Theoretical Paper: Traditional Methods of Avoiding Genocidal Slaughter

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There are many ways of defining genocide. If we want to limit ourselves to the gigantic mass slaughters that successfully attempted to physically wipe out a whole or most of a category of people defined by their ethnicity, religion, or nationality, then such events are rare. The best known examples in the twentieth century – Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Jews in Nazi occupied parts of Europe, Tutsis in Rwanda – were unusual events. The numbers killed were huge, but each case seems almost unique. If we extend the definition to include mass killings on the basis of supposed economic class, particularly the murder and deadly deportations of kulaks by Stalin, or the deaths of city people and those “infected” by Vietnamese thinking by the Khmer Rouge, we are still talking about catastrophes caused by very unusual circumstances. But to limit ourselves to such huge cases obscures the fact that mass slaughter of non-combatants in all kinds of internal and cross-border wars has been much more common; moreover, even in small scale stateless societies in conflict with each other, we know that there were occasional massacres of whole villages, clans, or tribes.

We should enlarge the meaning of the term “genocidal” by including cases in which a large proportion of people in a particular group, including non-combatants, died because of deliberate action, even where the number killed was smaller, or the massacres more localized than in the famous big cases. In many colonial wars, including the slaughter of indigenous people in the Americas and Africa, the outcomes were certainly genocidal, even when the total number killed was in the low thousands rather than hundreds of thousands or millions. What about when the people in one town have been slaughtered, every last one of them? Was this full-fledged genocide if the rest of that ethnic or religious group was then left alone? Perhaps not, but we should still analyze such events within the same framework. These tragedies were genocidal for those who were killed just because they were in that town, village, tribe, or clan.

The question is not simply one of scholastic definition. Could we classify what happened in Srebrenica in 1995, when Serbian soldiers slaughtered most of the Muslim men and boys over a certain age in cold blood as genocide? Historically, such events were far from unusual. We know that Greeks and Romans engaged in such practices from time to time, and the historical record of every civilization has its share of them. The Hebrew Bible describes genocidal events, as do other foundation tales about the origins of many agrarian states from Sparta to Shaka’s nineteenth century Zulu empire. Ethnographic evidence about pre-state societies shows that many experienced genocidal episodes, though usually most warfare at that level was more limited (Chirot and McCauley, 2006).

If we demand a definition of genocide that is too tightly circumscribed, and includes only the most extreme cases, we lose sight of the more common slaughters such as that of the innocent residents of the city of Béziers in 1209 during the Albigensian Crusade, of members of Confucian families hunted down by a vengeful Ming Emperor in the early fifteenth century, or of Congolese villagers in parts of Ituri in the Congo in the twenty-first century, targeted because they were of the “wrong” ethnic group (Niel, 1955: 79; Chan, 1988: 196-202; Human Rights Watch, 2003).

On the other hand, if we make our definition too broad, then all sorts of small-scale tragedies could be defined as genocidal, and the term loses its meaning entirely. If a certain number of civilians are killed in a war – and in every war there are always some such deaths – but there is no intent to wipe out a particular category of non-combatants just for the sake of killing them, then the event, however unfortunate, is not genocidal. Thus, to take an extreme example, the bombings that killed so many Germans and Japanese during World War II could not be considered genocidal in so far as they were meant to defeat these countries by destroying their capacity to fight wars. We can debate whether or not the bombing of Dresden by Anglo-American forces in 1945 was against a non-military target, in which case it could be labeled a case of mass murder of civilians, or whether it was because Dresden was a legitimate transportation hub contributing to the German war effort, in which case the civilians deaths were, in a sense, incidental. (Pape, 1995 takes the conventional, former view, while Taylor, 2004 argues the latter.) The fact is that once they had surrendered, there was no mass slaughter of German or Japanese civilians. This is quite different from the order given by the Japanese high command to rape, torture, and kill hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in Nanjing at the end of 1937 after that city had surrendered, or, to take an older example, the massacre of civilians in Jerusalem by the First Crusade after the city had fallen (Chang, 1998; Runciman, 1964: 286-287). In those cases, the massacres clearly had a genocidal character. Chinese civilians in Nanjing were targeted because they happened to be Chinese in Nanjing, and Jews and Muslims, including women and children, were slaughtered in Jerusalem because of what they were, not because they were still fighting.

We should therefore limit ourselves to deliberate genocidal massacres in which all those in that category were targets, whether fighters or not. This has happened many times in the past, and continues in several parts of the world. Yet, compared to the number of violent conflicts between states, civil was, wars between tribes, clans, or villages, or those between religiously defined groups, such politically inspired massacres have been much less frequent than the number of conflicts themselves. Most wars do not result in genocidal massacres, even localized ones, and the killing of non-combatants has been fairly limited. At first glance, we might be tempted to say that this is natural. But a quick look at the causes of genocidal slaughters would suggest that in fact genocidal massacres as we have defined them ought to be more common.

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