Forum 8 : Ben Kiernan:"Genocide: Themes and Variations from Armenia to East Timor" Melbourne, August 2001

L isten to Ben Kiernan's address (Real Audio Player required)

Abstract of Ben Kiernan's address:

Twentieth century cases of genocide varied in important ways, yet their perpetrators shared some basic ideological features. The different paradigms by which they have been interpreted -- theories of genocide, nationalism, totalitarianism, and national security ideology -- illuminate the differences but inadequately account for the commonalities.

Ideological extremism, one-party dictatorships, relentless pursuit of 'enemies' and violence against 'contaminating' elements are prominent features of most genocides. But territorial expansionism, transnational terror, and ideological concepts of 'the land' and 'the people' can also be detected in most cases. They share with racial and religious hatred both a transnational dimension and a construct which ignores real people but claims to justify extreme violence in their name.

The ideologically diverse perpetrators of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the Cambodian genocide were, respectively, militarists, Nazis and Communists. Yet racism was a key component of the ideology of each regime - Turkish, German and Khmer. Even though all three regimes were atheistic, the racism was also conflated with religion, particularly targeting religious minorities (Christians, Jews, and Muslims). All three regimes also attempted to expand their territories into a contiguous heartland ('Turkestan', 'Lebensraum', and 'Kampuchea Krom'), mobilising primordial racial rights and connections to the land. Consistent with this, all three regimes idealized their ethnic peasantry as the true 'national' class, the ethnic soil from which the new state grew.

These international ideological elements - race, religion, land and 'people' - make for an explosive mixture. Most also appear, in different colours and compounds, in the chemistry of other cases of genocide, for instance the Indonesian massacres of Communists in 1965-66 and in East Timor from 1975 to 1999, and also in the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides of the early 1990s.

About Ben Kiernan

Ben Kiernan, who was born in Melbourne in 1953, is A.Whitney Griswold Professor of History and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He gained his B.A. Hons. (first class) from Monash University in 1975 and his Ph.D. from Monash in 1983. Kiernan is author of How Pol Pot Came to Power (London, 1985), The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1999 (New Haven, 1996), and three other works and over a hundred scholarly articles on Southeast Asia and the history of genocide. He is editor of Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, The United Nations, and the International Community (New Haven, 1993). Kiernan founded the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University in 1994, winning research grants of nearly $2 million from the U.S. and other governments. He has been called 'the most knowledgeable observer of Cambodia anywhere in the Western world' (Choice 9/94). Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge 'indicted' him as an 'arch war criminal' (Khmer Rouge radio, 14 August 1995). Kiernan's work has been translated into ten languages and widely reviewed internationally. His latest book, Le Génocide au Cambodge, 1975-1979: Race, idéologie et pouvoir was published by Gallimard in its distinguished series, Nouvelle Revue Francaise, in 1998. Kiernan is a member of the Editorial Boards of Critical Asian Studies, Human Rights Review, and the Journal of Genocide Research. He founded the Genocide Studies Program at Yale in 1998 with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is writing a global history of genocide since 1500.

Genocide Studies Program Website - Yale Center for International and Area Studies