Genocide

A Comprehensive Introduction

Adam Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317533856
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction is the most wide-ranging textbook on genocide yet published. The book is designed as a text for upper-undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a primer for non-specialists and general readers interested in learning about one of humanity's enduring blights.

Fully updated to reflect the latest thinking in this rapidly developing field, this unique book:

• Provides an introduction to genocide as both a historical phenomenon and an analytical-legal concept, including the concept of genocidal intent, and the dynamism and contingency of genocidal processes.
• Discusses the role of state-building, imperialism, war, and social revolution in fuelling genocide.
• Supplies a wide range of full-length case studies of genocides worldwide, each with a supplementary study.
• Explores perspectives on genocide from the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science/international relations, and gender studies.
• Considers "The Future of Genocide, " with attention to historical memory and genocide denial; initiatives for truth, justice, and redress; and strategies of intervention and prevention.

Highlights of the new edition include:

• Nigeria/Biafra as a "contested case" of genocide
• Extensive new material on the Kurds, Islamic State/ISIS, and the civil wars/genocide in Iraq and Syria.
• Conflict and atrocities in the world's newest state, South Sudan.
• The role, activities, and constraints of the United Nations Office of Genocide Prevention.
• Many new testimonies from genocide victims, survivors, witnesses—and perpetrators.
• Dozens of new images, including a special photographic essay.

Written in clear and lively prose with over 240 illustrations and maps, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction remains the indispensable text for new generations of genocide study and scholarship.

An accompanying website (www.genocidetext.net) features a broad selection of supplementary materials, teaching aids, and Internet resources.

Part 1 Overview

Chapter 1

The Origins of Genocide

This chapter analyzes the origins of genocide as a global-historical phenomenon, providing a sense of genocide’s frequency through history. It then examines the origin and evolution of the concept, unravels some central theoretical debates, and explores “contested cases” that test the boundaries of the genocide framework. No other chapter in the book tries to cover so much ground, and the discussion may at points seem complicated and confusing, so please fasten your seatbelts.^*

Genocide in prehistory, antiquity, and early modernity

“The word is new, the concept is ancient,” wrote sociologist Leo Kuper in his seminal 1981 text of genocide studies.¹ He echoed the father of genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin, whose unfinished history of genocide—only recently published—declared at its outset: “Genocide is a new word, but the evil it describes is old.”² The roots of genocide are lost in distant millennia, and will remain so unless an “archaeology of genocide” can be developed.³ The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their study The History and Sociology of Genocide, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to “objective” facts, many past accounts aimed to praise the writer’s patron (normally a powerful leader) and to emphasize the superiority of one’s own religious beliefs. They may also have been intended as good stories—so that when Homer quotes King Agamemnon’s quintessential pronouncement of root-and-branch genocide, one cannot know what basis it might have in fact:

We are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs—not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.⁴

The founder of genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin, quoted the declaration of the Assyrian King Ashur-natsir-pal, boasting about one of his military triumphs:

I crossed the mountain of Kashiari and toward Kinabu, the fortress of Hulai I advanced. With the multitude of my troops by a charge, tempestuous as the tempest, I fell upon the town. I took it. I put to the sword 600 of their warriors. I delivered 3,000 prisoners over to the flames and I left not a single one of them alive to serve as a hostage…. Their carcasses I piled in heaps, their young men and their maidens I delivered to the flames. Hulai, their governor, I flayed; I stretched his skin along the wall of Dadaamusa. The city I destroyed, I ravaged it, I gave it to the flames.⁵

What are we to make of Agamemnon’s command and Ashur-natsir-pal’s proclamation? Are they factually reliable? Regardless, they encapsulate a fantasy and often an ambition of kings and commoners alike: know thine enemies, and annihilate them.

Box 1.1 Neanderthals: The first victims of genocide?

The Neanderthals, humanity’s closest cousins, disappeared from their lands in Europe some 26,000 to 32,000 years ago. For many decades, a consensus prevailed that climate change had driven them to extinction. According to more recent research, however, it appears that not only were Neanderthal populations highly resistant to climatic fluctuations, but conditions were quite mild in southwestern Europe, during the period when the Neanderthals “made their last stand” as a species. According to The Washington Post’s Rick Weiss, reviewing a 2007 study by Chronis Tzedakis and his colleagues: “That pretty much leaves one suspect: the butler—or more precisely the predecessors to all butlers and to modern humans, generally, who were making their initial sweep across Europe at the time.” As Konrad Hughen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution noted: “They [Neanderthals] survived 20,000 years of very unstable climate. Then when you add humans to the mix, they are gone within 10,000 years. You tell me what the most parsimonious explanation is.”⁶

In 2013, Spanish anthropologists went further, speculating that “our closest extinct relative was exterminated in the same way as 178 other large mammals, so called megafauna, which are suspected of going at least partially by the hand of hungry human hunters.” That is, the Neanderthals may have been hunted to extinction as food, as well as competitors for land and nutritional resources, as other megafauna were.⁷ Or perhaps it was dogs that did most of the eating. Pat Shipman argued in her book The Invaders that human beings first partnered with canines to bring about the Neanderthals’ extermination.⁸

Figure 1.1 Growing evidence points to a human-driven extermination of Europe’s Neanderthal population, rather than a slow decline linked to climate change.

Source: © Procyab/Dreamtime.com.

Regardless of the Neanderthals’ fate, archaeological discoveries announced in early 2016 emphasized how deeply-rooted in the human species was the institution of savage intercommunal massacre. For the first time, persuasive evidence was found of such massacres—which bear the hallmarks of “root-and-branch” genocide—occurring some 10,000 years ago, prior to the rise of agriculture and durable human settlements. James Gorman of The New York Times reported findings in the journal Nature that of “12 relatively complete skeletons” found by Lake Turkana in Kenya, “10 showed unmistakable signs of violent death … Partial remains of at least 15 other people were found at the site and are thought to have died in the same attack.” The remains of these early hunter-gatherers, Gorman reported, “tell a tale of ferocity. One man was hit twice in the head by arrows or small spears and in the knee by a club. A woman, pregnant with a 6- to 9-month-old fetus, was killed by a blow to the head, the fetal skeleton preserved in her abdomen. The position of her hands and feet suggest that she may have been tied up before she was killed.”

Pottery at the site suggested that the targeted population may have harbored food resources that drew the notice of forager-predators. “Or the attackers may have been after captives,” Gorman wrote. “Bones from one young teenager were found at the site, and remains of adults and children under 6, but no remains of older children, who might have been taken by the attackers.”⁹

Humanity has always nurtured conceptions of social difference that generate a sense of in-group versus out-group, as well as hierarchies of good and evil, superior and inferior, desirable and undesirable. As Chalk and Jonassohn observed:

Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant “the people” to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals.¹⁰

The fewer the shared values and standards, the more likely members of the out-group were (and are) to find themselves beyond the “universe of obligation,” in sociologist Helen Fein’s evocative phrase. Hence the advent of “religious traditions of contempt and collective defamation, stereotypes, and derogatory metaphor indicating the victim is inferior, sub-human (animals, insects, germs, viruses) or super-human (Satanic, omnipotent).” If certain classes of people are “pre-defined as alien … subhuman or dehumanized, or the enemy,” it follows that they must “be eliminated in order that we may live (Them or Us).”¹¹

An example of this mindset is the text that underpins the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultural traditions: the Old Testament (particularly its first five books, the Pentateuch). In general, these texts depict God as “a despotic and capricious sadist,”¹² and his followers as eager génocidaires (genocidal killers). The trend begins in the Book of Genesis (6:17–19), where God decides “to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven,” with the exception of Noah and a nucleus of human and animal life.¹³ In “the most unequivocally extirpatory of [the] Old Testament texts,”¹⁴ 1 Samuel 15: 2–3, “the Lord of hosts” declares: “I will punish the Amalekites for what they did in opposing the Israelites when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”¹⁵

The Midianites in Numbers 31: 7–18 fare little better, but even the minimal selectivity at the outset vexes Moses:

They warred against Midian, as the Lord commanded Moses, and slew every male…. And the people of Israel took captive the women of Midian and their little ones; and they took as booty all their cattle, their flocks, and all their goods. All their cities … they burned with fire…. And Moses was angry with the officers of the army…. [He] said to them, “Have you let all the women live? Behold, these caused the people of Israel, by the counsel of Balaam, to act treacherously against the Lord … and so the plague came to the congregations of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man by lying with him [sexually]. But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.¹⁶

As this passage suggests, genocides in prehistory and antiquity were often designed not just to eradicate enemy ethnicities, but to incorporate and exploit some of their members. Generally, it was children (particularly girls) and women (particularly virgins, or those in the associated age group) who were spared murder. They were simultaneously seen as the group least able to offer resistance, and as sources of offspring for the dominant group, descent in patrilineal society being traced through the male bloodline.¹⁷ By contrast, “every male” was often killed, “even the little ones.” We see here the roots of gendercide against men and boys, including male infants, discussed further in Chapter 13.

A combination of gender-selective mass killing and root-and-branch genocide pervades accounts of ancient wars. Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire’s root-and-branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE,^* and the destruction of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (fifth century BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his “Melian Dialogue.”¹⁸

The Roman siege and eventual razing of Carthage at the close of the Third Punic War (149–46 BCE) has been labeled “The First Genocide” by historian Ben Kiernan.¹⁹ The “first” designation is debatable; the label of genocide seems apt. Fueled by the documented ideological zealotry of the senator Cato, Rome sought to suppress the supposed threat posed by (disarmed, mercantile) Carthage. “Of a population of 2–400,000, at least 150,000 Carthaginians perished...