PHIL 210 World Religions · Man’s Inhumanity to Man · Lecture 2 (rev6 deck, main lecture, slides 1–77: A, DQ, F through CO (O now in the Pierian Spring); B–E now in the Pierian Spring, not narrated here)
Estimated runtime: about 41–43 minutes — 5,080 spoken words at 130–140 words a minute, plus 1 min 58 s of silent image holds on 28 photograph slides and a short pause at each of the 49 narrated slide changes.
Documentary narration. Read slowly, at about 130–140 words a minute, and let the pauses breathe. Full-bleed archival photographs are silent: the image holds and the narrator says nothing. Anything those slides used to say has been moved into the narrated slide before or after them. Bracketed lines are stage directions; do not read them aloud.
Slide 1 · A — Century of Genocide
The twentieth century gave the world flight, antibiotics, and footprints on the moon. It also gave the world a new word.
Again and again, in those hundred years, governments and the people who followed them set out to destroy whole groups of human beings. This is the century of genocide.
A word of care before we begin. Some of what you will see and hear today is very hard. Mass killing. Starvation. Sexual violence. Some of the photographs show the dead. If you need to look away, look away. You can still listen.
Slide 2 · DQ — “Never forget”: what?
“Never forget,” we say. But never forget what? The Holocaust stands at the centre of how we remember the twentieth century. Around it are the cases we follow today: the Armenian genocide, the famine in Soviet Ukraine, the Soviet Gulag, the Rape of Nanjing, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Rwandan genocide, and Srebrenica.
The phrase “never forget” rings hollow if we do not remember these, if we ever knew them in the first place.
Slide 3 · F — The United Nations made genocide a crime in international law.
Before we tell these stories, we need the word the world gave them, and the law that came with it.
Paris. December 9, 1948.
In the Palais de Chaillot, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopts the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The next day it will adopt the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The word has become law.
Its Article II is still the legal definition of genocide. Every case we meet today will be measured against it.
Slide 4 · G — The definition (Genocide Convention, Article II)
Genocide means any of these acts, committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.
Killing members of the group. Causing them serious bodily or mental harm. Inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy them. Preventing births. Forcibly transferring their children to another group.
Slide 5 · H — Genocide is defined by intent, and only four kinds of group are protected.
Two features matter. Genocide is defined by intent: the aim to destroy a group as such, not a count of the dead.
And political groups and social classes are not on the list. So the law has a hole, exactly where the killing of “class enemies” falls.
Slide 6 · I — Mass murder outside the definition is called a crime against humanity.
Lawyers call mass murder outside the definition a crime against humanity, a category the Nuremberg tribunal had already used in 1945 and 1946. It is not a lesser evil, only a different legal description.
Slide 7 · J — Case 1 · Armenia, 1915 (section divider)
We begin with the Armenians.
The Ottoman Empire. 1915.
Slide 8 · K — The Ottoman government destroyed its own Armenian Christians.
The Armenians are an ancient Christian people. They had lived on the Anatolian plateau for more than two thousand years. Before 1914, some one and a half to two million of them lived in the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim empire.
The Young Turks run the empire, among them Talaat, a former telegraph clerk.
In November 1914 the empire enters World War I on Germany’s side. That winter, at Sarıkamış, the Russian army inflicts a catastrophic defeat. The leaders need someone to blame. They blame the Armenians. A disloyal people, they say. An “internal enemy.” They decide to remove them from Anatolia altogether.
What follows is the destruction of the empire’s Armenians by their own government, in 1915 and 1916.
Look at the map. The routes and the killing sites spread across the whole of Anatolia. They all run toward the desert of Syria.
Slide 9 · M — In one night the police arrested the Armenians’ leaders.
Constantinople, the Ottoman capital. Today, Istanbul. The night of April 24, 1915.
The police knock on doors. They arrest some 235 to 270 Armenian community leaders. Writers. Editors. Physicians. Lawyers. Members of parliament. Clergy.
Most are deported to the interior. In the months that follow, most are murdered.
Armenians remember April 24 as the day the genocide began.
Slide 10 · N — First they killed the men; then they marched everyone else toward the desert.
The men first.
Armenian men had been drafted into the Ottoman army. Early in 1915 they are disarmed and put into labor battalions. Then they are killed in batches. In the towns and villages, the able-bodied men are rounded up, marched outside town, and shot or cut down.
Then the deportations.
Women, children, and the elderly are given a few days’ notice. The official word is “relocation.” The destination is the Syrian desert. The columns walk for weeks, then months, through the mountains toward Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor, today in Syria. They are denied food and water. They are attacked again and again.
In 1916 a second wave of killing destroys most of those who survived the marches to the camps around Deir ez-Zor.
Slide 11 · DK — The horrors: Armenia
Gather up what was done.
The men are taken out of their towns and shot, bayoneted, or cut down with axes and knives. On the plain of Muş people are burned alive in barns. On the Black Sea and in the gorges of the Euphrates, women and children are drowned.
The deportation columns are robbed again and again. Of money. Of clothing. Of food. They are kept from water and driven on. Those who cannot keep up are killed, or left to die by the road.
Women and girls are raped, abducted, or sold. Children are taken from their mothers and raised as Muslims, under new names.
Those who reach Syria are held in open-air camps along the Euphrates. There tens of thousands die of starvation, typhus, and cholera, before the massacres of 1916 destroy most of the rest.
And notice who does it. Not only the Special Organization, the regime’s irregular killing squads. Gendarmes. Local officials. Convicts let out of prison for the work. Tribesmen and villagers from the countryside, who join in the robbery and the killing.
[Content note, spoken:] The photographs that follow show the deportations and the dead. Look away if you need to.
In the first, armed soldiers march Armenian men out of the town of Kharput, to be killed outside the city. Then a mother kneels beside her dead child in a field near Aleppo, almost at the end of the road. The original caption says it happened “within sight of help and safety.” And last, Deir ez-Zor, on the Euphrates, where the roads ended.
Slide 12 · S — Armenian men marched out of Kharput, spring 1915 (photograph)
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Slide 13 · T — A column of deportees, Harput province, 1915 (photograph)
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Slide 14 · U — A mother beside her dead child, near Aleppo (photograph)
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Slide 15 · V — Deir ez-Zor (photograph)
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Slide 16 · W — Up to 1,500,000 Armenians killed (death toll)
At Deir ez-Zor, a man named Papasian stood where they had died.
How many? The figure most often cited is one and a half million.
On any count, the Armenian presence in Anatolia, more than two thousand years old, was effectively destroyed.
Slide 17 · X — Case 2 · The Holodomor (section divider)
Our second case takes us to Soviet Ukraine.
And to a weapon that needs no bullets. Hunger.
Slide 18 · Y — Stalin’s government took the villages’ food and sealed them in.
Ukrainians have a name for the famine of 1932 and 1933. They call it the Holodomor. Death by hunger.
In those years Joseph Stalin’s government takes the grain of the villages of Soviet Ukraine. Then it seals the borders.
Millions die.
Slide 19 · AA — Stalin made war on the peasants, then used hunger as a weapon.
It begins as a war on a class.
Late in 1929, Stalin orders the forced collectivization of agriculture. Peasant farms are merged into collective farms, and their grain goes to the state. He announces “the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.” A kulak is supposed to be a rich peasant. In practice the label can be pinned on anyone who resists.
The result is famine across the Soviet grain regions, from 1931 to 1933.
But Ukraine is singled out.
In 1932 the state sets grain quotas Ukraine cannot possibly meet. A law of August 7 makes theft of collective property punishable by death, or ten years in the camps. Peasants call it the “law of five ears.” A hungry mother can be sentenced for gleaning a handful of grain stalks.
Villages that fall short are put on blacklists. Their shops are closed. All their food, not just grain, can be taken.
Then, on January 22, 1933, Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov order that peasants be stopped from leaving Ukraine and the Kuban to look for bread.
People are sealed in with their hunger.
Slide 20 · DL — The horrors: the Holodomor
What does the policy do to people?
The searches are not carried out by strangers. They are carried out by brigades of local party officials, village activists, and young Communists. Often they are people from the same village. They go from house to house, again and again. They probe floors, walls, stoves, and gardens with long iron rods. They take the last potatoes. The beans. The seed.
Neighbors are rewarded for informing on neighbors.
The starving eat grass, bark, nettles, acorns. Finally, their cats and dogs. Their bodies swell with hunger. Then comes apathy. Then death.
Parents who cannot feed their children leave them at railway stations and in towns, hoping strangers will. Whole villages die out. The dead lie unburied in the houses and along the roads.
At the extreme, hunger drives some people to cannibalism. The police record the cases and arrest those they catch. Most people never cross that line. That some did is a measure of what was done to them.
The famine was hidden so well that few photographs of it exist. The most important were taken in secret, on the streets of Kharkiv in 1933, by Alexander Wienerberger, an Austrian chemical engineer working at a Soviet factory. Starving peasants had come into the city looking for bread. He photographed them in the crowds, on the roads, and on the pavement, where people walked around the bodies.
Slide 21 · AD — A crowd outside a shop, Kharkiv, 1933 (photograph)
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Slide 22 · AE — Peasants on the move, 1933 (photograph)
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Slide 23 · AF — The starving on a Kharkiv pavement, 1933 (photograph)
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Slide 24 · AG — “An everyday picture”: a cart taking away the dead, Kharkiv, 1933 (photograph)
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Slide 25 · AH — About 3,900,000 died of famine in Ukraine (death toll)
When Wienerberger’s photograph of a cart carrying away the dead was published in 1935, the caption called it “an everyday picture.”
The best current demographic estimate is 3.9 million deaths in Ukraine. Some estimates run higher.
Behind the number are the villages. The hidden potatoes taken. The roads closed. The dead who could not even be buried where they fell.
Slide 26 · AI — Case 3 · The Gulag (section divider)
Our third case is not a famine. It is not a massacre.
It is a system. The Soviet forced-labor camps.
Slide 27 · AJ — From a monastery prison to a continent of camps.
The Gulag was the Soviet Union’s system of forced-labor camps. From 1918 until after Stalin’s death in 1953, the state sent millions of people to camps across the country. Common criminals and political prisoners alike. They felled timber. They dug canals. They mined gold and coal.
In 1923 the Bolsheviks turn an ancient Orthodox monastery on the Solovetsky Islands, in the White Sea, into a prison camp. Solovki. The “mother of the Gulag.”
The Gulag’s first great project is the White Sea–Baltic Canal. Between 1931 and 1933, tens of thousands of prisoners dig it, largely by hand, with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Thousands die.
Farther east, in Kolyma, prisoners mine gold in the permafrost.
Slide 28 · AL — Some 18 million people passed through the camps.
The prisoners are of every kind. Thieves and murderers. Peasants. Workers. Engineers. Priests. Poets. Communist Party members who have fallen from favor.
Many of the “politicals” are sentenced under Article 58 of the Soviet criminal code. It punishes “counterrevolutionary” crimes. It can be stretched to cover almost anything.
In all, about 18 million people passed through the camps between 1929 and 1953.
That number counts prisoners, not the dead. The dead come at the end of this section.
Slide 29 · DJ — The horrors: the Gulag
The Gulag’s horrors begin before the camp.
Arrests come at night, often after a denunciation by a neighbor or a colleague. Interrogators beat prisoners. They keep them standing and awake for days. They threaten their families, until the prisoners sign confessions and name others. In January 1939 Stalin himself confirms, by telegram, that “physical pressure” has been permitted since 1937.
Families are punished too. Under an order of August 1937, the wives of men condemned as “traitors to the motherland” are sent to camps, and their children to orphanages. Women give birth in the camps. Later their children are taken from them.
Many die on the way, in cattle cars, and in the holds of ships bound for Kolyma.
In the camps, rations are tied to work quotas. A prisoner who falls short gets less bread. He grows weaker. He falls further short. In the end he becomes what the prisoners call a dokhodyaga. A goner. Twelve- to fourteen-hour days in cold far below zero, in thin clothing, with typhus, dysentery, and scurvy, do the rest.
Guards, and gangs of criminal prisoners, beat, rob, rape, and kill. In the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938, thousands of prisoners are shot in the camps.
The worst year is 1942, when the food goes to the front. By the camps’ own records, about one prisoner in four dies.
The photographs that follow move through the system: the canal; a camp at Inta, in the Arctic, around 1950; a punishment block at Vorkuta in 1945; and two political prisoners at a coal-mining camp in 1955, eating from bowls whose contents depended on what they had produced.
Slide 30 · AQ — Prisoners on the White Sea Canal, 1932 (photograph)
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Slide 31 · AR — The Inta camp, Komi ASSR, about 1950 (photograph)
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Slide 32 · AS — A punishment block and watchtower, Vorkuta, 1945 (photograph)
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Slide 33 · AT — Political prisoners at Intalag, 1955 (photograph)
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Slide 34 · AU — More than 1,500,000 deaths in the camps (death toll)
That last photograph was taken in 1955. Stalin had been dead for two years.
He died on March 5, 1953. Within weeks an amnesty freed about 1.2 million prisoners. The political prisoners came home more slowly. The Gulag administration was abolished in 1960, though camps for political prisoners went on into the 1980s.
Soviet archival records count about one and a half to 1.7 million deaths in the camps between 1930 and 1953. The true figure was higher. Camps released dying prisoners, so that their deaths would not appear in the statistics.
Slide 35 · AV — Case 4 · Nanjing (section divider)
Our fourth case takes us to China.
To the capital the Japanese army captured in December 1937.
Slide 36 · AW — The Japanese army took China’s capital and murdered and raped for six weeks.
In the 1930s Japan is ruled by a militarist, ultranationalist regime. In 1931 its army seizes Manchuria. In July 1937 Japan begins a full-scale war on China.
Japan’s leaders expect a short war. Instead the battle for Shanghai lasts three months. Then the Japanese armies race up the Yangtze River toward the Chinese capital, Nanjing.
On December 13, 1937, Nanjing falls.
For some six weeks, Japanese soldiers murder prisoners of war and civilians, and rape tens of thousands of women and girls. It is remembered as the Nanjing Massacre.
Slide 37 · AX — The defense collapsed, and the hunt for soldiers began.
The Chinese commanders are ordered to hold the city at all costs. Then, on December 12, the order is reversed. The retreat collapses into a rout. Soldiers throw off their uniforms and try to hide among civilians.
On December 13, the city falls.
For six to seven weeks, Japanese troops hunt for anyone who might have been a soldier. That means almost any young Chinese man.
They kill them in mass shootings along the Yangtze. With machine guns and bayonets. By burning. By beheading. Officers use prisoners for sword and bayonet practice.
Bodies lie so thick along the river that the water runs red.
Slide 38 · AY — A Tokyo newspaper reported a killing contest like a sporting event.
In Tokyo, a newspaper finds a story.
Two second lieutenants, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, are in a “contest.” Which of them will be first to kill a hundred Chinese with a sword? The Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun prints the running score as they advance on the city, the way a paper prints a ball score.
After the war, both men are tried in Nanjing. In January 1948 both are executed.
Slide 39 · DM — The horrors: Nanjing
[Content note, spoken:] A note of care. This slide describes sexual violence.
The hunt for soldiers becomes a hunt for everyone.
Soldiers go from house to house. They go into the Safety Zone, a refugee area run by a few Western residents, and drag out men to be shot and women to be raped.
The international tribunal in Tokyo found that about 20,000 rapes took place in the city in the first month. Girls and old women are not spared. Many victims are killed afterward.
Whole families are killed in their homes. Civilians are shot or bayoneted in the streets. Soldiers loot shops and houses, then set them on fire.
The men who do this are ordinary soldiers, many of them conscripts. Often they act in groups. Their officers look on, or take part.
For six weeks, almost no one stops them.
[Content note, spoken:] The photographs that follow show the dead. Look away if you need to.
They come from very different hands. The first was taken by a Japanese soldier, Private Murase Moriyasu: bodies along the Qinhuai River outside the city wall, and a Japanese soldier standing among them. The second was kept by an American missionary, Ernest Forster: a pond outside the city filled with the bodies of people killed by Japanese troops. Beside it he wrote that this was typical of many of the ponds inside the city.
The last two are harder to trace. One shows a soldier with a sword, smiling among the dead; the other, said to show a beheading, has been disputed. What they depict, the killing of prisoners with the sword, is well documented.
Slide 40 · BD — Bodies along the Qinhuai River (photograph, Murase Moriyasu)
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Slide 41 · BE — A pond filled with the dead (photograph, Forster album)
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Slide 42 · BF — A soldier with a sword among the dead (photograph; provenance unverified)
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Slide 43 · BG — A sword execution, as the photograph is said to show (photograph; provenance disputed)
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Slide 44 · BH — 200,000–300,000 prisoners and civilians killed in about six weeks (death toll)
How many were killed?
The Tokyo tribunal found that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners were killed in the first six weeks. In 1947 the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal put the number at more than 300,000. That is the figure the government of China uses today.
Slide 45 · BI — Case 5 · Cambodia (section divider)
Our fifth case is Cambodia.
Here a government tried to start history over, at Year Zero.
Slide 46 · BK — The Khmer Rouge took power and emptied the capital in a day.
From April 1975 to January 1979, Cambodia is ruled by the Khmer Rouge, the “Red Khmers.” It is a communist movement led by Pol Pot. It means to build a pure, classless, agrarian society from nothing.
April 17, 1975. Young soldiers dressed in black march into Phnom Penh. People cheer. The civil war is over.
Within hours, the soldiers order the whole city, some two million people, into the countryside. The Americans are going to bomb it, they say. Everyone can come back in three days.
No one comes back.
Hospital patients are pushed out in their beds. The sick, the very old, and the newborn die along the roads.
Money is abolished. Markets. Schools. Religion. Private property. The party calls itself simply Angkar. “The Organization.”
The people are divided. “New people” are city dwellers, the educated, anyone who wears glasses or speaks a foreign language. To the new people, a slogan is repeated: “To keep you is no gain, to lose you is no loss.”
Slide 47 · BL — A high school became a secret prison: S-21.
In Phnom Penh, a high school becomes a secret prison. Its code name is S-21. Today it is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
The UN-backed tribunal found that at least 12,273 people were held there. Very few came out alive.
As the regime hunts for traitors in its own ranks, most of the prisoners are Khmer Rouge cadres and soldiers. Often they are brought in with their wives and children.
The commandant is Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch. He had been a mathematics teacher.
Slide 48 · DG — Inside S-21: photograph, torture, confession.
This is how S-21 works.
On arrival, every prisoner is photographed and numbered, then shackled in a cell. The classrooms have been cut into cells barely wider than a person.
Then the interrogators go to work. The tribunal found that their methods included beatings, electric shocks, and suffocation with plastic bags. Each prisoner is tortured until he or she writes a confession of spying for the CIA or for Vietnam, and names others. The others are arrested in turn.
That is how the prison feeds itself.
Slide 49 · DH — The killing fields, and death by hunger and labor.
Nearly all the prisoners of S-21 are trucked to an orchard at Choeung Ek, outside the city, and killed. Often they are killed with blows from hoes or iron bars, to save bullets. Babies are killed by being swung against a tree. The tree still stands.
Choeung Ek is only one killing field.
And much of the dying needs no executioner. In the work cooperatives, people die of starvation, overwork, and untreated disease. The new people get the hardest work and the least food.
Slide 50 · BN — Some victims were chosen for who they were, not for their class.
Some victims are chosen not for their class but for who they are.
The Cham are a Muslim people who have lived in Cambodia for centuries. Under the Khmer Rouge they are forbidden their language, their dress, and their religion. Qur’ans are burned. Mosques are destroyed. Cham villagers are forced to eat pork.
About 90,000 of some 250,000 Cham died. More than a third. Of 113 imams, only 21 are reported to have survived.
The man in this photograph is Ismael Ahmad, a Cham who had studied in Egypt and in Peking. Called home in 1975, he was arrested in January 1977 and photographed on entering S-21.
Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese fare worse. Some 150,000 are expelled to Vietnam in 1975. Of the roughly 20,000 who stay, most of them married to Khmer, nearly all are hunted down and killed in 1977 and 1978, as the regime goes to war with Vietnam.
Slide 51 · DN — The horrors: life under Angkar
Beyond the prison and the killing fields lies the everyday horror of life under Angkar.
Families are broken up. Children are taken into youth work units. Husbands and wives are sent to separate brigades. Angkar replaces the family. Parents have no claim on their children.
The regime forces strangers to marry, in mass ceremonies. At night, militiamen watch to make sure the marriages are consummated.
Picking fruit for yourself, keeping food, complaining, weeping for the dead: any of these can mark a person as an enemy. Such people are taken for “re-education,” often at night. Most are never seen again.
Children are taught to inform on their parents. The guards and executioners are village chiefs and young cadres, many of them teenagers.
And always there is hunger. In many cooperatives the ration shrinks to a thin rice gruel. People eat leaves, insects, and lizards to stay alive.
[Content note, spoken:] The images that follow show the prisoners of S-21 and the graves at Choeung Ek.
You will see some of those faces, and the narrow cells where they were held. Almost none of them survived. Today the photographs are how they are remembered. Then the orchard at Choeung Ek, where the hollows in the ground are excavated mass graves.
Slide 52 · BO — Prisoner photographs, Tuol Sleng (photograph)
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Slide 53 · BP — The cellblock at S-21 (photograph)
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Slide 54 · BQ — S-21 prisoner photographs, close (photograph)
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Slide 55 · BR — The mass graves at Choeung Ek (photograph)
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Slide 56 · BS — About 2,000,000 dead: about one Cambodian in five (death toll)
Demographic studies estimate one and a half to 2.2 million deaths, from execution, starvation, overwork, and untreated disease, out of a population of about 7.8 million in 1975. Roughly one Cambodian in four or five.
The regime fell when Vietnam invaded. Phnom Penh was taken on January 7, 1979. Pol Pot died in 1998. He never faced trial.
Slide 57 · BT — Case 6 · Rwanda (section divider)
Our sixth case is Rwanda, in 1994. Within the lifetime of your parents.
The world watched it happen.
Slide 58 · BU — In one hundred days, neighbors killed neighbors.
Between April and July 1994, Hutu extremists who control the government of Rwanda try to exterminate the country’s Tutsi minority.
It begins on the evening of April 6, 1994. A plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, is shot down over the capital, Kigali.
Within hours, extremists in the army and the presidential guard, and the militias called Interahamwe, “those who attack together,” begin killing Tutsi and moderate Hutu. They work from lists prepared in advance.
A radio station, Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, broadcasts names and hiding places. It calls the Tutsi inyenzi. Cockroaches.
Neighbors kill neighbors, mostly with machetes and clubs.
Slide 59 · DI — The killing was done by hand.
The genocide in Rwanda is not carried out mainly by soldiers.
Most of the killers are ordinary Hutu men, many of them farmers, called out by local officials to join the militias, armed with machetes and clubs.
Roadblocks go up across the country. Militiamen check identity cards. Since Belgian colonial rule, every card has listed its holder’s ethnicity. A card marked Tutsi can mean death on the spot. On this card, “Tutsi” is the only word not struck out.
Thousands of Tutsi flee to churches, where they had found safety in earlier waves of violence. At Nyamata, at Ntarama, and in many other parishes, militias and soldiers attack them there and kill them inside.
Slide 60 · DO — The horrors: Rwanda
Those who escape the first massacres are hunted for weeks. In the hills. In the forests. In the banana groves. In the marshes.
In the Bugesera region, around Nyamata, Tutsi hide by day in the papyrus marshes. From mid-April to mid-May, the killers go down into the marshes every morning to search, day after day. Of some 59,000 Tutsi in the district, about 50,000 are killed.
Most victims are killed by people they know. Neighbors. Fellow parishioners. People they had farmed and traded beside.
Tutsi women and girls are raped on a mass scale, often by gangs. They are held as sexual slaves at roadblocks and in militia camps, and mutilated. Many are killed immediately afterward. Many who survive are left infected with HIV, and some later testified that their attackers told them they meant them to die slowly.
Children and babies are killed with their families. Many victims are maimed and left to die of their wounds.
And the killers turn on their own. Hutu who refuse to take part, or who are caught hiding Tutsi, can be beaten, fined, or killed.
Yet many Tutsi who survived owe their lives to Hutu who hid them, sometimes for weeks.
[Content note, spoken:] The next images show the dead.
People ran to the churches for sanctuary. The killers came to the churches too. The first photograph was taken at Nyarubuye, in eastern Rwanda, at the end of May 1994: a woman and her child lying by the church, seven weeks after the massacre there. Then the church at Ntarama, where the clothes and belongings of those killed inside have been left where they were. Then a wall at the memorial in Kigali, covered with photographs that families brought: weddings, school portraits, babies. Each one is a person who was murdered.
Slide 61 · BX — Nyarubuye, May 31, 1994 (photograph, AP / Jean-Marc Bouju)
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Slide 62 · BY — Inside the church at Ntarama (photograph)
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Slide 63 · BZ — Family photographs of the murdered, Kigali Genocide Memorial (photograph)
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Slide 64 · CA — Registering unaccompanied children, Kibeo camp, August 1994 (photograph)
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Slide 65 · CB — An estimated 500,000–800,000 murdered in about one hundred days (death toll)
After the killing, thousands of children were left without families. In August 1994, at a camp in the southwest, Red Cross workers registered the children who had come in without their parents, so that their families could find them.
In about a hundred days, from April to July, an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 people were murdered.
A later census by the Rwandan government counted more than a million victims.
Slide 66 · CC — Case 7 · Srebrenica (section divider)
Our last case is the most recent.
Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. July 1995. A town the United Nations had promised to protect.
Slide 67 · CD — The UN promised to protect Srebrenica.
In 1992 Yugoslavia is breaking apart. Bosnia and Herzegovina declares its independence. Bosnian Serb forces, with support from Serbia, set out to drive out its Bosniak, Bosnian Muslim, and Croat inhabitants. The world comes to call it “ethnic cleansing.”
In the Drina valley, Bosniaks driven from their villages crowd into the town of Srebrenica.
In April 1993 the UN Security Council declares Srebrenica a “safe area.” A battalion of lightly armed Dutch peacekeepers is stationed there.
Slide 68 · CE — The enclave fell; the men and boys were separated from their families.
July 6, 1995. Two years later, the Bosnian Serb army attacks.
July 11. Forces under General Ratko Mladić overrun the town.
Some 20,000 to 25,000 people, most of them women, children, and the elderly, flee to the Dutch base at nearby Potočari. Several thousand press inside the compound. The rest crowd into the factories and fields around it.
That night some 10,000 to 15,000 men, soldiers and civilians together, set out on foot through the forests. They are trying to reach Bosnian government territory around Tuzla.
On July 12 and 13, the women, children, and elderly at Potočari are loaded onto buses and trucks and driven to Bosnian government lines.
The men and boys are separated from their families and held apart. Thousands more from the column in the forest are captured, or surrender, along the roads.
Slide 69 · CG — Over a few days, thousands of prisoners were shot.
The mass executions begin on July 13.
That afternoon about 1,000 to 1,500 prisoners are crowded into a warehouse at Kravica and killed with rifle fire and grenades.
Over the next days, prisoners are bused north to schools and other holding sites. Then to the execution sites. Many are shot with their hands tied, or their eyes blindfolded.
The bodies are bulldozed into mass graves. Later the graves are dug up and the remains scattered, to hide the evidence.
This photograph was taken from the air, by American reconnaissance, in July 1995: mass graves at Nova Kasaba.
Slide 70 · DP — The horrors: Srebrenica
Go back now to the days before the shooting. Before the executions came three days of terror.
At Potočari some 25,000 people wait, with very little food or water, in stifling July heat. They can see soldiers setting houses and haystacks on fire. Soldiers move through the crowd cursing them, telling them to leave, telling them they will be slaughtered.
At night the terror deepens. Soldiers pick people out of the crowd and take them away. Some come back. Others do not. A Dutch medical orderly comes upon two soldiers raping a young woman while refugees watch, unable to help. Several people are so terrified that they hang themselves. In the morning, refugees looking for water find bodies by a stream.
When the buses come, soldiers pull the men and boys out of the lines. Sometimes out of their mothers’ hands.
In the forests, the column of men trying to reach Tuzla is shelled and ambushed. Survivors call it a manhunt. Soldiers shout into the woods that the Geneva Conventions will be respected if the men surrender. Some use stolen UN equipment, to make the men believe the UN or the Red Cross is there.
Those who do the killing are not strangers from far away. They are soldiers and police of the Bosnian Serb forces, among them brigades raised in the nearby towns of Bratunac and Zvornik.
[Content note, spoken:] The images that follow show the graves and the remains of the dead.
The first shows investigators exhuming the grave at the Branjevo military farm in 1996. The second shows what investigators found at the Kravica warehouse: spent cartridges, a wristwatch, papers, a set of false teeth. Each belonged to a man.
Slide 71 · CI — Exhuming the Branjevo grave, 1996 (photograph, ICTY exhibit)
[Silence — image holds, ~4 seconds]
Slide 72 · CJ — Items recovered at the Kravica warehouse (photograph, ICTY exhibit)
[Silence — image holds, ~4 seconds]
Slide 73 · CK — Remains awaiting identification, Tuzla (photograph)
[Silence — image holds, ~4 seconds]
Slide 74 · CL — Women in the refugee camp at Tuzla, July 1995 (photograph)
[Silence — image holds, ~4 seconds]
Slide 75 · CM — About 8,000 Bosniak men and boys murdered (death toll)
Because the graves were torn open and moved, the bones of a single victim are often found in three or four different graves, many kilometers apart. Since 2001, the International Commission on Missing Persons has identified the dead by matching their DNA with blood from surviving relatives.
The women who were driven out ended in camps like the one at Tuzla. In July 1995 they did not yet know what had happened to their husbands, fathers, and sons.
In all, Bosnian Serb forces murdered about 8,000 men and boys.
About 7,000 have been identified by their DNA. Every July 11, more are laid to rest, under names like these.
Slide 76 · CN — Who were these people?
Look again at the faces.
Talaat had been a telegraph clerk. Duch, the commandant of S-21, had been a mathematics teacher. Ratko Mladic was a career general.
Now the other side.
Armin Wegner was a German soldier who photographed the Armenian deportations, and defied first the Ottomans and then Hitler. John Rabe was a member of the Nazi Party. As chairman of the Safety Zone in Nanjing, he helped save thousands. Minnie Vautrin, a teacher from a small town in Illinois, stood at a college gate night after night, protecting the women who had taken refuge inside. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded the small UN force in Rwanda, warned UN headquarters three months before the killing began. He was told not to act.
The perpetrators were not a different species. They were human beings, most of them unremarkable, who had been handed an idea. In its name another person became a “kulak.” A “new person.” A “cockroach.”
The rescuers were not a different species either.
Slide 77 · CO — What is it in us that resists?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in the Gulag. He came out with this conclusion:
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.”
So we end with the question this whole lecture has been asking.
What, then, is it in human nature that makes this possible?
And what is it in us that resists?
[Silence — hold on the quotation, ~6 seconds. End of main lecture.]