The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  “Even before the gates of Aleppo they were not allowed to rest... the shrunken parties were ceaselessly driven barefooted, hundreds of miles under the burning sun, through stony defiles, over pathless steppes, enfeebled by fever and other maladies, through semi-tropical marshes, into the wilderness of desolation. Here they died – slain by Kurds, robbed by gendarmes, shot, hanged, poisoned, frozen, parched with thirst, starved.”

  “... I have seen maddened deportees eating as food their own clothes and shoes – women cooking the bodies of their new-born babes.”53

  Like the German Holocaust, the genocide was self-destructive. Turkey deprived itself of a large portion of its professional and administrative class. Resources badly needed for war were diverted. Killing and removing Armenians resulted in a lack of support personnel that made the 1916 Russian invasion of Turkish Armenia easier. Count Metternich, a German official, noted that the Turkish government seemed almost bent on losing the war.54

  The role of bystanders

  In 1876 Turkey put down a Bulgarian revolt with indiscriminate massacres. In England there was a strong public reaction led by Gladstone, then in the Opposition. He said that the evidence of atrocities “makes the responsibility of silence.. .too great to be borne.”

  An old servant of the Crown and State, I entreat my countrymen, upon whom far more than perhaps any other people of Europe it depends, to require, and to insist, that our Government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other, and shall apply all its vigour and concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria; let the Turks carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying themselves off.55

  However, Great Britain’s policymakers feared Czarist Russia and therefore courted Turkey.56 Realpolitik won out over moral or humane considerations. British (and world) indignation was not brought to bear on Turkey.

  European nations also passively accepted the great massacres under Abdul Hamid. At the time of the massacres Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany visited Constantinople, publicly embracing the sultan. Massacres of Russian Armenians during the Russian revolution of 1905 also made killing Armenians more acceptable. The German atrocities in Belgium early in the war had a similar effect.

  During the war Turkey was heavily dependent on Germany, which gave it tacit support in suppressing Armenian opposition. Count Ernst von Reventlow wrote in the Deutcher Tageszeitung:

  If the Porte considers it necessary that Armenian insurrections and other goings on should be crushed by every means available, so as to exclude all possibility of their repetition, then that is no “murder” and “atrocity” but simply measures of a justifiable and necessary kind.57

  Germany was the only nation in a position to exert influence on Turkey, but the German government never responded to invitations by the United States and other governments to cooperate in efforts to end the genocide. In the view of one Armenian writer:

  It is clear that, whoever commanded the atrocities, the Germans never made a motion to countermand them, when they could have stopped it at the start by a single word.. .by entering the war, Turkey placed herself entirely in Germany’s power. She is dependent on Germany for munitions of war and leadership in battle, for the preservation of her existence at the present and for its continuance in the future, should Germany succeed in preserving it now. The German Government had but to pronounce the veto, and it would have been obeyed; and the central authorities at Berlin could have ensured its being obeyed through their local agents on the spot. For ever since 1895, Germany has been assiduously extending the network of her consular service over all the Asiatic provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In every administrative centre throughout those districts where massacres and deportations have occurred – in Anatolia, Cilicia, and Armenia proper – there is a German consul; and the prestige of these consuls is unbounded. They are the agents of a friendly power, the only power that offers Turkey her friendship with no moral conditions attached.58

  The capacity of Germany to halt the genocide is probably overestimated here. Once an intense motivation to kill becomes dominant and gains expression in action, suppressing it is not easy. But Germany did not try.59

  Ulrich Trumpener argues that German diplomats and military officials had little capacity to influence the internal policies of Turkey, whether to promote German financial and economic interests or with regard to the treatment of the Armenians.60 But he also indicates that Germany, intent on keeping the Turkish army fighting, was reluctant to do anything “drastic” about the atrocities. The German ambassador refused to consider extending German protection to the Armenians. As it became evident that the extermination was in progress, the ambassador informed his government, which took no action and sent him no policy directive. His own protests of actions against Armenians not “dictated by military reasons” were ignored by the Ottoman government.61 The German government showed no concern about the victims, but did show an interest in preparing a defense against possible charges of complicity.

  In the early stages the Germans did believe that there was an Armenian insurrection. Later they realized the true nature of events but continued to use insurrection as a justification. The German ambassador in Washington, once the atrocities became difficult to deny, defended them on the grounds that “the Armenians were disloyal and secretly aided Russia.”62

  Just-world thinking, the devaluation of victims, fear of alienating their ally and a tendency to adopt its attitude, a focus on their own concerns in the midst of the war, and perhaps their own attitudes toward minorities all contributed to German passivity. An article in the Frankfurter Zeitung in October 9, 1915, reveals part of the German attitude.

  “The Armenian.. .enjoys, through his higher intellect and superior commercial ability, a constant business advantage in trade, tax-farming, banking, and commission-agency over the heavy-footed Turk, and so accumulates money in his pocket, while the Turk grows poor. That is why the Armenian is the best-hated man in the East – in many cases not unjustly, though a generalization would be unfair.63

  Dr. Johannes Lepsius went to Armenia to see, to protest, and also to aid Armenians, which was not allowed by the Ottoman government. Upon his return to Germany, his description of events in Turkey was criticized as exaggerated, even by liberal politicians.

  Germany’s behavior with respect to Turkey during the First World War may have been one element that paved the way for the Holocaust. The Armenian genocide helped shape German attitudes toward violence against “internal enemies.” The quiet acceptance by the rest of the world also contributed. Even after Turkey lost the war, and despite new massacres of Armenians in 1922, little was done to punish Turkey or individual Turks. Hitler could later jsutifiably say, “Who remembers now the massacres of the Armenians?”b64

  * * *

  a In recent years questions have been raised about the authenticity of the Nairn “memoirs” – in reality not memoirs but fifty-two pieces purported to be documents, two letters, and fifty decoded cipher telegrams, with Nairn’s annotations explaining the individual items. There are also interspersed comments by Aram Andonian, the Armenian who received the material from Nairn and compiled it. Vakahn Dadrian examines the question of forgery and the factual errors contained in the documents but concludes that the errors can be explained and the material can be authenticated in many ways. Their validity is supported by the official and mostly secret reports of German and Austrian diplomats to their government, allied to Ottoman Turkey; by information that surfaced at the time of Turkish court-martial proceedings in 1919-20 that tried Young Turk leaders for their conduct of the war and the policy of extermination; by the German consul at Aleppo, Rossler, whose district was in the center of events described in the documents and who read the French translation and judged the documents seemingly genuine. While they are important, these documents are only one source of information about the genocide in Turkey.47

  b After the military trial
s, Turkey reversed course and has ever since denied the atrocities. The reasons for this probably include psychological defenses (denial in the psychological sense, rationalizations, and justifications), fear of Armenian claims for reparations, and the unrealistic fear of an Armenian attempt to establish an independent state. Such denial is potentially very harmful. A society not facing up to atrocities it committed and not dealing with its own inhumanity is likely to continue or repeat such actions. In Turkey, interference with the cultural life of the Armenians, discrimination, and economic pressure have continued. Complicity by others contributes to the possibility of denial: for example, the U.S. State Department, apparently influenced by U.S. national interests in Turkey, decided in 1982 that the evidence of the Turkish genocide or atrocities was unclear. Later, Congress reasserted the earlier U.S. view recognizing that a genocide had taken place.65

  13 Cambodia: genocide to create a better world

  The killing of perhaps two million people in Cambodia was an example of human cruelty perpetrated to fulfill a vision of a better world. God made the Jews wander in the wilderness for forty years so that only a new generation, with souls uncontaminated by slavery in Egypt, would reach the promised land. The Cambodian communist leaders did not have the patience of God. They set out to create a radically new society immediately. Anyone bound to the old ways by their former status or present behavior was to die, to make this better world possible. In the resulting climate of violence and suspicion, many of the communists themselves were killed.

  Historical (life) conditions

  One popular view depicted Cambodia as a jungle paradise, filled with peaceful, gentle people, until the civil war that brought the Khmer Rouge into power. In this view the people were poor but contented; their Buddhism was a source of their inner peace, and the land was bountiful. Not only French colonials, but even the Cambodian elite saw the Cambodian peasantry this way. It was an image actively propagated by the Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk after the country gained independence from the French in 1954.

  For Sihanouk and others this image may have served to fend off discontent. While there were elements of truth in it, it was far from accurate or complete. For centuries Cambodia had been invaded and at times brutally ruled by outsiders – for example, by the Vietnamese in the first part of the nineteenth century. It was ruled by the French (through a protectorate) from 1863 to 1954. The peasants had always been heavily taxed.1 After independence their economic condition deteriorated until the civil war started in 1970.

  Cambodian peasants: economic conditions, uprising, reprisals

  After World War II there was a population explosion. The acreage of arable land declined and the number of large landholdings grew.2 While a few had more land, many had less. After independence, many peasants were forced off their land and drifted into the cities, rootless and destitute.3 The number of rich peasants grew from about 6 percent to 14 percent of the population; they rented land to the landless poor. The number of peasants in debt increased, with annual interest rates as high as 100 percent to 200 percent. Much of this indebtedness was to Vietnamese and Chinese who owned commercial institutions.4

  The shrinkage of average landholdings combined with the increase in population led to food shortages and a general decline in living standards. Food prices rose about 350 percent from 1950 to 1970. A peasant uprising began in 1967-68 in the Samlaut region, and disturbances later spread to cities and other provinces. The immediate cause of the uprising may have been government land expropriations for a sugar refinery; aggressive tax collecting; or an influx of Khmer refugees from the war in Vietnam settled by the government on land the peasants regarded as communal property.5

  Peasants in Samlaut killed two members of a tax-collecting detachment, attacked a garrison, and carried away its arms. Prime Minister Lon Nol, the leader of the government in the absence of the head of state, Sihanouk, responded by sending the national police to pacify the region, mainly by killing peasants. Two communists then in the government, Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn, were accused by the returning Sihanouk of complicity with the uprising and went underground. It was widely believed that the government had murdered them and fifteen thousand people demonstrated in Phnom Penh.

  The next day Sihanouk declared a state of emergency. Army troops assisted by local peasants armed with clubs combed areas of the uprising to crush actual and potential unrest. In a 1972 interview Sihanouk said that he had “read somewhere that 10,000 died” at this time, but insisted that his intervention had restored peace and order.6

  The uprising indicated, and together with the harsh reprisals enlarged, the growing cleavage between the government and the people. It led Khieu Samphan and Hou Youn to give up their attempt to work within the system. They were associates of Pol Pot and members of the group that later became the architect of genocide.

  Political instability and violence

  Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia’s king under French colonial rule, demoted himself so that he could participate in party politics after independence, and ruled until 1970. He came to believe in the 1960s that ultimately the communists would rule most of Southeast Asia. He followed policies that may have been pragmatic under the confused conditions in Southeast Asia, but seemed opportunistic and inconsistent. He brutally repressed communist activities within Cambodia, but offered some support to communists outside Cambodia. He first permitted the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to use sanctuaries in the border regions of Cambodia, but later tried to curb their activities and their use of Cambodia as a supply route. He both protested against the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and secretly asked for U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia.a7

  Sihanouk’s vacillating policies alienated elements of the ruling class, especially his indulgence of the Vietnamese, Cambodia’s ancient enemies, which was even objectionable to many Cambodian communists. Mainly because of his compromises with the Vietnamese communists, he was overthrown in 1970 by the general and then prime minister Lon Nol. After that, the conflict with the communists turned into a full civil war.

  Government corruption was rampant during this conflict. Food sent by the United States was sold by corrupt officials on the black market. Arms sent by the United States were sold by corrupt officers to the Khmer Rouge. This was consistent with Cambodian cultural experience; a high political position was seen as an opportunity to sell privileges.8 As the population fled from violence in the countryside and Khmer Rouge occupation, the population of Phnom Penh increased from six hundred thousand to nearly three million. Starvation was widespread; medicine and other essentials were totally inadequate.

  The Khmer Rouge started the guerrilla war in 1968, at about the same time U.S. bombing began. Between 1970 and 1973, the United States dropped three times the tonnage of bombs on Cambodia that it had dropped on Japan during all of World War II. The bombing began in the border areas that served as a sanctuary for Vietnamese fighting in Vietnam, but was extended to the increasingly large areas under the control of Cambodian communists.9 In 1973, much of the bombing occurred in the most heavily populated areas of the country. This sustained, intense bombing killed many thousands of people, disrupted communities, and created many refugees. It had profound effects on the people’s feelings about their government, whose ally was the perpetrator. Communist recruitment became easier.

  Meanwhile, in 1970, the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies invaded Cambodia, pushing the North Vietnamese and their Khmer Rouge allies further into the interior. Lon Nol, especially after he gained power, expounded a nationalistic, racist view of Khmer superority, intensely hostile to Vietnam.10 His government instigated punitive actions against Vietnamese living in Cambodia. They were murdered, raped, their properties seized. The invading South Vietnamese army countered Lon Nol’s policies by confiscating Khmer property, which they gave to victimized Vietnamese families.11

  The fighting between government troops and the growing army of the Khmer Rouge spread all over the country. In the increasingl
y large area occupied by the Khmer Rouge, the lives of the people were completely disrupted. Some were killed or forced into reeducation camps. Others were driven out of their villages to start new lives elsewhere, as part of the communist program of radical change. The social structure was profoundly changed, and many traditional practices were prohibited. The actions of the communists in at least parts of the occupied areas presaged their later policies, even the mass killings. The combination of terror and rewards for prescribed behavior resulted in substantial compliance. Until they gained final control, the communists balanced force with maintaining certain traditions and playing on the people’s loyalties.

  In sum, life conditions in Cambodia were increasingly difficult before 1970, and difficulties intensified greatly after 1970. Because of the historical role of the ruler and his own long rule, Sihanouk’s ouster had great psychological impact on Cambodian peasants, especially when combined with loss of homes and livelihood, social disorganization, and constant violence. The results were, as usual, feelings of hostility and needs for defense of the physical and psychological self, renewed comprehension of reality, guidance, and connection to others. All this prepared Cambodian peasants to accept the Khmer Rouge and subordinate themselves to new leaders.

  The Khmer Rouge rule and autogenocide

  On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge occupied Phnom Penh. According to some reports they were greeted warmly by a population tired of war.12 They proceeded to evacuate the city, killing on the spot some who did not follow orders and driving others from their homes and even from hospital beds. Many died on the way out of the city. With three million people leaving at once, congestion was tremendous and progress very slow. Food was in short supply and temperatures in the 100s. People had to drink from roadside puddles, wells, and rivers, which were contaminated by corpses and excrement. They died of starvation, dehydration, and illness.13