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War Crimes
According to the Crimes of War Project,
Since 1945, a far-reaching body of law – whose centerpiece is the Geneva Conventions of 1949 – has developed to regulate conflict between and within states. In recent years there have been significant developments in the legal mechanisms through which these laws can be enforced. At the same time, changes in international politics have provided, and will continue to provide, challenges to the existing system of international law, provoking debate about whether the law should evolve further to meet new threats to international order.
War Crimes Research Links
Nuremberg International Military Tribunal
Berkeley War Crimes Studies Center
Nomination of Prof. Saburo IENAGA for Nobel Peace Prize
Vietnam Veterans’ Winter Soldier Investigations
Vietnam: Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths
Bringing Iraqi War Criminals to Justice
Iraq/Yazidi
In an episode that may comprise the 21st century’s clearest case of genocide so far, on August 3, 2014, ISIS troops invaded Sinjar, the central location of the Yazidi people, as well as the location of many important Yazidi cultural and religious sites. By nightfall, Sinjar was effectively under ISIS control. An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 Yazidis – mostly men and elderly women – were killed. Approximately 6,000 – mostly women and children (both male and female) – were taken captive, to be held and sold as slaves, and then subject to repeated rape and beatings. Young boys were pressed into military service as early as the age of seven. Tens of thousands fled the city to surrounding areas.
ISIS and their allies intentionally targeted the Yazidi – an ethnic and religious group – for destruction. Their acts corresponded precisely with those enumerated in the UN Genocide Convention: killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, “inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” preventing births, and forcibly transferring children from one group to another.
As of July 2019, the risk of continued persecution – and even genocide – remains acute. Although ISIS has been officially defeated, not a single conspirator or perpetrator of the genocide has been brought to justice – and hardly any even tried. Extremists claiming to adhere to ISIS’s ideology continue to threaten people in the region. Local communities – mostly comprised of Sunni Arabs – who collaborated with ISIS in the violence against the Yazidi live on in the area with impunity. Iraqi and Kurdish forces struggle with one another for access to and control over the area around Sinjar, neither demonstrating a commitment to prioritizing the security of the Yazidis. Access to education, health services, jobs, and basic needs is poor, particularly for the Yazidi.
“Before It’s Too Late – A Report Concerning the Ongoing Genocide and Persecution by the Yazidis in Iraq, and Their Need for Immediate Protection” was launched on July 30, 2019, a few days before the fifth anniversary of the onset of the genocide against the Yazidi people. The report spells out the risks and challenges confronting the Yazidis of Iraq in simple, legally relevant terms, with reference to certain fundamental rights laid out in the UN Charter on Human Rights and to the Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes developed by the UN Office of the Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide.
Two of the lead authors of the Persecution Prevention Project report – Melinda Taylor and Sareta Ashraph – participated in a symposium entitled “The Yazidi Genocide: Prosecution, Protection, and Preservation,” hosted by the Genocide Studies Program in April 2019. The report reflects several of the insights gleaned at that symposium.
Resources for inquiries regarding “Before It’s Too Late”
AUGUST 2020
In the spring 2020 term at Yale, students in David Simon’s “Mass Atrocities and Global Politics” seminar composed a policy report, directed to the U.S. Department of State (indeed, predicated upon a mythical request for policy advice from the Secretary of State). On the sixth anniversary of the gencoidal attach on Sinjar, an edited version of that report, called “TOWARDS JUSTICE AND SECURITY: PRINCIPLES AND POLICIES FOR THE YAZIDI IN 2020 AND BEYOND”, is now available, here.
Crimes Against Humanity
A Crime Against Humanity has been defined as “a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population.” Such crimes include the murder of political or social groups that are unprotected by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. Since the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and mass murder of other ethnic, religious, political and social groups, the crime of “extermination” has been a crime against humanity, and its definition includes not only massacres but also “the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.” Enslavement and deportation are also crimes against humanity. The purpose of these persecutions is not relevant to guilt, nor do charges of crimes against humanity require proof, as the charge of genocide does, of specific “intent to destroy” a group “in whole or in part.”
Further details on the current international law on Crimes Against Humanity may be found in the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, accessible at www.un.org/icc, article 7, 1-2, and in Chérif Bassiouni, “Crimes against Humanity,” Crimes of War Project: www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/crimes-against-humanity.html.
Papua, Indonesia
Welcome to the GSP Project on Papua Indonesia (formerly called West Papua, Irian Jaya, West Irian)
Papua, Indonesia
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Yale Law School, 2004 Lowenstein Clinic/Schell Center Report on Genocide in Papua.
Indonesia’s 1969 Takeover of West Papua
West Papua: The Obliteration of a People
Carmel Budiardjo & Liem Soei Liong, TAPOL, London, 1988, third edition (revised), 142pp.Carmel Budiardjo, “West Papua: Land of Peace or Killing Field”
Paradise Betrayed: West Papua’s Struggle for Independence, by John Martinkus, Quarterly Essay, no. 7, 2002, Melbourne, Australia, pp. 1-83.
Indonesia’s Secret War: The Guerrilla Struggle in Irian Jaya, by Robin Osborne, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1985.
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West Papua and Indonesia since Suharto, by Peter King, Sydney, University of NSW Press, 2004.
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Survival International: 44 Papuan uncontacted tribes threatened with extinction
Reluctant Indonesians: Australia, Indonesia and the Future of West Papua, by Clinton Fernandes (Melbourne, 2007)
Indonesia
Independence from the Netherlands in 1949 made Indonesia the world’s largest Muslim country, but it also included many Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and animists. The Republic of Indonesia adopted an official multicultural ideology. After seizing power in a 1965 military coup in Jakarta, General Suharto launched an army-sponsored massacre of the very large but mostly unarmed Communist opposition, the Partai Kommunis Indonesia (PKI). The PKI was the world’s biggest nonruling Communist party, and Suharto later described its destruction as a struggle against political contamination: “I had to organize pursuit, cleansing, and crushing.” He ordered an “absolutely essential cleaning out” of the PKI and its sympathizers from public life and government. The Australian embassy in Jakarta reported in late October 1965 that “on all sides and in all areas, ‘cleansing,’ ‘purging’ … proceeds apace.” As his paratroops moved into Central Java, Suharto’s fellow officer General Nasution reportedly said, “All of their followers and sympathizers should be eliminated” and ordered the Communist Party’s extinction “down to its very roots.” Jakarta’s police information chief told the U.S. ambassador in mid-November that with the “blessing” of the army, “50 to 100 PKI members are being killed every night in East and Central Java by civilian anti-communist groups.” The Australian embassy estimated on December 23 “about 1,500 assassinations per day since September 30th.” By February 1966, two confidential Western agencies agreed on “a total of about 400,000 killed,” and the deputy U.S. ambassador thought that the full toll could be much higher.
Most victims were Javanese peasants, usually nominal Muslims, and Balinese Hindu peasants who had also supported the PKI or were suspected of doing so. In both Java and Bali the PKI had won many votes in elections during the 1950s. The army ran the anticommunist campaign while fervent Muslim youth groups did much of the killing. Paratroop commander Sarwo Edhie reportedly conceded that in Java, “we had to egg the people on to kill Communists.” Historian Geoffrey Robinson states that in Bali, the army’s intervention ensured that “only PKI forces were killed and that they were killed systematically.” Yet in parts of Sumatra and Sulawesi, according to a contemporary Canadian embassy report, “where there are rabid Muslim religious groups all PKI members have been beheaded.” The U.S. ambassador concurred that in north Sumatra, “Muslim fervor” in Aceh “has apparently put all but [a] few PKI out of action” and “placed their heads on stakes along [the] road.” In Medan, two officials of the Muslim youth group Pemuda Pancasila separately told U.S. representatives that “their organization intends [to] kill every PKI member they can catch.” In a few months, the army and allied Muslim groups slaughtered over half a million suspected Communists. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency described the killing as “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930s, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist bloodbath of the early 1950s.”
Below and in the left sidebar you will find research products of the GSP Project on Documenting Violence in Indonesia. Also see the left sidebar for the GSP Projects on East Timor and Papua.
1. Early Indonesian Nationalism:
- Frank Dhont, Nationalisme Baru Intelektual
Indonesia Tahun 1920-An (Gadjah Mada University
Press, 2005)
- “Pandangan Kaum Intelektual Nasionalis
Indonesia Muda Akhir 1920-An Terhadap Demokrasi,
Politik Lokal Dan Otonomi.” Oleh: Frank Dhont
2. Forced Labour under Japanese Occupation: Frank Dhont, “Kesaksian kami: Romusha yang masih tersisa”
3. Andi Achdian, comp., Bibliography on Violence in Indonesia, 1965-66
See also Papua, Indonesia
Resistance
Modern genocides have been stopped in various ways. The Nazi Holocaust during World War II ended only in the face of a massive external military onslaught mounted on two fronts, by both the Allies and the Soviet Union. Jewish and Soviet partisans, and resistance movements in Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Italy, Greece, and France all inflicted significant casualties on Nazi forces, in some cases causing substantial losses, but such indigenous opposition played a secondary role in the defeat of the Hitler regime. This is not surprising, because genocidal regimes also tend to be aggressively expansionist, and frequently create international crises or provoke external cross-border retaliation.
Yet domestic opposition can also be important. In Bangladesh in 1971, local guerrilla forces resisted the Pakistani army’s genocidal repression until an invading Indian army ended it. In Rwanda in 1994, it was left to an externally-trained but indigenous, predominantly Tutsi insurgent army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, to overthrow the Hutu Power regime and halt its genocide of Tutsis.
The Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot collapsed only in the face of an international military intervention: a full-scale Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979. The Indonesian occupation of East Timor, too, ended only under the substantial international pressure exerted by a United Nations peacekeeping force which arrived in East Timor in 1999. Yet both Cambodia and East Timor had also produced significant indigenous resistance movements, which challenged these genocidal regimes with military force that proved inferior though not ineffectual. Resistance forces were able to draw upon or muster important indigenous political support that contributed to the eventual defeat of the two perpetrator regimes. The factors that led them to take action merit study.
Although these two Southeast Asian genocidal dictatorships, respectively communist and militarist, came from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and the motives of the rebel leaders who confronted them varied, both of the resistance movements originated in radical leftist political parties. National independence was a major goal of the Fretilin guerrilla movement in East Timor, and Maoist ideology was an additional influence on some of its leaders. Along with indigenous racism, Maoism was also a major element of the ideology of Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime, but Mao’s thinking had initially also influenced the Khmer Rouge cadres who rebelled against that regime. In both Cambodia and East Timor, however, the leading resistance forces, though they began as radical organizations, also became more moderate over time in the face of genocide and extermination. Other resistance movements in various regions of the world have followed different trajectories.
Rebel movements that inflict casualties on perpetrator regimes are of course not the only forms of resistance worth studying. In various cases, organized non-violent or passive resistance has also obstructed mass repression and rescued targeted victims. At an individual level, more everyday forms of resistance have also enabled victims to survive, including by enabling them to maintain their dignity and self-respect. These other kinds of resistance deserve equal attention.
For more on armed and unarmed resistance movements, see for instance:
Yitzhak Arad, “The Armed Jewish Resistance in Eastern Europe: Its Unique Conditions and its Relations with the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the Ghettoes,” in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Re-examined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, 591-600.
Ben Kiernan, Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia: Documentation, Denial and Justice in Cambodia and East Timor, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2008.
Jacques Semelin, Unarmed against Hitler: Civilian Resistance in Europe, 1939-1943, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993.
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985;
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1990;
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979, 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002, 246-50.
Yugoslavia (Former)
In June 1991, Croatia and Slovenia – two of the component republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – declared their independence. The secession of the latter was bitterly fought over, both by regular troops and against civilians suddenly resistant to living in ethnically mixed settings. In 1991 and 1992, as Croatia’s military fought Yugoslavia’s military, Croat and Serb civilians in both realms undertook campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” – i.e. efforts by one ethnic, political, or religious group to rid certain geographic areas of another such group through coercion and violence. The dynamics that unfolded in the early 1990s echoed of World War Two-era conflicts in which the Croatian, Nazi-allied Ustashe and Serbian Chetniks fought against one other and targeted their respective opposite’s civilian bases.
After both sides drew back (and Croatia’s independence received recognition), similar dynamics began to unfold in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That republic followed Croatia’s and Slovenia’s leads in declaring independence in March 1992, although Serbian leaders had, by that point, already declared its own independence from the rest of the republic. The ensuing conflict most intensely involved civilian populations in the eastern and western areas of Bosnia, where Serb militias fought to negate Bonsian independence – and, failing that, to eradicate the Bosniak population of those regions. The international response to this campaign was create “Safe Areas” in which Bosniak civilians were to be protected from Serbian militias. The militias, however, targeted the Safe Areas anyway. Most notoriously, a Serbian militia overran the Safe Area of the town of Srebenica, leading the mostly Bosniak civilian population to seek refuge at the United Nations’ base nearby. There, however, forces led by the militia leader Ratko Mladic convinced the UN forces to allow them to separate the men from the women and children. The latter were deported to the zone controlled by Bosniak forces. The former, numbering over 7,000, were massacred. Subsequent jurisprudence, both from the International Criminal Court for Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice, determined that the massacre constituted genocide.
Later, the remaining Yugoslav republics of Macedonia and Montenegro seceded, as did the former autonomous province of Kosovo. In each case, violence against civilians defined along identity-based lines existed, most intensely so in Kosovo. In 1999, a multilateral force conducted a ten-week-long bombing campaign against Serbian forces, whom Western leaders feared were set to wage another campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo as a response to Kosovo’s independence aspirations.
The Genocide Studies Program has featured numerous seminars relating to the events in the Balkan region. Jasmina Besirevic-Regan, a lecturer and dean of Trumbull College at Yale, sits on the GSP’s board of advisors.
Colonial Genocides Project
Jürgen Zimmerer und Joachim Zeller (ed.)
Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904-1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (2nd edition, 2004)
Format: 16,5 x 23,5 cm; ISBN: 3-86153-303-0; Preis: EUR 22.90; Seiten: 280; Erschienen: 08.09.2003
2004 jährt sich zum hundertsten Mal der Kolonialkrieg, den das deutsche Kaiserreich gegen die Herero und Nama in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (heute Namibia) führte. Das militärische Vorgehen der deutschen Schutztruppe endete in einem Völkermord, der seine Fortsetzung in den landesweit eingerichteten Konzentrationslagern fand, in denen nahezu jeder zweite afrikanische Kriegsgefangene zu Tode kam. Die besiegten Afrikaner verloren nicht nur ihr Land und ihren Viehbesitz, sondern wurden fortan auch einem rigiden Kontrollsystem unterworfen. In dem vorliegenden Band werden Ursachen, Verlauf und Folgen dieses Kolonialkrieges beleuchtet. Dabei findet die historische Perspektive der Deutschen, wie der Afrikaner Berücksichtigung. Nicht zuletzt wird die Frage nach der Bedeutung des ersten von Deutschen verübten Völkermordes für die weitere Geschichte beider Länder aufgeworfen, eines Genozids, der für Namibia bis heute ein nationales Trauma darstellt.
Justice and Prosecutions
With the adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, genocide became a crime under international law. The convention also mandates that signatories of the convention incorporate the criminalization of genocide into their own legal code. Although the punitive element of the convention as not invoked until the International Criminal Tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda (the ICTY and ICTR, respectively) did so in the late 1990s, a considerable body of jurisprudence has developed both prior to and since then.
The development of a regime of justice related to genocide is most apparent in international law: While the ICTY and ICTR have made several convictions of genocide between them. The International Court of Justice has made a determination that genocide did occur in Srebenica (and that the government of Serbia was legally complicit in failing to prevent Bosnian Serb militias from committing genocide despite the knowledge and means of doing so). The partially international Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has brought genocide-related charges as well. The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Omar Bashir, president of Sudan, on genocide charges.
The national realm of justice ought not to be overlooked as well, though. In several South American countries, genocide law includes “political groups” among those to be protected from intent to destroy. Other judges have considered invoking universal jurisdiction to indict individuals living outside their national realm for crimes against others outside their national realm for crimes committed outside their national realm.
Meanwhile, in countries that have experienced genocide, justice is not restricted to the use of the genocide convention. National courts have considered both genocide and genocide-related charges (such as crimes against humanity, or simply murder, in the context of widespread mass violence) in several places. Rwanda’s gacaca courts, created at the grassroots level, ultimately heard almost two million trials related to the 1994 genocide.
Sudan
When Sudan attained independence (from Great Britain) in 1956, it inherited a rebellion by southern rebels against Khartoum-based rule. Identity based divisions, both between and within the warring sides, characterized both phases – the 1955-1972 “First Sudanese Civil War” and the 1983-1995 “Second Sudanese Civil War” – of what turned out to be an enduring conflict. The government of Sudan repeatedly employed a strategy of targeting civilians in particular regions, as part of an effort to deter support for the rebellion against it. Areas such as Blue Nile, South Kordofan and witnessed attacks against civilians, frequently originating from the national army or from sources affiliated with it.
In 2003, a rebellion broke out in the western region of Darfur. Although the rebels in Darfur did not claim or seek common cause with those in the south, they pursued similar objectives, including greater autonomy from Khartoum-based control. The government of Sudan responded by mobilizing so-called janjaweed militias, which waged a scorched earth campaign against civilians in the region. Following the lead of several scholars (e.g., Eric Reeves, Gérard Prunier), and activists (e.g., John Prendergast and his Enough Project), the U.S. Congress, Secretary of State, and President (George W. Bush) all labeled the violence in Darfur “genocide” perpetrated by the government and its allied forces. A United Nations commission created to investigate the question (among others) declined to declare that a genocide had occurred, but did defer further investigation to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC subsequently issued warrants for Sudanese President Omar Bashir on several charges including (eventually) genocide. Specifically, a warrant issued in July 2010 accuses Bashir of committing genocide “by killing”, “by causing serious bodily or mental harm,” and “by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction.”
Meanwhile, pursuant to a referendum proposing secession from the rest of the country, South Sudan became independent in 2011. However, tensions – and fighting – continued to plague border regions such as Abeyi and South Kordofan, where the government allegedly employed similar tactics against civilians to those used in the civil war.
resources on the sudanese genocide
Other Resources on the Sudan Civil War
Report of the UN International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur
Darfur Panel on Canadian TV Ontario, “The Agenda”
To view the discussion, click on the link below, then on the ‘The Darfur Genocide’ blue tab, and then on the “Watch video” icon at right:
www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/theagenda/index.cfm?page_id=7&
bpn=779192&ts=2008-05-07%2020:00:45.0
web sites for additional information:
Report of the UN commission on Darfur
International Criminal Court’s home page for the “situation” in Sudan
US Holocaust Memorial Museum page on Sudan
International Crisis Group website, Sudan page
African Arguments, Making Sense of Sudan
Sudan in 1990 (after genocide began in the south)
Armenian Genocide
The first non-colonial genocide of the twentieth-century was the Armenian catastrophe in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. It started in early 1915, when the Young Turk regime rounded up hundreds of Armenians and hanged many of them in the streets of Istanbul, before beginning the genocidal deportation of most of the Armenian population to the desert, in which up to a million died or were murdered en route.
The Armenian minority in Ottoman Turkey had been subject to sporadic persecutions over the centuries. In 1894-96, these were stepped up with pogrom-like massacres. With the outbreak of the First World War, the Young Turk government proceeded far more radically against the Armenians. From 1915, inspired by rabid nationalism and secret government orders, Turks drove the Armenians from their homes and massacred them in such numbers that outside observers at the time described what was happening as ‘a massacre like none other,’ or ‘a massacre that changes the meaning of massacre.’ Although we do not have reliable figures on the death toll, many historians accept that between 800,000 and one million people were killed, often in unspeakably cruel ways, or marched to their deaths in the deserts to the south. Unknown numbers of others converted to Islam or in other ways survived but were lost to the Armenian culture. At the time a number of influential people spoke out against these atrocities, most notably the distinguished historian Arnold J. Toynbee, but it has only been since the 1970s that scholars have devoted anything like sustained attention to this human catastrophe. There is more than enough evidence to suggest that the mass murder of the Armenians was a case of genocide, as that crime was subsequently defined in the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948. Surviving perpetrators of the Armenian genocide could certainly have been held to account in an international criminal court.
Rwanda Project
The genocide in 1994 was perhaps the most clear-cut case of genocide since the Holocaust: as certain actors made clear the intent to destroy the Tutsi population, hundreds of thousands were killed. Hundreds of thousands more were raped, maimed, or otherwise traumatized. As much as 90% of Rwanda’s pre-1994 Tutsi population (which was estimated to comprise about 14% of the country’s total population) was murdered. The extermination effort took place within the context of a renewed civil war, but much of the carnage involved civilians far away from the front lines. Indeed, the government of Rwanda appeared to have diverted substantial military resources from the front lines to the effort to slaughter civilians.
The basic contours of the genocide are well-known. A three-year civil war pitting the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) against the predominantly Hutu government (the Rwandese National Movement for Democracy and Development, or MRNDD) and its forces had ended in a peace agreement, The Arusha Accord, in August of 1993. The accord called for the creation of a transitional government incorporating elements of the incumbent regime, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the political wing of the RPA), and the mixed ethnic domestic opposition. It also provided for a UN force of oversee the transition. However, after months of negotiations and false starts, the parties failed to agree on the specific make-up of the transitional regime. When a plane carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down from the sky as it returned from negotiations over the transitional government on April 6, 1994, organized street violence quickly ensued. Hardliners –i.e., those who had most resisted partnership with the rebels – maneuvered to gain control of the government, not least by assassinating the incumbent, Agatha Uwilingiyimana, a Hutu who had favored the implementation of the accord. Soon, government forces (including the army and the presidential guard), along with non-governmental allies (generally affiliated with political parties, such as the infamous interahamwe – the youth wing of MRNDD) were targeting both political rivals and Tutsi civilians. Many of the intended targets congregated in places where they believed they would be safe, such as churches, government buildings, and factories. Instead, those locales became massacre sites, as government forces, militia members, and other members of the civilian population attacked them en masse.
The genocide only ended when the RPA rebels, who had abandoned the peace agreement themselves on April 8, gained control of Kigali and all government offices in July of 1994. Hundreds of thousands of RPA supporters began to enter the country from Uganda another neighboring areas, meaning that a substantial portion of the Tutsi population that had been killed was “replaced” by a Tutsi population returning from exile. For its part, the interim government that had overseen the genocidal effort tried to flee to neighboring Zaire, while bringing over a million, mostly Hutu refugees with it.
Among the issues that Rwanda has had to deal with since the genocide are the status of ex-government forces and refugee populations in neighboring countries, the pursuit of justice for crimes committed during (and as part of) the genocide, and the political, economic, and social reconstruction of a country devastated by intense conflict.
The Genocide Studies Program’s Rwandan Genocide Project was founded in 2002, and began with a study of how GIS imaging revealed indications of genocide in the western part of the country. After lying dormant for several years, it has recently been revived under the director ship of David Simon. The project serves as a resource for students and educators studying Rwanda and the 1994 genocide. A central focus of the project is the preservation of documentation and testimonies related to the genocide.
Other GSP-sponsored research on Rwanda
phd dissertations
- Charles Mironko, GSP Associate Director, Social and Political Mechanisms of Mass Murder: An Analysis of Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide, Yale University, Department of Anthropology, submitted March 2004.
- Philip Verwimp, GSP Visiting Fellow (1999, 2002-04), Development and Genocide in Rwanda: A Political Economy Analysis of Peasants and Power under the Habyarimana Regime, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, 2003.