CASE STUDIES IN POST WORLD WAR II GENOCIDE: ROOTS OR REGIMES? THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of Texas State University‐San Marcos in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of SCIENCE by Robert Justin Jones, B.S. San Marcos, Texas May 2010 CASE STUDIES IN POST WORLD WAR II GENOCIDE: ROOTS OR REGIMES? Committee Members Approved: ______________________________ Robert F Gorman, Chair ______________________________ Kenneth L Grasso ______________________________ Arnold Leder Approved: ___________________________________ J. Michael Willoughby Dean of the Graduate College For Richard E. Jones ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I would like to thank my wife Kristen for her support and encouragement throughout this long process. Also, I would like to give a very special thanks to my parents and grandparents for allowing me to travel down this path. You will all always be in my heart. Secondly this work would not have been possible without the generous help and time of my thesis committee, which was made up of Dr. Robert Gorman, Dr. Kenneth Grasso and Dr. Arnold Leder. It has been a pleasure to work with you from start to finish and for your patience, I am eternally grateful. Finally, I would like to extend a special thanks to Dodie Weidner in the Texas State University-San Marcos Political Science office, for helping me meet all of my deadlines during the thesis submission process. This manuscript was submitted on August 28, 2009. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………...………………………………………..……..…iv INTRODUCTION………………………………………………...……………...……....1 PART I: THE ROOTS OF GENOCIDE: THREE DISTINCT HISTRIOGRAPHIES……………………………...……………....11 CHAPTER 1: CAMBODIA…………………………………………………………....................12 From Antiquity through the Polity of Funan…………………………………….………………………….….12 The Rise and Decline of Angkor…………………………………………….......16 The French Protectorate………………………………….……………………....28 Independence, Civil War and the U.S. War in Vietnam……………………………………………….…....…..43 Democratic Kampuchea and the Khmer Rouge………………….……..……..…57 2: RWANDA……………………………………………………………...….……...68 From Migratory Tribes to the Beginnings of Political Unification………………………………………………..…………….67 Colonialism Under Germany……………………………….………………....…72 Colonialism Under Belgium ……………………………….…………………...79 Decolonization, the 1959 ―Revolution‖ and the Republic of Rwanda……………………………………………….…………96 The RPF Invasion, Civil War and Decent into the Abyss ……………………………………….………………….120 v 3: BOSNIA………………………………………………………...……………….133 From Prehistory to the Greek Era…………………………….………………...133 The Roman Epoch…………………………………………………….…...…....136 Byzantium…………………………………………………………..……...…...142 The Ottoman Period……………………………………………….……………166 From Austro-Hungarian Rule to Yugoslavia ……………………………….….202 World War II and Communist Yugoslavia………………………………….….225 Economic Crisis, the Collapse of Communism and the Wars of Yugoslav Succession……………………….…….………...…242 PART II: COMMON THREADS……………...……………………………………….266 4: TRENDS…………………………………………………………….…………...267 The Origins of Genocide……………………………………………..……...….268 The Political Component of Genocide……………………………….……....…275 At Risk CulturalTraits……………………………………………………..……277 Ideological Features……………………………………………………..…...…281 The Media and Genocide………………………………………………..…...…285 Warfare, Disease, Hunger and Refugee Flight…………………………...….…286 GenocidalRegimes………………………………………………………......….288 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………........291 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………....…293 vi INTRODUCTION Today, some sixty years after the world witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust, the abhorrent phenomenon of genocide continues to plague mankind. In the half-century following the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in which the international community committed itself to ―liberate mankind from such an odious scourge,‖1 the world has experienced some of the bloodiest decades in the, perennially brutal, annals of human history. Here, at the dawn of the third millennium, the modern consciousness is dominated by twenty-four hour news cycles. The latest murder mysteries and political scandals are played on loop, while stories covering catastrophic complex emergencies, such as the one currently transpiring in the Darfur region of Sudan, are largely shuffled under the mat. Such stories simply don‘t compete in the ratings with those covering missing girls, sex or corporate scandals and the economy; much less with the never-ending string of reality shows. Perhaps we have become numb to stories of such violence in the wake of the unprecedentedly brutal twentieth century. Maybe we safely file these images away into the back of our consciousness, believing that they are other peoples‘ problems in some dark, far corner of the world. We live in an epoch popularly referred to as the information age, in which infinite knowledge is at our fingertips. Yet, presented with this unprecedented smorgasbord of knowledge and 1 Samantha Power, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), 59, 330-334. 1 2 information, the fingertips of the developed world overwhelmingly choose to consume the basest material that the information age has to offer: reality shows, sports, video games, rap music, pornography, online gambling, et cetera, ad nauseum. Due to the effects of globalization and the myriad of technologies that tie people together like never before, the world is shrinking into a global community. As a result of the Holocaust and the subsequent cases of mass murder that occurred in the years since (such as those examined in this analysis), public awareness of genocide is also at an all time historical high. Unfortunately, for the reasons discussed above, the great mass of people choose to turn their head the other way when faced with such horrific revelations about the plight of their human brethren. Having said this, there is a vigilant minority who are working hard, in their own way, to eliminate this blight from the human condition. The following analysis is an attempt to fight this good fight, ultimately against the very existence of genocide itself, but in the process it hopes to also battle against the widespread apathy and ignorance that pervades the popular psyche when it comes to this important subject. In approach, Part 1 works toward an understanding of genocide using case studies to examine it in its particulars. Then, using a comparative approach, Part 2 endeavors to draw a number of more far-reaching conclusions. Before we delve into the specific cases, a few preliminary issues need to be addressed. First, the obvious overarching question with regard to the propriety of this analysis, why is such a study important? Author Adam Jones speaks to this question, writing: ―First and foremost, if you are concerned about issues of peace, human rights, and social justice, there is a sense that with genocide you are confronting the ‗Big One,‘ what Joseph Conrad called the ‗heart of darkness.‘ That can be deeply intimidating and disturbing. It can even make you feel trivial and powerless. But genocide is the opposite of trivial. Whatever energy and commitment you invest in understanding 3 genocide will be directed towards comprehending and confronting one of humanity‘s greatest scourges.‖2 Thus, in its small way, this analysis is an attempt to comprehend genocide and, in so doing, to confront it. To this end, this volume focuses on three specific states in which genocide was perpetrated in the post-Holocaust era, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia. Conceptually it varies somewhat from similar studies in the nature of its approach. Specifically, as the title implies, Part 1 includes a complete historiography of each of the three sample countries. This is far broader than the traditional lens through which genocide is most often examined, which focuses on the narrower set of events and circumstances that directly surround it. The long historical perspective out of which the circumstances were born is often only given lip service in a few preliminary paragraphs, where broad generalizations are drawn. This is in no way an indictment of that approach or a dismissal of the huge body of invaluable research drawn on this model. Instead, it offers an alternative that aspires to broaden understanding on the whole. Essentially, Part 1 of this analysis includes the narrative of three rich and unique regions, whose journeys share a tragic period of rending that irreparably changed their futures and, I would say, the way that humanity perceives itself in the postmodern world. My aim is to paint a broad enough historical picture that the reader will be able to draw their own conclusions with regard to the root causes of genocide in each case. In other words, I am creating a framework for understanding each of the three cases, from a historical perspective. Further, my hope is that that the depth and structure of the information covered is such that it can both serve as a foundation and 2 Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006), xviii. 4 springboard for those scholars to whom it is new, and still be informative to those who are familiar with the cases. I recognize and accept the possible criticism that such an approach could draw. Primarily, that the breadth of the material covered goes far beyond the scope of our focal point, the genocides that took place in each of the sample countries during the second half of the twentieth century. I would argue