GUEST ESSAY
I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era.
How do genocides end? In most cases, there are two options. Either the perpetrators accomplish their goal, or a military force stops them, and accountability ensues.
In 1904 the Imperial German Army began a campaign that nearly wiped out the Herero and Nama peoples in what was then German South West Africa, now Namibia, through fatal expulsions into the desert, incarceration in forced labor camps and outright murder. No one intervened. In 1915 the Ottoman Empire murdered vast numbers of Armenians it sought to remove from the heartland of Anatolia or caused their deaths by forced marches. Feeble efforts to bring former Ottoman leaders to account were quickly abandoned. To this day, Turkey denies the genocide.
Conversely, because the Nazi regime was defeated in World War II, its genocide of the Jews and its other mass crimes were adjudicated at Nuremberg. Other genocides that also ended with the military defeat of the perpetrators — such as in Cambodia in 1979, in Rwanda in 1994 and in Bosnia in 1995 — culminated in some sort of reckoning, however belated and incomplete. Denial of what occurred thus became impossible.
In the earlier case of genocides that succeeded because of impunity at the time or the absence of subsequent accountability, the perpetrator state went on to benefit from its criminal actions. The invention and codification of the concept of genocide after World War II was meant to prevent the persistence of this dynamic of impunity and profit.
Omer Bartov is a professor of Holocaust
and genocide studies at Brown University.
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