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Revolution and Genocide: An Interview with Robert Melson
By Khatchig Mouradian
February 10, 2005
“All victims of disasters think their disaster is unique in the world. It’s
a bit like having someone very close to you die in your family; you really
don’t want someone rushing to you saying, “I’m sorry this person died, but
let me tell you that somebody else also died!” says Robert Melson in this
interview.
As a survivor of the Holocaust, Melson has reason to feel that the suffering
of his people was unique. However, trained in comparative politics, he also
finds it important to draw parallels between the Holocaust and other
Genocides. “If you’re going to have some understanding, you have to
compare,” he notes. In his book “Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of
the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust” (University of Chicago Press,
1992), Robert Melson does exactly that.
For him, “uniqueness does not mean incomparabilty, and comparability does
not mean equivalence.”
Robert Melson has received his PhD in Political Science from MIT (1967). His
research covers genocide and ethnic conflict in plural societies. Currently,
he is the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
His book, “Revolution and Genocide” won the PIOOM Award from Leiden
University for the best book in the field of Human Rights for 1993 and was
also nominated for the Grawemeyer award. His other publications include,
“False Papers: Deception and Survival in the Holocaust” and “Nigeria:
Modernization and the Politics of Communalism” (with Howard Wolpe).
In this interview, conducted by phone on January 13, 2005, we discuss a
number of issues related to genocide.
Aztag-You define genocide as “a policy initiative that uses massacre and
other means to eliminate a communal group or social class from a social
structure.” This definition is, as you yourself have noted, both wider than
the UN definition and narrower. Why did you opt for this specific
definition?
Robert Melson- Well, what I was trying to do is to solve the problem of the
UN Convention (on Genocide). Many argue that the UN definition is too
narrow, because it doesn’t include political and socio-economic groups. It
is also argued that the definition is too broad because it doesn’t make a
distinction between genocide in whole and genocide in part. My definition
takes into consideration both criticisms. However, I’m not fixated on
definitions; What I’m really interested in is the process, the reality of
what leads to genocide and what stops genocide. Genocide, to me, is a
planned wide-scale destruction of innocent human beings in its largest
sense, and what I was doing in the book was trying to be scholarly and more
exact as far as definitions are concerned, but it’s not the most important
thing.
Aztag- In one of your lectures, you say, “My parents began to discover the
truth about what had happened to the jewish people, but it was knowledge
without understanding.” Was it the need to “make sense of the insensible”
that shaped your research interests?
Robert Melson- Yes, I think that’s a good way of putting it. I’m trained as
a political scientist, and as I was doing political research I found that on
the one hand I was practicing my profession and on the other hand, what was
uppermost on my mind and what was most worrying to me was my past; the
Holocaust, the destruction of my family. So the personal solution for me was
to bring my research and my thinking in line with my interest and that’s
what I did; I have to say that it took a number of years to work this out.
Aztag- And why is this “understanding” important for a survivor of genocide?
Robert Melson- That’s a very good question. Understanding doesn’t bring
anybody back to life, I’m not even sure understanding helps to prevent
future genocides –although people have stressed that without understanding,
prevention is not possible. At its most fundamental psychological basis,
without understanding you’re at the mercy of the past; you feel that you
have no control over it, you feel that you’re victimized by it. Although
understanding does not start a process of rebuilding the past, or bringing
back the people who are victimized, but at least it gives you some control
over your own thoughts. Understanding is, in a way, a selfish process, it’s
a way of dealing with your own crisis. I guess the analogy would be someone
who has a serious illness –let’s say cancer– and knows it’s a terminal
cancer. One of the things he would do is to try to understand cancer; this
won’t make the cancer go away, but the understanding helps him to deal with
it. Maybe that’s as good as an answer as I can give you.
Aztag- What about comparing?
Robert Melson- I’m not a historian, I’m not a sociologist and i’m not a
psychologist; I do comparative politics. So I naturally use the methodology
and the approaches that I’ve been trained with, and I happen to think that
it’s the best way. I think that is the way; if you’re going to have some
understanding, you have to compare. Comparison is, in a way, the basis of
all science. Without it, you can’t understand or even measure something! You
have too have a reference point; how big is the lamp that is on my desk? The
question is, “compared to what?”
Aztag- And being a Holocaust survivor and a researcher of the Holocaust,
there is the sensitive issue of uniqueness, which can make comparison a
harder endeavor, can’t it?
Robert Melson- I guess all victims of disasters think their disaster is
unique in the world. It’s a bit like having someone very close to you die in
your family, you really don’t want someone rushing to you saying, “I’m sorry
this person died, but let me tell you that somebody else also died!” You’re
not in the mood for that; it’s not appropriate. However, if you’re a
physician and you’re trying to understand a disease, you look for different
cases of this disease –again going back to the notion of comparison–to be
able to see under what conditions does this disease manifest itself.
Some parts of the Jewish community have been sensitive to the issue of
comparison, both because the Holocaust was recent and so many people were
affected by it, but there is another reason the uniqueness issue came up for
the Jews; very often they were told “Well, yes, it’s terrible that there was
Holocaust, but many other people have suffered, so don’t make such a big
fuss about it, be normal like everybody else.” And the honest reaction has
been “Give us a chance to grieve a little bit! Give us a chance to bury our
dead before you tell us to become normal.” So there was a kind of an
emotional reaction toward the comparison. But by now – we’re not in 1955 –
by 2005, with the Cambodian and Rwandan Genocide and with increased
awareness on the Armenian Genocide, I think most people do recognize that
there are more things in the world than one particular people being
destroyed.
Aztag- Can you please briefly explain the argument you present in
“Revolution and Genocide”?
Robert Melson- The main points are both in the introduction and the
conclusion of the book. I was trying to compare the Armenian Genocide and
the Holocaust, and I was trying to look not only into the ideology of the
Young Turks or of the Nazis, but also the circumstances under which both of
these Genocides occured. A revolutionary transformation that occured in the
Ottoman Empire with the coup against Abdul Hamid, and the circumstances were
WWI. And then if you look at the Holocaust, it was the coming to power of
Hitler which was also a kind of a revolution – he made it quite clear that
he was a revolutionary and that the Nazis were revolutionaries – and the
circumstances were WWII. So in both cases you have revolutionaries coming to
power and then a genocide occuring during wartime.
And then a question comes up: Why? What is it about revolution and wartime
that can, under certain circumstances, lead to genocide? I think the simple
idea behind it is that revolutionaries try to transform their societies in
profound ways, and one way to transform a society is to eliminate groups
that don’t fit into the identity that the revolutionaries would like their
society to have. And what war does is that it enables these radical measures
to take place, because wars close off societies and they call for military
solutions to social problems. Now it’s not true that every revolution leads
to genocide – the American Revolution didn’t lead to genocide, the English
Revolution didn’t lead to genocide – but under some conditions, some
revolutions do lead to genocide. Similarly, not all genocides are products
of revolutions. The destruction of Native Americans and the destructions of
peoples in Africa were products of Imperialism, not revolution.
Aztag- When I was reading your book, I kept thinking about other cases of
genocide, the Cambodian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide…
Robert Melson- Yes, I just wrote and article about this in the book “The
Specter of Genocide” edited by Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan. In that
chapter, what I do is extend the analysis from the Armenian Genocide and the
Holocaust to Rwanda. And again we have the pattern of revolution in the
1950s – the revolution in 1959 – and the Hutu coming to power, displacing
the Tutsi, articulating a racialist ideology, the Hamitic ideology claims
that the Tutsis were not originally a part of the nation, that they had come
from Somalia or Ethiopia and, therefore, they ought not to have any power
and they ought to be demoted from any postions that they have; very soon
after, massacres occured. When you talk to people in Rwanda, they tell you
that the genocide did not start in 1994, noting that the process of the
genocide started in 1959. The war was the war between RPF (the Rwanda
Patriotic Front) starting in 1990. Therefore, again, in Rwanda you have the
conditions of revolution and war leading to genocide.
Aztag- What about Darfur? The events that have lately caused the
displacement of more than a million people and the death of thousands of
others; many are calling what is happening there genocide, others are
falling short of using the word.
Robert Melson- Again, I know that president Bush and the US Congress have
used the term “genocide”, then again, if you go back to the UN definition,
it talks about genocide in part and genocide in whole. Genocide in whole
means extermination; this is what happened to the Tutsis, the Armenians, and
the Jews in Europe. I think in Darfur there is genocide, but it’s more like
ethnic cleansing, it resembles more what happened in Yugoslavia, where
people were being driven out and were being “punished” for political
activities; this is not a planned extermination, but it’s bad enough! Tens
of thousands people have been killed already, and if there’s not enough
support, more people will be killed, so it is a genocide in part, but it is
not the kind of extermination that I wrote about.
Aztag- When talking about the causes of the Armenian Genocide, Dadrian and
Suny do give a minimal credit to the “provocation thesis”, according to
which the actions of the Armenians caused the perpetrators to react with
violence, but you completely dismiss it.
Robert Melson- I think the difference between Dadrian and Suny and me is a
matter of emphasis. We all recognize that there were Armenian bands, that
Russian troops committed atrocities against Turkish villagers in the Eastern
Vilayets and so on. The real question is: Did these provocations cause
genocide? Bernard Lewis and Turkish “explainers” argue that the provocations
were the basis of genocide. My argument was rather simple, in any
provocation, whether it’s the Armenian genocide or when you’re provoked by a
colleague at work, how you react doesn’t depend on the provocation, it
depends on you– what you are thinking , what your attitude is towards your
colleague. Your action is not an automatic reaction to the provocation. If
you’re walking down the hall, and a colleague accidentally bumps into you,
and you push him hard, your reaction is not automatically a product of his
action. It’s a product of you being mad that morning or disliking that
person or being an aggressive person yourself. Consequently, to understand
the actions of any person who is conducting violence you have to understand
what motivates that person; it’s not enough to look at what the victim has
done. The victim might have done something, or the victim might have done
nothing. That’s it, that’s really the basis of the argument. So what I was
trying to argue is “let’s look at what was happening to the Young Turks,
what was going through their minds, rather than what the Armenians were
doing.”
Aztag- You say in one of your papers that people sometimes emphesize the
nationalism of the Armenians without looking at the nationalism of the
Turks.
Robert Melson- Exactly. I mean, sure, there was nationalism – the Dashnaks,
the Henchaks- yeah, there were nationalist movements. but what about the
Turks?
Bernard Lewis’s book “The Emergence of The Modern Turkey” is a wonderful
book, a great book, but when it comes to the Armenian Genocide, his
treatment is very strange. It’s as if somehow the Turks became some kind of
an automatic pilot, and had no conceptions of their own, no ideology of
their own. Their ideology was nationalism, of course.
Aztag- What are your research interests currently?
Robert Melson- Well, since then, I’ve thought about the Rwandan Genocide and
I wrote that article on that. I’ve also written a memoir of my family’s
experiences during the war, it’s called “False Papers.”
Lately, I’ve been thinking about prevention. At some point, one has to
think, “This analysis should be helpful, it should lead to helpful
policies”. Therefore, in terms of the study of genocide, I’ve become
interested in the question of prevention and the question of resistance.
These are two questions I’ve been thinking about, and, probably, will write
about comparatively, using the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the
Rwandan genocide.
I teach a course here on the Holocaust and Genocide, and very often, one of
the questions the students ask me is: “Why didn’t these people resist being
killed?” And my answer is: “Because they were not prepared to resist. They
were not an armed population, and they were being attacked by an armed
organisation; usually it takes a while to organise resistance, and by the
time that while has passed by, it’s too late, most of the people are already
dead.
Aztag- What cases of resistance do you have in mind?
Robert Melson- Exactly. For example the resistance at Van, or the resistance
at the Warsaw Ghetto, the resistance in parts of Rwanda. In some cases there
was resistance, in many cases there was none! And very often what the
victims do is they blame themselves, or they blame their culture.
The very same generation that suffered the Holocaust has been accused of
being too aggressive, too armed, and too expansive. On the one hand, it’s
too passive, on the other hand it’s too aggressive. so I don’t think that
cultural explanation is very good, I think a better explanation is the
situational/structural explanation; people who don’t expect to be killed are
not prepared to resist, and therefore, they won’t resist! And it’s a kind of
a waste of time to look at the culture and try to explain, in that context,
why they don’t resist. So that’s my thesis.
There have been heavy-duty studies of Jewish cultures, of how, for
centuries, the Jews looked the other way while violence was meted out to
them, because they had no chance to resist, just like the Armenians in the
Ottoman Empire.
The fact of the matter is that, if people can get organised, and if they can
get weapons, they resist.
Aztag- This can also make the provocation thesis less and less sustainable,
doesn’t it?
Robert Melson- That’s a good way of putting it. If people are so
provocative, why didn’t they resist? And that’s right! I mean, that’s a very
good point that you’re making, at the same time people are accused of
provoking the genocide, and they’re also accused of being passive and not
resisting. The other thing is this whole issue of denial. They provoked the
genocide, they were too passive, but of course, there was no genocide! It’s
a wonderful package of demonizing and humiliating the victims all over
again. First they’re killed, then they’re told they were killed because they
provoked the killing, then they’re told they should have resisted, then
they’re told they weren’t killed! It’s a great package!
Aztag- Historians and political scientists often speak about comparative
genocide as a way of understanding and then being able to prevent genocide.
But the fact of the matter is that we say “Never Again” and then we have it
again and again and again, so how helpful is it? Isn’t everything in the end
about real politics? One might think: “No matter how much you compare and
analyze, you won’t change much, because everything boils down to real
politics and the interests of superpowers.”
Robert Melson- Well I think there’s a grain of truth in what you’re saying.
In Samantha Power’s book “A problem from Hell: America and the age of
Genocide”, the basic argument is that it’s not an accident that the United
State does not prevent genocide; it doens’t want to prevent genocide, unless
its interests, as you put it, are immediately hurt. It doens’t want to risk
its people, it doens’t want to risk its wealth. We have beautiful words, we
have beautiful sentiments but nothing much happens, and the best example of
that is Rwanda, because the Holocaust occured under conditions of World War,
and so did the Armenian Genocide and it was very hard to intervene. However,
in Rwanda, a few battalions of US Marines could have prevented the whole
business. The Real Politic played an important role.
I guess scholars and researchers contribute a little bit, but they cannot
substitute their decision making for the decision making of people in power.
I think what they can show is that there are signs, that a genocidal
situation is developing, and that prevention in an early stage is not that
expensive. It’s not necessarilly the sending in of troops and of having a
loss of life on the part of those people who are saving others. For example
in the Rwandan Genocide, there was call for genocide on the radio and the US
and the UN didn’t want to jam that radio for example. There were public
statements made by people in power threatening genocide, no one reacted to
it, no one said “look, we’re going to impose severe sanctions on you, we’re
going to freeze your external balances, bank accounts”.
There are many things that can be done if people pay attention to signs, to
warning signs, and I think that this is where scholars can be useful. What
are the some warning signs that a genocide is about to occur? I do think
that if you have a deeply divided society that’s undergoing a revolution,
heading into war, I think those are warning signs; people can pay attention
to it or not pay attention to it, but at least as a scholar, you can say
“look, why don’t you pay attention to that early and not before it’s too
late?” That’s where you can be helpful, but of course, our influence is
limited. I’m a professor, I type! I don’t command armies!
Aztag- And you might also help create greater awareness…
Robert Melson- Sure, sure. The world is complicated, it’s not only real
politique. Out there, there is a worldwide human rights sensitivity, people
do react to, for example, the Tsunami. You have the tsunami in Indonesia and
Sri Lanka, the world got mobilized around this right away, millions of
dollars were spent to help people and so on…Why wasn’t this mobilization
there for when Rwanda occured? So there is a human rights movement, it’s
almost like an anti-slavery movement in the 19th century, in the 20th and
the 21st century there are lot of people around the world who are concerned
about these things and they can be mobilized for action and they should be
mobilized for an action, but there’s also Real Politique; people who are in
power define things narrowly, and they pay attention to public opinion, they
pay attention to the costs of actions, and if the actions are expensive in
terms of money and lives they won’t do it. If the actions are not so
expensive, and there was public pressure to do something, they might do
something, I’m stressing the obvious here, I think.
–Boundary_(ID_ooAlgermr6kV3gSq8sQcyQ)–
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://www.aztagdaily.com/interviews/Interviews.htm