In contemplating the bloodletting that has accompanied the crumbling of nations and the building of a “New World Order” after the cold war, it has been hard to avoid hearing echoes of the Holocaust.
Bosnia and Rwanda are now at center stage. In Bosnia, Serbs wage war against Muslims in the name of “ethnic cleansing,” systematically raping and murdering civilians and throwing Muslims into concentration camps. In Rwanda, Hutu squads have murdered at least 200,000 Tutsi -- almost 20 per cent of the country’s Tutsi population -- in less than two months. Newspapers, magazines, and television illustrate the carnage with a depressing array of photographs and videotapes: starved, maimed, and hopeless survivors; corpses piled high, strewn on roads, jamming rivers. For many people in the West, these nightmarish images instantly recall the pictures taken at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
Those who have sought intervention by other countries and the United Nations to stop the killing in Bosnia and Rwanda often explicitly compare today’s events to the Nazis’ murder of millions of Europe’s Jews and Gypsies. Correctly labeling the Hutu and Serbian actions as “genocide,” they challenge the West and the world to act. A recent press release from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum concerning Rwanda makes the case bluntly: “Africans who are killed solely because of their tribal identification and a history of conflict with other tribes are no less victims of ethnic hatred than today’s Bosnian Muslims or yesterday’s European Jews.” Implicitly referring to the Allies’ inaction during the Holocaust, museum officials warn that there can be “no exoneration for those who do not do what can be done” to end the carnage in Bosnia and Rwanda.
How useful is the analogy between these current tragedies and the Holocaust? Clearly, the wanton destruction of lives and cultures in Bosnia and Rwanda merits the kind of moral outrage most people feel about the Holocaust. Not coincidentally, we use words and ideas to describe these horrors that scholars originally created to describe the Holocaust and the world’s response to it. The sociologist Raphael Lemkin, for example, devised the term “genocide” during World War II to characterize the special nature of crimes like the racially inspired murder of Jews and Gypsies. Lemkin’s term has allowed us to make a qualitative distinction about the intent behind a particular type of atrocity.
Further, recent literature on the response to the Holocaust while it was going on has helped to shape our sense of international moral responsibility. Among works by historians, David Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews and Martin Gilbert’s Auschwitz and the Allies have helped to reconstruct and publicize the historical fact of the Allies’ long indifference to the plight of European Jews and Gypsies. This history serves as a goad to conscience today.
Yet Holocaust scholarship also reveals a complicated history only partially applicable to current situations. Before World War II broke out, France, England, and the United States might have utilized economic boycotts, more-liberal immigration policies, and other means short of military intervention to alleviate the suffering of German Jews and Gypsies and to register contempt for Nazi policy. Yet they did very little, and both the government and the news media in those countries attempted to underplay or ignore the problem. Fear of war, indifference, anti-Semitism, and a focus on pressing domestic affairs all combined to rule out much assistance for Jews. As for Gypsies, the rest of Europe shared the Nazis’ contempt for this “alien” people, and Americans hardly knew they existed outside literature and opera.
With the invasion of Poland and the onset of World War II, Hitler’s campaign against Jews and Gypsies turned into wholesale slaughter. The Nazis single-mindedly carried out genocide even as they fought a world war. As historians such as Mr. Wyman, Mr. Gilbert, Walter Laqueur, Deborah Lipstadt, and others have shown, the Allies kept public knowledge of genocide to a minimum during the war and did little to prevent the killings or to aid in the escape of refugees.
By comparison, international reaction to the Bosnian and Rwandan tragedies has been intense and humanitarian. This has been especially true in the area of refugee relief. Despite daunting numbers and often horrendous conditions, thousands of lives have been saved.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the United Nations, and individual countries have been less successful in achieving peace in Bosnia and Rwanda. They have tried arms embargoes, economic boycotts, and threats of air bombardment. International commissions (in the case of Bosnia) and neighboring countries (in the case of Rwanda) have negotiated cease-fires, but so far these have not fully taken effect. They have not stopped the killing of civilians by paramilitary forces and have been disregarded after short periods of enforcement.
As for direct military presence, uniformed U.N. peacekeepers in both areas have been mocked, defied, abused, and martyred by both Serbian and Hutu forces, undercutting their already precarious legitimacy. It remains to be seen whether the current French intervention in Rwanda will succeed in its mission of saving lives without courting military engagement. In any case, had the Western democracies exhibited a similar consciousness and commitment in the 1930’s and 1940’s, many more thousands of Jews and Gypsies might have been saved. Still, comparing the Allied response to the Holocaust with the international response to the carnage in Rwanda and Bosnia also underscores how difficult it is to end genocidal bloodlust once it has broken out.
One reason for failure to achieve peace thus far is that both Serbian and Hutu forces have pursued genocidal policies as part of long-brewing civil wars, a complication for which the Holocaust analogy does not prepare us. The Nazis attempted to isolate and murder two stateless, landless, unarmed, and friendless peoples -- Jews and Gypsies -- in the cause of an ideology of Aryan racial superiority, which transcended politics and borders. Unlike the Jews and Gypsies, today’s victims are neither stateless nor without armed forces.
Bosnian Muslims ask not for rescue and a safe haven but rather for more weapons. They reject cease-fire plans that allow the Serbs to retain what the Muslims consider to be too much conquered territory. In Rwanda, Tutsi rebels actually have made significant inroads against Hutu-dominated government forces, although their military successes have not yet translated into protection for Tutsi civilians.
Coming between warring parties in a civil war is difficult enough, but in both Bosnia and Rwanda long-standing alliances with other countries complicate peace negotiations. Russia champions the Serbs; France retains links to the Hutu and Belgium to the Tutsi. Indeed, France’s intervention in Rwanda on behalf of civilians has been rejected by Tutsi rebels, who fear that it will inevitably favor the Hutu. Such facts in no way diminish the magnitude of the tragedies in Bosnia and Rwanda; they do, however, point to circumstances far different from those of the Holocaust. The absence of outside supporters was a fact of life and death for European Jews and Gypsies.
More-useful analogies to the present crises can be found. For instance, the Bosnian tragedy brings to mind the Spanish Civil War. Between 1936 and 1939, Spanish Loyalists and Fascists engaged in a bloodbath in which 200,000 soldiers and more than 130,000 civilians perished. The vast majority of civilians died in massacres or other acts of terrorism committed by both sides -- acts quite comparable to those in Bosnia. The Fascists killed an additional 100,000 Loyalists in the years immediately following their victory. Ideology and religion figured as more-prominent issues than ethnicity (although ethnic tensions surfaced, as well), but the results were just as bloody as those in Bosnia and Rwanda.
Italy and Germany lent military support to the Spanish Fascists, and Stalin’s Russia aided the Loyalists. The Western democracies remained neutral and even declared an arms embargo, in part because they feared a world war and in part because each side in Spain had strong lobbies in the West. Like the Muslims in Bosnia, all the Loyalists wanted was money and arms. Yet it is unclear whether allowing the Loyalists to receive more arms would have led to their victory or simply to more bloodshed. A similar dilemma now is facing policy makers considering the Bosnian situation, and the possibility of further bloodshed has made them reluctant to remove the arms embargo.
In thinking about Rwanda, the fate of breakaway Biafra in the Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 provides useful parallels. In just over two years, nearly one million Biafrans starved to death while Nigeria wore down the rebels. The outside world provided famine relief and help to refugees, but could not broker a settlement because Nigeria did not want anything less than total victory. In another African case relevant to Rwanda, it took an invasion by Tanzania to bring Idi Amin’s murderous rule in Uganda to an end. But even then mass killings and civil war continued as the former Ugandan president, Milton Obote, fought to re-establish his power -- only to lose it later, when he was ousted by a military coup.
Sadly, such comparisons offer little hope for an end to the bloodshed in such conflicts short of victory by one side, mutual exhaustion, or decisive military intervention by outside forces. If we are to prevent future outbreaks of genocide and make cease-fires stick, we must face the economic, political, and social problems of potential Rwandas and Bosnias before they disintegrate into civil wars and worse. We must spend more time and money encouraging nations at risk to achieve social stability. We were willing to invest such resources when the goal was defending the world against Communism; why should we be unwilling to do so when the aim is preventing genocide?
Both the Bosnian and Rwandan tragedies have histories that belie their sudden appearance in the headlines. Each of those histories had moments when timely aid, pressure, or threats might have dampened the bloodlust that is now so hard to tame. Calling up the memory of Auschwitz may shock us into awareness, but we must make historical comparisons with care. And we must remember that, taken too seriously, analogies can blind us to knowledge of the unique and specific circumstances of contemporary events.
Robert H. Abzug is professor of history and director of the American-studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (Oxford University Press, 1985) and, most recently, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1994).