“This genocide is beyond our ability to understand…The only answer I can give is that it was like being in a fog. I could call it ignorance but it was not ignorance. It was cruelty that overcame us…You hear people dying, cries of agony, and you are thinking you are powerful. It was as if there were no consequences, you thought nothing would happen to you.”

Those are the words of Elie Ngarambe a Rwandan currently serving a sentence for participating in his country’s 1994 genocide, during which over 800,000 ethnic Tutsis were massacred.

Scholars and politicians still struggle to understand the phenomenon of genocide.

Daniel Goldhagen, author of the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, says any genocide “boils down to a series of choices:”

 “Leaders choose to initiate the killing; ordinary people take a conscious choice to participate; and those with a power to prevent or stop it choose to do nothing.”

Fantasy of threat
Groups are targeted by political leaders on the basis of a fantasy of threat, says Ton Zwaan, an associate professor at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam:

“It is the collective fantasy of political elites who feel themselves threatened… mostly wrongly… by certain groups of outsiders.”

When this happens, all members of a group are seen to pose a threat, including women and small children.

Ultimately, says Zwaan, the perception stems from our own sense of insecurity:

“People are seldom really assured of their own safety and security.” Generally, he says, there is a lack of trust between groups of people, between states, and between different regions in the world.

Eventually this uneasy state can prompt some leaders to resort to the mass slaughter of their perceived collective enemy, thinking that it’s the only means of resolving a conflict or retaining power.

Why genocide again?
But given that we’ve witnessed, only too often, the horror of genocide, why, after saying ‘never again’, do we stand on the sidelines and allow it to happen time after time?

According to Zwaan, it’s due to the complexity of our international system and the notion of sovereignty:

“There is this nice word ‘the international community’ but in fact if you look at efforts to prevent genocide in certain cases like Rwanda,…you discover again that ‘the international community’ is in fact a collection of separate states with their own central political and economic interest.”

In the documentary Worse than War, based on his book, Goldhagen points to the ways in which international organisations have let down those people most in need.

One example documented by the film is when United Nations forces retreated from the conflict zones of Rwanda once the genocide escalated.

"[It] is something that the UN should be able to explain,” says Tharcisse Karugarama, Rwanda’s Minister of Justice.

“People are supposed to be able to protect people at a time that is so critical.”

Preventing genocide
Once a genocide starts, Karugarama tells Goldhagen, something else takes over:

“Mass hysteria – it is very difficult to explain. When [people] are involved in mass hysteria, they can no longer be held accountable for their actions...Once people have stepped beyond the first step of actually killing, of throwing a child down and hacking him to death…there is nothing that they couldn’t do. At the back of their mind, the radio is telling them, if you don’t kill them yourselves, they are coming to finish you.”

From a practical point of view, the problem of prevention is grounded in our inability to see genocides before they start or discern certain patterns of behaviour that could help us trigger an alarm, says Ton Zwaan:

“We have no effective system of so-called early warning in which you could say, with a few months still to go, this is probably going to happen.”

But even if we could predict an oncoming genocide, Zwaan says, that wouldn’t necessarily mean we could stop it:

“Most political leaders even in democratic societies, do not have the prevention of genocide as [their] political priority, they simply do not care enough.”

Specifically, he says, we often witness states that are not moved by moral arguments but are instead concerned with issues such as “the protection of their vital economic interests or geo-political security.”

While Goldhagen agrees with Zwaan’s account of what actually happens, he’s not content to leave it there. Instead, he proposes a genocide prevention mechanism that rests on a so-called “coalition of the willing” – a group of the most able and willing democratic states gathering a “rapid intervention force” that would quickly intervene in crisis situations.

“Our problem is that we do little or nothing at all… Timely intervention can stop political leaders from the eliminationist assault…to be effective, intervention must often be forceful. We need an international watchdog organisation made up of democratic nations that will enforce a zero tolerance policy on genocide and eliminationism. Each of the members must have the right to intervene, individually or collectively, to stop campaigns of elimination."

Democracy or action
For Zwaan, however, there’s no quick fix.

He says democracy offers the best hope of stopping genocides before they start:

“Democracy has the lawful, strong constitutional base that groups of people are forced to deal with each other without violence because the constitutional state holds a monopoly on violence. [This implies] that violence is not a normal means of dealing politically with each other.”

In the longer run, he adds, it comes down to a question of civilization:

“What we need is a civilizing offensive on a world scale - people just have to learn that it is important to respect the right to life of other people,…to respect the law.”

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