Sometimes I learn from experience. During a visit to Kigali in 2002, I had the opportunity to address nearly one thousand Rwandans at a major assembly dedicated to reconciliation. I described the Remembering Rwanda movement and asked, before they could: Why was a white outsider, a muzungu, in the widely used Swahili term, leading this initiative? The moment I said that as a Jew I instinctively felt a close bond with Rwanda, the mood in the huge parliamentary chamber palpably changed. Suddenly, trust emerged; we understood each other. The solidarity of victims prevailed.
Certainly some suspicion still existed; I could hardly blame them. But after the speech I was confronted by a handsome, dynamic woman I didn’t recognize, who abruptly embraced me. Yolande Mukagasana, a genocide survivor, had made it clear in a brief e-mail that she didn’t know why I was involved in this issue, didn’t trust me, and could continue the fight for the memory of the genocide’s victims without me, thanks anyway. Now, she said, she knew we would be in the struggle together. Yolande, a poet and storyteller and a passionate keeper of the survivors’ flame, invited me to dinner later at her small house in Kigali, now home to thirteen adopted children who were kibitzing in a room nearby. As I tried politely to continue eating, she pointed to the photos on the wall of her husband and three young children and explained in graphic detail how, ten years earlier, they had all been hunted down and murdered not far from where we sat.
From the first, I had thought my report should put the Rwandan genocide into some historical context, and I began reading in the field of genocide generally. Before long, I had come face to face with the burgeoning world of genocide studies. This subculture, I soon discovered, is quite separate from that of high-profile Holocaust studies. While some specialists in “other” genocides are also students of the Holocaust, for a long time only a handful of Holocaust specialists were prepared to accept ex¬perts in comparative genocides as their kin. According to New York City College Professor Henry Huttenbach, a Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany, most Holocaust specialists still demand that the genocide of the Jews be treated as qualitatively different from – really a greater catastrophe than – the genocide of others. And “any whiff of comparison was automatically condemned as a form of denial, revisionism, trivialization, etc.” This is an enormously emotional and divisive issue, but the evidence surely corroborates Huttenbach’s assertion. In his intellectually thrilling and morally courageous study, The Holocaust in American Life, University of Chicago historian Peter Novick introduces the concept of “the Olympics of victimization,” a fierce competition for primacy among the world’s victims that the Jews are determined to win. Largely, they have succeeded. Even a good number, though not all, of my newly discovered genocide studies family share the view that the Holocaust – always with a capital “H” – is at the farthest point of the genocide continuum.
In 1999, when I began working on Rwanda, the world of non-Holocaust genocide studies was just beginning to flourish. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies in 1990 was way ahead of the curve. It was Rwanda and Srebrenica that really set things off. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (iags) had been organized in 1994. In 1999, Huttenbach founded the Journal of Genocide Studies, the first of its kind not exclusively dedicated to the Holocaust. The same year, a two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide appeared. In 2002, a thick and engrossing collection of essays appeared called Pioneers of Genocide Studies – imagine: pioneers already! – and Samantha Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her exceptional study A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Imagine: humanity had inflicted on itself an entire era of genocide, and we were living through it.
The field was taking off. In June, 2003, I was among two hundred people attending the iags conference in Galway, Ireland. There were forty-four intriguing panels to choose from, so many I couldn’t even attend all the Rwanda sessions let alone those on Burundi, Srebrenica, Armenia, the Third World and the Holocaust, the Herero of southwestern Africa, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Korea, Bangladesh, Assyria, the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, Cambodia, genocide prevention, genocide denial, comparative genocide, genocide art, genocide and children, survivors, truth commissions, the problem of reconciliation, the problem of reparations, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and even more.
Size is relative, of course. This small, tight world of genocide mavens is something of a movable feast really: I keep meeting them at other conferences, in London, northern England, Stockholm, Lund, Washington, Toronto, and Rwanda itself. Their hero is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the word “genocide” and was the driving force behind the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. They know by rote the convention’s key clauses and even its wildly optimistic title: “The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” And they know the politics. After long, acrimonious negotiations that included early intimations of Cold War hostilities, the General Assembly agreed soon after World War II that genocide would be defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
From these few words spill a host of complications. How do you prove intent? Exactly how many victims are necessary to constitute a “part”? What about “politicide,” the word invented to describe attempts to eliminate political opponents, the stock-in-trade of both governments proudly promising to introduce “socialism” – Stalin’s ussr, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia – and those defending the “free world” against “socialism” – U.S.-backed military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, the apartheid government in South Africa. What’s the difference between mass murder, pogroms, or large-scale massacres and genocide, and why does it matter? And – the central conundrum – how can we know whether a conflict will escalate into a genocide until it actually does?
Then there are the bedeviling practical issues. What are the consequences of a determination that genocide is being carried out? Countries that ratify the convention “undertake to prevent and to punish” genocide perpetrators, and are entitled to call on the UN “to take such action under the Charter of the UN as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.” That’s all. There’s no call for direct military intervention. So, despite the apparent angst by the Clinton administration in 1994 that if it recognized Rwanda as a genocide it would be obliged to dispatch U.S. troops, many authorities agree that a strongly worded resolution at the Security Council would fulfill the obligations of the convention – even if the genocide continued.
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