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EXCERPT:
THE SPECTER OF GENOCIDE
June 13, 2003 Episode no. 641
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Read an advance excerpt from THE SPECTER OF GENOCIDE: MASS MURDER IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan and forthcoming from Cambridge University Press:
On the Thai-Cambodian border in 1979, a young Khmer Rouge company commander remembered the U.S. aerial bombardment of his native village eight years before. Of the 350 villagers, 200 were killed, he said. The twelve-year-old survivor ran terrified into the jungle. Khmer Rouge guerrillas gave him a gun. They told him the "killing birds" had come "from Phnom Penh." Urban dwellers were the enemy. After victory in 1975, this boy murdered 200 "enemies." Asked what it felt like to kill so many people, he patted his right shoulder. "It hurts, here," he said, recalling the kickback from his rifle butt. In mid-2001, as many as 300,000 children under eighteen were participating in armed conflicts in 41 countries. How many of these young victims could become future war criminals?
Long-term genocide prediction and prevention require understanding of the societal nutrients that fertilize the seedbeds of mass murder. Popular historical grievances, previous social traumas, ingrained poverty, educational deprivation, sudden political or economic destabilization, colonial occupation, and war are just some of the conditions that foster the growth of sociopathic political movements. For example, modern warfare, exacerbated by the spread of the technology of industrial slaughter from the late 19th century, has been a breeding ground for genocidal movements, even as it provides a cover for their crimes. The Khmer Rouge and others were spawned in wartime atmospheres of crisis.
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The destabilization of entire societies through mass destruction, death, forced migration and trauma open up vast new possibilities for radical extremists not only to nurse paranoias about the enemy but also to project them on others, recruit supporters, seize power, and put their deadly goals into practice behind screens of war censorship and emergency military justification. Over the longer term, mass poverty, falling living standards, and rapid economic destabilization, including widespread land dispossession, have spread a similar sense of social crisis and often led to war, further encouraging simple solutions to complex socioeconomic problems. The targeting of easily visible, unarmed and vulnerable victim groups follows.
But not every sustained or sudden social or historical crisis leads to genocide and mass murder. A second essential element is human agency -- criminal decisions by leaders of extremist and violent political sects or regimes. Groups likely to implement such decisions must be identified in advance of their ascendancy, in order to block their path to power. Along with the historical and social environments in which they flourish, the ideological notions and inimical preoccupations of such groups must be studied and compared from one case to another, if we are to discover the essential political conditions for acts of genocide.
(c)Cambridge University Press 2003.
Reproduced with permission.
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Read the Cover Story on the 
