Genocide and Religion

7/28/2019 Genocide and Religion

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My takes on genocide

How and under what circumstances Religious ideas and movements can become

pernicious?

Many believe that one needs food and nutrition for body, and religion for soul. Religion is

always synonymous with peace and justice. No holy book ever ordered people to commit

crimes, lie, cheat and create havoc on earth. As a matter of fact, religion is always considered

the good. Nevertheless, can a religion who calls for peace and justice be manipulated and

used to commit evil deeds such as genocide? Well, if we examine history, we will see that the

churches involved in many massacres and atrocities during the medieval and early modern

eras. Many thought that the churches would have acted differently following the Enlightment

of the eighteenth century. However, the churches rejected the humanistic and liberalizing

ideas of the Enlightment. Although, the Enlightment brought the idea of sovereignty, which

one can see clearly in the American and French revolutions. In the twentieth centuries the

number of civilian victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing is estimated between 60 and 120

million, which differing quantitatively and qualitatively from the massacres and atrocities of

the pre-modern age. During the twentieth century, the quest for ethnically defined nations

began. Ethnic dominance within a nation was an important issue. And many ethnic groups

competed to be the dominant one within their nation, and the situation was often solved by a

war, or an act of genocide. Religion, in some instances, provides or cements the sense of

identity of the ethnic group.

Despite the widespread trends of secularization in the twentieth century, religion has played

an important role in several outbreaks of genocide. The examples provided in the next part,


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will illustrate the relation between religion and state-organized murder, the examples of

Rwanda, Bosnia, and Armenian genocides will shed some light on the fact that religion was

used as a justification or/and a tool to commit a heinous act.

This paper will also include many specific examples of how religion could be used to harm

individuals and societies, and a collection of early warning signs that tells us what to watch

out for when trouble may lie on the horizon.

Rwanda

The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's

Tutsis and Hutu political moderates by Hutus under the Hutu Power ideology. Over the course

of approximately 100 days, from the 6 of April through mid-July, at least 500,000 people

were killed. Most estimates indicate a death toll between 800,000 and 1,000,000.

What was the role of the Rwandan churches during this genocide? To answer this question,

one must examine the roots of Christianity in Rwanda. From the beginning, the churches in

Rwanda created and kept a racially divided society. After independence, the churches stood as

important centers of social, economic, and political power. The churches however, did not use

their power to support the rights of the population; the churches were part of wider structures

of power that allowed wealth to become concentrated in the hands of a selected few. The

churches worked side by side with the state to keep the stats-quo, to keep the exact settings

that led to genocide. Although, the Rwandan churches never publicly endorsed genocide, the

churches nevertheless are complicit because they helped to create and maintain the

authoritarian and divided society that made genocide possible. The church and state in


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Rwanda were not separated, which makes the church an equal partner in regard to the state

policies.

What do watch for?

Religion should never be used to legitimate, endorse and motivate genocide publicly

or secretly, the Christian churches in Rwanda involved on several levels in preparing

the theological, moral, political, and mythical ground work for genocide. Christianity

(the white fathers mission stations) was implanted in Rwanda by allying Christianity

first and foremost with political authority. The churches in Rwanda adopted a system

that kept a time-bomb ticking; they created a racially divided society that finally

exploded in 1994 with the mass killing of roughly on million human beings in the

course of 100 days. Religion should never be a tool to validate an ideology and a

political trend, and for sure it should not use to divide societies.

Bosnia

Bosnian Genocide is a term used to refer to the genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces in

Srebrenica in 1995,and to ethnic cleansing that took place between 1992 and 1995. As we all

know, this ethnic cleansing was conducted in the name of religion. Serbs Christian Orthodox

committed genocide in order to be the dominant ethnicity in Bosnia.

The story began on 1389, a war between Serbs and Ottomans, prince Lazar vs. sultan Murad.

This war ended with the defeat of Serbs and becoming part of the Ottoman Empire for the

next 500 years. Serbs always saw themselves as Christian, and see those Slavic people who

converted to Islam are traitors. They referred to them as Turks, in other word, the enemy. The


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problem intensified when Milosevic started to refer to the Muslims as the other, and that it

is a holy duty to cleanse the land from these Turks/Muslim Slavic people.

Roughly 200,000 people were killed, 12,000 of them children, up to 50,000 women were

raped, and 2.2 million were forced to flee their homes. This was a veritable genocide and

sociocide.

What to watch for?

It seems like religion was used in this situation as an identity. What we see here is a case

of religion fanaticism, which was criticized since the Enlightment

Here we have two groups, look the same, talk the same language and share the same heritage

and cultural background. However, one group associate themselves with a religion and their

identity became synonymous with this religion, while the other group was the competition, or

the other that should be eliminated, in order to become the dominant ethnic group. It is a

dangerous thing to associate ones identity with a certain religion. Throughout history, many

massacres and atrocities was committed due to religious rivalry. The sign of trouble here is a

religiously divide society, with a political power fueling this division in the name of religion.

Religion should be used to unit people, not to divide them.

Armenia

The genocide of over a million of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire, in eastern

Anatolia in 1915, happened because of the conflict between two nationalities, a struggle

between two peoples over a single peace of territory. The massacre of Armenians was not

religiously motivated, even though the victims of this massacre were from a different religion.


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It was conducted by a collapsing Empire that fears the other will do them harm. There was

a need to establish a country for the Turks; however, it was a threat that the Turkish towns and

villages were filled with Armenian nationals. The Ottomans used excessive violence against

the perceived Armenians danger and by 1915, roughly a million and a half Armenians were

perished. The genocide provided the base for a Turkish Republic in Anatolia.

What to watch for?

Armenian genocide is one of the first modern-era genocides. In this case, religious

fanaticism increased precisely at a time when religion being replaced by strident

nationalism as the focus of collective identity, in the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. It

was this process that generated the genocide policies against the Armenians.

To conclude this paper, by studying and researching these cases of genocide, one

can see the causes and the early warning signs, so that , we could do a better job

stopping acts of genocides, even before it occurs

Reference

Bartov, O. and Mack, P. (2001), In God's Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century

(New York: Berghahn Books).

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Genocide and Religion