Humanitarian Crisis in North Kivu, DRC

Though not extensively covered in the Western media, the world’s deadliest armed conflict since WWII occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), with an estimated 4 million dead between 1998 and 2003. That conflict has simmered on in North Kivu (a Congolese province bordering Uganda and Rwanda), with full scale war threatening to break out once more between the official army of DRC and the dissident troops of General Laurent Nkunda, a conflict that could end up involving foreign troops as well.

Humanitarian crisis doesn’t loom so much as it is already present. This from a recent article in The Economist (“A humanitarian disaster unfolds,” November 17, p. 54): “Making comparisons between humanitarian crises may not always be fair or useful. But those dealing with the emergency in Kivu are starting to do so. ‘The situation at the moment in North Kivu is worse than Darfur,’ says Sylvie van den Wildenberg of the UN mission in the province. More people have fled their homes this year than in Darfur.” As the same article reports, approximately 500,000 (out of the province’s population of 4 million) people have been displaced in the past year or so, 160,000 just in the past two months. Violence is common, and rape is being commonly used as a weapon of war.

See “More Clashes in DRC North Kivu Will Harm Civilians,” from New Zealand’s Scoop, for a general description of the situation. See “The Blood Keeps Flowing,” from AllAfrica.com, for a description of the effects on one town.

John Prendergast on Darfur

John Prendergast, who has written extensively on Africa generally and lately about Darfur specifically, has an essay worth reading posted at AllAfrica.com, “Can Europe and China Save Darfur?”

Prendergast’s essay addresses global inaction in the face of ongoing genocide in western Sudan, as well as the possibilities for action on the part of the U.S., Europe, and/or China. The following is from the essay:

“What is needed isn't exactly rocket science. I've been working in Africa's crisis zones for 25 years, and contrary to popular perceptions, the continent is ripe with success stories about countries that have been ripped apart by civil war, but have been able to resolve their issues and move on. Mozambique, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, and others can attest to the formula: a serious peace process combined with the deployment of relevant force works.

“A quartet of President Hu, President Sarkozy, Prime Minister Brown, and President Bush should pursue a peace and protection initiative that would prioritize a peace deal between the regime and rebel groups, and enforce the rapid deployment of the Security Council's authorized multinational forces to Darfur and eastern Chad. They should be prepared to back targeted sanctions in the UN Security Council (President Putin, you are welcome to join in) against anyone - government or rebel - who tries to obstruct these objectives. Not only would Darfur be "saved," but transatlantic and transpacific cooperation would also be enhanced at a time when such multilateralism is desperately needed.”

Sudan and the U.S.: Genocide and the War on Terror

To the extent that the ongoing genocide receives much attention in the press (which is generally not to any great extent), attention is often paid to how China's economic relationship with the Sudanese government limits the ability of the U.N. to engage in strong sanctioning activities against Sudan. China's position vis-a-vis Sudan is a crucial consideration that should not be understated.

Another factor less commonly reported is the U.S. government's conflicted relationship with Sudan, with the Bush administration one of the few around the world that has publicly decried the situation in Darfur and called it genocide (one of the only things I'll give the Bush adminstration credit for), but at the same time the administration sees the government in Khartoum as a critical ally in the War on Terror, largely for having expelled Osama bin Laden and cracked down on Islamic militants after the cruise missile attacks during the Clinton administration.

The Middle East Times has just posted a good overview of the situation: http://www.metimes.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20070616-055135-9519r

Here's one interesting section from the article:

"Marc Lavergne named intelligence chief Salah Abdallah Gosh and Nafi Ali Nafi, one of President Omar Al Beshir's key advisers, as Khartoum's leading strategists on Darfur and who are also well-known in certain Washington circles.

'These people regularly visit Washington and they are in permanent contact with the US, which considers them their special partners,'said Lavergne.

Thomas-Jensen also underscored the fact that Ghosh was flown into the US by private CIA jet for a week-long series of meetings in 2005 with US officials, causing much controversy within the Bush administration.

'By agreeing to divulge everything it has about Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, the Palestinians, Algerian Islamists, and a bunch of other troublemakers in the world, the Sudanese government is providing an enormous service to the US government and is irreplaceable,' said Lavergne.

To placate its critics, Sudan has suggested that Darfur rebels are of the same ilk as Al Qaeda and is seeking to maximize the benefits from its decision to expel Bin Laden and align itself with Washington."

Genocide and Hairsplitting

In an earlier post from March 7, I proposed a typology of genocide, ethnic cleansing and other types of mass violence. I want here to visit again the question of the point of such typologizing or making distinctions. I am prompted to do so by the insightful discussion of Adam LeBor in a review of several recent books related to genocide (Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act: Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Benjamin Lieberman’s Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe, Michael Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, and Mark Levene’s Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volumes I and II) in the March 19, 2007 issue of The Nation.

In addition to evaluating and discussing the books in question, LeBor also expresses exasperation with international proceedings related to genocide, whether with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or the continued lack of real coordinated international efforts to end the slaughter in Darfur. Much of his frustration is aimed at hairsplitting over the definition of genocide, for example arguments over whether this or that person was guilty of genocide or ethnic cleansing at Srebrenica or elsewhere, or rulings that genocide occurred at Srebrenica without as yet finding anyone guilty of the charge in that case.

LeBor also insightfully writes of some of the consequences of this style of hairsplitting in a passage I would like to quote at length (parenthetical note added):

“This endless hair-splitting greatly aids states that perpetrate genocide. If nobody knows what genocide is, then how can anyone be guilty of committing it? It detracts from the more important debate of how to stop the ongoing killing in Darfur. Wrongly viewing Darfur through the prism of the Iraq War, much of the left, both in the United States and Europe, seems paralyzed by the fear of being seen to support another overseas adventure. For all its complications (some of which are skillfully laid out in another article in the same issue of The Nation, “The Wars of Sudan” by Alex de Waal) – pre-existing conflicts over water and agricultural land, desertification and arbitrary international borders – the crisis in Darfur is also simple. The Sudanese government is waging a sustained campaign of murder, ethnic cleansing and displacement against the people of Darfur, a campaign extensively documented by the UN, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others. The slaughter could be curtailed or even brought to a close without Western military intervention. Such steps might include: deploying UN troops inside Sudan; deploying peacekeepers in Chad to prevent cross-border raids; targeted sanctions on Sudan’s oil industry; targeted sanctions on Sudanese government ministers, army and intelligence officers; using US trade as a weapon to pressure China, Sudan’s main sponsor, to stop the carnage; and even threats to boycott the Beijing Olympics.”

In light of LeBor’s discussion I want to revisit the question of the utility of making distinctions about genocide, ethnic cleansing, and similar phenomena. In short, I will argue that in some contexts, making fine distinctions is important, in other settings largely irrelevant, and in other cases a problem insofar as making distinctions becomes an act of hairsplitting as an end in itself in lieu of acting.

In the case of historical or social science analysis of genocidal or ethnic cleansing contexts, acts of classification and making distinctions are quite useful in coming to the fullest possible understanding of complex phenomena, whether in relation to the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the current slaughter in Darfur, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the historical displacement of Native North Americans, the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia, or any other case of genocide, ethnic cleansing, ethnocide, “classicide” (a term introduced in one of the books reviewed by LeBor, Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy), or other mass violence.

As I argued in my earlier post, it is also crucial to be able to make distinctions with regard to ongoing events if the international community (if it in any case ever decides to act before it’s too late) is to act effectively. I argued there that since different mass violence events are organized in different ways, understanding the important details and structural elements of an ongoing event is important if intervention is to be useful. For example, a genocide strongly orchestrated and coordinated by a central state government might be stopped effectively via strong military action to eliminate the government coordinating the genocide (e.g. military success by Rwandan Tutsi rebels was the main thing that stopped the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda), whereas a genocide only promoted by and loosely orchestrated by a centralized government might not be ended, or could perhaps be made worse, by the same style of intervention.

Similarly, LeBor says “While the term genocide is modern, the annihilation of one human group by another has occurred at least since biblical times.” True enough, of course, but as LeBor also recognizes, modern genocides occur via modern technology and infrastructure, and that changes at least the scope of potential genocides and the ways they can be organized – Genghis Khan put whole cities to slaughter in some of the most spectacular instances of pre-modern atrocity, but nothing on the scale of the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, or Armenian Genocide happened, or could have happened, before the Modern Era.

In one particular sort of way, distinctions between genocide, ethnic cleansing or other mass killing are irrelevant. For those directly or indirectly affected, it might not matter much why they are killed or otherwise affected. I can’t imagine it makes much difference to the slain victims or survivors of Srebrenica or other Bosnian massacre sites whether they suffered through genocide or ethnic cleansing.

As I previously argued, though, when we make distinctions between types of genocide or between genocide and ethnic cleansing, this need not and should not be taken to imply that one sort of phenomenon is more serious than another. All types of mass killing involve the murder of many individual human beings. The fact that genocide and ethnic cleansing might have subtly different motivations or that different genocides are organized and implemented differently doesn’t in any way make one sort more or less serious a crime than another.

So, I’m also exasperated by the sorts of things LeBor mentions. In particular, the act of splitting hairs in lieu of action I find disturbing. Further, I find it problematic to make distinctions between types of mass killing for the purposes of judging one more seriously than another or to judge one incident worthy of action or intervention and another not. That is, what’s wrong with making distinctions between genocide and other phenomena at the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia or with regard to Darfur is not the act of making distinctions, but using such distinctions as an excuse to not take action in Darfur or to judge one set of killings more leniently than another for Bosnia.

Sudan and Cultural Relativism

In recent blog posts, I’ve written on several occasions regarding two contemporary issues that pertain to the national context of Sudan: the genocide in Darfur and female genital modification (a phenomenon not restricted to Sudan, but practiced in varying frequencies throughout the Sudanic region of Sahel zone Sub-Saharan Africa and to some extent in surrounding cultural regions – but at the same time definitely a phenomenon of Sudan, and often practiced there in a form regarded by many as the most extreme example of female genital modification, what Janice Boddy has called, following local usage, “Pharaonic Circumcision,” which entails excision of all external female genitalia and infibulation of the vaginal opening). My question here is whether concepts of cultural relativism apply to either of these situations.

I’ve also written recently about differing conceptions or senses of “cultural relativism.” There are certain elements of cultural relativism that anthropologists in general tend to agree on. First, there is a recognition of the simple reality of different culturally shaped ways to be in the world. There is no single way to be human, and each of our ways of being human is largely influenced by our cultural contexts, and is “culturally relative” to that extent. Second, for ethnographic research, cultural relativism further entails an at least provisional setting aside of moral or ethical judgment of the cultural practices being observed and analyzed in the field context, and an attempt to understand cultural phenomena on their own terms, within their own logic. As Marshall Sahlins has written recently in his book Waiting for Foucault, Still, this is as much a pragmatic and methodological concern as anything. In order to do quality fieldwork, it is necessary to set aside preconceptions (to the extent humanly possible) and to not continually engage in moral judgment of those being studied. Beyond this, there is debate about the sense, meaning, or implications of cultural relativism. For some, the provisional setting aside of moral or ethical judgment or critique becomes an ultimate setting aside of these activities, at least with regard to the practices and premises of cultural contexts other than of one’s own upbringing. For me, cultural relativism does involve a strong inclination towards respect for the practices of other cultures (I think that’s been one of the strongest contributions of the discipline of anthropology to western culture [and other cultures]) and for the self determination and autonomy of others. Further, though, a concern for self determination and autonomy as well as respect for others as equals, for me, necessitates willingness to engage in cross-cultural dialogue and to critique and be critiqued.

But my question here is not so much the content of debates about cultural relativism but whether those debates about cultural relativism and their implications have any bearing on the issues of female genital modification or the genocide in Darfur? My short answer is “yes” to one, and “no” to the other.

Female Genital Modification is a “traditional” practice in most, if not all, of the communities where it is now performed. (I’m aware of the problems of invoking “tradition,” especially when notions of the traditional are used to imply stasis within the practices of a particular community or homogeneity in practice within a community or region. Still, I find the concept useful in referring to practices that have a history within a specific context [often, but not necessarily a long history] and which relate in important ways to many other elements of the culture. I’m respectful of those, like June Nash, who call for us to speak no more of “Tradition” – and we should speak no more of capital-T, static, essentializing “Tradition” – but I would call instead to speak in more complex, interesting ways of “tradition” or “traditional practice.”) It is important to provisionally set aside judgment (at least for those engaging in ethnographic fieldwork on the topic) and to understand the practice in relation to other features of the cultural context on their own terms, even if we ultimately engage in critique and/or support efforts to alter the practice.

The only element of cultural relativism that applies at all to the genocide in Darfur (or any other genocide, ethnic cleansing, or ethnic violence) is perhaps the goal of understanding the phenomenon on its own terms, the better to end it. Other than that, cultural relativism (and any associated notions of national autonomy) is utterly irrelevant in this case. While a certain amount of ethnic tension in Western and Southern Sudan may be “traditional,” genocide is clearly not and violates in the most extreme way possible the respect for diversity, self determination and autonomy on which cultural relativism is based.

A Typology of Genocide

I am prompted to consider whether there are different types of genocides by three things: (1) having recently read Jean Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season; (2) a recent class discussion in a course I am currently teaching on Native North American cultures; and (3) the continued dithering and lack of action on the part of the U.N. with regard to the ethnic violence and massacres in the Darfur region of Sudan and now also neighboring portions of Chad and the Central African Republic.

(1) Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season is a harrowing read, based as it is on interviews with Hutu killers who participated directly in the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in the mid 1990s. Hatzfeld had previously conducted interviews and written about Tutsi survivors of that genocide. He also has written about instances of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In Machete Season He makes a distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing. He also carefully makes clear that labeling the events in Bosnia “ethnic cleansing” rather than “genocide” is in no way intended to diminish the significance of the abuse heaped upon specific individuals and communities. Rather it is to recognize a difference in the way that events played out in Bosnia and Rwanda, as well as a difference in the motivations and coordination of the killers.

One key difference between the two cases concerns who was killed. In Bosnia, ethnic cleansing involved the removal of Bosniak Muslims from Serb dominated areas, including large scale massacres at some sites, such as Srebrenica. Such massacres focused on men. Men and older boys were killed wholesale, while women and children, when killed, were killed more randomly. Rape was perpetrated commonly, but not necessarily systematically, on Bosniak women (which doesn’t at all minimize its effects or horror, but simply describes the practice). Hatzfeld argues that the intent (and the result in some areas) was to drive out the Bosniaks, to brutalize them, to diminish their capability to retaliate, but did stop short of attempting to completely eliminate the Bosniaks as a group. It is this that prompts Hatzfeld to say this was something subtly different from genocide.

In the Rwandan case, the evidence from the Tutsi survivors, Hutu killers, and material remains makes clear that Tutsis, regardless of gender or age, were massacred wholesale. The goal was not to drive them out but to completely eliminate them.

(2) In a recent class discussion in my current course on Native North American cultures, where the specific discussion focused on effects of European and Euro-American interactions with Native Americans, the issue arose whether there had been a Native American genocide. After careful discussion, a number of conclusions were reached. First, the consensus of the class was that whether there was genocide in this case depended on whether we define it in terms of the sorts of effects that result from an interaction or in terms of the motivations influencing the actions of one side.

If genocide is defined in terms of effects (a legitimate starting point, though not the route I would choose, because it entails only ever being able to identify genocide after the fact, after the results are in), then there clearly was a Native American genocide. In terms of absolute numbers and population proportions, the consequences of European-Native American interaction were more deadly for Native Americans than was the case for any of the 20th – 21st century genocides, due to a combination of disease, violence, and enslavement.

The consensus of the class (with some respectful and respected dissenters) was that genocide should be defined more on the basis of motivations of those doing the killing. When so defined, in most cases we see something slightly different from genocide and more like ethnic cleansing in the Native American case. There were many massacres of Native American populations, just as in Bosnia, but rarely were they systematic in intent or practice, i.e. rarely were they systematic attempts to wipe out a whole group. There seems overall (despite the more clearly genocidal intent of some individuals, like General Sherman who tried to adapt the total war techniques he had pioneered during the Civil War to genocidal endeavors in the American West) to have been an attempt to move Native Americans away (e.g. the Trail of Tears and the whole reservation system) and later to assimilate them forcefully through institutions like Indian Boarding Schools. To use a current technical anthropological term, there was systematic “ethnocide” in European-Native American interactions, and there was frequent and often extreme violence (there was perhaps even genocide in specific cases), but taken overall, something a little different than genocide occurred (and as in the Bosnian ethnic cleansing case, saying genocide didn’t occur doesn’t make it better, but simply describes the situation). (If we shift our historical gaze south of the United States, in most of Latin America, there was not even an attempt to move Native Americans out of the way [except in parts of Argentina and Chile] – not because of a particularly nobler attitude towards Native Americans, but because the Spanish and Portuguese wanted to use their labor.)

(3) Some senior U.S. administration officials have labeled the events on the ground in Darfur and surrounding regions genocide, but to date the U.N. has refrained from doing so. This is partly no doubt out of cynical self interest on the part of some countries, such as China, with an interest in cultivating economic and political ties with the Sudanese government, partly reluctance to use that term, because under the U.N.’s charter, “genocide” would require strong action, but also arguably because some don’t quite see the events as genocide. I would label these events genocide, but I would also recognize that events in Darfur (and for that matter the events of the early 20th century Armenian genocide) are a bit different than those of the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.

Therefore, I would propose the following categories for considering genocide and related practice: state sponsored and coordinated genocide, state promoted – locally coordinated genocide, and ethnic cleansing.

State Sponsored and Coordinated Genocide

This is the sort of instance many have in mind when they think of “genocide,” and as I argued above may be part of the reason that some at the U.N. are uncomfortable labeling the Darfur situation a genocide (because it doesn’t – at least not systematically – fit into this type of genocide, and also as I said above, many states have other, less legitimate reasons, to resist the labeling of genocide).

The two most prominent examples of states sponsored and coordinated genocide are the Jewish Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. There are some important differences between these two cases (which will always be the case with any two distinct members of any sort of type or category): the Holocaust was administered largely through gassings and machine guns, the Rwandan genocide largely through machetes (through there was plenty of machine gunning in Rwanda, and plenty of stabbing and slashing in the Holocaust); while Jews in Germany and Tutsis in Rwanda were both minority ethnic groups, Jews in Germany were largely unknown at a personal level to many Germans, whereas most every Rwandan Hutu was on familiar terms with at least a handful of local Tutsis (which meant that the Rwandan genocide was more intimate; the Holocaust in places like Poland and Lithuania often took on a similar quality); the Holocaust in Germany (but not in places like Poland or the Baltic states) had an urban character, as German Jews were almost exclusively an urban ethnic minority there, while all of Rwandan society has a rural character (as Hatzfeld describes, even Kigali, which is a large city, has the character of many, many rural communities juxtaposed next to one another), with Tutsis despised by many Hutus because of their association of Tutsis with cattle breeding and greater wealth. So, to place the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide in the same category is not to suggest they are the same through and through.

They do have important similarities, though. Most importantly, they were both strongly associated with the state apparatus in their implementation. The state promoted overtly the mass killing of a particular ethnic minority. (This was more clearly the case in Rwanda, but there was plenty of explicit promotion of killing Jews in public statements by Hitler and others, including quite obviously in Mein Kampf.) Further, the genocides were centrally coordinated by the state. This was perhaps more elaborate (and well known) for the Holocaust, but also occurred through the use of radio communication for coordination and the use of the interahamwe militia to implement genocide at the local level (as is made clear in Hatzfeld’s book) in the Rwandan case. This isn’t to suggest that there wasn’t also plenty of local initiative taken to participate in the two genocides in ways not directly promoted and coordinated by the state – there’s plenty of evidence in both cases of things like Hutu villagers seeking out their former neighbors in hiding to kill them, even when not directly coerced to do so by the interahamwe, or Polish or Lithuanian peasants helping German units track local Jewish residents, sometimes even participating directly in the mass killings, or German soldiers volunteering to participate in military units, such as the einsatzgruppen, designed to do nothing more than track down and kill Jews. The overall quality of these two genocides, though, is of a state apparatus being channeled toward attempting to efficiently and systematically wipe out a particular ethnic group (really ethnic and other social groups in the case of the Holocaust, since vast numbers of Roma and a much smaller, but proportionally large, number of homosexuals were also targeted and killed).

The fact that the state was so intimately involved in these two instances makes them quite unusual. Really the only other such example I can readily think of is the German attempt to wipe out the Herero people in the German colony of Southwestern Africa (now Namibia) in the early 20th century. Several historians have discussed this episode as a sort of warm up for the Holocaust, which among other things pioneered the concentration camp as a tool in mass murder and genocide (the Germans probably borrowed the idea of the concentration camp from the British use of such camps in South Africa during the Boer War, and the earliest instance of the modern concentration camp was probably the Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia which housed Union prisoners of war during the American Civil War, but the camps housing Herero inmates were the first channeled to genocidal purposes).

State Promoted – Locally Coordinated Genocide

Both the current massacres in Darfur and the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century represent definite genocides. In both cases there is or was a definite attempt to wipe out particular ethnic groups, Armenians in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire or the Fur and related black, non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur, Sudan. The character of these genocides is different from that of the Holocaust or Rwanda, though. For the most part, the state is or was not the primary direct perpetrator but played mainly the role of instigator (exceptions include things like Sudanese military planes attacking communities in Darfur under the guise of attacking rebels). The Sudanese state is not completely lying when it claims to not be engaged in massacres – it is mainly the janjaweed militias who commit the atrocities, but there’s plenty of evidence to indicate state support (material and ideological) of the janjaweed. The Turkish state is not completely lying when it claims things like, “It was the Kurds who killed the Armenians” – in many cases, Kurds were involved in killing Armenians, but so were lots more Turks.

It’s important to recognize differences in organization and implementation of genocides because these differences require different responses. If the world at large through the U.N. were to ever decide to take action in Darfur before it’s too late to bother (something about which I’m quite skeptical and pessimistic, but also hopeful), the strategies and tactics called for would be different than if the world at large through the U.N. had ever gotten around to deciding to take action in Rwanda. In Rwanda, the military defeat of the Hutu-dominated army and government (and by the end of the genocide simply the Hutu army and government) by Tutsi rebels essentially ended the genocide. There had been some local initiative and coordination of specific maneuvers during the genocide, but these had been minor in scope and fell apart almost instantaneously with the defeat of the state. It’s not at all clear that the same would apply to Darfur. The fact that the state is involved, but mainly indirectly, means that things like sanctions or warfare against the Sudanese state might or might not be sufficient to end the genocide. With the first sort of genocide described above, the international response that would be appropriate is clear (even if the international community has never responded in this way) – end the state that is directly perpetrating genocide and you end the genocide. With this second type of more diffuse and localized genocide, while I would argue that it is still necessary to intervene powerfully in some way with the state in question, it’s not so clear that this would even be close to sufficient in order to end these types of genocide (in fact, the Armenian genocide continued well past the 1915 date normally associated with the genocide, even as the Ottoman state was crumbling at the end of World War I). If anything, a response involving very strong economic and political sanctions seems more likely to be effective than military action with this sort of genocide. Strong sanctions would give the Sudanese government at least some incentive to use the direct and indirect influence on the janjaweed to stop the killings; toppling the Sudanese government would more likely lead to a chaotic situation where no one would have much influence of the janjaweed.

Ethnic Cleansing

I would apply the term “ethnic cleansing” for situations that have strong analogous qualities to the context of the term's original use, Bosnia. That is, ethnic cleansing refers to situations which are not genocide because they do not involve the systematic attempt to eliminate an ethnic group altogether but which do involve a systematic attempt to remove an ethnic group from a particular context or area. This may involve ethnocide (the attempt the eliminate an ethnicity [as opposed to the people who comprise the ethnic group] through forced assimilation), such as with Indian boarding schools; it may involve large massacres, as in both the Bosnian and Native American contexts; it may involve targeted killings of members of a particular ethnic group, as in the sectarian violence in Iraq, the current situation that comes closest to fitting into the category of ethnic cleansing, though to be technical, the Iraqi situation would be more “sectarian cleansing;” but in each of these cases, this is not genocide. For the individuals killed or otherwise directly affected, ethnic cleansing is no less tragic or devastating than either type of genocide, so saying that ethnic cleansing is not genocide is not at all to suggest it is a less serious crime and horror, but to say that it is simply a slightly different kind of crime and horror, involving different motivations and strategies.

As with genocide, a further distinction could be made between ethnic cleansing that is both instigated and coordinated by a state apparatus and that which is locally coordinated and not centrally controlled. The Native North American case is obviously not a single case, but many contexts over a period of centuries. The Trail of Tears and many other instances of Indian Removal were state instigated and implemented. Many, perhaps most, massacres of Native Americans were locally initiated, sometimes with the state having helped to foster a situation of violence or acquiescing to violence, and sometimes not.

Other Mass Violence

Genocide and ethnic cleansing are not the only types of mass violence. Warfare in general involves mass violence, but it generally doesn’t involve the targeting of specific social groups beyond enemy militaries. The 20th century development of total war (which was being experimented with at least as early as the American Civil War), especially during World War II, brought troubling changes to this, as most of the major powers involved in that war engaged in military tactics which didn’t just kill large numbers of civilians collaterally but specifically targeted them as a way of undermining the total society. In most cases, while egregiously violating standards of human rights later formalized, these actions could not be easily regarded as genocide, ethnic cleansing, or even particularly motivated by ethnicity, but in a few cases, ethnicity does seem to have played a role. This seems to be the case in the Japanese atrocities in Nanjing, and I have found greatly troubling the U.S. fire bombing of every Japanese city and most every Japanese town (as well as the fact that far more attention has been paid to the fire bombing of a much smaller number of German communities and cities – which was horrific in its own right – but which entailed far fewer total German than Japanese deaths).

Other instances of mass violence don’t really fit in the discussion of ethnic violence of any sort because clearly not ethnically motivated, but do have some analogous qualities in terms of their implementation and the fact that they involve systematic killings and violence directed at specific selected social groups or individuals. For example, the Stalinist purges and gulag system or the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, while not genocide, involved mass internments and killings instigated and coordinated directly by the state apparatus and have some analogous qualities to the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide.

Why Distinguish between Different sorts of Mass Violence?

First, making accurate distinctions gives you a greater ability to make subtle arguments, and to avoid exaggeration or mischaracterization. When Amnesty International referred to Guantanamo as an “American Gulag,” they engaged in serious exaggeration which undermined the credibility of their own research and reporting. You don’t need to call it the “Gulag” in order to take accusations of impropriety at Guantanamo seriously. When I heard someone refer to Israeli military actions in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 as “genocide,” I couldn’t take seriously anything else she had to say about the matter. It’s not that I didn’t find any of Israel’s military actions troubling, but there was nothing particularly “genocidal” about Israeli actions.

Second, distinguishing between different sorts of practice can be pragmatically important. Since not all genocides or examples of mass ethnic violence work the same way, we don’t fully understand them if we don’t make such distinctions. While no genocide or ethnic cleansing will ever be easy to respond to – either in understanding what an appropriate response would be or in implementing that response, and while no amount of understanding will alone provide the political will necessary to appropriately respond, lack of full understanding will almost certainly doom any response, no matter how well intentioned, to failure.