The battle with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it’s yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in Turkey there is silence, in India there’s celebration, and I really don’t know which is worse. I think that silence suggests shame, and shame suggests conscience. Is that too naive and generous an interpretation? Perhaps, but why not be naive and generous? Celebration, unfortunately, does not lend itself to interpretation. It is what it says it is.
Lessons from your past have given me an insight into our future. My talk today is not about the past, it’s about the future. I want to talk about the foundations that are being laid for the future of India, a country being celebrated all over the world as a role model of progress and democracy.
In the state of Gujarat, there was genocide against the Muslim community in 2002. I use the word genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective punishment for an unsolved crime—the burning of a railway coach in which fifty-three Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned orgy of supposed retaliation, two thousand Muslims were slaughtered in broad daylight by squads of armed killers, organized by fascist militias, and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive. Muslim shops, Muslim businesses, and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically destroyed. Two thousand were killed and more than one hundred thousand people were driven from their homes.4
Even today, many of them live in ghettos—some built on garbage heaps—with no water supply, no drainage, no street lights, no health care. They live as second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically.5 Meanwhile, the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded, promoted. This state of affairs is now considered “normal.” To seal the “normality,” in 2004 both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India’s leading industrialists, praised Gujarat as a dream destination for finance capital.6
The initial outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness, even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to campaign on its behalf in other Indian states.
As genocides go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in the Congo, Rwanda, and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions, nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984, for instance, three thousand Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.)7 But the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers have landed in mainland India.
It’s an old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the march of civilization. Among the earliest recorded genocides is thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself—genocide— was coined by Raphael Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it as
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intending to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.8
Since this definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders in history. Personally, I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more apt. Genocide, they say, “is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.”9 Defined like this, genocide would include, for example, the millions killed and the monumental crimes committed by Suharto in Indonesia, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Stalin in the Soviet Union, and Mao in China.
All things considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human connection with it. It must see its victims as subhuman, as parasites whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example, is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:
Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about four hundred at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice.10
And here, approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting operation mounted by the Indian newsmagazine Tehelka a few months ago:
We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire, we set them on fire and killed them … hacked, burnt, set on fire … We believe in setting them on fire because these bastards don’t want to be cremated, they’re afraid of it.11
I hardly need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi, the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot be accused of is Genocide Denial.
Genocide Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist, bloodthirsty triumphalism. It probably evolved as an answer to the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the nineteenth century, when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and citizens’ rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed. “Denial is saying, in effect,” Robert J. Lifton observes, that “the murderers didn’t murder. The victims weren’t killed. The direct consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide.”12
Of course, today, when genocide politics meets the free market, official recognition—or denial—of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise. It rarely has anything to do with historical fact or forensic evidence. Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive process of high-end bargaining that belongs more to the World Trade Organization than to the United Nations. The currency is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that curious thing called futures trading, and plain old economic and military might.
In other words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons that genocides are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a barrel of oil (or a ton of uranium), permission granted for a military base, or the opening up of a country’s economy could be the decisive factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did not occur. Or indeed whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it
will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage will take. For example, the death of millions in the Congo goes virtually unreported.13 Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion in 2003, genocide (which is what UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday called it) or was it “worth it,” as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador to the United Nations, claimed?14 It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton? Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?
Since the United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world, in the Genocide Denial seedings it is the World’s Number One. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a holocaust that wiped out millions of Native Americans, about 90 percent of the original population. Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college, named after him.
In America’s second holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Well near half of them died in transit. But in 2001, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at the time.15 The United States has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and Hamburg—which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians—were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. (The argument here is that the government didn’t intend to kill civilians. This was an early stage of the development of the concept of “collateral damage.”)16 Since its first foreign conquest of Mexico in 1848, the US government has militarily intervened abroad, whether overtly or covertly, countless times. Its invasion of Vietnam, with excellent intentions of course, led to the deaths of millions of people in Indochina.17
None of these actions have been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts. “How much evil,” asks Robert McNamara, whose career graph took him from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (one hundred thousand dead overnight), to being the architect of the war in Vietnam, to president of the World Bank, now sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable country, “must we do in order to do good?”18
Could there be a more perfect illustration of Robert J. Lifton’s point that the denial of genocide invites more genocide?
As a friendly gesture to the government of Turkey, its ally in the volatile politics of the Middle East, the US government concurs with the Turkish government’s denial of the Armenian genocide. So does the government of Israel.19 For the same reasons. For them the Armenian people are suffering a collective hallucination.
And what to do when the victims become perpetrators, as they did in the Congo and in Rwanda? What remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one of the cruelest genocides in human history? What of its actions in the occupied territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonization of water, its new “security wall” that separates Palestinian people from their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their children’s schools, from hospitals and health care? It is genocide in a fishbowl, genocide in slow motion—meant especially to illustrate that section of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which says genocide is any act that is designed to “deliberately inflict on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part.”
Perhaps the ugliest aspect of the Genocide Game is that genocides have been ranked and seeded like tennis players on the international circuit. Their victims are categorized into worthy or unworthy ones. Take for example the best-known, best documented, most condemned genocide by far—the Jewish Holocaust, which took the lives of six million Jews. (Less publicized in books and films and Holocaust literature is the fact that the Nazis also liquidated thousands of Gypsies, communists, homosexuals, and millions of Russian prisoners of war, not all of them Jewish.)20 The Nazi genocide of Jews has been universally accepted as the most horrifying event of the twentieth century. In the face of this, some historians call the Armenian genocide the Forgotten Genocide, and in their fight to remind the world about it, frequently refer to it as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Peter Balakian, one of the most knowledgeable scholars of the Armenian genocide, and author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, says that “the Armenian genocide is a landmark event. It changed history. It was unprecedented. It began the age of genocide, which we must acknowledge the twentieth century indeed was.”21
The professor is in error. The “era of genocide” had begun long ago. The Herero people, for example, were exterminated by the Germans in Southwest Africa only a few years into the twentieth century. In October 1904, General Adolf Lebrecht von Trotha ordered that the Herero be exterminated.22 They were driven into the desert, cut off from food and water, and in this way annihilated. Meanwhile, in other parts of the African continent, genocide was proceeding apace. The French, the British, the Belgians were all busy. King Leopold of Belgium was well into his “experiment in commercial expansion” in search of slaves, rubber, and ivory in the Congo.23 The price of his experiment: ten million human lives. It was one of the most brutal genocides of all time. (The battle to control Africa’s mineral wealth rages on—scratch the surface of contemporary horrors in Africa, in Rwanda, the Congo, Nigeria, pick your country, and chances are that you will be able to trace the story back to the old colonial interests of Europe and the new colonial interests of the United States.)
In Asia, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British had finished exterminating the aboriginal people in Tasmania, and most of Australia, starving them out, hunting them down. British convicts were given five pounds for every native they hunted down. The last Tasmanian woman, Truganina, died in 1876. (Her skeleton is in a museum in Hobart. Look her up when you go there next.) The Spanish, the French, and the British, of course, had by then almost finished “God’s Work” in the Americas.
In the genocide sweepstakes, while pleading for justice for one people, it is so easy to inadvertently do away with the suffering of others. This is the slippery morality of the international politics of genocide. Genocide within genocide, denial within denial, on and on, like Matryoshka dolls.
The history of genocide tells us that it’s not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch in the human system. It’s a habit as old, as persistent, as much a part of the human condition as love and art and agriculture. Most of the genocidal killing from the fifteenth century onward has been an integral part of Europe’s search for what the Germans famously called lebensraum, living space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist Friedrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as dominant human species’ natural impulse to expand their territory in their search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.
The idea of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had already begun her quest for lebensraum four hundred years earlier, when Columbus landed in America.
Sven Lindqvist, author of Exterminate All the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler’s quest for lebensraum—in a world that had already been carved up by other European countries—that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe and on toward Russia.24 The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia stood in the way of Hitler’s colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the native peoples of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be en slaved or liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis’ racist dehumanization of Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once again, it is a product of the familiar mix: economic determinism well marinated in age-old racism—very much in keeping with European tradition of the time.
It’s not a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire was called the Committee for Union and Progress. “Union” (racial/ethnic/religious/national) and “Progress” (economic determinism) have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.
Armed with this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a country that is poised on the threshold of “progress” is also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and at this point in time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.
In bits and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing and the dying has already begun.
It was in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the government of India turned in its membership in the Nonaligned Movement and signed up for membership in the Completely Aligned, often referring to itself as the “natural ally” of Israel and the United States. (They have at least this one thing in common: all three are engaged in overt, neocolonial military occupations—India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine, the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.)
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