60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

46 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
the ‘New People’ under Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia who became
the objects of repression widely considered as genocide (cf. Ebihara
and Ledgerwood 2002). Here again, the forms of framing group
membership are clearly distinct. In the Soviet case, this was predicated
both on contingent constraints in grain provision and a general
conception about the social dynamics of the market to inevitably generate
a reversal to capitalism, an idea linked to a rigid conception of
class orientation in socio-political terms; in Democratic Kampuchea,
anybody who had not lived under Khmer Rouge control during the
civil war prior to 1975 was cast as an enemy, liable to imprisonment
and death.
At the opposite end of the continuum we can discern active grouping,
when for instance, the Ovaherero who in 1904 took up arms
against colonial oppression were systematically exterminated or expelled
from then German South West Africa; or Maya peasants in
Guatamela who, having organised to overcome ‘a legacy of desperation’
lasting close to 500 years, fell victim to genocidal suppression by
the military regime (Manz 2002: 295). In the fi rst instance, modern
state violence is directed against a joint eff ort at resistance against
colonial encroachment, on the basis of kinship-based organisation
and incipient proto-national consolidation (cf. Gewald 1999); in the
second case, mobilisation on social grounds also made use of existing
communal ties and was met by the violence exerted by the modern
central state, under the conditions of military dictatorship and
counter-insurgency. At least in part, grouping occurred by and in the
course of mobilisation which then met with savage repression.
Aftermath dynamics
Only in rare cases does mass violence and even genocide terminate in
the complete annihilation of the targeted group. For this reason, processes
of social, cultural and mental resilience are of great importance.
In the course of such processes, group defi nitions are taken up in resilience
processes in widely varying ways. This includes deep-going
changes of such collective identities and self-defi nitions. Such changes
include the rigid defi nition and assertion of essentialised identities
or ‘groupness’ (Brubaker 2004). Such enhanced and frequently reifi ed
identities therefore emerge not only as a facilitating feature for resilience
and in the best of cases, for healing; they can also be regarded
as one of the important and signifi cant consequences of mass violence
directed at specifi c groups, including genocide. Again, signifi cantly,
this does not apply to all victim groups. Take the kulaks. Whether
their terrible fate can reasonably considered as genocide is still a moot