Genocide: - DIIS

Comparing the Killing Fields: Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia
1. The Impact of Ideology
Perhaps the most striking common denominator at the root of these genocides
is that they were all rationalized in terms of ideologies borrowed
from the West. Although their real impact on the cognitive maps of the
killers is open to debate, there is little question that they contributed in no
small way to providing offi cial justifi cation for their crimes.
Democracy defi ned as the rule of the majority, nationalism and Marxism-Leninism
served as the overarching ideological framework for mass
murder in Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia. The fi rst became the legitimizing
myth of the Rwanda revolution, and the offi cial ideological subtext
for resisting the Tutsi “counter-revolution”; the second is inseparable from
the ethnic surgery performed in the name of Greater Serbia; the third gave
its characteristic anti-imperialist-cum-populist stamp to the Cambodian
carnage.
Though intended to give an aura of democratic respectability to Hutu rule,
the Rwanda revolution did little to protect the rights of the Tutsi minority.
And because Hutu rule meant majority rule, and Tutsi rule meant the rule
of the minority, and a feudal minority at that, any effort to turn the tide
could only be seen as an attempt to undermine the democratic rights of
the majority. For some Hutu ideologues, the killing of Tutsi thus came to
be identifi ed as a service to democracy. It was the only way to salvage the
heritage of the Hutu revolution. The scale of the killings was consistent
with the magnitude of the stakes.
In former Yugoslavia the surge of ethno-regional nationalism made it imperative
to redraw geographical boundaries around self-proclaimed “national”
communities, even if this meant the extermination of tens of thousands
and the displacement of hundreds of thousands. Here the process
of self-determination served to both unify and tear apart: to unify ethnic
kinsmen around the new symbols of nationhood (“Slovenia”, “Croatia”,
“Bosnia”, “Serbia”), and at the same time sunder the long-standing social
and economic ties binding different communities together. Ironically, the
minority rights argument made in the name of the Greater Serbian homeland
deliberately ignores the rights of the Muslim or Croat minorities en-
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