Summary
In a mere eight months of 1941-42, the invading German armies killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war through starvation, exposure, and summary execution. This little-known gendercide vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated mass killing in human history.
The background
Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, in the biggest military operation the world had ever seen. Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" aimed to overthrow the Communist regime of Joseph Stalin (see the case-study of Stalin's Purges) and to impose a brutal system of slavery and colonial exploitation on the Soviet masses. The Soviet armies had been decimated by the prewar purges in their ranks, and they crumbled in the face of the Nazi onslaught. In the first few months of the war, the Nazis rounded up Soviet conscript troops in a series of huge encirclements around Minsk, Smolensk, Bryansk, and Kiev. By the time the brutal Russian winter descended, millions of Soviet POWs were dying in captivity, penned behind barbed wire with no protection from the elements, being executed en masse by the German Army (Wehrmacht), or being transported to Germany for extermination by the hundreds of thousands.
R.J. Rummel writes that prisoners-of-war through history have received "particularly lethal treatment ... If their lives were spared they were often sent to work as slaves in mines, on galley ships, in swamps, or at other labor that killed them off rapidly. The Mongols used their prisoners in the front ranks when attacking fortified cities and towns, and forced them to fill in moats or prepare catapults close to the dangerous walls. If not turned into slaves, prisoners of war were often simply killed, captured garrisons massacred." (Rummel, Death by Government, p. 67.) The young Soviet men who fell into German hands during these terrible years could expect treatment even more barbaric than the historical standard. As Slavs, they were considered "Untermenschen" -- subhumans -- by the Germans. As far as Nazi forces were concerned, the laws of war did not apply.
As an aside, it should not be assumed that the "POW" designation referred to men who had, in fact, seen military service. Nazi policy in the occupied areas was very explicit: "Men between the ages of 15 and 65 were to be treated as POWs ... [and] taken to POW camps." The 18th Panzer Division studied by Omer Bartov had "orders to arrest all men of military age and send them to the rear" (Bartov, The Eastern Front, p. 110). This rapidly became a euphemism for mass murder by execution, starvation, and exposure. Even those conscripted into formal military service had little opportunity to see battle: as noted, the majority of prisoners in these early phases of Operation Barbarossa surrendered en masse after being rounded up in huge encirclements.
The gendercide
Soviet prisoners-of-war jammed into
one of the open-air POW camps, summer 1941.
"Testimony is eloquent and prolific on the abandonment of entire divisions under the open sky," writes Alexander Dallin of the fate of these Soviet POWs. "Epidemics and epidemic diseases decimated the camps. Beatings and abuse by the guards were commonplace. Millions spent weeks without food or shelter. Carloads of prisoners were dead when they arrived at their destination. Casualty figures varied considerably but almost nowhere amounted to less than 30 percent in the winter of 1941-42, and sometimes went as high as 95 per cent" (Bartov, The Eastern Front, p. 110).
Many of the captured Soviet men were forced to walk "hundreds of kilometers" to their designated places of detention. Colonel Erwin Lahousen, a German foreign intelligence officer, wrote in October 1941 that "The columns of [Soviet] prisoners of war moving on the roads make an idiotic impression like herds of animals. The guard details ... can only maintain some semblance of order ... by using physical force. Because of the physical exertion of the marches, the meager diet and poor conditions in the quarters in individual camps, prisoners of war often break down, are then carried by their fellow-soldiers [see the photo at the beginning of this document] or are left lying. The 6th Army has given orders that all prisoners of war who break down are to be executed. Unfortunately, this is done on the road, even in towns ..." (Quoted in The Hamburg Institute for Social Research, The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews, and Other Civilians, 1939-1944 [New York: The New Press, 1999], pp. 100, 142.)
Conditions in the prison camps themselves were similarly atrocious. "There were no barracks or permanent housing. The camps were simply open areas fenced off with barbed wire. The prisoners had to lie in the sun, then in mud, and in the fall -- with temperatures as low as minus 30 degreees centigrade -- faced the possibility of freezing to death." (The German Army and Genocide, p. 142.) A Hungarian tank officer who visited one enclosure described it as follows: "Behind wire there were tens of thousands of [Soviet] prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring. Few could stand on their feet. Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep into their sockets. Hundreds were dying every day, and those who had any strength left dumped them in a vast pit" (Werth, Russia At War, pp. 635-36). Cannibalism was rife, and deliberate, according to Dallin: "German policy had caused, or at the very least had tolerated, the degradation of the prisoners -- and then held it up to its own people as something to be reviled, as something typical of a sub-human who could never be like Western man" (Dallin, German Rule in Russia, p. 415).
In his epic masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn describes the scene in one POW camp, with "the evening mist hoverng above a swampy meadow encircled by barbed wire; a multitude of bonfires; and, around the bonfires, beings who had once been Russian officers but had now become beastlike creatures who gnawed the bones of dead horses, who baked patties from potato rinds, who smoked manure and were all swarming with lice. Not all these two-legged creatures had died as yet. Not all of them had lost the capacity for intelligible speech, and one could see in the crimson reflections of the bonfires how a belated understanding was dawning on those faces which were descending to the Neanderthal." (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago [Harper & Row, 1973], p. 218.)
Mass death through starvation was anticipated well in advance by Nazi military planners. "Daily rations amounted to only one-fourth of what a normal person needed to survive. These meager rations resulted from the decision reached before the campaign, i.e. that providing food for the Wehrmacht and for Germany had the highest priority. 'As a result, millions of people will surely starve,' was the terse conclusion formulated at a conference of German State Secretaries in Berlin in May 1941." (The German Army and Genocide, p. 142.)
Soviet prisoner-of-war killed in Nazi "medical"
experiments, probably at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Despite the eventual shift from outright extinction to slave labour, which also swept up hundreds of thousands of Soviet women, "maltreatment continued ... to the very end," with "instances of cruel atrocities ... reported as late as the winter of 1944-5" (Bartov, The Eastern Front, p. 110). "Many [prisoners] were shot," writes Alexander Werth, "many died in concentration camps during the later stages of the war, ... [and] some were even used for vivisectionist and other 'scientific' experiments" (Russia At War, p. 635).
How many died?
Because the targeted group consisted for the most part of soldiers in a bureaucratically-run modern army, the gendercide against Soviet prisoners-of-war is one of the best-documented of these case studies. Daniel Goldhagen, in Hitler's Willing Executioners (p. 290), gives the astonishing figure of "2.8 million young, healthy Soviet POWs" killed by the Germans, "mainly by starvation ... in less than eight months" of 1941-42, before "the decimation of Soviet POWs ... was stopped" and the Germans "began to use them as laborers" (emphasis added). There is good reason to think that this rate of killing exceeds even the worst period of the Holocaust against the Jews, although the total number killed was lower, and the Soviet victims were drawn from a much larger population base. Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint write in Total War that "The total number of prisoners taken by the German armies in the USSR was in the region of 5.5 million. Of these the astounding number of 3.5 million or more had been lost by the middle of 1944 and the assumption must be that they were either deliberately killed or done to death by criminal negligence. Nearly two million of them died in camps and close on another million disappeared while in military custody either in the USSR or in rear areas; a further quarter of a million disappeared or died in transit between the front and destinations in the rear; another 473,000 died or were killed in military custody in Germany or Poland." They add that "This slaughter of prisoners cannot be accounted for by the peculiar chaos of the war in the east. ... The true cause was the inhuman policy of the Nazis towards the Russians as a people and the acquiescence of army commanders in attitudes and conditions which amounted to a sentence of death on their prisoners."
These losses must be placed in the context of a war that killed as many as 40 million Soviets, including large numbers of non-combatants apart from the POWs. Nonetheless, Alexander Werth writes that "Next to the Jews in Europe, six million of whom perished at the hands of the Germans ... the biggest single German crime was undoubtedly the extermination by hunger, exposure and in other ways of ... [Soviet] war prisoners" (Russia At War, p. 634). Given that the bulk of the gendercide took place in just eight months, it was, together with the genocide in Rwanda, the most concentrated mass slaughter of all time, eclipsing the most exterminatory months of the Jewish holocaust. It was also without doubt the greatest single act of gender-exclusive killing in human history.
An important group of Soviet victims is also left out of these calculations: namely, those soldiers who never even reached captivity after surrendering. According to Ward Churchill, "perhaps as many as a million troops ... were simply executed by Wehrmacht and Waffen SS units rather than being taken prisoner in the first place." (Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide [City Lights Books, 1997], p. 48.)
In one of the twentieth century's most tragic ironies, the two million or so POWs who survived to be repatriated to the USSR were arrested there en masse on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans. Almost without exception, they were sentenced to long terms in the Soviet death-camps. Gendercide Watch is unaware of any reliable estimates of the number who died there, but the total must have been in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. "In Russian captivity, as in German captivity, the worst lot of all was reserved for the Russians," writes Solzhenitsyn. "... It would appear that during the one thousand one hundred years of Russia's existence as a state there have been, ah, how many foul and terrible deeds! But among them was there ever so multimillioned foul a deed as this: to betray one's own soldiers and proclaim them traitors?" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, p. 240, 256.)
Who was responsible?
Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler inspects
a Soviet POW camp on the eastern front.
The mass killing of the Soviet POWs was a direct expression of "the ideological concepts of the Nazi regime, which strove physically to eliminate the 'Bolshevik Untermenschen'" (Bartov, p. 107). As such, it is the leaders of the Nazi regime, above all Adolf Hitler, who bear the greatest responsibility for inflicting their racist and genocidal vision on the Soviet people, the Jews, and many others. "Though clearly aware of the prisoners' plight," writes Alexander Dallin, "the Nazi authorities adopted a pose of righteous indignation over the behaviour of the sufferers." Nazi leader Hermann Goering joked about cannibalism in the camps, telling a diplomat that "in the camps for [Soviet] prisoners of war, after having eaten everything possible, including the soles of their boots, they have begun to eat each other, and what is more serious, have also eaten a German sentry" (Dallin, German Rule in Russia, p. 415).
But no one man or small group can commit genocide alone. The decision to ignore the laws governing the treatment of prisoners-of-war was also made by tens of thousands of German officers. "Except that some generals at Nuremberg [the war-crimes trials] tried to argue that it was difficult unexpectedly to have to feed so many POWs, there is nothing to show that the Army did anything to oppose the policy of extermination of the [Soviet] war prisoners, at least during the first twelve or eighteen months of the war. More than that: some of these 'gentlemanly' German generals were consciously starving the [Soviet] war prisoners" (Werth, Russia At War, p. 637).
Genocidal actions against the Soviet people, and against Soviet Jews in particular, were carried out by hundreds of thousands of "ordinary Germans" sent to fight on the Eastern Front and implement the Nazi occupation policies. Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners has done much to revive the debate about the role of "ordinary" people in inflicting genocidal atrocities. Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler surveys the different interpretations of Nazi rule and Hitler's personal evil, and includes a chapter on Goldhagen's work (see "Further Reading").
The aftermath
The Soviets stopped the Nazi armies at Moscow in December 1941 and eventually gained the upper hand at the Battle of Stalingrad (1942-43) and the Battle of Kursk (July 1943). By April 1945, Soviet forces had crushed all resistance and occupied the German capital, Berlin.
The Soviets took ferocious revenge on the millions of POWs who fell into their hands during the war. Many were simply executed; most were sent to concentration camps where they died of exposure, starvation, and overwork. German POWs (along with Romanians, Italians, and others) "were [not] treated even remotely in accordance with the Geneva Convention. Thousands froze to death and starved on the march or in unheated cattle trucks, and once in camps they were treated as slave labor. Heat, shelter, and clothing were all inadequate, diseases such as typhus were rampant, and food was so scarce that on occasion cannibalism occurred. In all, at least one million German prisoners died out of the 3,150,000 taken by the Red Army." (S.P. MacKenzie, "The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II," The Journal of Modern History, 66: 3 [September 1994], p. 511.)
The Russian Army today remains a death-trap for conscripted men -- though not at the hands of a foreign invader. As many as 10,000 soldiers die each year from hazing, assaults, murder, and suicide. See the case-study of military conscription for further details.
Postscript
In October 2003, Gendercide Watch received the following correspondence about the Soviet POW case, from a Canadian reader:
Hello Gendercide Watch:
I just came across your site and found it very interesting. The genocide of Russian prisoners of war by the Nazis is one of the forgotten stories of World War II.
I know a man who witnessed the barbaric treatment of many of these prisoners in the summer of 1941.
That man was my father, who is now 93 years old. He was a Serbian Royalist officer who was captured in April, 1941, along with the entire Serbian Army of 250,000 men and sent to POW camps in Germany (another forgotten story).
He has often told me that the brutal treatment of the Russians that he witnessed is beyond description.
In the summer of 1941 he witnessed the arrival of thousands of Russian prisoners, who were herded into a vast open-air enclosure next to his camp. He watched as they ate the grass in the fields down to the ground.
The only other reference I have ever heard about Russian prisoners eating grass is to be found in David Irving's biography of Hermann Goering, when Goering actually talks about Russians eating grass.
Your description of the camps is the truth. I do not doubt the stories of cannibalism.
History is a strange thing. There is very little historical information about the treatment of the Russians. [...] Obviously one needs to speak German, and needs to do research in the German archives to really uncover the whole story. There is still much that has never been seen. I know that the Nazis made newsreel films and took many photographs of these camps, as they did with the Jewish extermination camps, and I believe that there is still much of this material to be uncovered in Germany.
There is also material in the United States that has not been made available. The most significant archive of information is that of Hitler's most important Russian Intelligence Officer, Reinhold Gehlen, who knew more than anyone else about the details of the invasion of Russia.
Gehlen, as you know, surrendered to the Americans at the end of the war. He brought with him the entire Nazi Russian Intelligence files. His knowledge was so valuable to the Allies that, instead of prosecuting him for war crimes, they made him the head of the West German spy network. Many SS men were hired by him and also escaped prosecution.
I have always believed that Gehlen knew all the details about the extermination camps but was so valuable to the Allies they chose to overlook his participation in the Holocaust. If you've read his biography, you'll know that he was extremely intelligent. Hitler had supreme faith in his abilities, and it was Gehlen's intelligence that allowed Hitler to plan the invasion of Russia.
Gehlen was complicit in genocide, but he was allowed to get away with his crimes. If you look at it from that viewpoint, it makes sense that information about the genocide of Russian prisoners is so hard to come by. They were now our enemies in the Cold War, and one of Hitler's most valuable subordinates in the history of that genocide, was now working for us (his previous resume was not publicized for obvious reasons). He was forgiven for his crimes, and the Russians were conveniently and deliberately forgotten.
Thanks,
Paul Vuk
North Vancouver, B.C.
Saturday, April 8, 2006
The Jewish Holocaust, 1933-45
Summary
The holocaust inflicted upon European Jews by the Nazi regime was arguably the most systematic and sadistic campaign of mass extermination ever mounted. Like the Armenian and Rwandan holocausts, the "gendercidal" component is only a secondary and subsidiary one. Nonetheless, an understanding of the gendered strategies of incarceration and extermination pursued by the Nazis throws important light upon the Jewish holocaust, and genocidal strategies as a whole.
The background
The ideology and political programme of Nazism, the movement that seized power in Germany in 1933, was founded from the first on an abiding hatred of Jews as Untermenschen, or "sub-humans." They were accused of orchestrating the "stab in the back" that stripped Germany of victory in World War I and imposed upon it the humiliating surrender terms of the Versailles Treaty (1919). Exploiting deep anti-semitic strains in German and European culture (see Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners), along with the catastrophic economic conditions of the late 1920's and early 1930's, the Nazis under their supreme leader or Führer, Adolf Hitler, succeeded in winning a plurality in 1932 parliamentary elections. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the ageing German president, Paul von Hindenburg. When Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler took over as president, and set about using his police and paramilitaries to murder political opponents and ethnic "traitors" alike. Jews and "Bolsheviks" (communists) were at the top of the list for incarceration in the first "concentration camps."
The Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, but they made it their definitive institution. For many years, it was almost exclusively men who were detained in the grim and often atrocious conditions of the camps. The first Nazi prison camp, Dachau -- created in March 1933 -- housed males only, including many homosexuals. A major marker on the road to the holocaust against the Jews was the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") on November 9-10, 1938, when Hitler's thugs targeted Jewish citizens and property for largescale violence and destruction. According to Yehuda Bauer, the Kristallnacht was accompanied by a gender-selective mass roundup: the Nazis "arrested and sent to concentration camps some 30,000 Jewish men at least." (Cited in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 353.) As Eugen Kogon writes,
These arrests were made without regard for age. Ten-year old boys could be seen side by side with septuagenarians and octogenarians. En route from the Wiemar [sic: Weimar] railroad station [to the camp at Buchenwald] all stragglers were shot down, while the survivors were forced to drag the bloody bodies into camp. ... Inside stood the Block Leaders, wielding iron rods, whips and truncheons, and virtually every Jew who got into the camp sustained injuries. The events that took place at the time are not easily described in a few words. Let me merely mention that sixty-eight Jews went mad that very first night. They were clubbed to death like mad dogs ... four men at a time. ... SS [Schutz-Staffel, "Defense Echelon"] noncoms pushed the heads of some of their charges into overflowing latrine buckets until they suffocated.
Eventually, "for reasons that never became clear, most of the[se] Jews were set free on orders from the Reich authorities" and allowed to go into exile. Exactly a year later, however, after "an alleged attempt on Hitler's life," Jewish men in Buchenwald "were suddenly recalled from their [work] details and confined to barracks." The Germans "picked out twenty-one Austrian and German Jews, entirely at random, without any list. Most of them were vigorous young men. ... The SS took the group out through the gatehouse and shot them at close range in the quarry." (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, Berkley paperback edition [1980], pp. 176-79.)
Hitler's combined caution and brinkmanship in foreign policy won him increasing rewards during the 1930s. Western powers proved unable to unite, or to accept an alliance with the Soviets, to head off the Nazi threat. Eventually, Hitler struck a temporary deal with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, freeing Germany to invade Poland -- the heartland of European Jewry -- in September 1939. From the earliest days of the Nazi occupation, Poland's Jews were subjected to severe hardship and violence. However, it was only with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 that the genocidal hatred of the Nazis was fully unleashed on the defenseless populations of the east. Among those to suffer the worst, almost unacknowledged, were Soviet prisoners-of-war, who died in their millions from exposure, starvation, and mass execution in 1941-42. But from the first, it was clear that the German occupation of the vast new territories (including eastern Poland, which the Soviets had occupied under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact) presented Hitler with the opportunity to implement his "final solution" to the Jewish "problem" in Europe. What followed was a genocide that Noam Chomsky has called "the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history." (Cited in Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent [ECW Press, 1997], p. 186.)
The gendercide against Jewish men
Early Nazi roundups of Jewish males
in the occupied territories (see also below).
The gendercidal dimension of the holocaust against the Jews was evident during particular phases of the campaign of extermination. It nonetheless has its harbinger in the mass detentions of males during the earlier (1933-41) period of Nazi rule. As a campaign of full-blown mass execution, the gendercide against Jewish males marked an important, if temporary, "onset phase" of the holocaust in the occupied eastern territories (including, after August 1941, the Balkans). Gendercidal strategies against women were evident at later stages, both in mass executions and gassings, women-only death camps, and the forced marches that killed tens of thousands in the closing stages of the war. Again, it must be stressed that in both their male and female manifestations, the Jewish gendercides were subsidiary features and strategies of a campaign of "root-and-branch" extermination, in which gender was far from a dominant consideration overall.
Daniel Goldhagen points out in Hitler's Willing Executioners (pp. 149-50) how the"up-close," intimate killing of manifestly defenceless, screaming civilians on the eastern front -- killings which spattered blood and brain matter around the killing fields and over the killers -- was at first incrementally managed according to gender:
The Einsatzgruppen [death-squad] officers ... could habituate their men into their new vocation as genocidal executioners through a stepwise escalation of the killing. First, by shooting primarily teenage and adult Jewish males, they would be able to acclimate themselves to mass executions without the shock of killing women, young children, and the infirm. According to Alfred Filbert, the commander of Einsatzkommando 9, the [execution] order from [Reinhard] Heydrich "quite clearly" "included also women and children." Yet, "in the first instance, without a doubt, the executions were limited generally to Jewish males." By generally keeping units' initial massacres to smallish numbers (by German standards) of a few hundred or even a thousand or so, instead of many thousands, the perpetrators would be less likely to become overwhelmed by the enormity of the gargantuan bloodbaths that were to follow. They also could believe that they were selectively killing the most dangerous Jews, which was a measure that they could conceive to be reasonable for this apocalyptic war. Once the men became used to slaughtering Jews on this sex-selective and smaller scale, the officers could more easily expand the scope and size of the killing operations.
Jewish men rounded up for mass execution
at Zhytomyr, Ukraine, August 7, 1942.
In the early weeks of these murder campaigns, the Einsatzkommandos, according to Goldhagen, "were the equivalent of genocidal scouting parties, developing the methods of killing, habituating the perpetrators to their new vocation and, generally speaking, working out the feasibility of the overall enterprise" (p. 150). Gendercides against men can be seen in such cases as a vanguard for the wider "root-and-branch" genocide -- an initial barrier to be surmounted and a potential "threat" to be removed, before the community is consigned without discrimination to torment and death.
Christopher Browning's research into the atrocities committed by the police battalions attached to the Einsatzgruppen confirms that orders from the top were translated into gendercidal policies at the base. On July 11, 1942, the following orders went out to the police battalions: "Confidential! By order of the Higher SS and Police Leader ... all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law. The shootings are to take place away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares." Browning notes: "There was, of course, no investigation, trial, and confiction of so-called plunderers to be shot according to martial law. Male Jews who appeared to be between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were simply rounded up" and led away for execution. (Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, pp. 13-14.)
Importantly for the analysis of gendercide, Daniel Goldhagen notes that "even if ... the initial order was to kill 'only' teenage and adult Jewish males -- the order was still genocidal and clearly was understood by the perpetrators as such ... The killing of the adult males of a community is nothing less than the destruction of that community" (p. 153, emphasis added). The point is critical in a more general way to modern scholarship on the Jewish holocaust, since this currently centres on key decision-points in the killing campaign on the eastern front, and the debate over precisely when the Nazi actions passed from the atrocious to the outright genocidal (see Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler). As in other holocausts (Armenia, Rwanda), the mass killing of Jewish males proved a necessary initial strategy, but not a sufficient expression, of the eliminationist impulse.
The link to Soviet prisoners-of-war
The waging of genocide against eastern Jews proceeded alongside a much lesser-known holocaust, that of male prisoners captured by the German Army in huge encirclements during the first few months of the war. Nearly three million are known to have died in less than eight months of 1941-42. Gendercide Watch includes a detailed case-study of the Soviet POWs on this site. Most of them died before being transferred to Germany. Those that did not, however, became the original "guinea-pigs" in the Nazis' vast machinery of death. Indeed, as Christian Streit has pointed out, it was originally for the Soviet POWs that the infrastructure of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Maidanek death camps was developed:
It is more than a mere coincidence that the discovery of the technical means to implement the Holocaust with a minimum of material and personal expense and the preparation of the infrastructure at two of the most important death factories, Auschwitz and Maidanek, are also connected with the dynamic described above. In this case, it was particularly the treatment of the Soviet POWs which speeded up developments. Two large groups of Soviet prisoners were involved. The first comprised those prisoners who were selected and executed as "politically intolerable." Before the end of December 1941 at least 33,000 such prisoners had been executed in the concentration camps of the Reich and the General Government [in occupied Poland]. The second group consisted of those Soviet POWs who had been allotted to Himmler as slave labourers in the SS enterprises. The decision to turn these POWs into Himmler's slaves also resulted from the basic decision to brush aside international law in the war against the Soviet Union. ... Repeatedly during the summer of 1941, and starting with a convoy of several hundred in July, groups of Soviet prisoners of war, who had been selected as "intolerable," had been taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp to be executed there. To ease the mental strain of the shooting squads and to save costs and energies the executors soon started looking for a simpler method. It was probably deputy commander Karl Fritzsch who experimented in early September with a pesticide, Zyklon B, to murder some 600 such prisoners and another 250 camp inmates who had been selected as "unfit for work." After more such "test gassings" -- there were at least two more convoys of Soviet prisoners among the victims, one numbering 900 men -- the gassings of Jewish victims were started in January or February 1942. ... Even the infrastructure used in the Final Solution, the Birkenau camp with its rail connection, had originally been intended for 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were to be [Heinrich] Himmler's allocation of slave labourers for the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz which I.G. Farben and the SS were planning as a joint venture. Soviet prisoners numbering 10,000, who were to build the huge Birkenau camp for 100,000 POWs, had been brought to Auschwitz in October 1941. By the end of November half of them were dead, by February 1942 about 8,000. Only 186 were still alive on 1 May 1942. Those prisoners who had not starved had been tortured to death. (Christian Streit, "Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen, Soviet POWs and Anti-Bolshevism in the Emergence of the Final Solution," in Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution, pp. 111-12.)
Streit adds in a footnote (51, p. 117): "The same is true for the Maidanek concentration camp. It developed from an SS-Kriegsgefangenenlager, whose construction had been begun by 5,000 Soviet POWs, who were as rapidly decimated as those at Auschwitz." But it was the Jewish population of the east that would be the primary victims of the genocidal apparatus that these Soviet POWs first built, then perished in by the tens or hundreds of thousands.
The gendercide against Jewish women
(L) A Jewish woman and child are executed on the eastern front;
(R) A Jewish woman pleads for her life at a mass-murder scene
As with the Armenian case, the Jewish holocaust was launched with an initial genocidal outburst that targeted overwhelmingly males -- partly as a means of acclimatizing the genocidal agents to their tasks. But in neither the Armenian nor the Jewish cases did more than a short time elapse before women were swept up in the worst of the horror. Jürgen Forster's analysis brings out the speed, but also the stages, by which the holocaust on the eastern front was extended to women. He writes that: "The first formal order to kill immediately 'all male Jews of 17-45 years of age' was issued ... on 11 July 1941. ... The necessity of killing male Jews was not justified ... with any reference to partisan activities but 'resulted from the political situation.' Since the SS was still liquidating selected target groups, the Intelligence Officer of the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS informed his superiors in his after-action report of 28 July 1941 that 'all persons involved are in doubt whether the Jewish problem can be brought to a fundamental solution by the multitude of executions of male Jews alone.' While the Einsatzkommando 3 ... began to include Jewish women and children on 15 August 1941, the Police Regiment Centre only increased the age band for men to be killed to 16-65. Its 3rd Battalion, however, executed sixty-four Jewish women, too, in Minsk on 1 September 1941. The evidence on the practice of liquidating after 22 June 1941 suggests that a second, principal decision was made in the summer of 1941, this time to cleanse the conquered living space more thoroughly from any manifestations of Jewry and Bolshevism, to make it 'free' of Jews and communists." (Förster, "The Relations Between Operation Barbarossa as an Ideological War of Extermination and the Final Solution," in Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution, p. 93. Emphasis added.) It was this second decision that led to the mass murder of women, both in mass shootings like Babi Yar (33,000 Jews killed in September 1941) and in the gas-vans and concentration camps that were increasingly used from late 1941 onwards.
The historical record of the renewed genocidal offensive on the eastern front in 1942 includes cases in which women (along with children and the elderly of both sexes) were targeted for immediate annihilation, while able-bodied men were preserved, at least temporarily, for use as forced labour. The murderous activities of Police Battalion 101, studied by both Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen, included a massacre of 1,500 Jews at the Polish village of Józefów on July 13, 1942, in which the battalion was "ordered to round up ... Jews. The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews -- the women, children, and elderly -- were to be shot on the spot by the battalion," as occurred. A similar mass atrocity took place in the Jewish ghetto of Konskowola in October 1942, where between 500 and 1,000 Jews "were selected for labor," overwhelmingly able-bodied men, although "100 were shot en route after collapsing from exhaustion. ... The remaining Jews -- 800 to 1,000 women and children as well as a large number of elderly men -- were simultaneously led off to a shooting site in a woods beyond the edge of town. ... First the Jewish men were taken into the woods, forced to lie face down, and shot. The women and children followed." (Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. 2, 116-17.)
Link to a map of the main
extermination centers
in Europe.
One of the key rituals of the Nazi death-camp system similarly seems to have targeted women (especially mothers) for extermination, along with children and the elderly, while adult males were disproportionately preserved for use as forced labour. The reference here is to the "selection on the railway sidings," when huge numbers of Jews and others arrived at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other camps. Especially later in the war, when the Nazis' absurd squandering of potential Jewish labour was tempered by approaching defeat, emphasis was placed on the preservation -- usually brief -- of those deemed able to work in the factories. All "women in charge of children" were targeted for immediate extermination in these initial selections, along with "the old people, all the children ... and in general all the people unfit for work," according to Johann Paul Kremer, a Nazi "doctor" at Auschwitz. "[They] were loaded into trucks and taken to the gas chambers." Auschwitz managers reported an "arrival strength" for 21 January 1943, at the height of the holocaust, as "2,000 Jews, of whom 418 were selected to be put to work (254 men, 164 women), i.e., 20.9 percent; 24 January 1943, 2,029 Jews, of whom 228 were selected to be put to work (148 men, 80 women), i.e., 11.8 percent; on 27 January 1943, 993 Jews, of whom 284 were selected to be put to work (212 men and 72 women), i.e., 22.5 percent." (Eugen Kogon et al., eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas [Yale University Press, 1993], pp. 153, 159.)
The gendercide against women in the death camps may have been even more intense than at first appears, since there is evidence of a pre-selection of males for mass execution before the construction of the death-camp system, as we have noted. Gendercide Watch is aware of no comparative research on the numbers of men and women killed by the different Nazi mechanisms, however, and reminds the reader that the Nazis' genocidal ideology and mass-murder apparatus finally spared no-one among the European populations it targeted, Jews above all.
It is also important to note that the variable of age/infirmity, and not just gender, was another vital marker or "tripwire" on the road to fullscale genocide. Indeed, the Nazis' murder between 1939 and 1941 of 70,000 "useless" and "burdensome" elderly and infirm Germans -- which Gendercide Watch refers to as geracide (from the Greek geras, "old age") -- was clearly a manifestation of the exterminationist impulse that would in short order be directed against Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Slavic males, and others. The euthenasia campaigns also buttressed the Nazis' penetration of the German professions. When medical doctors were called upon to perform ghastly medical experiments at Auschwitz and other death-camps, their Hippocratic oaths had long since been shattered by involvement in the earlier "geracide."
How many died?
Raul Hilberg writes that "The Jewish dead numbered more than 5 million: about 3 million in killing centers and other camps, 1.4 million in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in ghettos." Hilberg adds that "Traditional estimates are closer to 6 million." (Hilberg, "Holocaust," Encarta Encyclopedia.) As Goldhagen notes, "The geographic scope of the German's exterminationist drive against the Jews has no parallel, certainly not in the twentieth century" (Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 412). It is estimated that the Nazis succeeded in killing 60 percent of all the Jews in Europe. In addition to the Jews murdered in Poland (3 million) and the USSR (1 million), the worst-hit communities were in Hungary (550,000 Jews killed), Romania (275,000), Lithuania (150,000), Germany itself (135-140,000), and the Netherlands (100,000) (all figures approximate).
It was not the largest mass killing of the twentieth century -- both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong probably killed more people than Adolf Hitler. But "in ferocity, hate, sadism and horror, the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe has no peer." (Cathal Nolan, The Longman Guide to World Affairs [Longman, 1995], p. 159.) The element of sadism has attracted considerable recent notice: "The Germans debased and inflicted pain upon Jews with a regularity calculated not just to cripple their bodies but also to plunge them into a state of perpetual terror. The ideal guiding the Germans' treatment of the [Jews] ... was that it ought to be a world of unremitting suffering which would end in their deaths. A Jew's life ought to be a worldly hell, always in torment, always in physical pain, with no comfort available." (Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, pp. 320, 457).
Who was responsible?
Primary responsibility has long been assigned to Adolf Hitler, one of the most psychotic and sanguinary leaders in history, who consigned tens of millions of people to furnaces and firing squads. Debate still rages over whether and when Hitler personally gave the order to exterminate the Jews. But there is no doubt that he provided the venomous ideological framework for the genocide, headed the state and military apparatus that implemented it, and frequently proclaimed his approval of the perpetrators' actions.
The Nazi Party that Hitler headed rapidly became indistinguishable from the German state. All party institutions and members -- especially Hitler's elite guard, the SS ("Death's Head" units, commanded by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich), and the Einsatzkommanda (genocidal "action squads" in the East) -- shared responsibility for the Holocaust against Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and Roma, among other groups. At lower levels of the bureaucracy of mass death, "Amorality was encouraged by specialization; each department and individual was accountable for only one small segment of the program, diffusing personal responsibility." (Donald Niewyk in Totten et al., Century of Genocide, pp. 141-42.)
In the last several years, debate has raged around the "Goldhagen thesis" (see Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners) -- namely, that "ordinary Germans" in their multitudes participated willingly, and usually enthusiastically, in the merciless tortures and annihilations that the Nazis inflicted upon the subject peoples of Europe. Ron Rosenbaum includes a chapter on the controversy in Explaining Hitler.
Recent research on the holocaust in the occupied territories has also emphasized the role of the German army in facilitating the genocides against Jews and Soviet POWs in particular. The long-held view that the "proud" German military somehow held itself aloof from the Nazis' genocide has been decisively debunked (see Bartov, The German Army and Genocide). The relationship between the regular army and the SS or paramilitary killers was intimate and mutually supportive -- as in the Serbs' genocidal and gendercidal campaigns in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, but on a massively greater scale.
The aftermath
The German invasion of the USSR proved Hitler's undoing. The Second World War was won and lost on the eastern front, where about 80 percent of German forces were concentrated between 1941 and 1944. Despite the Nazi victories and unbridled mass killing of the first year of the war, the Soviets successfully withstood the German drive on Moscow. At the critical battles of Stalingrad (September 1942 -- January 1943) and Kursk (July 1943), Soviet forces turned the tide against the German armies. By April 1945, they had driven them back to the gates of Berlin, with late assistance from Allied forces (who invaded Nazi-occupied France in June 1944). Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker as Soviet troops approached.
The images of mountains of corpses
left behind by the Nazi mass murderers
shocked the world, and helped contribute
to the founding of the state of Israel.
As the Soviet and Allied forces rolled back across Nazi-occupied Europe, they came across evidence of the holocaust against the Jews and others. For the first time, the outside world could see and be stunned by mountains of Jewish corpses in the concentration camps, and skeletal survivors gathered at the wire. The horror at the discoveries fuelled the Nürnberg (Nuremberg) Trials of 1945-47, when surviving Nazi leaders (including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel) were tried for crimes against humanity. Twelve were sentenced to death, but not Göring, who swallowed poison in his prison-cell hours before he was to be executed. Subsequent trials were held for "doctors who had conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war, judges who had committed murder and other crimes under the guise of the judicial process, and industrialists who had participated in the looting of occupied countries and in the forced-labor program" (Hilberg, "Holocaust"). Again death sentences and long prison terms were the norm.
The founding of the state of Israel in 1948, in large part by holocaust survivors, was assisted by global sympathy for the principal victims of Nazi genocide. In 1960, it was Israeli secret agents who tracked down one of the last surviving architects of the holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, and smuggled him from Argentina to Israel to stand trial. (See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.) He was convicted and hanged in Jerusalem in 1962.
Many thousands of survivors worldwide still bear the tattooed identification numbers they were given in the concentration camps. All must live with the enormous weight of the genocide, which laid waste to entire lineages and historic communities. Jewish populations in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, and several other countries have never recovered from the blow dealt them by Hitler and the Nazis. Meanwhile, "studies of Holocaust survivors have shown that virtually all suffered to some degree from a 'survivor syndrome' that included acute anxiety, cognitive and memory disorders, depression, withdrawal, and hypochondria" (Donald Niewyk in Century of Genocide, p. 144).
The memory of the holocaust has been kept alive by Jews and others worldwide, and has staged a resurgence in cultural prominence in the last two or three decades. To a degree this resurgence has been fuelled by the renewed rise of a racist, anti-semitic "far right" in numerous European countries, most notably France, Austria (Hitler's birthplace), and Switzerland. As a result of widespread efforts to conscientize and inform, "The Holocaust [today] is perhaps the one genocide of which every educated person has heard" (Niewyk). It is often cited as a benchmark in debates over more recent genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The holocaust inflicted upon European Jews by the Nazi regime was arguably the most systematic and sadistic campaign of mass extermination ever mounted. Like the Armenian and Rwandan holocausts, the "gendercidal" component is only a secondary and subsidiary one. Nonetheless, an understanding of the gendered strategies of incarceration and extermination pursued by the Nazis throws important light upon the Jewish holocaust, and genocidal strategies as a whole.
The background
The ideology and political programme of Nazism, the movement that seized power in Germany in 1933, was founded from the first on an abiding hatred of Jews as Untermenschen, or "sub-humans." They were accused of orchestrating the "stab in the back" that stripped Germany of victory in World War I and imposed upon it the humiliating surrender terms of the Versailles Treaty (1919). Exploiting deep anti-semitic strains in German and European culture (see Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners), along with the catastrophic economic conditions of the late 1920's and early 1930's, the Nazis under their supreme leader or Führer, Adolf Hitler, succeeded in winning a plurality in 1932 parliamentary elections. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor by the ageing German president, Paul von Hindenburg. When Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler took over as president, and set about using his police and paramilitaries to murder political opponents and ethnic "traitors" alike. Jews and "Bolsheviks" (communists) were at the top of the list for incarceration in the first "concentration camps."
The Nazis did not invent the concentration camp, but they made it their definitive institution. For many years, it was almost exclusively men who were detained in the grim and often atrocious conditions of the camps. The first Nazi prison camp, Dachau -- created in March 1933 -- housed males only, including many homosexuals. A major marker on the road to the holocaust against the Jews was the Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") on November 9-10, 1938, when Hitler's thugs targeted Jewish citizens and property for largescale violence and destruction. According to Yehuda Bauer, the Kristallnacht was accompanied by a gender-selective mass roundup: the Nazis "arrested and sent to concentration camps some 30,000 Jewish men at least." (Cited in Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 353.) As Eugen Kogon writes,
These arrests were made without regard for age. Ten-year old boys could be seen side by side with septuagenarians and octogenarians. En route from the Wiemar [sic: Weimar] railroad station [to the camp at Buchenwald] all stragglers were shot down, while the survivors were forced to drag the bloody bodies into camp. ... Inside stood the Block Leaders, wielding iron rods, whips and truncheons, and virtually every Jew who got into the camp sustained injuries. The events that took place at the time are not easily described in a few words. Let me merely mention that sixty-eight Jews went mad that very first night. They were clubbed to death like mad dogs ... four men at a time. ... SS [Schutz-Staffel, "Defense Echelon"] noncoms pushed the heads of some of their charges into overflowing latrine buckets until they suffocated.
Eventually, "for reasons that never became clear, most of the[se] Jews were set free on orders from the Reich authorities" and allowed to go into exile. Exactly a year later, however, after "an alleged attempt on Hitler's life," Jewish men in Buchenwald "were suddenly recalled from their [work] details and confined to barracks." The Germans "picked out twenty-one Austrian and German Jews, entirely at random, without any list. Most of them were vigorous young men. ... The SS took the group out through the gatehouse and shot them at close range in the quarry." (Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell, Berkley paperback edition [1980], pp. 176-79.)
Hitler's combined caution and brinkmanship in foreign policy won him increasing rewards during the 1930s. Western powers proved unable to unite, or to accept an alliance with the Soviets, to head off the Nazi threat. Eventually, Hitler struck a temporary deal with the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, freeing Germany to invade Poland -- the heartland of European Jewry -- in September 1939. From the earliest days of the Nazi occupation, Poland's Jews were subjected to severe hardship and violence. However, it was only with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 that the genocidal hatred of the Nazis was fully unleashed on the defenseless populations of the east. Among those to suffer the worst, almost unacknowledged, were Soviet prisoners-of-war, who died in their millions from exposure, starvation, and mass execution in 1941-42. But from the first, it was clear that the German occupation of the vast new territories (including eastern Poland, which the Soviets had occupied under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact) presented Hitler with the opportunity to implement his "final solution" to the Jewish "problem" in Europe. What followed was a genocide that Noam Chomsky has called "the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history." (Cited in Robert F. Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent [ECW Press, 1997], p. 186.)
The gendercide against Jewish men
Early Nazi roundups of Jewish males
in the occupied territories (see also below).
The gendercidal dimension of the holocaust against the Jews was evident during particular phases of the campaign of extermination. It nonetheless has its harbinger in the mass detentions of males during the earlier (1933-41) period of Nazi rule. As a campaign of full-blown mass execution, the gendercide against Jewish males marked an important, if temporary, "onset phase" of the holocaust in the occupied eastern territories (including, after August 1941, the Balkans). Gendercidal strategies against women were evident at later stages, both in mass executions and gassings, women-only death camps, and the forced marches that killed tens of thousands in the closing stages of the war. Again, it must be stressed that in both their male and female manifestations, the Jewish gendercides were subsidiary features and strategies of a campaign of "root-and-branch" extermination, in which gender was far from a dominant consideration overall.
Daniel Goldhagen points out in Hitler's Willing Executioners (pp. 149-50) how the"up-close," intimate killing of manifestly defenceless, screaming civilians on the eastern front -- killings which spattered blood and brain matter around the killing fields and over the killers -- was at first incrementally managed according to gender:
The Einsatzgruppen [death-squad] officers ... could habituate their men into their new vocation as genocidal executioners through a stepwise escalation of the killing. First, by shooting primarily teenage and adult Jewish males, they would be able to acclimate themselves to mass executions without the shock of killing women, young children, and the infirm. According to Alfred Filbert, the commander of Einsatzkommando 9, the [execution] order from [Reinhard] Heydrich "quite clearly" "included also women and children." Yet, "in the first instance, without a doubt, the executions were limited generally to Jewish males." By generally keeping units' initial massacres to smallish numbers (by German standards) of a few hundred or even a thousand or so, instead of many thousands, the perpetrators would be less likely to become overwhelmed by the enormity of the gargantuan bloodbaths that were to follow. They also could believe that they were selectively killing the most dangerous Jews, which was a measure that they could conceive to be reasonable for this apocalyptic war. Once the men became used to slaughtering Jews on this sex-selective and smaller scale, the officers could more easily expand the scope and size of the killing operations.
Jewish men rounded up for mass execution
at Zhytomyr, Ukraine, August 7, 1942.
In the early weeks of these murder campaigns, the Einsatzkommandos, according to Goldhagen, "were the equivalent of genocidal scouting parties, developing the methods of killing, habituating the perpetrators to their new vocation and, generally speaking, working out the feasibility of the overall enterprise" (p. 150). Gendercides against men can be seen in such cases as a vanguard for the wider "root-and-branch" genocide -- an initial barrier to be surmounted and a potential "threat" to be removed, before the community is consigned without discrimination to torment and death.
Christopher Browning's research into the atrocities committed by the police battalions attached to the Einsatzgruppen confirms that orders from the top were translated into gendercidal policies at the base. On July 11, 1942, the following orders went out to the police battalions: "Confidential! By order of the Higher SS and Police Leader ... all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law. The shootings are to take place away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares." Browning notes: "There was, of course, no investigation, trial, and confiction of so-called plunderers to be shot according to martial law. Male Jews who appeared to be between the ages of seventeen and forty-five were simply rounded up" and led away for execution. (Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, pp. 13-14.)
Importantly for the analysis of gendercide, Daniel Goldhagen notes that "even if ... the initial order was to kill 'only' teenage and adult Jewish males -- the order was still genocidal and clearly was understood by the perpetrators as such ... The killing of the adult males of a community is nothing less than the destruction of that community" (p. 153, emphasis added). The point is critical in a more general way to modern scholarship on the Jewish holocaust, since this currently centres on key decision-points in the killing campaign on the eastern front, and the debate over precisely when the Nazi actions passed from the atrocious to the outright genocidal (see Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler). As in other holocausts (Armenia, Rwanda), the mass killing of Jewish males proved a necessary initial strategy, but not a sufficient expression, of the eliminationist impulse.
The link to Soviet prisoners-of-war
The waging of genocide against eastern Jews proceeded alongside a much lesser-known holocaust, that of male prisoners captured by the German Army in huge encirclements during the first few months of the war. Nearly three million are known to have died in less than eight months of 1941-42. Gendercide Watch includes a detailed case-study of the Soviet POWs on this site. Most of them died before being transferred to Germany. Those that did not, however, became the original "guinea-pigs" in the Nazis' vast machinery of death. Indeed, as Christian Streit has pointed out, it was originally for the Soviet POWs that the infrastructure of the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Maidanek death camps was developed:
It is more than a mere coincidence that the discovery of the technical means to implement the Holocaust with a minimum of material and personal expense and the preparation of the infrastructure at two of the most important death factories, Auschwitz and Maidanek, are also connected with the dynamic described above. In this case, it was particularly the treatment of the Soviet POWs which speeded up developments. Two large groups of Soviet prisoners were involved. The first comprised those prisoners who were selected and executed as "politically intolerable." Before the end of December 1941 at least 33,000 such prisoners had been executed in the concentration camps of the Reich and the General Government [in occupied Poland]. The second group consisted of those Soviet POWs who had been allotted to Himmler as slave labourers in the SS enterprises. The decision to turn these POWs into Himmler's slaves also resulted from the basic decision to brush aside international law in the war against the Soviet Union. ... Repeatedly during the summer of 1941, and starting with a convoy of several hundred in July, groups of Soviet prisoners of war, who had been selected as "intolerable," had been taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp to be executed there. To ease the mental strain of the shooting squads and to save costs and energies the executors soon started looking for a simpler method. It was probably deputy commander Karl Fritzsch who experimented in early September with a pesticide, Zyklon B, to murder some 600 such prisoners and another 250 camp inmates who had been selected as "unfit for work." After more such "test gassings" -- there were at least two more convoys of Soviet prisoners among the victims, one numbering 900 men -- the gassings of Jewish victims were started in January or February 1942. ... Even the infrastructure used in the Final Solution, the Birkenau camp with its rail connection, had originally been intended for 100,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were to be [Heinrich] Himmler's allocation of slave labourers for the giant industrial complex at Auschwitz which I.G. Farben and the SS were planning as a joint venture. Soviet prisoners numbering 10,000, who were to build the huge Birkenau camp for 100,000 POWs, had been brought to Auschwitz in October 1941. By the end of November half of them were dead, by February 1942 about 8,000. Only 186 were still alive on 1 May 1942. Those prisoners who had not starved had been tortured to death. (Christian Streit, "Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen, Soviet POWs and Anti-Bolshevism in the Emergence of the Final Solution," in Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution, pp. 111-12.)
Streit adds in a footnote (51, p. 117): "The same is true for the Maidanek concentration camp. It developed from an SS-Kriegsgefangenenlager, whose construction had been begun by 5,000 Soviet POWs, who were as rapidly decimated as those at Auschwitz." But it was the Jewish population of the east that would be the primary victims of the genocidal apparatus that these Soviet POWs first built, then perished in by the tens or hundreds of thousands.
The gendercide against Jewish women
(L) A Jewish woman and child are executed on the eastern front;
(R) A Jewish woman pleads for her life at a mass-murder scene
As with the Armenian case, the Jewish holocaust was launched with an initial genocidal outburst that targeted overwhelmingly males -- partly as a means of acclimatizing the genocidal agents to their tasks. But in neither the Armenian nor the Jewish cases did more than a short time elapse before women were swept up in the worst of the horror. Jürgen Forster's analysis brings out the speed, but also the stages, by which the holocaust on the eastern front was extended to women. He writes that: "The first formal order to kill immediately 'all male Jews of 17-45 years of age' was issued ... on 11 July 1941. ... The necessity of killing male Jews was not justified ... with any reference to partisan activities but 'resulted from the political situation.' Since the SS was still liquidating selected target groups, the Intelligence Officer of the Kommandostab Reichsführer-SS informed his superiors in his after-action report of 28 July 1941 that 'all persons involved are in doubt whether the Jewish problem can be brought to a fundamental solution by the multitude of executions of male Jews alone.' While the Einsatzkommando 3 ... began to include Jewish women and children on 15 August 1941, the Police Regiment Centre only increased the age band for men to be killed to 16-65. Its 3rd Battalion, however, executed sixty-four Jewish women, too, in Minsk on 1 September 1941. The evidence on the practice of liquidating after 22 June 1941 suggests that a second, principal decision was made in the summer of 1941, this time to cleanse the conquered living space more thoroughly from any manifestations of Jewry and Bolshevism, to make it 'free' of Jews and communists." (Förster, "The Relations Between Operation Barbarossa as an Ideological War of Extermination and the Final Solution," in Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution, p. 93. Emphasis added.) It was this second decision that led to the mass murder of women, both in mass shootings like Babi Yar (33,000 Jews killed in September 1941) and in the gas-vans and concentration camps that were increasingly used from late 1941 onwards.
The historical record of the renewed genocidal offensive on the eastern front in 1942 includes cases in which women (along with children and the elderly of both sexes) were targeted for immediate annihilation, while able-bodied men were preserved, at least temporarily, for use as forced labour. The murderous activities of Police Battalion 101, studied by both Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen, included a massacre of 1,500 Jews at the Polish village of Józefów on July 13, 1942, in which the battalion was "ordered to round up ... Jews. The male Jews of working age were to be separated and taken to a work camp. The remaining Jews -- the women, children, and elderly -- were to be shot on the spot by the battalion," as occurred. A similar mass atrocity took place in the Jewish ghetto of Konskowola in October 1942, where between 500 and 1,000 Jews "were selected for labor," overwhelmingly able-bodied men, although "100 were shot en route after collapsing from exhaustion. ... The remaining Jews -- 800 to 1,000 women and children as well as a large number of elderly men -- were simultaneously led off to a shooting site in a woods beyond the edge of town. ... First the Jewish men were taken into the woods, forced to lie face down, and shot. The women and children followed." (Browning, Ordinary Men, pp. 2, 116-17.)
Link to a map of the main
extermination centers
in Europe.
One of the key rituals of the Nazi death-camp system similarly seems to have targeted women (especially mothers) for extermination, along with children and the elderly, while adult males were disproportionately preserved for use as forced labour. The reference here is to the "selection on the railway sidings," when huge numbers of Jews and others arrived at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other camps. Especially later in the war, when the Nazis' absurd squandering of potential Jewish labour was tempered by approaching defeat, emphasis was placed on the preservation -- usually brief -- of those deemed able to work in the factories. All "women in charge of children" were targeted for immediate extermination in these initial selections, along with "the old people, all the children ... and in general all the people unfit for work," according to Johann Paul Kremer, a Nazi "doctor" at Auschwitz. "[They] were loaded into trucks and taken to the gas chambers." Auschwitz managers reported an "arrival strength" for 21 January 1943, at the height of the holocaust, as "2,000 Jews, of whom 418 were selected to be put to work (254 men, 164 women), i.e., 20.9 percent; 24 January 1943, 2,029 Jews, of whom 228 were selected to be put to work (148 men, 80 women), i.e., 11.8 percent; on 27 January 1943, 993 Jews, of whom 284 were selected to be put to work (212 men and 72 women), i.e., 22.5 percent." (Eugen Kogon et al., eds., Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas [Yale University Press, 1993], pp. 153, 159.)
The gendercide against women in the death camps may have been even more intense than at first appears, since there is evidence of a pre-selection of males for mass execution before the construction of the death-camp system, as we have noted. Gendercide Watch is aware of no comparative research on the numbers of men and women killed by the different Nazi mechanisms, however, and reminds the reader that the Nazis' genocidal ideology and mass-murder apparatus finally spared no-one among the European populations it targeted, Jews above all.
It is also important to note that the variable of age/infirmity, and not just gender, was another vital marker or "tripwire" on the road to fullscale genocide. Indeed, the Nazis' murder between 1939 and 1941 of 70,000 "useless" and "burdensome" elderly and infirm Germans -- which Gendercide Watch refers to as geracide (from the Greek geras, "old age") -- was clearly a manifestation of the exterminationist impulse that would in short order be directed against Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Slavic males, and others. The euthenasia campaigns also buttressed the Nazis' penetration of the German professions. When medical doctors were called upon to perform ghastly medical experiments at Auschwitz and other death-camps, their Hippocratic oaths had long since been shattered by involvement in the earlier "geracide."
How many died?
Raul Hilberg writes that "The Jewish dead numbered more than 5 million: about 3 million in killing centers and other camps, 1.4 million in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in ghettos." Hilberg adds that "Traditional estimates are closer to 6 million." (Hilberg, "Holocaust," Encarta Encyclopedia.) As Goldhagen notes, "The geographic scope of the German's exterminationist drive against the Jews has no parallel, certainly not in the twentieth century" (Hitler's Willing Executioners, p. 412). It is estimated that the Nazis succeeded in killing 60 percent of all the Jews in Europe. In addition to the Jews murdered in Poland (3 million) and the USSR (1 million), the worst-hit communities were in Hungary (550,000 Jews killed), Romania (275,000), Lithuania (150,000), Germany itself (135-140,000), and the Netherlands (100,000) (all figures approximate).
It was not the largest mass killing of the twentieth century -- both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong probably killed more people than Adolf Hitler. But "in ferocity, hate, sadism and horror, the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe has no peer." (Cathal Nolan, The Longman Guide to World Affairs [Longman, 1995], p. 159.) The element of sadism has attracted considerable recent notice: "The Germans debased and inflicted pain upon Jews with a regularity calculated not just to cripple their bodies but also to plunge them into a state of perpetual terror. The ideal guiding the Germans' treatment of the [Jews] ... was that it ought to be a world of unremitting suffering which would end in their deaths. A Jew's life ought to be a worldly hell, always in torment, always in physical pain, with no comfort available." (Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, pp. 320, 457).
Who was responsible?
Primary responsibility has long been assigned to Adolf Hitler, one of the most psychotic and sanguinary leaders in history, who consigned tens of millions of people to furnaces and firing squads. Debate still rages over whether and when Hitler personally gave the order to exterminate the Jews. But there is no doubt that he provided the venomous ideological framework for the genocide, headed the state and military apparatus that implemented it, and frequently proclaimed his approval of the perpetrators' actions.
The Nazi Party that Hitler headed rapidly became indistinguishable from the German state. All party institutions and members -- especially Hitler's elite guard, the SS ("Death's Head" units, commanded by Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich), and the Einsatzkommanda (genocidal "action squads" in the East) -- shared responsibility for the Holocaust against Jews, Poles, Soviet prisoners-of-war, and Roma, among other groups. At lower levels of the bureaucracy of mass death, "Amorality was encouraged by specialization; each department and individual was accountable for only one small segment of the program, diffusing personal responsibility." (Donald Niewyk in Totten et al., Century of Genocide, pp. 141-42.)
In the last several years, debate has raged around the "Goldhagen thesis" (see Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners) -- namely, that "ordinary Germans" in their multitudes participated willingly, and usually enthusiastically, in the merciless tortures and annihilations that the Nazis inflicted upon the subject peoples of Europe. Ron Rosenbaum includes a chapter on the controversy in Explaining Hitler.
Recent research on the holocaust in the occupied territories has also emphasized the role of the German army in facilitating the genocides against Jews and Soviet POWs in particular. The long-held view that the "proud" German military somehow held itself aloof from the Nazis' genocide has been decisively debunked (see Bartov, The German Army and Genocide). The relationship between the regular army and the SS or paramilitary killers was intimate and mutually supportive -- as in the Serbs' genocidal and gendercidal campaigns in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, but on a massively greater scale.
The aftermath
The German invasion of the USSR proved Hitler's undoing. The Second World War was won and lost on the eastern front, where about 80 percent of German forces were concentrated between 1941 and 1944. Despite the Nazi victories and unbridled mass killing of the first year of the war, the Soviets successfully withstood the German drive on Moscow. At the critical battles of Stalingrad (September 1942 -- January 1943) and Kursk (July 1943), Soviet forces turned the tide against the German armies. By April 1945, they had driven them back to the gates of Berlin, with late assistance from Allied forces (who invaded Nazi-occupied France in June 1944). Adolf Hitler killed himself in his bunker as Soviet troops approached.
The images of mountains of corpses
left behind by the Nazi mass murderers
shocked the world, and helped contribute
to the founding of the state of Israel.
As the Soviet and Allied forces rolled back across Nazi-occupied Europe, they came across evidence of the holocaust against the Jews and others. For the first time, the outside world could see and be stunned by mountains of Jewish corpses in the concentration camps, and skeletal survivors gathered at the wire. The horror at the discoveries fuelled the Nürnberg (Nuremberg) Trials of 1945-47, when surviving Nazi leaders (including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel) were tried for crimes against humanity. Twelve were sentenced to death, but not Göring, who swallowed poison in his prison-cell hours before he was to be executed. Subsequent trials were held for "doctors who had conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war, judges who had committed murder and other crimes under the guise of the judicial process, and industrialists who had participated in the looting of occupied countries and in the forced-labor program" (Hilberg, "Holocaust"). Again death sentences and long prison terms were the norm.
The founding of the state of Israel in 1948, in large part by holocaust survivors, was assisted by global sympathy for the principal victims of Nazi genocide. In 1960, it was Israeli secret agents who tracked down one of the last surviving architects of the holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, and smuggled him from Argentina to Israel to stand trial. (See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem.) He was convicted and hanged in Jerusalem in 1962.
Many thousands of survivors worldwide still bear the tattooed identification numbers they were given in the concentration camps. All must live with the enormous weight of the genocide, which laid waste to entire lineages and historic communities. Jewish populations in Poland, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, and several other countries have never recovered from the blow dealt them by Hitler and the Nazis. Meanwhile, "studies of Holocaust survivors have shown that virtually all suffered to some degree from a 'survivor syndrome' that included acute anxiety, cognitive and memory disorders, depression, withdrawal, and hypochondria" (Donald Niewyk in Century of Genocide, p. 144).
The memory of the holocaust has been kept alive by Jews and others worldwide, and has staged a resurgence in cultural prominence in the last two or three decades. To a degree this resurgence has been fuelled by the renewed rise of a racist, anti-semitic "far right" in numerous European countries, most notably France, Austria (Hitler's birthplace), and Switzerland. As a result of widespread efforts to conscientize and inform, "The Holocaust [today] is perhaps the one genocide of which every educated person has heard" (Niewyk). It is often cited as a benchmark in debates over more recent genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
East Timor (1975-99)
Summary
This case study of the events in East Timor in September 1999 is necessarily the most ambiguous of our studies of "gendercide." Indeed, it is impossible to state with certainty that a fully-fledged gendercide did occur, and on what scale. Nonetheless, in the opinion of Gendercide Watch, there are grounds not only for believing that genocidal atrocities occurred during the period immediately following Timor's independence vote, but that they were widespread, pre-planned, and systematic -- and were strongly gendercidal in character. We also devote extended attention to the quarter-century of Indonesian occupation preceding the independence vote of August 30, 1999, in which gendercidal atrocities were prominent, though not predominant.
The background
East Timor owes its territorial distinctiveness from the rest of Timor, and the Indonesian archipelago as a whole, to the fact that it was colonized by the Portuguese, not the Dutch, beginning in the mid-17th century. (An agreement dividing the island between the two powers was signed in 1915.) In alliance with local chieftains, the Portuguese established an increasingly harsh regime of exploitation and corvée (forced) labour that, by the turn of the twentieth century, swept up the entire able-bodied male population. The colonial regime was replaced by the Japanese during World War II, whose occupation spawned a resistance movement that resulted in the deaths of 60,000 Timorese, or 13 percent of the entire population.
After the war, the Dutch East Indies rapidly became the independent republic of Indonesia. The Portuguese, meanwhile, re-established control over East Timor; but in April 1974, the Portuguese armed forces mounted a coup d´état against the fascist government in Lisbon, and announced their intention of rapidly divesting Portugal of its overseas empire (including Angola and Mozambique). Indigenous political parties rapidly sprang up in Timor. Elections for a National Constituent Assembly were set for 1976, with full independence anticipated three years thereafter. By 1975, the leading political force in the territory was Fretilin (the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor), which had established strong grassroots support throughout the countryside with progressive policies aimed at improving the lives of the peasantry. In January 1975, Fretilin formed an alliance with the other main political grouping, the UDT (Timorese Democratic Union), and local elections were held under the supervision of the Portuguese parliament's Decolonization Committee.
In May 1975, however, the UDT withdrew from the coalition, and when Fretilin candidates won 55 percent of the vote in the local elections, the UDT launched a coup attempt, apparently with the connivance of the Indonesian government. Fretilin forces crushed the revolt and expelled the UDT to Indonesian West Timor. This was followed by a declaration of independence on November 28. Just over a week later, on December 7, the Indonesians invaded East Timor in force, with military aid and tacit political approval from the Ford administration in the U.S. (Secret government documents published in 1980 showed that the Australian government also "had an extensive knowledge of, and acquiesced in, events prior to the invasion," according to John Taylor [East Timor: The Price of Freedom, p. 204.)
Fretilin forces were pushed deep into the countryside, and Indonesian president Suharto declared East Timor's annexation by Indonesia in July 1976. By November of that year, relief agencies in East Timor estimated that an extraordinary 100,000 Timorese had been killed since the Indonesian invasion less than a year earlier. What followed was a protracted guerrilla war by Fretilin forces, who eventually succeeded in establishing control over about half the remaining Timorese population. Indonesian "counterinsurgency" strategies reached a genocidal scale, causing widespread starvation. Indeed, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued in their 1980 book, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, that the Indonesian assault had taken a greater per-capita toll -- killing about a third of the Timorese population -- than any genocide since the Jewish holocaust. But the slaughter took place at a time when western governments and media were resolutely focused on the atrocities committed by the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia/Kampuchea, and attracted barely a whisper of notice or official condemnation.
Despite repeated calls from the United Nations, Indonesia refused to withdraw from East Timor or allow a plebiscite on the territory's future. But the credibility of Indonesia's claim to the territory began to weaken noticeably with the November 12, 1991 mass killing of some 270 civilians at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, the East Timorese capital. As part of a new crackdown, Indonesia began to rely more and more on locally-raised paramilitary forces (ninjas) to terrorize the population. These were supplied and overseen by Kopassus, the elite Indonesian army force that would play a critical role in the atrocities of September 1999.
In 1996, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the leader of the East Timor Catholic Church, Bishop Belo, and Fretilin's leader-in-exile, José Ramos-Horta. The renewed publicity given to the Timorese cause was bolstered in 1998 when, with Indonesia suffering an economic meltdown, longtime dictator General Suharto resigned in favour of his vice-president, B.J. Habibie. As part of a wide-ranging liberalization program, Habibie first offered East Timor "special status" within a united Indonesia, a move that was rejected by the Timorese opposition. Finally, in January 1999, Habibie declared Indonesia's willingness to "let East Timor go" if its people chose independence. The United Nations, together with Portugal, rapidly announced their willingness to conduct a direct plebiscite, offering the Timorese autonomy within Indonesia or fully-fledged independence. After several delays, the vote was finally scheduled for August 30, and U.N. officials under the banner of UNAMET (The United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor) arrived to supervise the process.
In the run-up to the plebiscite, the Indonesian military raised and supplied a number of new paramilitary groups, consisting mostly of Timorese collaborators and Kopassus commandos. (For an overview of the founding and training of these notorious "militias," see Human Rights Watch, "Background: The Indonesian Army and Civilian Militias in East Timor", April 1999.) The militias that played the greatest role in fomenting violence during the pre- and post-plebiscite periods included the Besi Merah Putih ("Iron Rod for the Red and White"), Mahidi ("Live or Die for Integration with Indonesia"), and the Halintar ("Thunderbolt"). An estimated 5,000 Timorese were murdered by these forces and their army allies in 1998 and the first eight months of 1999, and an estimated 60,000 displaced from their homes. Despite these widespread atrocities, the U.N. chose to designate the Indonesian armed forces responsible for providing "security" before, during, and after the plebiscite. This proved a disastrous decision; when an organized campaign of mass destruction, and possibly genocide, erupted in the aftermath of the vote, it would be orchestrated by these same "security" forces.
Gendercide in East Timor (I),
1975-1998
Gendercidal massacres of males, and in at least one case of females, were prominent in the period immediately following the Indonesian invasion of December 1975. "One of the most bizarre and gruesome ... atrocities" of the Indonesian invasion itself "occurred within 24 hours of the invasion and involved the killing of about 150 people. This shocking spectacle began with the execution of more than 20 women who, from various accounts, were selected at random ... The women were led out to the edge of the jetty and shot one at a time, with the crowd of shocked onlookers being forced at gun-point to count [out] loud as each execution took place." (Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War Against East Timor [Zed Books, 1984], pp. 128-29.) Immediately thereafter, however, a typical gendercidal massacre of males took place, according to a source quoted by John Taylor in East Timor: The Price of Freedom (p. 68):
At 2 p.m., 59 men, both Chinese and Timorese, were brought on to the wharf ... These men were shot one by one, with the crowd, believed amounting to 500, being ordered to count. The victims were ordered to stand on the edge of the pier facing the sea, so that when they were shot their bodies fell into the water. Indonesian soldiers stood by and fired at the bodies in the water in the event that there was any sign of life.
In the wider slaughter in Dili, males appear to have been targeted overwhelmingly. According to John Taylor (East Timor: The Price of Freedom, pp. 68-69), one of the main killing sites "was the area surrounding the Portuguese police barracks in the south of the capital," where one survivor claimed that
At about 12 noon, the green berets began to land. ... They advanced to where I was. They ordered us all out of our homes, to gather in the street. We were taken to an open space, women, children, old people and men, including me. ... There were about fifty of us then, all men, just picked up at random. All able-bodied men. ... Then the soldiers, there were three of them, started spraying us with bullets. Many died on the spot, some managed to run off, falling as they fled because they had been hit. As far as I know, only 3 or 4 out of the 50 men are still alive. (Taylor, pp. 68-69.)
Jill Jolliffe writes in her book East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism (University of Queensland Press, 1978) that "in late 1976, letters smuggled via [the West Timorese town of] Kupang reached relatives in Darwin [Australia], listing whole families killed during the invasion. ... [One letter] said that many of the inhabitants of Dili had fled to the mountains before the invasion but that of those remaining 80% of the men were killed by Indonesian troops" (p. 279). According to Taylor (p. 68), the death-toll in Dili reached "2000 men." In May 1976, a further "67 boys were shot in Suai" (Taylor, p. 71).
The trend continued into the 1980s. In July 1984, a priest described military actions against the Kota Boot tribe "from March 1984, [when] many men and youths were imprisoned and killed ... almost all men and youths disappeared. They were taken by Indonesian soldiers, killed and thrown on a fallow piece of land. There are eye-witnesses to what happened." (Quoted in Taylor, pp. 102-03.)
A particularly massive roundup of Timorese males was conducted as part of Operasi Keamanan ("Operation Security") in March-April 1981, when "virtually the entire male population from the ages of 15 to 50 was pressed into service. In some places, boys as young as 9 and men as old as 60 were ordered to join." (Budiardjo and Liem, p. 41.) "Those recruited for Operasi Keamanan were given no advanced warning," writes Taylor. "The army marched into villages, ordered together all men and boys and took them to the region from which the [so-called] fence of legs was to begin. Once assembled, they were organized into small groups and forced to walk in front of units of soldiers, searching the countryside for Fretilin cadres. ... Since they were forced to leave without any notice, they were unable to take with them supplies of food or clothing. Provided with the most meagre food rations, many died of starvation." (East Timor: The Price of Freedom, p. 117.) Many thousands of Timorese, also overwhelmingly "able-bodied" males, were rounded up for brutal torture and incarceration -- although many younger women also suffered this fate, being exposed especially to sexual torture and rape.
Thus, when the Indonesian occupying forces discriminated according to gender, the victims of the most serious abuses were generally male. But to present this period as one of predominantly gender-selective violence would be deeply misleading. Entire families of "Fretilin suspects" were often annihilated together with the suspects themselves, or out of frustration at the Indonesian soldiers' inability to locate them. In many cases, whole village populations were targeted for savage atrocities -- most massively, in the region of Aitana in July 1981, where "a ghastly massacre occurred ... They murdered everyone, from tiny babies to the elderly, unarmed people who were not involved in the fighting but were there simply because they had stayed with Fretilin and wanted to live freely in the mountains." Perhaps 10,000 people died. (Source cited in Taylor, p. 118). At Lacluta near Dili in September of the same year, "at least 400 people were killed, mostly women and children." (Taylor, p. 101.) And at Malim Luro in August 1983, "after plundering the population of all their belongings, [Indonesian troops] firmly tied up men, women and children, numbering more than sixty people. They made them lie on the ground and then drove a bulldozer over them, and then used it to place a few centimetres of earth on top of the totally crushed corpses." (Source cited in Taylor, p. 103.)
The most destructive strategy of all was the starvation and heavy bombing inflicted on populations remaining in the "liberated zones" outside the Indonesians' control, or in concentration camps set up, in classic counterinsurgency fashion, to separate the Fretilin guerrillas from their "base of support." Many tens of thousands of Timorese died as a result of this "'generalized warfare' of encirclements, bombing, uprooting of the population, malnutrition and generalized brutalities" (Taylor, p. 151), constituting the bulk of the estimated 200,000 victims of Indonesia's genocidal occupation policies between 1975 and 1999.
Gendercide in East Timor (II)?
After the plebiscite
Atrocity in Dili, September 1999: the decapitated body of a
young Timorese male is dragged behind a motorcycle by an
Indonesian policeman and his accomplice.
The events in East Timor in September 1999, particularly the issue of genocidal killing, are still clouded by considerable uncertainty. Indeed, it is impossible to say with full confidence that largescale gendercidal slaughter did occur. The difficulty arises in part from the unwillingness of the international community, particularly the United Nations, to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the atrocities. A key purpose of launching this Gendercide Watch case-study, with its attendant press release, is to encourage such an investigation.
On August 31, 1999, East Timorese went to the polls to vote for autonomy within Indonesia or fully-fledged independence. But as noted, despite clear signals that the Indonesian military and its Timorese militia allies would respond with violence to a vote for full independence, the U.N. assigned responsibility for "security" to the Indonesian armed forces. When widespread violence and destruction broke out on September 2, the U.N. and the international community were therefore unable (and initially unwilling) to address the consequences of the plebiscite that they themselves had overseen.
East Timorese voted almost en bloc, with more than 98 percent of those eligible casting a ballot, and 78.5 percent voting for independence. When the results of the plebiscite were made public, the Indonesian military and its allies implemented a well-prepared and systematic policy of murder and destruction ("Operation Global Clean-Sweep") aimed at preserving Indonesian control over the territory, or at least a substantial portion of it.
Scorched earth, East Timor, September 1999.
The gender-selective character of the atrocities was evident from the outset. (Note: Extensive excerpts from most of the following reports can be found in "Gender-Selective Atrocities in East Timor", a news digest compiled throughout the crisis, and afterwards, by Gendercide Watch executive director Adam Jones.)
On September 4, Matt Frei of BBC Online provided gruesome eyewitness testimony of the murder of a young Timorese independence supporter. "While I was running towards the UN compound a pro-independence supporter was being hunted down like an animal. The young man fell after being hit on the head with a machete. Then six black T-shirts descended on him. A colleague hiding in a shack just opposite the gates to the UN compound filmed the whole thing. It took only 30 seconds to hack the man to pieces. The attack was so ferocious that bits of him were literally flying off. The sound reminded me of a butchers' shop -- the thud of cleaved meat, I'll never forget it." (Frei, "Face to Face with Timor Terror," BBC Online, September 4, 1999.) Also on September 4, Joao Brito, a young Timorese man, claimed to have witnessed the killing of possibly hundreds of people in the town of Ermera. Indonesian soldiers "called house-to-house and they burned out the political leaders," he said later. "When the houses burnt, they let the women and children out, but they pushed the men back into the fire where they died." (Dennis Schulz, "Refugees Recall the Flames of Death," The Age [Melbourne], September 16, 1999.)
Timorese leader José Ramos-Horta spoke on September 5 of "information that many males have been disposed of, have been killed and dumped into the sea." (Quoted in Stephen Powell, "International Pressure Builds on Timor Crisis," Reuters dispatch, September 7, 1999.) The Guardian's John Aglionby wrote on September 9 of "Villagers [who told] of men being marched to the waterfront in Dili and gunned down out of view of observers trapped inside safe houses." (Aglionby, "City's Destruction Now Complete," The Guardian, September 9, 1999.) The following day, Aglionby described "a young man [who] ran into the house telling a terrible story. He had come from the port, where he and some pro-independence friends had been trying to leave on a ship. The women boarded, but the men were dragged away. Five were stabbed to death in front of him and their bodies dumped in the sea." (Aglionby, "To Survive I Knew I Had to Get Out," The Guardian, September 10, 1999.) Craig Skehan and Malcolm Brown of The Sydney Morning Herald reported that
One distraught young mother said she witnessed the murder of two refugees on the back of a truck inside West Timor. She said she saw the two men tied up in a truck by militiamen on a road inside West Timor. "Suddenly, in front of lots of people, a militia member drew a sword and slowly stabbed one of the people in the truck. Lots of blood began gushing, flooding the floor of the truck until it began to drip out," she said. "The other man's hands and feet were tied like a pig and he was thrown like a bag of rice onto the asphalt then thrown into another truck." Another man said he watched terrified at the West Timor port of Akapupu, near Atumbua at the northern end of the border, as militia used machetes to kill men alleged to be independence supporters. They were among East Timorese disembarking from a ship which had come from Dili. "Other men had their hands tied and they were put on trucks and taken away," said one source, who is collecting accounts for presentation to the international community. (Skehan and Brown, "Refugee Plight Compared to Nazi Terror Against Jews," The Sydney Morning Herald, September 10, 1999.)
Agence France-Presse cited "reports [that] men in UN gear were loading young men into C-130 aircraft for unknown destinations." ("Refugees Starving in East Timor Mountains, Living Off Roots," AFP dispatch, September 13, 1999.) In an "urgent action" of September 14, the East Timor Human Rights Centre in Australia reported that "Indonesian military, police and militia are patrolling both Kupang and Atambua [in West Timor], and are carrying out operations, particularly at night, where they search for East Timorese men, including independence supporters. Between Monday September 6 and Thursday September 9, the streets were deserted, and the town extremely tense. Sources fear that East Timorese men and independence supporters are being rounded up to be assassinated."
On September 10, a confirmed gendercidal killing took place at Passabe in the enclave of Oecussi. Reporting investigators' findings in February 2000, Mark Dodd wrote: "Evidence gathered so far indicated the victims were mostly men taken on September 8 from villages near Passabe, identified by Indonesian authorities as pro-independence strongholds. According to accounts from independence supporters, between 52 and 56 men were marched across the nearby border into West Timor for registration. Their hands were then bound with palm twine and they were marched a short distance back into East Timor where they were executed." (Mark Dodd, "Passabe Massacre: Marked for Killing Frenzy," The Sydney Morning Herald, February 9, 2000.)
One of the most detailed and powerful reports of gendercidal atrocities was published in The Washington Post on September 14, 1999:
Jani thought he was safe on the ferry. After three days of terror in East Timor, the boat would take him and two college friends to safety, he thought. Then the militiamen boarded. No young men may leave East Timor, they announced as the boat prepared to depart. Jani, 27, tried to hide; the militiamen caught his friends. "Are there any others?" they demanded, Jani recalls. "No, no other young men," his friends replied in a last gift of kindness. They marched Armando Gomez, 29, and Armando DiSilva, 30, to the front of the boat and killed them as 200 refugees watched. Gomez's body was dumped into the sea, DiSilva's on the ground by the dock. Jani raced through the boat. "Please help me," he whispered to the other refugees. A woman motioned to him to hide between her and her children. The searching militiamen walked by.
The account of Jani, now a fearful refugee in western Timor, adds to the mounting evidence that victims of the murderous rampage by militia gangs in East Timor following the territory's overwhelming vote for independence from Indonesia were systematically culled from the population at large. Young men, political opponents of the Jakarta government, Roman Catholic clergy and anyone else suspected of favoring the independence opposed by the militias were targeted, in a chilling echo of the techniques of systematic killing seen in Kosovo. (Doug Struck and Keith B. Richburg, "Refugees Describe Method to Murderous Rampage in E. Timor," The Washington Post, September 14, 1999.)
On September 24, Amnesty International detailed "credible reports that 35 young East Timorese men were killed on board a ship bound for Kupang from Dili on 11 September. According to an eyewitness account, the bodies of the victims were dumped overboard. Amnesty International has collected accounts of other incidents of East Timorese being beaten and killed on boats leaving Dili." (Amnesty International, "Fear, Intimidation and Forced Relocation in the [Indonesian] Archipelago," AI Index: ASA 21/166/99, September 24, 1999.)
The situation in the concentration camps of West Timor, to which much of the Timorese population had been abducted by Indonesian forces, was no less grievous. John Aglionby wrote of the "refugees" being "herded, sifted, and cut off." He cited one witness's testimony that "Many of the men are [being] 'taken away for questioning' ... The women have no idea what happens to their husbands. Many have not returned." One woman reported a militia camp guard's comment that "You may have got your country but it will be a land full of widows." (Aglionby, "Herded, Sifted, and Cut Off," The Guardian, September 10, 1999.) A detainee who returned safely, Domingos Dos Santos, told Agence France-Presse that "pro-Indonesian militias were hunting down male refugees and planned to kill them all." ("Timor Refugees 'Can Return'," BBC Online, October 3, 1999.) On October 10, Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao spoke of "more than 230,000 East Timorese [having] been taken to camps in Atambua, Kefa, Kupang, Alor, Wetar and Kisar where the men were selectively murdered, leaving only women, children and the elderly." ("Gusmao Appeals to Indonesia to Free East Timorese from Camps," Agence France-Presse dispatch, October 11, 1999.)
Occasional concerns for the fate of Timor's men were expressed by prominent figures in the international community. The Deputy British representative to the United Nations, Stewart Eldon, told the U.N. Security Council on September 11 that "There are reports of women and children being forced into trucks to be taken to West Timor while men and boys are left behind. We know and we fear -- from Kosovo -- what that may mean." Most dramatically, in mid-September the Canadian ambassador to Indonesia, Kenneth Sunquist, raised the alarm over an apparent deficit of adult men in the West Timor camps. His account appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline, "The Chilling Disappearance of East Timor's Young Men":
Thousands of East Timorese men have disappeared en route to the relative safety of refugee camps in the western section of the embattled island, Canada's ambassador to Indonesia said after a tour of the area. Ken Sunquist and Norway's ambassador here are the first foreign diplomats to visit the camps in the West Timorese capital of Kupang, home to more than 100,000 refugees fleeing anti-independence militias responsible for an orgy of violence in neighbouring East Timor over the past two weeks. "The refugee camps themselves are filled overwhelmingly with women and children, so we're wondering where the men are, whether they've been segregated elsewhere, whether they're up in the hills in East Timor or if there's some more sinister explanation," Mr. Sunquist said after touring three Kupang-area refugee camps on Tuesday. "We tried to ask these questions on several occasions but it's clear that the people felt we were putting them at risk even talking to them. There were lots of police around everywhere we went."
Most of refugees seen by the joint mission, which accompanied five Indonesian cabinet ministers to Kupang, were older men, women and boys under the age of 16, he said. "While we were at the airport, for example, a plane came in with 171 people aboard, 150 of whom were children under the age of 10, older women and several younger men who appeared to have been wounded, but whether this was done by the militias before they left or not we couldn't tell," he said. (Paul Dillon and Jeff Sallot, "The Chilling Disappearance of East Timor's Young Men," The Globe and Mail, September 16, 1999.)
In an interview on September 20, Sunquist expanded on his perceptions of the situation:
The question is, for instance, the camps have women and children but no men. What's happened to those men? You can either take one approach, which is most of them went up in the hills to fight. That is probably true for a lot of them. A second one is that they were segregated. There's a lot of reports that say the men were segregated. ... In fact, from what we've now heard, there are some camps along the border which are almost entirely male. So maybe the husbands, fathers, brothers, were segregated and are sitting in camps by themselves. I really hope that's true. And then there's the third one, that they were killed. No one, I mean, not anyone is willing to say that they were killed, because they don't know what happened to them. The wives don't know. They know they are missing. But they don't know where they are. And that's what a commission of inquiry [is needed for]. (Quoted in Richard S. Ehrlich, "The Military and East Timor's Militias", The Laissez Faire City Times, 3: 38 [September 27, 1999].)
A Timorese man displays empty shell cartridges
from the massacre at Suai, September 6, 1999.
In addition to the apparent largescale gendercide of Timorese males, at least one sizable massacre predominantly targeted females, at the church in Suai on September 6. Up to 200 people who had taken refuge in the church were attacked by militia members and massacred. "The number of victims and their identities are uncertain," reported The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy. "What is known is that most were women and girls [and, according to other reports, elderly men]. The evidence attests to that: the jumble of bras, underpants and sanitary napkins on the steps leading up to the church; the children's leg bones; a hank of a woman's hair; the scorched skeletal remains of two women behind the church; the thick bloodstain on a schoolroom door, covered by bougainvillea petals baking beneath the sun. ... What happened was male savagery as old as history -- rape, killing, burning, razing -- in a church, a school, in the adjacent huge, grey, concrete shell of a cathedral called Ave Maria under construction to the glory of God. Savagery against the defenceless, as women and children usually are; vengeance on a people who voted for independence from their Indonesian military overlords and landowners." Afterwards, surviving "women and children were carted away on trucks to Indonesia's neighbouring West Timor province, about 30 kilometres away, where they are still being held. The whereabouts of many of the men is not known." (Valpy, "Rape and Murder in the Sight of Our Lady," The Globe and Mail, November 1, 1999.)
A number of younger Timorese women are reported to have been killed as known or suspected independence supporters. Reports also reached the international media of young Timorese women being raped, or abducted for use as sex-slaves. A representative of the aid agency World Vision stated in mid-October that "Apparently when the militias went on their rampage, they herded people into the marketplace to make forced evacuations and during that time, many young girls were dragged away and raped by the pro-integrationist forces." ("Aid Agency Claims to Have Evidence of Mass Rape by Militias," ABC [Australia] News Online, October 20, 1999.) Some of the worst cases of sexual assault, accompanied by mass killing, occurred at Suai on September 6 (see above). Rape was also allegedly widespread in the detention camps in West Timor, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, who was sent to Dili to file a report in November. (No special U.N. rapporteur on violence against men was appointed, and no report on the subject filed.)
How many died?
Were the atrocities that took place in East Timor in September-October 1999 on a "genocidal" scale? The consensus position of internatonal commentators has been "no" -- that in fact, the deaths amounted to no more than a few hundred people, perhaps only "dozens," as an Associated Press report claimed in mid-2000. Gendercide Watch considers these estimations to be highly suspect, and deriving in part from the desire of the international community (especially the U.N.) to avoid blame for its failure to intervene promptly in the slaughter and destruction.
The evidence is threefold that killings occurred on a much larger scale than has been generally recognized. First, independent investigators, operating with very few resources, have uncovered subsantially greater evidence of mass killings than has the tiny group of investigators dispatched by the United Nations -- but most death-count estimates have been based on the U.N. efforts. Second, there is strong physical, eyewitness, and circumstantial evidence of bodies being disposed of in large numbers at sea, or otherwise destroyed and hidden by Indonesian forces and Timorese militia-members. Last, and most significant, tens of thousands of Timorese remain "missing" and "unaccounted for" a year after the horror -- though this subject has attracted no attention in international media for many months.
The physical evidence. The possibility of turning up extensive forensic evidence of the atrocities has diminished drastically since September 1999, as a result of two factors: the apparently systematic attempts by Indonesian forces and militia to destroy such evidence; and the pathetically inadequate efforts by the U.N. to investigate atrocities on the ground.
Reports of the destruction of evidence are widespread. According to Australian doctor Andrew McNaughtan, "It is very clear that there has been a very organized, orchestrated, systematic cleanup of bodies" by Indonesian forces. (Jackie Woods, "Human Rights Activists Decry Slow U.N. Probe," Kyodo News Service, November 2, 1999.) Australian army lawyer Jens Streit told The Washington Post in October 1999 that "The great lengths the militias have gone to to hide and destroy the bodies makes it very difficult for us to figure out what happened. We have eyewitness accounts, but other than things like shell casings and blood stains, we don't have a lot of physical evidence. ... The Indonesians are extremely concerned about saving face. They want to be able to deny any of this happened." (Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "A Killing Ground Without Corpses: Bodies of E. Timor Victims Apparently Burned, Dumped," The Washington Post, October 22, 1999.) It is also certain that many victims were trucked across the border to West Timor and buried there: in late November 1999, 25 bodies were discovered by Indonesian non-governmental investigators in three mass graves on the western side of the border. Recall also the frequent testimony, already cited, of young men being taken out to sea to be killed, and their bodies dumped overboard.
As for international investigations, in marked contrast to the hundreds of forensics experts who were rushed to Kosovo in the wake of the Serb killing campaign earlier in 1999, only a handful of investigators were made available by InterFET (the International Force in East Timor), most with no forensics training. "Requests to the U.N. headquarters in New York for forensic investigators" went unheeded. (Woods, "Human Rights Activists Decry Slow U.N. Probe.") After nearly three months of stalling, a special U.N. advisory team toured the territory for a mere ten days in late November, gathering information and evidence for a possible war-crimes tribunal along the lines of Bosnia and Rwanda. In all, InterFET and U.N. investigators have recovered some 120 bodies across East Timor. ("You know what we call it when we find a well stuffed with dead people?" an Australian soldier asked The Laissez Faire City Times. "A manhole.") Many international observers have expressed exasperation at the limited scale and glacial pace of the investigations. "It's like you come home, the house is burnt down, grandma's been murdered and the kids have been kidnapped and you know who did it," said one American intelligence officer. "But everyone just keeps saying, 'Oh, how awful. She's dead, the house is burnt, the kids are gone -- they should just have more kids and build another house.' I say use the evidence to drag the murderer, the arsonist, the kidnapper into court then lock his ass in jail." (Quoted in Paul Daley, "U.N. Stalling Holds Up Horror Inquiry," The Sydney Morning Herald, November 13, 1999.)
The limited international efforts were cast into sharp relief by the work of the East Timor Human Rights Commission, a group of 79 Timorese volunteers, mainly students, who on their own "found evidence of 364 recent killings in Dili" and vicinity alone. Bodies found on beaches were not included in the total. (Paul Daley, "Massacre Evidence Grows", The Age, November 12, 1999.)
Intelligence data. Some of the most significant evidence of the Indonesian killing campaign in September 1999 almost certainly resides with U.S. and Australian intelligence agencies. A key component of any serious investigation into the atrocities must be to call for these agencies to turn over all relevant data to investigators. What has surfaced so far, through media sources, may be taken as indicative of the wealth of information currently held in secret files.
In a chilling report in the Melbourne Age, reporter Paul Daley wrote that "Evidence of hundreds of killings in Dili alone -- and potentially many more at sea -- confirms the view of Australian intelligence figures that thousands, rather than hundreds, of East Timorese have died in recent months." Citing "allegations that the Indonesian military (TNI), police and militias killed a large number of East Timorese students aboard a passenger ferry on route from Java to East Timor on 7 September, before dumping them at sea," Daley added:
The allegation is given weight by Australian signals intelligence, whch specifically indicates a large number of East Timorese students were killed at sea. The signals intelligence generally points to many other East Timorese being killed on boats -- or land -- before being dumped into the ocean. The Australian intelligence officers believe the discovery of more than 90 bodies on beaches on the north and south coasts of East Timor in recent weeks, also indicates a large number of people were disposed of at sea. "You have a situation where, in some cases hands and feet were tied, in other cases bodies have wounds or were burnt. It leads to the conclusion that large numbers of East Timorese could be dead -- some killed at sea, others killed on land, then burnt and hidden at sea," an intelligence figure told The Age. "This takes some effort and it points to a systematic cover-up." (Daley, "Massacre Evidence Grows", The Age, November 12, 1999.)
In a subsequent story, Daley cited another intelligence officer who told him that "The bodies found [by InterFET] weren't meant to be found -- that is, they were stuffed in drains, dumped in wells, buried in shallow graves and charred in burnt buildings. We believe they are the ones that the Indonesians themselves missed after cleaning up what they thought were all the bodies, before InterFET arrived and while journalists had been forced out of the place."
"It is possible to reach only one conclusion," Daley wrote. "East Timor is the scene of a massive crime against humanity -- and an even bigger attempt at cover-up -- by Indonesia's security forces." (Daley, "U.N. Stalling Holds Up Horror Inquiry.")
The missing. Of all the data to emerge from East Timor since the Indonesian onslaught of September 1999, estimates of the missing are the most disturbing. (For an in-depth examination of the phenomenon, see Adam Jones, "East Timor: Where Are the People?", ZNet, November 15, 1999.)
The voting drive conducted by the U.N. mission in East Timor registered 438,000 Timorese who were of voting age -- over 17 -- and who expressed a desire to cast a ballot. The U.N. then estimated the total population of East Timor as between 850,000 and 890,000, in keeping with standard "Third World" demographic trends in which 50 or even 60 percent of the population are minors. Thus, the international community never had as clear an idea of the number of Timorese in the territory as at the very point when the slaughter broke out at the beginning of September 1999.
In the early days of the September crisis, estimates of Timorese "unaccounted for" ranged from 200,000 to as high as 600,000. In October, José Ramos Horta spoke of the possible "disappearance" of 100,000 people in the territory. As the Indonesian armed forces prepared to depart, many thousands of Timorese subsequently returned from hiding to their shattered communities. But on November 3, the head of InterFET, Maj.-Gen. Peter Cosgrove, told media that "There is a discrepancy, we feel, of about 80,000 [people]. Are these in the hills or just unlocated? We are not sure. There could be more in West Timor than we've found, there could be more in the hills, or in the wider area of the Indonesia archipelago." But he also mentioned "speculation about a fourth fate." Cosgrove, it must be noted, was basing his estimate on a total Timorese population of 800,000 -- some 50,000 to 90,000 fewer than the U.N. estimates made at the time of the voter-registration drive. On November 5, The Sydney Morning Herald reported: "Different U.N. officials calculate that the human cost of Indonesia's bloody withdrawal could be close to 200,000." As the East Timor Observatory (a Portuguese body created to monitor the transition process) noted grimly, "Whatever figures are used, the difference is in the region of tens of thousands, probably many tens of thousands. It would be illogical to dismiss the possibility of genocide before finding out what has really happened to all the 'disappeared.'"
The last mention of the missing that Gendercide Watch has unearthed in the international press was on January 29, 2000 (Marian Wilkinson, "Justice Must Be Done," The Melbourne Age). The article stated: "Tens of thousands of Timorese are still unaccounted for since September. While these figures are now thought [sic: claimed] to be the result of statistical errors, even InterFET's General Cosgrove says the numbers still trouble him." Since that time, the issue -- barely visible for two months prior to Wilkinson's article -- has entirely evaporated from media coverage. The conundrum, however, remains unsolved, and the so-called "statistical errors" that may have led to a miscount have never been explained.
If tens of thousands of Timorese are indeed "missing," where might they have gone? One possibility is that large numbers were forcibly dispersed to distant corners of the Indonesian archipelago. Some may simply not have been listed as "accounted for" within East Timor itself. But Dr. William Maley of the Australian Defence Force Academy has been quoted as saying that "a lot" of the missing could have been murdered. He cites the obviously extensive planning that underlay the terror campaign of September as "one reason I think it would have been possible to kill a lot of people in a short period of time. It wasn't just a ragged-edge exercise with a few people running amok because they were disappointed with the result. ... At the early stages of a genocide investigation one does not start with body one and then go on to count a pile of bodies. It's in terms of population estimates and population deficits. If you have a population of, say, 880,000 and then you count everyone and there are only 700,000, that doesn't mean you can explain at this stage what happened to every individual. But it is very strong evidence that something very nasty has happened. People don't disappear into thin air if they are alive." (Quoted in Brendan Nicholson, "Grim View on Timor's Missing 80,000", The Age [Melbourne], November 12, 1999.)
A snapshot of the quandary was provided by Sydney Morning Herald reporter Lindsay Murdoch in April 2000. Writing from the district of Liquica, 40 kilometres west of Dili, Murdoch noted that "almost every day people trail into the Liquica police station to tell the United Nations police stationed there about new grave sites." According to a U.S. police officer assigned to the force, Alan Williams, "Officially we must stay with the number of bodies that we have actually lifted, but the total number of people killed in this district is much, much higher than that, perhaps even astronomical." (Murdoch, "Horror Lives on for Town of Liquica", The Sydney Morning Herald, April 8, 2000.)
With most of the physical and forensic evidence of atrocities washed away by monsoon rains, the only feasible way of determining the scale of the killings in East Timor is by conducting a fullscale census of the Timorese population. Such a survey "is necessary and urgent," the East Timor Observatory proclaimed in November 1999. This would take no more effort than the efficient voter-registration drive carried out immediately prior to the plebiscite, which permitted an accurate estimate to be made of the overall Timorese population.
Who was responsible?
The major share of responsibility for the genocide in East Timor since 1975 rests with the Indonesian military, which has long been the dominant force in national politics and, over the long years of occupation, amassed a wide range of lucrative economic interests in East Timor. The Commander of the Armed Forces and Defence Minister, General Wiranto, oversaw the atrocities of 1999 conducted under the aegis of Operasi Sapu Jagad ("Operation Global Clean-Sweep"). As well, "senior generals playing active roles included Lieutenant-General Tyasno Sudarso, head of military intelligence, his predecessor Lieutenant-General Zacky Anwar Makarim, and Major-General Adam Damiri, commander of the Udayana military command which includes East Timor. This group was strongly supported by influential retired Generals Tri Sutrisno and Benny Burdani, the latter having been intimately involved in East Timor operations ever since 1974. Despite his exile, sacked Lieutenant [sic: Major]-General Prabowo [former commander of the Kopassus special-forces unit, and son-in-law of deposed President Suharto] gave advice at every stage of the campaign. Lieutenant-General Yunus Yosfiah, Information Minister in the Habibie cabinet, also played an active role ... Crucial local military commanders were Lieutenant Colonels Asep Kuswanto in Liquica, Burhanudin Siagan in Bobonaro, Muhammed Nur in Emera, and Colonel Mudjino, Dili deputy commander." (Taylor, East Timor: The Price of Freedom, pp. xix-xx.)
On August 18, 2000, the People's Consultative Assembly in Jakarta issued a blanket amnesty for all human-rights abuses committed by the armed forces, in Indonesia as well as in East Timor. "Top serving and retired officers ... put enormous pressure on politicians to pass the decree banning retroactive prosecution of human rights cases ... The ban effectively rules out charges against senior officers, because Indonesia's criminal code does not recognise culpability by those in command. Only those who carried out orders could be charged and prosecuted." (See Lindsay Murdoch, "Blanket Amnesty for Officers: They Were Only Issuing Orders", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 2000.) The United Nations responded by appointing a senior prosecutor, Mohamed Ottman, to investigate atrocities over the entire period of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There were hopes that the investigation would lead to the creation of a fully-fledged war-crimes tribunal under U.N. sponsorship. (See Mark Dodd, "War Crimes Lawyer to Study 1975 Invasion", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2000.)
The killings, property destruction, and forced translocations of September 1999 were carried out at ground level by Indonesian army and police forces in coordination with the Timorese militias described earlier. At all levels, those who commanded and conducted the killing were men; Timorese males, mostly youths, were recruited for militia service with promises of good pay and other "benefits" (including a free rein when it came to raping and sexually abusing Timorese women). A number were also former detainees who had been released from brutal treatment in Indonesian custody after pledging to collaborate with the occupying forces.
The aftermath
Massive public demonstrations in Australia, North America, and Western Europe against the atrocities in East Timor, along with the recent precedent of intervention in Kosovo, finally pushed the West to intervene. Pressure, especially from the United States, forced the Habibie government to accept an international force, InterFET, composed mainly of Australian and Nepalese Gurkha troops. The forces began deploying in Dili on September 20, 1999, and a week later Indonesian forces finally ceded control to the international contingent, though troops would remain in the territory until the end of October. On September 28, the United Nations voted to establish an international inquiry into the atrocities in the territory, though it was still unclear at the time of writing whether this would be followed by an international criminal tribunal along the lines of Bosnia and Rwanda.
The Indonesian killing campaign was accompanied by property destruction on an almost inconceivable scale, apparently aimed at "the virtual demolition of the physical basis for survival in the territory," according to Noam Chomsky. ("East Timor Is Not Yesterday's Story", ZNet, October 23, 1999.) In a lengthy feature article published in The New York Times in April 2000, Seth Mydans described the state of the territory in the post-plebiscite period:
DILI, East Timor -- People here have gotten used to the scene: a mob of unemployed young men shoving, shouting and weeping in anger outside the headquarters of the United Nations, held back by an impassive multinational police contingent. "Nothing has changed!" they shouted the other day, and their complaint has become a theme for critics -- both foreign and Timorese -- as the United Nations passes the six-month mark in its first experiment in building a new nation. As monsoon rains bring added misery, whole towns and villages still stand burned, roofless and silent, devastated by the rampage of destruction that followed East Timor's vote last August to end 24 years of Indonesian occupation. As many as 80 percent of the territory's 700,000 people still have no jobs. Another 100,000 or more remain in camps across the border in Indonesian West Timor, still afraid to return. ... Aid workers and diplomats say they fear that this discontent could lead to lawlessness and political disarray and could open the door to trouble from the Indonesian-backed militias that crossed the border to Indonesian West Timor after laying waste to the territory last September. (Mydans, "Ruined East Timor Awaits A Miracle," The New York Times, April 22, 2000. For a more optimistic assessment of the prospects an independent East Timor will face, see Lindsay Murdoch, "Peace Stirs a New Nation to Work towards a Prosperous Future", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2000.)
Indeed, at the time of writing (August 2000), renewed militia violence was reported in the regions along the West Timorese border, and was feared to be rapidly spreading east towards Dili. There were indications that the militias were seeking to destabilize East Timor ahead of the country's formal attainment of independence in 2001.
This case study of the events in East Timor in September 1999 is necessarily the most ambiguous of our studies of "gendercide." Indeed, it is impossible to state with certainty that a fully-fledged gendercide did occur, and on what scale. Nonetheless, in the opinion of Gendercide Watch, there are grounds not only for believing that genocidal atrocities occurred during the period immediately following Timor's independence vote, but that they were widespread, pre-planned, and systematic -- and were strongly gendercidal in character. We also devote extended attention to the quarter-century of Indonesian occupation preceding the independence vote of August 30, 1999, in which gendercidal atrocities were prominent, though not predominant.
The background
East Timor owes its territorial distinctiveness from the rest of Timor, and the Indonesian archipelago as a whole, to the fact that it was colonized by the Portuguese, not the Dutch, beginning in the mid-17th century. (An agreement dividing the island between the two powers was signed in 1915.) In alliance with local chieftains, the Portuguese established an increasingly harsh regime of exploitation and corvée (forced) labour that, by the turn of the twentieth century, swept up the entire able-bodied male population. The colonial regime was replaced by the Japanese during World War II, whose occupation spawned a resistance movement that resulted in the deaths of 60,000 Timorese, or 13 percent of the entire population.
After the war, the Dutch East Indies rapidly became the independent republic of Indonesia. The Portuguese, meanwhile, re-established control over East Timor; but in April 1974, the Portuguese armed forces mounted a coup d´état against the fascist government in Lisbon, and announced their intention of rapidly divesting Portugal of its overseas empire (including Angola and Mozambique). Indigenous political parties rapidly sprang up in Timor. Elections for a National Constituent Assembly were set for 1976, with full independence anticipated three years thereafter. By 1975, the leading political force in the territory was Fretilin (the Revolutionary Front of Independent East Timor), which had established strong grassroots support throughout the countryside with progressive policies aimed at improving the lives of the peasantry. In January 1975, Fretilin formed an alliance with the other main political grouping, the UDT (Timorese Democratic Union), and local elections were held under the supervision of the Portuguese parliament's Decolonization Committee.
In May 1975, however, the UDT withdrew from the coalition, and when Fretilin candidates won 55 percent of the vote in the local elections, the UDT launched a coup attempt, apparently with the connivance of the Indonesian government. Fretilin forces crushed the revolt and expelled the UDT to Indonesian West Timor. This was followed by a declaration of independence on November 28. Just over a week later, on December 7, the Indonesians invaded East Timor in force, with military aid and tacit political approval from the Ford administration in the U.S. (Secret government documents published in 1980 showed that the Australian government also "had an extensive knowledge of, and acquiesced in, events prior to the invasion," according to John Taylor [East Timor: The Price of Freedom, p. 204.)
Fretilin forces were pushed deep into the countryside, and Indonesian president Suharto declared East Timor's annexation by Indonesia in July 1976. By November of that year, relief agencies in East Timor estimated that an extraordinary 100,000 Timorese had been killed since the Indonesian invasion less than a year earlier. What followed was a protracted guerrilla war by Fretilin forces, who eventually succeeded in establishing control over about half the remaining Timorese population. Indonesian "counterinsurgency" strategies reached a genocidal scale, causing widespread starvation. Indeed, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman argued in their 1980 book, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, that the Indonesian assault had taken a greater per-capita toll -- killing about a third of the Timorese population -- than any genocide since the Jewish holocaust. But the slaughter took place at a time when western governments and media were resolutely focused on the atrocities committed by the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia/Kampuchea, and attracted barely a whisper of notice or official condemnation.
Despite repeated calls from the United Nations, Indonesia refused to withdraw from East Timor or allow a plebiscite on the territory's future. But the credibility of Indonesia's claim to the territory began to weaken noticeably with the November 12, 1991 mass killing of some 270 civilians at the Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, the East Timorese capital. As part of a new crackdown, Indonesia began to rely more and more on locally-raised paramilitary forces (ninjas) to terrorize the population. These were supplied and overseen by Kopassus, the elite Indonesian army force that would play a critical role in the atrocities of September 1999.
In 1996, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the leader of the East Timor Catholic Church, Bishop Belo, and Fretilin's leader-in-exile, José Ramos-Horta. The renewed publicity given to the Timorese cause was bolstered in 1998 when, with Indonesia suffering an economic meltdown, longtime dictator General Suharto resigned in favour of his vice-president, B.J. Habibie. As part of a wide-ranging liberalization program, Habibie first offered East Timor "special status" within a united Indonesia, a move that was rejected by the Timorese opposition. Finally, in January 1999, Habibie declared Indonesia's willingness to "let East Timor go" if its people chose independence. The United Nations, together with Portugal, rapidly announced their willingness to conduct a direct plebiscite, offering the Timorese autonomy within Indonesia or fully-fledged independence. After several delays, the vote was finally scheduled for August 30, and U.N. officials under the banner of UNAMET (The United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor) arrived to supervise the process.
In the run-up to the plebiscite, the Indonesian military raised and supplied a number of new paramilitary groups, consisting mostly of Timorese collaborators and Kopassus commandos. (For an overview of the founding and training of these notorious "militias," see Human Rights Watch, "Background: The Indonesian Army and Civilian Militias in East Timor", April 1999.) The militias that played the greatest role in fomenting violence during the pre- and post-plebiscite periods included the Besi Merah Putih ("Iron Rod for the Red and White"), Mahidi ("Live or Die for Integration with Indonesia"), and the Halintar ("Thunderbolt"). An estimated 5,000 Timorese were murdered by these forces and their army allies in 1998 and the first eight months of 1999, and an estimated 60,000 displaced from their homes. Despite these widespread atrocities, the U.N. chose to designate the Indonesian armed forces responsible for providing "security" before, during, and after the plebiscite. This proved a disastrous decision; when an organized campaign of mass destruction, and possibly genocide, erupted in the aftermath of the vote, it would be orchestrated by these same "security" forces.
Gendercide in East Timor (I),
1975-1998
Gendercidal massacres of males, and in at least one case of females, were prominent in the period immediately following the Indonesian invasion of December 1975. "One of the most bizarre and gruesome ... atrocities" of the Indonesian invasion itself "occurred within 24 hours of the invasion and involved the killing of about 150 people. This shocking spectacle began with the execution of more than 20 women who, from various accounts, were selected at random ... The women were led out to the edge of the jetty and shot one at a time, with the crowd of shocked onlookers being forced at gun-point to count [out] loud as each execution took place." (Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War Against East Timor [Zed Books, 1984], pp. 128-29.) Immediately thereafter, however, a typical gendercidal massacre of males took place, according to a source quoted by John Taylor in East Timor: The Price of Freedom (p. 68):
At 2 p.m., 59 men, both Chinese and Timorese, were brought on to the wharf ... These men were shot one by one, with the crowd, believed amounting to 500, being ordered to count. The victims were ordered to stand on the edge of the pier facing the sea, so that when they were shot their bodies fell into the water. Indonesian soldiers stood by and fired at the bodies in the water in the event that there was any sign of life.
In the wider slaughter in Dili, males appear to have been targeted overwhelmingly. According to John Taylor (East Timor: The Price of Freedom, pp. 68-69), one of the main killing sites "was the area surrounding the Portuguese police barracks in the south of the capital," where one survivor claimed that
At about 12 noon, the green berets began to land. ... They advanced to where I was. They ordered us all out of our homes, to gather in the street. We were taken to an open space, women, children, old people and men, including me. ... There were about fifty of us then, all men, just picked up at random. All able-bodied men. ... Then the soldiers, there were three of them, started spraying us with bullets. Many died on the spot, some managed to run off, falling as they fled because they had been hit. As far as I know, only 3 or 4 out of the 50 men are still alive. (Taylor, pp. 68-69.)
Jill Jolliffe writes in her book East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism (University of Queensland Press, 1978) that "in late 1976, letters smuggled via [the West Timorese town of] Kupang reached relatives in Darwin [Australia], listing whole families killed during the invasion. ... [One letter] said that many of the inhabitants of Dili had fled to the mountains before the invasion but that of those remaining 80% of the men were killed by Indonesian troops" (p. 279). According to Taylor (p. 68), the death-toll in Dili reached "2000 men." In May 1976, a further "67 boys were shot in Suai" (Taylor, p. 71).
The trend continued into the 1980s. In July 1984, a priest described military actions against the Kota Boot tribe "from March 1984, [when] many men and youths were imprisoned and killed ... almost all men and youths disappeared. They were taken by Indonesian soldiers, killed and thrown on a fallow piece of land. There are eye-witnesses to what happened." (Quoted in Taylor, pp. 102-03.)
A particularly massive roundup of Timorese males was conducted as part of Operasi Keamanan ("Operation Security") in March-April 1981, when "virtually the entire male population from the ages of 15 to 50 was pressed into service. In some places, boys as young as 9 and men as old as 60 were ordered to join." (Budiardjo and Liem, p. 41.) "Those recruited for Operasi Keamanan were given no advanced warning," writes Taylor. "The army marched into villages, ordered together all men and boys and took them to the region from which the [so-called] fence of legs was to begin. Once assembled, they were organized into small groups and forced to walk in front of units of soldiers, searching the countryside for Fretilin cadres. ... Since they were forced to leave without any notice, they were unable to take with them supplies of food or clothing. Provided with the most meagre food rations, many died of starvation." (East Timor: The Price of Freedom, p. 117.) Many thousands of Timorese, also overwhelmingly "able-bodied" males, were rounded up for brutal torture and incarceration -- although many younger women also suffered this fate, being exposed especially to sexual torture and rape.
Thus, when the Indonesian occupying forces discriminated according to gender, the victims of the most serious abuses were generally male. But to present this period as one of predominantly gender-selective violence would be deeply misleading. Entire families of "Fretilin suspects" were often annihilated together with the suspects themselves, or out of frustration at the Indonesian soldiers' inability to locate them. In many cases, whole village populations were targeted for savage atrocities -- most massively, in the region of Aitana in July 1981, where "a ghastly massacre occurred ... They murdered everyone, from tiny babies to the elderly, unarmed people who were not involved in the fighting but were there simply because they had stayed with Fretilin and wanted to live freely in the mountains." Perhaps 10,000 people died. (Source cited in Taylor, p. 118). At Lacluta near Dili in September of the same year, "at least 400 people were killed, mostly women and children." (Taylor, p. 101.) And at Malim Luro in August 1983, "after plundering the population of all their belongings, [Indonesian troops] firmly tied up men, women and children, numbering more than sixty people. They made them lie on the ground and then drove a bulldozer over them, and then used it to place a few centimetres of earth on top of the totally crushed corpses." (Source cited in Taylor, p. 103.)
The most destructive strategy of all was the starvation and heavy bombing inflicted on populations remaining in the "liberated zones" outside the Indonesians' control, or in concentration camps set up, in classic counterinsurgency fashion, to separate the Fretilin guerrillas from their "base of support." Many tens of thousands of Timorese died as a result of this "'generalized warfare' of encirclements, bombing, uprooting of the population, malnutrition and generalized brutalities" (Taylor, p. 151), constituting the bulk of the estimated 200,000 victims of Indonesia's genocidal occupation policies between 1975 and 1999.
Gendercide in East Timor (II)?
After the plebiscite
Atrocity in Dili, September 1999: the decapitated body of a
young Timorese male is dragged behind a motorcycle by an
Indonesian policeman and his accomplice.
The events in East Timor in September 1999, particularly the issue of genocidal killing, are still clouded by considerable uncertainty. Indeed, it is impossible to say with full confidence that largescale gendercidal slaughter did occur. The difficulty arises in part from the unwillingness of the international community, particularly the United Nations, to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into the atrocities. A key purpose of launching this Gendercide Watch case-study, with its attendant press release, is to encourage such an investigation.
On August 31, 1999, East Timorese went to the polls to vote for autonomy within Indonesia or fully-fledged independence. But as noted, despite clear signals that the Indonesian military and its Timorese militia allies would respond with violence to a vote for full independence, the U.N. assigned responsibility for "security" to the Indonesian armed forces. When widespread violence and destruction broke out on September 2, the U.N. and the international community were therefore unable (and initially unwilling) to address the consequences of the plebiscite that they themselves had overseen.
East Timorese voted almost en bloc, with more than 98 percent of those eligible casting a ballot, and 78.5 percent voting for independence. When the results of the plebiscite were made public, the Indonesian military and its allies implemented a well-prepared and systematic policy of murder and destruction ("Operation Global Clean-Sweep") aimed at preserving Indonesian control over the territory, or at least a substantial portion of it.
Scorched earth, East Timor, September 1999.
The gender-selective character of the atrocities was evident from the outset. (Note: Extensive excerpts from most of the following reports can be found in "Gender-Selective Atrocities in East Timor", a news digest compiled throughout the crisis, and afterwards, by Gendercide Watch executive director Adam Jones.)
On September 4, Matt Frei of BBC Online provided gruesome eyewitness testimony of the murder of a young Timorese independence supporter. "While I was running towards the UN compound a pro-independence supporter was being hunted down like an animal. The young man fell after being hit on the head with a machete. Then six black T-shirts descended on him. A colleague hiding in a shack just opposite the gates to the UN compound filmed the whole thing. It took only 30 seconds to hack the man to pieces. The attack was so ferocious that bits of him were literally flying off. The sound reminded me of a butchers' shop -- the thud of cleaved meat, I'll never forget it." (Frei, "Face to Face with Timor Terror," BBC Online, September 4, 1999.) Also on September 4, Joao Brito, a young Timorese man, claimed to have witnessed the killing of possibly hundreds of people in the town of Ermera. Indonesian soldiers "called house-to-house and they burned out the political leaders," he said later. "When the houses burnt, they let the women and children out, but they pushed the men back into the fire where they died." (Dennis Schulz, "Refugees Recall the Flames of Death," The Age [Melbourne], September 16, 1999.)
Timorese leader José Ramos-Horta spoke on September 5 of "information that many males have been disposed of, have been killed and dumped into the sea." (Quoted in Stephen Powell, "International Pressure Builds on Timor Crisis," Reuters dispatch, September 7, 1999.) The Guardian's John Aglionby wrote on September 9 of "Villagers [who told] of men being marched to the waterfront in Dili and gunned down out of view of observers trapped inside safe houses." (Aglionby, "City's Destruction Now Complete," The Guardian, September 9, 1999.) The following day, Aglionby described "a young man [who] ran into the house telling a terrible story. He had come from the port, where he and some pro-independence friends had been trying to leave on a ship. The women boarded, but the men were dragged away. Five were stabbed to death in front of him and their bodies dumped in the sea." (Aglionby, "To Survive I Knew I Had to Get Out," The Guardian, September 10, 1999.) Craig Skehan and Malcolm Brown of The Sydney Morning Herald reported that
One distraught young mother said she witnessed the murder of two refugees on the back of a truck inside West Timor. She said she saw the two men tied up in a truck by militiamen on a road inside West Timor. "Suddenly, in front of lots of people, a militia member drew a sword and slowly stabbed one of the people in the truck. Lots of blood began gushing, flooding the floor of the truck until it began to drip out," she said. "The other man's hands and feet were tied like a pig and he was thrown like a bag of rice onto the asphalt then thrown into another truck." Another man said he watched terrified at the West Timor port of Akapupu, near Atumbua at the northern end of the border, as militia used machetes to kill men alleged to be independence supporters. They were among East Timorese disembarking from a ship which had come from Dili. "Other men had their hands tied and they were put on trucks and taken away," said one source, who is collecting accounts for presentation to the international community. (Skehan and Brown, "Refugee Plight Compared to Nazi Terror Against Jews," The Sydney Morning Herald, September 10, 1999.)
Agence France-Presse cited "reports [that] men in UN gear were loading young men into C-130 aircraft for unknown destinations." ("Refugees Starving in East Timor Mountains, Living Off Roots," AFP dispatch, September 13, 1999.) In an "urgent action" of September 14, the East Timor Human Rights Centre in Australia reported that "Indonesian military, police and militia are patrolling both Kupang and Atambua [in West Timor], and are carrying out operations, particularly at night, where they search for East Timorese men, including independence supporters. Between Monday September 6 and Thursday September 9, the streets were deserted, and the town extremely tense. Sources fear that East Timorese men and independence supporters are being rounded up to be assassinated."
On September 10, a confirmed gendercidal killing took place at Passabe in the enclave of Oecussi. Reporting investigators' findings in February 2000, Mark Dodd wrote: "Evidence gathered so far indicated the victims were mostly men taken on September 8 from villages near Passabe, identified by Indonesian authorities as pro-independence strongholds. According to accounts from independence supporters, between 52 and 56 men were marched across the nearby border into West Timor for registration. Their hands were then bound with palm twine and they were marched a short distance back into East Timor where they were executed." (Mark Dodd, "Passabe Massacre: Marked for Killing Frenzy," The Sydney Morning Herald, February 9, 2000.)
One of the most detailed and powerful reports of gendercidal atrocities was published in The Washington Post on September 14, 1999:
Jani thought he was safe on the ferry. After three days of terror in East Timor, the boat would take him and two college friends to safety, he thought. Then the militiamen boarded. No young men may leave East Timor, they announced as the boat prepared to depart. Jani, 27, tried to hide; the militiamen caught his friends. "Are there any others?" they demanded, Jani recalls. "No, no other young men," his friends replied in a last gift of kindness. They marched Armando Gomez, 29, and Armando DiSilva, 30, to the front of the boat and killed them as 200 refugees watched. Gomez's body was dumped into the sea, DiSilva's on the ground by the dock. Jani raced through the boat. "Please help me," he whispered to the other refugees. A woman motioned to him to hide between her and her children. The searching militiamen walked by.
The account of Jani, now a fearful refugee in western Timor, adds to the mounting evidence that victims of the murderous rampage by militia gangs in East Timor following the territory's overwhelming vote for independence from Indonesia were systematically culled from the population at large. Young men, political opponents of the Jakarta government, Roman Catholic clergy and anyone else suspected of favoring the independence opposed by the militias were targeted, in a chilling echo of the techniques of systematic killing seen in Kosovo. (Doug Struck and Keith B. Richburg, "Refugees Describe Method to Murderous Rampage in E. Timor," The Washington Post, September 14, 1999.)
On September 24, Amnesty International detailed "credible reports that 35 young East Timorese men were killed on board a ship bound for Kupang from Dili on 11 September. According to an eyewitness account, the bodies of the victims were dumped overboard. Amnesty International has collected accounts of other incidents of East Timorese being beaten and killed on boats leaving Dili." (Amnesty International, "Fear, Intimidation and Forced Relocation in the [Indonesian] Archipelago," AI Index: ASA 21/166/99, September 24, 1999.)
The situation in the concentration camps of West Timor, to which much of the Timorese population had been abducted by Indonesian forces, was no less grievous. John Aglionby wrote of the "refugees" being "herded, sifted, and cut off." He cited one witness's testimony that "Many of the men are [being] 'taken away for questioning' ... The women have no idea what happens to their husbands. Many have not returned." One woman reported a militia camp guard's comment that "You may have got your country but it will be a land full of widows." (Aglionby, "Herded, Sifted, and Cut Off," The Guardian, September 10, 1999.) A detainee who returned safely, Domingos Dos Santos, told Agence France-Presse that "pro-Indonesian militias were hunting down male refugees and planned to kill them all." ("Timor Refugees 'Can Return'," BBC Online, October 3, 1999.) On October 10, Timorese leader Xanana Gusmao spoke of "more than 230,000 East Timorese [having] been taken to camps in Atambua, Kefa, Kupang, Alor, Wetar and Kisar where the men were selectively murdered, leaving only women, children and the elderly." ("Gusmao Appeals to Indonesia to Free East Timorese from Camps," Agence France-Presse dispatch, October 11, 1999.)
Occasional concerns for the fate of Timor's men were expressed by prominent figures in the international community. The Deputy British representative to the United Nations, Stewart Eldon, told the U.N. Security Council on September 11 that "There are reports of women and children being forced into trucks to be taken to West Timor while men and boys are left behind. We know and we fear -- from Kosovo -- what that may mean." Most dramatically, in mid-September the Canadian ambassador to Indonesia, Kenneth Sunquist, raised the alarm over an apparent deficit of adult men in the West Timor camps. His account appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail under the headline, "The Chilling Disappearance of East Timor's Young Men":
Thousands of East Timorese men have disappeared en route to the relative safety of refugee camps in the western section of the embattled island, Canada's ambassador to Indonesia said after a tour of the area. Ken Sunquist and Norway's ambassador here are the first foreign diplomats to visit the camps in the West Timorese capital of Kupang, home to more than 100,000 refugees fleeing anti-independence militias responsible for an orgy of violence in neighbouring East Timor over the past two weeks. "The refugee camps themselves are filled overwhelmingly with women and children, so we're wondering where the men are, whether they've been segregated elsewhere, whether they're up in the hills in East Timor or if there's some more sinister explanation," Mr. Sunquist said after touring three Kupang-area refugee camps on Tuesday. "We tried to ask these questions on several occasions but it's clear that the people felt we were putting them at risk even talking to them. There were lots of police around everywhere we went."
Most of refugees seen by the joint mission, which accompanied five Indonesian cabinet ministers to Kupang, were older men, women and boys under the age of 16, he said. "While we were at the airport, for example, a plane came in with 171 people aboard, 150 of whom were children under the age of 10, older women and several younger men who appeared to have been wounded, but whether this was done by the militias before they left or not we couldn't tell," he said. (Paul Dillon and Jeff Sallot, "The Chilling Disappearance of East Timor's Young Men," The Globe and Mail, September 16, 1999.)
In an interview on September 20, Sunquist expanded on his perceptions of the situation:
The question is, for instance, the camps have women and children but no men. What's happened to those men? You can either take one approach, which is most of them went up in the hills to fight. That is probably true for a lot of them. A second one is that they were segregated. There's a lot of reports that say the men were segregated. ... In fact, from what we've now heard, there are some camps along the border which are almost entirely male. So maybe the husbands, fathers, brothers, were segregated and are sitting in camps by themselves. I really hope that's true. And then there's the third one, that they were killed. No one, I mean, not anyone is willing to say that they were killed, because they don't know what happened to them. The wives don't know. They know they are missing. But they don't know where they are. And that's what a commission of inquiry [is needed for]. (Quoted in Richard S. Ehrlich, "The Military and East Timor's Militias", The Laissez Faire City Times, 3: 38 [September 27, 1999].)
A Timorese man displays empty shell cartridges
from the massacre at Suai, September 6, 1999.
In addition to the apparent largescale gendercide of Timorese males, at least one sizable massacre predominantly targeted females, at the church in Suai on September 6. Up to 200 people who had taken refuge in the church were attacked by militia members and massacred. "The number of victims and their identities are uncertain," reported The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy. "What is known is that most were women and girls [and, according to other reports, elderly men]. The evidence attests to that: the jumble of bras, underpants and sanitary napkins on the steps leading up to the church; the children's leg bones; a hank of a woman's hair; the scorched skeletal remains of two women behind the church; the thick bloodstain on a schoolroom door, covered by bougainvillea petals baking beneath the sun. ... What happened was male savagery as old as history -- rape, killing, burning, razing -- in a church, a school, in the adjacent huge, grey, concrete shell of a cathedral called Ave Maria under construction to the glory of God. Savagery against the defenceless, as women and children usually are; vengeance on a people who voted for independence from their Indonesian military overlords and landowners." Afterwards, surviving "women and children were carted away on trucks to Indonesia's neighbouring West Timor province, about 30 kilometres away, where they are still being held. The whereabouts of many of the men is not known." (Valpy, "Rape and Murder in the Sight of Our Lady," The Globe and Mail, November 1, 1999.)
A number of younger Timorese women are reported to have been killed as known or suspected independence supporters. Reports also reached the international media of young Timorese women being raped, or abducted for use as sex-slaves. A representative of the aid agency World Vision stated in mid-October that "Apparently when the militias went on their rampage, they herded people into the marketplace to make forced evacuations and during that time, many young girls were dragged away and raped by the pro-integrationist forces." ("Aid Agency Claims to Have Evidence of Mass Rape by Militias," ABC [Australia] News Online, October 20, 1999.) Some of the worst cases of sexual assault, accompanied by mass killing, occurred at Suai on September 6 (see above). Rape was also allegedly widespread in the detention camps in West Timor, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Radhika Coomaraswamy, who was sent to Dili to file a report in November. (No special U.N. rapporteur on violence against men was appointed, and no report on the subject filed.)
How many died?
Were the atrocities that took place in East Timor in September-October 1999 on a "genocidal" scale? The consensus position of internatonal commentators has been "no" -- that in fact, the deaths amounted to no more than a few hundred people, perhaps only "dozens," as an Associated Press report claimed in mid-2000. Gendercide Watch considers these estimations to be highly suspect, and deriving in part from the desire of the international community (especially the U.N.) to avoid blame for its failure to intervene promptly in the slaughter and destruction.
The evidence is threefold that killings occurred on a much larger scale than has been generally recognized. First, independent investigators, operating with very few resources, have uncovered subsantially greater evidence of mass killings than has the tiny group of investigators dispatched by the United Nations -- but most death-count estimates have been based on the U.N. efforts. Second, there is strong physical, eyewitness, and circumstantial evidence of bodies being disposed of in large numbers at sea, or otherwise destroyed and hidden by Indonesian forces and Timorese militia-members. Last, and most significant, tens of thousands of Timorese remain "missing" and "unaccounted for" a year after the horror -- though this subject has attracted no attention in international media for many months.
The physical evidence. The possibility of turning up extensive forensic evidence of the atrocities has diminished drastically since September 1999, as a result of two factors: the apparently systematic attempts by Indonesian forces and militia to destroy such evidence; and the pathetically inadequate efforts by the U.N. to investigate atrocities on the ground.
Reports of the destruction of evidence are widespread. According to Australian doctor Andrew McNaughtan, "It is very clear that there has been a very organized, orchestrated, systematic cleanup of bodies" by Indonesian forces. (Jackie Woods, "Human Rights Activists Decry Slow U.N. Probe," Kyodo News Service, November 2, 1999.) Australian army lawyer Jens Streit told The Washington Post in October 1999 that "The great lengths the militias have gone to to hide and destroy the bodies makes it very difficult for us to figure out what happened. We have eyewitness accounts, but other than things like shell casings and blood stains, we don't have a lot of physical evidence. ... The Indonesians are extremely concerned about saving face. They want to be able to deny any of this happened." (Rajiv Chandrasekaran, "A Killing Ground Without Corpses: Bodies of E. Timor Victims Apparently Burned, Dumped," The Washington Post, October 22, 1999.) It is also certain that many victims were trucked across the border to West Timor and buried there: in late November 1999, 25 bodies were discovered by Indonesian non-governmental investigators in three mass graves on the western side of the border. Recall also the frequent testimony, already cited, of young men being taken out to sea to be killed, and their bodies dumped overboard.
As for international investigations, in marked contrast to the hundreds of forensics experts who were rushed to Kosovo in the wake of the Serb killing campaign earlier in 1999, only a handful of investigators were made available by InterFET (the International Force in East Timor), most with no forensics training. "Requests to the U.N. headquarters in New York for forensic investigators" went unheeded. (Woods, "Human Rights Activists Decry Slow U.N. Probe.") After nearly three months of stalling, a special U.N. advisory team toured the territory for a mere ten days in late November, gathering information and evidence for a possible war-crimes tribunal along the lines of Bosnia and Rwanda. In all, InterFET and U.N. investigators have recovered some 120 bodies across East Timor. ("You know what we call it when we find a well stuffed with dead people?" an Australian soldier asked The Laissez Faire City Times. "A manhole.") Many international observers have expressed exasperation at the limited scale and glacial pace of the investigations. "It's like you come home, the house is burnt down, grandma's been murdered and the kids have been kidnapped and you know who did it," said one American intelligence officer. "But everyone just keeps saying, 'Oh, how awful. She's dead, the house is burnt, the kids are gone -- they should just have more kids and build another house.' I say use the evidence to drag the murderer, the arsonist, the kidnapper into court then lock his ass in jail." (Quoted in Paul Daley, "U.N. Stalling Holds Up Horror Inquiry," The Sydney Morning Herald, November 13, 1999.)
The limited international efforts were cast into sharp relief by the work of the East Timor Human Rights Commission, a group of 79 Timorese volunteers, mainly students, who on their own "found evidence of 364 recent killings in Dili" and vicinity alone. Bodies found on beaches were not included in the total. (Paul Daley, "Massacre Evidence Grows", The Age, November 12, 1999.)
Intelligence data. Some of the most significant evidence of the Indonesian killing campaign in September 1999 almost certainly resides with U.S. and Australian intelligence agencies. A key component of any serious investigation into the atrocities must be to call for these agencies to turn over all relevant data to investigators. What has surfaced so far, through media sources, may be taken as indicative of the wealth of information currently held in secret files.
In a chilling report in the Melbourne Age, reporter Paul Daley wrote that "Evidence of hundreds of killings in Dili alone -- and potentially many more at sea -- confirms the view of Australian intelligence figures that thousands, rather than hundreds, of East Timorese have died in recent months." Citing "allegations that the Indonesian military (TNI), police and militias killed a large number of East Timorese students aboard a passenger ferry on route from Java to East Timor on 7 September, before dumping them at sea," Daley added:
The allegation is given weight by Australian signals intelligence, whch specifically indicates a large number of East Timorese students were killed at sea. The signals intelligence generally points to many other East Timorese being killed on boats -- or land -- before being dumped into the ocean. The Australian intelligence officers believe the discovery of more than 90 bodies on beaches on the north and south coasts of East Timor in recent weeks, also indicates a large number of people were disposed of at sea. "You have a situation where, in some cases hands and feet were tied, in other cases bodies have wounds or were burnt. It leads to the conclusion that large numbers of East Timorese could be dead -- some killed at sea, others killed on land, then burnt and hidden at sea," an intelligence figure told The Age. "This takes some effort and it points to a systematic cover-up." (Daley, "Massacre Evidence Grows", The Age, November 12, 1999.)
In a subsequent story, Daley cited another intelligence officer who told him that "The bodies found [by InterFET] weren't meant to be found -- that is, they were stuffed in drains, dumped in wells, buried in shallow graves and charred in burnt buildings. We believe they are the ones that the Indonesians themselves missed after cleaning up what they thought were all the bodies, before InterFET arrived and while journalists had been forced out of the place."
"It is possible to reach only one conclusion," Daley wrote. "East Timor is the scene of a massive crime against humanity -- and an even bigger attempt at cover-up -- by Indonesia's security forces." (Daley, "U.N. Stalling Holds Up Horror Inquiry.")
The missing. Of all the data to emerge from East Timor since the Indonesian onslaught of September 1999, estimates of the missing are the most disturbing. (For an in-depth examination of the phenomenon, see Adam Jones, "East Timor: Where Are the People?", ZNet, November 15, 1999.)
The voting drive conducted by the U.N. mission in East Timor registered 438,000 Timorese who were of voting age -- over 17 -- and who expressed a desire to cast a ballot. The U.N. then estimated the total population of East Timor as between 850,000 and 890,000, in keeping with standard "Third World" demographic trends in which 50 or even 60 percent of the population are minors. Thus, the international community never had as clear an idea of the number of Timorese in the territory as at the very point when the slaughter broke out at the beginning of September 1999.
In the early days of the September crisis, estimates of Timorese "unaccounted for" ranged from 200,000 to as high as 600,000. In October, José Ramos Horta spoke of the possible "disappearance" of 100,000 people in the territory. As the Indonesian armed forces prepared to depart, many thousands of Timorese subsequently returned from hiding to their shattered communities. But on November 3, the head of InterFET, Maj.-Gen. Peter Cosgrove, told media that "There is a discrepancy, we feel, of about 80,000 [people]. Are these in the hills or just unlocated? We are not sure. There could be more in West Timor than we've found, there could be more in the hills, or in the wider area of the Indonesia archipelago." But he also mentioned "speculation about a fourth fate." Cosgrove, it must be noted, was basing his estimate on a total Timorese population of 800,000 -- some 50,000 to 90,000 fewer than the U.N. estimates made at the time of the voter-registration drive. On November 5, The Sydney Morning Herald reported: "Different U.N. officials calculate that the human cost of Indonesia's bloody withdrawal could be close to 200,000." As the East Timor Observatory (a Portuguese body created to monitor the transition process) noted grimly, "Whatever figures are used, the difference is in the region of tens of thousands, probably many tens of thousands. It would be illogical to dismiss the possibility of genocide before finding out what has really happened to all the 'disappeared.'"
The last mention of the missing that Gendercide Watch has unearthed in the international press was on January 29, 2000 (Marian Wilkinson, "Justice Must Be Done," The Melbourne Age). The article stated: "Tens of thousands of Timorese are still unaccounted for since September. While these figures are now thought [sic: claimed] to be the result of statistical errors, even InterFET's General Cosgrove says the numbers still trouble him." Since that time, the issue -- barely visible for two months prior to Wilkinson's article -- has entirely evaporated from media coverage. The conundrum, however, remains unsolved, and the so-called "statistical errors" that may have led to a miscount have never been explained.
If tens of thousands of Timorese are indeed "missing," where might they have gone? One possibility is that large numbers were forcibly dispersed to distant corners of the Indonesian archipelago. Some may simply not have been listed as "accounted for" within East Timor itself. But Dr. William Maley of the Australian Defence Force Academy has been quoted as saying that "a lot" of the missing could have been murdered. He cites the obviously extensive planning that underlay the terror campaign of September as "one reason I think it would have been possible to kill a lot of people in a short period of time. It wasn't just a ragged-edge exercise with a few people running amok because they were disappointed with the result. ... At the early stages of a genocide investigation one does not start with body one and then go on to count a pile of bodies. It's in terms of population estimates and population deficits. If you have a population of, say, 880,000 and then you count everyone and there are only 700,000, that doesn't mean you can explain at this stage what happened to every individual. But it is very strong evidence that something very nasty has happened. People don't disappear into thin air if they are alive." (Quoted in Brendan Nicholson, "Grim View on Timor's Missing 80,000", The Age [Melbourne], November 12, 1999.)
A snapshot of the quandary was provided by Sydney Morning Herald reporter Lindsay Murdoch in April 2000. Writing from the district of Liquica, 40 kilometres west of Dili, Murdoch noted that "almost every day people trail into the Liquica police station to tell the United Nations police stationed there about new grave sites." According to a U.S. police officer assigned to the force, Alan Williams, "Officially we must stay with the number of bodies that we have actually lifted, but the total number of people killed in this district is much, much higher than that, perhaps even astronomical." (Murdoch, "Horror Lives on for Town of Liquica", The Sydney Morning Herald, April 8, 2000.)
With most of the physical and forensic evidence of atrocities washed away by monsoon rains, the only feasible way of determining the scale of the killings in East Timor is by conducting a fullscale census of the Timorese population. Such a survey "is necessary and urgent," the East Timor Observatory proclaimed in November 1999. This would take no more effort than the efficient voter-registration drive carried out immediately prior to the plebiscite, which permitted an accurate estimate to be made of the overall Timorese population.
Who was responsible?
The major share of responsibility for the genocide in East Timor since 1975 rests with the Indonesian military, which has long been the dominant force in national politics and, over the long years of occupation, amassed a wide range of lucrative economic interests in East Timor. The Commander of the Armed Forces and Defence Minister, General Wiranto, oversaw the atrocities of 1999 conducted under the aegis of Operasi Sapu Jagad ("Operation Global Clean-Sweep"). As well, "senior generals playing active roles included Lieutenant-General Tyasno Sudarso, head of military intelligence, his predecessor Lieutenant-General Zacky Anwar Makarim, and Major-General Adam Damiri, commander of the Udayana military command which includes East Timor. This group was strongly supported by influential retired Generals Tri Sutrisno and Benny Burdani, the latter having been intimately involved in East Timor operations ever since 1974. Despite his exile, sacked Lieutenant [sic: Major]-General Prabowo [former commander of the Kopassus special-forces unit, and son-in-law of deposed President Suharto] gave advice at every stage of the campaign. Lieutenant-General Yunus Yosfiah, Information Minister in the Habibie cabinet, also played an active role ... Crucial local military commanders were Lieutenant Colonels Asep Kuswanto in Liquica, Burhanudin Siagan in Bobonaro, Muhammed Nur in Emera, and Colonel Mudjino, Dili deputy commander." (Taylor, East Timor: The Price of Freedom, pp. xix-xx.)
On August 18, 2000, the People's Consultative Assembly in Jakarta issued a blanket amnesty for all human-rights abuses committed by the armed forces, in Indonesia as well as in East Timor. "Top serving and retired officers ... put enormous pressure on politicians to pass the decree banning retroactive prosecution of human rights cases ... The ban effectively rules out charges against senior officers, because Indonesia's criminal code does not recognise culpability by those in command. Only those who carried out orders could be charged and prosecuted." (See Lindsay Murdoch, "Blanket Amnesty for Officers: They Were Only Issuing Orders", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 2000.) The United Nations responded by appointing a senior prosecutor, Mohamed Ottman, to investigate atrocities over the entire period of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. There were hopes that the investigation would lead to the creation of a fully-fledged war-crimes tribunal under U.N. sponsorship. (See Mark Dodd, "War Crimes Lawyer to Study 1975 Invasion", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2000.)
The killings, property destruction, and forced translocations of September 1999 were carried out at ground level by Indonesian army and police forces in coordination with the Timorese militias described earlier. At all levels, those who commanded and conducted the killing were men; Timorese males, mostly youths, were recruited for militia service with promises of good pay and other "benefits" (including a free rein when it came to raping and sexually abusing Timorese women). A number were also former detainees who had been released from brutal treatment in Indonesian custody after pledging to collaborate with the occupying forces.
The aftermath
Massive public demonstrations in Australia, North America, and Western Europe against the atrocities in East Timor, along with the recent precedent of intervention in Kosovo, finally pushed the West to intervene. Pressure, especially from the United States, forced the Habibie government to accept an international force, InterFET, composed mainly of Australian and Nepalese Gurkha troops. The forces began deploying in Dili on September 20, 1999, and a week later Indonesian forces finally ceded control to the international contingent, though troops would remain in the territory until the end of October. On September 28, the United Nations voted to establish an international inquiry into the atrocities in the territory, though it was still unclear at the time of writing whether this would be followed by an international criminal tribunal along the lines of Bosnia and Rwanda.
The Indonesian killing campaign was accompanied by property destruction on an almost inconceivable scale, apparently aimed at "the virtual demolition of the physical basis for survival in the territory," according to Noam Chomsky. ("East Timor Is Not Yesterday's Story", ZNet, October 23, 1999.) In a lengthy feature article published in The New York Times in April 2000, Seth Mydans described the state of the territory in the post-plebiscite period:
DILI, East Timor -- People here have gotten used to the scene: a mob of unemployed young men shoving, shouting and weeping in anger outside the headquarters of the United Nations, held back by an impassive multinational police contingent. "Nothing has changed!" they shouted the other day, and their complaint has become a theme for critics -- both foreign and Timorese -- as the United Nations passes the six-month mark in its first experiment in building a new nation. As monsoon rains bring added misery, whole towns and villages still stand burned, roofless and silent, devastated by the rampage of destruction that followed East Timor's vote last August to end 24 years of Indonesian occupation. As many as 80 percent of the territory's 700,000 people still have no jobs. Another 100,000 or more remain in camps across the border in Indonesian West Timor, still afraid to return. ... Aid workers and diplomats say they fear that this discontent could lead to lawlessness and political disarray and could open the door to trouble from the Indonesian-backed militias that crossed the border to Indonesian West Timor after laying waste to the territory last September. (Mydans, "Ruined East Timor Awaits A Miracle," The New York Times, April 22, 2000. For a more optimistic assessment of the prospects an independent East Timor will face, see Lindsay Murdoch, "Peace Stirs a New Nation to Work towards a Prosperous Future", The Sydney Morning Herald, August 26, 2000.)
Indeed, at the time of writing (August 2000), renewed militia violence was reported in the regions along the West Timorese border, and was feared to be rapidly spreading east towards Dili. There were indications that the militias were seeking to destabilize East Timor ahead of the country's formal attainment of independence in 2001.
Bosnia-Herzegovina
Summary
Atrocities were committed by all sides and against all sectors of the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. But the Serb strategy of gender-selective mass executions of non-combatant men was the most severe and systematic atrocity inflicted throughout. The war in Bosnia can thus be considered both a genocide against Bosnia's Muslim population, and a gendercide against Muslim men in particular.
The background
The Yugoslav ("Southern Slav") federation, cobbled together from the disintegrated Ottoman Empire after World War I, was torn apart by combined Nazi invasion and ethnic conflict during the Second World War. Indeed, the slaughter of Serbs, Jews, Muslims, Croats, and Roma (Gypsies) constituted one of the most genocidal theatres of that war; the Jewish population was nearly exterminated. A partisan movement led by Josip Broz Tito (a Croat) seized power with Allied help, massacred its enemies, and established a comparatively liberal socialist state, creating an atmosphere for a sense of Yugoslav nationhood to flourish (an idea that lives on today in "Cyber-Yugoslavia"). The federation began to unwind after Marshal Tito's death in 1980, with economic crisis and foreign debt speeding the dissolution of the union. A new generation of extreme-nationalist politicians arose to fan the flames of ethnic hatred as a springboard to personal power. In Serbia, President Slobodan Milosevic consolidated his highly authoritarian brand of rule after 1987, imposing a police state on the restive Serb province of Kosovo and its ethnic-Albanian majority in 1989. Franjo Tudjman, meanwhile, won presidential elections in Croatia by reviving the symbolism and rhetoric of the fascist Ustashe, Croatia's Nazi collaborationists, who fifty years earlier had inflicted genocide on the Serbs, Jews, and Roma within their reach.
While Tudjman and others played an important role in ensuring that the breakup of Yugoslavia would be violent, it was overridingly Milosevic's ambitions of a "Greater Serbia" that sparked the onset of fullscale war in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Using its dominant control over the Yugoslav army, the Serb regime shelled large parts of Croatia into submission in 1991 (including the destruction of the Danube city of Vukovar and the subsequent genocidal massacre: see below). The Bosnian government, almost defenseless, desperately sought to stay out of the widening conflict. But the following year, in Spring 1992, Milosevic -- in alliance with Radovan Karadzic's breakaway Bosnian Serbs -- launched the genocidal and gendercidal "ethnic cleansing" of those parts of Bosnia intended for "Greater Serbia." Sarajevo's time-honoured ethnic harmony was shattered by a protracted Serb siege. Meanwhile, the outside world dithered ineffectually, imposing an arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims equal to the one it imposed on the well-armed Serbs. Europe's worst conflict since the Second World War was underway, and the military imbalance placed Milosevic's genocidal ambitions within reach.
The gendercide
In the light of long-established and heavily "gendered" strategies of intercommunal conflict in the Balkans, it was hardly surprising that the gender-selective massacre of non-combatant males would emerge as the dominant and most severe atrocity inflicted on the civilian population in the modern Balkans wars. Regardless of their often-atrocious maltreatment of other population groups (including the destruction of entire cities and the mass rape of women), Serb forces -- and to a lesser extent Croats and Muslims -- concentrated their attention systematically on "battle-age" men. As the Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic described the Serb strategy in 1996, "Wherever they [the Serbs] captured people, they either detained or killed all the males from 18 to 55 [years old]. It has never happened that the men of that age arrived across the front-line." Citing Muratovic's comment, Mark Danner summarized the Serbs' modus operandi as follows:
1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and after warning the resident Serbs -- often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with white flags -- intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and then bring them out into the streets.
2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors.
3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from men of "fighting age" -- sixteen years to sixty years old.
4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country.
5. Liquidation. Execute "fighting age" men, dispose of bodies.
All of the largest atrocities of the Balkans war were variations on this gendercidal theme -- targeting males almost exclusively, and for the most part "battle-age" males. The five worst acts of mass killing in the modern Balkans wars were also the worst in Europe since the killing of tens of thousands of disarmed enemy men by Tito's partisan forces in 1945-46. At Vukovar in November 1991, between 200 and 300 Croatian men, "mostly lightly wounded soldiers and hospital workers," were pulled out of the hospital surroundings -- some with the catheters still dangling from their arms -- executed, and buried en masse outside city limits. (See Stover and Peress, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar.)
A panel from Joe Sacco's memorable work, Safe Area Gorazde
(link to ordering information for Sacco's book).
The story of Vlasic (Ugar Gorge) is that of another ruthless act of gender-selective mass killing. On 21 August 1992, a convoy of prisoners from the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp were driven to Muslim and Croat territory. En route, men were separated from women, driven off in separate buses, and executed at the edge of the ravine. Some 200-250 men are believed to have died.
But neither Vukovar nor the Ugar Gorge could hold a candle to a more obscure slaughter -- at Brcko during the Serb offensive of 1992. Although much about the incident remains shadowy, Brcko, a strategic "choke point" on the Drina River, appears to have been the target of a systematic gender-selective slaughter that strongly foreshadowed the nightmare at Srebrenica three years later. Mark Danner, who has investigated what little is publicly known about the events, summarizes them as follows:
During the late spring and early summer of 1992, some three thousand Muslims ... were herded by Serb troops into an abandoned warehouse, tortured, and put to death. A U.S. intelligence satellite orbiting over the former Yugoslavia photographed part of the slaughter. "They have photos of trucks going into Brcko with bodies standing upright, and pictures of trucks coming out of Brcko carrying bodies lying horizontally, stacked like cordwood," an investigator working outside the U.S. government who has seen the photographs told us. ... The photographs remain unpublished to this day. (Danner, "Bosnia: The Great Betrayal," New York Review of Books, 26 March 1998.)
The vast majority of mass killings and gender-selective slaughters between 1991 and 1994 were smaller in magnitude, and went virtually unrecorded. The best place to find accounts of them, in English at least, is the Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch report, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The litany of atrocities in a narrow stretch of Volume II alone makes clear the pervasiveness and systematic character of the gendercide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a way that the more epic mass killings perhaps do not:
In my village, about 180 men were killed. The army put all men in the center of the village. After the killing, the women took care of the bodies and identified them. The older men buried the bodies. (Trnopolje)
We were met by the Cetniks [Serb paramilitaries], who were separating women and children from the men. Many of the men were killed on the spot -- mostly over old, private disputes. The rest of us were put on buses and they started to beat us. (Kozarac)
The army came to the village that day. They took us from our houses. The men were beaten. The army came in on trucks and started shooting at the men and killing them. (Prnovo)
The army took most of the men and killed them. There were bodies everywhere. (Rizvanovici)
The shooting started at about 4:00 p.m., but we were surrounded and could not escape. They [Serb troops] finally entered the village at 8:00 p.m. and immediately began setting houses on fire, looking for men and executing them. When they got to our house, they ordered us to come out with hands raised above our heads, including the children. There were four men among us, and they shot them in front of us. We were screaming, and the children cried as we were forced to walk on. I saw another six men killed nearby. (Skelani)
Our men had to hide. My husband was with us, but hiding. I saw my uncle being beaten on July 25 when there was a kind of massacre. The Serbs were searching for arms. Three hundred men were killed that day. (Carakovo)
We came out of the shelter. They were looking for men. They got them all together. We saw them beating the men. We heard the sounds of the shooting. One man survived the executions. They killed his brother and father. Afterwards the women buried the men. (Biscani)
The crowning act of gendercide in the Balkans wars -- at least until "Operation Horseshoe" in Kosovo in 1999 -- came at Srebrenica between July 12 and 17, 1995. After the atrocities of 1992 and further fighting in 1993, Srebrenica had been declared one of five "safe areas" under UN protection. Tens of thousands of desperate Muslims sought protection there. Despite privations and squalor, the safety held -- until July 1995, when Serb forces overran the enclave. As Dutch U.N. troops and the international community looked on, the Serbs separated the men, most of them elderly and infirm, from the children and women. While the other members of the community were bused to safety in Muslim-held territory, thousands of Srebrenica's men were taken out to open fields, executed, and buried in mass graves. Thousands of other unarmed men were rounded up and hunted down in nearby forests, in what Serb commander Ratko Mladic called a "feast" of mass killing.
How many died?
"As of December 1994," writes Sabrina Ramet in Balkan Babel (p. 267), "between 200,000 and 400,000 people had died since June 1991 as a result of the war between Serbs and non-Serbs, and at least 2.7 million people had been reduced to refugees. An estimated 20,000-50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers in a systematic campaign of humiliation and psychological terror." Most authorities, while accepting that the death-toll from the Bosnian conflict alone reached six figures, would tend towards the lower end of Ramet's casualty estimate. But to this must be added the further slaughter during the "endgame" of the war in mid-1995, including the gendercidal massacre at Srebrenica and the Croat invasion of the Serb-held Krajina region later in the summer.
No reliable statistics exist for the number of male versus female casualties in the Bosnian or Croatian wars. All members of the civilian population suffered in the protracted and bloody sieges of cities such as Vukovar and Sarajevo. But the overwhelming weight of testimony and recorded evidence suggests a heavy preponderance of "battle-age" males among the dead -- probably over 80 percent. One clue can be gleaned from the lists of missing persons from the Bosnian conflict. The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted that "the majority of missing persons [in Bosnia-Herzegovina] are men ... Of the approximately 18,000 persons registered by the ICRC in Bosnia-Herzegovina as still missing in connection with the armed conflict that ended there in 1995, 92% are men and 8% are women." (ICRC, "The Impact of Armed Conflict on Women", 6 March 2001.) This apparent disproportion, combined with the systematic gender-selective strategies pursued in the individual massacres and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns, warrants the designation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of the worst gendercides in recent decades. Especially in 1992-93, atrocities were also inflicted in the brutal concentration camps operated by the Serbs (e.g., Omarska, Trnopolje), and to a lesser extent by the Croats (Dretelj). The inmates of these camps were overwhelmingly Muslim males (95 percent or more); many thousands died from torture, beatings, and summary executions.
Who is responsible?
Although crimes have been committed by all sides in the Balkans conflict, the vast majority of the mass killings and other atrocities were inflicted by the Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic himself now numbers among those indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), on the basis of his genocidal actions in Kosovo. He is presently the only sitting head of state to be so indicted. Four top aides were indicted alongside him. Among Milosevic's key co-conspirators is his wife, Mirjana Markovic, a leading party ideologue.
The Yugoslav power structure is extensively penetrated by criminal and paramilitary elements, most notably those under the control of Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan") and Vojislav Seselj. Both of these paramilitary leaders were deeply involved in the ground-level killing at the major massacre sites. Radovan Karadzic, Prime Minister of the self-declared "Republika Srpska" (the Serb statelet in Bosnia-Herzegovina), has also been indicted on war-crimes charges. He was intimately involved in planning and preparing the genocidal actions against the Muslim population of Bosnia. His top general, Ratko Mladic, supervised the gendercide at Srebrenica and numerous other acts of mass killing, and is also under indictment.
One must not overlook the men and occasionally women who slaughtered the defenseless victims and buried them in the mass graves, or killed them in their houses and streets. Again, although extreme nationalism was evident in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, it is the ordinary citizens of Serbia who have overridingly supported their regime in its campaign to build "Greater Serbia" over the graves of Muslims, Croats, and Kosovars.
The aftermath
The slaughter at Srebrenica, which seemed to mark the apogee of "Greater Serbia," was quickly followed by its demise. A Croat-Muslim alliance, now rearmed with tacit U.S. assistance, went on the offensive. "On August 4 [1995], with clear U.S. backing, Croatia's army attacked and overran Knin, the symbolic capital of the rebel Serbs who, at the instigation of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav army, had seized a quarter of Croatia's territory and driven out their Croat neighbors in 1990 and 1991. Within hours, the tide of the wars in Yugoslavia had shifted. The rebel Serbs' leaders abandoned the civilian Serb population in Croatia. The Croatian army sent tens of thousands of these Serbs fleeing across the Croatian border into Serb-held districts in Bosnia." (Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 324.) Many thousands of Serbs, especially the elderly and infirm, were killed by Croat forces in these new vengeful "cleansings." Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies were forced to the negotiating table. In November 1995, at Dayton, Ohio, they signed a peace treaty with Muslim and Croat representatives that saw Bosnia-Herzegovina formally preserved as an independent country, though with clear areas of predominance for Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. The pact was secured by 60,000 NATO peacekeepers -- but Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" dream remained. It would turn its attentions next to the territory it had first focused upon -- Kosovo, with its rebellious ethnic-Albanian majority. The result was a renewed bout of "ethnic cleansing" and gendercide in the Balkans, in 1998-99.
Atrocities were committed by all sides and against all sectors of the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. But the Serb strategy of gender-selective mass executions of non-combatant men was the most severe and systematic atrocity inflicted throughout. The war in Bosnia can thus be considered both a genocide against Bosnia's Muslim population, and a gendercide against Muslim men in particular.
The background
The Yugoslav ("Southern Slav") federation, cobbled together from the disintegrated Ottoman Empire after World War I, was torn apart by combined Nazi invasion and ethnic conflict during the Second World War. Indeed, the slaughter of Serbs, Jews, Muslims, Croats, and Roma (Gypsies) constituted one of the most genocidal theatres of that war; the Jewish population was nearly exterminated. A partisan movement led by Josip Broz Tito (a Croat) seized power with Allied help, massacred its enemies, and established a comparatively liberal socialist state, creating an atmosphere for a sense of Yugoslav nationhood to flourish (an idea that lives on today in "Cyber-Yugoslavia"). The federation began to unwind after Marshal Tito's death in 1980, with economic crisis and foreign debt speeding the dissolution of the union. A new generation of extreme-nationalist politicians arose to fan the flames of ethnic hatred as a springboard to personal power. In Serbia, President Slobodan Milosevic consolidated his highly authoritarian brand of rule after 1987, imposing a police state on the restive Serb province of Kosovo and its ethnic-Albanian majority in 1989. Franjo Tudjman, meanwhile, won presidential elections in Croatia by reviving the symbolism and rhetoric of the fascist Ustashe, Croatia's Nazi collaborationists, who fifty years earlier had inflicted genocide on the Serbs, Jews, and Roma within their reach.
While Tudjman and others played an important role in ensuring that the breakup of Yugoslavia would be violent, it was overridingly Milosevic's ambitions of a "Greater Serbia" that sparked the onset of fullscale war in both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Using its dominant control over the Yugoslav army, the Serb regime shelled large parts of Croatia into submission in 1991 (including the destruction of the Danube city of Vukovar and the subsequent genocidal massacre: see below). The Bosnian government, almost defenseless, desperately sought to stay out of the widening conflict. But the following year, in Spring 1992, Milosevic -- in alliance with Radovan Karadzic's breakaway Bosnian Serbs -- launched the genocidal and gendercidal "ethnic cleansing" of those parts of Bosnia intended for "Greater Serbia." Sarajevo's time-honoured ethnic harmony was shattered by a protracted Serb siege. Meanwhile, the outside world dithered ineffectually, imposing an arms embargo on the Bosnian Muslims equal to the one it imposed on the well-armed Serbs. Europe's worst conflict since the Second World War was underway, and the military imbalance placed Milosevic's genocidal ambitions within reach.
The gendercide
In the light of long-established and heavily "gendered" strategies of intercommunal conflict in the Balkans, it was hardly surprising that the gender-selective massacre of non-combatant males would emerge as the dominant and most severe atrocity inflicted on the civilian population in the modern Balkans wars. Regardless of their often-atrocious maltreatment of other population groups (including the destruction of entire cities and the mass rape of women), Serb forces -- and to a lesser extent Croats and Muslims -- concentrated their attention systematically on "battle-age" men. As the Bosnian Prime Minister Hasan Muratovic described the Serb strategy in 1996, "Wherever they [the Serbs] captured people, they either detained or killed all the males from 18 to 55 [years old]. It has never happened that the men of that age arrived across the front-line." Citing Muratovic's comment, Mark Danner summarized the Serbs' modus operandi as follows:
1. Concentration. Surround the area to be cleansed and after warning the resident Serbs -- often they are urged to leave or are at least told to mark their houses with white flags -- intimidate the target population with artillery fire and arbitrary executions and then bring them out into the streets.
2. Decapitation. Execute political leaders and those capable of taking their places: lawyers, judges, public officials, writers, professors.
3. Separation. Divide women, children, and old men from men of "fighting age" -- sixteen years to sixty years old.
4. Evacuation. Transport women, children, and old men to the border, expelling them into a neighboring territory or country.
5. Liquidation. Execute "fighting age" men, dispose of bodies.
All of the largest atrocities of the Balkans war were variations on this gendercidal theme -- targeting males almost exclusively, and for the most part "battle-age" males. The five worst acts of mass killing in the modern Balkans wars were also the worst in Europe since the killing of tens of thousands of disarmed enemy men by Tito's partisan forces in 1945-46. At Vukovar in November 1991, between 200 and 300 Croatian men, "mostly lightly wounded soldiers and hospital workers," were pulled out of the hospital surroundings -- some with the catheters still dangling from their arms -- executed, and buried en masse outside city limits. (See Stover and Peress, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar.)
A panel from Joe Sacco's memorable work, Safe Area Gorazde
(link to ordering information for Sacco's book).
The story of Vlasic (Ugar Gorge) is that of another ruthless act of gender-selective mass killing. On 21 August 1992, a convoy of prisoners from the Serb-run Trnopolje concentration camp were driven to Muslim and Croat territory. En route, men were separated from women, driven off in separate buses, and executed at the edge of the ravine. Some 200-250 men are believed to have died.
But neither Vukovar nor the Ugar Gorge could hold a candle to a more obscure slaughter -- at Brcko during the Serb offensive of 1992. Although much about the incident remains shadowy, Brcko, a strategic "choke point" on the Drina River, appears to have been the target of a systematic gender-selective slaughter that strongly foreshadowed the nightmare at Srebrenica three years later. Mark Danner, who has investigated what little is publicly known about the events, summarizes them as follows:
During the late spring and early summer of 1992, some three thousand Muslims ... were herded by Serb troops into an abandoned warehouse, tortured, and put to death. A U.S. intelligence satellite orbiting over the former Yugoslavia photographed part of the slaughter. "They have photos of trucks going into Brcko with bodies standing upright, and pictures of trucks coming out of Brcko carrying bodies lying horizontally, stacked like cordwood," an investigator working outside the U.S. government who has seen the photographs told us. ... The photographs remain unpublished to this day. (Danner, "Bosnia: The Great Betrayal," New York Review of Books, 26 March 1998.)
The vast majority of mass killings and gender-selective slaughters between 1991 and 1994 were smaller in magnitude, and went virtually unrecorded. The best place to find accounts of them, in English at least, is the Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch report, War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The litany of atrocities in a narrow stretch of Volume II alone makes clear the pervasiveness and systematic character of the gendercide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in a way that the more epic mass killings perhaps do not:
In my village, about 180 men were killed. The army put all men in the center of the village. After the killing, the women took care of the bodies and identified them. The older men buried the bodies. (Trnopolje)
We were met by the Cetniks [Serb paramilitaries], who were separating women and children from the men. Many of the men were killed on the spot -- mostly over old, private disputes. The rest of us were put on buses and they started to beat us. (Kozarac)
The army came to the village that day. They took us from our houses. The men were beaten. The army came in on trucks and started shooting at the men and killing them. (Prnovo)
The army took most of the men and killed them. There were bodies everywhere. (Rizvanovici)
The shooting started at about 4:00 p.m., but we were surrounded and could not escape. They [Serb troops] finally entered the village at 8:00 p.m. and immediately began setting houses on fire, looking for men and executing them. When they got to our house, they ordered us to come out with hands raised above our heads, including the children. There were four men among us, and they shot them in front of us. We were screaming, and the children cried as we were forced to walk on. I saw another six men killed nearby. (Skelani)
Our men had to hide. My husband was with us, but hiding. I saw my uncle being beaten on July 25 when there was a kind of massacre. The Serbs were searching for arms. Three hundred men were killed that day. (Carakovo)
We came out of the shelter. They were looking for men. They got them all together. We saw them beating the men. We heard the sounds of the shooting. One man survived the executions. They killed his brother and father. Afterwards the women buried the men. (Biscani)
The crowning act of gendercide in the Balkans wars -- at least until "Operation Horseshoe" in Kosovo in 1999 -- came at Srebrenica between July 12 and 17, 1995. After the atrocities of 1992 and further fighting in 1993, Srebrenica had been declared one of five "safe areas" under UN protection. Tens of thousands of desperate Muslims sought protection there. Despite privations and squalor, the safety held -- until July 1995, when Serb forces overran the enclave. As Dutch U.N. troops and the international community looked on, the Serbs separated the men, most of them elderly and infirm, from the children and women. While the other members of the community were bused to safety in Muslim-held territory, thousands of Srebrenica's men were taken out to open fields, executed, and buried in mass graves. Thousands of other unarmed men were rounded up and hunted down in nearby forests, in what Serb commander Ratko Mladic called a "feast" of mass killing.
How many died?
"As of December 1994," writes Sabrina Ramet in Balkan Babel (p. 267), "between 200,000 and 400,000 people had died since June 1991 as a result of the war between Serbs and non-Serbs, and at least 2.7 million people had been reduced to refugees. An estimated 20,000-50,000 Bosnian Muslim women had been raped by Bosnian Serb soldiers in a systematic campaign of humiliation and psychological terror." Most authorities, while accepting that the death-toll from the Bosnian conflict alone reached six figures, would tend towards the lower end of Ramet's casualty estimate. But to this must be added the further slaughter during the "endgame" of the war in mid-1995, including the gendercidal massacre at Srebrenica and the Croat invasion of the Serb-held Krajina region later in the summer.
No reliable statistics exist for the number of male versus female casualties in the Bosnian or Croatian wars. All members of the civilian population suffered in the protracted and bloody sieges of cities such as Vukovar and Sarajevo. But the overwhelming weight of testimony and recorded evidence suggests a heavy preponderance of "battle-age" males among the dead -- probably over 80 percent. One clue can be gleaned from the lists of missing persons from the Bosnian conflict. The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted that "the majority of missing persons [in Bosnia-Herzegovina] are men ... Of the approximately 18,000 persons registered by the ICRC in Bosnia-Herzegovina as still missing in connection with the armed conflict that ended there in 1995, 92% are men and 8% are women." (ICRC, "The Impact of Armed Conflict on Women", 6 March 2001.) This apparent disproportion, combined with the systematic gender-selective strategies pursued in the individual massacres and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns, warrants the designation of Bosnia-Herzegovina as one of the worst gendercides in recent decades. Especially in 1992-93, atrocities were also inflicted in the brutal concentration camps operated by the Serbs (e.g., Omarska, Trnopolje), and to a lesser extent by the Croats (Dretelj). The inmates of these camps were overwhelmingly Muslim males (95 percent or more); many thousands died from torture, beatings, and summary executions.
Who is responsible?
Although crimes have been committed by all sides in the Balkans conflict, the vast majority of the mass killings and other atrocities were inflicted by the Yugoslav regime of Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic himself now numbers among those indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), on the basis of his genocidal actions in Kosovo. He is presently the only sitting head of state to be so indicted. Four top aides were indicted alongside him. Among Milosevic's key co-conspirators is his wife, Mirjana Markovic, a leading party ideologue.
The Yugoslav power structure is extensively penetrated by criminal and paramilitary elements, most notably those under the control of Zeljko Raznatovic ("Arkan") and Vojislav Seselj. Both of these paramilitary leaders were deeply involved in the ground-level killing at the major massacre sites. Radovan Karadzic, Prime Minister of the self-declared "Republika Srpska" (the Serb statelet in Bosnia-Herzegovina), has also been indicted on war-crimes charges. He was intimately involved in planning and preparing the genocidal actions against the Muslim population of Bosnia. His top general, Ratko Mladic, supervised the gendercide at Srebrenica and numerous other acts of mass killing, and is also under indictment.
One must not overlook the men and occasionally women who slaughtered the defenseless victims and buried them in the mass graves, or killed them in their houses and streets. Again, although extreme nationalism was evident in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo, it is the ordinary citizens of Serbia who have overridingly supported their regime in its campaign to build "Greater Serbia" over the graves of Muslims, Croats, and Kosovars.
The aftermath
The slaughter at Srebrenica, which seemed to mark the apogee of "Greater Serbia," was quickly followed by its demise. A Croat-Muslim alliance, now rearmed with tacit U.S. assistance, went on the offensive. "On August 4 [1995], with clear U.S. backing, Croatia's army attacked and overran Knin, the symbolic capital of the rebel Serbs who, at the instigation of Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav army, had seized a quarter of Croatia's territory and driven out their Croat neighbors in 1990 and 1991. Within hours, the tide of the wars in Yugoslavia had shifted. The rebel Serbs' leaders abandoned the civilian Serb population in Croatia. The Croatian army sent tens of thousands of these Serbs fleeing across the Croatian border into Serb-held districts in Bosnia." (Sudetic, Blood and Vengeance, p. 324.) Many thousands of Serbs, especially the elderly and infirm, were killed by Croat forces in these new vengeful "cleansings." Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies were forced to the negotiating table. In November 1995, at Dayton, Ohio, they signed a peace treaty with Muslim and Croat representatives that saw Bosnia-Herzegovina formally preserved as an independent country, though with clear areas of predominance for Serbs, Muslims, and Croats. The pact was secured by 60,000 NATO peacekeepers -- but Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" dream remained. It would turn its attentions next to the territory it had first focused upon -- Kosovo, with its rebellious ethnic-Albanian majority. The result was a renewed bout of "ethnic cleansing" and gendercide in the Balkans, in 1998-99.
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