demand for justice is that it leads scholars to try to square deviant cases with the sociologically incoherent Convention, often through tortuous legal (or legalistic) argument. Thus Daniel Feierstein takes up Spanish judge Baltazar Garzón’s argument (in a 1999 indictment of Argentine officers) that the term ‘national group’ (one of the Convention’s categories of protected group) is appropriate in the Argentine case, because (as Feierstein puts it) ‘[t]he Argentine national group had been annihilated “in part”, substantially altering the social fabric of the country’ (p.52). Yet however laudible the aim of bringing the officers to account, this seems a misinterpretation of the Convention and of the general idea of anti-group violence, since while the Argentine military certainly wished to alter the national society, they did this by targeting particular sections of the population. As Feierstein himself later puts it, ‘eradicating certain political, social and cultural groups was intended to subjugate society as a whole.’ (p.60)

Quite how to define the targeting of Cold War genocide in Latin America is addressed in several places in this book. In the Introduction, Marcia Esparza argues that ‘extreme class, race and ethnic polarization in the region has led to the construction of el pueblo as an entity that can be considered as the “hostage group”.’ (p.13) Esparza’s analytically interesting implication is that, rather than there having been a single type of polarization, common but complex and overlapping cleavages characterize Latin American genocide. These cleavages are deeply rooted, she suggests, in colonial as well as post-colonial history, and have produced in the ruling classes a ‘neocolonial mentality … transmitted from generation to generation’, which informs the specific violence of the Cold War period that has been conditioned by ‘US-led geopolitical projects’. (p.13)

Powerful as this idea of el pueblo is, a problem of any such general analysis seems to be the variety of Latin American national experiences. The over 200,000 deaths in Guatemala (discussed in a thorough chapter by Marc Drouin) dwarf the 30,000 killed and ‘disappeared’ in Argentina, while the latter far exceed the 3,000 murdered by the Pinochet regime in Chile and the 3-5,000 supporters of the Unión Patriótica (UP) assassinated in Colombia. These quantitative differences seem to reflect qualitative differences in targeting: in Guatemala extensive violence was deployed against the (mainly) rural masses, while elsewhere violence was focused more narrowly on the (mostly) urban opposition. Of course, even this ‘narrow’ focus was broad in the sense of catching a wide range of people ‘guilty’ only of presumed family or friendship connections with activists, as well as in the sense of being designed to intimidate larger social constituencies and movements.

In this book, illuminating case studies are not complemented by serious comparative analysis which might have indicated the prevalence of genocidal violence in Latin America as a whole (indeed not all countries with large-scale political violence are included, and its relative absence in others is not discussed). Although the case studies indicate significant differences in experiences, the general chapters provide mostly overarching explanations, rather than nuanced comparative analysis; and while Esparza suggests that the profoundly unequal societies developed from the colonial era have been formative, these chapters focus mainly on the US relationship.

The latter is certainly an important frame: genocide studies too often assume that the phenomenon is produced ‘domestically’, neglecting how international relations are involved. Clearly US-led anti-communism was a unifying factor in Latin American regimes’ and militaries’ outlooks, US training informed Latin American militaries’ repression, and the USA encouraged collaboration between the separate national armies, police and intelligence bodies such as that evidenced in the notorious Operation Condor (discussed in a chapter by J. Patrice McSherry). But as Maureen S. Hiebert and Pablo Policzer put it, in assessing US complicity in the Chilean and other regimes’ crimes, ‘indirect complicity, where American officials actively encouraged but did not direct the Latin Americans’ actions against their political enemies’, and situations ‘where the Americans were aware of the Latin Americans’ actions but did nothing to discourage or challenge them’, seem more viable explanations than ‘direct complicity’. (p.76)

Or as Andrei Gómez-Suárez puts it, writing about Colombia, US ‘discourses merged with local representations flourishing in the armed conflict, creating a fertile field for genocide to happen’; US support and ‘misrepresentation of the threat that guerrilla groups posed for the security of the hemisphere allowed’ local genocidal alliances of government and military officials with paramilitaries and drug cartels to destroy the UP. (p.163) Here Gómez-Suárez also draws attention, as do other contributors in the case studies, to the relationships of armed conflict to the emergence of genocidal violence against civilian oppositionists and movements. However in the book’s more general analyses, the role of the armed oppositions in helping to provoke regime violence is not posed as a serious question. Yet ‘armed struggle’ and genocidal violence both marked various countries of Latin America in the Cold War; they have both declined since. Some kind of linkage seems clear, even its ramifications need fuller analysis.

Too much of this book is devoted to conceptual rather than theoretical analysis, and (taken as a whole) it raises more questions than it answers. However in the global framework of genocide research, this is a landmark contribution, not only as the first study to apply genocide analysis to late twentieth-century Latin America, but also because taking account of the context of genocidal violence in that continent, we have new perspectives on the global patterns of the incidence and forms of genocide.

Once more on ‘left-wing’ genocide denial

Posted: May 22, 2012 in Bosnia, genocide, Rwanda, the left
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The Guardian journalist George Monbiot has written a further article, ‘See No Evil’, on the denial by Edward Herman and David Peterson of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica, Bosnia, in 1995, in their book The Politics of Genocide which includes a supportive Preface by Noam Chomsky.

Monbiot is responding to Herman and Peterson’s reply on ZNet to his original criticism in The Guardian,  following his unsuccessful attempts in lengthy email correspondence (reproduced on Monbiot’s own site) to get Chomsky to address his collaborators’ genocide denial.

Last year I published a review which came to similar conclusions to Monbiot’s. In preparing his latest reply Monbiot asked me and three other academic writers on genocide (Adam Jones, Linda Melvern and Marko Atilla Hoare) to write our own responses to Herman and Peterson’s new justification of their position. Monbiot refers to my review and response in his article, and has published all four comments on his site. Below I reproduce my own new response to Herman and Peterson.

Edward Herman and David Peterson, in their reply to George Monbiot, do little to respond to the wave of incredulity and revulsion which their denial of genocide and its endorsement by Noam Chomsky are causing.

They misrepresent Monbiot, a widely respected critical journalist, as a cog in a Guardian-Observer propaganda machine which – in turn – is simply churning out a version of something called the ‘Western party-line’. Such crude, amalgamated constructs not only make serious debate difficult, but are also designed to damage one of the most important arenas for critical information and debate in the mainstream media – in precisely one of the areas in which it has been strongest, reporting on and debating crimes against humanity.

Herman and Peterson do this because, as I have argued in my full review in the Journal of Genocide Research, their Politics of Genocide ‘does not stop at raising … counter-examples to the Western mainstream. Instead, it engages in what can only be described as extensive genocide denial.’ Deniers need to block out key information and misrepresent opponents to support their perverse world-views. As the sociologist Stanley Cohen puts it in a classic study, ‘One common thread runs through the many different stories of denial: people, organizations, governments or whole societies are presented with information that is too disturbing, threatening or anomalous to be fully absorbed or openly acknowledged. The information is therefore somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted. Or else the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

What is the information which disturbs Herman and Peterson? They cannot accept what has now been established by extensive and rigorous enquiry, that in 1995 unarmed Bosniak men and boys from the Srebrenica ‘safe area’, who were captured by Bosnian-Serbian forces, were murdered in cold blood. They suggested in their book that the case was ‘extremely thin, resting in good part on the difficulty of separating executions from battle killings’. This is a classic genocide denial mechanism (which can be traced back to the Armenian genocide), representing genocidal killing as really only war, suggesting that the victims were not really civilians (they might have been killed in battle), or if they were, as killed accidentally in the course of fighting.

Herman and Peterson believe that their trump card against Monbiot is that he ‘fails to mention that … we point out that the Bosnian Serbs “had taken the trouble to bus all the women, children, and the elderly men to safety”.’ What this shows, however, is that do not understand genocide, which involves not just indiscriminate attacks on entire populations, but also narrower, targeted violence – as often against men of military age (as potential resisters) as against women (whose sexual violation completes the humiliation of a community).

They also cannot accept that an exceptionally large, fast campaign of mass murder was carried out by Rwandan Hutu Power forces in 1994, claiming that the ‘great majority of deaths were Hutu, with some estimates as high as two million’. Claiming that Monbiot’s objections are ‘laughable’, they ridicule him for running ‘to his readers with the scoop that we are so sloppy in our use of sources’.

Yet the principal academic reference for Herman and Peterson’s claim is an unpublished paper, ‘Rwandan Political Violence in Space and Time’, which they attribute to Christian Davenport and Allan Stam and source to Davenport’s website, dated to 2004. Yet on page 37 of the same paper (which while citing a database compiled jointly with Stam, is attributed only to Davenport and dated 2008), are printed in black and white the following unequivocal conclusions: ‘we find that the majority of killings take place in the zone under government control (accounting for approximately 990,000 deaths). They are the ones directly responsible for almost all of the political violence.’ (Accessed on 17 October 2011)

A charitable explanation could be that Davenport’s paper has been updated since 2004, and this conclusion added since then, although 2008 was still well before The Politics of Genocide went to press. But Herman and Peterson can hardly have missed a clear line of argument which, while qualifying previous accounts of the Rwandan genocide, does not undermine the conclusion that the majority of killing in Rwanda in 1994 was committed by Hutu Power forces. The difference is that Davenport and Stam want to raise questions about the narrative of genocide; Herman and Peterson want to fully overturn it.

So they are sloppy with their sources: it is they, in the nice phrase they use against Monbiot, who are ‘hit-and-run intellectuals’, scooping up quotes and references without due care. As Cohen says, in denial ‘information is … somehow repressed, disavowed, pushed aside or reinterpreted.’ We find bucket-loads of all these tendencies in Herman and Peterson – and their patron, Chomsky. Indeed one suspects that, as Cohen continued, ‘the information “registers” well enough, but its implications – cognitive, emotional or moral – are evaded, neutralized or rationalized away.’

The remaining question is why do the Chomskyites do it? The obvious answer is political: they have such a huge investment in the idea that the USA and the West are the source of all the world’s evils, that they can only process information to fit this case. More complex answers might include, that like their fellow deniers in the former LM coterie, they are building an intellectual and political niche out of contrarian positions. The danger is that such nonsense, with its pseudo-scholarly apparatus of extensive footnotes and media science, finds a ready audience among the political idealistic.

Sir Roy Shaw 1918 – 2012

Posted: May 16, 2012 in obituaries
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      Roy Shaw, 1975 and 2011

My father, Roy Shaw, died on 15 May 2012, aged 93.

Informed appreciations of his life and work can be found as follows:

There was also an obituary in the Daily Telegraph.


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The United States and ‘atrocity prevention’

Posted: April 25, 2012 in genocide
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Draft of new article for openDemocracy.net

In a speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), President Barack Obama has launched a ‘comprehensive strategy’ to ‘prevent and respond to atrocities’. He has charged his new Atrocities Prevention Board (APB), chaired by Samantha Power (author of an indictment of earlier US inaction on genocide) with ‘helping the US government identify and address atrocity threats, and oversee institutional changes that will make us more nimble and effective.’

The APB will be beefed up with representatives of all the main departments of the US government, the National Intelligence Council will prepare a National Intelligence Estimate on the global risk of mass atrocities and genocide, and there will be new peacekeeper training and diplomatic initiatives. There will be a new capacity for ‘civilian surge’ to respond rapidly to crises, and new sanctions for companies that aid the Syrian and Iranian governments track and target civilians for abuse. Most important perhaps, the US military will incorporate counter-atrocity planning into its operating procedures, and senior officers will meet – at the USHMM – to plan this.

Aiming to bridge the gap between national interest and altruistic intervention, last year’s Presidential Study Directive 10 had already claimed that ‘preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest’ as well as ‘a core moral responsibility of the United States. Our security is affected when masses of civilians are slaughtered, refugees flow across borders, and murderers wreak havoc on regional stability and livelihoods. America’s reputation suffers, and our ability to bring about change is constrained, when we are perceived as idle in the face of mass atrocities and genocide.’

A White House release accompanying Obama’s speech claims ‘an unprecedented record of actions taken to protect civilians and hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable’, including ‘leadership of the successful international military effort to protect civilians in Libya’ as well as of of various international efforts over Cote d’Ivoire, Kyrgyzstan, Libya, and Syria; efforts to ensure ‘peaceful and orderly’ independence for South Sudan; action against the Lord’s Resistance Army and to apprehend Joseph Kony (anti-hero of a recent YouTube hit), and supporting the capture of Ratko Mladic.

Obama’s moves have been welcomed by the USA’s increasingly active genocide lobby. The principal campaigning group, United to End Genocide, webcast Obama’s speech to supporters, and its president, Tom Andrews, hailed it in an email to them as ‘a major victory for genocide prevention’ and campaigning, indeed as ‘a result of three years of hard work and over 200,000 of your emails, phone calls, letters and meetings’.

Certainly, counter-atrocity policy is taking ever-stronger shape under Obama. It will now be institutionalised in a way that entrenches its role as a ‘national interest’. However genocide campaigners should beware functioning as the administration’s cheerleaders. Even if atrocity-prevention is a national interest, that hardly means it will trump other national interests – strategic and commercial for example. In the UK, we recall the fate of the ‘ethical dimension’ of New Labour’s foreign policy: it remained just a dimension, and an increasingly subordinate one at that.

Administration claims immediately suggest specific reasons for scepticism.  Some civilians were certainly protected by Western military support for Libya’s rebels, but many others died in the civil war: it is egregious to claim that the policy was merely one of civilian protection, when the main driver was regime change.  The USA’s support for peace and order in the Sudan has not prevented the Sudanese government’s new aggression in border provinces, which genocide activists have been quick to protest. Kony, despite his new celebrity, is still at large.

Although the administration sees atrocity-prevention as multilateral rather than unilateral, it makes no commitment to consistent multilateral action against atrocity. It is one thing to sanction your enemies in the name of fine ideals, but if you don’t mobilise the UN to do the same against your allies, these ideals are tarnished. Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s hesitation over acting against Mubarak and his military successors in Egypt, and against the repression carried out by the Saudi and Bahraini monarchies, suggests a strong danger in tying ‘atrocity’ campaigning closely to official US policy.

It could be objected that repression in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain has not reached genocidal levels, but it has surely included atrocities. The policy and board are framed, after all, in ‘atrocity’ rather than ‘genocide’ terms. It is surely the point of ‘preventative’ policy to act at lower levels of violence, to stop escalation. Why are there no sanctions against companies that aid these regimes to track and abuse activists? Why, indeed, is there no withdrawal of US military collaboration with these (and similar) regimes that have also been responsible for atrocities?

The linkage to sanctions against Iran and Syria is also problematic, not because these regimes are not guilty of atrocities, but because of the link this could easily provide to Israeli campaigning for a military strike on Iran to halt the Iranian nuclear programme. Israel’s leaders, the pro-Israel lobby in the USA, and some ‘genocide scholars’ are already framing their proposed attack as ‘genocide prevention’. Yet the last thing genocide prevention needs is to be linked to aggressive war, which will severely discredit the whole idea.

Such a war will surely bring its own atrocities against innocent Iranian civilians, just as the Iraq war did against Iraqis and the Afghan war against Afghans. There are direct victims of US policy, currently including Pakistani citizens who are dying from US drone attacks, and Afghan villagers (notably the wedding parties studied in a new book chapter by Stephen Rockel) regularly strafed by US aircraft. And there are indirect victims, notably the thousands of Iraqis who are still dying in the low-level civil war provoked by the US-UK invasion in 2003, a war that at one point reached genocidal dimensions as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were forced to flee their neighbourhoods, mostly into exile.

Are not these all cases of atrocity? The Atrocities Prevention Board, to live up to its name, cannot ignore the way that US military policies daily produce atrocities. Genocide campaigners need to be alive to these dangers, and campaign against US policy when it too causes violence against civilians. While we should note the potential of the Obama administration’s latest moves to prevent some atrocities, we should remain vigilant lest they end up being mobilized to produce others.

Review of Bosnia Remade and Balkan Genocides

Posted: April 24, 2012 in Bosnia, genocide, genocide reviews, reviews, Yugoslavia
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Draft review for the Journal of Genocide Research

Gerard Toal and Carl C. Dahlmann, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, 978-0-19-973036-0.
Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, 978-1-4422-0663-2.

The anti-population violence during the Bosnian War of 1992-95 was, together with the mass murder in Rwanda in 1994, one of the seminal events for the public awareness of genocide in the period after the Cold War. Yet while the Rwandan Genocide has been clearly named and is the focus of ever-growing academic study, the significance of the Bosnian events remains highly contested and their study lacks the momentum of the Rwandan field. Most of the general literature dates from the 1990s, and there have been few recent attempts to synthesise the events themselves and their legacy. Gerard Toal and Carl C. Dahlmann’s Bosnia Remade, with its incisive empirical study of the problematic post-war ‘return’ of the expelled and its ambitious critical-geopolitical theoretical framework for understanding the war and its aftermath, is therefore a very welcome addition.

The authors’ primary aim is to evaluate the process of return of displaced people. Annexe 7 of the 1995 Dayton General Framework Agreement committed the international authorities supervising Bosnia to upholding this right in the aftermath of the war, and there followed what was probably the most determined attempt to enforce the return of expelled populations anywhere in the world. (Omar Bartov was therefore wrong to claim, in this journal, that the right of return is demanded only for Palestinians displaced by Israel.#) Although around a million, out of over two million, Bosnians expelled from their homes and home districts during the war had returned by 2004, Toal and Dahlmann’s analysis – using detailed studies of three key municipalities as well as general data – shows that most of these were ‘majority returns’, of people belonging to the same ethnic group as the postwar controllers of particular areas. ‘Minority returns’, of people belonging to different groups from local powerholders, were often met with violence and obstruction. Despite sometimes determined efforts by international bodies, they were largely unsuccessful.

This outcome is explained as a consequence of the character of the wartime processes that produced displacement and how the political structures that they produced were largely embedded in the postwar settlement, and explains why Bosnia Remade’s account of the returns process is preceded by a very full synthesis of the war itself and the original expulsion process. Ethnic cleansing, they say, was a ‘military tactic to realise a larger strategic vision … as much about seizing and consolidating territory as … about identity. More than simply the removal of an out-group from a location, ethnic cleansing involves the ethnicization of space.’ It is thus a form of geopolitics, involving two related practices, the attempts to produce a new ethnoterritorial order of space, and to build an ethnocratic political order. The latter involved a ‘fundamental reorganisation of a local political economy’, through ‘accumulation by dispossession’, with housing, land and valuables stolen (116-17). The phenomenon originated in the Serbian strategy ‘to reconstitute Yugoslavia as a smaller, more compact federation controlled from Belgrade’ (21) and Serbian nationalists were responsible for most expulsions, although the Croatians developed similar strategies in some areas and their ethnic cleansing in 1995 constituted its ‘largest single instance’ (6). Although Toal and Dahlmann ‘reject as lazy and irresponsible the nostrum that there is a “moral equivalence” between the fighting factions in Bosnia’ (17), they recognise that Bosnian forces were also responsible for some expulsions and show that Muslim-based parties sometimes blocked minority returns to areas they controlled after the war.

The key to the relative failure of the returns process is that Dayton mostly allowed parties controlling localities at the end of the war – in many cases having removed much of the original population – to consolidate their power. Post-war politics was ‘the continuation of the war by other means’; local elites ‘established patronage systems in their captured opstine [municipalities] that endured into the peace.’ (235) US President Bill Clinton insisted on early elections, in the belief that democratisation was a way out of Bosnia’s impasse, but just as the earlier 1990 elections had originally ethnonationalised Bosnian politics – laying the basis for territorial division – so post-Dayton elections were manipulated by local powerholders who boosted their own population group’s electoral registration and absentee voting, while blocking the participation of the expelled – so confirming territorial division. ‘Rapid elections … mostly served to entrench nationalist parties and collective rights’ (234), at the expense of the individual rights of expelled people. Moreover this local control was reinforced by the establishment of the wartime Republika Srpska as an ‘entity’ (within a new federal structure for the Bosnia-Herzegovina state), which Serbian politicians treated as far as possible as a separate state. Although the literature has often emphasised the lack of ‘will’ of international authorities, Toal and Dahlmann point to the inherent weakness of multinational bureaucracy and its lack of capacity faced with local intransigence: ‘the international community soon realised that it was insuffiently equipped to monitor and enforce Dayton’s provisions across two entities, ten cantons and 148 local governments, each with its own tactics for discouraging returns and repossession.’ (237)

Thus Bosnia Remade shows that Michael Mann’s argument that ethnic cleansing is the ‘dark side of democracy’ is particularly relevant when the latter is proposed as an answer to ethnic conflict: as a growing literature attests, elections can be catalysts for conflict. The book also matches two of the themes of Stathis Kalyvas’ influential arguments about civil war violence: the importance of the local level, and the fact that populations help produce the violence that is directed at civilians.#  Thus Toal and Dahlmann argue that ethnic cleansing ‘is never straightforwardly “ethnic” or motivated only by a desire to “cleanse” localities thought the murder and expulsion of ethnic others. Criminal opportunism, local grievances, revenge and nihilism fuelled by alcohol and drugs are also elements of the practice. Some violence … was motivated by long-held grudges.’ (13) However their demonstration of the centrality of Serbian and Croatian geopolitical projects to the cleansing process contradicts Kalyvas’ claim, in an article with Nicholas Sambanis, that it can be mainly explained by the level of resistance to Serbian power.#

Toal and Dahlmann argue that both ethnic cleansing and return are unavoidably geographical projects, and their approach is based on critical geopolitics, ‘an approach that produces “categories of analysis” to grasp and explain the too-often unproblematized “categories of practice” of banal and not-so-banal nor benign geopolitics.’ (9) Thus they reject the subsumption of the events in the categories of ‘civil war’ and ‘ethnic conflict’, and similarly to David Campbell’s earlier post-structuralist account#, show how ethnopolitics was constructed out of Bosnia’s historic hybrid, plurinational society. However, despite pointing out that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is ‘a vivid metaphor conveying the commitments of its perpetrators’ (3), they are remarkably content to use this as their main analytical category. ‘Genocide’, in contrast, is treated overwhelmingly as a rhetorical device of actors, whether of Serbian perpetrators recalling their peoples’ historic victimisations, or of Bosnian Muslim leaders complaining about Serbian ‘cleansing’. In a surprising lapse of critical focus on the ‘categories of practice’, they reproduce the view (now conventional in international legal circles) that genocide was only committed at Srebrenica in 1995, while the general destruction of plural Bosnian society, which occurred as they show mainly in 1992, was not genocide.

Yet what Toal and Dahlmann describe is what others from Raphael Lemkin onwards have carefully defined as genocide: carving out imagined ethnic homelands by destroying Bosnia’s ‘common life, multiethnic settlements and the homes of ordinary Bosnians’ (134), and destroying its common public infrastructure and cultural and religious property, indeed its ‘lifeworld of coexistence (140). When they talk of a ‘geopolitical logic of erasure and refoundation’ (6) they reproduce Lemkin’s ‘two phases [of genocide]: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.’# Their argument that the ethnonationalism has largely succeeded even though it was not militarily victorious is another way of expressing his dictum that genocide is a way of winning even when the war itself is lost. Yet nowhere do Toal and Dahlmann argue for these conceptual choices.

Paul Mojzes makes similar conceptual decisions, but he does at least try to justify them. His book is a historical synthesis, which has the considerable virtue of bringing together the large number of genocidal events in the modern Balkans over the last century. He begins with the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, seen as an ‘unrecognized genocide’, and proceeds to the ‘multiple genocides of World War II’ and ‘retaliatory genocides against wartime enemies’, before arriving at ‘ethnic cleansing during Yugoslavia’s wars of distintegration in the 1990s’ (Kosovo is considered in a separate chapter, as is the ICTY). In each of this periods, Mojzes carefully accumulates the evidence on anti-population violence from all sides, and this will serve as a useful reference work. He also tries to say which events constituted genocide, and which not, and while his criteria and judgements may both be disputed, it is all done in a careful way that gives the readers useful pointers. The sheer range of events that are covered, the variety of their perpetrators, and the demonstrations of their interconnectedness, also provide useful antidotes to any simple ideas that only one or other type of actor perpetrated genocide. Mojzes falls into the trap of identifying the political factions with the ethnic groups themselves, so begging the question of the ethnopoliticisation that is the focus of Toal and Dahlmann’s analysis. But by placing the Bosnian war in the larger series of recent conflicts that began in Slovenia and Croatia and ended in Kosovo, he provides useful contextualisation, even if Balkan Genocides has neither the interpetative historical depth of Donald Bloxham’s work#, which covers the earlier part of its ground, nor the theoretical and empirical richness of Bosnia Remade.

Any optimism about the future of the Balkans in these books is highly tempered, but Toal and Dahlmann are right to say that Bosnia-Herzegovina is still in the process of being made. There is no inexorable law that condemns us to reproduce the crimes of the past, even if there are powerful social forces that work in that direction.

See the full review including references.

The Holocaust and genocide: loose talk, bad action

Posted: March 31, 2012 in genocide, Israel / Palestine
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A new post on openDemocracy 21 March 2012

Israel’s prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a characteristic intervention during his address in Washington to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac ↑ ) on 5 March 2012. In voicing determination to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon and thus to reject a situation where Israelis would “live under the shadow of annihilation”, Netanyahu said ↑ that in his desk was a copy of a letter from the World Jewish Congress requesting the United States to bomb the Auschwitz death camp ↑ in 1944, together with the American reply making excuses for declining to do so.

It hardly honours Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide to make them a pretext for killing more innocents in a new ↑ war. Netanyahu’s cheap comparison between the situation of Israelis today and the terrible plight of Auschwitz inmates sixty-eight years ago only insults their memory. Likewise, his attack on the secrecy of Iran’s nuclear programme – “its underground nuclear facilities” – is brazen hypocrisy from the leader of an undeclared nuclear-armed state; one which is moreover in a deep alliance with the greatest nuclear power on earth.

Such Holocaust militarism is surely an example of the “loose talk of war” of which President Barack Obama rightly warned in his own speech ↑ to Aipac the previous day. But sadly, the abuse of genocide-victims’ experience is all too routine. It is not only Israeli spokespersons – who regularly invoke the Holocaust as a justification for their state’s oppression of Palestinians – who abuse historical memory. Across the board, victims’ tragedies are cheapened by many politics of genocide mobilisation (as also, of course, of genocide denial).

The anti-denial problem

A twist in this situation is that some abuses of this kind take place in the name of combating denial. In Rwanda, journalists Agnès Uwimana and Saïdati Mukakibibi were sentenced ↑ to seventeen and seven years respectively for articles (published in a small circulation journal) that alleged corruption among officials and criticised Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame ↑ , in the run-up to the elections of 2010. They were convicted on counts of endangering national security, insulting the president, fomenting division, and denying the genocide of 1994.

Rwanda has a constitutional ban ↑ on “revisionism, negationism and trivialisation of genocide”. It defends this by referring to similar laws that were adopted by some European countries in response to Holocaust denial. Such laws have long existed in Germany, Austria and elsewhere; more recently they are being complemented by laws ↑ against denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915. A law adopted by the French parliament is a prime example, which was later struck ↑ down by France’s constitutional court though may yet ↑ be passed in revised form.

Such laws have some value in indicating the gravity of these issues, but they are also insidious (by enshrining in statute particular versions of historical memory in a way that facilitates tendentious manipulation) and invidious (in protecting the memory of some genocides and some victims while suppressing that of others).

It is legitimate, for example, to draw attention to Hutu victims of massacres committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which controls the post-genocide government in Rwanda ↑ – even if it must also be acknowledged that these massacres were different from the “Hutu power” genocide against the Tutsi (being of far lesser scale, and not linked to the unified aim of destroying a whole population group, than was the case in the 1994 events ↑ ). But this nuanced argument, which I can make from the safety of European academia (and which I hasten to add, the condemned Uwimana and Mukakibibi did not make) would earn me imprisonment in Rwanda.

Laws in third-party countries, like France’s in relation to events in the Ottoman empire a century ago, inevitably raise questions of international politics. Many Turks (and others) will interpret the French law in terms of contemporary French chauvinism towards Muslims and hostility to Turkish membership of the European Union. It will probably reinforce denial more than it will make Turks confront the dark side of their state’s early history.

Moreover, such international moves provoke retaliatory accusations, as when Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan argued ↑ that France should instead “investigate how many people French soldiers massacred in Algeria, and their involvement in the killing of 800,000 people in Rwanda”. Erdogan was not wrong: Jean-Paul Sartre famously accused ↑ his country of genocide in Algeria, and many questions have been raised about France’s role in Rwanda (see Andrew Wallis, “Rwanda: a step towards truth“, 21 January 2012). But such accusations are hardly an appropriate response to the overwhelming historical consensus on the Armenian genocide.

The law is often too crude an instrument to address the questions raised by genocide, whether it focuses on particular cases (and thus is interpreted as partisan and selective) or on general sanctions against denial (which then provoke legitimate and sometimes difficult historical questions about where and when genocide has actually been committed, which can make the law look controlling or irrelevant).

Education, not politicisation

The only answer to denial is non-partisan historical research and education. But even scholarship is bedevilled by partisanship based on nationalist and ideological agendas. In a previous article, I criticised the denial of genocide in Rwanda by Noam Chomsky and his associates (see “The politics of genocide: Rwanda and DR Congo“, 16 September 2010). But I was uneasy about a proposal for an official condemnation of their denial by the International Association of Genocide Scholars ↑  (IAGS), which seemed to be applying a sledgehammer to crack a few nuts.

The IAGS, after all, is the very organisation that compromised its authority when it responded to the anti-Israeli rhetoric of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by warning ↑ of “a risk of genocide” from Iran’s nuclear programme, thus helping to lay “academic” foundations for Israel’s current efforts to make war look reasonable and perhaps inevitable.

Knowledge and understanding of genocide deserve to be made widely available – but the pitfalls in “authoritative” collective pronouncements on these questions should be at the forefront of educators’ minds. Academic fatwas are as problematic as legal prohibitions, neither of which protects the victims or their memory.

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