Case Study: Genocide in Rwanda, 1994

Summary
The genocide in the tiny Central African country of Rwanda was one of the most intensive killing campaigns -- possibly the most intensive -- in human history. Few people realize, however, that the genocide included a marked gendercidal component; it was predominantly or overwhelmingly Tutsi and moderate Hutu males who were targeted by the perpetrators of the mass slaughter. The gendercidal pattern was also evident in the reprisal killings carried out by the Tutsi-led RPF guerrillas during and after the holocaust.

The background
The roots of Rwanda's genocide lie in its colonial experience. First occupied and colonized by the Germans (1894-1916), during World War I the country was taken over by the Belgians, who ruled until independence in 1962. Utilizing the classic strategy of "divide and rule," the Belgians granted preferential status to the Tutsi minority (constituting somewhere between 8 and 14 percent of the population at the time of the 1994 genocide). In pre-colonial Rwanda, the Tutsis had dominated the small Rwandan aristocracy, but ethnic divisions between them and the majority Hutus (at least 85 percent of the population in 1999) were always fluid, and the two populations cannot be considered distinct "tribes." Nor was inter-communal conflict rife. As Stephen D. Wrage states, "It is often remarked that the violence between Hutus and Tutsis goes back to time immemorial and can never be averted, but Belgian records show that in fact there was a strong sense among Rwandans ... of belonging to a Rwandan nation, and that before around 1960, violence [along] ethnic lines was uncommon and mass murder of the sort seen in 1994 was unheard of." (Wrage, "Genocide in Rwanda: Draft Case Study for Teaching Ethics and International Affairs," unpublished paper, 2000.) Whatever communal cleavages existed were sharply heightened by Belgian colonial policy. As Grard Prunier notes, "Using physical characteristics as a guide -- the Tutsi were generally tall, thin, and more 'European' in their appearance than the shorter, stockier Hutu -- the colonizers decided that the Tutsi and the Hutu were two different races. According to the racial theories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Tutsi, with their more 'European' appearance, were deemed the 'master race' ... By 1930 Belgium's Rwandan auxiliaries were almost entirely Tutsi, a status that earned them the durable hatred of the Hutu." (Prunier, "Rwanda's Struggle to Recover from Genocide," Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 99.) It was also the Belgians who (in 1933) instituted the identity-card system that designated every Rwandan as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa (the last of these is an aboriginal group that in 1990 comprised about 1 percent of the Rwandan population). The identity cards were retained into the post-independence era, and provided crucial assistance to the architects of genocide as they sought to isolate their Tutsi victims.

As Africa moved towards decolonization after World War II, it was the better-educated and more prosperous Tutsis who led the struggle for independence. Accordingly, the Belgians switched their allegiance to the Hutus. Vengeful Hutu elements murdered about 15,000 Tutsis between 1959 and 1962, and more than 100,000 Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, notably Uganda and Burundi. Tutsis remaining in Rwanda were stripped of much of their wealth and status under the regime of Juvnal Habyarimana, installed in 1973. An estimated one million Tutsis fled the country (it is in part this massive outflow that makes the proportion of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 so difficult to determine). After 1986, Tutsis in Uganda formed a guerrilla organization, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which aimed to invade Rwanda and overthrow the Habyarimana regime. In 1990, the RPF launched its invasion, occupying zones in the northeast of Rwanda. In August 1993, at the Tanzanian town of Arusha, Habyarimana finally accepted an internationallymediated peace treaty which granted the RPF a share of political power and a military presence in the capital, Kigali. Some 5,000 U.N. peacekeepers (UNAMIR, the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda) were dispatched to bolster the accord. "But Hutu extremists in [Habyarimana's] government did not accept the peace agreement," writes Prunier. "Some of these extremists, who were high-level government officials and military personnel, had begun devising their own solution to the 'Tutsi problem' as early as 1992. Habyarimana's controversial decision to make peace with the RPF won others over to their side, including opposition leaders. Many of those involved in planning the 1994 genocide saw themselves as patriots, defending their country against outside aggression. Moderate Hutus who supported peace with the RPF also became their targets." (Prunier, "Rwanda's Struggle ...") This was the so-called "Hutu Power" movement that organized and supervised the holocaust of April-July 1994.

Genocide and gendercide

The mass and majesty of this world, all That carries weight and always weighs the same Lay in the hands of others; they were small And could not hope for help and no help came: What their foes liked to do was done, their shame Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride And died as men before their bodies died. - W.H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles On April 6, 1994, President Habyarimana's plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile as it approached Kigali airport. Responsibility for the assassination has never been confirmed, but the speed with which the genocide was subsequently launched strongly suggests that the Hutu extremists had decided to rid themselves of their accommodationist president, and implement a "final solution" to the Tutsi "problem" in Rwanda. Interahamwe militiamen at a roadblock in Kigali, April 1994. Within 24 hours of Habyarimana's jet being downed, roadblocks sprang up around Kigali, manned by the so-called interahamwemilitia (the name means "those who attack together").

Tutsis were separated from Hutus and hacked to death with machetes at roadside (although many taller Hutus were presumed to be Tutsis and were also killed). "Doing murder with a machete is exhausting, so the militias were organized to work in shifts. At the day's end, the Achilles tendons of unprocessed victims were sometimes cut before the murderers retired to rest, to feast on the victims' cattle and to drink. Victims who could afford to pay often chose to die from a bullet." (Wrage, "Genocide in Rwanda.") Meanwhile, death-squads working from carefullyprepared lists went from neighbourhood to neighbourhood in Kigali. They murdered not only Tutsis but moderate Hutus, including the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana. The prime minister was guarded by a detachment of Belgian soldiers; these were arrested, disarmed, tortured, and murdered, prompting Belgium -- as intended -- to withdraw the remainder of its U.N. troops from Rwanda. With breathtaking rapidity, the genocide expanded from Kigali to the countryside. Government radio encouraged Tutsis to congregate at churches, schools, and stadiums, pledging that these would serve as places of refuge. Thus concentrated, the helpless civilians could be more easily targeted -- although many miraculously managed to resist with only sticks and stones for days or even weeks, until the forces of the Rwandan army and presidential guard were brought in to exterminate them with machine-guns and grenades. By April 21 -- that is, in just two weeks -perhaps a quarter of a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. Together with the mass murder ofSoviet prisoners-of-war during World War II, it was the most concentrated act of genocide in human history: "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], p. 3.) (Grard Prunier provides an even higher estimate: "the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps." Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide [Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 261.) By the end of April, according to Human Rights Watch, "the worst massacres had finished ... perhaps half of the Tutsi population of Rwanda" had been murdered. Rwandan men killed at one of the thousands of massacre sites. The gender dimension of the killings is one of the least-known and least-investigated aspects of the Rwanda genocide. But an increasing number of sources have acknowledged, with Ronit Lentin, that "Throughout the genocide, it was Tutsi men who were the primary target." (Lentin, "Introduction: (En)gendering Genocides," in Lentin, ed., Gender & Catastrophe [Zed Books, 1997], p. 12.) Judy El-Bushra writes that During the war of 1994, and particularly as a result of the genocidal massacres which precipitated it, it was principally the men of the targeted populations who lost their lives or fled

to other countries in fear. ... This targeting of men for slaughter was not confined to adults: boys were similarly decimated, raising the possibility that the demographic imbalance will continue for generations. Large numbers of women also lost their lives; however, mutilation and rape were the principal strategies used against women, and these did not necessarily result in death. (Judy El-Bushra, "Transformed Conflict: Some Thoughts on a Gendered Understanding of Conflict Processes," in Susie Jacobset al., eds., States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance[Zed Books, 2000], p. 73.) The trend had been evident throughout the 1990-94 period, when numerous smaller-scale massacres of Tutsis took place, and when, according to Human Rights Watch and other observers, Tutsi males were targeted almost exclusively, as presumed or "potential" members of the RPF guerrilla force. This Tutsi man survived an attack by machete-wielding assailants. There are strong indications that the gendering of the Rwandan genocide evolved between April and June 1994, with adult males targeted almost exclusively before the genocide and predominantly in its early stages, but with more children and women swept up in the later stages. (For somewhat similar trends, see the Armenia and Jewish holocaust case studies.) In a comprehensive 1999 report on the genocide, Alison Des Forges wrote: "In the past Rwandans had not usually killed women in conflicts and at the beginning of the genocide assailants often spared them. When militia had wanted to kill women during an attack in Kigali in late April, for example, Renzaho [a principal leader of the genocide] had intervened to stop it. Killers in Gikongoro told a woman that she was safe because 'Sex has no ethnic group.' The number of attacks against women [from mid-May onwards], all at about the same time, indicates that a decision to kill women had been made at the national level and was being implemented in local communities." (See Human Rights Watch, "Mid-May Slaughter: Women and Children as Victims," in Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda.) It must be stressed that if such a new stage of killing can indeed be isolated, this does not mean that women and girls were immune to mass murder until that point. Although the number of women actually killed was substantially lower than the number of murdered men, many women (along with girl children) were massacred from the outset. They were also exposed to a wide range of horrific (if generally non-fatal) abuses. Notes Human Rights Watch: testimonies from survivors confirm that rape was extremely widespread and that thousands of women were individually raped, gang-raped, raped with objects such as sharpened sticks or gun barrels, held in sexual slavery (either collectively or through forced "marriage") or sexually mutilated. These crimes were frequently part of a pattern in which Tutsi women were raped after they had witnessed the torture and killings of their relatives and the destruction and looting of their homes. According to witnesses, many women were killed immediately after being raped. Other women managed to survive, only to be told that they were being allowed to live so that they would "die of sadness." Often women were subjected to sexual slavery and held collectively

by a militia group or were singled out by one militia man, at checkpoints or other sites where people were being maimed or slaughtered, and held for personal sexual service. The militiamen would force women to submit sexually with threats that they would be killed if they refused. These forced "marriages," as this form of sexual slavery is often called in Rwanda, lasted for anywhere from a few days to the duration of the genocide, and in some cases longer. Rapes were sometimes followed by sexual mutilation, including mutilation of the vagina and pelvic area with machetes, knives, sticks, boiling water, and in one case, acid. (Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath [Human Rights Watch, 1996].) Rwanda may in fact stand as the paradigmatic example of "genocidal rape," owing to the fact that many of the Tutsi women who were gang-raped have subsequently tested positive for the HIV virus. According to the UK Guardian, "rape was a weapon of genocide as brutal as the machete." "I was raped by so many interahamwe and soldiers that I lost count," said one survivor, Olive Uwera. "I was in hospital for a year afterwards. A few months after my child was born the doctors told me I was HIV-positive." Tests conducted on the 25,000 Tutsi women members of the Widows of Genocide organisation (Avega) showed that "two-thirds were found to be HIV-positive. ... Soon there will be tens of thousands of children who have lost their fathers to the machete and their mothers to Aids." (See Chris McGreal, "A Pearl in Rwanda's Genocide Horror",The Guardian [UK], December 5, 2001.

Reprisal killings of Hutus

As soon as the genocide broke out, the Tutsi-led RPF launched a concerted drive on Kigali, crushing Rwandan government resistance and bringing a halt to the genocide in successive areas of the country. RPF forces based in Kigali also took up arms, and succeeded in protecting a large number of residents from the holocaust. On July 4, 1994, Kigali fell to the RPF, and the genocide and "war" finally came to an end on July 18. There followed a massive flight of Hutus to neighboring countries, notably to refugee camps in Zaire, as well as largescale reprisals against Hutus who were alleged to have participated in the holocaust. Most of these reprisal killings also had strong gendercidal overtones. For example, in the town of Mututu, according to Human Rights Watch (Leave None to Tell the Story): RPF soldiers asked children to go bring back the adults in their families who were hiding in the fields and bush. On June 10, after several hundred adults had returned, the soldiers directed them to assemble at the commercial center to be transported to a safer location to the east. The RPF reportedly killed a number of young men at the market place late in the afternoon and tied up some of the others. The crowd was directed to set out for the commune, about one hour away by foot. The soldiers reportedly killed some men on the way and threw their bodies in latrines or in a compost heap at a reservoir. In another report from the same area, witnesses said that RPF soldiers and armed civilians gathered men and adolescent boys at the home of a man named Rutekereza and then killed them. In another case, a witness reported that "I saw the the RPF soldiers bringing bodies in trucks at night and throwing them in toilets at Mwogo, near where they had dug their trenches. They brought men already wounded with their arms tied behind their backs. They brought no women."

Various other incidents cited by the Human Rights Watch investigators attest to the broad gendercidal pattern. In other instances, however, "The [RPF] soldiers killed without regard to age, sex, or ethnic group." (Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story.) The organization cites sources to the effect that between 25,000 and 45,000 Hutus were killed in all, though other estimates are higher.

How many died?

According to Grard Prunier, "Because of the chaotic nature of the genocide, the total number of people killed has never been systematically assessed, but most experts believe the total was around 800,000 people. This includes about 750,000 Tutsis and approximately 50,000 politically moderate Hutus who did not support the genocide. ... Only about 130,000 Tutsis survived the massacres." Some, though, have taken issue with Prunier's (and others') estimates, alleging that the number of Tutsis in Rwanda was lower at the outbreak of the genocide than is generally believed. By these measures, "an estimated 500,000 Rwandan Tutsi were killed, or more than three-quarters of their population. ... The number of Hutu killed during the genocide and civil war is even less certain, with estimates ranging from 10,000 to well over 100,000." (Alan J. Kuperman, "Genocide in Rwanda and the Limits of Humanitarian Military Intervention," unpublished paper, 2000; see also Kuperman, "Rwanda in Retrospect," Foreign Affairs, January/February 2000.) In February 2002, the Rwandan government released the results of the first major census that sought to establish the number of people killed in the genocide and during its prelude period (1990-94). It found that 1,074,017 people -- approximately one-seventh of the total population -were murdered, with Tutsis accounting for 94 percent of the victims. ("More Than One Million Rwandans Killed in 1990's," Associated Press dispatch, February 14, 2002.) The proportion of males among those killed can only be guessed at, but was probably in the vicinity of 75 or 80 percent.

Who was responsible?

The genocidal and gendercidal strategy was conceived and implemented by a small coterie of Rwandan government officials, led by the Hutu extremist Theoneste Bagosora, "a retired army Colonel who held the post of acting defense minister on the day Habyarimana was killed. In the hours and days after the assassination, Bagosora apparently orchestrated both the genocide and formation of an interim government to support it." Another key organizer of the holocaust was Mme. Agathe Habyarimana, wife of the murdered president and one of the very few women who have played a central role in the planning and perpetration of genocide. These leaders were able to exploit the highly-centralized nature of the Rwandan state (probably unparalleled anywhere in the world outside the state-socialist bloc): "The genocide happened not because the state was weak, but on the contrary because it was so totalitarian and strong that it had the capacity to make its subjects obey absolutely any order, including one of mass slaughter." (Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 353-54.)

The generally "low-tech" means by which the killing was carried out -- the murderers standardly used machetes or hoes -- required the involvement of a large proportion of the Hutu population. "Videotapes of the killings show that three or more killers often hacked on a single victim. Since the organizers wished to implicate as many people in the killing as possible, there may have been many more killers than victims." (Wrage, "Genocide in Rwanda.") As is always true in cases of genocide and mass killing, the overwhelming majority of direct killers were male. According to Human Rights Watch, [Rwandan] authorities offered tangible incentives to participants. They delivered food, drink, and other intoxicants, parts of military uniforms and small payments in cash to hungry, jobless young men. ... Many poor young men responded readily to the promise of rewards. Of the nearly 60 percent of Rwandans under the age of twenty, tens of thousands had little hope of obtaining the land needed to establish their own households or the jobs necessary to provide for a family. Such young men, including many displaced by the war and living in camps near the capital provided many of the early recruits to the Interahamwe, trained in the months before and in the days immediately after the genocide began. (Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story.) Grard Prunier similarly emphasizes both the class and gender dimension of the recruitment for genocide: The social aspect of the killings has often been overlooked. In Kigali the Interahamwe ... had tended to recruit mostly among the poor. As soon as they went into action, they drew around them a cloud of even poorer people, a lumpenproletariat of street boys, rag-pickers, car-washers and homeless unemployed. For these people [men] the genocide was the best thing that could ever happen to them. They had the blessings of a form of authority to take revenge on socially powerful people as long as they were on the wrong side of the political fence. They could steal, they could kill with minimum justification, they could rape and they could get drunk for free. This was wonderful. The political aims pursued by the masters of this dark carnival were quite beyond their scope. They just went along, knowing it would not last. (Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 231-32.) But it was not only such men who perpetrated the atrocities. One of the most unusual aspects of the Rwanda genocide is the prominent role of women in the slaughter. The major study of this phenomenon was carried out by African Rights in 1995. Summarizing its findings, the organization reported: A substantial number of women, and even girls, were involved in the slaughter in countless ways, inflicting extraordinary cruelty on other women, as well as children and men. Women of every social category took part in the killings. ... The extent to which women were involved in the killings is unprecedented anywhere in the world. This is not accidental. The architects of the holocaust sought to implicate as much of the population as possible, including women and even children. ... Some women killed with their own hands. ... Women and girls in their teens joined the crowds that surrounded churches, hospitals and other places of refuge. Wielding machetes and nail-studded clubs, they excelled as "cheerleaders" of the genocide, ululating the killers into action. They entered churches, schools, football stadiums and hospitals to finish off the

wounded, hacking women, children and even men to death. Some women have been accused of killing or betraying their own husbands and children. Above all, women and girls stripped the dead -- and the barely living -- stealing their jewellery, money and clothes. Other women told the killers where people were hiding, often screaming out their names as the terrified quarry ran for their lives. Some women, including a nun currently hiding in Belgium, provided the petrol with which people were burnt alive. ... There is no evidence that women were more willing to give refuge to the hunted than men. Some mothers and grandmothers even refused to hide their own Tutsi children and grandchildren. Some women forced out people taken in by their husbands. Many nurses at the CHK Hospital in Kigali and at Butare's University Hospital gave the militia and soldiers lists of patients, colleagues and refugees to be killed. (Excerpts from summary of African Rights report, Rwanda - Not So Innocent: When Women Become Killers, August 1995.) The culpability of these women has been obscured by some feminists' attempts to depict women as the main victims of the mass slaughter. As Ronit Lentin notes, "Describing women and girls as the principal victims of the genocide ... obscured their roles as aggressors ... The involvement of women in the genocide and murder of Hutu political opponents failed to attract national and international attention, precisely because of the construction of women as the universal victims of that particular catastrophe." (Lentin, "Introduction," pp. 12-13.) Controversy has raged since 1994 over the role of foreign governments and the United Nations in allowing the genocide to proceed. According to Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch, During the early weeks of slaughter international leaders did not use the word "genocide," as if avoiding the term could eliminate the obligation to confront the crime. The major international actors -- policymakers in Belgium, the U.S., France, and the U.N. -- all understood the gravity of the crisis within the first twenty-four hours even if they could not have predicted the massive toll that the slaughter would eventually take. They could have used national troops or UNAMIR or a combined force of both to confront the killers and immediately save lives. By disrupting the killing campaign at its central and most essential point, the foreign soldiers could have disabled it throughout the country. ... Major international leaders were ready to collaborate on the common goal of evacuating their own citizens and expatriate employees, but they refused any joint intervention to save Rwandan lives. Instead they focused on issues of immediate importance for their own countries: Belgium on extricating its peacekeepers with a minimum of dishonor; the U.S. on avoiding committing resources to a crisis remote from U.S. concerns; and France on protecting its client and its zone of Francophone influence. Meanwhile most staff at the U.N. were fixed on averting another failure in peacekeeping operations, even at the cost of Rwandan lives. (See Human Rights Watch, "Ignoring Genocide", in Leave None to Tell the Story.) On April 7, 2000, the sixth anniversary of the outbreak of the genocide, Belgium's prime minister apologized for the international community's failure to intervene. Guy Verhofstadt told a crowd of thousands at the site of Rwanda's planned memorial to the genocide that "A dramatic combination of negligence, incompetence and hesitation created the conditions for the tragedy." (Hrvoje Hranjski, "Belgium Apologizes for World's Inaction During Rwanda Chaos," Associated Press dispatch, April 8, 2000.)

As concerns the reprisal killings of Hutus by RPF forces, no central direction has been established analogous to the clear top-down direction of the genocide against Tutsis. Nonetheless, the apologetics and obfuscation proffered by top RPF leaders, including (nowpresident) Paul Kagame, strongly indicate a willingness to "turn a blind eye" to atrocities committed by RPF officers (both senior and junior) and common soldiers.

The aftermath
In the wake of the holocaust, the U.N. established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in Arusha, Tanzania. In September 1998, the Tribunal issued its first conviction on charges of genocide, against the former mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba, Jean-Paul Akayesu. AsRudy Brueggemann points out, this marked "the first time ever [that] a suspect was convicted by an international tribunal for the crime of genocide." A day later, the ICTR sentenced the former Hutu prime minister, Jean Kambanda, to life in prison; he had pled guilty to "genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, complicity in genocide and two charges of crimes against humanity." A total of thirty-two other Rwandan Hutu officials are currently awaiting trial. However, according to the Public Education Center of The New York Times, "after five years, the Tribunal's accomplishments are still often overshadowed by its failures. Its operations are slow, unwieldy, and at the worst of times unprofessional, and its own limited mandate conspires with international indifference to undermine its core message." In Rwanda itself, some 120,000 people were jailed on allegations of participation in the genocide, and thousands died in the brutal and unsanitary conditions of the jails. As of April 2000, some 2,500 people had been tried, with about 300 of them receiving death sentences. The scars of the genocide and subsequent reprisals will remain with Rwandans for generations, and may yet provoke another round of mass killing. Prunier writes: "Rwanda's economy remains badly damaged, with little hope of a quick recovery. There are several reasons for this, including the lack of roads, bridges, and telephone lines. Education is also suffering due to a shortage of schools, educational materials, and teachers, many of whom died in the genocide. ... Many Tutsis are increasingly convinced that the only way to ensure their survival is to repress the Hutus. Many Hutus believe they have been proclaimed guilty by association and that no one cares about their sufferings under the current Tutsi-led government. Extremists on both sides retain the belief that the only solution is the annihilation of the other. These groups are preparing for a future struggle, one that could include another wave of mass slaughter." (Prunier, "Rwanda's Struggle ...") As noted by Judy El-Bushra, the gendercidal strategies pursued throughout the conflict have produced "a demographic imbalance [that may] continue for generations." (El-Bushra, "Transforming Conflict," p. 73.) According to David Gough, in certain parts of "Gitarama

district in central Rwanda, scene of some of the worst excesses in 1994 ... adult males make up a mere 20% of the population." (Gough, "Husband-hiring hastens the spread of Aids in Rwanda",The Guardian [UK], February 8, 2000.) The burden placed upon women survivors of the carnage has attracted considerable attention since 1994. Writes El-Bushra ("Transforming Conflict," p. 73): "In the areas most affected by the massacres -- for example in Bugasera in eastern Rwanda -- the proportion of women who have been widowed, raped or physically handicapped is very high. It is to a large extent these women on whom the responsibility for producing food is now falling. Their psychological as well as their physical status is therefore a major issue for the community's survival in the current stage." El-Bushra also notes that "a major issue of concern to women in Rwanda is the impact of the demographic imbalance on marriages. Polygamy, which is not legally permitted in Rwanda, is often suggested as a means of solving the problems of the large number of widows and younger women whose prospects of marriage have become drastically reduced. Rivalry between women over potential husbands has become common, and an issue which sparks off heated debate." (ElBushra, "Transforming Conflict," p. 74.) David Gough's profile of the Gitarama district (see above) states that "with so many men killed during the genocide, or later imprisoned for their part in it ... the practice of sharing men, known as kwinjira, has become so widespread ... that health officials say that it represents the greatest challenge to their efforts to combat the spread of Aids." Gough adds, The spread of Aids and of kwinjira are also fuelled by poverty. With an annual income of 180 dollars (110) per person, Rwanda is ranked by the World Bank as the world's third poorest country. Seventy per cent of all households fall below the poverty line. "If a woman has land and maybe some money then she can attract the services of young men," said Jerome Ndabagariya of CARE. "He does some work for her in the field and then some more work in the bedroom." A more affluent woman will give a man some food, maybe some beer or, in rare cases, money. In return he may well give her the Aids virus. ______________________________________________________________________________

Reference: Jones, Adam, Case Study: Genocide in Rwanda, 1994, 2002, <http://www.gendercide.org/case_rwanda.html> (accessed 16/05/2012).

Case Study: East Timor (1975-99)

Summary
This case study of the events in East Timor in September 1999 is necessarily the most ambiguous of our studies of "gendercide." Indeed, it is impossible to state with certainty that a fully-fledged gendercide did occur, and on what scale. Nonetheless, in the opinion of Gendercide Watch, there are grounds not only for believing that genocidal atrocities occurred during the period immediately following Timor's independence vote, but that they were widespread, pre-planned, and systematic -- and were strongly gendercidal in character. We also devote extended attention to the quarter-century of Indonesian occupation preceding the independence vote of August 30, 1999, in which gendercidal atrocities were prominent, though not predominant.

The background
East Timor owes its territorial distinctiveness from the rest of Timor, and the Indonesian archipelago as a whole, to the fact that it was colonized by the Portuguese, not the Dutch, beginning in the mid-17th century. (An agreement dividing the island between the two powers was signed in 1915.) In alliance with local chieftains, the Portuguese established an increasingly harsh regime of exploitation and corve (forced) labour that, by the turn of the twentieth century, swept up the entire able-bodied male population. The colonial regime was replaced by the Japanese during World War II, whose occupation spawned a resistance movement that resulted in the deaths of 60,000 Timorese, or 13 percent of the entire population.

After the war, the Dutch East Indies rapidly became the independent republic of Indonesia. The Portuguese, meanwhile, re-established control over East Timor; but in April 1974, the Portuguese armed forces mounted a coup dtat against the fascist government in Lisbon, and announced their intention of rapidly divesting Portugal of its overseas empire (including Angola and Mozambique). Indigenous political parties rapidly sprang up in Timor. Elections for a

National Constituent Assembly were set for 1976, with full independence anticipated three years thereafter. By 1975, the leading political force in the territory was Fretilin (the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor), which had established strong grassroots support throughout the countryside with progressive policies aimed at improving the lives of the peasantry. In January 1975, Fretilin formed an alliance with the other main political grouping, the UDT (Timorese Democratic Union), and local elections were held under the supervision of the Portuguese parliament's Decolonization Committee. In May 1975, however, the UDT withdrew from the coalition, and when Fretilin candidates won 55 percent of the vote in the local elections, the UDT launched a coup attempt, apparently with the connivance of the Indonesian government. Fretilin forces crushed the revolt and expelled the UDT to Indonesian West Timor. This was followed by a declaration of independence on November 28. Just over a week later, on December 7, the Indonesians invaded East Timor in force, with military aid and tacit political approval from the Ford administration in the U.S. (Secret government documents published in 1980 showed that the Australian government also "had an extensive knowledge of, and acquiesced in, events prior to the invasion," according to John Taylor [East Timor: The Price of Freedom, p. 204.) Fretilin forces were pushed deep into the countryside, and Indonesian president Suharto declared East Timor's annexation by Indonesia in July 1976. By November of that year, relief agencies in East Timor estimated that an extraordinary 100,000 Timorese had been killed since the Indonesian invasion less than a year earlier. What followed was a protracted guerrilla war by Fretilin forces, who eventually succeeded in establishing control over about half the remaining Timorese population. Indonesian "counterinsurgency" strategies reached a genocidal scale, causing widespread starvation. Indeed, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued in their 1980 book, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, that the Indonesian assault had taken a greater per-capita toll -- killing about a third of the Timorese population -- than any genocide since the Jewish holocaust. But the slaughter took place at a time when western governments and media were resolutely focused on the atrocities committed by the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia/Kampuchea, and attracted barely a whisper of notice or official condemnation. Despite repeated calls from the United Nations, Indonesia refused to withdraw from East Timor or allow a plebiscite on the territory's future. But the credibility of Indonesia's claim to the territory began to weaken noticeably with the November 12, 1991 mass killing of some 270 civilians at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, the East Timorese capital. As part of a new crackdown, Indonesia began to rely more and more on locally-raised paramilitary forces (ninjas) to terrorize the population. These were supplied and overseen by Kopassus, the elite Indonesian army force that would play a critical role in the atrocities of September 1999. In 1996, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the leader of the East Timor Catholic Church, Bishop Belo, and Fretilin's leader-in-exile, Jos Ramos-Horta. The renewed publicity given to the Timorese cause was bolstered in 1998 when, with Indonesia suffering an economic meltdown, longtime

dictator General Suharto resigned in favour of his vice-president, B.J. Habibie. As part of a wideranging liberalization program, Habibie first offered East Timor "special status" within a united Indonesia, a move that was rejected by the Timorese opposition. Finally, in January 1999, Habibie declared Indonesia's willingness to "let East Timor go" if its people chose independence. The United Nations, together with Portugal, rapidly announced their willingness to conduct a direct plebiscite, offering the Timorese autonomy within Indonesia or fully-fledged independence. After several delays, the vote was finally scheduled for August 30, and U.N. officials under the banner of UNAMET (The United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor) arrived to supervise the process. In the run-up to the plebiscite, the Indonesian military raised and supplied a number of new paramilitary groups, consisting mostly of Timorese collaborators and Kopassus commandos. (For an overview of the founding and training of these notorious "militias," see Human Rights Watch, "Background: The Indonesian Army and Civilian Militias in East Timor", April 1999.) The militias that played the greatest role in fomenting violence during the pre- and postplebiscite periods included the Besi Merah Putih ("Iron Rod for the Red and White"), Mahidi ("Live or Die for Integration with Indonesia"), and the Halintar("Thunderbolt"). An estimated 5,000 Timorese were murdered by these forces and their army allies in 1998 and the first eight months of 1999, and an estimated 60,000 displaced from their homes. Despite these widespread atrocities, the U.N. chose to designate the Indonesian armed forces responsible for providing "security" before, during, and after the plebiscite. This proved a disastrous decision; when an organized campaign of mass destruction, and possibly genocide, erupted in the aftermath of the vote, it would be orchestrated by these same "security" forces.

Gendercide in East Timor (I), 1975-1998

Gendercidal massacres of males, and in at least one case of females, were prominent in the period immediately following the Indonesian invasion of December 1975. "One of the most bizarre and gruesome ... atrocities" of the Indonesian invasion itself "occurred within 24 hours of the invasion and involved the killing of about 150 people. This shocking spectacle began with the execution of more than 20 women who, from various accounts, were selected at random ... The women were led out to the edge of the jetty and shot one at a time, with the crowd of shocked onlookers being forced at gun-point to count [out] loud as each execution took place." (Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War Against East Timor [Zed Books, 1984], pp. 128-29.) Immediately thereafter, however, a typical gendercidal massacre of males took place, according to a source quoted by John Taylor in East Timor: The Price of Freedom (p. 68): At 2 p.m., 59 men, both Chinese and Timorese, were brought on to the wharf ... These men were shot one by one, with the crowd, believed amounting to 500, being ordered to count. The victims were ordered to stand on the edge of the pier facing the sea, so that when they were shot their bodies fell into the water. Indonesian soldiers stood by and fired at the bodies in the water in the event that there was any sign of life. In the wider slaughter in Dili, males appear to have been targeted overwhelmingly. According to John Taylor (East Timor: The Price of Freedom, pp. 68-69), one of the main killing sites "was

the area surrounding the Portuguese police barracks in the south of the capital," where one survivor claimed that At about 12 noon, the green berets began to land. ... They advanced to where I was. They ordered us all out of our homes, to gather in the street. We were taken to an open space, women, children, old people and men, including me. ... There were about fifty of us then, all men, just picked up at random. All able-bodied men. ... Then the soldiers, there were three of them, started spraying us with bullets. Many died on the spot, some managed to run off, falling as they fled because they had been hit. As far as I know, only 3 or 4 out of the 50 men are still alive. (Taylor, pp. 68-69.) Jill Jolliffe writes in her book East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism(University of Queensland Press, 1978) that "in late 1976, letters smuggled via [the West Timorese town of] Kupang reached relatives in Darwin [Australia], listing whole families killed during the invasion. ... [One letter] said that many of the inhabitants of Dili had fled to the mountains before the invasion but that of those remaining 80% of the men were killed by Indonesian troops" (p. 279). According to Taylor (p. 68), the death-toll in Dili reached "2000 men." In May 1976, a further "67 boys were shot in Suai" (Taylor, p. 71). The trend continued into the 1980s. In July 1984, a priest described military actions against the Kota Boot tribe "from March 1984, [when] many men and youths were imprisoned and killed ... almost all men and youths disappeared. They were taken by Indonesian soldiers, killed and thrown on a fallow piece of land. There are eye-witnesses to what happened." (Quoted in Taylor, pp. 102-03.) A particularly massive roundup of Timorese males was conducted as part ofOperasi Keamanan ("Operation Security") in March-April 1981, when "virtually the entire male population from the ages of 15 to 50 was pressed into service. In some places, boys as young as 9 and men as old as 60 were ordered to join." (Budiardjo and Liem, p. 41.) "Those recruited for Operasi Keamanan were given no advanced warning," writes Taylor. "The army marched into villages, ordered together all men and boys and took them to the region from which the [socalled] fence of legs was to begin. Once assembled, they were organized into small groups and forced to walk in front of units of soldiers, searching the countryside for Fretilin cadres. ... Since they were forced to leave without any notice, they were unable to take with them supplies of food or clothing. Provided with the most meagre food rations, many died of starvation." (East Timor: The Price of Freedom, p. 117.) Many thousands of Timorese, also overwhelmingly "ablebodied" males, were rounded up for brutal torture and incarceration -- although many younger women also suffered this fate, being exposed especially to sexual torture and rape. Thus, when the Indonesian occupying forces discriminated according to gender, the victims of the most serious abuses were generally male. But to present this period as one of predominantly gender-selective violence would be deeply misleading. Entire families of "Fretilin suspects" were often annihilated together with the suspects themselves, or out of frustration at the Indonesian soldiers' inability to locate them. In many cases, whole village populations were targeted for savage atrocities -- most massively, in the region of Aitana in July 1981, where "a ghastly massacre occurred ... They murdered everyone, from tiny babies to the elderly, unarmed people who were not involved in the fighting but were there simply because

they had stayed with Fretilin and wanted to live freely in the mountains." Perhaps 10,000 people died. (Source cited in Taylor, p. 118). At Lacluta near Dili in September of the same year, "at least 400 people were killed, mostly women and children." (Taylor, p. 101.) And at Malim Luro in August 1983, "after plundering the population of all their belongings, [Indonesian troops] firmly tied up men, women and children, numbering more than sixty people. They made them lie on the ground and then drove a bulldozer over them, and then used it to place a few centimetres of earth on top of the totally crushed corpses." (Source cited in Taylor, p. 103.) The most destructive strategy of all was the starvation and heavy bombing inflicted on populations remaining in the "liberated zones" outside the Indonesians' control, or in concentration camps set up, in classic counterinsurgency fashion, to separate the Fretilin guerrillas from their "base of support." Many tens of thousands of Timorese died as a result of this "'generalized warfare' of encirclements, bombing, uprooting of the population, malnutrition and generalized brutalities" (Taylor, p. 151), constituting the bulk of the estimated 200,000 victims of Indonesia's genocidal occupation policies between 1975 and 1999.

Gendercide in East Timor (II)? After the plebiscite

Atrocity in Dili, September 1999: the decapitated body of a young Timorese male is dragged behind a motorcycle by an Indonesian policeman and his accomplice. The events in East Timor in September 1999, particularly the issue of genocidal killing, are still clouded by considerable uncertainty. Indeed, it is impossible to say with full confidence that largescale gendercidal slaughter did occur. The difficulty arises in part from the unwillingness of the international community, particularly the United Nations, to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the atrocities. A key purpose of launching this Gendercide Watch case-study, with its attendantpress release, is to encourage such an investigation. On August 31, 1999, East Timorese went to the polls to vote for autonomy within Indonesia or fully-fledged independence. But as noted, despite clear signals that the Indonesian military and its Timorese militia allies would respond with violence to a vote for full independence, the U.N. assigned responsibility for "security" to the Indonesian armed forces. When widespread violence and destruction broke out on September 2, the U.N. and the international community were therefore unable (and initially unwilling) to address the consequences of the plebiscite that they themselves had overseen. East Timorese voted almost en bloc, with more than 98 percent of those eligible casting a ballot, and 78.5 percent voting for independence. When the results of the plebiscite were made public, the Indonesian military and its allies implemented a well-prepared and systematic policy of

murder and destruction ("Operation Global Clean-Sweep") aimed at preserving Indonesian control over the territory, or at least a substantial portion of it. Scorched earth, East Timor, September 1999. The gender-selective character of the atrocities was evident from the outset. (Note: Extensive excerpts from most of the following reports can be found in "GenderSelective Atrocities in East Timor", a news digest compiled throughout the crisis, and afterwards, by Gendercide Watch executive director Adam Jones.) On September 4, Matt Frei of BBC Online provided gruesome eyewitness testimony of the murder of a young Timorese independence supporter. "While I was running towards the UN compound a pro-independence supporter was being hunted down like an animal. The young man fell after being hit on the head with a machete. Then six black T-shirts descended on him. A colleague hiding in a shack just opposite the gates to the UN compound filmed the whole thing. It took only 30 seconds to hack the man to pieces. The attack was so ferocious that bits of him were literally flying off. The sound reminded me of a butchers' shop -- the thud of cleaved meat, I'll never forget it." (Frei, "Face to Face with Timor Terror," BBC Online, September 4, 1999.) Also on September 4, Joao Brito, a young Timorese man, claimed to have witnessed the killing of possibly hundreds of people in the town of Ermera. Indonesian soldiers "called house-to-house and they burned out the political leaders," he said later. "When the houses burnt, they let the women and children out, but they pushed the men back into the fire where they died." (Dennis Schulz, "Refugees Recall the Flames of Death," The Age [Melbourne], September 16, 1999.) Timorese leader Jos Ramos-Horta spoke on September 5 of "information that many males have been disposed of, have been killed and dumped into the sea." (Quoted in Stephen Powell, "International Pressure Builds on Timor Crisis," Reuters dispatch, September 7, 1999.) The Guardian's John Aglionby wrote on September 9 of "Villagers [who told] of men being marched to the waterfront in Dili and gunned down out of view of observers trapped inside safe houses." (Aglionby, "City's Destruction Now Complete," The Guardian, September 9, 1999.) The following day, Aglionby described "a young man [who] ran into the house telling a terrible story. He had come from the port, where he and some pro-independence friends had been trying to leave on a ship. The women boarded, but the men were dragged away. Five were stabbed to death in front of him and their bodies dumped in the sea." (Aglionby, "To Survive I Knew I Had to Get Out," The Guardian, September 10, 1999.) Craig Skehan and Malcolm Brown of The Sydney Morning Herald reported that One distraught young mother said she witnessed the murder of two refugees on the back of a truck inside West Timor. She said she saw the two men tied up in a truck by militiamen on a

road inside West Timor. "Suddenly, in front of lots of people, a militia member drew a sword and slowly stabbed one of the people in the truck. Lots of blood began gushing, flooding the floor of the truck until it began to drip out," she said. "The other man's hands and feet were tied like a pig and he was thrown like a bag of rice onto the asphalt then thrown into another truck." Another man said he watched terrified at the West Timor port of Akapupu, near Atumbua at the northern end of the border, as militia used machetes to kill men alleged to be independence supporters. They were among East Timorese disembarking from a ship which had come from Dili. "Other men had their hands tied and they were put on trucks and taken away," said one source, who is collecting accounts for presentation to the international community. (Skehan and Brown, "Refugee Plight Compared to Nazi Terror Against Jews," The Sydney Morning Herald, September 10, 1999.) Agence France-Presse cited "reports [that] men in UN gear were loading young men into C-130 aircraft for unknown destinations." ("Refugees Starving in East Timor Mountains, Living Off Roots," AFP dispatch, September 13, 1999.) In an "urgent action" of September 14, the East Timor Human Rights Centre in Australia reported that "Indonesian military, police and militia are patrolling both Kupang and Atambua [in West Timor], and are carrying out operations, particularly at night, where they search for East Timorese men, including independence supporters. Between Monday September 6 and Thursday September 9, the streets were deserted, and the town extremely tense. Sources fear that East Timorese men and independence supporters are being rounded up to be assassinated." On September 10, a confirmed gendercidal killing took place at Passabe in the enclave of Oecussi. Reporting investigators' findings in February 2000, Mark Dodd wrote: "Evidence gathered so far indicated the victims were mostly men taken on September 8 from villages near Passabe, identified by Indonesian authorities as pro-independence strongholds. According to accounts from independence supporters, between 52 and 56 men were marched across the nearby border into West Timor for registration. Their hands were then bound with palm twine and they were marched a short distance back into East Timor where they were executed." (Mark Dodd, "Passabe Massacre: Marked for Killing Frenzy," The Sydney Morning Herald, February 9, 2000.) One of the most detailed and powerful reports of gendercidal atrocities was published in The Washington Post on September 14, 1999: Jani thought he was safe on the ferry. After three days of terror in East Timor, the boat would take him and two college friends to safety, he thought. Then the militiamen boarded. No young men may leave East Timor, they announced as the boat prepared to depart. Jani, 27, tried to hide; the militiamen caught his friends. "Are there any others?" they demanded, Jani recalls. "No, no other young men," his friends replied in a last gift of kindness. They marched Armando Gomez, 29, and Armando DiSilva, 30, to the front of the boat and killed them as 200 refugees watched.

Gomez's body was dumped into the sea, DiSilva's on the ground by the dock. Jani raced through the boat. "Please help me," he whispered to the other refugees. A woman motioned to him to hide between her and her children. The searching militiamen walked by. The account of Jani, now a fearful refugee in western Timor, adds to the mounting evidence that victims of the murderous rampage by militia gangs in East Timor following the territory's overwhelming vote for independence from Indonesia were systematically culled from the population at large. Young men, political opponents of the Jakarta government, Roman Catholic clergy and anyone else suspected of favoring the independence opposed by the militias were targeted, in a chilling echo of the techniques of systematic killing seen in Kosovo. (Doug Struck and Keith B. Richburg, "Refugees Describe Method to Murderous Rampage in E. Timor," The Washington Post, September 14, 1999.) On September 24, Amnesty International detailed "credible reports that 35 young East Timorese men were killed on board a ship bound for Kupang from Dili on 11 September. According to an eyewitness account, the bodies of the victims were dumped overboard. Amnesty International has collected accounts of other incidents of East Timorese being beaten and killed on boats leaving Dili." (Amnesty International, "Fear, Intimidation and Forced Relocation in the [Indonesian] Archipelago," AI Index: ASA 21/166/99, September 24, 1999.) The situation in the concentration camps of West Timor, to which much of the Timorese population had been abducted by Indonesian forces, was no less grievous. John Aglionby wrote of the "refugees" being "herded, sifted, and cut off." He cited one witness's testimony that "Many of the men are [being] 'taken away for questioning' ... The women have no idea what happens to their husbands. Many have not returned." One woman reported a militia camp guard's comment that "You may have got your country but it will be a land full of widows." (Aglionby, "Herded, Sifted, and Cut Off," The Guardian, September 10, 1999.) A detainee who returned safely, Domingos Dos Santos, told Agence France-Presse that "pro-Indonesian militias were hunting down male refugees and planned to kill them all." ("Timor Refugees 'Can Return'," BBC Online, October 3, 1999.) On October 10, Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao spoke of "more than 230,000 East Timorese [having] been taken to camps in Atambua, Kefa, Kupang, Alor, Wetar and Kisar where the men were selectively murdered, leaving only women, children and the elderly." ("Gusmao Appeals to Indonesia to Free East Timorese from Camps," Agence France-Presse dispatch, October 11, 1999.) Occasional concerns for the fate of Timor's men were expressed by prominent figures in the international community. The Deputy British representative to the United Nations, Stewart Eldon, told the U.N. Security Council on September 11 that "There are reports of women and children being forced into trucks to be taken to West Timor while men and boys are left behind. We know and we fear -- from Kosovo -- what that may mean." Most dramatically, in midSeptember the Canadian ambassador to Indonesia, Kenneth Sunquist, raised the alarm over an apparent deficit of adult men in the West Timor camps. His account appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline, "The Chilling Disappearance of East Timor's Young Men":

Thousands of East Timorese men have disappeared en route to the relative safety of refugee camps in the western section of the embattled island, Canada's ambassador to Indonesia said after a tour of the area. Ken Sunquist and Norway's ambassador here are the first foreign diplomats to visit the camps in the West Timorese capital of Kupang, home to more than 100,000 refugees fleeing anti-independence militias responsible for an orgy of violence in neighbouring East Timor over the past two weeks. "The refugee camps themselves are filled overwhelmingly with women and children, so we're wondering where the men are, whether they've been segregated elsewhere, whether they're up in the hills in East Timor or if there's some more sinister explanation," Mr. Sunquist said after touring three Kupang-area refugee camps on Tuesday. "We tried to ask these questions on several occasions but it's clear that the people felt we were putting them at risk even talking to them. There were lots of police around everywhere we went." Most of refugees seen by the joint mission, which accompanied five Indonesian cabinet ministers to Kupang, were older men, women and boys under the age of 16, he said. "While we were at the airport, for example, a plane came in with 171 people aboard, 150 of whom were children under the age of 10, older women and several younger men who appeared to have been wounded, but whether this was done by the militias before they left or not we couldn't tell," he said. (Paul Dillon and Jeff Sallot, "The Chilling Disappearance of East Timor's Young Men," The Globe and Mail, September 16, 1999.) In an interview on September 20, Sunquist expanded on his perceptions of the situation: The question is, for instance, the camps have women and children but no men. What's happened to those men? You can either take one approach, which is most of them went up in the hills to fight. That is probably true for a lot of them. A second one is that they were segregated. There's a lot of reports that say the men were segregated. ... In fact, from what we've now heard, there are some camps along the border which are almost entirely male. So maybe the husbands, fathers, brothers, were segregated and are sitting in camps by themselves. I really hope that's true. And then there's the third one, that they were killed. No one, I mean, not anyone is willing to say that they were killed, because they don't know what happened to them. The wives don't know. They know they are missing. But they don't know where they are. And that's what a commission of inquiry [is needed for]. (Quoted in Richard S. Ehrlich, "The Military and East Timor's Militias", The Laissez Faire City Times, 3: 38 [September 27, 1999].) A Timorese man displays empty shell cartridges from the massacre at Suai, September 6, 1999. In addition to the apparent largescale gendercide of Timorese males, at least one sizable massacre predominantly targeted females, at the church in Suai on September 6. Up to 200 people who had taken refuge in the church were attacked by militia members and massacred. "The number of victims and their identities

are uncertain," reportedThe Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy. "What is known is that most were women and girls [and, according to other reports, elderly men]. The evidence attests to that: the jumble of bras, underpants and sanitary napkins on the steps leading up to the church; the children's leg bones; a hank of a woman's hair; the scorched skeletal remains of two women behind the church; the thick bloodstain on a schoolroom door, covered by bougainvillea petals baking beneath the sun. ... What happened was male savagery as old as history -- rape, killing, burning, razing -- in a church, a school, in the adjacent huge, grey, concrete shell of a cathedral called Ave Maria under construction to the glory of God. Savagery against the defenceless, as women and children usually are; vengeance on a people who voted for independence from their Indonesian military overlords and landowners." Afterwards, surviving "women and children were carted away on trucks to Indonesia's neighbouring West Timor province, about 30 kilometres away, where they are still being held. The whereabouts of many of the men is not known." (Valpy, "Rape and Murder in the Sight of Our Lady," The Globe and Mail, November 1, 1999.) A number of younger Timorese women are reported to have been killed as known or suspected independence supporters. Reports also reached the international media of young Timorese women being raped, or abducted for use as sex-slaves. A representative of the aid agency World Vision stated in mid-October that "Apparently when the militias went on their rampage, they herded people into the marketplace to make forced evacuations and during that time, many young girls were dragged away and raped by the pro-integrationist forces." ("Aid Agency Claims to Have Evidence of Mass Rape by Militias," ABC [Australia] News Online, October 20, 1999.) Some of the worst cases of sexual assault, accompanied by mass killing, occurred at Suai on September 6 (see above). Rape was also allegedly widespread in the detention camps in West Timor, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, who was sent to Dili to file a report in November. (No special U.N. rapporteur on violence against men was appointed, and no report on the subject filed.)

How many died?

Were the atrocities that took place in East Timor in September-October 1999 on a "genocidal" scale? The consensus position of internatonal commentators has been "no" -- that in fact, the deaths amounted to no more than a few hundred people, perhaps only "dozens," as an Associated Press report claimed in mid-2000. Gendercide Watch considers these estimations to be highly suspect, and deriving in part from the desire of the international community (especially the U.N.) to avoid blame for its failure to intervene promptly in the slaughter and destruction. The evidence is threefold that killings occurred on a much larger scale than has been generally recognized. First, independent investigators, operating with very few resources, have uncovered subsantially greater evidence of mass killings than has the tiny group of investigators dispatched by the United Nations -- but most death-count estimates have been based on the U.N. efforts. Second, there is strong physical, eyewitness, and circumstantial evidence of bodies being disposed of in large numbers at sea, or otherwise destroyed and hidden by Indonesian forces and Timorese militia-members. Last, and most significant, tens of thousands of Timorese remain "missing" and "unaccounted for" a year after the horror -- though this subject has attracted no attention in international media for many months.

The physical evidence. The possibility of turning up extensive forensic evidence of the atrocities has diminished drastically since September 1999, as a result of two factors: the apparently systematic attempts by Indonesian forces and militia to destroy such evidence; and the pathetically inadequate efforts by the U.N. to investigate atrocities on the ground. Reports of the destruction of evidence are widespread. According to Australian doctor Andrew McNaughtan, "It is very clear that there has been a very organized, orchestrated, systematic cleanup of bodies" by Indonesian forces. (Jackie Woods, "Human Rights Activists Decry Slow U.N. Probe," Kyodo News Service, November 2, 1999.) Australian army lawyer Jens Streit told The Washington Post in October 1999 that "The great lengths the militias have gone to to hide and destroy the bodies makes it very difficult for us to figure out what happened. We have eyewitness accounts, but other than things like shell casings and blood stains, we don't have a lot of physical evidence. ... The Indonesians are extremely concerned about saving face. They want to be able to deny any of this happened." (Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "A Killing Ground Without Corpses: Bodies of E. Timor Victims Apparently Burned, Dumped,"The Washington Post, October 22, 1999.) It is also certain that many victims were trucked across the border to West Timor and buried there: in late November 1999, 25 bodies were discovered by Indonesian nongovernmental investigators in three mass graves on the western side of the border. Recall also the frequent testimony, already cited, of young men being taken out to sea to be killed, and their bodies dumped overboard. As for international investigations, in marked contrast to the hundreds of forensics experts who were rushed to Kosovo in the wake of the Serb killing campaign earlier in 1999, only a handful of investigators were made available by InterFET (the International Force in East Timor), most with no forensics training. "Requests to the U.N. headquarters in New York for forensic investigators" went unheeded. (Woods, "Human Rights Activists Decry Slow U.N. Probe.") After nearly three months of stalling, a special U.N. advisory team toured the territory for a mere ten days in late November, gathering information and evidence for a possible war-crimes tribunal along the lines of Bosnia and Rwanda. In all, InterFET and U.N. investigators have recovered some 120 bodies across East Timor. ("You know what we call it when we find a well stuffed with dead people?" an Australian soldier asked The Laissez Faire City Times. "A manhole.") Many international observers have expressed exasperation at the limited scale and glacial pace of the investigations. "It's like you come home, the house is burnt down, grandma's been murdered and the kids have been kidnapped and you know who did it," said one American intelligence officer. "But everyone just keeps saying, 'Oh, how awful. She's dead, the house is burnt, the kids are gone -- they should just have more kids and build another house.' I say use the evidence to drag the murderer, the arsonist, the kidnapper into court then lock his ass in jail." (Quoted in Paul Daley, "U.N. Stalling Holds Up Horror Inquiry," The Sydney Morning Herald, November 13, 1999.) The limited international efforts were cast into sharp relief by the work of the East Timor Human Rights Commission, a group of 79 Timorese volunteers, mainly students, who on their own "found evidence of 364 recent killings in Dili" and vicinity alone. Bodies found on beaches were not included in the total. (Paul Daley, "Massacre Evidence Grows", The Age, November 12, 1999.)

Intelligence data. Some of the most significant evidence of the Indonesian killing campaign in September 1999 almost certainly resides with U.S. and Australian intelligence agencies. A key component of any serious investigation into the atrocities must be to call for these agencies to turn over all relevant data to investigators. What has surfaced so far, through media sources, may be taken as indicative of the wealth of information currently held in secret files. In a chilling report in the Melbourne Age, reporter Paul Daley wrote that "Evidence of hundreds of killings in Dili alone -- and potentially many more at sea -- confirms the view of Australian intelligence figures that thousands, rather than hundreds, of East Timorese have died in recent months." Citing "allegations that the Indonesian military (TNI), police and militias killed a large number of East Timorese students aboard a passenger ferry on route from Java to East Timor on 7 September, before dumping them at sea," Daley added: The allegation is given weight by Australian signals intelligence, whch specifically indicates a large number of East Timorese students were killed at sea. The signals intelligence generally points to many other East Timorese being killed on boats -- or land -- before being dumped into the ocean. The Australian intelligence officers believe the discovery of more than 90 bodies on beaches on the north and south coasts of East Timor in recent weeks, also indicates a large number of people were disposed of at sea. "You have a situation where, in some cases hands and feet were tied, in other cases bodies have wounds or were burnt. It leads to the conclusion that large numbers of East Timorese could be dead -- some killed at sea, others killed on land, then burnt and hidden at sea," an intelligence figure told The Age. "This takes some effort and it points to a systematic cover-up." (Daley, "Massacre Evidence Grows", The Age, November 12, 1999.) In a subsequent story, Daley cited another intelligence officer who told him that "The bodies found [by InterFET] weren't meant to be found -- that is, they were stuffed in drains, dumped in wells, buried in shallow graves and charred in burnt buildings. We believe they are the ones that the Indonesians themselves missed after cleaning up what they thought were all the bodies, before InterFET arrived and while journalists had been forced out of the place." "It is possible to reach only one conclusion," Daley wrote. "East Timor is the scene of a massive crime against humanity -- and an even bigger attempt at cover-up -- by Indonesia's security forces." (Daley, "U.N. Stalling Holds Up Horror Inquiry.") The missing. Of all the data to emerge from East Timor since the Indonesian onslaught of September 1999, estimates of the missing are the most disturbing. (For an in-depth examination of the phenomenon, see Adam Jones, "East Timor: Where Are the People?", ZNet, November 15, 1999.) The voting drive conducted by the U.N. mission in East Timor registered 438,000 Timorese who were of voting age -- over 17 -- and who expressed a desire to cast a ballot. The U.N. then estimated the total population of East Timor as between 850,000 and 890,000, in keeping with standard "Third World" demographic trends in which 50 or even 60 percent of the population are minors. Thus, the international community never had as clear an idea of the number of Timorese

in the territory as at the very point when the slaughter broke out at the beginning of September 1999. In the early days of the September crisis, estimates of Timorese "unaccounted for" ranged from 200,000 to as high as 600,000. In October, Jos Ramos Horta spoke of the possible "disappearance" of 100,000 people in the territory. As the Indonesian armed forces prepared to depart, many thousands of Timorese subsequently returned from hiding to their shattered communities. But on November 3, the head of InterFET, Maj.-Gen. Peter Cosgrove, told media that "There is a discrepancy, we feel, of about 80,000 [people]. Are these in the hills or just unlocated? We are not sure. There could be more in West Timor than we've found, there could be more in the hills, or in the wider area of the Indonesia archipelago." But he also mentioned "speculation about a fourth fate." Cosgrove, it must be noted, was basing his estimate on a total Timorese population of 800,000 -- some 50,000 to 90,000 fewer than the U.N. estimates made at the time of the voter-registration drive. On November 5, The Sydney Morning Herald reported: "Different U.N. officials calculate that the human cost of Indonesia's bloody withdrawal could be close to 200,000." As the East Timor Observatory (a Portuguese body created to monitor the transition process) noted grimly, "Whatever figures are used, the difference is in the region of tens of thousands, probably many tens of thousands. It would be illogical to dismiss the possibility of genocide before finding out what has really happened to all the 'disappeared.'" The last mention of the missing that Gendercide Watch has unearthed in the international press was on January 29, 2000 (Marian Wilkinson, "Justice Must Be Done," The Melbourne Age). The article stated: "Tens of thousands of Timorese are still unaccounted for since September. While these figures are now thought [sic: claimed] to be the result of statistical errors, even InterFET's General Cosgrove says the numbers still trouble him." Since that time, the issue -- barely visible for two months prior to Wilkinson's article -- has entirely evaporated from media coverage. The conundrum, however, remains unsolved, and the so-called "statistical errors" that may have led to a miscount have never been explained. If tens of thousands of Timorese are indeed "missing," where might they have gone? One possibility is that large numbers were forcibly dispersed to distant corners of the Indonesian archipelago. Some may simply not have been listed as "accounted for" within East Timor itself. But Dr. William Maley of the Australian Defence Force Academy has been quoted as saying that "a lot" of the missing could have been murdered. He cites the obviously extensive planning that underlay the terror campaign of September as "one reason I think it would have been possible to kill a lot of people in a short period of time. It wasn't just a ragged-edge exercise with a few people running amok because they were disappointed with the result. ... At the early stages of a genocide investigation one does not start with body one and then go on to count a pile of bodies. It's in terms of population estimates and population deficits. If you have a population of, say, 880,000 and then you count everyone and there are only 700,000, that doesn't mean you can explain at this stage what happened to every individual. But it is very strong evidence that something very nasty has happened. People don't disappear into thin air if they are alive." (Quoted in Brendan Nicholson, "Grim View on Timor's Missing 80,000", The Age[Melbourne], November 12, 1999.)

A snapshot of the quandary was provided by Sydney Morning Herald reporter Lindsay Murdoch in April 2000. Writing from the district of Liquica, 40 kilometres west of Dili, Murdoch noted that "almost every day people trail into the Liquica police station to tell the United Nations police stationed there about new grave sites." According to a U.S. police officer assigned to the force, Alan Williams, "Officially we must stay with the number of bodies that we have actually lifted, but the total number of people killed in this district is much, much higher than that, perhaps even astronomical." (Murdoch, "Horror Lives on for Town of Liquica", The Sydney Morning Herald, April 8, 2000.) With most of the physical and forensic evidence of atrocities washed away by monsoon rains, the only feasible way of determining the scale of the killings in East Timor is by conducting a fullscale census of the Timorese population. Such a survey "is necessary and urgent," the East Timor Observatory proclaimed in November 1999. This would take no more effort than the efficient voter-registration drive carried out immediately prior to the plebiscite, which permitted an accurate estimate to be made of the overall Timorese population.

Who was responsible?

The major share of responsibility for the genocide in East Timor since 1975 rests with the Indonesian military, which has long been the dominant force in national politics and, over the long years of occupation, amassed a wide range of lucrative economic interests in East Timor. The Commander of the Armed Forces and Defence Minister, General Wiranto, oversaw the atrocities of 1999 conducted under the aegis of Operasi Sapu Jagad ("Operation Global CleanSweep"). As well, "senior generals playing active roles included Lieutenant-General Tyasno Sudarso, head of military intelligence, his predecessor Lieutenant-General Zacky Anwar Makarim, and Major-General Adam Damiri, commander of the Udayana military command which includes East Timor. This group was strongly supported by influential retired Generals Tri Sutrisno and Benny Burdani, the latter having been intimately involved in East Timor operations ever since 1974. Despite his exile, sacked Lieutenant [sic: Major]-General Prabowo [former commander of the Kopassus special-forces unit, and son-in-law of deposed President Suharto] gave advice at every stage of the campaign. Lieutenant-General Yunus Yosfiah, Information Minister in the Habibie cabinet, also played an active role ... Crucial local military commanders were Lieutenant Colonels Asep Kuswanto in Liquica, Burhanudin Siagan in Bobonaro, Muhammed Nur in Emera, and Colonel Mudjino, Dili deputy commander." (Taylor, East Timor: The Price of Freedom, pp. xix-xx.) On August 18, 2000, the People's Consultative Assembly in Jakarta issued a blanket amnesty for all human-rights abuses committed by the armed forces, in Indonesia as well as in East Timor. "Top serving and retired officers ... put enormous pressure on politicians to pass the decree banning retroactive prosecution of human rights cases ... The ban effectively rules out charges against senior officers, because Indonesia's criminal code does not recognise culpability by those in command. Only those who carried out orders could be charged and prosecuted." (See Lindsay Murdoch, "Blanket Amnesty for Officers: They Were Only Issuing Orders", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 2000.) The United Nations responded by appointing a senior prosecutor, Mohamed Ottman, to investigate atrocities over the entire period of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There were hopes that the investigation would lead to the creation of a

fully-fledged war-crimes tribunal under U.N. sponsorship. (See Mark Dodd, "War Crimes Lawyer to Study 1975 Invasion",The Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2000.) The killings, property destruction, and forced translocations of September 1999 were carried out at ground level by Indonesian army and police forces in coordination with the Timorese militias described earlier. At all levels, those who commanded and conducted the killing were men; Timorese males, mostly youths, were recruited for militia service with promises of good pay and other "benefits" (including a free rein when it came to raping and sexually abusing Timorese women). A number were also former detainees who had been released from brutal treatment in Indonesian custody after pledging to collaborate with the occupying forces.

The aftermath
Massive public demonstrations in Australia, North America, and Western Europe against the atrocities in East Timor, along with the recent precedent of intervention in Kosovo, finally pushed the West to intervene. Pressure, especially from the United States, forced the Habibie government to accept an international force, InterFET, composed mainly of Australian and Nepalese Gurkha troops. The forces began deploying in Dili on September 20, 1999, and a week later Indonesian forces finally ceded control to the international contingent, though troops would remain in the territory until the end of October. On September 28, the United Nations voted to establish an international inquiry into the atrocities in the territory, though it was still unclear at the time of writing whether this would be followed by an international criminal tribunal along the lines of Bosnia and Rwanda. The Indonesian killing campaign was accompanied by property destruction on an almost inconceivable scale, apparently aimed at "the virtual demolition of the physical basis for survival in the territory," according to Noam Chomsky. ("East Timor Is Not Yesterday's Story", ZNet, October 23, 1999.) In a lengthy feature article published in The New York Times in April 2000, Seth Mydans described the state of the territory in the post-plebiscite period: DILI, East Timor -- People here have gotten used to the scene: a mob of unemployed young men shoving, shouting and weeping in anger outside the headquarters of the United Nations, held back by an impassive multinational police contingent. "Nothing has changed!" they shouted the other day, and their complaint has become a theme for critics -- both foreign and Timorese -- as the United Nations passes the six-month mark in its first experiment in building a new nation. As monsoon rains bring added misery, whole towns and villages still stand burned, roofless and silent, devastated by the rampage of destruction that followed East Timor's vote last August to

end 24 years of Indonesian occupation. As many as 80 percent of the territory's 700,000 people still have no jobs. Another 100,000 or more remain in camps across the border in Indonesian West Timor, still afraid to return. ... Aid workers and diplomats say they fear that this discontent could lead to lawlessness and political disarray and could open the door to trouble from the Indonesian-backed militias that crossed the border to Indonesian West Timor after laying waste to the territory last September. (Mydans, "Ruined East Timor Awaits A Miracle," The New York Times, April 22, 2000. For a more optimistic assessment of the prospects an independent East Timor will face, see Lindsay Murdoch, "Peace Stirs a New Nation to Work towards a Prosperous Future", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2000.) Indeed, at the time of writing (August 2000), renewed militia violence was reported in the regions along the West Timorese border, and was feared to be rapidly spreading east towards Dili. There were indications that the militias were seeking to destabilize East Timor ahead of the country's formal attainment of independence in 2001.

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Reference: Jones, Adam, Case Study: East Timor (1975-99) , 2002, <http://www.gendercide.org/case_timor.html> (accessed 16/05/2012).

Case Study: Bosnia-Herzegovina

Summary
Atrocities were committed by all sides and against all sectors of the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. But the Serb strategy of gender-selective mass executions of non-combatant men was the most severe and systematic atrocity inflicted throughout. The war in Bosnia can thus be considered both a genocide against Bosnia's Muslim population, and a gendercide against Muslim men in particular.

The background
The Yugoslav ("Southern Slav") federation, cobbled together from the disintegrated Ottoman Empire after World War I, was torn apart by combined Nazi invasion and ethnic conflict during the Second World War. Indeed, the slaughter of Serbs, Jews, Muslims, Croats, and Roma (Gypsies) constituted one of the most genocidal theatres of that war; the Jewish population was nearly exterminated. A partisan movement led by Josip Broz Tito (a Croat) seized power with Allied help, massacred its enemies, and established a comparatively liberal socialist state, creating an atmosphere for a sense of Yugoslav nationhood to flourish (an idea that lives on today in "Cyber-Yugoslavia"). The federation began to unwind after Marshal Tito's death in 1980, with economic crisis and foreign debt speeding the dissolution of the union. A new generation of extreme-nationalist politicians arose to fan the flames of ethnic hatred as a springboard to personal power. In Serbia, President Slobodan Milosevic consolidated his highly authoritarian brand of rule after 1987, imposing a police state on the restive Serb province of Kosovo and its ethnic-Albanian majority in 1989. Franjo Tudjman, meanwhile, won presidential elections in Croatia by reviving the symbolism and rhetoric of the fascist Ustashe, Croatia's Nazi collaborationists, who fifty years earlier had inflicted genocide on the Serbs, Jews, and Roma within their reach. While Tudjman and others played an important role in ensuring that the breakup of Yugoslavia would be violent, it was overridingly Milosevic's ambitions of a "Greater Serbia" that sparked the onset of fullscale war in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Using its dominant control over the Yugoslav army, the Serb regime shelled large parts of Croatia into submission in 1991

(including the destruction of the Danube city of Vukovar and the subsequent genocidal massacre: see below). The Bosnian government, almost defenseless, desperately sought to stay out of the widening conflict. But the following year, in Spring 1992, Milosevic -- in alliance with Radovan Karadzic's breakaway Bosnian Serbs -- launched the genocidal and gendercidal "ethnic cleansing" of those parts of Bosnia intended for "Greater Serbia." Sarajevo's time-honoured ethnic harmony was shattered by a protracted Serb siege. Meanwhile, the outside world dithered ineffectually, imposing an arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims equal to the one it imposed on the well-armed Serbs. Europe's worst conflict since the Second World War was underway, and the military imbalance placed Milosevic's genocidal ambitions within reach.

The gendercide
In the light of long-established and heavily "gendered" strategies of intercommunal conflict in the Balkans, it was hardly surprising that the gender-selective massacre of non-combatant males would emerge as the dominant and most severe atrocity inflicted on the civilian population in the modern Balkans wars. Regardless of their often-atrocious maltreatment of other population groups (including the destruction of entire cities and the mass rape of women), Serb forces -- and to a lesser extent Croats and Muslims -- concentrated their attention systematically on "battle-age" men. As the Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic described the Serb strategy in 1996, "Wherever they [the Serbs] captured people, they either detained or killed all the males from 18 to 55 [years old]. It has never happened that the men of that age arrived across the front-line." Citing Muratovic's comment, Mark Danner summarized the Serbs' modus operandi as follows: 1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and after warning the resident Serbs -- often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with white flags -- intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and then bring them out into the streets. 2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors. 3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from men of "fighting age" -- sixteen years to sixty years old. 4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country. 5. Liquidation. Execute "fighting age" men, dispose of bodies. All of the largest atrocities of the Balkans war were variations on this gendercidal theme -targeting males almost exclusively, and for the most part "battle-age" males. The five worst acts of mass killing in the modern Balkans wars were also the worst in Europe since the killing of

tens of thousands of disarmed enemy men by Tito's partisan forces in 1945-46. At Vukovar in November 1991, between 200 and 300 Croatian men, "mostly lightly wounded soldiers and hospital workers," were pulled out of the hospital surroundings -- some with the catheters still dangling from their arms -- executed, and buried en masse outside city limits. (See Stover and Peress, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar.) A panel from Joe Sacco's memorable work, Safe Area Gorazde (link to ordering information for Sacco's book).

The story of Vlasic (Ugar Gorge) is that of another ruthless act of gender-selective mass killing. On 21 August 1992, a convoy of prisoners from the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp were driven to Muslim and Croat territory. En route, men were separated from women, driven off in separate buses, and executed at the edge of the ravine. Some 200-250 men are believed to have died. But neither Vukovar nor the Ugar Gorge could hold a candle to a more obscure slaughter -- at Brcko during the Serb offensive of 1992. Although much about the incident remains shadowy, Brcko, a strategic "choke point" on the Drina River, appears to have been the target of a systematic gender-selective slaughter that strongly foreshadowed the nightmare at Srebrenica three years later. Mark Danner, who has investigated what little is publicly known about the events, summarizes them as follows: During the late spring and early summer of 1992, some three thousand Muslims ... were herded by Serb troops into an abandoned warehouse, tortured, and put to death. A U.S. intelligence satellite orbiting over the former Yugoslavia photographed part of the slaughter. "They have photos of trucks going into Brcko with bodies standing upright, and pictures of trucks coming out of Brcko carrying bodies lying horizontally, stacked like cordwood," an investigator working outside the U.S. government who has seen the photographs told us. ... The photographs remain unpublished to this day. (Danner, "Bosnia: The Great Betrayal," New York Review of Books, 26 March 1998.)

The vast majority of mass killings and gender-selective slaughters between 1991 and 1994 were smaller in magnitude, and went virtually unrecorded. The best place to find accounts of them, in English at least, is the Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch report, War Crimes in BosniaHercegovina. The litany of atrocities in a narrow stretch of Volume II alone makes clear the pervasiveness and systematic character of the gendercide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a way that the more epic mass killings perhaps do not: In my village, about 180 men were killed. The army put all men in the center of the village. After the killing, the women took care of the bodies and identified them. The older men buried the bodies. (Trnopolje) We were met by the Cetniks [Serb paramilitaries], who were separating women and children from the men. Many of the men were killed on the spot -- mostly over old, private disputes. The rest of us were put on buses and they started to beat us. (Kozarac) The army came to the village that day. They took us from our houses. The men were beaten. The army came in on trucks and started shooting at the men and killing them. (Prnovo) The army took most of the men and killed them. There were bodies everywhere. (Rizvanovici) The shooting started at about 4:00 p.m., but we were surrounded and could not escape. They [Serb troops] finally entered the village at 8:00 p.m. and immediately began setting houses on fire, looking for men and executing them. When they got to our house, they ordered us to come out with hands raised above our heads, including the children. There were four men among us, and they shot them in front of us. We were screaming, and the children cried as we were forced to walk on. I saw another six men killed nearby. (Skelani) Our men had to hide. My husband was with us, but hiding. I saw my uncle being beaten on July 25 when there was a kind of massacre. The Serbs were searching for arms. Three hundred men were killed that day. (Carakovo) We came out of the shelter. They were looking for men. They got them all together. We saw them beating the men. We heard the sounds of the shooting. One man survived the executions. They killed his brother and father. Afterwards the women buried the men. (Biscani) The crowning act of gendercide in the Balkans wars -- at least until "Operation Horseshoe" in Kosovo in 1999 -- came at Srebrenica between July 12 and 17, 1995. After the atrocities of 1992 and further fighting in 1993, Srebrenica had been declared one of five "safe areas" under UN protection. Tens of thousands of desperate Muslims sought protection there. Despite privations and squalor, the safety held -- until July 1995, when Serb forces overran the enclave. As Dutch U.N. troops and the international community looked on, the Serbs separated the men, most of them elderly and infirm, from the children and women. While the other members of the community were bused to safety in Muslim-held territory, thousands of Srebrenica's men were taken out to open fields, executed, and buried in mass graves. Thousands of other unarmed men were rounded up and hunted down in nearby forests, in what Serb commander Ratko Mladic called a "feast" of mass killing.

How many died?

"As of December 1994," writes Sabrina Ramet in Balkan Babel (p. 267), "between 200,000 and 400,000 people had died since June 1991 as a result of the war between Serbs and non-Serbs, and at least 2.7 million people had been reduced to refugees. An estimated 20,000-50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers in a systematic campaign of humiliation and psychological terror." Most authorities, while accepting that the death-toll from the Bosnian conflict alone reached six figures, would tend towards the lower end of Ramet's casualty estimate. But to this must be added the further slaughter during the "endgame" of the war in mid-1995, including the gendercidal massacre at Srebrenica and the Croat invasion of the Serb-held Krajina region later in the summer. No reliable statistics exist for the number of male versus female casualties in the Bosnian or Croatian wars. All members of the civilian population suffered in the protracted and bloody sieges of cities such as Vukovar and Sarajevo. But the overwhelming weight of testimony and recorded evidence suggests a heavy preponderance of "battle-age" males among the dead -probably over 80 percent. One clue can be gleaned from the lists of missing persons from the Bosnian conflict. The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted that "the majority of missing persons [in Bosnia-Herzegovina] are men ... Of the approximately 18,000 persons registered by the ICRC in Bosnia-Herzegovina as still missing in connection with the armed conflict that ended there in 1995, 92% are men and 8% are women." (ICRC, "The Impact of Armed Conflict on Women", 6 March 2001.) This apparent disproportion, combined with the systematic gender-selective strategies pursued in the individual massacres and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns, warrants the designation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of the worst gendercides in recent decades. Especially in 1992-93, atrocities were also inflicted in the brutal concentration camps operated by the Serbs (e.g., Omarska, Trnopolje), and to a lesser extent by the Croats (Dretelj). The inmates of these camps were overwhelmingly Muslim males (95 percent or more); many thousands died from torture, beatings, and summary executions.

Who is responsible?
Although crimes have been committed by all sides in the Balkans conflict, the vast majority of the mass killings and other atrocities were inflicted by the Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic himself now numbers among those indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), on the basis of his genocidal actions inKosovo. He is presently the only sitting head of state to be so indicted. Four top aides were indicted alongside him. Among Milosevic's key co-conspirators is his wife, Mirjana Markovic, a leading party ideologue. The Yugoslav power structure is extensively penetrated by criminal and paramilitary elements, most notably those under the control of Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan") and Vojislav Seselj. Both of these paramilitary leaders were deeply involved in the ground-level killing at the major massacre sites. Radovan Karadzic, Prime Minister of the self-declared "Republika Srpska" (the Serb statelet in Bosnia-Herzegovina), has also been indicted on war-crimes charges. He was

intimately involved in planning and preparing the genocidal actions against the Muslim population of Bosnia. His top general, Ratko Mladic, supervised the gendercide at Srebrenica and numerous other acts of mass killing, and is also under indictment. One must not overlook the men and occasionally women who slaughtered the defenseless victims and buried them in the mass graves, or killed them in their houses and streets. Again, although extreme nationalism was evident in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, it is the ordinary citizens of Serbia who have overridingly supported their regime in its campaign to build "Greater Serbia" over the graves of Muslims, Croats, and Kosovars.

The aftermath
The slaughter at Srebrenica, which seemed to mark the apogee of "Greater Serbia," was quickly followed by its demise. A Croat-Muslim alliance, now rearmed with tacit U.S. assistance, went on the offensive. "On August 4 [1995], with clear U.S. backing, Croatia's army attacked and overran Knin, the symbolic capital of the rebel Serbs who, at the instigation of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav army, had seized a quarter of Croatia's territory and driven out their Croat neighbors in 1990 and 1991. Within hours, the tide of the wars in Yugoslavia had shifted. The rebel Serbs' leaders abandoned the civilian Serb population in Croatia. The Croatian army sent tens of thousands of these Serbs fleeing across the Croatian border into Serb-held districts in Bosnia." (Sudetic,Blood and Vengeance, p. 324.) Many thousands of Serbs, especially the elderly and infirm, were killed by Croat forces in these new vengeful "cleansings." Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies were forced to the negotiating table. In November 1995, at Dayton, Ohio, they signed a peace treaty with Muslim and Croat representatives that saw BosniaHerzegovina formally preserved as an independent country, though with clear areas of predominance for Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. The pact was secured by 60,000 NATO peacekeepers -- but Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" dream remained. It would turn its attentions next to the territory it had first focused upon -- Kosovo, with its rebellious ethnic-Albanian majority. The result was a renewed bout of "ethnic cleansing" and gendercide in the Balkans, in 1998-99.

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Reference: Jones, Adam, Case Study: Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2002, < http://www.gendercide.org/case_bosnia.html > (accessed 16/05/2012).

Case Study: Stalin's Purges

Summary
Under the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, tens of millions of ordinary individuals were executed or imprisoned in labour camps that were little more than death camps. Perceived political orientation was the key variable in these mass atrocities. But gender played an important role, and in many respects the Purge period of Soviet history can be considered the worst gendercide of the twentieth century.

The background
According to the historian Robert Conquest, Joseph Stalin "gives the impression of a large and crude claylike figure, a golem, into which a demonic spark has been instilled." He was nonetheless "a man who perhaps more than any other determined the course of the twentieth century." Joseph Stalin Stalin was born Joseph Dzhugashvili in the Georgian town of Gori in 1879. In his youth he imbibed both the seminary training and the Great Russian nationalism that many would later link to his tyrannical exercise of power. He was an early activist in the Bolshevik movement, where he first assumed the pseudonym Stalin (which means "man of steel"), and was twice exiled to Siberia by the Tsarist authorities. When theRussian Revolution triumphed in October 1917, Stalin returned from exile, and was named General Secretary in 1922. The post was largely an undistinguished administrative one, but Stalin used it to fortify his power base and control over the bureaucracy of the ruling Communist Party. When the communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, died in 1924, a struggle for control broke out that pitted Stalin against his nemesis, Leon Trotsky, and a host of lesser party figures. Stalin's victory was slow and hard-fought, but by 1927 he had succeeded in having Trotsky expelled from the party and, in 1929, from the country (Trotsky was tracked down and killed by Stalin's agents in Mexico City in 1940). By 1928, Stalin was entrenched as supreme Soviet leader, and he wasted little time in launching a series of national campaigns (the so-called Five-Year Plans) aimed at "collectivizing" the peasantry and turning the USSR into a powerful industrial state. Both campaigns featured murder on a massive scale. Collectivization especially targeted Ukraine, "the breadbasket of the Soviet Union," which clung stubbornly to its own national identity and preference for village-level communal landholdings. In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance. The Ukrainian famine has only recently been recognized as one of the most destructive genocides of the twentieth century (see Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, and the Web resources compiled by The Ukrainian Weekly). The Five-Year Plans for industry, too, were implemented in

an extraordinarily brutal fashion, leading to the deaths of millions of convict labourers, overwhelmingly men. These atrocities are described in the corve(forced) labour case study. The millions of deaths in Stalin's "Gulag Archipelago" (the network of labour camps [gulags] scattered across the length and breath of Russia) are dealt with in the incarceration/death penalty case study. A leader whose callous disregard for human life was matched only by his consuming paranoia, Stalin next turned his attention to the Communist Party itself. Various factions and networks opposed to his rule had managed to survive into the early 1930s; many in the party were now calling for reconciliation with the peasantry, a de-emphasizing of industrial production, and greater internal democracy. For Stalin, these dissident viewpoints represented an unacceptable threat. Anyone not unquestioningly loyal to him -- and many hundreds of thousands who were -had to be "weeded out." The Communist Party would be rebuilt in the image of the "Great Leader." This was the origin of the "cult of personality" that permeated Soviet politics and culture, depicting Stalin as infallible, almost deity-like. (The cult lasted until his death in 1953, and provided George Orwell with the fuel for his satire Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a Stalinlike figure appears as "Big Brother.") Stalin's drive for total control, and his pressing need for convict labour to fuel rapid industrialization, next spawned the series of immense internal purges -- beginning in 1935 -- that sent millions of party members and ordinary individuals to their deaths, either through summary executions or in the atrocious conditions of the "Gulag Archipelago." A hagiographic portrait of Stalin as the "Great Leader."

By the time Stalin's wrath descended on his countrymen and women, the USSR had already suffered a devastating decline in its cohort of younger adult males. World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent civil war that pitted "Reds" against "Whites," had inflicted its "heaviest" losses "in the age group 16-49, particularly in its male contingent," writes Richard Pipes, "of which it had eradicated by August 1920 -- that is, before the famine [of 1922] had done its work -- 29 percent." The monstrous famines of the early 1920s and early 1930s were indiscriminate in their impact on the afflicted populations. But the campaign of mass executions launched against the kulaks -- designated "wealthier" peasants -- also overwhelmingly targeted males. "In Kiev jail they are reported at this time [1929-30] shooting 70-120 men a night,"

reports Robert Conquest; a typical story "is of the Ukrainian village of Velyki Solontsi where, after 52 men had been removed as kulaks, their women and children were taken, dumped on a sandy stretch along the Vorskla River and left there." (Excerpts from Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow.) The vast majority of "kulaks" imprisoned in the labour/death camps were also male (see theincarceration/death penalty case study). The gendered impact of the Purge period itself on Soviet society we now turn to consider.

The gendercide
Hello Papa I forgot how to write soon in School I will go through the first winter come quickly because it's bad we have no Papa mama says you are away on work or sick and what are you waiting for run away from that hospital here Olyeshenka ran away from hospital just in his shirt mama will sew you new pants and I will give you my belt all the same the boys are all afraid of me, and Olyeshenka is the only one I never beat up he also tells the truth he is also poor and I once lay in fever and wanted to die along with mother and she did not want to and I did not want to, oh, my hand is numb from write thats enough I kiss you lots of times ... Igoryok 6 and one half years - Letter to an imprisoned victim of Stalin's Purges, cited by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 654-55. The most prominent elements of Stalin's Purges, for most researchers, were the intensive campaigns waged within key Soviet institutions and sectors like the Communist Party, the Army, the NKVD (secret police), and scientists and engineers. In December 1934, the popular Leningrad party leader, Sergei Kirov, was assassinated, allegedly on Stalin's orders. This provided the spark for the escalating series of purges that Stalin launched almost immediately, under emergency "security" legislation "stat[ing] that in cases involving people accused of terrorist acts, investing authorities were to speed up their work, judicial authorities were not to allow appeals for clemency or other delays in which the sentence was death, and the NKVD was to execute those sentenced to death immediately." (Frank Smitha, "Terror in the Soviet Union".) Nikolai Bukharin, Purge victim The "Old Bolshevik" elite was targeted in three key "show trials" between 1936 and 1938, in which leaders such as Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Grigori Zinoviev were accused of complicity in Kirov's murder and conspiring with Trotskyite and "rightist" elements to undermine communism in the USSR. The evidence presented against the accused was almost nonexistent, convictions relying on confessions extracted through torture and threats against family members. But convictions there were, and most of the Bolshevik "old guard" was sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment. "Dumfounded, the world watched three plays in a row, three wide-ranging and expensive dramatic productions in which the powerful leaders of the fearless Communist Party, who had turned the entire world upside down and terrified it, now marched forth like doleful, obedient goats and bleated out everything they had been ordered to, vomited all over themselves, cringingly abased themselves and their convictions, and confessed to crimes they could not in any wise have committed." So writes

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, adding: "This was uprecedented in remembered history." (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1, p. 408.) When the "Old Bolsheviks" had been consigned to oblivion, their successors and replacements quickly followed them into the void: "The new generation of Stalinist careerists, who had adapted themselves completely to the new system, still found themselves arrested. ... They were succeeded by younger but similar characters, who again often fell quickly." (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 224.) The purging of the army, meanwhile, saw about 35,000 military officers shot or imprisoned. The destruction of the officer corps, and in particular the execution of the brilliant chief-of-staff Marshal Tukhachevsky, is considered one of the major reasons for the spectacular Nazi successes in the early months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.) But the impetus to "cleanse" the social body rapidly spilled beyond these elite boundaries, and the greatest impact of the Purge was felt in the wider society -- where millions of ordinary Soviet citizens assisted in "unmasking" their compatriots. Frank Smitha describes this mass hysteria well, writing that A society that is intense in its struggle for change has a flip side to its idealism: intolerance. People saw enemies everywhere, enemies who wanted to destroy the revolution and diminish the results of their hard work and accomplishments, enemies who wanted to restore capitalism for selfish reasons against the collective interests of the nation. If those at the top of the Communist Party and an old revolutionary like Trotsky could join the enemy, what about lesser people? In factories and offices, mass meetings were held in which people were urged to be vigilant against sabotage. It was up to common folks to make the distinction between incompetence and intentional wrecking [i.e., sabotage], and any mishap might be blamed on wrecking. Denunciations became common. Neighbors denounced neighbors. Denunciations were a good way of striking against people one did not like, including one's parents, a way of eliminating people blocking one's promotion, and ... a means of proving one's patriotism. Many realized that some innocent people were being victimized, and the saying went around that "when you chop wood the chips fly." As with Lenin, it was believed that some who were innocent would have to be victimized if all of the guilty were to be apprehended. Stalin, allegedly signing a death warrant. "Blind chance rules a man's life in this country of ours," said one NKVD officer, who found himself suddenly placed under arrest. For ordinary citizens, "Fear by night, and a feverish effort by day to pretend enthusiasm for a system of lies, was the permanent condition." (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, p. 434.) Solzhenitsyn adds: "Any adult inhabitant of this country, from a collective farmer up to a member of the Politburo, always knew that it would take only one careless word or gesture and he would fly off irrevocably into the abyss." (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 633.)

Much has been written about the absurdly minor infractions for which individuals were sentenced to ten years in labour camps -- standardly a death sentence. "A tailor laying aside his needle stuck it into a newspaper on the wall so it wouldn't get lost and happened to stick it in the eye of a portrait of Kaganovich [a member of the Soviet Politburo]. A customer observed this. Article 58, ten years (terrorism). A saleswoman accepting merchandise from a forwarder noted it down on a sheet of newspaper. There was no other paper. The number of pieces of soap happened to fall on the forehead of Comrade Stalin. Article 58, ten years." (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 293.) The gendering of the witch-hunt was cast into particularly sharp relief in those cases where most, sometimes almost all, adult males among a given population were rounded up for mass arrest and probable death. Writes Robert W. Thurston: "According to some reports, entire groups of men were taken in one swoop by the NKVD. 'Almost all the male inhabitants of the little Greek community where I lived [in the lower Ukraine] had been arrested,' recalled one migr. Another reported that the NKVD took all males between the ages of seventeen and seventy from his village of German-Russians. ... In some stories, the police clearly knew they were arresting innocent people. For example, an order reportedly arrived in Tashkent to 'Send 200 [prisoners]!' The local NKVD was at its wits' end about who else to arrest, having exhausted all the obvious possibilities, until it learned that a band of 'gypsies' (Romany) had just camped in town. Police surrounded them and charged every male from seventeen to sixty with sabotage." In the city of Zherinka, "'Ivan Ivanovich' ... had his wife sew rubles [Soviet currency] into his coat because the NKVD was taking all the men in his town." (Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 19341941 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996], pp. 79-80, 150.) Nikolai Yezhov crushes the traitors in a Soviet propaganda cartoon. As the above examples suggest, the campaigns were further fuelled by the "denunciation quotas" established under the authority of Nikolai Yezhov, who took over as head of the NKVD in September 1936 and immediately widened the scope of secret-police persecutions. (Soviet citizens often referred to the Great Terror as theYezhovshchina, "the times of Yezhov.") Relatives of those accused and arrested, including wives and children down to the age of twelve, were themselves often condemned under the "counter-terrorism" legislation: "Wives of enemies of the people" was one of four categories of those sentenced to execution or long prison terms. Women accounted for only a small minority of those executed and incarcerated on political grounds (perhaps 2 percent of the former and 5 percent of the latter). Conquest notes that "Women on the whole seem to have survived [incarceration] much better than men," although "in the mixed[-sex] camps, noncriminal [i.e., political-prisoner] women were frequently mass-raped by urkas [male criminals], or had to sell themselves for bread, or to get protection from camp officials.") But wives spared arrest or state-sanctioned murder nonetheless

encountered extreme hardship. "For the wives ... life was very bad," writes Conquest. "... All reports agree that the women lost their jobs, their rooms, and their permits, had to sell possessions, and had to live on occasional work or on the few relatives who might help them. Ignorant of their husbands' fate, they faced a worsening future." (The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 235, 264, 315) As Solzhenitsyn puts it: There in that stinking damp world in which only executioners and the most blatant of betrayers flourished, where those who remained honest became drunkards, since they had no strength of will for anything else ... in which every night the gray-green hand reached out and collared someone in order to pop him into a box -- in that world millions of women wandered about lost and blinded, whose husbands, sons, or fathers had been torn from them and dispatched to the Archipelago. They were the most scared of all. They feared shiny nameplates, office doors, telephone rings, knocks on the door, the postman, the milkwoman, and the plumber. And everyone in whose path they stood drove them from their apartments, from their work, and from the city. ... And these women had children who grew up, and for each one there came a time of extreme need when they absolutely had to have their father back, before it was too late, but he never came. (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 664.) By 1938, Conquest estimates that about 7 million Purge victims were in the labour/death camps, on top of the hundreds of thousands who had been slaughtered outright. In the worst camps, such as those of the Kolyma gold-mining region in the Arctic, the survival rate was just 2 or 3 percent (see theincarceration/death penalty case study). Alexander Solzhenitsyn calls the prison colonies in the Solovetsky Islands "the Arctic Auschwitz," and cites the edict of their commander, Naftaly Frenkel, which "became the supreme law of the Archipelago: 'We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months -- after that we don't need him anymore.'" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 49.) Robert Conquest The main evidence for the gendercidal impact of the "Great Terror" lies in the Soviet census of 1959. In a fascinating addendum to the original edition of his work on the Purge period, The Great Terror, Robert Conquest uses the census figures to argue that the Soviet population "was some 20 million lower than Western observers had expected after making allowance for war losses." "But the main point," he notes, "arises from a consideration of the figures for males and females in the different age groups." He then unveils a striking table indicating that whereas age cohorts up to 25-29 displayed the usual 51-to-49 percent split of women to men, from 30-34 the gap widened to 55 to 45 percent. Thereafter, the disparity became massive, reflecting the generations of males caught up in the purges and the Great Patriotic War. From 35-39, women outnumbered men by 61 to 39 percent; from 40-54, the figure was 62 to 38 percent; in the 55-59 age group, 67 to 33 percent; from 60-69, 65 to 35 percent; and 70 or older, 68 to 32 percent. Conquest summarizes the findings as follows: Many women died as a result of the war and the purges. But in both cases the great bulk of the victims was certainly male. From neither cause should there be much distinction in the figures for the sexes for the under-30 age groups in 1959. Nor is there. For the 30-34 block the[re] ... is a

comparatively small difference, presumably indicating the losses of the young Army men in their late teens during the war. In the 35-39 group, which could have been expected to take the major war losses, we find figures of 391 to 609 women. One would have thought that these men, in their early twenties in the war, would have had the highest losses.But the proportion then gets worse still, and for the 40-44, 45-49 and 50-54 [cohorts] remains a set 384 to 616. Even more striking, the worst proportion of all comes for the 55-59 age group (334 to 666: in fact in this group alone there are almost exactly twice as many women as men). The figures for the 60-69 group (349 to 691) and for the 70 and over group (319 to 681) are also much worse than the soldiers' groups. Now all authorities agree that the Purge struck in the main at people "between thirty and fifty-five"; "generally, arrested people are all thirty or over. That's the dangerous age: you can remember things." There were few young or old, most of them being "in the prime of life." Add twenty years for the 1959 position. Precise deductions are not possible. Older men died as soldiers in the war. But on the other hand, the mass dispatch to labour camps of prisoners of war returned from Nazi hands in 1945 must have led to an extra, and non-military, death rate among the younger males. So must the guerrilla fighting in the Baltic States and the Western Ukraine, which lasted for years after the war; and so must the deportations from the Caucasus and the general renewal of Purge activities in the postwar period. But in any case, the general effect of the figures is clear enough. The wastage of millions of males in the older age groups is too great to be masked, whatever saving assumptions we may make. We here have, frozen into the census figures, a striking indication of the magnitude of the losses inflicted in the Purge. (Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties [New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968], pp. 711-12. Emphasis added.) A key analytical question is to what extent this gendered slaughter should be considered an actual gendercide -- that is, by our definition, a gender-selectivekilling. As noted in the "Summary" section above, it was imputed political orientation and alleged "wrecking" activities that generally governed the selection of victims, and many innocent women were swept up in the holocaust. But other variables always figure in gendercides, and are especially prominent in the case of men. In Bosnia-Herzegovina or Bangladesh in 1971, for example, it was not all men who were targeted, but those belonging to the targeted ethnic/political grouping. In the opinion of Gendercide Watch, the sheer overwhelming proportion of (innocent) males among the politically-targeted victims indeed qualifies Stalin's Purges as a gendercide. The "gendering" of the slaughter may be extended further still. In a passage from her provocative study of the witch-hunts in early-modern England,Malevolent Nurture -- it is in fact the concluding passage of the book -- Deborah Willis develops her sophisticated gendering of the hunts with an important digression on "some of the most virulent of the twentieth-century 'witchhunts,'" in which "violence has been directed against symbolic 'fathers' or other figures of authority." The trend is especially prominent "in countries where newly emergent but precarious ruling elites needed 'others' to blame for the serious economic or other problems they faced." The example she chooses is Stalin's Purges: ... During the 1930s and 1940s in Stalin's Soviet Union, leadership fractured at all levels, not only within Stalin's "inner circle" but also within local and regional party machines (paralleling in some ways the neighborly quarrels and religious controversies that divided early modern

communities). As power oscillated between different factions, purges were carried out in the name of Stalin, "Father of the Country," "the Great and Wise Teacher," "the Friend of Mankind," against the antifathers and betraying sons who had perverted the socialist program, the "enemies with party cards." Underlying the psychology of the purges may have been, among other things, the magical beliefs of the Russian peasantry, still lively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, translated after the Revolution into the language of "scientific socialism." Rather than the female witch, however, it was the male possessed by evil spirits who anticipated the typical target of persecutory violence -- the "evil spirits" of foreign, class-alien, or counterrevolutionary ideas. Demystified, secularized, stripped of his supernatural power, the great demonic adversary no longer needed to seduce a weaker [female] vessel but could walk among the elect as one of their own. (Deborah Willis, Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England[Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995], pp. 244-45; see also the discussion of Willis's findings in the European witch-huntcase study.) Willis's comments are a rare treatment of the gendering of modern "witch-hunts," of which Stalin's Purges stand as the most prominent and destructive example. (Indonesia in 196566, East Pakistan/Bangladesh in 1971,Punjab/Kashmir, the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, and the Balkans wars of the 1990s [see also the Srebrenica and Kosovo case studies] are just a few of the contemporary gendercides that could be added to the list.) Willis's analysis also draws out a number of the key variables (social class, political affiliation) that typically combine with gender to produce gendercidal outcomes.

How many died?

In the original version of his book The Great Terror, Robert Conquest gave the following estimates of those arrested, executed, and incarcerated during the height of the Purge: Arrests, 1937-1938 - about 7 million Executed - about 1 million Died in camps - about 2 million In prison, late 1938 - about 1 million In camps, late 1938 - about 8 million Conquest concluded that "not more than 10 percent of those then in camp survived." Updating his figures in the late 1980s based on recently-released archival sources, he increased the number of "arrests" to 8 million, but reduced the number in camps to "7 million, or even a little less." This would give a total death toll for the main Purge period of just under ten million people. About 98 percent of the dead (Gendercide Watch's calculation) were male. The estimates are "only approximations," Conquest notes, and "anything like complete accuracy on the casualty figures is probably unattainable." But "it now seems that further examination of the data will not go far from the estimates we now have except, perhaps, to show them to be understated"; and "in any case, the sheer magnitudes of the Stalin holocaust are now beyond doubt." He cites Joseph Berger's remark that the atrocities of Stalin's rule "left the Soviet Union in the condition of 'a country devastated by nuclear warfare.'" (All figures and quotes from Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 485-88.)

Who was responsible?

One of the enduring debates over this era of Soviet history is whether Stalin's despotism marked a decisive break with previous Bolshevik practice, or whether it was merely a continuation of the brutal and dictatorial system installed under his predecessor, Lenin. Scholarship has increasingly favoured the "continuity" thesis, articulated by Richard Pipes in his book Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime: "Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron's political philosophy and practices. Every ingredient of what has come to be known as Stalinism save one -- murdering fellow Communists -- he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. Stalin's megalomania, his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal qualities should not obscure the fact that his ideology and modus operandi were Lenin's. A man of meager education, he had no other source of ideas." (See the excerpts from Pipes' book.) As is always the case with mass atrocities, the Purge provided an opportunity for many careerminded individuals, overwhelmingly men, to move up the ladder and experience a taste of absolute power. "To know what it meant to be a bluecap [interrogator] one had to experience it!" writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "Anything you saw was yours! Any apartment you looked at was yours! Any woman was yours! Any enemy was struck from your path! The earth beneath your feet was yours! The heaven above you was yours -- it was, after all, like your cap, sky blue!" (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 1 [New York: Harper & Row, 1973], pp. 151-52.) Solzhenitsyn likens the commanders of the death camps, meanwhile, to feudal lords: "Like the estate owner, the chief of the camp could take any slave to be his lackey, cook, barber, or jester (and he could also assemble a serf theater if he wished); he could take any slave woman as a housekeeper, a concubine, or a servant." (The Gulag Archipelago, vol. 2, p. 150.)

The aftermath
The impetus of the Purge waned at the end of 1938, by which time "the snowball system [of accusations] had reached a stage where half the urban population were down on the NKVD lists," and the proportion of the entire Soviet population arrested had reached one in every twenty. "One can virtually say that every other family in the country on average must have had one of its members in jail," proportions that were "far higher among the educated classes. ... Even from Stalin's point of view, the whole thing had become impossible. ... To have gone on would have been impossible economically, politically, and even physically, in that interrogators, prisons, and camps, already grotesquely overloaded, could not have managed it. And meanwhile, the work of the mass Purge had been done. The country was crushed." Stalin now eased the pressure, dismissing Yezhov from his post (he would subsequently be executed) and declaring that "grave mistakes" had occurred, though on balance the results of the Purge "were beneficial." (Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, pp. 289-290, 440.) But "terror was ... by no means abandoned as an instrument of political rule; indeed, four of the six executed members of Stalin's Politburo perished between 1939 and 1941." (Gerhard Rempel, "The Purge".) And overall, instead of subsiding, the Great Terror simply changed its

choice of targets. After the Germans and Soviets divided up Poland between them in September 1939, nearly half a million Poles (almost exclusively male) and 200,000 Polish prisoners-of-war were sent to camps, where the vast majority died. When the tables turned and the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Stalin pulled back, releasing many surviving prisoners to serve in the armed forces. But those hoping that the end of the Second World War, in which the USSR played the major role in defeating the Nazis and their allies, would mean a liberalization of society were sadly disillusioned. Instead, Stalin allowed his old paranoia to surface anew. Returning Soviet prisoners-of-war were sent to the labour camps as suspected "traitors," and fresh "plots" were discovered that swelled the camps' population to some 12 million people by the time Stalin finally died in March 1953. The man who emerged as Soviet leader after a brief interregnum following Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev, acted swiftly to dismantle much of Stalin's legacy. Most of the camp inmates were released, and after Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, many of the prominent victims of the Purge were posthumously rehabilitated. But the Khrushchev "thaw" ended even before his fall from power in 1964, and the subsequent regime of Leonid Brezhnev staged a limited rehabiliation of Stalin himself. The Nobel Prize-winning writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose massive work The Gulag Archipelago (published abroad) did so much to bring the horrors of Stalinism to light, was exiled for his pains in the 1970s. Only with the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 did Stalin's legacy begin to be seriously investigated and re-examined -- a process that led to a spiralling series of revelations, each more horrific than the last. With the fall of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Soviet scholars like Edvard Radzinsky and Dmitri Volkogonov have published prominent exposs of Stalinist rule, based on newly-opened archives (see "Further Reading"). And the estimates of the death toll arrived at by Robert Conquest and others, long denounced as craven exaggerations, have been shown instead to be, if anything, understated.

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Reference: Jones, Adam, Case Study: Stalins Purges, 2002, <http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html> (accessed 16/05/2012).

Case Study: The Armenian Genocide, 1915-17

Summary
The Armenian genocide was one of the most massive "root-and-branch" exterminations ever carried out against a defenseless people. In 1915, as World War I raged, the Turkish government (ruler of the Ottoman Empire) decided upon the systematic extermination of most of the male Armenian population, and the forced deportation of the remainder, mostly women, children, and the elderly. The deportation became a death march, with extreme violence and deprivation leading to the death of most of the survivors of the initial gendercide -- as was intended. By the time the exhausted and traumatized survivors reached refuge in neighbouring countries, up to three-quarters of the entire Ottoman Armenian population had been exterminated.

The background
Armenians are one of the most ancient peoples of the Near East, having lived in the southern Caucasus region for as long as 3,000 years. Christianized early in the first millennium, they formed by the 19th century the largest non-Muslim population in the Ottoman Empire. Peaceful relations between Armenians and Ottoman Muslims had long been the norm: despite acts of discrimination, Armenians were referred to as "the loyal millet." This changed in the 19th century, as the forces of nationalism swept both the Ottoman realm and Armenians themselves, and as the Ottoman Empire -- "the sick man of Europe" -- began to crumble in the face of regional revolts. Calls by European powers for protection of the Armenian population had the opposite effect: the regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid II viewed such outside "intervention" as a threat to its sovereignty, and responded in 1896 with a massive campaign of killing, in which at least 200,000 Armenians died. Though one of the most atrocious imperial acts of the 19th century, it was merely a harbinger of the fullscale genocide that was to descend two decades later. In 1908, a group of modernization-minded officers -- "the Young Turks" -- toppled the Ottoman Sultan. Armenians generally welcomed the new regime, viewing it as a progressive alternative to Ottoman despotism. But the "Young Turk" movement (with its political party, the Committee of Union and Progress [CUP]) was rapidly taken over by a small group of fanatical nationalists, headed by the triumvirate of Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, and Talat Pasha. The trio began to plot the extermination of the Armenian population, seen as a potentially traitorous "fifth column."

The events of World War I, which saw Turkey allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary against Britain, France, and Russia, gave these architects of genocide the opportunity they sought to implement their plan. One of the movement's leading ideologues, Dr. Nazim, told a closed session of the CUP Central Committee in February 1915 that "if this purge is not general and final, it will inevitably lead to problems. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so that there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished. We are now at war. We shall never have a more suitable opportunity than this." (Quoted in G.S. Graber,Caravans to Oblivion: The Armenian Genocide, 1915, pp. 87-88.) The slaughter began on April 24, 1915, with a classic act of "elitocide": some 600 Armenian notables, all male, were rounded up in Istanbul and murdered. Today, April 24 is commemorated by Armenians worldwide as "Genocide Memorial Day." Much worse was to come. Armenian notables assembled for a photograph immediately prior to their execution in 1915.

The gendercide against Armenian men

Henry Morgenthau:Witness to genocide Like the Jewish holocaust, the Armenian genocide represents a case of a clearcut, "pre-emptive" targeting of the male population, followed by a "root-andbranch" extermination of as many of the survivors as could be killed outright or driven to death. The two gendercidal strategies followed at the outset were 1) the mobilization of "battle-age" Armenian men for service in the Turkish army, followed by the execution or death through overwork of some hundreds of thousands of them; and 2) the concomitant rounding-up and mass slaughter of remaining community males. The U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau, provided one of the most gut-wrenching descriptions of "The Murder of a Nation" in a report to his superiors, published after the war (the U.S. was at the time neutral in the conflict). He summarized the first strategy as follows: In the early part of 1915, the Armenian soldiers in the Turkish army were reduced to a new status. Up to that time most of them had been combatants, but now they were all stripped of their arms and transformed into workmen. Instead of serving their country as artillerymen and cavalrymen, these former soldiers now discovered that they had been transformed into road labourers and pack animals. Army supplies of all kinds were loaded on their backs, and, stumbling under the burdens and driven by the whips and bayonets of the Turks, they were forced to drag their weary bodies into the mountains of the Caucasus. Sometimes they would have to plough their way, burdened in this fashion, almost waist high through snow. They had to

spend practically all their time in the open, sleeping on the bare ground -- whenever the ceaseless prodding of their taskmasters gave them an occasional opportunity to sleep. They were given only scraps of food; if they fell sick they were left where they had dropped, their Turkish oppressors perhaps stopping long enough to rob them of all their possessions -- even of their clothes. If any stragglers succeeded in reaching their destinations, they were not infrequently massacred. In many instances Armenian soldiers were disposed of in even more summary fashion, for it now became almost the general practice to shoot them in cold blood. In almost all cases the procedure was the same. Here and there squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from the village. Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp. Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes. In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims' sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot. Morgenthau describes one such episode in July 1915, in which some 2,000 Armenian "amls" ("such is the Turkish word for soldiers who have been reduced to workmen") were dispatched from the city of Harpoot, ostensibly for a road-construction project: The Armenians in that town understood what this meant and pleaded with the Governor for mercy. But this official insisted that the men were not to be harmed, and he even called upon the German missionary, Mr. Ehemann, to quiet the panic, giving that gentleman his word of honour that the ex-soldiers would be protected. Mr. Ehemann believed the Governor and assuaged the popular fear. Yet practically every man of these 2,000 was massacred, and his body thrown into a cave. A few escaped, and it was from these that news of the massacre reached the world. A few days afterward another 2,000 soldiers were sent to Diarbekir. The only purpose of sending these men out in the open country was that they might be massacred. In order that they might have no strength to resist or to escape by flight, these poor creatures were systematically starved. Government agents went ahead on the road, notifying the Kurds that the caravan was approaching and ordering them to do their congenial duty. Not only did the Kurdish tribesmen pour down from the mountains upon this starved and weakened regiment, but the Kurdish women came with butcher's knives in order that they might gain that merit in Allah's eyes that comes from killing a Christian. These massacres were not isolated happenings; I could detail many more episodes just as horrible as the one related above ... Decapitated heads of Armenian men are put on display by the Turks. Like the opening "elitocide," this strategy was designed to strip the Armenian community of those who might effectively mobilize and defend it, as Morgenthau notes: "Throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey." A prominent modern scholar of the genocide, Vahakn Dadrian, concurs: "Though [the] mobilization had many other objectives, it served a major purpose for the swift execution of the plan of genocide. By removing all able-bodied Armenian males from their cities,

villages, hamlets, and by isolating them in conditions in which they virtually became trapped, the Armenian community was reduced to a condition of near-total helplessness, thus an easy prey for destruction. It was a masterful stroke as it attained with one blow the three objectives of the operation of traping the victim population: a) dislocation through forcible removal; b) isolation; c) concentration for easy targeting." (Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide [Berghahn Books, 1995], p. 226.) With this "conscription-as-gendercide" thus accomplished, the Turkish authorities turned their attention to the remaining male population. The authorities were now free to turn to the destruction of the remainder of the Armenian population. Armenians were told they were to be deported to "safe havens" in third countries. The deportation process, was seen as simply another tool of genocide, as Morgenthau notes: "The real purpose of the deportation was robbery and destruction; it really represented a new method of massacre. When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact." Before the caravans were dispatched, however, a final assault was made on the few Armenian males remaining. Morgenthau again: The systematic extermination of the men continued; such males as the persecutions which I have already described had left were now violently dealt with. Before the caravans were started, it became the regular practice to separate the young men from the families, tie them together in groups of four, lead them to the outskirts, and shoot them. Public hangings without trial -- the only offense being that the victims were [male] Armenians -- were taking place constantly. The gendarmes showed a particular desire to annihilate the educated and the influential. From American consuls and missionaries I was constantly receiving reports of such executions, and many of the events which they described will never fade from my memory. At Angora all Armenian men from fifteen to seventy were arrested, bound together in groups of four, and sent on the road in the direction of Caesarea. When they had travelled five or six hours and had reached a secluded valley, a mob of Turkish peasants fell upon them with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws. Such instruments not only caused more agonizing deaths than guns and pistols, but, as the Turks themselves boasted, they were more economical, since they did not involve the waste of powder and shell. In this way they exterminated the whole male population of Angora, including all its men of wealth and breeding, and their bodies, horribly mutilated, were left in the valley, where they were devoured by wild beasts. After completing this destruction, the peasants and gendarmes gathered in the local tavern, comparing notes and boasting of the number of "'giaours" that each had slain. In Trebizond the men were placed in boats and sent out on the Black Sea; gendarmes would follow them in boats, shoot them down, and throw their bodies into the water. When the signal was given for the caravans to move, therefore, they almost invariably consisted of women, children, and old men. Any one who could possibly have protected them from the fate that awaited them had been destroyed.

The gendercide against Armenian women

An artist's depiction of the atrocities unleashed on Armenian women during the forced deportations. The forced deportation of the women, childerly, and elderly left alive after the gendercide against Armenian men gave rise to some of the most hellish scenes in recorded history. Some Armenian women and children were offered the alternative of conversion to Islam and subsequent slavery in Turkish homes, but it is generally held that only a thousand or so accepted. The rest were driven from their homeland at bayonet-point, and forced to run a vicious gauntlet of soldiers and marauding tribespeople. "Women who lagged behind were bayoneted on the road, or pushd over precipices, or over bridges," writes the historian Arnold Toynbee (quoted in Leo Kuper, Genocide, p. 111). Morgenthau offers an unforgettable description of their torment: The whole course of the journey became a perpetual struggle with the Moslem inhabitants. Detachments of gendarmes would go ahead, notifying the Kurdish tribes that their victims were approaching, and Turkish peasants were also informed that their long-waited opportunity had arrived. The Government even opened the prisons and set free the convicts, on the understanding that they should behave like good Moslems to the approaching Armenians. Thus every caravan had a continuous battle for existence with several classes of enemies -- their accompanying gendarmes, the Turkish peasants and villagers, the Kurdish tribes and bands of Chts or brigands. And we must always keep in mind that the men who might have defended these wayfarers had nearly all been killed or forced into the army as workmen, and that the exiles themselves had been systematically deprived of all weapons before the journey began. ... Such as escaped ... attacks in the open would find new terrors awaiting them in the Moslem villages. Here the Turkish roughs would fall upon the women, leaving them sometimes dead from their experiences or sometimes ravingly insane. After spending a night in a hideous encampment of this kind, the exiles, or such as had survived, would start again the next morning. The ferocity of the gendarmes apparently increased as the journey lengthened, for they seemed almost to resent the fact that part of their charges continued to live. Frequently any one who dropped on the road was bayoneted on the spot. The Armenians began to die by hundreds from hunger and thirst. Even when they came to rivers, the gendarmes, merely to torment them, would sometimes not let them drink. The hot sun of the desert burned their scantily clothed bodies, and their bare feet, treading the hot sand of the desert, became so sore that thousands fell and died or were killed where they lay. Thus, in a few days, what had been a procession of normal human beings became a stumbling horde of dust-covered skeletons,

ravenously looking for scraps of food, eating any offal that came their way, crazed by the hideous sights that filled every hour of their existence, sick with all the diseases that accompany such hardships and privations, but still prodded on and on by the whips and clubs and bayonets of their executioners. "The passage of rivers, and especially of the Euphrates, was always an occasion of wholesale murder," writes Toynbee. Morgenthau notes that "In a loop of the river near Erzinghan ... the thousands of dead bodies created such a barrage that the Euphrates changed its course for about a hundred yards." Starving Armenian woman and child after reaching "refuge."

The end result of these torments was standardly neartotal extermination. Morgenthau describes a typical convoy consisting of "18,000 souls," of whom "just 150 women and children reached their destination. A few of the rest, the most attractive, were still living as captives of the Kurds and Turks; all the rest were dead." "The last survivors often staggered into Aleppo [Syria] naked," writes Toynbee; "every shred of their clothing had been torn from them on the way. Witnesses who saw their arrival remark that there was not one young or pretty face to be seen among them, and there was assuredly none surviving that was truly old ..." Their suffering was not over: many who had survived the earlier rampage starved to death or died of disease in the squalid camps established in Syria and Mesopotomia (Iraq). Massacres of Armenians by Turks continued even after the final defeat of the empire in 1918-19, with the Turkish invasion of the independent Republic of Armenia (see below). "Whatever crimes the most perverted instincts of the human mind can devise, and whatever refinements of persecution and injustice the most debased imagination can conceive, became the daily misfortunes of this devoted people," Morgenthau summarized. "I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915." Although the bulk of the slaughter was carried out in 1915, largescale massacres of Armenians continued until the end of World War I and even afterward. "In the last months of the war between 50,000 and 100,000 Armenians were massacred by Turkish troops in the various Caucasus campaigns. To this figure must be added the results of genocidal actions taken by

Turkish nationalist forces in Cilicia [the Mediterranean region of southeastern Turkey] ... after the Mudros Armistice (October 30, 1918)." (Graber, Caravans to Oblivion, p. 148.)

How many died?

Morgenthau, working with limited information, claimed that "at least 600,000 people" had been killed in the genocide, "and perhaps as many as 1,000,000." Modern estimates tend to be higher, ranging from 1.1 to 1.8 million killed out of about 2.5 million Armenians alive in the Ottoman lands at the onset of the slaughter in 1915. As a proportion of population, it is believed that between half and three-quarters of all Ottoman Armenians died in the genocide. This is a death rate comparable to the Jewish holocaust, in which some two-thirds of European Jews were killed.

Who was responsible?

Primary responsibility for the genocide must rest with the trio of Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, and Talat Pasha, who dominated the Central Committee of the "Young Turk" government and planned the systematic extermination and expulsion of the Armenian population. At the groundlevel, however, the genocide was carried out by many thousands of Turkish officers and soldiers, along with ordinary citizens (including Kurdish tribespeople) who saw the persecution of the Armenians as an ideal opportunity for plunder, rape, and kidnapping. The Armenians' status as a religious minority, and their reputation for higher levels of education and wealth than many other groups in the Ottoman Empire, made them the target of popular hatred and envy. The comparison with the position and fate of Jews in Germany and the Nazi-occupied territories is inescapable. As the Knights of Vartan Armenian Research Center has pointed out, there are in fact profound similarities between the Armenian and Jewish genocides. "Both people adhere to an ancient religion. Both were religious minorities of their respective states. Both have a history of persecution. ... Both are talented and creative minorities who have been persecuted out of envy and obscurantism."

The aftermath
Turkey's defeat in World War I, and the consequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire, offered surviving Armenians an opportunity for national selfrealization. In 1918, an independent Republic of Armenia was declared. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was granted the right to draw up the boundaries of a new Armenian nation, formalized at the Treaty of Svres in 1920. However, the Turkish government, under nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk, rapidly renounced the Treaty. In collusion with the newly-created Soviet Union, the Turks invaded Armenia and reconquered six of the former western Ottoman provinces granted to Armenia under the Treaty, along with the Armenian provinces of Kars and Ardahan. What remained of Armenia was swallowed up by the invading Soviet armies. After a brief period of cooperation with Armenian nationalist forces, the Soviets took complete control in 1921, and Armenia was incorporated into the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (SFSR) in 1922. A separate Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was created in 1936. The Armenian Communist Party was the only political party permitted to function under Soviet rule, which remained in place until 1991, when Armenians overwhelmingly voted for secession from the collapsing

USSR. In the late 1980s, the boundary established between Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan became the subject of bitter conflict, as Armenians fought to unite the predominantly Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh with the new Armenian republic. A ceasefire was signed in 1994, but the enclave remains one of the "hot spots" of the volatile Caucasus region. For many decades, the horrors inflicted upon the Armenian people were little-known in the outside world. Indeed, the Nazis' genocide against the Jews, the Poles, and others may have been facilitated by the "memory hole" into which the Armenians had fallen. "Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" mused Adolf Hitler in 1939, as he ordered a merciless assault on the civilian population of occupied Poland. In recent decades, fortunately, the lie has been put to Hitler's rhetorical question. Armenian scholars and activists, joined by numerous sympathizers around the world, have worked to research and publicize the genocide, and to gather the testimony of survivors before they pass from the earth. Gradually, much of the outside world has acknowledged the scale and character of the slaughter. The Europan Parliament in 1987 voted in favour of recognizing the Armenian Genocide, as did the Russian parliament in 1994. Also in 1994, Israel, after decades of statesponsored suppression of the facts of the genocide (which was felt to distract from the "exceptional" character of the Jewish holocaust), informally recognized that the fate of the Armenians "was not war," but "certainly massacre and genocide, something the world must remember," in the words of Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin. The major exception to the rule, predictably, is Turkey. In the brief interim (1918-20) between the Ottoman collapse and the ascendancy of the nationalist Ataturk regime, the Turkish government did hold trials for dozens of accused war-criminals, but only fifteen death sentences were passed, and only three insignificant actors actually executed. (The three main organizers of the genocide were subsequently killed -- Enver Pasha while leading an anti-Bolshevik revolt in Turkestan in 1922, and Cemal Pasha and Talat Pasha by Armenian assassination squads, who tracked them down to deliver summary justice.) The Ataturk government effectively cancelled the court-martial process (Ataturk himself claiming that the Armenians killed were "victims of foreign intrigues" and guilty of abusing "the privileges granted them"). (For more on the trials, see Vahakn Dadrian, "The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide", Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 11: 1 [Spring 1997].) Since the early 1920s, successive Turkish governments have maintained an ostentatious silence on the subject, broken only to issue denials that the genocide ever occurred, and denunciations of those who assert that it did. In 1990, for example, the Turkish ambassador to the U.S. dismissed the holocaust as resulting from "a tragic civil war initiated by Armenian nationalists." The Turkish government has also devoted millions of dollars to a propaganda campaign aimed at western universities and a handful of compliant scholars. (See Amy Magaro Rubin, "Critics Accuse Turkish Government of Manipulating Scholarship", Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 October 1995.) They have had support from NATO and other western countries, which view Turkey as a linchpin of "stability" in the Near East. In the United States, for example, "conforming to Turkey's wishes, all congressional resolutions to recognize the Armenian Genocide have been opposed by the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations, and all such

resolutions have thus far been defeated." (Levon Chorbajian, "Introduction," in Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds., Studies in Comparative Genocide, p. xxvi.) As Stanley Cohen of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem puts it: The nearest successful example [of "collective denial"] in the modern era is the 80 years of official denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915-17 genocide against the Armenians in which some 1.5 million people lost their lives. This denial has been sustained by deliberate propaganda, lying and coverups, forging documents, suppression of archives, and bribing scholars. The West, especially the United States, has colluded by not referring to the massacres in the United Nations, ignoring memorial ceremonies, and surrendering to Turkish pressure in NATO and other strategic arenas of cooperation. ______________________________________________________________________________

Reference: Jones, Adam, Case Study: The Armenian Genocide, 1915-17, 2002, <http://www.gendercide.org/case_armenia.html> (accessed 16/05/2012).

Case Study: The Jewish Holocaust, 1933-45

Summary
The holocaust inflicted upon European Jews by the Nazi regime was arguably the most systematic and sadistic campaign of mass extermination ever mounted. Like the Armenian and Rwandan holocausts, the "gendercidal" component is only a secondary and subsidiary one. Nonetheless, an understanding of the gendered strategies of incarceration and extermination pursued by the Nazis throws important light upon the Jewish holocaust, and genocidal strategies as a whole.

The background
The ideology and political programme of Nazism, the movement that seized power in Germany in 1933, was founded from the first on an abiding hatred of Jews asUntermenschen, or "sub-humans." They were accused of orchestrating the "stab in the back" that stripped Germany of victory in World War I and imposed upon it the humiliating surrender terms of the Versailles Treaty (1919). Exploiting deep anti-semitic strains in German and European culture (see Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners), along with the catastrophic economic conditions of the late 1920's and early 1930's, the Nazis under their supreme leader or Fhrer, Adolf Hitler, succeeded in winning a plurality in 1932 parliamentary elections. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the ageing German president, Paul von Hindenburg. When Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler took over as president, and set about using his police and paramilitaries to murder political opponents and ethnic "traitors" alike. Jews and "Bolsheviks" (communists) were at the top of the list for incarceration in the first "concentration camps." The Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, but they made it their definitive institution. For many years, it was almost exclusively men who were detained in the grim and often atrocious conditions of the camps. The first Nazi prison camp, Dachau -- created in March 1933 -- housed males only, including many homosexuals. A major marker on the road to the holocaust against the Jews was the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") on November 9-10, 1938, when Hitler's thugs targeted Jewish citizens and property for largescale violence and destruction. According to Yehuda Bauer, the Kristallnacht was accompanied by a gender-selective mass roundup: the Nazis "arrested and sent to concentration camps some 30,000 Jewish men at least." (Cited in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 353.) As Eugen Kogon writes,

These arrests were made without regard for age. Ten-year old boys could be seen side by side with septuagenarians and octogenarians. En route from the Wiemar [sic: Weimar] railroad station [to the camp at Buchenwald] all stragglers were shot down, while the survivors were forced to drag the bloody bodies into camp. ... Inside stood the Block Leaders, wielding iron rods, whips and truncheons, and virtually every Jew who got into the camp sustained injuries. The events that took place at the time are not easily described in a few words. Let me merely mention that sixty-eight Jews went mad that very first night. They were clubbed to death like mad dogs ... four men at a time. ... SS [Schutz-Staffel, "Defense Echelon"] noncoms pushed the heads of some of their charges into overflowing latrine buckets until they suffocated. Eventually, "for reasons that never became clear, most of the[se] Jews were set free on orders from the Reich authorities" and allowed to go into exile. Exactly a year later, however, after "an alleged attempt on Hitler's life," Jewish men in Buchenwald "were suddenly recalled from their [work] details and confined to barracks." The Germans "picked out twenty-one Austrian and German Jews, entirely at random, without any list. Most of them were vigorous young men. ... The SS took the group out through the gatehouse and shot them at close range in the quarry." (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, Berkley paperback edition [1980], pp. 176-79.) Hitler's combined caution and brinkmanship in foreign policy won him increasing rewards during the 1930s. Western powers proved unable to unite, or to accept an alliance with the Soviets, to head off the Nazi threat. Eventually, Hitler struck a temporary deal with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, freeing Germany to invade Poland -- the heartland of European Jewry -- in September 1939. From the earliest days of the Nazi occupation, Poland's Jews were subjected to severe hardship and violence. However, it was only with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 that the genocidal hatred of the Nazis was fully unleashed on the defenseless populations of the east. Among those to suffer the worst, almost unacknowledged, were Soviet prisoners-of-war, who died in their millions from exposure, starvation, and mass execution in 1941-42. But from the first, it was clear that the German occupation of the vast new territories (including eastern Poland, which the Soviets had occupied under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact) presented Hitler with the opportunity to implement his "final solution" to the Jewish "problem" in Europe. What followed was a genocide that Noam Chomsky has called "the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history." (Cited in Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent [ECW Press, 1997], p. 186.)

The gendercide against Jewish men

Early Nazi roundups of Jewish males in the occupied territories (see also below). The gendercidal dimension of the holocaust against the Jews was evident during particular phases of the campaign of extermination. It nonetheless has its harbinger in the mass detentions of males during the earlier (1933-41) period of Nazi rule. As a campaign of fullblown mass execution, the gendercide against Jewish males marked an important, if

temporary, "onset phase" of the holocaust in the occupied eastern territories (including, after August 1941, the Balkans). Gendercidal strategies against women were evident at later stages, both in mass executions and gassings, women-only death camps, and the forced marches that killed tens of thousands in the closing stages of the war. Again, it must be stressed that in both their male and female manifestations, the Jewish gendercides were subsidiary features and strategies of a campaign of "root-and-branch" extermination, in which gender was far from a dominant consideration overall. Daniel Goldhagen points out in Hitler's Willing Executioners (pp. 149-50) how the"up-close," intimate killing of manifestly defenceless, screaming civilians on the eastern front -- killings which spattered blood and brain matter around the killing fields and over the killers -- was at first incrementally managed according to gender: The Einsatzgruppen [death-squad] officers ... could habituate their men into their new vocation as genocidal executioners through a stepwise escalation of the killing. First, by shooting primarily teenage and adult Jewish males, they would be able to acclimate themselves to mass executions without the shock of killing women, young children, and the infirm. According to Alfred Filbert, the commander of Einsatzkommando 9, the [execution] order from [Reinhard] Heydrich "quite clearly" "included also women and children." Yet, "in the first instance, without a doubt, the executions were limited generally to Jewish males." By generally keeping units' initial massacres to smallish numbers (by German standards) of a few hundred or even a thousand or so, instead of many thousands, the perpetrators would be less likely to become overwhelmed by the enormity of the gargantuan bloodbaths that were to follow. They also could believe that they were selectively killing the most dangerous Jews, which was a measure that they could conceive to be reasonable for this apocalyptic war. Once the men became used to slaughtering Jews on this sex-selective and smaller scale, the officers could more easily expand the scope and size of the killing operations. Jewish men rounded up for mass execution at Zhytomyr, Ukraine, August 7, 1942. In the early weeks of these murder campaigns, theEinsatzkommandos, according to Goldhagen, "were the equivalent of genocidal scouting parties, developing the methods of killing, habituating the perpetrators to their new vocation and, generally speaking, working out the feasibility of the overall enterprise" (p. 150). Gendercides against men can be seen in such cases as a vanguard for the wider "root-andbranch" genocide -- an initial barrier to be surmounted and a potential "threat" to be removed, before the community is consigned without discrimination to torment and death. Christopher Browning's research into the atrocities committed by the police battalions attached to the Einsatzgruppen confirms that orders from the top were translated into gendercidal policies

at the base. On July 11, 1942, the following orders went out to the police battalions: "Confidential! By order of the Higher SS and Police Leader ... all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law. The shootings are to take place away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares." Browning notes: "There was, of course, no investigation, trial, and confiction of so-called plunderers to be shot according to martial law. Male Jews who appeared to be between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were simply rounded up" and led away for execution. (Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, pp. 13-14.) Importantly for the analysis of gendercide, Daniel Goldhagen notes that "even if ... the initial order was to kill 'only' teenage and adult Jewish males -- the order was still genocidal and clearly was understood by the perpetrators as such ... The killing of the adult males of a community is nothing less than the destruction of that community" (p. 153, emphasis added). The point is critical in a more general way to modern scholarship on the Jewish holocaust, since this currently centres on key decision-points in the killing campaign on the eastern front, and the debate over precisely when the Nazi actions passed from the atrocious to the outright genocidal (see Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler). As in other holocausts (Armenia, Rwanda), the mass killing of Jewish males proved a necessary initial strategy, but not a sufficient expression, of the eliminationist impulse.

The link to Soviet prisoners-of-war

The waging of genocide against eastern Jews proceeded alongside a much lesser-known holocaust, that of male prisoners captured by the German Army in huge encirclements during the first few months of the war. Nearly three million are known to have died in less than eight months of 1941-42. Gendercide Watch includes a detailed case-study of the Soviet POWs on this site. Most of them died before being transferred to Germany. Those that did not, however, became the original "guinea-pigs" in the Nazis' vast machinery of death. Indeed, as Christian Streit has pointed out, it was originally for the Soviet POWs that the infrastructure of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Maidanek death camps was developed: It is more than a mere coincidence that the discovery of the technical means to implement the Holocaust with a minimum of material and personal expense and the preparation of the infrastructure at two of the most important death factories, Auschwitz and Maidanek, are also connected with the dynamic described above. In this case, it was particularly the treatment of the Soviet POWs which speeded up developments. Two large groups of Soviet prisoners were involved. The first comprised those prisoners who were selected and executed as "politically intolerable." Before the end of December 1941 at least 33,000 such prisoners had been executed in the concentration camps of the Reich and the General Government [in occupied Poland]. The second group consisted of those Soviet POWs who had been allotted to Himmler as slave

labourers in the SS enterprises. The decision to turn these POWs into Himmler's slaves also resulted from the basic decision to brush aside international law in the war against the Soviet Union. ... Repeatedly during the summer of 1941, and starting with a convoy of several hundred in July, groups of Soviet prisoners of war, who had been selected as "intolerable," had been taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp to be executed there. To ease the mental strain of the shooting squads and to save costs and energies the executors soon started looking for a simpler method. It was probably deputy commander Karl Fritzsch who experimented in early September with a pesticide, Zyklon B, to murder some 600 such prisoners and another 250 camp inmates who had been selected as "unfit for work." After more such "test gassings" -- there were at least two more convoys of Soviet prisoners among the victims, one numbering 900 men -- the gassings of Jewish victims were started in January or February 1942. ... Even the infrastructure used in the Final Solution, the Birkenau camp with its rail connection, had originally been intended for 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were to be [Heinrich] Himmler's allocation of slave labourers for the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz which I.G. Farben and the SS were planning as a joint venture. Soviet prisoners numbering 10,000, who were to build the huge Birkenau camp for 100,000 POWs, had been brought to Auschwitz in October 1941. By the end of November half of them were dead, by February 1942 about 8,000. Only 186 were still alive on 1 May 1942. Those prisoners who had not starved had been tortured to death.(Christian Streit, "Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen, Soviet POWs and Anti-Bolshevism in the Emergence of the Final Solution," in Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution, pp. 111-12.) Streit adds in a footnote (51, p. 117): "The same is true for the Maidanek concentration camp. It developed from an SS-Kriegsgefangenenlager, whose construction had been begun by 5,000 Soviet POWs, who were as rapidly decimated as those at Auschwitz." But it was the Jewish population of the east that would be the primary victims of the genocidal apparatus that these Soviet POWs first built, then perished in by the tens or hundreds of thousands.

The gendercide against Jewish women

(L) A Jewish woman and child are executed on the eastern front; (R) A Jewish woman pleads for her life at a mass-murder scene

As with the Armenian case, the Jewish holocaust was launched with an initial genocidal outburst that targeted overwhelmingly males -- partly as a means of acclimatizing the genocidal agents to their tasks. But in neither the Armenian nor the Jewish cases did more than a short time elapse before women were swept up in the worst of the horror. Jrgen Forster's analysis brings out the speed, but also the stages, by which the holocaust on the eastern front was extended to women. He writes that: "The first formal order to kill immediately 'all male Jews of 17-45 years

of age' was issued ... on 11 July 1941. ... The necessity of killing male Jews was not justified ... with any reference to partisan activities but 'resulted from the political situation.' Since the SS was still liquidating selected target groups, the Intelligence Officer of the Kommandostab Reichsfhrer-SS informed his superiors in his after-action report of 28 July 1941 that 'all persons involved are in doubt whether the Jewish problem can be brought to a fundamental solution by the multitude of executions of male Jews alone.' While the Einsatzkommando 3 ... began to include Jewish women and children on 15 August 1941, the Police Regiment Centre only increased the age band for men to be killed to 16-65. Its 3rd Battalion, however, executed sixtyfour Jewish women, too, in Minsk on 1 September 1941. The evidence on the practice of liquidating after 22 June 1941 suggests that a second, principal decision was made in the summer of 1941, this time to cleanse the conquered living space more thoroughly from any manifestations of Jewry and Bolshevism, to make it 'free' of Jews and communists." (Frster, "The Relations Between Operation Barbarossa as an Ideological War of Extermination and the Final Solution," in Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution, p. 93. Emphasis added.) It was this second decision that led to the mass murder of women, both in mass shootings like Babi Yar (33,000 Jews killed in September 1941) and in the gas-vans and concentration camps that were increasingly used from late 1941 onwards. The historical record of the renewed genocidal offensive on the eastern front in 1942 includes cases in which women (along with children and the elderly of both sexes) were targeted for immediate annihilation, while able-bodied men were preserved, at least temporarily, for use as forced labour. The murderous activities of Police Battalion 101, studied by both Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen, included a massacre of 1,500 Jews at the Polish village of Jzefw on July 13, 1942, in which the battalion was "ordered to round up ... Jews. The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews -- the women, children, and elderly -- were to be shot on the spot by the battalion," as occurred. A similar mass atrocity took place in the Jewish ghetto of Konskowola in October 1942, where between 500 and 1,000 Jews "were selected for labor," overwhelmingly able-bodied men, although "100 were shot en route after collapsing from exhaustion. ... The remaining Jews -- 800 to 1,000 women and children as well as a large number of elderly men -- were simultaneously led off to a shooting site in a woods beyond the edge of town. ... First the Jewish men were taken into the woods, forced to lie face down, and shot. The women and children followed." (Browning,Ordinary Men, pp. 2, 116-17.) One of the key rituals of the Nazi death-camp system similarly seems to have targeted women (especially mothers) for extermination, along with children and the elderly, while adult males were disproportionately preserved for use as forced labour. The reference here is to the "selection on the railway sidings," when huge numbers of Jews and others arrived at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other camps. Especially later in the war, when the Nazis' absurd squandering of potential Jewish labour was tempered by approaching defeat, emphasis was placed on the preservation -- usually brief -- of those deemed able to work in the factories. All "women in charge of children" were targeted for immediate extermination in these initial selections, along with "the old people, all the children ... and in general all the people unfit for work," according to Johann Paul Kremer, a Nazi "doctor" at Auschwitz. "[They] were loaded into trucks and taken to the gas chambers." Auschwitz managers reported an "arrival strength" for 21 January 1943, at the height of the holocaust, as "2,000 Jews, of whom 418 were selected

to be put to work (254 men, 164 women), i.e., 20.9 percent; 24 January 1943, 2,029 Jews, of whom 228 were selected to be put to work (148 men, 80 women), i.e., 11.8 percent; on 27 January 1943, 993 Jews, of whom 284 were selected to be put to work (212 men and 72 women), i.e., 22.5 percent." (Eugen Kogon et al., eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas [Yale University Press, 1993], pp. 153, 159.) The gendercide against women in the death camps may have been even more intense than at first appears, since there is evidence of a pre-selection of males for mass execution before the construction of the death-camp system, as we have noted. Gendercide Watch is aware of no comparative research on the numbers of men and women killed by the different Nazi mechanisms, however, and reminds the reader that the Nazis' genocidal ideology and massmurder apparatus finally spared no-one among the European populations it targeted, Jews above all. It is also important to note that the variable of age/infirmity, and not just gender, was another vital marker or "tripwire" on the road to fullscale genocide. Indeed, the Nazis' murder between 1939 and 1941 of 70,000 "useless" and "burdensome" elderly and infirm Germans -- which Gendercide Watch refers to as geracide (from the Greek geras, "old age") -- was clearly a manifestation of the exterminationist impulse that would in short order be directed against Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Slavic males, and others. The euthenasia campaigns also buttressed the Nazis' penetration of the German professions. When medical doctors were called upon to perform ghastly medical experiments at Auschwitz and other death-camps, their Hippocratic oaths had long since been shattered by involvement in the earlier "geracide."

How many died?

Raul Hilberg writes that "The Jewish dead numbered more than 5 million: about 3 million in killing centers and other camps, 1.4 million in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in ghettos." Hilberg adds that "Traditional estimates are closer to 6 million." (Hilberg, "Holocaust," Encarta Encyclopedia.) As Goldhagen notes, "The geographic scope of the German's exterminationist drive against the Jews has no parallel, certainly not in the twentieth century" (Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 412). It is estimated that the Nazis succeeded in killing 60 percent of all the Jews in Europe. In addition to the Jews murdered in Poland (3 million) and the USSR (1 million), the worst-hit communities were in Hungary (550,000 Jews killed), Romania (275,000), Lithuania (150,000), Germany itself (135-140,000), and the Netherlands (100,000) (all figures approximate). It was not the largest mass killing of the twentieth century -- both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong probably killed more people than Adolf Hitler. But "in ferocity, hate, sadism and horror, the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe has no peer." (Cathal Nolan, The Longman Guide to World Affairs [Longman, 1995], p. 159.) The element of sadism has attracted considerable recent notice: "The Germans debased and inflicted pain upon Jews with a regularity calculated not just to cripple their bodies but also to plunge them into a state of perpetual terror. The ideal guiding the Germans' treatment of the [Jews] ... was that it ought to be a world of unremitting suffering which would end in their deaths. A Jew's life ought to be a worldly hell, always in torment,

always in physical pain, with no comfort available." (Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, pp. 320, 457).

Who was responsible?

Primary responsibility has long been assigned to Adolf Hitler, one of the most psychotic and sanguinary leaders in history, who consigned tens of millions of people to furnaces and firing squads. Debate still rages over whether and when Hitler personally gave the order to exterminate the Jews. But there is no doubt that he provided the venomous ideological framework for the genocide, headed the state and military apparatus that implemented it, and frequently proclaimed his approval of the perpetrators' actions. The Nazi Party that Hitler headed rapidly became indistinguishable from the German state. All party institutions and members -- especially Hitler's elite guard, the SS ("Death's Head" units, commanded by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich), and the Einsatzkommanda (genocidal "action squads" in the East) -- shared responsibility for the Holocaust against Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and Roma, among other groups. At lower levels of the bureaucracy of mass death, "Amorality was encouraged by specialization; each department and individual was accountable for only one small segment of the program, diffusing personal responsibility." (Donald Niewyk in Totten et al.,Century of Genocide, pp. 141-42.) In the last several years, debate has raged around the "Goldhagen thesis" (see Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners) -- namely, that "ordinary Germans" in their multitudes participated willingly, and usually enthusiastically, in the merciless tortures and annihilations that the Nazis inflicted upon the subject peoples of Europe. Ron Rosenbaum includes a chapter on the controversy inExplaining Hitler. Recent research on the holocaust in the occupied territories has also emphasized the role of the German army in facilitating the genocides against Jews and Soviet POWs in particular. The long-held view that the "proud" German military somehow held itself aloof from the Nazis' genocide has been decisively debunked (see Bartov, The German Army and Genocide). The relationship between the regular army and the SS or paramilitary killers was intimate and mutually supportive -- as in the Serbs' genocidal and gendercidal campaigns in BosniaHerzegovina and Kosovo, but on a massively greater scale.

The aftermath
The German invasion of the USSR proved Hitler's undoing. The Second World War was won and lost on the eastern front, where about 80 percent of German forces were concentrated between 1941 and 1944. Despite the Nazi victories and unbridled mass killing of the first year of the war, the Soviets successfully withstood the German drive on Moscow. At the critical battles of Stalingrad (September 1942 -- January 1943) and Kursk (July 1943), Soviet forces turned the tide against the German armies. By April 1945, they had

driven them back to the gates of Berlin, with late assistance from Allied forces (who invaded Nazi-occupied France in June 1944). Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker as Soviet troops approached. The images of mountains of corpses left behind by the Nazi mass murderers shocked the world, and helped contribute to the founding of the state of Israel. As the Soviet and Allied forces rolled back across Nazi-occupied Europe, they came across evidence of the holocaust against the Jews and others. For the first time, the outside world could see and be stunned by mountains of Jewish corpses in the concentration camps, and skeletal survivors gathered at the wire. The horror at the discoveries fuelled the Nrnberg (Nuremberg) Trials of 1945-47, when surviving Nazi leaders (including Hermann Gring, Rudolf Hess, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel) were tried for crimes against humanity. Twelve were sentenced to death, but not Gring, who swallowed poison in his prison-cell hours before he was to be executed. Subsequent trials were held for "doctors who had conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war, judges who had committed murder and other crimes under the guise of the judicial process, and industrialists who had participated in the looting of occupied countries and in the forced-labor program" (Hilberg, "Holocaust"). Again death sentences and long prison terms were the norm. The founding of the state of Israel in 1948, in large part by holocaust survivors, was assisted by global sympathy for the principal victims of Nazi genocide. In 1960, it was Israeli secret agents who tracked down one of the last surviving architects of the holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, and smuggled him from Argentina to Israel to stand trial. (See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.) He was convicted and hanged in Jerusalem in 1962. Many thousands of survivors worldwide still bear the tattooed identification numbers they were given in the concentration camps. All must live with the enormous weight of the genocide, which laid waste to entire lineages and historic communities. Jewish populations in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, and several other countries have never recovered from the blow dealt them by Hitler and the Nazis. Meanwhile, "studies of Holocaust survivors have shown that virtually all suffered to some degree from a 'survivor syndrome' that included acute anxiety, cognitive and memory disorders, depression, withdrawal, and hypochondria" (Donald Niewyk in Century of Genocide, p. 144). The memory of the holocaust has been kept alive by Jews and others worldwide, and has staged a resurgence in cultural prominence in the last two or three decades. To a degree this resurgence has been fuelled by the renewed rise of a racist, anti-semitic "far right" in numerous European countries, most notably France, Austria (Hitler's birthplace), and Switzerland. As a result of widespread efforts to conscientize and inform, "The Holocaust [today] is perhaps the one

genocide of which every educated person has heard" (Niewyk). It is often cited as a benchmark in debates over more recent genocides inRwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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Reference: Jones, Adam, Case Study: The Jewish Holocaust, 1933-45, 1915-17, 2002, < http://www.gendercide.org/case_jews.html> (accessed 16/05/2012).