The seven ages of genocide testimony
Before the testimony there is the crime. The crime happens because of stories and words. A country is pregnant with genocide for a long time before the actual killing begins. Ideas are written, spoken and argued over. Ideologies evolve from these conversations about ideas. Ideologies target a group of people. They give this group an identity they cannot escape – how can you stop being a Jew or a Tutsi. The followers of these ideas come to control the state. They then put into practice their ideas. They will not live on the same planet as the other, usually, an “other” which is within the same state. Always an “other” that includes all members from the smallest children to the oldest grandparent. In all genocides, words give shape and meaning to the idea of annihilation before it takes place. There are also many places where the same soup of prejudice, hate, half-baked philosophy, scapegoating and malice never gives birth to mass murder. In cases where it does the words of hate find a voice to carry them forward to fruition by gaining control of the state. In all genocides there is agency. Context and history matter. However, for genocide to take place there must be individuals who decide that this is what should happen now. Agency gives birth to extermination; words give individuals the power to act. They make the enemy legible and the murder meaningful. Without words and ideas genocides do not take place.
There are discourses of hate that do not lead to genocide. There are instances of mass killing that do not come to be called genocide. When the event has taken place there must be a naming of that event. A consensus that this particular bout of human hatred is one thing and not another: words come into play again. The baptism of an event as a genocide became possible after 1944 when the word was coined. It was given legal meaning in 1948 when the convention was passed. It has since become a hugely contested area of geopolitics. What name do we give the killing of this group of people by their state or this population by an invading state?
The first two stages in the life cycle of a genocide take place before a victim’s voice is heard. While the genocide is taking place the decisions about what to call it are not made in response to the testimony of the victims. Rather the mass killing is first a geopolitical event. Its status is determined by the status, position, importance of the location of events and the context in terms of other events in which it is taking place. Some voices might begin to be heard but almost always it is after the event that the witness comes to the fore.
The early years after a genocide are the childhood and adolescence of the event. They are the period in which the witness voices begin to be heard. They are heard, recorded and formed through a range of genres and in a range of ways. Evidence is collected to contribute to the bringing of cases to the ICC and evidence is taken from victims who have fled to establish if they are real refugees or not. Formal evidence collection brings the voice of the victim, the words of the victim, into contact with the first of a myriad of interconnecting, sometimes competing and different cycles. This first is the legal cycle. It is slow, cautious and driven by what is and can be recorded, cross checked and verified. Whether it is the evidence of the victim about the perpetrators or indeed the evidence of the victim about themselves, facts become key; these facts can be challenged in court, the testimony can contradicted, there is insecurity, there is fresh trauma and there is the fallibility of memory. Victims must prove themselves either to ensure that their perpetrators are judged and maybe also punished, but also to establish their own identity, status and position as victims. Much of this evidence will emerge from and repeat private or closed discourses within the victim communities and in their own languages rather than any international lingua franca. These closed discourses in diaries, letters, family discussions and community newspapers, for example the US Yiddish and Hebrew press of the 1940s and 1950s, is often dominated by survivors trying to find each other, trying to find who has lived and who has died. They are full of stories of escape and stories of destruction. They are raw and the stories are then repeated for immigration and UN officials, in court cases, in application for pensions and reparations.
Gradually the stories and testimony mature. The private cycles of community discourse and the slow moving cycles of legal process, are intertwined with political cycles of interest and disinterest. They are intertwined with news and media cycles of interest and indifference. They intertwined with generational cycles comprising the questions of children and grandchildren. They are intertwined with the cycles of historians and the opening of the archives and the writing of the history. A process of hegemony of a narrative can take place. A mature story emerges which was once fresh and exciting, gradually fades from view. Perhaps the world pays attention for a time but then gradually the story becomes old. The interconnected wheels of news, politics, and history shift and the testimony becomes overly familiar, too often heard and slowly it begins to be ignored. The court cases finish or slow to a stop. The news organisations refuse stories, the movies stop being made, the books are no longer published. New genocides emerge and new causes develop. The story dies. But it does not disappear.
In the digital age there is a permanent afterlife. The story sits in this digital heaven and can have new life breathed into on occasion. But in essence, outside the closed discourses of the victims themselves, their families, their sites of memorialising, unless a political cycle needs to revive it, the story has been told.
The case of Ukraine: When does Genocide End? – Originally published in Ukraine Week in 2011
The debate on whether the Holodomor constitutes a genocide has been settled by publications such as those by Prof. Volodymyr Vassylenko.[1] These events take their place in the sequence beginning with the Armenian Genocide in the terrible events of the 20th century. As the crime of crimes seems to happen with greater frequency it is the responsibility of us all to examine the historical record of past instances. In understanding the past we might also contribute in some way to preventing genocide in the future. But the phrase “understanding the past”, is in many ways misleading. The crime of genocide is not one which has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. Its impact is more profound and long lasting than virtually any comparable paradigm shift in historical evolution because it is such a sudden and multifaceted shock to a society. So as the world gradually moves towards recognition of the Holodomor as one of the sequence of genocides committed by the Stalinist regime, Ukraine must consider the consequences for its society and politics. It must face up to the nature of a post-genocide society and the trauma inherent in this status. There are a number of different dimensions to consider. First we must define what the genocide is, establish the facts as best we can and identify when the killing stopped. Then we must have admission of guilt from the perpetrators and some process by which there can be a judgment and, more problematically given the passage of time, a punishment. Finally we must honour and remember the dead and use this memorializing to enhance the lives of the living.
Let us consider each of these stages in turn. The question of when a genocide actually ends is best thought through from the perspective of the Kantian injunction that nothing should happen in war that makes reconcilement impossible. In the Ukrainian case this was not in the context of conventional war but a dimension of class and national civil war. However, the issue remains the same. Is there something at the heart of the mass extermination of a national group that means reconciliation is impossible? The killing is on such a scale that it does not in fact stop when the conflict stops but continues to reverberate down through time in both the private reliving of the pain and in the broader sense of this being a crime that remains present in the life of a nation. Above and beyond the sheer scale of the killing and its concentration in terms of time and geography, there is the first encounter we have with the issue of denial. Does genocide end when the when the killing stops or when people stop questioning if it happened?
These terrible questions raise so many other questions in turn. If we are to speak of the end of genocide, then when are we to stop counting the victims? How are we meant to count the victims of a genocide, for how many generations? Think of the example of a Rwandan woman called Mary, who escaped to the UK just before the killing began. She lost 80 members of her family. She is a victim, as are subsequent generations both in the sense of the unborn of those who have been murdered and in the sense of the isolation of those who survive.
Genocide continues to claim lives long after the central event is over. Lives in the sense of the effects of trauma, grief and instability caused by the attempt to understand your place as a second or third generation survivor, but also directly. There are frequent cases of those who have physically survived the Nazis extermination camps living long enough to bear witness and then killing themselves. Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Jean Amery are the most famous examples. This might be the desire to control the means of your own death. It might be because the experience of genocide is one that cannot be overcome by the individuals caught up in it. Its magnitude is such that grasping the reality of what has occurred might prove in the end impossible. It is also clear from the writing of all three of the examples given here that the fact of survival is in and of itself a deeply troubling reality. Others had to die so that you could survive.
If grasping the magnitude of what has occurred is profoundly challenging for those involved, it can also help explain those who dispute or deny the facts of a genocide. Denial can take place for purely ideological reasons. It can also connect with the difficulty some have of believing that such crimes actually take place. Whatever the cause the final stage of genocide is denial. As noted there are differing types of denial. Some make a blanket claim: it did not happen. There was no systematic killing. Others concede that something did happen but they play a numbers game – some died but not that many. In the case of Ukraine, both of these kinds of arguments are advanced. Whilst not acknowledging the truth of the events, deniers also seek to relativise the killing as much as they can. Yes, they say, people died but it was complicated and the “victims” were also perpetrators. Finally, the aggressive response is to constantly question all and any physical evidence for the events. To demand that scholars prove that it happened and each time irrefutable physical evidence is presented for one part of the genocide, the deniers move on and attack from another angle.
Let us imagine that with time and patience you can establish the parameters of the event so that it is generally accepted to have happened and that what happened is so established that the deniers appear as fringe elements in society. The second stage in the ending of genocide is the admission of guilt by perpetrators. The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, suggested there were layers of guilt involved in a crime of such magnitude:
- criminal guilt for individual acts which are dealt with in courts
- political guilt for our own responsibility for the actions of our states
- moral guilt expressed as our private fate before my god.
- Metaphysical guilt, our guilt for being alive at this time and not acting.
Germans feared Jaspers when his work was published immediately after the war. While governments acknowledged guilt and paid reparations, many ordinary West Germans sought shelter from guilt in the ideas of functionalism – that the holocaust happened as a response to events and had not been planned all along. The Russian nationalist response to the Ukrainian Genocide has many elements in common with the position of the functionalist writers on the holocaust. Then a new generation, through the work of Daniel Goldhagen, embraced guilt. But if guilt is admitted what matters more – judgement or punishment. On the global level, in terms of the reputation of nations, it is judgment which matters more than punishment. By now the perpetrators are dead, the regime is gone but if guilt can be admitted and judgment passed that part of the identity of a nation can be restored.
Let us assume that judgment is applied to the perpetrators and that some form of punishment is even administered, if only symbolically. Is genocide over then? Not quite because there is a silence or lacuna at the heart of all genocides: the silence of the dead. We know what we know of the Nazis and Stalinist camps because of the people who survived them. At Auschwitz 90% of Jews were killed on arrival. That is the unspeakable reality of the gas chambers, but it is also the unspoken. How can we give voice to the perished? We must face the question of how we should honour the dead. There needs to be a visible acknowledgement of what has been. This can be done well, for example Yad Vashem. It can also be done badly as it has been, many argue, in Rwanda and in Iraqi Kurdistan. What works is a space in which victims and perpetrators can come together. It should be part of a national project to engage with this history as a way of engaging with the story of the nation.
There is a principle in politics that can be summed up as “only Nixon can go to China”. The principle is simple. Nixon was so firmly established as an anti-communist that he could break the stalemate of the cold war and no one could accuse him of being soft on Communism. The same applies to the current Ukrainian government. It is in a position to achieve recognition and a formal process of judgment because no one can accuse it of doing these things because it is anti-Russia. But even President Putin doing his Willy Brandt moment is but one part of the process of ending genocide. The formal and the national stage is important, but the historical and the personal dimensions are also vital. The historical record needs to be established and accepted, the deniers and the minimisers isolated from main stream society and debate. The memorialising needs to take place in the context of supporting and enabling a sense of recognition amongst that have survived. Then, over time, we might be able to say that the Ukrainian genocide is over.
[1] Prof. Volodymyr Vassylenko. THE UKRAINIAN HOLODOMOR OF 1932–33 AS A CRIME OF GENOCIDEhttp://www.mfa.gov.ua/australia/en/publication/content/35142.htm
The Charlwood Review Books 