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Genocide

Source:
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
Author(s):
Katherine G. V. FidlerKatherine G. V. Fidler, Katherine G.V. FidlerKatherine G.V. Fidler, Trudy JacobsenTrudy Jacobsen

Genocide 

[This entry includes three subentries, an overview and discussions of genocide in Africa and in Southeast Asia. See also Ethnic Cleansing and Deportation.]

Overview

The term “genocide” emerged in a specific historical moment: that of the Nazi Holocaust. It is now used to describe atrocities committed both before and after those committed by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s and denotes the most extreme forms of abuses inflicted by humans on fellow humans.

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and international lawyer, sought a meaningful term to describe the atrocities perpetrated against the Armenians in the early twentieth century and those perpetrated by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. In an effort to convey the scale of the violence perpetrated against various groups in Europe, Lemkin rejected the terms “mass murder,” “denationalization,” and “Germanization.” He believed that these terms inadequately described the full-scale attempts not only to exterminate entire populations but also to erase and exploit various markers of community identity. In his definitive work Axis Rule (1944), Lemkin settled on a hybrid term: one that combined the Greek work geno, meaning “race” or “tribe,” and the Latin cide, derived from the Latin verb caedere, meaning “to kill.”

In the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945, the victor nations indicted and prosecuted captured Nazi leaders in Nürnberg, Germany, on charges of crimes against humanity. These charges encompassed only actions taken during the war and excluded any atrocities committed before the war. Lemkin, among others, believed that the adoption and incorporation of genocide into international legal codes would allow for atrocities occurring outside the bounds of war to be adequately prosecuted.

In 1946 the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution that condemned genocide as “the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” The United Nations commissioned the drafting of a convention on genocide to address and define the parameters of genocide, as well as the responsibilities of member nations in the prevention of future acts of genocide.

On 9 December 1948 the U.N. General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Its Article 2 defines genocide as

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:A. Killing members of the group;B. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;C. Deliberately inflicting on the group the conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;D. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;E. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Although this definition addresses the need to account for a particular scale of atrocities and allows for genocide to occur outside the bounds of international war, the contours of the definition have in the latter part of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century caused considerable confusion as to what kind of violence constitutes genocide. For a series of atrocities to constitute genocide rather than mass murder, one must prove that a particular set of persons has demonstrated absolute intent to destroy another national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. This condition has proved difficult to meet in the international legal sphere.

The Herero of Namibia (1904–1907).

Although the term “genocide” emerged in the context of those atrocities perpetrated during the Nazi regime, it has also been used to describe particular events occurring before the Holocaust. Recent scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism has explored the forms and extent of violence employed by European colonial forces against indigenous peoples.

Germany extended colonial control over German Southwest Africa (now Namibia) in 1884. During the course of the next twenty years German Southwest Africa witnessed the arrival of more German settlers than any other German overseas holding. As part of colonial rule the Germans dispossessed African tribes of their land, resulting in impoverishment and political subordination. In January 1904 the Herero rose up against German rule. Although the Herero vastly outnumbered German forces, the German colonial military, under the leadership of General Lothar von Trotha, possessed decidedly superior military technology. To others, General von Trotha boasted of his desire to “annihilate the rebelling tribes with rivers of blood and rivers of gold. Only after a complete uprooting will something new emerge.”

The German colonial forces thus embarked on a campaign to eradicate the Herero through various strategies, such as killing cattle, driving the Herero on forced marches into the Namibian desert, and herding surviving members into detention camps. In the span of several years, between forty and seventy thousand Herero were killed, with only fifteen to twenty thousand surviving. It is worth noting that the same colonial administrators and medical personnel involved in the Herero massacre went on to inform Nazi policy on race and eugenics.

The Armenian Genocide (1915–1918).

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire perpetrated a series of massacres against the Christian Armenian minority (1894–1896 and 1909). The Ottoman government aimed to quell the growth of Armenian political groups that had formed in response to repressive religious and social policies enacted by the sultanate. These massacres resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians—estimates run from between one hundred to three hundred thousand—and the dislocation and impoverishment of many thousands more.

In 1915 the empire embarked on a systematic program to drive out and eradicate Armenians. The Ottoman government used the pretext of World War I to justify the deportation of Armenian Christians. In conjunction with the systematic expulsion and extermination of Armenians, the Ottomans confiscated the property and possessions of dislocated and deceased Armenians and destroyed many historical and religious sites. By 1922 approximately 1.5 million people had been killed.

The Holocaust (1935–1945).

The Nazi regime, led by Adolf Hitler and a powerful propaganda machine, was informed by theories of racial purity, specifically Aryan superiority. Beginning in the 1930s the Nazis embarked on a series of measures targeting “degenerate” groups including Jews, Slavs, Poles, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, disabled people, and dissenting religious groups. The Nazis initially employed exclusionary methods such ghettoization, forced sterilization, employment barriers, strict marriage laws, and the wearing of symbols displaying one's status.

By the late 1930s the Nazi regime pursued a more aggressive policy of extermination, introducing concentration camps throughout Germany and Poland. An integral component of these concentration camps were gas chambers designed to dispose efficiently of the so-called degenerate groups. These gas chambers represented a technological advance from the mobile gas chambers employed by the Nazis against Jews and Roma several years earlier. By the time of their defeat by Allied forces in 1945, the Nazis had killed some 7 to 9 million people, as a result of their internment in concentration camps, gassing, or summary execution. Of this number, approximately 6 million were Jewish and 1.2 million Polish.

The Cambodian Genocide (1974–1978).

The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, was strongly influenced by Maoist Communism and engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Cambodian monarchy for several years before it came to power in 1974. Pol Pot advocated a return to an agrarian state and a rejection of Western society. The Khmer Rouge liquidated cities throughout Cambodia and targeted anyone resembling a Western intellectual for immediate execution. Those who survived were forced to work in rice fields throughout Cambodia and were given starvation rations.

Pol Pot and his government were intensely suspicious of any Western, particularly CIA, interference or espionage in Cambodia. Consequently, the Khmer Rouger accused countless people of spying for the United States. Those accused of such crimes were transported to facilities like Tuol Sleng (known as S-21 and located in Phnom Penh) and tortured until a confession was obtained. Of the nearly ten thousand people known to have been held and tortured in Tuol Sleng, only five are known to have survived.

Over a four-year period thousands of Cambodians fled across the border into Thailand, and in 1978 the Vietnamese invaded the country and forced the Khmer Rouge into exile. In its wake the Khmer Rouge left approximately 1.7 million people dead—from summary execution, starvation, disease, or torture. As of the early twenty-first century no leader of the Khmer Rouge had been prosecuted for crimes of genocide.

Bosnia (1992–1995).

The first attempts to prosecute individuals for the crime of genocide occurred in the aftermath of the Bosnian war of 1992–1995. The conflict that set the killing in motion originated in part after the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1991. Slovenia seceded from the Republic of Yugoslavia, followed by Croatia. As a result Bosnia found itself in a difficult position: if it remained part of Yugoslavia, its Serb population would receive preferential treatment at the expense of Muslims and Croats, but if it declared independence, Muslims would become particularly vulnerable to attack. Bosnia chose to secede in March 1992, and subsequently hard-line Bosnian Serbs formed an independent Bosnian-Serbian state within the borders of the former Serbia.

Members of the new Bosnian-Serbian state had compiled lists of prominent non-Serbs—primarily Muslim and Croat civilians—and shortly after Bosnia's secession from Yugoslavia they began to round up and in many instances kill non-Serbs. Violence against this ethnic group soon escalated and involved the establishment of concentration camps and the systematic use of sexual violence against women, summary execution, and torture. The international community was slow to respond to the overwhelming evidence of a well-organized effort to eradicate the Bosnian Muslim population. The United States for its part hesitated to designate the atrocities as “genocide” and declined to dispatch U.S. forces to accompany a U.N. peacekeeping force to the region. A NATO force, with U.S. troop support, did ultimately enter the region. The Dayton Accords, supported by the administration of President Bill Clinton, ended hostilities in 1995. The United Nations established the International Criminal Tribunal of Yugoslavia (ICTY) after the cessation of hostilities to investigate and prosecute the crimes committed between 1992 and 1995.

Rwanda (1994).

Concurrent with the genocide occurring in Bosnia, Rwanda erupted into civil war in 1994 with the invasion—one of a series—of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). After achieving independence from Belgium in 1959, the Rwandan government had been controlled by increasingly radical Hutu factions. In response to the incursions of the RPF, an organization composed of Tutsi refugees living in exile in Uganda, relations between Hutus and Tutsis progressively deteriorated throughout the early 1990s, with an increasingly hostile Hutu media referring to Tutsis as inyenzi or “cockroaches.”

On 6 April 1994 the Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down as he returned from Tanzania, where he had attended a meeting on the implementation of the 1993 Arusha Accords that sought to normalize relations between warring Hutus and Tutsis and establish a multiethnic ruling coalition. Hours later, blockades were set up throughout the capital city of Kigali, and the national radio station, Radio Milles Collines, began to incite extremists, broadcasting kill lists of moderate Hutu intellectuals and politicians along with prominent Tutsis. Within days the killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus spread throughout the country, and it accelerated once the United Nations was compelled to pull out all its personnel from Rwanda because of the escalating violence.

Over the course of 100 days, between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsis and Hutus were killed by the Interahamwe (a radical Hutu Power youth militia) and other Hutus. Perpetrators used machetes, hoes, and other tools as weapons. In the aftermath of the genocide, many scholars, legal analysts, and human rights advocates noted the rapidity with which people were exterminated.

The killing ended with the taking of Kigali by RPF forces in early July. Since 1994 the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR), located in Arusha, has indicted, tried, and convicted several government officials and local leaders for the crime of genocide.

Genocide is universally condemned. However, despite repeated exhortations to prevent genocide from occurring, genocidal violence continues to occur throughout the world. Violence in the Darfur region of Sudan has reached genocidal proportions. Though many nations and aid organizations are attempting to relieve the human suffering felt by the African population at the hands of the Janjaweed militia, no one has yet been able to end the violence.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.Find this resource:

Gewald, Jan-Bart. Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero in Namibia, 1890–1923. Oxford: James Currey, 1999.Find this resource:

Gutman, Roy. Witness to Genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize–Winning Dispatches on the “Ethnic Cleansing” of Bosnia. New York: Macmillan, 1993.Find this resource:

Hinton, Alexander. Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.Find this resource:

Hovannisian, Richard, ed. Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1998.Find this resource:

Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.Find this resource:

Power, Samantha. “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002.Find this resource:

Schabas, William A. Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Find this resource:

Katherine G. V. Fidler

Africa

The category of “genocide” emerged in the aftermath of World War II. Formulated as a response to the war crimes of the Nazis, the term was first coined in 1944 by the scholar Raphael Lemkin and was later codified and criminalized by the United Nations in 1948.

Under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2 defines genocide as an act in which there exists “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Under international law, individuals from Yugoslavia and Rwanda have been charged with—and convicted of—the crime of genocide as defined by the U.N. Genocide Convention. In addition, several countries including Spain, France, Belgium, Finland, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have criminalized genocide as a particular crime in their domestic codes.

Genocide in the Colonial Period.

Although genocide exists as a legal category, the term is also used to describe and understand colonial violence against African populations in the modern period. Advancing under the banner of la mission civilisatrice, or the civilizing mission, European colonial forces exploited and expropriated mineral resources and land throughout Africa in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The genocidal violence of colonialism in Africa accelerated with the arrival of European settler communities throughout southern Africa and the discovery of valuable mineral and plant resources such as gold, diamonds, and rubber in the nineteenth century.

In the early nineteenth century, British forces engaged in a series of frontier wars with the Xhosa, a southern African tribe. These frontier wars were designed to remove the Xhosa from the Western Cape of contemporary South Africa. By the 1840s settlers and British military forces, with the help of sophisticated long-range weapons such as the Minie rifle and rockets, deployed a genocidal policy against the Xhosa. British commanders urged their soldiers and settlers not only to defeat but also to exterminate the Xhosa population. Although the efforts to exterminate the Xhosa completely were ultimately unsuccessful, British military forces and settlers were able to force the Xhosa into the Eastern Cape and into a position of subservience that lasted throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, until the end of apartheid in 1994.

The use of violence against the Xhosa population is an example of settler genocide in which European settlers used racist ideology to justify the attempted extermination of African populations to claim the most arable and productive land; likewise, European colonial forces used genocidal violence in the course of seizing valuable resources. A particularly apt example is what occurred in the Congo Free State in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the “humanitarian” directive of King Leopold II (r. 1865–1909), Belgian forces extracted massive amounts of rubber and ivory from the Congo Free State (known in the early twenty-first century as the Democratic Republic of the Congo) through slave labor. Leopold's agents authorized and oversaw such coercive measures as amputating limbs, caning, whipping, and incarcerating women and children. Natives were subjected to forced deportation to mineral-rich areas where they performed slave labor and were killed if their yield did not meet specific quotas set by their European masters. It is unclear how many Africans died while performing slave labor for King Leopold II, but most scholars have concluded that a substantial percentage, if not the majority, of the population in the region was killed during the course of Leopold's rule. Although it might be difficult to prove the intent to exterminate the African population within the parameters of the U.N. Genocide Convention, it is clear that Leopold's agents employed extraordinary violence that targeted native populations simply on the basis of race.

The first clear case of genocide perpetrated in Africa during the twentieth century occurred in German Southwest Africa (now Namibia). German colonial forces first occupied and claimed this region in 1884. In the twenty years that followed, a substantial settler population came to reside in the region and began to push out native populations. These native populations were also subjected to discriminatory practices by German settlers. In 1904 the largest tribe in the region, the Herero, rose up against the settlers. The German empire dispatched to the region a large military force of approximately fifteen thousand men under the command of General Lothar von Trotha. General von Trotha declared that the Herero were no longer under the protection of the German empire and that all Herero must leave the colony of German Southwest Africa or face immediate death. German forces proceeded to drive the Herero across the barren Kalihari Desert.

On receiving imperial orders rescinding this directive, German forces then proceeded to force the remaining Herero population into concentration and slave-labor camps. In these camps German doctors and ethnographers “studied” and experimented on the Herero. Their findings contributed to the development of eugenics as later implemented by Nazi doctors in the 1930s and 1940s. Although it is difficult to document the exact numbers of Herero killed by German military forces, the 1985 Whitaker report, issued by Benjamin Whitaker, U.N. special rapporteur on genocide, estimated that approximately sixty-five thousand Herero—80 percent of the population—were killed as a result of General von Trothar's genocidal decree. The German government eventually in 2004 admitted that it had committed genocide against the Herero, but it has subsequently refused to pay any compensation to the remainder of that indigenous population.

The Rwandan Genocide.

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 is perhaps the best known and most devastating of genocides perpetrated in Africa during the modern period. Rwanda, originally a German colony, became a Belgian colony in the aftermath of World War I when Germany was forced to relinquish all its colonies under a League of Nations mandate. The Belgian colonial administration, employing a form of indirect rule, identified the minority Tutsi ethnic group as the ruling class in Rwanda. The Belgians based this choice on a series of questionable ethnographic observations in which the Tutsi appeared to hold the majority of wealth and power in Rwandan society. As a result, the Belgian colonial administration allowed the Tutsi elite to exert repressive controls over the Hutu population. However, when faced with the realities of decolonization in the mid-1950s, Belgium switched its political support from the Tutsi elite to a developing Hutu elite. Upon independence in 1962, open elections in Rwanda brought a Hutu party to power.

In the years following independence, Tutsi refugees in Uganda used the emergence of a repressive Hutu government as a rallying point around which to organize armed groups and stage attacks against Hutu targets. In addition, the postindependence Hutu government led retaliatory killings against Tutsi civilians in Rwanda throughout the 1960s. A Tutsi resistance movement based in Uganda, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), eventually invaded Rwanda in October 1990, sparking a civil war. In response, the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana sought to normalize relations between the Rwandan Hutu government and the RPF, culminating in the 1993 Arusha Accords. However, this attempt to develop a multiethnic coalition infuriated an extremist movement, Hutu Power, and contributed to the development of a genocidal anti-Tutsi ideology. On 6 April 1994, returning from a meeting in Tanzania that focused on the implementation of the earlier Arusha Accords, the plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down. Within hours of this incident, Hutu

GenocideClick to view larger

Rwandan Genocide. A survivor prays over the bones of the 1994 Genocide victims at a mass grave, Nyamata, Rwanda, 6 April 2004. AP Images

Power youth groups known as the Interahamwe set up roadblocks, armed with kill lists of prominent Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Within days the killing of people identified either through identity cards or by physical traits thought to characterize the Tutsi had spread throughout the country. With only a small number of U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda at the time and the international community's explicit refusal to intervene in the slaughter, members of the Interahamwe and other Hutus within a 100-day period perpetrated a genocide in which between 800,000 and 1 million people were killed on the basis of their ethnicity. The only military action taken by the international community during the course of the genocide was the French-led Operation Turquoise, which was later revealed to have provided, ironically, a safe haven for the Hutu government and its allied militias. The Hutu government and these associated groups in fact repeatedly took advantage of this operation to perpetuate massacres and moved the radio station being used to incite and coordinate the genocide within the confines of the safe zone secured by the French in southeastern Rwanda.

In the absence of any concrete action to prevent the genocide, the international community, slowly and at times haphazardly, attempted to establish a means by which to address the atrocities committed in Rwanda. Initially, citing budgetary constraints, the United Nations Security Council proposed to subsume at the Hague a tribunal for Rwanda under the ongoing criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia by adding extra trial chambers and hiring additional staff. However, after the transitional government in Rwanda, composed primarily of Tutsi refugees from Uganda, expressed considerable opposition, an independent tribunal for Rwanda—called the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda or ICTR—came into existence as the mechanism for transitional justice and a means by which to hold the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide accountable.

Although the ICTR has been beset by a number of bureaucratic and political woes, including the Rwandan government's withdrawal of support in the early twenty-first century, the tribunal has arrested, tried, and convicted a number of accused perpetrators, including Jean-Paul Akayesu, a local Rwandan mayor, on the count of genocide. Akayesu was the first person to be convicted of the crime of genocide in an international court since the drafting of the U.N. Genocide Convention. The decision against Akayesu also expanded the legal definition of genocide to include the crime of rape.

Genocide in Contemporary Sudan.

In the early twenty-first century the Darfur region of western Sudan witnessed escalating violence. Human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International accused the Sudanese government of supporting genocidal acts by the Arab-based Janjaweed movement against the non-Arab population in the region. The Janjaweed military has engaged in such violent acts as the destruction of villages, the forced deportation of civilians, rape, and murder. Estimates in 2004 suggested that more than fifty thousand people had been killed and more than 1 million forced from their homes into refugee camps or unofficial settlements. Although a humanitarian crisis resulting from extraordinary acts of violence still existed in mid-2007, it is difficult to determine if genocide in the legal sense of the term has occurred because such a legal conclusion depends on whether or not organizations like the Janjaweed are targeting specific groups on the basis of their race, religion, or ethnicity.

To add to the human tragedy, international aid has been slow to come to the region. Although many international leaders, including a number of U.S. government and U.N. officials, have suggested or explicitly stated that genocide continues to occur in Darfur, as of mid-2007 there had been no attempt to intervene legally or militarily, and humanitarian aid in the form of food and medicine remained intermittent at best. The crisis in Sudan continues and threatens the national security of the country, as well as that of neighboring countries, including Chad and the Central African Republic.

Bibliography

Flint, Julie, and Alexander de Waal. Darfur: A Short History of a Long War. London: Zed Books, 2005.Find this resource:

Gewald, Jan-Bart. Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923. Oxford: James Currey, 1999.Find this resource:

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.Find this resource:

Human Rights Watch. “Entrenching Impunity: Governmental Responsibility for the International Crimes in Darfur.” December 2005. http://hrw.org/reports/2005/darfur1205/.Find this resource:

Human Rights Watch. “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda.” March 1999. http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/.Find this resource:

Mamdani, Mahmood. Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996.Find this resource:

Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.Find this resource:

Prunier, Gérard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. London: C. Hurst, 1998.Find this resource:

Katherine G.V. Fidler

Southeast Asia

Southeast Asia has not had an incident that fits within the parameters of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. If more liberal definitions that include the persecution of social and political groups are entertained, however, then genocides have taken place in at least three Southeast Asian nation-states since the middle of the twentieth century: Indonesia (1965–1966), Cambodia (1975–1979), and East Timor (Timor-Leste; 1975–1999).

Indonesia.

The persecution, torture, and execution of alleged members of the Parti Kommunis Indonesia (PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party), between October 1965 and March 1966, during which more than 500,000 people died or disappeared, resulted from the failed coup attempt of 30 September 1965. Suspected PKI members, including the Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Gerwani), a Communist women's organization, were identified, arrested, and detained for questioning regarding the PKI's purported orchestration of the coup. Government military units carried out direct executions of those believed responsible after extracting confessions by torture. Gerwani members were sexually assaulted. Local anti-Communist groups (Muslim, Christian, and nationalist) carried out summary punishments and executions with the support of the armed forces, although many seem to have taken this opportunity to exact retribution for perceived slights, in some cases going back generations and disguised as outrage over the coup.

Cambodia.

An estimated 2.52 million people died as a result of execution, torture, disease, malnutrition, and overwork in Democratic Kampuchea—the name by which Cambodia was known between 17 April 1975 and 7 January 1979—because of the policies and mismanagement of the Khmer Rouge. Cities were evacuated, people who had worked for the previous governments were killed along with their families, and large numbers of ethnic Vietnamese and Cham people were executed. Anyone who could speak a foreign language, had been educated—doctors, lawyers, engineers—or had owned a business was targeted. Individualism was outlawed, men and women alike being required to dress in black, cut their hair short, and eschew adornment. Everyone was relocated to the countryside in order to plant and harvest rice, build dams, hew new courses for waterways, and “build solidarity.” Family connections were broken down, with children being placed in children's cooperatives where they, too, worked, collecting chicken waste for fertilizer and firewood. Marriages were carried out en masse and with little or no decision making from the parties involved.

The crimes of the regime are forever documented in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh and the “killing fields,” the mass graves in which the Khmer Rouge buried their victims. The People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) held a genocide tribunal for the “leaders of the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique” in August 1979, but this has been categorized as inadequate in the eyes of the international community. The International Criminal Court was scheduled to convene the Extraordinary Chambers for the Period of Democratic Kampuchea in order to bring the surviving leaders of the regime to justice.

East Timor.

Indonesia invaded East Timor on 7 December 1975 in response to the declaration of independence by the Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (Fretilin), the popularly supported independence movement. Its main political rival, the União Democrática Timorense (UDT), had been receiving support from the Indonesian army for some time, in return for which UDT agreed to support East Timor's integration into the Indonesian nation-state. By February 1976 more than sixty thousand East Timorese had been killed, and human rights violations committed by the Indonesian army, including rapes and other assaults, were widespread. The United Nations never recognized the annexation, and Jose Ramos-Horta of Fretilin led an East Timorese government-in-exile for the next ten years.

Another 100,000 to 200,000 people died between 1975 and 1981, and 800,000 more died between 1974, when the Indonesian armed forces are alleged to have begun their campaign of terror and intimidation, and the arrival of the advance United Nations peacekeeping mission on 20 September 1999. The governments of the United States and Australia, who are alleged to have given tacit approval for the 1975 invasion, ignored the situation until the Dili Massacre of 12 November 1991, when Indonesian soldiers opened fire on people attending the burial of a student who had himself been killed by the armed forces. Kay Rala Xanana Gusmão spoke openly about the incident, generating international condemnation of the continued occupation of East Timor.

Mounting international pressures caused the Indonesian government to agree to a referendum for East Timor, held on 30 August 1999, during which the Indonesian armed forces attempted to intimidate people into voting against independence through still more violence. Independence was declared on 20 May 2002 and the country was renamed Timor-Leste. The Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor was devised as a mechanism for reconciling the perpetrators and victims of violence between 1974 and 1999.

Because all these incidents are not classified as genocides according to the 1948 convention, and the acknowledgement of them as such would involve investigation of current heads of state and the past indifference of the international community, their perpetrators carry on with impunity.

Bibliography

Cribb, Robert, ed. The Indonesian Killings, 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Clayton, Australia: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990.Find this resource:

Kiernan, Ben. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979. 2nd ed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.Find this resource:

Saul, Ben. “Was the Conflict in East Timor ‘Genocide’ and Why Does It Matter?Melbourne Journal of International Law 2, no. 2 (2001): 477–523.Find this resource:

Trudy Jacobsen