My “day job” these days– when I’m not posting stuff on the blog, tending my garden, or doing all the other things that can handily distract me from it– is to write up all the material I’ve been gathering over the past 42 months on “How societies deal with legacies of atrocious violence.” This will be a book, once I’ve wrestled all my material into shape.
These days I’m working on the chapters on Rwanda. Finding the best words to convey the horror of what happened during the genocide there–and especially the enthusiastic, public, and mass-participatory aspect of it– is hard enough. Finding words that work toward providing an explanation of that is even harder.
This weekend, I’m going to what looks like a really timely conference in London, Ontario, titled “Why neighbours kill”. (Note the Canadian spelling there.) They even have a website for the conference. I think I’m supposed to talk about Rwanda, with an emphasis on implications for post-genocide policies. Preventing iterations of violence/atrocity is the big concern of my book. However, as I think about the conference I’ve also been thinking about another situation of prolonged, genocidal or near-genocidal violence among neighbors with which I’m even more intimately familiar than the one in Rwanda: that is, the time I spent in Lebanon, 1974-81.
The Lebanese civil war started on April 25, 1975…
In my role as a journo, I used to cross the front-lines quite frequently there. Since my (then-)husband was/is a Lebanese Christian with relatives on both sides of the Green Line, I had some pretty good entrees into people’s thinking at a number of different levels. The main kind of genocidal or near-genocidal activities that I witnessed were those of the Maronitist militants; and certainly the main form of broad, public, genocidal mobilization I saw was that practised on their side of the line. “Ala kul lubnani in yuqtil filastiniyyan” (It is the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian) was a very common slogan indeed, stencilled all over the walls of East Beirut.
Action-wise, the most vivid ( sorry, completely the wrong word) thing that I personally saw was the immediate aftermath of the Maronitist militias’ capture of the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp for Palestinian refugees. Militia leader Bashir Gemayyel led us on a “victory tour” the day after the camp fell, and prefaced it by saying “I am proud of what you will see here”… I want to go back and dig out the actual description I wrote at the time, of the terrible, terrible devastation, mutilated bodies, etc, that he then proceeded to show us.
The day before that, I’d interviewed some of the women and kids who had managed to reach the relief trucks that evacuated them to the relative safety of West Beirut. They were dazed and shocked and told of how their menfolk had been separated from them as they tried to leave the camp. My colleague Jon Randal wrote some even more vivid descriptions of what he saw being done to those men, but I didn’t see that.
At that time too, I remember being told by Miss Tracy Chamoun, the lovely 15-year-old daughter of Maronit militia boss Danny Chamoun, about how she and her schoolfriends would stop their school-bus every day near a certain ravine so they could get out and go and ogle at the latest crops of crushed and mutilated bodies of Palestinians that had been thrown in there overnight.
So anyway, about both Lebanon and Rwanda…
I’ve come up with a sort of working hypthesis, that I’m working with, for now.
A first observation in this regard is something that first occurred to me just over a year ago. Indeed, it was exactly one year ago today that I put this post up on JWN. It was titled, “The nexus between genocide and war”. It was mainly a reflection on the movie, “The Pianist”. But in it I wrote:
- the movie also reminded me of something I first started reflecting on some weeks ago: namely, that while hate-inciters and other various assorted sickoes can be found in every society, it seems to be only in the circumstances of an all-out war that such people and grouplets actually get to act out the full sickness of their genocidal ambitions.
I think this feels like a fairly significant insight. Think of Germany, think of Rwanda, think of Saddam’s Anfal campaign. All of them carried out under the “fog of war”.
This is NOT to say, at all, that genocide is “just another one of the things that gets to happen in war.” It is NOT just another “excess” of the war situation. It deserves to be treated seriously, and with deep opprobrium…
I postulate that the reason for the nexus between genocide and war is because, in time of war, so many of people’s “normal” inhibitions–and primarily, the normal inhibition against killing– have to be suppressed. This then allows sick individuals and grouplets who advocate genocidal, mass killings to gain a much wider and more sympathetic hearing than they could ever get in normal times. Plus, there is all the fear and hysteria of war-time discourse: the frequently exaggerated fears of hostile “fifth columns” whose members–often thought in many people’s minds to be members of a certain rethnic or religious group– need to be rooted out. Etc., etc.
Well, I still think that’s a pretty sound observation. Also, that the policy approach I advocated on the basis of it ain’t shabby, either:
- If this nexus exists, then one very effect[ive] way to “prevent” genocide– an obligation that the 1948 Genocide Convention lays on all members of the international community– would be to prevent war.
However, now, I’m thinking of going a bit further than that, to specify two other aspects of what fuels the acceptability of genocidal mobilaztion. these are:
- (1) A very vivid fear of what might happen to oneself and one’s community if the mebers of the targeted group are allowed to live, a fear that builds on and is buttressed by?
(2) A lived experience of radically diminished personal and public security allied with a radical decrease in socioeconomic status and security.
In other words, we would have a situation where the mobilizable group has already, in recent memory experienced a significant defeat, and fears a further, possibly even annihilatory defeat if the “target” group is allowed to live.
In both Lebanon and Rwanda, in addition, we have the interesting phenomenon of what I like to think of as “death-throes of the influence of Francophonie” in that society/region. I can tell you for a fact that among the supporters of the Maronitist hardliners in Lebanon there were any number of people from families of modest means whose parents had scrimped and saved to send them to the very best (French-language) church schools that they could afford– only to have them get out on the job market and discover that all the really good jobs in the banks, the oil industry, and Beirut’s enormous international service industry were going to– scruffy little Palestinian boys and girls from the refugee camps who had the good fortune to have had English rather than French as their second language.
And what did I discover in Rwanda when I was doing reserach there in 2002? Lots of English-speaking Tutsis running government ministries while hundreds of well-educated but sullen French- and Kinyarwanda-speaking Hutus couldn’t find a decent job….
Well, the time-line and modality of the language factor there was slightly different than in Lebanon. In the case of Rwanda, nearly all the people actually i the country in early 1994, whether Hutu or Tutsi had French as their second language. Whereas the people in the top government jobs now nearly all grew up in Rwandan-Tutsi refugee camps in Uganda or other strongly Anglophone countries. So the second-language issue there really divides those Tutsis who returned to the country after the genocide from the (agonizingly few) Tutsis who were direct survivors of the genocide, as well as from most Hutus…
But still, my “death-throes of Francophonie” theory seems to have some strong applicability in both cases, and quite likely in other cases around the world.
H’mm, wonder what the good people in Ontario will make of this latter portion of my theory? I guess I’ll find out soon…
What did the Palestinians do to incite such venomous behavior on the part of Lebanese Christians?
Mr. Truesdell, are you a troll? Are you trying to blame the victims of massacres for their deaths? Ms. Cobban, this Lebanese American (of Christian background) hopes you have a good answer for this. Damn I am tired of the demonization of the Palestinians. Now even the Palestinian dead of Lebanon (and there are many thousands) are responsible for their own extermination. Why don’t you ask what the Jews of mid-century Europe did to incite the venomous behavior of the Germans? It’s a similar question, equally repugnant, biased and clueless.
Allow me to hope that Mr. Truesdell’s question was merely worded extremely poorly, and was not intended to imply that the Palestinians “deserved” such barbaric treatment.
In order to explain why the genocidal ideology of the Phalange Militia became so endemic, it has to be pointed out that Lebanon was an old, privileged enclave of the Maronites (and incidentally, the Druze–who were ancient rivals of the Maronites since the Ottoman conquest). The Maronites hoped to retain (a) their own privileged position in Lebanon and (b) the particularist nation of Lebanon itself, detached from the Arab struggle against Israel.
The arrival of several hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, especially from Jordan, meant also the arrival of the PLO and the massive strengthening of the Maronite’s other armed rival, the Murabitun, which had agitated for the dissolution of the Maronite-dominated state of Lebanon. So I gues you can see what happened: while the Palestinians were received into Lebanon for humanitarian reasons, and were mainly interesting in leading normal lives, they also had large numbers of guerrillas and partisans who either wanted to wage war on Israel from Lebanese soil, or else, join up with the other Muslims in Lebanon, destroy the conservative Maronite state, and create a radical Arab nation that could confront Israel.
Such an outcome would utterly destroy the Maronite way of life. That the armed Palestinians were merely fighting to regain their rights would not really alter this atttitude.
I think people’s values reflect the amount of power they have; if they can kill with impunity they can become indifferent to this act, if it benefits them. When weakness is perceived it brings out agressive tendencies.
I have concluded that most people do not object to mass murder or other atrocities in an absolute way but only in a context-dependent way because of what has happened in Iraq and elsewhere. I consider the sanctions an act of genocide. Most Americans I confronted with the facts about this policy could have cared less.
I found an interesting perspective on this issue in a book on brain evolution, “braindance”, by Dean Falk. We are hard-wired to have certain agressive behaviors.
Your project sounds very important to me. Have you met Lawrence Weschler of the New Yorker? He wrote a book several years ago entitled A Miracle, A Universe which dealt with survivors of torture in Brazil and Uruguay.
Pardon me for mentioning it, as you probably are familiar with it, but I thought it was a very important book, and well-written. I first heard of it on a late night radio interview which John Hockenbury of NPR did with Weschler.
Could you say more about Rwanda? I understand your “death-throes of the influence of Francophonie” thesis about that country, but am not so clear about the context being a war pre-existing the genocidal outbreak. Had Rwandans been living in the midst of war prior to the shooting down of the president’s plane? Honest question, not argumentation?
As for the general thesis, would it be possible to restate it as “genocide become possible when a) war has calloused human interaction and b) one group in a society unexpectedly loses a competitive advantage over another, sometimes in a way marked by language.” Just wondering.
Hostility is caused by the perception of “other” escalating to resource capture. Neighbour is as useful as Neigbor or voisin. There was no need to put the u in parentheses. Saxon, Norman, Arab, Zionist — it’s water and how you slice your onions. And how you spell neighbour.
You’ve just lost all your credibility.
Or credibilite.
Jan– the context being a war pre-existing the genocidal outbreak. Had Rwandans been living in the midst of war prior to the shooting down of the president’s plane?
Read Chapters 3-6 of Gerard Prunier’s book, “The Rwanda Crisi; History of a Genocide”, or any other book that explained what happened from October 1, 1990 thru the start of the genocide in April 1994.
Edward– Male psychologists have long argued that “people’s brains are hard-wired for aggression”. More recently, feminist psychologists have started to point out there is hard-wiring for cooperation and empathy, too (or perhaps, instead). Male thinkers have long liked to argue, qua Hobbes or Locke that “man” is by nature a self-sufficient entity who’s inclined to war against all other men, etc etc. Of course, none of those gents ever was married or had to raise kids. Indeed, they themselves would never have reached adulthood, learned to speak, etc etc., if someone (most likely, female) hadn’t carefully nurtured, socialized, empathized with, and taught them… There is at least as much evidence for “hard-wiring” of cooperative, nonviolent problem-solving behaviors as there is for aggression.
Personally, I’m also committed to not viewing neurochemistry/neurobiology as destiny. We can, as Hume argued, educate our sensibilities and our emotions as much as any other aspect of our ever-evolving selves.
The author of this brain evolution book, Dean Falk, is female, and she attacks what she considers some male shibboleths in the book. There are a lot of interesting claims in the book which I can’t really judge because I am not a biologist. Apparently a lot of prejudice-influenced theories have appeared in her field and later been debunked.
Ms. Falk does not argue we are destined to make war but simply that this is a primitive urge we have that needs to be controlled. In the last chapter she discusses some studies of chimpanzee behavior. Chimpazees live in tribes which claim and patrol a territory. When a patrol encounters a lone chimpazee from another tribe they attack and sometimes kill the intruder. She makes some amusing comparisons of this behavior with policies of the Reagan administration.
Just my personal perception, but it seems war and genocide have rewards to the offspring of the “winners” — in increased access to resources, and less competition from the “others”, being those that were killed.
Slavery also had rewards for the slave owners and offspring (still true today in the USA, even after all these years).
This is not to argue that these behaviors are acceptable. I find them immoral.
Why focus on the past atrocities in Rwanda and Lebanon?…for a horrendous example of genocidal policies in our own enlightened age, look no further than the Sudan.
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