Darfur: BackgroundDarfur: Western Sudan, 40% of Sudanese population

Land disputes between semi-nomadic livestock herders & those who practiced agriculture

1991, Zaghawa people of Sudan victims of Arab apartheid

DLF attacked Golo in 2003; Entry of the dreaded Janjaweed

The Other View

• Sudan for long has remained under the NIF regime.• Legacy of exploitation- in the south’s oil rich region,

to secure operations of international oil companies• In Darfur, the NIF pursued a deliberate policy of

human destruction, targeting ethnically African populations that had rebelled against, or were victims of, decades of political and economic marginalization.

• Complicity of oil companies from Canada, Sweden, China, Malaysia, India, Austria

• Geopolitical angle

• Casualties:– UN figure: 70000 dead (disputed)– Latest estimates put the figure close to 461000– 2.85 million displaced– Many continue to die of disease and hunger

• Darfur Peace Agreement (2011) was proposed by the Joint Mediators at the Doha Peace Forum.

• The proposed document included provisions for a Darfuri Vice-President and more administrative rights.

• Concept of nation, nation state, citizenship, community

• Genocide: Why they begin, how the progress, why they end

• What drives people to such violence?

In context: Nation, State and Nation State

Nation• refers only to a socio-cultural entity, a union of people sharing who can

identify culturally and linguistically. This concept does not necessarily consider formal political unions.

State • to a legal/political entity that is comprised of the following: a) a

permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) a government ; and d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states

Nation state• A political unit consisting of an autonomous state inhabited

predominantly by a people sharing a common culture, history, and language.

Genocide

The crime of genocide is defined in international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide

• Killing members of the group• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Working Definition

The intentional physical destruction, in whole or in part, of a group as defined by the perpetrator and carried out by the state or other recognized authority.

UN Genocide Convention- restricts victim groups to the categories of `national, ethnical , racial or religious’ and leaves out political, sexual and other groups

Nation State

Tells us who we are

Provides with a promise to get through a normal day without a violent confrontation with another person, family, clan or tribe.

Because the state holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violent force

It provides the benefit of reigning in human propensities for aggression

The idea of the "nation" becomes the individual's primary identity point of reference – Mark Levene

• Subordinate All Other Groups• Each individual is a subject of the state and the state is

under no obligation to recognize an individual's membership in any other group when it comes to that individual's rights and obligations to the state.

• In the political realm, the state's primacy is absolute. Any individual or group that would challenge this absolute authority exposes itself to the state's monopoly of violent force.

Premium on Social Coherence• States push individuals/groups to assimilate

to ideals of a nation—the notion of a collective and unified community. The idea of the nation "standardizes" individuals.

• Groups that refuse to assimilate national values may be encapsulated or, if this is not possible, they may be targeted for persecution

Drive for Development and Totalizing• The responsibility of state is to not merely to provide a

secure basis for living, it will constantly seek to improve health and productivity of society

• State seek to mobilize all aspects of life toward these goals-this push towards progress can become totalizing

• Groups or individuals that dissent or resist the state's goals and efforts must reckon with the state's monopoly of violent force.

Bottom Line :• Genocide is not some aberration external to the modern

age of nation-states. • Quite the contrary, the very processes that have created

the conditions for the modern nation-state also created the conditions of genocide.

Citizenship (T H Marshall)

• Civil element :– rights necessary for individual freedom such as liberty of the

person, freedom of speech, thought and faith, the right to own property and to conclude valid contracts, as well as the right to justice.

• Political element – right to participate in political power as a member of the

political body or as an elector of the members of such a body.• Social element

– right to economic welfare and security, the right to fully share social heritage, and the right to live life according to the standard in the society

Janus faced Citizenship

Relationship between the individual and state.As Melanie Philips has put it “There appears to be a great yearning for it, even though no one actually knows what it is”Thus citizenship was analysed by many researchers to act as an integrating force in the society.

Defending one’s own community and country is often perceived as an ultimate citizen’s duty, in fact, to die as well as to kill for the sake of the homeland or the nation (Yuval-Davis )

Feminist Ruth Lister says, “ There is a janus faced nature of citizenship for it “operates simultaneously as a mechanism of both inclusion and exclusion and also as a language of both discipline and resistance

to naturalize poor and black agony, distress and death”

• Hurricane Katrina devastation in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 28, 2005

Global Citizenship (Nira Davis Yuval)

Davis pointed out that in this era of globalisation, the relationship between citizens and states and civil societies keeps on changing.

A new perspective of “global citizenship”

She stated that citizenship can be comprehended as “multi-tier construct” to understand people’s membership in a variety of collectivities at the local, ethnic, national and transnational levels

CommunityAnderson falls into the “historicist”“modernist” school of nationalism along with Ernest Geller and Eric Hobsbawm in that he posits that nations and nationalism are products of modernity and have been created as means to political and economic ends. Most influential contemporary literature on Nationalism

• Anderson’s definition of the nation as an “imagined community”• As Anderson puts it, a nation "is imagined because the members of even the

smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion“

• Members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinityEx: the nationhood felt with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympic Games

An Anthropological Perspective• Humans sacrifice their own self interest

for unrelated individuals even for abstract ideals

• Such groups naturally feel solidarity and feel some degree of exclusiveness

• Most universal way of constructing-’brethren & sistren’

• Benedict points this as ‘Double edged sword’-Good subjects but also good soldiers.-Indulgence in group hates-Human problem stem from excess solidarity not excess individualism

Also sacrifice lives willingly for their social groups(not only loyal soldiers but also punks in street)

Social solidarity constructed via religion/festivals/shared cultural

knowledge

-Called ‘Culture’ -Define ‘Ethnic Groups’

Nations draw on every mechanism to create the ‘imagined communities’

Why They Begin

Nation Building

• Homogenization of society• State sponsored genocide: Turkish Committee of Union & Progress decided to eliminate

Armenians• Pre emptive strike to defang real or imagined threats to State authority: Cambodia under

Khmer Rouge • Centrality of political leaders: Saddam Hussein’s Baathist credo; Mao Zedong; Agha Khan

Why They Begin

Acute ethnic conflict or intensive prejudice against a group

• Holocaust (anti Semitic), Rwanda (Hutu-Tutsi)• Hatred doesn’t lead to systematic slaughter

without political mobilization: Turkish acts

How they are implemented

Temporal classification

• Focused: a single, time bounded assault• American bombing at Hiroshima, Nagasaki

• Iterative, a series of assaults• Initiate – halt - relaunch• Rwanda : 1963 – 1964 - 1994

• Systemic, continual and drawn out• Integral part of a regime• Germany during Nazi period

Means and methods

Depends on:

• Perpetrator’s character, their conception of the victims, available technological means, perceived time pressure

Rwanda : poor, underdeveloped

• Locked people in houses, starved to death• Killed with clubs, machetes• Less guns, bullets

Means and methods

Cambodia – Khmer Rouge

• Planned starvation

Germany – modern technology

• Gas chambers• Inefficient• not economically rational – required transportation• Liked to think they were disinfecting the world

• assembly line killing

Why They EndInternational Political Environment’s Crucial Context:

4 dimensions:• Legal: Is mass murder legally proscribed• Rhetorical: Is mass murder publicly discussed and loudly condemned by

media, govts, people• Action: Are outside actors/states/organizations permissive toward mass

murdering or do they intervene to stop• Hortatory: Do outsider actors overtly or covertly actually support leaders

who commit mass murders

How they end:• The perpetrators reached their goal: Turks annihilation of Armenians• There was internal change owing to the leader’s death- • The state lost war that was waged against them- Pakistan ceased killing

Bengalis

Bangladesh Liberation War

• Operation Searchlight1. 1970 Pakistan parliamentary elections2. Awami league and Pakistan Peoples’ Party tiff3. Carried out by Pakistan army (then west Pakistan) to

curb the bengali nationalist movement4. Plan was to take control of major cities in East

Pakistan within one month through murder, rape and torture by Pakistani militia and autorities.

5. indiscriminate killings of students of Dhaka University

6. women were raped, tortured and killed during the war

It is estimated that between 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 civilians were killed in Bangladesh, and up to four hundred thousand women raped by the Pakistani

armed forces especially Bengali Hindus.As a result of the conflict, a further eight to ten million people fled the country

at the time to seek refuge in neighbouring India

Blood Telegram:

(March 27, 1971), Blood wrote about American observations at Dhaka under the subject heading "Selective genocide”

1. Here in Decca we are mute and horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak[istani] Military. Evidence continues to mount that the MLA authorities have list of AWAMI League supporters whom they are systematically eliminating by seeking them out in their homes and shooting them down2. Among those marked for extinction in addition to the A.L. hierarchy are student leaders and university faculty. In this second category we have reports that Fazlur Rahman head of the philosophy department and a Hindu, M. Abedin, head of the department of history, have been killed. Razzak of the political science department is rumored dead. Also on the list are the bulk of MNA's elect and number of MPA's.3. Moreover, with the support of the Pak[istani] Military. non-Bengali Muslims are systematically attacking poor people's quarters and murdering Bengalis and Hindus.(U.S. Consulate (Dacca) Cable, Selective genocide, March 27, 1971

• General Tikka Khan earned the nickname 'Butcher of Bengal' due to the widespread atrocities he committed.

• His orders to his troops were: 'I want the land not the people...' Major General Farman had written in his table diary, "Green land of East Pakistan will be painted red". It was painted red by Bengali blood.

• Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on 27 March 1971 expressed full support of her government for the independence struggle of the people of East Pakistan.

• The Indian government repeatedly appealed to the international community

• The Indian leadership under Prime Minister Gandhi quickly decided that it was more effective to end the genocide by taking armed action against Pakistan than to simply give refuge to those who made it across to refugee camps.

• Exiled East Pakistan army officers and members of the Indian Intelligence immediately started using these camps for recruitment and training of Mukti Bahini guerrillas.

Prevention & Intervention

Psychosocial Model:• Primary Prevention: • Addressing historic animosities and patterns of disparity• Promoting positive relation between groups (more contact, celebrating differences,

personalization, de-stereotyping• Education

• Secondary Prevention:• International aid to communities in crises (social, political, economic,

environmental)• Intervention: When everything fails, armed intervention may be necessitated

(Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Violence, 1997)• Post Genocide Intervention:

• Aid to victims• Bring perpetrators to justice- This has not been attempted consistently.• Truth Commission

Efforts to form global community based on co operation , non violent conflict resolution, human rights and peace.

Reference- Journal of Genocide Research (2005),7,(1)- Linda Woolf & Michael Hulsizer