1

The Genocide Studies Program: the first decade

MacMillanCenter for International and Area Studies

YaleUniversity

2006-07 Annual Report

YaleUniversity has hosted intensive work in the field of Genocide Studies for the past thirteen years. The Genocide Studies Program (GSP) grew out of the Cambodian Genocide Program (CGP), established in 1994 at the then YaleCenter for International and Area Studies (YCIAS). The GSP, formally established in January 1998 at YCIAS, now the MacMillanCenter for International and Area Studies, has continued and expanded this work by conducting research, seminars and conferences on comparative, interdisciplinary, and policy issues relating to the phenomenon of genocide, and has provided training to researchers from afflicted regions, including Cambodia, Rwanda, and East Timor.

The GSP is an affiliate of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and is sponsored by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at YaleLawSchool. The GSP holds weekly faculty seminars at Yale’s Institution on Social and Policy Studies and maintains a highly-acclaimed multi-lingual website

The GSP Steering Committee comprises:

Ben Kiernan (A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies, Yale), Director

Professor Dori Laub (Psychiatry,Yale), Deputy Director (Trauma Studies)

Professor Ivo Banac (History, Yale)

Professor Kai Erikson (Sociology, Yale)

Professor Geoffrey Hartman (Comparative Literature, Yale)

Professor Paula Hyman (History/Judaic Studies, Yale)

Professor Claude Rawson (English, Yale)

Professor James C. Scott (Political Science/Anthropology, Yale)

Professor Jay Winter (History, Yale)

Professor Susan Cook (University of Pretoria, South Africa)

Professor Debórah Dwork (Director, StrasslerFamilyCenter for

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, ClarkUniversity)

Dr. Maryam Elahi (Director emerita, Human Rights Program, TrinityCollege)

Staff and Consultants

GSP staff and consultants in 2006-07 included:Dr. Adam Jones (Postdoctoral Fellow), who ran the GSP’s Thursday seminars during Prof. Kiernan’s research leave; Barbara Papacoda (Business Manager), Michael Appleby (databases), Abraham Parrish (mapping databases), Russell Schimmer (Geographic Information Systems), and Molly Simpson (website).

We wish to thank Frederick J. Iseman, Esq.; Prof. Ian Shapiro, the MacMillan Center’s Henry Luce Director;the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies and its Director Professor Derek Briggs, and the Center for Earth Observation’s Professor Ron Smith and Laurent Bonneau, for their support of the GSP; and the Institution on Social and Policy Studies for hosting the weekly GSP seminar program since 2001.

New GSP Books

GSP Director Ben Kiernan completed two new books during his research leave in 2006-07. These areBlood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, Yale University Press, forthcoming September 2007); and Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor, 1975-2006 (New Brunswick, Transaction Books, forthcoming 2007).

The year 2006 also saw the publication or republication of a number of other GSP books. Conflict and Change in Cambodia, edited with an Introduction by Ben Kiernan, was published by Routledge/Critical Asian Studies, London, in the fall of 2006. Kiernan and Robert Gellately’s co-edited anthology, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003) appeared in Italian translation as Il Secolo del Genocidio (Milano, Longanesi, 2006); former CGP Director Susan E. Cook’s edited anthology, Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives, was republished by Transaction (New Brunswick, NJ); Adam Jones’ Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, was published by Routledge (London); and former GSP Postdoctoral Fellow Edward Kissi’s book Revolution and Genocide in Cambodia and Ethiopia, was published by Lexington Books/Routledge (New York).

The GSP published its 34th Working Paper in 2006. This followed the publication of three Geographic Informations Systems-related GSP Working Papers (nos. 31, 32 and 33) written by Russell Schimmer with the assistance of Yale’s Center for Earth Observation. These are respectively entitled, Environmental Impact of Genocide in Guatemala: the Ixil Triangleand the Mexican Border (no. 31); Indications of Genocide in the Bisesero Hills, Rwanda, 1994 (no. 32); and Violence by Fire in East Timor, September 8, 1999 (no. 33). The GSP also published a fourth Working Paper, in Political Science: Liai Duong, Racial Discrimination in the Cambodian Genocide (no. 34). These four GSP Working Papers and earlier ones are available online at .

The Genocide Studies Seminar Series, fall 2006/spring 2007

(Coordinator: Adam Jones)

With renewed support from the MacMillanCenter and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund, the GSP Seminar Series for 2006-07, the eighteenth and nineteenth consecutive series of GSP weekly seminars since 1998, was again a success. The theme for this year’s seminars was “New Directions in Genocide Research.” As a fairly recent field, with a notably interdisciplinary character, genocide studies is exploring a wide range of fresh issues and new conceptual territories. The intention in this round of seminars was to highlight some of those areas of exploration, with the participation of some of the leading figures in the field, as well as a number of up-and-coming scholars.

The series began on October 5, 2006 with Prof. Ben Lieberman of Fitchburg State College, author of the recent book Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe. Lieberman is one of the most incisive analysts of “ethnic cleansing” and its relation to, and in his view difference from, genocide per se. His nuanced analysis of, especially, the Central European and Balkans “cleansings” of the 19th and 20th centuries was well-expressed in his seminar presentation, titled “States, Nationalist Narratives, and the Ethnic Cleansing of Modern Europe.” His talk included a visually impressive array of images from the unhappy histories he detailed.

There followed one of the most unusual, but also most captivating, seminars of the entire series: New Haven-area independent researcher Patricia Klindienst’s October 12 examination of “Ethnic Cleansing and the Making of Gardens: 17th Century Colonial America, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.” Klindienst’s thesis is that the architecture of gardens created under dictatorships and colonial authorities reveals a great deal about the mentality of genocidal perpetrators, and the dynamics of genocidal processes. Her seminar was also illustrated with an extraordinary range of imagery from Europe and the Americas, and provoked lively discussion.

Recent years have witnessed important contributions by anthropologists to genocide studies. One of the leading figures in this field is CUNY professor Victoria Sanford, an expert on the Guatemalan genocide (the subject of her book Buried Secrets). Sanford’s October 19 seminar was titled “Justice After Genocide? Impunity and Human Rights in 21st Century Guatemala,” and related the accomplishments and remaining challenges of the post-genocide quest for justice in this Central American country. Among Sanford’s points of focus was the “feminicide” now afflicting Guatemala, with younger women increasingly the victims of murders and rape-murders. The impunity so far accorded to perpetrators of the genocide similarly attaches to the killers of women in “peacetime.” Sanford’s seminar was one of the best-attended of the year, drawing a significant representation of scholars and students interested in transitional justice and Latin American politics.

For the past two years, Yale graduate Russell Schimmer has used the facilities of the campus Geophysics Lab and the Center for Earth Observation to conduct groundbreaking research on the applicability of remote-sensing technologies to genocide studies. Schimmer has explored diverse case-studies, including Guatemala, Rwanda, East Timor, and the Balkans, to see what information can be gleaned from satellite photographs taken before, during, and after genocidal processes. In the Guatemalan case, for example, he has demonstrated the profound physical impact on the landscape of the genocide as it was waged in a small area of the Mayan highlands (the so-called “Ixil Triangle”). He has also charted the rise of an extensive infrastructure along the Mexican border, responding to the flood of Guatemalan refugees fleeing the highlands holocaust. In his October 26 seminar, “Tracking Evidence of Genocide through Environmental Change: The Uses of Remote Sensing,” Schimmer outlined his findings, with reference to vivid satellite imagery. Though turnout was light, the discussions were among the year’s liveliest, and Schimmer went on to deliver a similar talk to Adam Jones’s genocide course in the International Studies department, captivating some 40 students with his innovative approach.

Independent researcher Thea Halo is the author of a powerful memoir of the Pontic Greek genocide in Ottoman Turkey, Not Even My Name, which relates the experiences of her mother during the 1915-16 genocide. Few people are aware that the Ottoman campaign usually described as “the Armenian genocide” in fact swept up a host of Christian minority populations in Anatolia and the Black Sea region. Halo considers the inattention to these other atrocities as an example of “the exclusivity of suffering.” She has worked diligently and successfully to broaden historical understandings, and the canvas of historical memory, regarding the events in Ottoman Turkey. Her November 2 seminar on “The Exclusivity of Suffering: When Tribal Concerns Take Precedence Over Historical Accuracy” ranged far beyond the Ottoman case, and sparked lively discussion and debate – including some inspired commentary by discussant David Simon of the Yale Political Science department.

The first semester of the series closed with two seminar presentations on November 9. The first, “Theorizing Issue Emergence in Transnational Networks: The Curious Case of Children Born of Genocidal Rape,” saw University of Pittsburgh scholar R. Charli Carpenter explore her important research on norm-generation and regime-formation in International Relations. Why have humanitarian organizations and initiatives had difficulty integrating the issue of the offspring born of rape, particularly in the Balkans genocide, the focus of Carpenter’s research (and the subject of her recent book, “Innocent Women and Children”)? Attendance was heavy, and remained so for the second seminar of the day, by Motoo Noguchi, GSP Visiting Fellow for 2006-07. Judge Noguchi is Japan’s representative on the mixed UN/Cambodian tribunal in Phnom Penh which has begun to try surviving senior perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide. His evening session on “Khmer Rouge Trials: Justice, Now or Never” provided a unique insider’s perspective on the tribunal, and was delivered to an audience that included many students and scholars from the YaleLawSchool.

The second semester of the seminar series began with Nicholas Robins of DukeUniversity. Robins has established himself as one of the leading experts on “subaltern genocide” – genocides by the oppressed against their oppressors. Like his recent book for Indiana University Press, Robins’s talk on January 26 was titled “Native Insurgencies and the Genocidal Impulse in the Americas.” It examined the “Great Rebellion” of the 1780s in present-day Peru and Bolivia, together with similarly uprisings in northern and southern Mexico in the 17th and 19th centuries. Genocide studies has traditionally, and in many ways justifiably, focused on genocides inflicted by state agents and dominant elites against vulnerable or subjugated minorities. However, such strategies may also be employed by subaltern actors against elites – an argument that has powerful contemporary relevance, as cases like Cambodia and Rwanda may exemplify.

Robins is currently working with GSP Research Fellow Adam Jones on an edited volume exploring subaltern genocide. Jones himself was next up in the seminar series, on February 1, with a presentation on a rather different theme: that of “Genocide and Structural Violence.” As genocide studies has tended to concentrate on state and elite actors as perpetrators, it has also generally focused on discrete “events” like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. Might a genocide framework, however, also be applicable to institutionalized aspects of human relations and structural forms of violence – for example, female infanticide, or the economic “shock treatment” inflicted on vulnerable societies in the developing world? Jones argued that certain features of a structurally violent situation, including reliable evidence of largescale mortality, a reasonably short causal chain, and a high level of awareness among actors of the consequences of their destructive actions, can bolster the case for a genocide framing.

Joyce Apsel of New YorkUniversity has long been an authority on the subject of genocide pedagogy. The theme has grown in relevance as more and more universities and high schools have adopted Holocaust education and, to a lesser extent, comparative genocide studies as aspects of their curriculum. Her seminar on February 8, “Popular Culture and the Politics of Education and Denial: Challenges of Introducing Comparative Genocide and Human Rights in Today’s Classroom,” explored the tension between an exclusive focus on the Jewish Holocaust and a broader comparative analysis. What determines which genocides get space in the classroom? What can genocide scholars and activists do to advance a more inclusive agenda?

A doyen of genocide studies is Frank Chalk of Montreal’s ConcordiaUniversity (home to the Montreal Institute of Genocide and Human Rights Studies, MIGS). Co-author of one of the seminal works in the field, The History and Sociology of Genocide, Chalk in his recent work has focused on genocide and communication, particularly the role of radio in the Rwanda genocide of 1994. His current research project focuses on the Darfur genocide, and was outlined in his February 15 seminar presentation, “Divided Signals: Fathoming Intentions for Darfur from Sudanese Government Domestic and Foreign Radio Broadcasts.” According to Chalk, a careful reading of transcripts of Sudanese radio broadcasts suggests that the Khartoum regime will not easily be dissuaded from its genocidal crackdown in Darfur.

Another éminence grise of genocide studies is Henry Huttenbach, founder and co-editor of the Journal of Genocide Research. Recently, Huttenbach has been working with scholars from ColumbiaUniversity to develop a syllabus for training those who work in the United Nations and other international organizations to take greater interest in genocide, and to develop constructive strategies of intervention and prevention. His February 22 seminar, “Methodology of Genocide Prevention: Critique of a Syllabus,” was accompanied by contributions from Columbia University representatives, and provided insights into one of the most notable initiatives to move genocide studies out of the classroom and into the policymaking sphere.

How might such training be used to develop “early warning” strategies for incipient or impending genocides? A particularly pressing case was outlined by Edward Paulino of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in his March 1 seminar, “From State-Sponsored Mass Murder to Racial Pogroms: Examining the 20th Century Roots of Contemporary Anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic.” The twentieth-century history of the Dominican Republic witnessed one major genocidal outbreak, with the massacre of thousands of Haitian workers under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in 1937. In recent years, smaller-scale pogroms against migrant Haitian cane-workers and their families have erupted, causing many deaths and largescale “cleansing” of Haitian communities. Paulino, a scholar of Dominican descent, has conducted extensive interviews with victims of the recent atrocities, and has worked to publicize the plight of the Haitian minority. His seminar offered a potent reminder of the need for genocide scholarship to defend minority rights today, rather than simply studying their systematic violation in the past.

The semester’s seminars closed on March 8 with a presentation by Harvard scholar Jens Meierhenrich, a Rwanda specialist with a particular interest in the linguistic aspects of genocide. His seminar was titled “From Itsembabwoko to Jenoside: Genocide in Translation,” and explored the terminology developed in post-genocide Rwanda to refer to the apocalyptic events of 1994. His emphasis was on the practical and political utility of the vocabulary, and contestation over the most appropriate terms – for example, whether the preferred word referred vaguely to past events, thereby promoting reconciliation; or whether it more specifically captured the horror of the events, and encouraged justice-seeking by the genocide’s survivors. Well-attended and well-received, with a number of Yale’s African specialists present, the seminar and subsequent discussion ended the series on a high point.

An exciting spinoff from the seminar series is the number of participants who ended up submitting essays for a new anthology edited by GSP Research Fellow Adam Jones, Evoking Genocide: Scholars and Activists Describe the Works That Shaped Their Lives. This project compiles some 60 essays, in which contributors discuss books, stories, films, songs, monuments, and documents that had a formative influence on their evolution in genocide studies. Inviting the exponents of such a wide range of innovative research agendas presented a golden opportunity to secure contributions for Evoking Genocide as well. Ben Lieberman discussed the “negative influence” of Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey, one of the major texts seeking to deny the applicability of a “genocide” framework to the massacres of Armenians during World War One. Victoria Sanford supplied an extraordinarily moving account of mortuary photographs of a friend’s daughter murdered in the “feminicide” currently afflicting post-genocide Guatemala. Patricia Klindienst described her recollections of viewing TV coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in the early 1960s. Joyce Apsel recalled her first encounter with Raul Hilberg’s foundational text of Holocaust studies, The Destruction of the European Jews. Russell Schimmer built on his work with remote-sensing technologies for the GSP in a meditation on the satellite photos of Dili, East Timor, on fire during the Indonesian-led rampage of September 1999. Jens Meierhenrich wrote a tribute to the German-Jewish writer Victor Klemperer, best known for his epic diaries of the Nazi era, but also the author of a groundbreaking study of The Language of the Third Reich. Edward Paulino related his encounter with the “Norweb Communiqué,” a memorandum from a US diplomatic official present in the Dominican Republic in 1937, when a wave of state-directed genocidal massacres struck the Haitian minority on Dominican soil. R. Charli Carpenter utilized the “I, Borg” episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to examine issues of self and other, and the justifications offered for mass exterminations. Finally, series organizer and volume editor Adam Jones cited an anti-nuclear anthem by the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, “Hercules,” as a seminal influence on his emergence as a political activist.Evoking Genocide is currently projected for publication in 2008.