2002年5月30日 HPI研究フォーラム
講師 ロバート・メルソン（パデュー大学政治学部教授）
1. テーマ
「比較分析的観点から見たアルメニア人集団虐殺とホロコースト――イデオロギー、戦争、そして革命と現代集団虐殺の源流」
2. 日時
2002年5月30日（木） 14:30～17:00
3. 場所
広島平和研究所 会議室
4. 講演の概要
アルメニア人集団虐殺（エイゲット）は現代の集団虐殺の原型であり、カンボジア（1975～76年）やルワンダ（1994年）など完全集団虐殺4件の最初の事例である。オスマン帝国時代、アルメニア人は他の40余りのミレット（地域社会）の大半と同じく自治権を享受したが、帝国崩壊後に破壊的な暴力が広がった。1908年の「青年トルコ党」による政治革命は自由主義思想運動として始まったが、最後は汎トルコ主義思想を抱く国家主義者の動乱となった。第1次世界大戦下、アナトリアのアルメニア人らはロシアのスパイとして告発された。青年トルコ党の指導部は、アルメニア人の国外追放と殺害を命じた。
ナチスは青年トルコ党と同じく、旧体制の崩壊、すなわち1918年のドイツ帝国の敗北、社会革命、およびワイマール共和国崩壊の後に権力を獲得した。ナチスは19世紀後半の人種理論を再び持ち出し、ユダヤ人は「アーリア人」への脅威であると宣言した。ヒトラーはまた、「ユダヤ人世界の陰謀」を非難した。ヨーロッパに古くからある反ユダヤ主義を利用し、ユダヤ人を迫害した。第2次大戦下、ヒトラーは、その計画のために国家機関、軍隊（国防軍）、ナチ親衛隊および占領下の約20ヵ国の協力者を動員し、600万人のユダヤ人の命を奪った。
この2例の類似点と相違点は、他の集団虐殺および大量殺戮行為の事例と関連させて考えるべきである。19世紀の植民地における集団虐殺と20世紀における4件の徹底的な集団虐殺が明らかに異なるのは、後者にはある国のれっきとした構成集団の抹殺という特徴が見られるという点である。犠牲となった集団は、抹殺が行われた国の少数派であり、最初の犠牲者は政治的反対勢力のメンバー達であった。こうした集団虐殺の枠組みとなる条件をもたらしたのは、革命や広範な動乱および戦争である。なぜなら戦争が、少数派に対処する他の手段である統合、同化、分離などの可能性を封じたからだ。
講演後の質疑討論は活発で、特に広島・長崎への原爆投下をいかに集団虐殺として位置づけるかという点について議論が白熱した。メルソン氏はあらためて、集団虐殺を「国家、民族、人種もしくは宗教上の集団の一部またはすべてをそのような集団として抹殺することを意図してなされる行為」と定義する国連条約を指摘した（下線筆者）。原爆投下を決定したトルーマン大統領およびその助言者の目的と、その決定が広島市民にもたらした影響とを区別するべきだと提言した。原爆投下の影響は疑いもなく集団虐殺であった。
一部の参加者から、目的と影響とを区別することは平和と核兵器廃止に向けた運動に悪影響を与えるのではないかとの意見が出された。また、最近の核兵器の拡散についての発言があり、将来の使用禁止の可能性について悲観論が聞かれた。しかしメルソン氏は、核兵器の影響が現在あまりにもよく認知されているので、将来それを使用すれば集団虐殺と見なされるに違いないと指摘した。そう見なすことで、われわれは核兵器の使用を絶対的に排除すると同時に、国連の集団虐殺の定義を一貫して維持することができると述べた。
今回の講演は、HPIの主要研究テーマに含まれる集団虐殺、大量殺戮および戦争犯罪等の問題に関連するものであった。ホロコーストの生存者であるメルソン氏は、夫人のゲール・メルソン博士と共に平和記念資料館を訪問し、また被爆者代表と会って経験を語り合い、意見交換を行った。
（クリスチャン・シェラー 広島平和研究所教授）
5. ロバート・メルソン氏の略歴
パデュー大学の政治学部教授及びユダヤ研究プログラム前ディレクター。国際民族殺戮研究者協会筆頭副会長。
1959年にマサチューセッツ工科大学において数学及び人文科学科で理学士を取得、のちにエール大学大学院で人類学を専攻し、1967年にマサチューセッツ工科大学で政治学の博士号を取得。
博士の研究及び教鞭の主たる分野は、民族紛争と民族殺戮。これらの問題に対する博士の関心は、博士自身と家族の欧州における経験、及び、ナイジェリアービアフラ紛争勃発の前年に当たる1964～65年にナイジェリアにおいて博士自身が行ったフィールドワークから生まれた。博士とその家族がホロコーストを生き延びた話は「フォルス・ペーパー（False Paper）」に書かれているが、この本は2001年度国際ユダヤ書籍賞の最終選考に残った。同書は2002年度のコレット賞にも推薦されている。
HPI Research Forum on May 30, 2002
The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust in Comparative Perspective: Ideology, War, and Revolution and the Origins of Modern Genocide
By Robert Melson, Professor in Political Science and Former Acting Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Purdue University
1. Topic
"The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust in Comparative Perspective: Ideology, War, and Revolution and the Origins of Modern Genocide"
2. Date and Time
May 30 (Thu.), 2002, 14:30-17:00
3. Venue
HPI Conference Room
4. Lecture
I. Introduction
More than fifty years ago in August 1945, when I was eight years old, my parents and I, Polish Jewish survivors of the Shoah, found ourselves in Brussels, Belgium. We had survived the war on false papers of identity, passing ourselves off as Polish Catholics. Later, even as we were preparing to emigrate to America, my parents began to discover the truth about what had happened to our family, to their friends, and to the Jewish people, and I too came to share in that terrible knowledge. But it was knowledge without understanding.
In the fall of 1965, by then I was twenty-eight, I returned from Nigeria, where I had done field work for my doctorate in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A year later, the killings of the Ibos began. They precipitated the Biafran civil war and initiated the mass death of over a million Biafrans. I was shocked when I discovered that some of the Ibo trade unionists I had interviewed for my thesis on the Nigerian labor movement had been murdered by Nigerian troops, or by mobs, or had died from the war-induced starvation. I could not help but to compare their fate to that of my family, and that of the Ibos of Nigeria to the Jews of Poland.
In retrospect the comparison is inaccurate The Nigerian military were not the Nazis and the Biafran Ibos were not the Jews, but in my own subjective, inchoate, way I had started on the road to comparing the Holocaust to another genocide in order better to understand what had happened in both instances. Later, when I became more disciplined about it, I set about comparing the Holocaust not to Biafra but to the Armenian Genocide. The destruction of the Armenians, starting in 1915, was the first modern total genocide of the twentieth century, and it set a precedent not only for the Holocaust but for other instances of that crime as well.
When I use the term "genocide" in this context I rely heavily on the widely accepted United Nations definition. The UN labels genocide as "actions committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such."[1] The Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were both genocides, but more than that they were quintessentially modern genocides in that the perpetrators intended to destroy both groups as such, and the victims were segments of the very states and societies that attacked them.
They were not like the men of Melos that the ancient Athenians put to death during the Peloponnesian war. Nor were they in the path of some invading Genghis Khan. Nor were they the native peoples of America and Australia, who were labeled by their European setters as "heathen savages" and therefore as inhuman. Armenians and Jews were not foreign enemies at war with the Turks and the Germans, the way the Japanese were with the Americans and the Chinese with the Japanese during the Second World War. The Jews of Europe and the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire were familiar communities, often one's neighbors. That they were killed as if they had been suddenly transformed into a rampaging horde of aliens begs for an explanation, and links their case to more contemporary slaughters in the Soviet Union, Cambodia, Yugoslavia, and most recently, Rwanda.
What I would like to do is to discuss some of the things I learned from that comparison. I should warn you not to raise your expectations too high. Neither history nor social science has the answer that explains why the killers killed and acted with incomprehensible brutality, why the bystanders turned away when their help could have saved lives, and why certain groups were singled out for victimization. But I do think that a comparison of the Holocaust to the Armenian genocide can provide us with a few clues to the answers we seek.
I shall begin the analysis with some of the similarities and differences between the two genocides, and I shall conclude by commenting on the role of ideology, revolution, and war in contemporary genocide.
II. The Armenian Genocide
In traditional Ottoman society Armenians, like other Christians and Jews, were defined as a dhimmi millet, a non-Muslim religious community of the Empire. Their actual treatment by the state varied to some extent with the military fortunes of the empire, with the religious passions of its elites, and with the encroachment upon their land of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucuses, and of Kurdish pastoralists.
Although by and large dhimmis were free to practice their religion, they were considered to be distinctively inferior to Muslims in status.[2] However, in the 19th century the Armenians challenged the traditional hierarchy of Ottoman society, as they became better educated, wealthier, and more urban. In response, despite attempts at reforms, the empire became more represssive, while the Armenians, more than any other Christian minority, bore the brunt of persecution.[3] Already, in 1894-96, twenty years before the genocide of 1915, thousands of Armenians were massacred in the empire headed by Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
Throughout the 19th century the Ottoman sultans were caught in the vise between great power pressures on the one hand and the demand for self determination among their minorities on the other. By the time Abdul Hamid II came to power in 1876, he had set a course of political and social repression and technological modernization. Nevertheless, he could not halt the military and political disintegration of his regime, and he was replaced in 1908 by a political revolution of Young Turks led by intellectuals and military officers with new and radical ideas of how to address the Ottoman crisis.
In the first instance, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the political organization formed by the Young Turks, attempted radically to transform the regime following liberal and democratic principles that had been embodied in the earlier constitution of 1876. They hoped for the support of the Great Powers for their reforms, but neither the European powers nor the minorities reduced their pressures. On the contrary, they took the opportunity of internal Ottoman disarray and revolutionary transformation to press their demands, and between 1908 and 1912 they succeeded in reducing the size of Ottoman territory by forty percent and its population by twenty percent.[4] The consequences of these defeats on the Young Turks cannot be exaggerated.
Concluding that their liberal experiment had been a failure, the CUP leaders turned to Pan-Turkism, a xenophobic and chauvinistic brand of nationalism that sought to create a new empire based on Islam and Turkish ethnicity. This new empire, stretching from Anatolia to western China would exclude minorities or grant them nominal rights unless they became Turks by nationality and Muslim by religion.
This dramatic shift in ideology and identity, from Ottoman pluralism to an integral form of Turkish nationalism, had profound implications for the emergence of modern Turkey.[5] At the same time Pan-Turkism had tragic consequences for Ottoman minorities, most of all for the Armenians. From being once viewed as a constituent millet of the Ottoman regime, they suddenly were stereotyped as an alien nationality. Their situation became especially dangerous because of their territorial concentration in eastern Anatolia on the border with Russia, Turkey's traditional enemy. Thus the Armenians, at one and the same time, were accused of being in league with Russia against Turkey and of claiming Anatolia, the heartland of the projected Pan-Turkic state.
This was the situation even before the First World War. When war broke out, however, the Young Turks led especially by Enver Pasha joined the German side in an anti-Russian alliance that would allow the Pan-Turkists to build their state at Russia's expense. It was in this context of revolutionary and ideological transformation and war that the fateful decision to destroy the Armenians was taken.
By February 1915 Armenians serving in the Ottoman army were turned into labor battalions and either worked to death or killed. By April that same year the remaining civilians were deported from eastern Anatolia and Cilicia, in an early form of "ethnic cleansing," toward the deserts near Aleppo. The lines of Armenian deportees were set upon again and again by Turkish and Kurdish villagers who were often incited and led by specially designated killing squads, Teshkilat-i Makhsusiye, that had been organized by members of the CUP.[6] Those who escaped massacre were very likely to perish of famine on the way. In this manner, between 1915 and the armistice in 1918, some one million people, out of a population of two million, were killed or starved to death. Later a half million more Armenians perished as Turkey sought to free herself of foreign occupation and to expel minorities. Thus between 1915 and 1923, approximately three quarters of the Armenian population was destroyed in the Ottoman Empire.
III. The Holocaust
The Holocaust had similar origins, albeit with significant variations. Jews, akin to dhimmis, were a traditional pariah caste in Europe that in the 19th century began to advance in social, economic, cultural, and political spheres. It is in this context that the antisemitic political movement got its start. Initially it was dedicated to revoke Jewish emancipation and to undermine Jewish progress. Later it spawned an ideology that identified the Jews as a biologically alien tribe that was part of a world wide conspiracy to control the world. In Imperial Germany, however, antisemitic political parties failed to make significant inroads, and on the eve of the Great War the movement was marginalized and in retreat.[7]
Like the Young Turks, the Nazis came to power after the collapse of an old regime. The German state experienced defeat in the First World War, a failed revolt from the left, inflation, depression, and the collapse of the democratic Weimar Republic. It was this revolutionary interregnum, starting with the fall of Imperial Germany, that enabled the Nazis to come to power.
Led by Hitler, whose charismatic persona and ideology united them, the Nazis were a movement centered on a cult of the fuhrer and racialist antisemitism. Once in power the Nazis sought to recast Germany as an "Aryan" nation from which they would eradicate Jews and banish what they called the "Jewish spirit." Between 1933 and 1945 Germans scrambled to prove to themselves and to each other that their lineage had not been "polluted" by the infusion of Jewish "blood" and that their character had not been shaped by Jewish, or even Christian, values.
Indeed, the higher one went in the Nazi hierarchy the "purer" and more brutal one was expected to be. This attempt to recast one's identity in opposition to a mythical "Jew" and his Weltanschauung accounts in part for the growing radicalization of Nazi policy. In order to please Hitler and the Nazi elite, various spheres of the party and state began to compete with each other over Jewish policy and over the mantle of who was most radical on the "Jewish Question."
The Holocaust was implemented in three overlapping stages. Between 1933 and 1939 Jews were defined, expropriated, and expelled from Germany. Between 1939 and 1941, as the Germans set off the Second World War, Jews were concentrated in ghettos near railroad transit centers, especially in Poland and the other occupied countries of eastern Europe. Between 1941 and 1945, as Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the seat of the imaginary "Jewish World Conspiracy," Jews were first massacred by shooting squads, and later, for the sake of efficiency and secrecy, they were deported to killing centers where they were gassed and cremated. [8]
IV. Similarities: Revolution, War, and Ideology
From this brief sketch of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust we can note certain parallels. In both instances a deliberate attempt was made by the government of the day to destroy in part or in whole an ethno-religious community of ancient provenance, one that had existed as a segment of the government's own society.[9] In both instances genocide was perpetrated after the fall of an old regime and during the reign of a revolutionary movement that was motivated by an ideology of social, political, and cultural transformation. And in both cases genocides occurred in the midst of world wars. These may be said to account for some of the basic similarities between the two genocides, although, of course, there were significant differences as well.
At this juncture permit me to call your attention to two kinds of explanations that neglect ideology, war, and revolution, thereby failing to give a credible accounting for the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. Here I refer to writers like Lucy Dawidowicz, Steven Katz, and Daniel Jonah Goldghagen who stress the ideological intentions of Hitler or the Nazis, while neglecting the circumstances of war and revolution that enabled the Nazis to come to power and to execute their plans for genocide. Meanwhile other writers who try to account for the Armenian Genocide, like Professor Bernard Lewis, do emphasize war and revolution, while neglecting the Pan-Turkist ideology of the Young Turks, which, under the circumstances, promoted genocide in the Ottoman empire.
Antisemitism and the Holocaust
There can be no denying that antisemitism as an ideology with Hitler as its fanatical exponent, and the bureaucracy of destruction both played necessary roles in the Holocaust. Consider the alternative: Would there have been a Holocaust without antisemitism, or without Hitler, or without the party and bureaucratic structures that implemented the destruction? Of course not. The problem with identifying Hitler's intentions and the dynamics of party bureaucracy with a causal analysis of the Holocaust, however, is that these neglect other essential factors. Chief among these are the revolutionary and wartime circumstances that allowed the Nazis to come to power and to implement their ideological visions.
For the Holocaust to become a policy of the Third Reich, it was not enough for Hitler to wish to destroy the Jews, nor even for a party and a bureaucracy to implement or to anticipate his wishes. Without state power Hitler would have remained a harmless crank, a second rate painter of banal watercolors, and without the opportune context provided by the German revolution and the Second World War the German state and society would not have been organized into a machinery of destruction that carried out the Final Solution. The revolutionary interregnum between 1919 and 1945 destroyed the legitimate authority of Imperial Germany and then of the democratic Weimar Republic. It was in this context that the Nazis could come to power and substitute racialist antisemitism as the governing ideology of the state. Acting in the name of that new authority, the Nazi regime then perpetrated world war and genocide.
Thus a causal analysis of the Holocaust points to circumstances of revolution and war that provided a crucial context, an opportunity, for Hitler's ideology to become manifest and for the machinery of destruction to formulate and implement the Final Solution.
The Provocation Thesis and the Armenian Genocide
A similar emphasis on revolution and war as providing contexts for genocide helps to explain the Armenian Genocide and moves the argument beyond what I have called, "the provocation thesis." A number of influential studies dealing with the Armenian Genocide continue to derive it from the supposedly provocative behavior of the victims themselves. Briefly, it is contended that the Armenian Genocide was due to the intolerable threat that the Armenians posed to the Ottoman Empire and the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party that had come to power in 1908.
The provocation thesis assumes that the issue between the Turks and the Armenians was that of two national movements in desperate conflict over the eastern provinces of Turkey, an area that each considered to be the very heartland of its people. In this view the Armenians were a Christian national minority living, unfortunately for them, on both sides of the Turkish-Russian border. Like the other minorities of the Ottoman Empire, they became enthusiastic nationalists who demanded self-determination. Hence, like the Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Greeks, and later the Arabs, their desire for self-determination would necessarily lead to secession. Whereas the departure of the other nationalities was a blow to the power and prestige of the Ottoman Empire, the secession of Armenia would mean the death of Turkey. This was the situation even before the war with Russia.
Once the First World War began, however, and Russian troops were poised to invade Turkey, the frightening possibility appeared that the Armenians would join the Russians, and Turkey would be destroyed. Hence, the Armenian danger had to be eliminated. It was this threatening situation that, while not justifying them, created the conditions for the deportations of the Armenians to the Syrian desert and for their ensuing destruction. A major component of the threat that drove the Young Turks to commit genocide, so goes the argument of the provocation thesis, was Armenian nationalism itself. Hence it can be said that the Armenians provoked their own fate.
The problem with the provocation thesis derives from its exaggerating the extent and threat of Armenian nationalism, while underestimating the role that Turkish nationalism and the ideology of Pan-Turkism played in the genocide. The Turkish revolution of 1908 experienced a liberal phase, but like the German revolution that followed it, that of the Young Turks became radical and xenophobic. Both the Ottomanism and Pan-Islam of the old regime were swept away by Pan-Turkism. The people who had formerly considered themselves to be Turkish speaking Muslim Ottomans were now urged to view themselves as Turks and the others as strangers. As I have already noted, it was this transformation in the identity of the majority that had fateful consequences for the Armenians.
The provocation thesis argues that something in the actions or the demeanor of the victims causes the perpetrators, the provoked party, to react with violence. Had the Armenians behaved differently, had they acted less threateningly, the Young Turks would not have decided on genocide in 1915. By analogy, had there been fewer Jewish Communists, or bankers, or department store owners, or journalists, or beggars there would have been no Holocaust. To argue against this view does not at all imply that the victim is always a scapegoat whose motives and actions need never to be taken into account. It is to suggest that a premeditated act of mass murder, which is what genocide is all about, cannot be understood without first examining the motives or intentions of the murderers.
It is ironic that explanations for the Holocaust that stress the role of ideology, as they should, tend to neglect the context of revolution and war that contributed the opportunity for racialist antisemitism to become the policy of the Nazi state; while explanations for the Armenian Genocide that emphasize revolutionary and wartime conditions as explanations, tend to neglect the ideology of Pan-Turkism that provided the worldview and motivations for the Young Turks. My point is that in analyzing the complex process of genocide it is important to keep in mind both the historical context of war and revolution that provided the opportunity for genocide, as well as the ideology of the perpetrators that furnished its motivation.
ENDNOTES
[1] The UN definition has been widely criticized as being both too broad and too narrow in that it does not distingush precisely between what is meant by a destruction-in-part and destruction-in-whole, and it excludes categories of victims like economic classes and political parties. See the United Nations, Yearbook of the United Nations, 1948-49. New York, 1949, 959-60. For a critique of the UN definition and a more detailed discussion of genocide see Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 23-30.
[2] See Roderic H.Davison, "Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim Equality in the Nineteenth Century," American Historical Review 4, 1954, pp. 844-64.
[3] See Melson, pp. 43-69.
[4] See Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p.153.
[5] See Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961).
[6] See Vahakan. N. Dadrian, "Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and its Contemporary Legal Ramifications." Yale Journal of International Law 2, Summer 1989, pp. 221-334.
[7] See Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
[8] See Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1967; new ed. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985).
[9] On the basis of the United Nations definition, it is possible to distinguish between "genocide-in-whole," and "genocide-in-part." In this essay a "total domestic genocide" is a genocide-in-whole directed against a group of a state's own society, while a "partial" genocide is a "genocide-in-part." Total genocide implies extermination and/or massive death of such order that a group ceases to continue as a distinct culture. Partial genocide stops at extermination and the annihilation of culture. For further discussion of these distinctions see Robert F. Melson, Revolution and Genocide; On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 22-30.
5. Discussion after the lecture
Scherrer: Let us compare the first two total genocides in the 20th century [the genocide against the Armenians and the Nazi Holocausts against the European Jews, the Roma, disabled people and Slavic POWs] with the Cambodian genocide and the Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi of 1994, two other total domestic genocides. In all four cases a component or components of domestic society was wiped out, and in all four cases, these components which became the victim group were minorities. As compared to the genocides of the 19th century and those committed since 1500 and during the European expansion, which were colonial genocides, the 20th century genocides were structurally different. Thus the ideologies used by the perpetrators of these two types were different indeed. For the 20th century genocides nationalism, and particularly narrow nationalism, was important, while the pseudo-scientific "theory of the races" [and of racial origin; Deutsche Rassentheorie] of the late 19th century became the missing link, as regards to the Holocaust. Even more anachronistically so, the same German race theory became a genocidal ideology in Rwanda 1994. We might talk about the three elements in the title of this lecture, namely the roles of ideology, war, and revolution or upheaval in the origins of modern genocide.
Tanaka: Besides ideology the other two elements are war and revolution. Could you elaborate why war and revolution makes it easier to create the cause of genocide?
Revolution or upheaval as context of genocide
Melson: When a group takes power it needs to make itself legitimate. To do so it claims the support of a part of the population. When it does that, for example, the Young Turks, the Nazis, the Khmer Rouges in Cambodia, Hutu Power in Rwanda, it will identify the segment of society, which gives it legitimacy and which it represents. When the (new) group in power defines the segment of society as the people it represents on the base of race, religion, class, or whatever, at the same time it identifies other groups that do not belong as "enemies of our people" and "enemies of the revolution".
The people who are seen as the enemy of the revolution are in danger of genocide, i.e. in the Nazi case it was Jews, in the Turkish case it was Armenians, in Cambodia it was non-Khmer groups of Vietnamese and Cham Muslims, and the middle and upper-class of the Khmer society, and in Rwanda it was the Tutsi community.
The fourth example was Rwanda, as Scherrer recalled. That genocide was not a tribal genocide, not one tribe killing another tribe. This was a group of extremists calling themselves "Hutu power" who defined the Tutsis as the enemy of the "revolution" and killed them. These are some of the factors that are conducive for genocide, and then I might talk about war.
Victims as defined by the perpetrators
In war time the "revolutionaries" take the opportunity to commit genocide. They concentrate power in their hands, and they define the group that earlier they had said did not support revolution as being allied to the enemy of the state.
For example, in the Holocaust the Jews were said to be allied on the one hand to the Soviet communists and on the other hand to the American and world capitalists.
In the Armenian genocide, Armenians were accused (by Talaat Pasha and Enver Pasha) of being in league with the Russian enemy.
Cambodia is one of the strangest genocides. The middle and upper class Cambodians were perceived by the Khmer Rouges as the allies of the American enemies, as not Khmer at all, and that is why they had to be killed.
In Rwanda, Tutsi peasants living side by side with Hutus, were seen as being the allies of the Rwandan guerrillas from Uganda who came to free Rwanda from the domination of Hutu power.
In all of these cases the groups that were killed were defined by the perpetrators as allies of the "enemy of the revolution".
War closes off other possibility for dealing with the minority
Another reason why war is conducive to genocide is that war closes off other possibilities for dealing with minorities. Two ways governments choose for dealing with minorities were assimilation or segregation. But assimilation takes a long time, sometimes generations, for the minorities to be assimilated by the majority. Revolutionaries simply don't have the time to spend on assimilation. In the case of the Nazis, they even feared assimilation because they viewed it as "pollution", as "dirtying" the blood of the majority population.
Segregation may simply not be possible, because the minority does not occupy a separate territory. That's why, when I compared the Holocaust to another genocide, I didn't compare it to Biafra, to the Ibo case. The Biafrans had a separate territory in Eastern Nigeria, and when conflict began, the destruction of the Ibos began, but Nigeria could expel the Ibos into a separate territory and starve them. But Jews did not have a separate land to be driven to, and the Armenians occupied the very territory that Turks claimed.
War as a smoke-screen for genocide
Scherrer: One more element of war is its role as "smoke screen" for genocide. Often genocide escapes the attention of the international community as the media focus on the war. The role of the outside powers is important, and sometimes their role is instrumental for genocide. For instance, in the case of the Holocaust there was a conspiracy of silence about the extermination of the European Jews by both sides in the war, the allies fighting the Nazis and by the Nazi perpetrators themselves. Even worse, sometimes outside states are in direct complicity, such as France in the Rwandan genocide.
Shinoda: I'm thinking of the possibility of another element besides war and revolution. Social upheaval may be a cause of genocide. Ideology of nationalism should also be looked at. In Rwanda the thesis of overpopulation was launched by some authors. Additionally, many Hutus were also killed.
Melson: The cases I have specially been interested in are the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, and Rwanda. In these four cases there was an attempt to exterminate a minority population [or several minorities at one time].
The United Nation's definition of "Genocide" in the Genocide Convention of 1948 is: "Acts committed to destroy in part or in whole a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such." In the four cases there was an attempt to destroy a group "in whole." There are always some types of upheavals behind any genocide. In the four cases under discussion the upheavals took the form of "revolutions", which were a necessary but not sufficient element in each of these genocides. Genocide does not occur in stable, peaceful, democratic, happy societies.
The first victims are members of the political opposition
Scherrer: In each of the four genocides the first victims are from among the political opposition; its members are killed first. In Rwanda several thousands of Hutu moderates opposed to the extremists of the Hutu power were killed at the onset while one million Tutsis were killed within the entire period of 99 days. The very first victims were the Hutu prime minister of the transitional government; she was killed along with other Hutu leaders. The very first victims of the German Nazis were German communists, socialists, and trade union members, etc; they were the first inmates of the concentration camps. In Turkey the Young Turks systematically killed those who dared to oppose them. In Cambodia the first victims were those Khmer Rouge members who opposed the genocidal policy of Pol Pot. All these victim groups were opposing the policy of elimination. That's a matter of challenge to the power of genocidal regimes.
About nuclear genocide in Hiroshima
Okamoto: Thank you for the lecture; it is the best lecture I have heard at this institute. When we talk about the atomic bombing in Hiroshima overseas, we often use words like "holocaust", "genocide", and "massacre". Translated into Japanese, those words simply mean "massive or cruel killing". Domestic genocide or inter-ethnic killing or colonial genocide, which Christian Scherrer mentioned, is quite different from the wholesale killing by the atomic bomb. I wonder how you locate the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in your conceptual map of genocide. As Hiroshima citizens we are interested in the similarity of other cruel mass killings.
Melson: Let us go back to the U.N. convention which defines the genocide as "acts committed with intent, to destroy in part or in whole a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such." It is important to distinguish what intent the perpetrators had, in this case the intent of U.S. President Truman and his advisors who decided to use the A-bombs. What was Truman's intent when he decided to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Historians have yet to fill this gap.
The use of nuclear weapons is genocidal
I want to distinguish the INTENT from the EFFECT of that decision on the citizens of Hiroshima. The effect of the bombing, no doubt, was genocidal. In fact, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it became clear that the use of nuclear weapons is intrinsically genocidal. Should any state decide to use nuclear weapons now, it clearly knows what the effect is going to be. Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed us that nuclear bombs have in effect genocidal power.
My question is, what was the intent of the first decision-makers, that is president Truman and his advisors, in using the A-bombs? People in this room know this history better than I. One interpretation is that the Truman administration's intent was not to destroy the Japanese as such but to bring the war to the end as quickly as possible. Adhering to the U.N. definition strictly, dropping of the A-bomb was not a genocide-in-whole like the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. When the bomb fell on Hiroshima, it was not intended to kill all Japanese, it certainly was intended to kill some [to kill-in-part, according to the U.N. convention]. I will have to study the Hiroshima case in more depth; as I said, you are better scholars of the Hiroshima bombing than I am.
Scherrer: Let me note what you just said. The effect of the a-bomb is clearly genocidal and mass destructive. We all seem to agree with that. You also said that there was intent to kill-in-part the Japanese people, in order, if that thesis is correct, to finish the war, thus formally fulfilling the definition given in the U.N. convention. Different theses are there: some say the bombing was militarily useless, others say negotiations for surrender were under way, etc.. We are kind of on difficult terrain.
Tanaka: Were those people in the White House aware how many people would be killed.
Scherrer: The size is important but not really decisive when looking at the wording of the convention.
Okamoto:Didn't the White House really know what was going to happen when atomic bombs were used? I am pretty sure that Robert Oppenheimer and his team members at Los Alamos who already watched the A-bomb explosion a few weeks earlier in New Mexico, knew exactly what was going to happen in Hiroshima. When the world's first atomic bomb was exploded, Oppenheimer quoted from Baghavad Gita, saying, "I have become Death, the destroyer of the worlds".
Melson: Some of the scientists who had worked for the A-bomb program said they tried to influence Truman not to use it. They did not use term "genocide" because it was not used then. [It had just been invented by Rafael Lemkin in 1944 his famous chapter IX on 'Genocide' in 'Axis Rule in Occupied Europe'.] They said these weapons of mass destruction should not be used, but they were used.
Never again should genocide occur
Kato: What would be the major factors which prevent the realization of peace? What are the lessons to be learned? I also direct this question to the director of HPI. What are the three main factors inhibiting peace?
Melson: My wife, Dr. Gail Melson, and I visited the museum this morning. There we became aware that the museum calls for "Never again" should nuclear weapons be used "NEVER AGAIN" is exactly the same term that Jews used after the Holocaust. Never again should a genocide occur. The fact is that atomic weapons have not been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but we do know genocide has occurred after the Holocaust. We know about Cambodia, Rwanda, and the killings in Yugoslavia. Genocide has occurred and may occur again, I am afraid the lesson of Hiroshima may be the same as the lesson of Holocaust. No one can guarantee us it will never happen again. I've come to a pessimistic view about the capacity of human beings to learn from the disaster of Hiroshima and the disaster of the Holocaust.
Proliferation and pessimism about denying the possibility of the Nuclear Weapon use in the future
Fukui: Looking back the history of Japan, as soon as agriculture started men fight against each other, some 5000 years ago. The origin of agriculture is the origin of war. It seems the characteristic and the fundamental way of thinking of human race. In light of this I don't think it is possible to eradicate genocide nor war. The second factor is that science and technology greatly contributed to the sophistication and escalation of war through time. Today, more than 50 years have passed after the Hiroshima bomb, and the nuclear weapons have become more and more destructive. I’m pessimistic that we cannot deny the possibility of the Nuclear Weapon use. Now India and Pakistan joined the club of the nuclear powers; there is an imminent danger that these countries may use the atomic bomb in a situation of high tension. The third element: since the medieval period only a handful of people were perpetrators, and 99% of them were male. Unless men-only control the government, the world without war may be possible. I think 50% of politicians should be women.
Tanaka: Virginia Wolf pointed out 50 years ago that men make war.
[Are women going to save the planet?]
The effect of nuclear weapons are genocidal regardless the intent of its use
Ms. Watanabe: I can clearly understand today, at this forum, why we can not appeal strongly to the world that the use of nuclear weapons is genocidal. Truman administration did not intend to commit genocide by using the nuclear weapons [no one stated so] and the effect on the people was genocidal. That kind of distinction might weaken the argument that the use of nuclear weapons is genocidal. Distinguishing "the effect" from "the intent" might weaken our appeal.
We, HPI, NGOs, and people in Hiroshima should establish a large framework to prevent the use of the nuclear weapons. I am trying very hard to realize it, and I really hope for the cooperation of all. However, I'm afraid today's argument would weaken our position.
Melson: I'm not an expert of the history of the Truman administration, but let me assume that the Truman administration did not intend to commit genocide. However, whether he intended or did not intend, the effect of nuclear weapons are genocidal. In effect, you don't have to have evil leaders like Hitler and Stalin who decide, "I'm going to use nuclear weapons because I want to destroy a population." You can have democratic, liberal, humane governments decide on the use of nuclear weapons, and the effect will be genocidal. I think this distinction will strengthen your position.
You can say: I'm not interested in the stated intent of the people who dropped the bomb. I'm interested in the effect and the effects are always genocidal.
Watanabe: Even if we didn't have Hitler as a leader, someone, even an ordinary leader, might decide the use of the nuclear weapons if he thinks he has good reasons to do so. I think we need to establish a large framework to ban it, saying it's apparently criminal. We should not allow the situation to happen at any circumstances, because it is absolutely evil. We need some logic to ban the use of nuclear weapons.
Okamoto: I think I can understand what Ms Watanabe is trying to say. Some states are allowed to possess nuclear weapons in the name of nuclear deterrence. To be an effective military strategy, nuclear deterrence must have a clear intent for the actual use of nuclear weapons. If we cannot establish the logic of criminality of nuclear deterrence, we cannot eliminate nuclear weapons.
Fukui: There are some problems in the U.N. definition of "genocide". There is a need to explain exactly what is meant with "intent" in each case.
Okamoto: The definition of "genocide" is different from that of "the use of Nuclear weapon"....
Anyone using a nuclear device in the future must have the intent to commit genocide.
Scherrer: We have to wind-up. This was a very exciting discussion. I am sorry for those who still want to add something. I thank all of you, having participated in this debate.
To close the discussion I would like to underline one point. I don't want to read in tomorrow's paper that Professor Melson said "forget about intent" in the definition of the genocide convention. That is not the case. The United Nations Genocide Convention of December 1948 is actually the basis of our discussion. The convention defines what genocide means in international law. It is only this definition that is and remains politically relevant. Any questioning of the convention's definition of intent to genocide would open up the term to abuse, as a tool for political propaganda purposes.
Our discussion on the bombing of Hiroshima and the nuclear holocaust has nothing to do with such an attempt. It is a matter of how to conceive of what actually was the intent by the perpetrators, the U.S. government of the time, and in which relation the intent stands to the effect of the bombing. Intent is a very essential element in the definition of genocide, and we are not going to question it. That would be dangerous and ludicrous. There should not be any misunderstanding about this particular issue. The last world is with Professor Melson.
Dr. Gail Melson: I have a comment, speaking as a psychologist about intent. Sometimes "intent" is very clear because perpetrators were explicit about it. In our discussion we were talking about Hiroshima, about a situation were historically intent is perhaps less clear. But the relation between the effect and the intent of an act is very interesting. When an effect is well known, and the effect of the atomic bomb is now well known, we can make a reasonable inference that anyone who uses a nuclear device in the future must have the intent to commit genocide. By making this inference we remain consistent with the U.N. definition of genocide, and we clearly link effect with intent.
[applause]
Melson: Thank you very much for your interest and participation.
6. Profile of Dr.Robert Melson
Robert Melson is a professor of political science and former acting director of the Jewish Studies Program at Purdue University. He is the current First Vice-President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
He completed his BS in Mathematics and Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959, and, after graduate work in Anthropology at Yale University, he received his Ph.D in Political Science from MIT in 1967.
His major area of teaching and research has been ethnic conflict and genocide. His interest in the topic derives from his family's experience in Europe, as well as from his field work in Nigeria in 1964-65, a year before the onset of the Nigerian-Biafran civil war. The story of his and his family's survival during the Holocaust is told in False Papers, (University of Illinois Press, 2000), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for 2001. False Papers has also been nominated for the Koret Award for 2002.
His book, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (University of Chicago Press, 1992), won the international PIOOM Award in Human Rights for 1993. (PIOOM is a Dutch affiliate of Amnesty International. The acronym in Dutch stands for "Interdisciplinary Program of Research on the Root Causes of Human Rights Violations.")
He has published (with Howard Wolpe, eds.), Nigeria: Modernization and the Politics of Communalism (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1971) and articles in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and elsewhere.
Professor Melson has been a Foreign Area Fellow of the Ford Foundation (for research in Nigeria 1964-66), a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois (1969-70), Fellow of the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture (1983), and a Purdue University Nominee for the Lilly Foundation Open Fellowship (1995).
On September 14, 2000 he testified before the House Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights concerning the Armenian Genocide. He has held positions as Research Associate at the Harry S. Truman Institute of the Hebrew University, as Research Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and at the Center for International Studies at MIT. He was a founder of the Association of Genocide Scholars. Currently he is a member of the board of the Armenian Genocide Archive and the Armenian National Institute.
He has lectured on problems of ethnic conflict and genocide at the University of California at Los Angeles, Oxford University, the University of London, Nagoya University, MIT, Harvard University, Leiden University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Armenian Academy of Science (Erevan), Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), Colgate University, McGill University, and Yale University, Slippery Rock University, and Ibuka (Kigali, Rwanda).