The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

genocide against indigenous peoples 51
selective killings to force the Indians to fight on the government side, or at least to
fight against those whom the government had targeted as its enemies. In yet other
areas it offered paternalistic protection and assistance to communities it sought to
win over, so that the overall strategy was called one of beans and bullets. This strategy
succeeded in turning the civil war into a stalemate, with the indigenous masses
in the countryside being forced to absorb terrible punishment. Meanwhile the army
succeeded in institutionalizing itself and its methods as central to the supposedly
democratic state that had succeeded the openly authoritarian military regimes of
previous decades.
In Nagaland, Burma, and the Sudan, national governments have waged war
against marginalized indigenous peoples because they refused to grant them autonomy
and would not allow them to secede. In Guatemala the national government
and its army represent the elites who have presided for a long time over an unjust and
repressive social system that discriminated against the country’s indigenous masses.
These forces were quite willing to torture and massacre the Indians in order to protect
the status quo and to ward off such changes as would undermine their traditional
dominance.
It should by now be clear how such conflicts degenerate all too easily into genocide.
It is because genocide everywhere depends on the perpetrators’ dehumanizing
their intended victims, establishing them as radically alien creatures who deserve to
be eliminated, and having the power to kill them. These conditions normally apply
to indigenous peoples who are marginalized and treated as aliens, even in their own
countries, and are invariably in a position of political weakness. Moreover, indigenous
peoples have in the recent past, and in some places right up to the present day,
been considered “savages” who had to be annihilated physically or socially. In recent
years indigenous peoples have been threatened in the name of development or
for reasons of state.
It is particularly dangerous for them when these two threats come together, as
happens when there are valuable resources in indigenous territory that the state
wishes to seize in the name of development, and when indigenous wishes to secede
from the state (often precisely because the state is trying to take over indigenous
resources) are held to constitute a threat to the state.
It is the idea of the threatened state that is particularly insidious and especially
likely to lead to genocide. 5 The Enlightenment idea of the state that has dominated
Western thinking until recently stressed the rationality of the modern state, which
would treat its citizens equally and guarantee their liberty by protecting their rights.
It was thus concerned with the rights of individuals rather than with the rights of
groups such as ethnic minorities or indigenous peoples. It was supposed instead that
ethnicity would evaporate in the modern state as a result of modernization itself.
The grim history of the twentieth century and the ethnic conflicts and persecutions
that have played such a prominent part in it have shown, however, that ethnicity and
ethnic nationalism have not disappeared, nor are they about to. It follows that actual
modern states have not turned out the way they were supposed to; meanwhile,