Mass Violence and Genocide

Mass Violence and Genocide:

Past Present and Future

Thursday 30 June, 2011

Leopold Hotel, Sheffield

Thursday 30th June

9.15 – 9.45 Registration

9.45 – 10.00 Introductory Address

10.00 – 11.45 Second World War Atrocities (Chair: Dr. Gerold Krozewski)

H. Pieper “The SS Cavalry Brigade and its Operations in the Soviet Union, 1941-1942”

P. Gasztold-Sen ”The Memory of Katyn Massacre in Communist Poland”

D. Patrick “Atrocity Publicity in the Wake of Liberation: April – May, 1945”

11.45 – 12.00 Coffee

12.00 – 13.30 Publicity and Response (Chair: David Patrick)

E. Gutmann “How Many Harvested? Provisional Estimates of Religious and Political Prisoners in China Eliminated by Organ Harvesting from 1997 to 2007”

I. Brakstad “Holocaust and Tribal War? Mass Media and the Interpretation of Genocide”

M. Seymenoglu “An Analysis on Denial Prohibition, Freedom of Expression and Genocide Scholarship”

13.30 – 14.15 Buffet Lunch 14.15 – 15.45 Remembering Genocide (Chair: Dr. Adrian Gallagher)

M. Azman “Reconciliation: Attainable but not Sustainable?”

L. Asquith “Life After Genocide”

J. Pahmeyer “Remembering Colonial Genocide in the Context of Generation”

T. Sarukhanyan “Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, Testimonies of Armin Theophil Wegner (1886-1978)”

15.45 – 16.00 Coffee

16.00 – 17.30 Theoretical Concepts (Chair: Henning Pieper)

C. Werkmeister “The Genesis of Genocide: A Critical Re- Evaluation of Raphael Lemkin’s Works”

A. Gallagher “The Problem of Genocide Prevention in an Anarchical Realm: Engaging with the Neo- Realise Perspective”

17.30- 18.30 Special Discussion – T.B.A.

Linda Asquith (University of Huddersfield)

“Life After Genocide”

What happens to those individuals who survive genocide? Much is known about the process of genocide and what it is to experience such events. The planning, the undertaking and the aftermath in relation to justice and accountability has been well documented in scholarly articles and books, not to mention the various museums throughout the world which tell the story of a number of genocides. In addition, much is written about how victims of ‘traditional crime’ recover from their experiences. Less is known about what happens afterwards to those individuals who survive genocide, particularly those who have migrated to other countries.

This paper seeks to understand how survivors have rebuilt their life in the UK, using Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social capital as a lens through which we can consider the strategies which survivors have used, allowing a consideration of how survivors access and utilise social capital, or how the lack of social capital has been an obstacle in rebuilding their lives.

The published testimony of four survivors is considered in this paper; Halima Bashir from Darfur, Illuminee Nganemariya from Rwanda, and Trude Levi and Kitty Hart Moxon who survived the Holocaust. Each of these survivors has written an autobiography which discusses their life afterward in considerable detail. This work forms part of a pilot project wherein autobiographies were used for their ease of access, and also to give a flavour of what a wider project which involves interviewing survivors would produce.

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Muhammad Daniel Azman (University of St Andrews)

“Reconciliation: Attainable but not Sustainable?”

In recent decades there has been an increased focus on Transitional Justice (TJ) in post-conflict societies. Though the relationship between justice and peace plays a significant role in contributing to our understanding of the critical phase of sustaining peace after mass violence, the relationship is not mutually exclusive, as mistakenly assumed by the liberal peacebuilding literature. Indeed, when Kenyans agreed to end the intensifying Post-Election Violence (PEV) in 2008, they embarked on a new chapter of reconciliation by debating several TJ options that ended in a contradictory relation of justice and peace. For more than 30 years, Kenya has received considerable scholarly attention. As result, three major debates have emerged: 1) postcolonial crisis and nation building, 2) underdevelopment and dependency theory, 3) and the meaning of democratization in plural societies (Branch, Cheseman, and Gardener, 2011). Although the three major debates tend to emphasize the continuity between the past and present of the Kenyan crisis, analysis within these three debates tends to be preoccupied with rigid historical interpretation, and neglects the new and the fourth debate following the 2008 PEV - peace versus justice.

This paper attempts to describe the origins and nature of the ongoing fourth debate by tracing the misconception of the Kenyan government’s preference for the ‘forgive and forget’ approach through the Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC), rather than for criminal prosecution, either by the domestic tribunal or International Criminal Court (ICC). Meanwhile, justice implementation during the transitional period requires both types of justice: retributive and restorative. However, for the Kenyan government, reconciliation cannot be attained through a demand for (retributive) justice and punishment, while advancing (restorative) peace to heal the national wound. This inevitably contributes to a public perception of the ‘love-hate relationship’ between peace and justice, an illusion of reconciliation narrative that purposely has been created by the political elite to divert the victim’s demands for political accountability (justice), for the sake of ‘interim peace’ for the ruling class. It will also be shown how this contradictory narrative of peace and justice was used by politicians both from the Party of National Unity (PNU) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) (the two factions within the Government of National Unity), to mobilize ethnic political rallies for the upcoming 2012 election, while the list of ‘laundry’ - political reform, inter-ethnic reconciliation, IDPs settlement scheme, and justice for victims - remains a pipe dream. As a result, this paper raises a broader question: can reconciliation be attainable, and further sustainable, if the public pendulum of justice and peace is subject to the ruling classes political game? Furthermore, these questions reveal the widening gap in state-society relations in Kenya, where the political patrons preferred amnesty through TJRC, while the rest of the public demand punishment through criminal prosecution. This issue will be discussed in connection with the debate concerning whether justice and peace is either simply a continuous theme of domestic political disorder (the elite’s political instrument) from past, present and future, or whether it is part of complex turbulence and external prescription of liberal peacebuilding which opens further incentive for the international reconciliation template, to be transferred to similar African crises in the likes of Zimbabwe and Ivory Coast.

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Ingjerd Veiden Brakstad (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

“Holocaust and Tribal War? Mass Media and the Interpretation of Genocide”

This paper will seek to deal with the public, non-academic discourse on genocide. Through research on how the crime of genocide is perceived and conveyed by the mass media I will try to show how certain models of understanding turn out to be crucial to the broader conception of genocide. The two core cases of this project are the genocides in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-95 war and in Rwanda in 1994. Both genocides generated great media interest, but were perceived in two different ways. I have found that when the media stories of these two crimes were created, they were both almost immediately placed within two specific frames of understanding: in the Bosnian case the dominant narrative was the war and genocide as a repetition of the great collapse of European civilization – the Holocaust, whereas the dominant understanding of the Rwandan genocide was tribal warfare.

The genocide in Bosnia was placed within the framework of a Holocaust narrative, and the vocabulary used in describing both the war and the genocide was generated by the moral imperative of “Never again!”, whereas in Rwanda the genocide was perceived as an inevitable outcome of “tribal hatred.” I want to explore how the two narratives of the Holocaust as a collapse of (our/Western) civilization on the one hand, and that of African tribal war as a result of absence of civilization on the other, became crucial to how these two genocides were perceived and described.

Adrian Gallagher (University of Sheffield)

“The Problem of Genocide Prevention in an Anarchical Realm: Engaging with the Structural Perspective”

This paper utilizes the primary fact of International Relations - that there is no world government - to highlight the legal, moral, and political complexities involved in genocide prevention. This is important for it is evident that genocide scholars often attribute too much agential power to state leaders when discussing the issue of genocide prevention. Because of this, they fail to take into account the structural limitations that the anarchical realm places on policy-makers. Whilst this paper does not uphold the Neo-Realist claim that the anarchical structure causes actors to behave in a certain way, it accepts that structural accounts help provide insight into understanding why policymakers do not have the political will required to prevent genocide. This is an important point that genocide scholars need to consider as they have to accept that the prevention of genocide may lead states into complex and dangerous foreign policy agendas. Such agendas raise a series of complex legal, moral, and political dilemmas which need to be addressed if states are to increase their ability to prevent genocide. Only then can we begin to resolve the central problem: preventing genocide in a world without a world government.

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Przemyslaw Gasztold-Sen (The Institute of National Remembrance – Warsaw)

“The Memory of Katyn Massacre in Communist Poland”

Katyn massacre - a mass execution of over 20,000 Polish citizens by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) took place in April-May 1940. Four years later, when the Polish Communists began to take power in the country, the Katyn Massacre became one of the biggest lies of the Polish People's Republic. In the name of "friendship" and cooperation with the Soviet Union, Polish Communists wanted to erase the public memory of the Katyn Massacre. This is why for 45 years communist authorities argued that Nazi Germany was responsible for this crime. For many years, anyone in Poland who dared to tell the truth about Katyn has been exposed to severe repressions.

In my paper I will present how the memory of Katyn affected Polish society and how the Poles have learned about the truth about the crime. I will try to answer the question why, in a country without the freedom of speech and in which human rights were not respected, the truth about Katyn was a factor integrating the Polish society. I will also consider why the thesis of German responsibility for that crime was so important to the ruling regime. I will present various forms of resistance and struggle with the false promotion of the official version of the Katyn Massacre by the organized opposition groups. Using the documents of the former Communist security apparatus, I will describe how the government punished the people who openly told the truth about Katyn. I will also discuss the importance of the Katyn massacre as a historical event, which continues to play a leading role in the Polish political life.

Ethan Gutmann (Adjunct Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies)

“How Many Harvested? Provisional estimates of religious and political prisoners in China eliminated by organ harvesting from 1997 to 2007. “

As allegations of Chinese organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience (Uyghurs, Tibetans, Falun Gong, and House Christians) gain incremental recognition, the full scale of Chinese medical, military, and political involvement remains shrouded in state secrecy. Author interviews with fifty Laogai System refugees are employed to generate provisional estimates and illustrative parameters of Falun Gong practitioners harvested over time. The scale of incarceration combined with a rate of “organs-only” physical examinations suggests a relatively constant pool of potential donors. Estimates for actual harvesting selection are based, in part, on an economic calculus that bears similarities to counterfeiting and brand piracy. The paper will conclude by anchoring the author’s quantitative estimates within a larger narrative of harvesting development over time, particularly focusing on evidence of organ harvesting in Xinjiang, (beginning with the live organ harvesting of condemned criminals in 1994 and expanding to Uyghur political prisoners following the Ghulja Incident of 1997). Establishing harvesting velocity over a decade, and incorporating factors such as the homogeneity of the exam process from province to province, may help to answer a central question: How much of the impetus to harvest prisoners of conscience originated from the Chinese Communist Party apparatus, and how much is a by-product from the unfettered capitalism of China's medical expansion? The recent Chinese government initiative to persuade ordinary citizens to donate their organs at death and the ongoing level of Chinese state surveillance aimed at military hospitals will also be incorporated into a brief discussion of whether recent Chinese leadership statements on harvesting constitute a serious attempt at widespread medical and penal reform or a symbolic gesture to inoculate against international condemnation.

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Jennifer Pahmeyer (University of Sheffield)

“Remembering Colonial Genocide in the Context of Generation”

Memory can be analysed on different levels (individual and collective) and is affected by different factors (gender, education, wealth, power etc.). The paper I will present focuses on generation as one sub-group in society and as an interesting factor regarding genocide remembrance in modern- day Namibia.

On the individual level, death is the most decisive incident and plays a prominent role within remembering. This is because of the existential and emotional input and therefore, especially, wars and genocides expand into collective memory. However, with every subsequent generation (colonial) genocide increasingly takes a back seat. Nevertheless, certain memories remain and become - because of books, films, national and global narrations - more and more standardised (for example, compared to oral histories of first-hand witnessed experiences).

Colonialism as well as Apartheid had very different impacts on different people and population groups. The Namibian society was highly separated; first of all through race, but also and in relation to it, through wealth and different localities. While these factors of course remain, additional factors changed the scenario, especially since the end of South African occupation (1990). For example, through better transport possibilities, an improved school system, internet and other media conveying national and global contexts, a shared background is also produced. The remarkable result is that the post-Apartheid generation which grew up after 1990, seems to be the first generation in Namibia which is connected through a collective identity in Namibia. This generation-identity even has a basis in the colonial period to a certain extent, because interpretations of colonialism and genocide are constantly adjusting.

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David Patrick (University of Sheffield)

“Atrocity Publicity in the Wake of Liberation: April-May, 1945” The discovery of the Nazi concentration camps by Allied forces in the late Spring of 1945 present a series of events which had both an enormous impact at the time, and which have also left a sustained legacy in the subsequent 65 years. Whilst being undoubtedly historically significant in themselves, the intrinsic link between the liberation of these camps and their depiction in the Western media makes these developments a fascinating subject for historical analysis. Their discovery provoked a deep sense of national outrage on both sides of the Atlantic, and one which was infinitely more visceral – and one could indeed argue genuine – than to the multitude of subsequent atrocities which followed.

With this over-arching theme in mind, the aims of this paper are three-fold. First of all, I will highlight the manner in which the horrors of the likes of Belsen and Buchenwald came to be disseminated to such a wide audience by those who bore witness. Building on this, the second section of the paper will discuss the overall response – with both public and elite spheres – which followed in the wake of these historic revelations. And finally, I will describe the cultural and societal developments which followed in the wake of the discovery of the camps, and attempt to highlight the significance of the link between visual media and Anglo-American engagement with mass-violence.

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Henning Pieper (University of Sheffield)

“The SS Cavalry Brigade and its Operations in the Soviet Union, 1941 – 1942”

My thesis, entitled ‘The SS Cavalry Brigade and its Operations in the Soviet Union, 1941 – 1942’ aims at writing the history of a German military unit in the Second World War. This formation was involved in the invasion of the Soviet Union and played an important role in the beginning of the Holocaust. The focus of my work is on the years 1941 and 1942, as it was during this time that the brigade, unlike most other regular German army formations or SS killing squads, combined a military with an ideological purpose. This ‘dual role’ and its implications, the fighting in the German advance on Moscow and the murder of thousands of Soviet Jews, are the key elements of my thesis. In order to complete this study, I am also analysing the prehistory of the unit in the Nazi state and the biographies of its members. Thus, my project will transcend the frame of unit history and integrate the findings into the context of Holocaust research, perpetrator history, and military history.

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Tigran Sarukhanyan (Armenian National Academy of Sciences)

"Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, Testimonies of Armin Theophil Wegner (1886-1978)"

The commemoration of the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust has become a key factor for reservation of national and cultural identity of both Nations, the Armenians and the Jews all over the world. The process of constructing memory sometimes challenges the true history, thus reflecting diversity in memory and historical reality. Commemoration of the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah, the studies on rescuers and bystanders, has become a special field for both nations in constructing and shaping this memory. In the above mentioned context the personality of Armin Theophil Wegner (1886- 1978) is of much interest, as he was one of few Germans whose name appeared in two major genocides of the 20th century - the Armenian Genocide and the Shoah – as a person who ‘tried to defend’ the targeted victims.

Though the Genocide of Armenians and the Jewish Holocaust are much studied, less has been written about those individuals who have been considered as the German Champions of the Armenians and Jews. One of those individuals was a German writer, jurist and a cosmopolitan freethinker Armin Theophil Wegner. A graduate of the Universities of Berlin, Breslau and Zuerich, Armin Wegner served as an officer of the German Sanitary Mission to Turkey. As a Sanitary attached to the 6th Turkish Army, led by German Marshall von der Goltz, Wegner marched to Baghdad via Aleppo, witnessing, like his comrades, the death marches and subsequent liquidation of the Armenian deportees in 1915 and 1916. Despite the danger of being infected by typhus, and the official censorship and prohibition of photographing, Wegner (along with other Germans, civilians and servicemen) did take photographs of the deportees, in particular in October 1916, when he was ordered to return to Constantinople. En route, he took the opportunity to visit some of the liquidation camps for the deported Armenians (Maden, Tibini, Abu Herera, Rakka) near Aleppo. Wegner’s life in general and in particular his importance as an intentional rescuer or at least eye- witness of the Armenian genocide is highly disputed. Most Armenians and Jews venerate him until today as “just one”, whose name is commemorated both in Yad Vashem and at the Genocide Memorial on Tsitsernakaberd Hill in Yerevan, the Armenian capital. There is also a plaque in commemoration of Wegner in front of his previous residence at Kaiserdamm, Berlin-Charlottenburg, and there is a registered NGO – the Wuppertal based Armin T. Wegner Gesellschaft – which aims to keep the memory of A. Wegner alive.

My paper is to study the contradictions of Wegner’s pro-Armenian and pro-Jewish activities and his personality as a ‘transnational memory icon’, which shapes our collective memories.

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Melek Seymenoglu (National University of Ireland)

“An Analysis on Denial Prohibition, Freedom of Expression and Genocide Scholarship”

Although the crime of genocide is codified in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, contemporary literature on genocide studies covers not only recently committed atrocities but also historical claims of genocide. Any legal study which deals with historical genocide claims, firstly has to address the issue of denial of alleged past genocides as a criminal offence and possible interference of denial laws with freedom of expression which is protected under universal and regional human rights treaties. Denial prohibition is one of the most controversial issues related to the freedom of expression in Europe, especially since the adoption of the ‘European Union Framework Decision on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law’ in 2008. The emergence of Holocaust denial in the public sphere in the mid-1980s gave rise to the statutes that establish denial of the Holocaust perpetrated against Jewish people as a criminal offense in many European countries which still carry the memories of Nazi lawlessness from 1933 to 1945. In some countries, despite lack of previous experience of the Nazi era, denial phenomenon started as a strong reaction against far-right movements and to provide protection against racially motivated criticism of Nuremberg trials.

There has been a multiplication of court decisions against those who have expressed and published revisionist views on the Holocaust; in many cases the defendants invoke the principle of freedom of expression. Depending on which jurisdiction is seized in the context of the issue, the principle of freedom of expression is interpreted in either a more absolute or more limited manner. Today, the relevant jurisprudence mainly deals with Holocaust denial, yet the legal landscape could change radically due to the EU Framework decision and judges could find themselves confronted with not only legal but also historical questions, since the EU Framework decision which aims to harmonize European legislation, also extends denial prohibition to other genocides.

This paper will attempt to make a comparative analysis of the relevant European jurisprudence and the decisions of other major international forums such as UN Human Rights Committee and European Court of Human Rights and also will seek to evaluate how different jurisdictional venues balance the protection of freedom of expression in a free and democratic society with the public interest in preserving the historical record and whether the criteria targeting Holocaust denial could be applied to alleged past genocides.

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Christain Werkmeister (Friedrich-Schiller University)

“The Genesis of Genocide: A critical re-evaluation of Raphaël Lemkin’s works”

It is commonly believed that Raphaël Lemkin coined the term “genocide”. Although this might be true for the definition of the crime of genocide as a “delictum iuris gentium”, the original work and structural definition were taken from existing publications. New archival findings demonstrate how the German missionary Johannes Lepsius was the first to define and use the term “Völkermord” (genocide) in order to describe the atrocities committed by the Young Turks against the Armenians during World War I. In his publications he not only informed about the Armenians’ fate in Turkey, but also distinguished between different kinds of genocide. He shaped the categories, which later culminated in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Lepsius’ works were circulated throughout Germany during and after the war in numerous editions and were especially known to the politicians of the Reichstag and among Christians.

Lemkin, who was a law student at that time, was strongly influenced by those findings. He used the detailed definition in his groundbreaking legal proposals that led to the United Nations’ definition. Although never referring to Lepsius’ works, Lemkin saw the beginning of his interest in “genocide” in the events in Turkey in 1915, which were brought to his attention by the murder of Talaat Pasha and the consecutive trial in Berlin in 1921. Lemkin visited the trial where Lepsius was one of the key witnesses, publicly accusing Turkey of genocide. The trial is the connection between Lepsius’ work and Lemkin’s attempts to become the initiator of the legal term genocide. The presentation will illustrate the origins of the definition and term genocide, hereby clarifying an important chapter of international law and genocide research.

Contact Details

Linda Asquith [email protected]

Muhammad Daniel Azman [email protected]

Ingjerd Veiden Brakstad [email protected] Amy Fagin [email protected]

Adrian Gallagher [email protected]

Przemyslaw Gasztold-Sen [email protected]

Ethan Gutmann [email protected]

James Osemene [email protected]

Jennifer Pahmeyer [email protected]

David Patrick [email protected]

Henning Pieper [email protected]

James Michael Poulter [email protected]