An incisive look at the causes and consequences of the Rwandan genocide "When we captured Kigali, we thought we would face criminals in the state; instead, we faced a criminal population." So a political commissar in the Rwanda Patriotic Front reflected after the 1994 massacre of as many as one million Tutsis in Rwanda. Underlying his statement was the realization that, though ordered by a minority of state functionaries, the slaughter was performed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, including judges, doctors, priests, and friends. Rejecting easy explanations of the Rwandan genocide as a mysterious evil force that was bizarrely unleashed, When Victims Become Killers situates the tragedy in its proper context. Mahmood Mamdani coaxes to the surface the historical, geographical, and political forces that made it possible for so many Hutus to turn so brutally on their neighbors. In so doing, Mamdani usefully broadens understandings of citizenship and political identity in postcolonial Africa and provides a direction for preventing similar future tragedies.

In this book I will look at the 'ethnic cleansing' of the Muslims by the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and late 1995. This is not to say atrocities were not committed by or against any other parties during the war. But as has been clearly proven the majority was committed by Serbs minority against the Muslims and this was in accordance with an overall policy of the Serbs in pursuit of a Greater Serbia. Thereafter, I will look at the response of the 'international community' towards the conflict and tragedy. This paper will show that the international community throughout the conflict accepted aggression.

Lutheran minister Henry Gerecke was fifty years old when he enlisted as an army chaplain during World War II. At the close of the European theater, Gerecke received his most challenging -assignment: he was sent to Nuremberg to minister to the twenty-one imprisoned Nazi leaders awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Detailed, incisive and emotionally charged, Mission at Nuremberg unearths groundbreaking new research and compelling first-hand accounts to take us deep inside the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, into the very cells of the accused, and the courtroom where they answered to the world for their crimes. These twenty-one Nazis had sat at the right hand of Adolf Hitler: Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank and Ernst Kaltenbrunner were the orchestrators of the most methodical genocide in history. As the drama leading to the court's final judgments unfolds, Townsend brings Henry Gerecke's impossible moral quandary to life. As he worked to form compassionate relationships with these men, how could he preach the gospel of mercy, knowing full well the devastating nature of the atrocities they had committed? And as the day came when he had to escort each of these men to the gallows, what comfort could he offer--and what promises of salvation could he make--to evil itself?

""Ravished Armenia"" and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian is the real-life tale of a teenage Armenian girl who was caught up in the 1915 Armenian genocide, the first genocide in modern history. Mardiganian (1901-1994) witnessed the murder of her family and the suffering of her people at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. Forced to march over fourteen hundred miles, she was sold into slavery. When she escaped to the United States, Mardiganian was then exploited by the very individuals whom she believed might help. Her story was published in book form and then used as the basis for a 1918 feature film, in which she herself starred. The film Ravished Armenia, also known as Auction of Souls, is a graphic retelling of Aurora Mardiganian's story, with the teenager in the central role, supported by Anna Q. Nilsson and Irving Cummings and directed by Oscar Apfel. Only twenty minutes of the film--the first to deal with the Armenian genocide--is known to survive, but it proves to be a stunning production, presenting its story in newsreel style. This revised edition of Anthony Slide's ""Ravished Armenia"" and the Story of Aurora Mardiganian also contains an annotated reprint of Mardiganian's original narrative and, for the first time, the full screenplay. In his introduction, Slide recounts the making of the film and Mardiganian's life in the United States, involving a cast of characters including Henry Morgenthau, Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Oliver Harriman, and film pioneer William Selig. The introduction also includes original comments by Aurora Mardiganian, whom Slide interviewed before her death. Acclaimed Armenian Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, who created a video art installation about Mardiganian in 2007, provides a foreword.

The former head of the United Nations in Sudan reveals for the first time the shocking depths of evil plumbed by those in Khartoum who designed and orchestrated 'the final solution in Darfur' Against A Tide of Evil How One Man Became the Whistleblower to the First Mass Murder of the Twenty-First Century By Dr. Mukesh Kapila When darkness stalked the plains of Africa one man stood alone to face the evil . . . In this no-holds-barred account, the former head of the United Nations in Sudan reveals for the first time the shocking depths of evil plumbed by those who designed and orchestrated 'the final solution' in Darfur. A veteran of humanitarian crisis and ethnic cleansing in Iraq, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, Dr Mukesh Kapila arrived in Sudan in March 2003 having made a promise to himself that if he were ever in a position to stop the mass-killers, they would never triumph on his watch. Against a Tide of Evil is a strident and passionate cri de coeur. It is the deeply personal account of one man driven to extreme action by the unwillingness of those in power to stop mass murder. It explores what empowers a man like Mukesh Kapila to stand up and be counted, and to act alone in the face of global indifference and venality. Kapila's story reads like a knife-edge international thriller as he uses all the powers at his disposal to bring to justice those responsible for the first mass murder of the twenty-first century - the Darfur genocide - and is finally forced to risk all and break every rule to do so.

Once El-Ghusein had escape, he undertook to write the book Martyred Armenia, describing it in the foreword as: "service to the cause of truth and of a people oppressed by the Turks, and also, as I have stated at the close, to defend the faith of Islam against the charge of fanaticism which will be brought against it by Europeans. May God guide us in the right way." The mistreatment of the Armenians in the name of Islam distressed him greatly, and he expressed horror about how his faith was being used to justify the brutality: "Is it right that these imposters, who pretend to be the supports of Islam and the Khilafat, the protectors of the Moslems, should transgress the command of God, transgress the Koran, the Traditions of the Prophet, and humanity? Truly, they have committed an act at which Islam is revolted, as well as all Moslems and all the peoples of the earth, be they Moslems, Christians, Jews, or idolators. As God lives, it is a shameful deed, the like of which has not been done by any people counting themselves as civilised. (wikipedia.org)

Topically diverse essays on American political institutions and practices related to freedom.

Silence has many causes: shame, embarrassment, ignorance, a desire to protect. The silence that has surrounded the atrocities committed against the Jewish population of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during World War II is particularly remarkable given the scholarly and popular interest in the war. It, too, has many causes--of which antisemitism, the most striking, is only one. When, on July 10, 1941, in the wake of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, local residents enflamed by Nazi propaganda murdered the entire Jewish population of Jedwabne, Poland, the ferocity of the attack horrified their fellow Poles. The denial of Polish involvement in the massacre lasted for decades.
Since its founding, the journal "Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History" has led the way in exploring the East European and Soviet experience of the Holocaust. This volume combines revised articles from the journal and previously unpublished pieces to highlight the complex interactions of prejudice, power, and publicity. It offers a probing examination of the complicity of local populations in the mass murder of Jews perpetrated in areas such as Poland, Ukraine, Bessarabia, and northern Bukovina and analyzes Soviet responses to the Holocaust.
Based on Soviet commission reports, news media, and other archives, the contributors examine the factors that led certain local residents to participate in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors; the interaction of Nazi occupation regimes with various sectors of the local population; the ambiguities of Soviet press coverage, which at times reported and at times suppressed information about persecution specifically directed at the Jews; the extraordinary Soviet efforts to document and prosecute Nazi crimes and the way in which the Soviet state's agenda informed that effort; and the lingering effects of silence about the true impact of the Holocaust on public memory and state responses.

From the years leading up to the First World War to the aftermath of the Second, Europe experienced an era of genocide. As well as the Holocaust, this period also witnessed the Armenian genocide in 1915, mass killings in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, and a host of further ethnic cleansings in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe. Crisis of Genocide seeks to integrate these genocidal events into a single, coherent history. Over two volumes, Mark Levene demonstrates how the relationship between geography, nation, and power came to play a key role in the emergence of genocide in a collapsed or collapsing European imperial zone - the Rimlands - and how the continuing geopolitical contest for control of these Eastern European or near-European regions destabilised relationships between diverse and multifaceted ethnic communities who traditionally had lived side by side. An emergent pattern of toxicity can also be seen in the struggles for regional dominance as pursued by post-imperial states, nation-states, and would-be states. Volume II: Annihilation covers the period from 1939 to 1953, particularly focussing on the Second World War, and its aftermath, the Holocaust and its lasting impact, and the latter part of the Stalinist regime. Levene demonstrates that while the attempted Nazi mass murder of the entirety of European Jewry represents the most thoroughgoing and extreme consequence of efforts aimed at political and social reformulation of the Rimlands' arena in particular, the accumulation and concentration of genocidal violence against many 'minority' groups would suggest that anti-Semitism or racism alone is insufficient to provide a comprehensive explanation for genocide.

This is the first major study of the mass sequestration of Armenian property by the Young Turk regime during the 1915 Armenian genocide. It details the emergence of Turkish economic nationalism, offers insight into the economic ramifications of the genocidal process, and describes how the plunder was organized on the ground. The interrelated nature of property confiscation initiated by the Young Turk regime and its cooperating local elites offers new insights into the functions and beneficiaries of state-sanctioned robbery. Drawing on secret files and unexamined records, the authors demonstrate that while Armenians suffered systematic plunder and destruction, ordinary Turks were assigned a range of property for their progress.

Focusing on the major cases of genocide in twentieth-century Europe, including the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and genocide in the former Yugoslavia, as well as mass killing in the Soviet Union, this book outlines the internal and external roots of genocide. Internal causes lie in the rise of radical nationalism and the breakdown of old empires, while external causes lie in the experience of mass violence in European colonial empires. Such roots did not make any case of genocide inevitable, but they did create models for mass destruction. This book enables students to assess the interplay between general causes of violence and the specific crises that accelerated moves towards radical genocidal policies. Chapters on the major cases of twentieth-century European genocide describe and analyse several key themes: acts of genocide; perpetrators, victims and bystanders; and genocide in particular regions. Using the voices of the human actors in genocide, often ignored or forgotten, this volume provides arresting new insights, while the conclusion frames European genocide in a global perspective, giving students an entry point to the discussion of genocide in other continents and historical periods.

Since the mid-nineteenth-century abolition of slavery, the call for reparations for the crime of African enslavement and native genocide has been growing. In the Caribbean, grassroots and official voices now constitute a regional reparations movement. While it remains a fractured, contentious and divisive call, it generates considerable public interest, especially within sections of the community that are concerned with issues of social justice, equity, civil and human rights, education, and cultural identity. The reparations discourse has been shaped by the voices from these fields as they seek to build a future upon the settlement of historical crimes. This is the first scholarly work that looks comprehensively at the reparations discussion in the Caribbean. Written by a leading economic historian of the region, a seasoned activist in the wider movement for social justice and advocacy of historical truth, Britain's Black Debt looks at the origins and development of reparations as a regional and international process. Weaving together detailed historical data on Caribbean slavery and the transatlantic slave trade with legal principles and the politics of postcolonialism, the author sets out a solid academic analysis of the evidence. He concludes that Britain has a case of reparations to answer which the Caribbean should litigate. The presentation of rich empirical historical data on Britain's transatlantic slave economy and society supports the legal claim that chattel slavery as established by the British state and sustained by citizens and governments was understood then as a crime, but political and moral outrage were silenced by the argument that the enslavement of black people was in Britain's national interest. International law provides that chattel slavery as practised by Britain was a crime against humanity. Slavery was invested in by the royal family, the government, the established church, most elite families, and large public institutions in the private and public sector. Citing the legal principles of unjust and criminal enrichment, the author presents a compelling argument for Britain's payment of its black debt, a debt that it continues to deny in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Britain's Black Debt brings together the evidence and arguments that the general public and expert policymakers have long called for. It is at once an exciting narration of Britain's dominance of the slave markets that enriched the economy and a seminal conceptual journey into the hidden politics and public posturing of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. No work of this kind has ever been attempted. No author has had the diversity of historical research skills, national and international political involvement, and personal engagement as an activist to present such a complex yet accessible work of scholarship for both activists and academics.

'In the last couple of years I realised that, as one of the last witnesses, I must speak out.' Tomi Reichental, who lost 35 members of his family in the Holocaust, gives his account of being imprisoned as a child at Belsen concentration camp. He was nine-years old in October 1944 when he was rounded up by the Gestapo in a shop in Bratislava, Slovakia. Along with 12 other members of his family he was taken to a detention camp where the elusive Nazi War Criminal Alois Brunner had the power of life and death. His story is a story of the past. It is also a story for our times. The Holocaust reminds us of the dangers of racism and intolerance, providing lessons that are relevant today.

An allAfrica.com 2011 New & Notable Book In 1998 David Kruiper, the leader of the Khomani San who today live in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, lamented, "We have been made into nothing." His comment applies equally to the fate of all the hunter- gatherer societies of the Cape Colony who were destroyed by the impact of European colonialism. Until relatively recently, the extermination of the Cape San peoples has been treated as little more than a footnote to South African narratives of colonial conquest. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dutch-speaking pastoralists who infiltrated the Cape interior dispossessed its aboriginal inhabitants. In response to indigenous resistance, colonists formed mounted militia units known as commandos with the express purpose of destroying San bands. This ensured the virtual extinction of the Cape San peoples. In The Anatomy of a South African Genocide, Mohamed Adhikari examines the history of the San and persuasively presents the annihilation of Cape San society as genocide.

Part of Trilogy - April 24, 1915 this work is a translation of 25 articles written by Aram Andonian in Armenian. Andonian was commissioned to write them by the publishers of Arevmoudk for their special edition dedicated to Komitas Vartabed's 75th birthday. These articles were published in Arevmoudk during a seven month period from December 1946 to June 1947. The articles were called Komitasi hed. Inch baymannerou dag aratchatsav Komitasi mdki daknabu (With Komitas: the circumstances which precipitated his mental turmoil). As the title implied, it was intended to highlight the Armenian composer's tragedy after his arrest and during his journey to exile. But the articles had unclogged the suppressed memory of those years in the author and the few articles that had been planned turned into a series that went beyond their initial mandate and covered the circumstances of not only Komitas' fate, but also the fate of all those intellectuals who were arrested during that same fateful night.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year:"A magisterial and profoundly disturbing &lsquonatural history' of mass murder." Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's books are events. They stir passionate public debate among political and civic leaders, scholars, and the general public because they compel people to rethink the most powerful conventional wisdoms and stubborn moral problems of the day. Worse Than War gets to the heart of the phenomenon, genocide, that has caused more deaths in the modern world than military conflict. In doing so, it challenges fundamental things we thought we knew about human beings, society, and politics. Drawing on extensive field work and research from around the world, Goldhagen explores the anatomy of genocide- explaining why genocides begin, are sustained, and end why societies support them, why they happen so frequently and how the international community should and can successfully stop them. As a great book should, Worse than War seeks to change the way we think and to offer new possibilities for a better world. It tells us how we might at last begin to eradicate this greatest scourge of humankind.

In After Genocide, leading scholars and practitioners analyse the political, legal and regional impact of events in post-genocide Rwanda within the broader themes of transitional justice and reconciliation. Given the forthcoming fifteenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and continued mass violence in Africa, especially in Darfur, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and northern Uganda, this volume is unquestionably of continuing relevance. The book includes chapters from leading scholars in this field, including William Schabas, Rene Lemarchand, Linda Melvern, Kalypso Nicolaidis and Jennifer Welsh along with senior government and non-government officials involved in matters related to Rwanda and transitional justice, including Hassan Bubacar Jallow (Chief Prosecutor of the ICTR), Martin Ngoga (Prosecutor General of the Republic of Rwanda) and Luis Moreno Ocampo, Prosecutor of the ICC.Because Rwandan voices have rarely been heard internationally in the aftermath of the genocide, this anthology also incorporates chapters from Rwandan academics and practitioners, such as Tom Ndahiro, Solomon Nsabiyera Gasana and Jean-Baptiste Kayigamba, all of whom are also survivors of the 1994 genocide, and draws on their personal experiences. After Genocide constitutes the most comprehensive survey to date of issues related to post-genocide Rwanda and transitional justice.