When most people in the west think about people who perpetrate
atrocities, they shift immediately (if they were not already in it)
into “judgment and denunciation mode”; and for the vast majority of
western rights activists that shift seems also to involve shutting down their
normal human curiosity about their fellow-humans, altogether.
It strikes me this shutting-down is of as little utility in the case of
atrocity perpatrators as it is in that of terrorists. Okay, we
all decry, oppose, are horrified by (or whatever) both terrorism and
the perpetration of atrocities… And maybe for some people it makes
them feel good to verbalize these denunciations in loud and judgmental
terms.
If, however, a person wants to end the perpetration of
either terrorism or other forms of atrocity, it is extremely helpful–
actually, indispensable– to try to find an answer to the question of
“why do some people end up doing these things?” Then, on
the basis of the results of such enquiries one can perhaps start to
craft better approaches and policies that can end pepetration in the
present and prevent it in the future.
Undertaking such an enquiry need not detract from one’s moral
horror. There is a problem, perhaps, in English, in the use of
the term “to understand”. At a purely intellectual level, to
“understand” how a bicycle works implies no moral stance toward the
working of bicycles at all. But to many people, the idea that it
might be worthwhile trying to “understand” why someone perpetrates
atrocities too often is taken to mean that one has (or is in danger of
developing) some sympathy toward the perpetrator.
I’ll say yes, that is a risk. I have interviewed a number of
people of whose acts I very strongly disapproved– and quite
frequently, the process of doing the interviewing both increases my
intellectual and human understanding of why the person acted as he did and engenders some sense of
basic human commonality with him. (This is not the same as saying that
I start to feel some approval of his devastating acts. It is, I
think, a fairly immature individual who is unable to make any
meaningful distinction between a fellow human and the very worst of his
or her acts.)
But oh, how much easier to stay on one’s own moral high horse,
expressing one’s denunciations left, right, and center without
undertaking the arduous task of seeking to understand the motivations
of the person one denounces!
How easy just to say that person who commits atrocious acts is just
inherently “evil”, and that’s that.
… All the above is a very wordy introduction to something I want to
write here about the value of the still-tiny field of enquiry called
“Perpetrator Studies”. It’s a field that we need a lot more
of! (I see that the estimable, Cape Town-based Institute for
Justice and Reconciliation has been doing
a little of it; basing their approach on that used in one portion
of the TRC’s work. Are there other good PS projects out there?)
I have just finished reading a remarkable book by the Croatian writer
Slavenka Drakulic, called They would
never hurt a fly: War criminals on trial in The Hague. I
think this book– and Pumla Gobodo-Madikazele’s A human being died that night—
between them provide a very useful gateway into “Perpetrator Studies”.
Drakulic is a very talented writer– of both fiction and
non-fiction. I’ve written about her book Balkan Express here before.
That was a collection of essays she wrote during the Wars of the
Balkans. This latest book is based on a lengthy “research trip”
she made to The Hague, in order to observe proceedings at the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In
the introduction she says:
simple one: as it cannot be denied war crimes were committed, I wanted
to find out about the people who committed them. Who were
they? Ordinary people like you or me– or monsters?(p.7)
It rapidly becomes clear in the body of the book what her answer is: not “monsters”, but the
“ordinary people like you or me.”
A key turning point in Drakulic’s narrative comes on p.50 of my Abacus
paperback edition, where she is describing and reflecting on the
trial of three Bosnian-Serb militiamen accused (and found guilty) of
having participated in and helped to organize the mass sexual demeaning
and defilement of literally hundreds of Bosniak women and girls
whom they treated as sex-slaves.
She writes:
said, ‘What the sum of the evidence manifestly demonstrates is the
effect a criminal personality will have in times of war on helpless
members of the civilian population.’
But if she is right, there must have
been many such ‘criminal personalities’ around to be able to rape tens
of thousands of women and to kill more than two hundred thousand people
during the war. There would have had to have been thousands of
men committing such acts. Were the majority of them ‘criminal
personalities’? This is hard to believe. More likely, the war itself turned
ordinary men– a driver, a waiter and a salesman, as were the three
accused– into criminals because of opportunism, fear and, not least,
conviction. Hundreds of thousands had to have been
convinced that they were right in what they doing. Otherwise the
vast numbers of rapes and murders simply cannot be explained– and this
is even more frightening.
In Chapter Six, she comes back to this theme of the deadly
transformative power of war itself. This chapter is about a young
man called Goran Jelisic– the original referent of the “he couldn’t
hurt a fly” description. Throughout this chapter, Drakulic keeps
remarking on intense similarities between this man and her
son-in-law. Both are about the same age; both love the
essentially solitary pastime of fishing and are generous with their
catch; both are considered gentle and helpful individuals.
That is, in Jelisic’s case, with the crucial exception of a certain
18-day period in 1992 when Jelisic, a guard in a detention camp in
Brcko in which Bosnian-Serb militiamen held Mulsim men prisoners, he
cold-bloodedly executed more than 100 of them. And there he was,
in the dock at The Hague.
Drakulic asks,
What did happen, then, during those eighteen crucial days? Nobody
could explain for certain, not even Jelisic himself.
person, but the circumstances. There was no longer peace; there
was war now. Jelisic could no longer find the opportunity to lie
in the grass while the river gently murmured and the world around him
stood still. The war changed it all. My son-in-law, too had
to leave behind fishing in his beloved Adriatic when he left for Canada
at about the same time Goran Jerlisic left for Brcko… Why did
one of them leave for Canada and the o0ther for Brcko? Could it
have been the other way around? Could my son-in-law become a
volunteer in the Croatian police [some members of which have also been
convicted of war crimes] instead? I believe that he could
not. But why could he not, while Jelisic could? I don’t
know the answer…
But I keep thinking that even if he did become an executioner, in a
deeper sense he was a victim himself. Goran Jelisic and his
entire generation were cheated. Many of his parents’ generation–
my generation– embraced the nationalist ideology and did nothing to
prevent the war that grew out of it. They were too opportunistic
and too frightened not to follow the leaders they had learned to
follow… (pp.72-73)
I am very interested in the conclusions Drakulic was reaching there:
principally, her conclusion that the circumstances of the war
itself had turned many otherwise “ordinary” people into perpetrators of
the vilest atrocities. This conclusion is also one that
former Rwandan Attorney-General Gerard Gahima has reached, based on his
experience of trying to unravel the often complex “legal
responsibility” issues around that maelstrom of violence, the
Rwandan genocide. It is also the explanation that the curandeiros and curandeiras (traditional healers)
whom I met in Mozambique most commonly used when I asked them describe
what they thought was happening during the incidents of terrible
atrocity that plagued their country during its civil war 1977 through
1992.
For Gahima and for the Mozambicans, the highest priority there needs to
be given to the task of preventing
the outbreak of any further war such as might be expected to
involve the perpetration of yet more atrocities.
This is Drakulic’s emphasis, too. She argues with some
conviction, however, that the work of the ICTY can be expected to help in preventing a return
to war– primarily by revealing with great clarity to all the peoples
involved in the Balkan wars– ethnic Serbs, ethnic Croats, Bosniaks–
the moral depravity of those who had led their chauvinistic movements
in the 1990s.
Myself, I’m not so certain as she seems to be that this will actually
be the effect of ICTY’s work. Elsewhere, I have cited the conclusions
reached by Balkan-affairs expert Tim Judah and Berkeley researchers
Eric Stover and Harvey Weinstein that ICTY’s work had had zero
discernibke effect (or even, in Judah’s evaluation, possibly even a
negative effect) on the prospects for reconciliation in the
Balkans. Certainly, Stover and Wesinstein’s work, and my own,
with reference to the effects of the ICT for Rwanda on reconciliation
there have also been correspondingly disheartening.
I think– as I’ve argued elsewhere– that there may well be a role for
public establishment, acknowledgment, and wide diessemination of the
“truth” about the atrocities committed during any particular instance
of conflict. But I’m not sure that the best time for that to
happen is during the very fragile period that imediately follows the
the termination of an active conflict (and certainly not, so long as
the basic political differences that underlay the conflict have not yet
reached a lasting and fully agreed resolution.) Any attempt at
public truth-seeking is almost bound to re-open psychic wounds and
social polarities that in those early stages have barely started to
heal. And especially in the context of a courtroom, the
adversarial nature of proceedings is almost bound to throw people back
into their old ultra-defensive sensitivities.
Still, Drakulic’s book makes an extremely valuable contribution to this
whole debate over the broader social-political “value” of the
ICT’s. She has a great, novelist’s eye for the telling detail,
and her capacity for human empathy and solidarity informs her whole
approach. She tells us her father had been an officer in the
Yugoslav National Army back in the old Tito days; and she finds she can
almost see him reflected in some of the (ethnic-Serb) army officers
indicted by ICTY… Including the infamous Ratko Mladic– the “butcher
of Srebenica”– whose own daughter expressed her disgust of her
father’s acts by committing suicide.
Drakulic writes,
the suffering that went with it, turned him from a mythological hero
into a human being again… This is why, as of March 1994, General
Mladic has been serving his life sentence, regardless of the fact that
her is a war criminal sought by the Tribunal in The Hague who is still
on the run.(p.154)
Her observation of the grindingly slow pace of the court’s work also
rings very true for me. After I spent a week observing the
mind-boggling slowness of the proceedings at ICTR, in Arusha, back in
2003, I went home and quoted Rebecca West’s description of the
Nuremberg court as being a “temple of boredom.” By the way,
if, after you’ve read Sloavenka Drakulic’s account of the people on
trial in ICTY, in The Hague, you want to read my acounts of the
workings of ICTR, you can find them here and here.
Helena, isn’t Hannah Arendt’s report on the “banality of evil” still the definitive perpetrator study? Is there really any more to be learned about attrocities by studying the perpetrators? I think the honest conclusion will always be that most of them are ordinary people, “just like us.”
The kinds of atrocities you are talking about are societal acts, not just individual acts. The interesting question, I think, is how does a society establish the boundaries between “atrocities” and “justified acts of self-defense” or the like, and what makes these boundaries shift over time? A good case study would be how the United States of America came to accept the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners as “not an atrocity” in such a short period of time. Clearly, the perpetrators of those acts were just ordinary people.
You might also want to read Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning.
Shocking as it is, this book gives evidence to suggest the opposite conclusion: that the sad-sack German draftees who perpetrated much of the Holocaust were not expressing some uniquely Germanic evil, but that they were average men comparable to the run of humanity, twisted by historical forces into inhuman shapes. Browning, a thorough historian who lets no one off the moral hook nor fails to weigh any contributing factor–cowardice, ideological indoctrination, loyalty to the battalion, and reluctance to force the others to bear more than their share of what each viewed as an excruciating duty–interviewed hundreds of the killers, who simply could not explain how they had sunken into savagery under Hitler.
For what its worth, its a little sobering to realize that Hitler was a vegetarian.
If we could see the Big-Time Crimes through the eyes of the big-time criminals, we would probably be amazed. Among some Nazies, for example, the motivation could turn out to have been a truely perverted sense of civic responisbility and public service.
And the atrocities that we (as a country) have been invlolved in… maybe simple carelessness… a kind of big-time criminal negligence.
That, plus an ignorance which is itself almost criminal, e.g. America in Iraq.
C Guida
Dennysville Maine
John C is on the right track when he says these are “societal acts, not just individual acts”.
Whereas in contrast the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) in South AFrica is pursuing “the understanding of what drove individuals to commit human rights violations” (quoted from its web site).
The IJR may be called “estimable”, and it has some big liberal guns on board, such as Desmond Tutu and Charles Villa-Vicenzio. But they are a rearguard, covering a forced retreat.
Justice and reconciliation are no longer widely regarded as having much in common in South Africa, where “reconciliation” means in effect that the whites keep their money and property, while the blacks get the privilege of voting for a government which is then obliged to admister neo-liberaism. Old-fashioned liberalism has been subsumed into all this.
Historically and also pre-historically, human beings have dealt with their propensity to slaughter one another and commit atrocities, by creating institutions. The march of human history is the development and periodic revolutionising of these institutions.
The crisis of the liberals is here because they are afraid of the next round of re-making of institutions. Hence neo-liberalism (anti-government) overall and “perpetrator studies” as an alternative to society. (“There is no such thing as society”, M. Thatcher).
“Perpetrator Studies” implies that we can act upon individuals to maintain a fixed view of society (e.g. as “Just and Reconciled”).
Or, for another example, we can enforce laws against women abuse and thereby avoid having to criticise the institution of marriage and the family.
The point is not so much that they are looking at individuals. The point is that they are not able to look at social institutions as well, and criticise them. This is because they have no other ground upon which to stand, other than the institutions that appear to them as eternal, such as the family and the State (“State” in the sense of an imaginary entity that is above social conflict).
The idea of such eternal institutions coming under scrutiny is unbearable to such liberals. Hence they turn their back upon studies that could get results, and go down the dead-end street of “Perpetrator Studies”.
how the United States of America came to accept the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners as “not an atrocity” in such a short period of time.”
John C., I think its old practice with US doing so. Please read this one
In 1960 her first album, ” Joan Baez
The answer to the question may be in the cognitive side of things, rather than in the emotional. Lacking observations of the demeanor of the perpetrators, I am speculating, but:
The classification of a class of people as not-quite-human or as “Beasts” or as “intrinsically evil” seems necessary for monstrous crimes on a large scale. To them it’s all a bit like trapping mice or poisoning insect pests. This may apply to murder, but probably not to rape.
Most of us do not regard the WWII bombing of German and Japanese cities as crimes or atrocities. Yet they were horrific. What made them acceptable was the honest perception that ones own self or ones country was threatened with destruction. Plus the sense of being wronged, of having been attacked.
There was a truly great CNN documentary by Christiane Amanpour on the Balkan wars. In it, we can see Slobodan Milosevic actually changing his mind on camera, as he is told that the Serbs “Were being beaten”. That is, physically beaten.
So I see three things:
Now if only I knew how to test this theory…
As usual, I have no idea what point WarrenW is trying to make, but I will counter his 3 elements with mine:
-opportunity
-excuse
-permission
I would say that some form of stress is also a prerequisite, except that in our modern world the requisite level of stress seems to be a constant.
JC yours is just another version of Maslow’s hierarchy. Empirical, behavoiurist, anti-humanist.
You end up throwing the humanist baby out with the bathwater.
To explain the so-called “perpetrators”, you become as irrational as they are.
No. Against the irrational we must re-state the rational.
Instead of trying to suck a laundry-list out of your thumb, you should be pursuing the concrete, or let’s say the organic. Do you think people don’t have this capability any more? Of course they do.
What happened to friendly, courteous (and humanistic) Dominic? D– have you been taken possession of by alien forces? Do you need saving?
Personally, I think all the contributions here– including yours, Warren W– are valuable and appreciate you all engaging with the issue.
Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is certainly a core text– though I think the exchange of correspondence she had with Karl Jaspers on the Nuremberg trials– contemporaneously with them– is also very valuable.
Yes, I should read the Browning book, too.
There are such a lot of contexts in which gross atrocities are committed. It’s good to find sources dealing with a range of them– and also sources that reflect the understanding of various different cultures of “the nature of evil”, which is somethng that all cultures have dealt with. For most non-“modern, western” cultures, evil is/was always associated with the rutpure of right relations within and among communities…
Thanks Helena, you’ve just saved me again.
This is a topic I think about a lot. Maybe it’s a bit too “near the knuckle” for me. Maybe I should leave it alone.
I think this thread is a bit like the answer given to the man who asked the way to Tipperary: “I wouldn’t start from here”.
True, one certainly wouldnt want to have to start from the point where atrocities have been committed or are still being committed. But given that these things happen and can relably be expected to continue to happen– either as direct reoffending or as revenge attacks, or both– unless the conditions are changed somehow, the question is what interventions should one seek?
At one level I admire a straightforward appeal to rules, order, prosecutions etc… That is what one should certainly do in any settled society with the rule of law and general respect for that. But what if those conditions don’t exist? (And that is generally the case in the protracted civil-conflict situations in which today’s atrocities occur.) Then, prosecutions can make things worse, in terms of making reconciliation and the establishment of a rule of law even harder and more distant…
My point of view is that so long as it is possible to hold up the (broadly-speaking “Enlightenment”) values of humanism, all of what you suggest is possible, and even desirable.
Without such values the exercise simply gets reduced to a shameful expedient or even a capitulation to the worst of the worst.
At the moment rational humanism is often explicitly rejected (as in post-modernism). Some go further and seek to find the source of irrationalism in rationalism (which is literally maddening). Others, like JC and WarrenW above simply sail straight past the question of common humanity and start erecting bullet-pointed lists of expedient arrangements. Perhaps they “know not what they do”.
I don’t think our so-called (South African) reconciliation would have been possible, and will not continue to be sustainable, without a higher vision of society. This higher vision cannot be tacit or taken for granted but must be explicit and be vigorously defended.
The train violence, the witdoeke, the IFP provocations, the Vlakpaas operations, we waited them out even though they were in all senses intolerable, and designed to be intolerable, only because we had a better common vision, which was expressed so unforgettably in the queues for voting in April, 1994.
We didn’t actually compromise. We got what we were after. There was nothing arbitrary or unprincipled about it. On the contrary. It was only principle that made it possible at all.
There’s an article called “Fear, Violence and Religion” at http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia09222005.html .
The writer is Manuel Garcia Jr. He is saying that the irrational is there and it need not harm us so long as it is not allowed to rule us. The rational must rule. I agree with that.
There’s a new fil by David Cronenberg called “a History of Violence”. Review by J G Ballard at http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1576212,00.html .
Socialism, or barbarism!
prosolution vimax vs