State-led killings and Justice: How to prosecute the enthusiastic masses

Cambodia is having its first -- and some imagine its only -- trial for the atrocities committed under Pol Pot. (There are, however, four others from the senior leadership awaiting trial). A school teacher turned torturer, Kaing Guek Eav, whose nom de guerre was Duch, oversaw the Tuol Sleng prison. The Khmer Rouge embarked on a four year spree of killing from 1975-1979, as part of the regime's attempt to construct a utopian society and bring the country back to "Year Zero," to take it back to a time unsullied by a petty bourgeois sentiment.

The Khmer Rouge regime brutalized its population, killing over 1.7 million, according to the New York Times accounting. The killing stopped upon a Vietnamese invasion and occupation of the governmental structures. One obstacle to swift justice in the case of the Khmer Rouge has been the fact that the party and its members are still active in Cambodian politics.

So how to feel about a defandant facing trial so many years after the crimes were committed? This was 30 years ago. Duch is an old man (okay, he's 66, but he looks much older). He is weak and, one might say, rather pathetic looking. He's also, in the minds of some of his victims, lucky. He gets food and television time. He has a lawyer. He will not be put to death, since his trial is under the auspices of an odd tribunal that includes the UN as a sponsoring institution.

Others, though, feel sorry for him and urge us all to see his humanity. In a remarkable op-ed for the New York Times, academic Francois Bizot recounts his own incarceration by the Khmer Rouge although he was protected by Duch even as his two assistants were murdered. Bizot writes:

It could be that forgiveness is possible after a simple, natural process, when the victim feels that he has been repaid. And the executioner has to pay dearly, for it is the proof of his suffering that eases ours.

Let us not fool ourselves. Beyond the crimes that Duch committed against humanity, those of the Khmer Rouge will also be judged. And beyond the crimes of the Khmer Rouge, the capacity of the tribunals to mete out justice will be tested, as well as our ability to judge man himself, and history. We shall all be at the trial — not just as judges, but also as victims, and the accused.

All of this gets me thinking about how justice is meted out to the perpetrators of genocides and mass murder events (some categorize the Khmer Rouge as genocidal, others describe it as *merely* a mass murderous regime). Clearly, more than 5 people carried out the murders from 1975-1979. Yet we generally find fault with the higher ups, not the rank and file.

Mahmood Mamdani observes in his book When Victims Become Killers that academics in particular are very wary of allocating blame to mass populations -- that somehow we focus on elite actions, enticements and planning to the detriment of accuracy -- that genocide can also be a popular and desired event by mass populations. Notably, his book considers the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This was an event that has been characterized by observers as remarkably popular. Philip Gourevitch refers to the Rwandan genocide as "an exercise in community building." (95)

One notable caveat to this is some work on the Holocaust. For example, Daniel Goldhagen's very controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners specifically ties the targeting of the Jewish population during the Holocaust to a pernicious history of German anti-Semitism. Yet this mass based element -- the argument that the Holocaust occurred because of a large generalized cultural history, rather than necessarily Hitler's mobilization -- is one reason why his book is so controversial.

Welcome

This blog was inspired by a series of blogs written by my students during a course I taught that explored comparative genocide. The idea that we can subject genocides, ethnic cleansing events, and mass killings to systematic analytical and scholarly inquire surprised my students. In the course of teaching the class, I began to find more and more linkages in genocidal or mass killing events that occurred across cultures, regime type, and historical experience.

I also discovered a meta-politics of genocide: political concerns such as Holocaust or genocide denial, perceptions of perpetrators, and the capabilities or interest of outside forces to intervene or seek justice excite passions and compel systematic inquiry.

This blog is the beginning of my own effort, and efforts by my co-bloggers, to explore these questions, to assess new literature, and to follow unfolding events.