The evolving narrative of denial: the Fraser government and the Timorese genocide, 1975–1980

As research by the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor documents, the years 1975–1980 constituted the worst period of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, during which grave human rights took place involving a high loss of life. In Australia, the government headed by Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (1975–1983) sought to present itself as a supporter of human rights and the international rule of law. It also prioritized relations with the Suharto regime, which it saw as key to its policy position in Southeast Asia. These two positions came into conflict due to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The Fraser government therefore worked to propagate a narrative concerning East Timor which denied the seriousness of the situation, distorted the historical narrative, deflected blame from Indonesia, and depicted the Australian position as principled and realistic. This paper examines the development of this narrative as events progressed and information concerning the crisis in East Timor came to the attention of the outside world. It also examines how the Fraser government employed this narrative internationally in order to protect the Suharto regime from scrutiny.     

Australia and the Secretive Exploitation of the Chatham Islands to 1842

The European discovery of the Chatham Islands in 1791 resulted in significant consequences for its indigenous Moriori people. The colonial Australian influence on the Chathams has received little scholarly attention. This article argues that the young colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land led the exploitation of the archipelago before its annexation to New Zealand in 1842. The Chathams became a secretive outpost of the colonial economy, especially the sealing trade. Colonial careering transformed the islands: environmental destruction accompanied economic exploitation, with deleterious results for the Moriori. When two Māori iwi (tribes) from New Zealand’s North Island invaded in 1835, Moriori struggled to respond as a consequence of the colonial encounter. Mobility and technology gained from the Australian colonies enabled and influenced the invasion itself, and derogatory colonial stereotypes about Aboriginal peoples informed the genocide that ensued. Hence this article writes the Chathams into Australian history and Australia into Chathams history, showing that discussions of the early colonial economy, environment, and genocide must consider the wider South Pacific context in conjunction with events internal to the colonies.     

Organic purity and the role of anthropology in Cambodia and Rwanda

Straus investigates the ideology of two genocidal regimes in the developing world: the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Hutu Power in Rwanda. Although the regimes were quite different - one Communist, the other nationalist - he argues that their ideals converged around a notion of organic purity. Both regimes pursued extraordinary violence to meet the ideal: mass destruction was a method to achieve organic purity. Straus further contends that anthropological writings provided the necessary ideational building blocks for this ideal. In promoting a violent return to a mythic past, both murderous regimes embraced the images and concepts of European archaeology and ethnography.     

The politics of genocide scholarship: the case of Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

The massive communal violence that occurred in East Pakistan in 1971 received worldwide attention at the time, but has been largely ignored since. Some scholars and other writers have denied that what took place in Bangladesh was a genocide. Journalists’ reports, expatriate testimony, refugee reports and an investigation by the International Commission of Jurists in 1972 all indicate, however, that the Pakistani army did commit genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. The political and ideological circumstances that led to the secession of East Pakistan were conducive to religious and ethnic genocide. Beachler examines the treatment by memoirists and scholars of the 1971 crisis in East Pakistan and seeks to explain the reasons why the genocide in Bangladesh has been largely ignored since the early 1970s. No ideological or partisan faction in the United States has stood to gain much from the study of the Bangladesh genocide. And the governments of Bangladesh and Pakistan have not been interested in promoting study of the mass murder and rapes that took place in 1971.     

The curious case of Ali Cenani Bey: the story of a génocidaire during and after the 1915 Armenian genocide

While there exists an extensive body of literature addressing the Armenian genocide, certain gaps persist. The processes and events of the genocide have been unearthed and examined, but genocide is not a phenomenon set in motion by a force of nature. On the contrary, the systematic destruction of Ottoman Armenians was designed and executed by a cadre of individuals, most of whom are little known today. Kurt’s aim here is to recover the story of one such actor from a particular town, Aintab, modern-day Gaziantep—situated on the boundaries of Cilicia (today the southern part of Anatolia) and Syria, near both the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Alexandretta—thereby revealing the perpetrators and their active involvement in the destruction of Armenians at the local/provincial level. Kurt’s article seeks to shed light on such a perpetrator by analysing the objective features of his background and career. Highlighting the human dimension of the genocide allows for an examination of the actors—their motives and their acts—that ultimately bore responsibility for the catastrophic loss of life. Kurt focuses on the life story of Ali Cenani (1872–1934): his background and involvement in the 1915 Armenian deportation and genocide as well as his career in post-genocide Turkey.     

Bosnia on the Border? Republican Violence in Northern Ireland During the 1920s and 1970s

Unionist politicians have argued that Republican political violence on the Irish border, during both the partition of Ireland and more recent Northern Ireland conflict, constituted ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Protestant/Unionist community in those areas. These views have been bolstered by an increasingly ambivalent scholarly literature that has failed to adequately question the accuracy of these claims. This article interrogates the ethnic cleansing/genocide narrative by analysing Republican violence during the 1920s and the 1970s. Drawing from a wide range of theoretical literature and archival sources, it demonstrates that Republican violence fell far short of either ethnic cleansing or genocide, (in part) as a result of the perpetrators’ self-imposed ideological constraints. It also defines a new interpretive concept for the study of violence: functional sectarianism. This concept is designed to move scholarly discussion of political and sectarian violence beyond the highly politicised and moral cul-de-sacs that have heretofore characterised the debate, and has implications for our understanding of political violence beyond Ireland.     

The politics of memory and commemoration: Armenian diasporic reflections on 2015

The centenary year of the Armenian genocide witnessed an escalation in cultural production and both political and academic focus. This paper looks at some of the sites and spaces, physical and discursive, in which the centenary was marked. In particular, it seeks to assess how the centenary has challenged and possibly altered the context within which we approach the genocide and its continuing legacies. The paper is positioned in the diasporic space – while recognizing that this is fluid and embodies transnational sites between “homelands” in the form of Armenia and Turkey, and “host states” where diaspora communities have resided (at least) since the genocide, in effect their homes. This paper attempts to pick out some of the themes apparent in the discourse and in the activities during 2015, from the perspective of Armenian diasporan actors, and is based on the author’s observations and participation in centenary events in the USA, Lebanon, Turkey, Switzerland, and the UK, as well as interviews with participants and organizers.     

The use of material culture to establish the ethnic identity of victims in genocide investigations: a validation study from the American Southwest*

Successful prosecution of genocide requires that the victims constitute one of four protected groups: national, religious, ethnic, or racial. Establishing victim identity in prior trials has relied on positive identification of decedents, been largely presumptive, or was based on untested methodology. This report details a validation study of one untested method: the use of material culture in establishing ethnic identity. Classes of clothing and personal effects were scored on 3,430 individuals of known Hispanic or White ancestry from autopsy records in New Mexico. Significant differences were seen in evidence of language, nationality, and religious affiliation between the two groups, as well as clothing types and currency. Predictive models used to estimate ethnic identity in random, blind subsets produced an overall accuracy of 81.5% and estimates of 61-98% in specific subsets. Results suggest material culture, when present, can provide reliable evidence of ethnic affinity in genocide investigations.     

THE CRIMINOLOGY OF GENOCIDE: THE DEATH AND RAPE OF DARFUR

Nearly 400,000 Africans may have been killed in racially motivated, lethally destructive, state supported, and militarily unjustified attacks on the farms and villages of the Darfur region of Sudan. Using victimization survey data collected from Darfurian survivors living in refugee camps in Chad, and drawing on conflict theory, we present evidence that the Sudanese government has directly supported violent killings and rapes in a lethally destructive exercise of power and control. In the language of the Geneva Genocide Convention, these attacks have inflicted on African tribal groups "conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part." The data include explicit evidence of the central mediating role played by racism in the attacks. There is little or no evidence from the surveys to support the claim of the Sudanese government that the attacks have been aimed at rebel groups as a counter-insurgency strategy. The Sudanese government claims are by this analysis not credible as self-defense arguments, but rather of the exercise of power and control through denial. Further forms of such denial are considered, including the slowness of modern American criminology to advance the study of genocide.     

AGE,GENDER, AND THE CRIME OF CRIMES: TOWARD A LIFE‐COURSE THEORY OF GENOCIDE PARTICIPATION*

This article asks whether genocide follows the age and gender distributions common to other crime. We develop and test a life‐course model of genocide participation to address this question using a new dataset of 1,068,192 cases tried in Rwanda's gacaca courts. Three types of prosecutions are considered: 1) inciting, organizing, or supervising violence; 2) killings and other physical assaults; and 3) offenses against property. By relying on systematic graphic comparisons, we find that the peak age of those tried in the gacaca courts was 34 years at the time of the genocide, which is older than the peak age for most other types of crime. We likewise find that women were more likely to participate in crimes against property and comparatively unlikely to commit genocidal murder. Symbolic–interactionist explanations of crime suggest people desist from crime as a result of shared understandings of the expectations of adulthood. We argue that this process may be turned on its head during genocide as participants may believe they are defending their communities against a perceived threat. Thus, in contrast to other criminological theories suggesting that people must desist from crime to be accorded adult status, some adults may participate in genocide to fulfill their duties as adult men.