A Brief History of Genocide

No one can be sure how many people were slaughtered in Rwanda in 1994. In one hundred days, a group of military and civilian leaders organized the country’s Hutu majority to eliminate its Tutsi minority. They killed many Hutu, as well: anyone who showed reluctance to perform what was considered to be his or her national duty became a target. But whereas these Hutu were murdered as individuals—butchered for their beliefs or their actions—the Tutsi were murdered because they were Tutsi. This is why the killings of more than half a million Rwandan Tutsi between March and July of 1994 must be called genocide.

The genocidal impulse may be as old as organized power. In the Hebrew Bible, Moses obeyed God’s command to exterminate a foreign people: “Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy people. And Moses spake unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites, and avenge the lord of Midian. . . . And they warred against the Midianites, as the lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males” (Num. 31:2–3, 7).

While the impulse to destroy an enemy is ancient, the technology of genocide is constantly evolving. The Nazi Holocaust was a state-of-the-art mass extermination. Jews were branded for the purpose of identification and subjected to experimentation by Nazi doctors. The killing took place in industrial compounds where the killers—the attendants—simply sprinkled Zyklon-B crystals into the gas chambers. The whole genocidal apparatus functioned with bureaucratic efficiency.

The Rwandan genocide, on the other hand, was rather old-fashioned. It was carried out with machetes rather than chemicals; street corners, living rooms, and churches became places of death. Whereas Nazi Germany made every attempt to isolate those most guilty of its crimes from their victims, the Rwandan genocide was a much more intimate affair. It was carried out by hundreds of thousands of people and witnessed by millions. A Rwandan government minister I met in 1997 contrasted the two horrors: “In Germany,” he said, “the Jews were taken out of their residences, moved to distant, faraway locations, and killed there, almost anonymously. In Rwanda, the government did not kill. It prepared the population, enraged it and enticed it. Your neighbors killed you.”

As it happens, the Germans had developed their technique in Africa. In 1904, German Southwest Africa—the territory that would ultimately become Namibia—faced a political crisis. The future of the colony seemed suddenly precarious; the Herero, a small agricultural people numbering some eighty thousand, had taken up arms to defend their land and cattle against German settlers. The governor of the territory attempted to negotiate with the Herero, but his subordinates persuaded Kaiser Wilhelm II to replace him. General Lothar von Trotha, the Kaiser’s choice, observed that

the views of the Governor and also a few old Africa hands on the one hand, and my views on the other, differ completely. The first wanted to negotiate for some time already and regard the Herero nation as necessary labour material for the future development of the country. I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated, or, if this was not possible by tactical measures, have to be expelled from the country by operative means and further detailed treatment. This will be possible if the water-holes . . . are occupied. The constant movement of our troops will enable us to find the small groups of the nation who have moved back westwards and destroy them gradually. . . . My intimate knowledge of many central African tribes (Bantu and others) has everywhere convinced me of the necessity that the Negro does not respect treaties but only brute force.

Under Trotha’s command, German infantry and artillery opened an offensive against the insurgents. As the Herero fled the German assault, every avenue of escape was blocked, save one: the southeast route, through the Kalahari Desert. Their journey across the desert was a death march: almost 80 percent of the Herero perished. This was not an accident, as a...