Gendercide and genocide

Journal of Genocide Research

Volumn 2, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 185-211

  Jones, Adam ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 85089753242     PISSN: 14623528     EISSN: 14699494     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/713677599     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Watch, Helsinki. 1993. War Crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vol 2, 82–83. New York: Human Rights Watch.
2. Mendez, Juan E., 1990. "U.S. join's Peru's dirty war,". The New York Times, May 7 (Mendez was executive director of Americas Watch.)
3. Jonassohn, Kurt, and Björnson, Karen. 1998. Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations, 242New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hochschild likewise notes that "In France's equatorial African territories, where the region's history is best documented, the amount of rubber-bearing land was far less than what Leopold controlled, but the rape [he apparently means gendercide] was just as brutal. … The population loss in the rubber-rich equatorial rain forest owned by France is estimated, just as in Leopold's Congo, as roughly 50 percent. … In the 1920s, construction of a new railway through French territory bypassing the big Congo River rapids cost the lives of an estimated twenty thousand forced laborers, far more than had died building, and later rebuilding, Leopold's railway nearby." Hochschild,, p 280
4. Jones, Adam. 1998. "Engendering debate,". Review of International Studies, 24 (2): 299–303.
5. Reisman, W. Michael, and Antomou, Chris T., eds. 1994. The Laws of War, 84–86. New York: Vintage Books.
6. Rodina, Mihaela. 1999. "Blood code rules in northern Albania,". Agence France-Presse dispatch, June 30
7. "Gender and ethnic conflict in ex-Yugoslavia," I independently theorized mass killings of men as acts of "retributory or 'pre-emptive' execution". Ethnic and Racial Studies, 17 (l) 124 Dadrian,, p 207. In my 1994 article
8. Kogon, Eugen. 1993. Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas, 54New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kogon et al write in their chapter on "Killings in the gas vans behind the Front" that "First, trial gassings were conducted, one of them with Russian prisoners of war in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the autumn of 1941." The mass killings of women and men together then began in December 1941 (p 55)
9. Streit, Christian. "Wehrmacht, Einsatzgruppen, Soviet POWs and anti-Bolshevism in the emergence of the Final Solution," ”. Edited by: Cesarani. 111–112., The appraisal of Theo Schulte, who calls the slaughter "the 'forgotten holocaust'" of World War II, is entirely congruent: "It could be argued that the destruction of millions of Soviet POWs had partly shaped the subsequent escalation of overall annihilation policies. The measures taken to liquidate the captured soldiers had not only established certain techniques of extermination, but had created a value system which facilitated, clarified and formularised implementation of the 'Final Solution.' The radicalisation of policy both by and through the actions of the German Army thus produced an extension of categories for extermination, in what Hans Mommsen has called an 'almost geometrical progression' from the Bolshevik leadership down through the mass of Soviet POWs to the Jewish population. … The captured Soviet troops were subjected to systematic and exploitative actions which treated them according to ethnic and racist criteria." He notes that "the mistreatment of captured Red Army soldiers had been a central issue at the Nuremberg War Trials"-but not, I would add, subsequently
10. Schulte. 1989. The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia, 180182–183. Oxford: Berg.
11. Hirschfeld, Gerhard, ed. 1986. The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany London
12. Honig, Jan Willem, and Both, Norbert. 1996. Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime, 177–178. London: Penguin. See also Vahakn Dadrian's account of the military mobilization of Armenian males in 1915, the prime strategy by which the most "threatening" portion of the Armenian population was concentrated and culled before the wider genocide was implemented (see Ch 6). "Though [the] mobilization had many other objectives, it served a major purpose for the swift execution of the plan of genocide. By removing all able-bodied Armenian males from their cities, villages, hamlets, and by isolating them in conditions in which they virtually became trapped, the Armenian community was reduced to a condition of near-total helplessness, thus an easy prey for destruction. It was a masterful stroke as it attained with one blow the three objectives of the operation of trapping the victim population: a) dislocation through forcible removal; b) isolation; c) concentration for easy targeting."
13. Dadrian. 1995. The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 226Providence, RI: Berghahn Books.
14. Lamer, Christina. 1981. Enemies of Cod: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland, 3London: Hogarth Press. emphasis added. Steven Katz rejects the idea that the witch-hunts were a "gynocidal" attack on women primarily because the alleged targeted group was not assaulted on a remotely genocidal scale. "One … never arrives at a situation in which more than 1/10 of 1 percent, at a maximum-the actual rate in all probability never exceeding 1/20 to 1/30 of 1 percent at a maximum-of the female population was executed [for witchcraft] in any given decade. That is, even at its peak, 99.9-plus percent of women in Europe were safe from the annihilatory impact of the panic." He compares this to "the over 60 percent death rate for European Jewry as a whole" during the Holocaust, "with no compromises having been made for Jewish women and children. Medieval antifeminism, even in its most brutal form, the witch-hunt, simply did not produce, and was not intended to produce, the same level of murderous violence generated by the genocidal project spawned by Hilterian [sic] racial antisemitism." Or, one might add, by any of the great gendercides against men in human history. See the discussion and computations in Katz,, pp 502-505
15. Dadrian, Vahakn N., 1975. "A typology of genocide,". International Review of Modern Sociology, 5 Fall: 205–206. The major perpetrators of the atrocity are, of course, the Ethiopian conscriptors, not the Eritrean troops (a fifth of them women) who are doing the killing. This is the sort of paradox that regularly clouds an analysis of "gendercide" beyond the gender-selective killing of strict non- (or never-) combatants. A possibly useful concept is Dadrian's notion of "latent" genocide, in which the mass killing is the unintended consequence of policies pursued fundamentally for other reasons (e.g. many famines in history), or the result of the spread of infectious disease (as in the "genocide" of Latin America's native Indian population). Dadrian specifically mentions the perpetrator's desire "to destroy or emasculate the manpower resources of [targeted] groups" as a means of effecting a latent genocide. See
16. Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. 1997. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, 290New York: Vintage. emphasis added
17. Dallin, Alexander. 1981. German Rule in Russia, 1941-45: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd edn, 414–415. London: The Macmillan Press.
18. Bartov, Omer. 1985. The Eastern Front: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, 107Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wrote one Wehrmacht soldier in a letter home: "What would have happened to cultural Europe, had these sons of the steppe, poisoned and drunk with a destructive poison, these incited subhumans, invaded our beautiful Germany?" Quoted
19. Bartov. 1994. "Operation Barbarossa and the origins of the Final Solution," ”. In The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation, Edited by: Cesarani, David. 18London: Routledge.
20. Bruinessen, Martin van. 1994. "Genocide in Kurdistan?," ”. In Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, Edited by: Andreopoulos, George J., 156–157. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
21. Braeckman. "Carve-up in the Congo,". Le monde diplomatique, October 1999 Colette Braeckman writes of the eastern Congo that "there have been numerous reports of rape by men involved in the fighting, many of whom are HIV positive."
22. Allcock, John B., 1998. "Genocide," ”. In Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia: An Encyclopedia, Edited by: Allcock. 99–100. Denver, CO: ABC-CLIO.
23. Kuper. 1994. "Theoretical issues relating to genocide," ”. In Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, Edited by: Andreopoulous, George J., 32Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kuper,, p 32. Elsewhere Kuper has written: "I will assume that 'in part' denotes an appreciable part, while recognizing the imprecision of the phrase."
24. Boehm, Christopher. 1984. Blood Revenge: The Anthropology of Feuding in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies, 111–112. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
25. Danner, Mark. 1998. "The killing fields of Bosnia,". New York Review of Books, September 24: 69 Quoted in
26. Kiernan, Ben. "The Cambodian genocide-1975-1979," ”. Edited by: Totten and etal. 345, citing the associated research of
27. Boua, Chanthou. "Women in today's Cambodia,". New Left Review, 45–61.
28. Goldfeld, Anne E., 1991. "More horror in Cambodia,". The New York Times, June 4 "Cambodia is a land of widows, where women head about 60 percent of the households"
29. Pilger, John. 1989. "Playing a game of holocaust,". Manchester Guardian Weekly, November 12 "Up to 70 percent of adults are women in areas such as this, where the killing was unrelenting. Many of the widows will describe, obsessively, their husbands' violent deaths and the cries of their smallest children denied food; and how they were then forced to marry a man they did not know."
30. December 1999. "Young men of fighting age," ”. In Kosovo/Kosova As Seen, As Told, December, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe-Kosovo Verification Mission. Ch 15
31. Aglionby, John. 1999. "Herded, sifted and cut off,". The Guardian, September 10
32. Dillon, Paul, and Sallot, Jeff. 1999. "The chilling disappearance of East Timor's young men,". The Globe and Mail, September 16 See, e.g.
33. Struck, Doug, and Richburg, Keith B., 1999. "Refugees describe method to murderous rampage in E. Timor,". The Washington Post, September 14
34. Warren, Mary Anne. 1985. Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection, 22Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld. (emphasis added). The inclusive term "gendercide" could usefully be supplemented with a reworked conception of "gynocide"-one that moves away from Mary DaIy's eccentric original use of the term in her Gyn/Ecology-and "androcide" for the gender-selective extermination of males
35. Miller, Errol. 1991. Men At Risk, 124–125. Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House, Ltd. Miller adds: "There is every reason to believe that the tradition of tracing one's ancestry through the mother, matrilineal descent, must have emerged partly as a means of increasing the chances of a lineage surviving capture and the killing of all its males. … For by tracing one's lineage through its captured females allowed the conquered lineage to survive conquest if by some means in the future its offspring were able to separate themselves from or overthrow their conquerors" (p 125). The institutions of eunuchry and slavery are also examined in this chapter, "Patriarchy's problem with alien men," the strongest and most interesting in Men At Risk
36. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 1997. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, 130New York: Metropolitan Books. Ehrenreich's short work has many more insights into the gendering of war and communal conflict than I can do justice to here
37. Kuper, Leo. 1981. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, 11London: Penguin. The fall of Carthage in 146 BC is an ambiguous case, according to Chalk and Jonassohn. "We have narratives indicating that the Romans enslaved survivors of the siege, but none of the classical authors claim that the Romans killed survivors in cold blood or that the annihilation of the inhabitants of Carthage was one of Rome's motives for going to war." None the less, the authors agree that "In the ancient world, killing all the men was often a measure aimed at destroying the military potential of a rival. It seems highly unlikely that the Romans simply released the men who survived the siege of Carthage."
38. Chalk, Frank, and Jonassohn, Kurt. 1990. The History and Sociology of Genocide, 7376New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
39. 1996. Human Rights Watch, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath, 2New York: Human Rights Watch.
40. Cough, David. 2000. "Good men hard to find; risk of AIDS the price Rwandan women will pay,". Guardian (in Globe and Mail), February 16 "In some part of the [Ntongwe] district ['in central Rwanda, the scene of some of the worst excesses in 1994'], adult males make up a mere 20 per cent of the population."
41. Junger, Sebastian. "The forensics of war,". Vanity Fair, October 1999
42. 1997. Chronicle of A Genocide Foretold, Vol 3, Ottawa: National Film Board. Seth Sendashonga, ex-Minister of the Interior in the RPF government, speaking from exile in Kenya; quoted in, Pt 3, Video production:
43. 1991. "Black shirts in Sri Lanka,". Newsweek, March 25
44. Hochschild. King Leopold's Ghost 126130161–162. 233
45. Kraft, Jennifer. May 1999. “ Hochschild ”. In Current History May, reviewing
46. 1998. "Columbian [sic] militia massacres 11,". Associated Press dispatch, November 9 From a 1995 report on Colombia: Gloria Cuartas, Mayor of Apartado, "attends to many of the widows of an estimated 677 men … who have been killed so far this year. 'You have no idea my feeling of impotence when a widow shows up at my office begging for a casket to bury her husband. They have no money and I don't either,' she said. … The victims, most of them banana workers, die one by one or in massacres. … In this macho society, women are protected and only the men are murdered, leaving about a thousand widows in the region, the Roman Catholic diocese estimates."
47. Dermota, Ken. 1995. "Workers caught in clutches of fatal conflict,". Globe and Mail, September 21 This area of Colombia, the region of Urabâ in the northwest part of Antioquia province, is probably the most violent region in the most violent province in the most atrocity-ridden country on earth. I can think only of parts of northern Algeria that compare-an important counter-example, however, since the Algerian slaughter has in no way been "gendered" as strongly as in Colombia
48. Conquest, Robert. 1968. The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, 711–712. New York: The Macmillan Company. What is debatable, I believe, is whether Stalin's purges can be considered a gender-selective slaughter-and therefore a true "gendercide." The primary variable is political affiliation of an obvious kind-holding a party card in a party-state. Men composed the annihilated group overwhelmingly, perhaps almost exclusively, a fact that should always be part of the discussion; but there was a real sense in which gender was incidental, in a way that it was not for Serbs executing Kosovar males en masse, for example
49. Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold's Ghost, 232Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
50. Cribb, Robert. 1997. "The Indonesian massacres," ”. In Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, Edited by: Totten. 261New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc. Indonesian journalist Maskun Iskandar (reporting in 1969, after a further series of mass killings in the afflicted regions), quoted in
51. Rounaq Jahan. "Genocide in Bangladesh," ”. In Century of Genocide Edited by: Totten, Samuel. 298 R.J. Rummel writes: "By November [1971], the rebel guerrillas … had wrested from the army control over 25 percent of East Pakistan, a success that led the Pakistan army to seek out those especially likely to join the resistance-young boys. Sweeps were conducted of young men who were never seen again. Bodies of youths would be found in fields, floating down rivers, or near army camps. As can be imagined, this terrorized all young men and their families within reach of the army. Most between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five began to flee from one village to another and toward India. Many of those reluctant to leave their homes were forced to flee by mothers and sisters concerned for their safety."
52. Rummel. 1994. Death By Government, 329New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
53. Kishwar, Madhu. 1985. "Delhi: gangster rule," ”. In Punjab: The Fatal Miscalculation Edited by: Singh, Patwant, and Malik, Harji. 171–178. New Delhi (a leading light of the Indian women's movement)
54. Stackhouse, John. 1994. "India dithers as Sikhs seek justice,". Globe and Matt, November 5 Thanks to Hamish Telford for bringing this source to my attention. For a discussion of the "Widows' Colony" in Delhi and the women's activism it spawned
55. Bums, John F., 1996. "The Sikhs get justice long after a massacre,". The New York Times, September 16 (referring to the massacre victims as "Sikhs," "people," "family members," "murder cases," and "breadwinners," but not as "men"); also
56. Briggs, Robin. 1998. Witches & Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, New York: Penguin. gives a figure of 25 percent males among accused witches between the 14th and 17th centuries. However, in France males accounted for about half the total; in Iceland, 90 percent. For a good overview of the literature on witchcraft and gender, see
57. Katz, Steven T., 1994. "Witchcraft and misogynism," ”. In The Holocaust in Historical Context, VoI I: The Holocaust and Mass Death Before the Modem Age, Edited by: Katz. Vol. VoI I, 175–176. New York: Oxford University Press. Ch 9 (n 1)