Armenia’s leaders believed it was their special connection to the land that secured their 1994 victory in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War against Azerbaijan. They thought they could win another one too, in 2020, pushing for maximalist demands while failing to obtain a reliable ally in either Russia or the West. They substituted diplomacy and military strategy with dreams of romantic nationalism.

In the Eighties, as the Soviet empire entered its death spiral, a movement for the rights of the majoritarian Armenians in autonomous Nagorno-Karabakh within Soviet Azerbaijan was gaining momentum. The Karabakh movement believed ethnic Armenians had a right to live on their ancestral land after years of harassment and discrimination. But the Soviet Azerbaijanis saw it as separatism, and a crackdown followed.

Rapidly spreading nationalisms turned neighbour against neighbour. In Azerbaijan, Armenians were killed in the streets in a series of pogroms. Homes were looted and victims were raped, murdered and burnt alive by mobs. When the USSR collapsed, in 1992 the two newly established nations declared war.

The Armenians prevailed, securing control over the region and forcing nearly half a million Azerbaijanis from the seven occupied districts adjacent to Nagorno-Karabakh. It was the largest of several exoduses happening in both directions. And in 1994, after a ceasefire was agreed, the smaller, poorer, land-locked Armenia emerged victorious. Even though Armenia’s occupation of the seven districts was a violation of international law, all attempts at reconciliation failed. After years of mutual enmity, pogroms and atrocities on both sides, there was no trust left.

Levon Ter-Petrossian, the first President of independent Armenia and leader of the Karabakh movement, wanted to give the occupied territories back. But he was toppled in 1998 by hardline ministers who rejected the compromise. Nationalist ideas, brewing for decades, burst into the open and the new uncompromising rulers entered an alliance with the previously banned Armenian Revolutionary Federation. It said that the seven districts around Karabakh were historic Armenian lands; they had been liberated, not occupied.

 The Armenians’ “greatest error” was “to give in to a fatal hubris of thinking they could create a ‘Greater Armenia’ on territory emptied of the people who had lived there”, wrote the historian Ronald Grigor Suny. The irredentist ideology which was legitimised in the Nineties would be Armenia’s downfall.

Meanwhile, revisionism took over in both nations’ academia where the study of history was hijacked and “transformed into political ideology… to justify mass violence”. In Azerbaijan, “historians became soldiers of the head of state”. While their defeat in the war caused a wide-spread trauma among ordinary people, on the state level, it led to a policy of “systematic hatred towards Armenians”, according to a European Parliament resolution.

But if Baku’s defeat gave way to mass trauma and state-level hatred, Yerevan’s victory allowed for mass ignorance. Outside fringe nationalist groups, very few actively embraced the occupation. Many simply did not know their country was occupying lands whose pre-war population was majority Azerbaijani. A tiny minority of intellectuals on both sides, though, condemned their side’s atrocities and called for reconciliation. In response, Azerbaijan arrested the critics, and it continues to do so. In Armenia, peaceniks were simply ignored. Seen as hippie lunatics in a region where might makes right, they were dismissed by analysts convinced of their “pragmatic” interests and “realist” strategies.

But the irony is that self-proclaimed realists were promoting an irredentist fantasy. It is not just that there was never any moral justification for the occupation of the seven districts. There was never a chance Armenia would be allowed to get away with it. “Despite the diplomatic efforts of different administrations, the Armenian side never managed to get the international community to endorse its position,” the historian and diplomat Jirair Libaridian told me in 2020.

The political hardliners who had pushed Ter-Petrossian out soon realised there was no other choice but compromise. Serzh Sargsyan, a former Karabakh commander, was one of them. Once President in 2008, he engaged in serious negotiations and put forward a plan that would include an immediate return of five of the seven occupied districts. “I was ready to be labelled a traitor as long as I could solve the issue,” he told me in 2021.

The West and Russia were supportive of the plan, but Azerbaijan showed no interest. And before the deal was even put on the table, Sargsyan’s time was up. Mass opposition rallies paralysed the capital and forced him to resign. The leader of the protests, a little-known MP called Nikol Pashinyan, would win a landslide election. And he became the most popular leader in Armenia’s independent history — living in a modest flat and driving an old car, he appeared like a man of the people. His call for an anti-corruption crackdown appeared to herald a new era.

Internationally, he decided to do things differently, too. Appointing a failed cigar entrepreneur as his top foreign policy adviser, not only did he poke Russia left and right, but he endorsed the old Karabakh nationalism. Worse even, Pashinyan’s vision of the conflict was shaped by the nationalist propaganda of the old regime. He cited conspiracy theories promoted by his predecessor’s mouthpieces and led a rally under nationalist slogans in Karabakh itself. His cabinet sponsored construction in the occupied districts and threatened to take more of Azerbaijan’s lands.

There was little doubt as to what was coming next. While Azerbaijan was buying Bayraktar drones and holding unprecedented drills with the Turkish army, Armenia was oblivious of the sorry state of its own military. Moreover, Armenians believed that they would find support in the West, encouraged by such signs as the country of the year title bestowed upon them by The Economist. In the worst case, they hoped that Russia, as their formal ally, would forgive their trespasses and come to their rescue. But Armenia’s leadership was deluded.

In the war that followed, in the autumn of 2020, the Armenian army was all but annihilated. Azerbaijan managed to retake the seven occupied districts and around half of Nagorno-Karabakh itself, driving tens of thousands of its residents out. In just 44 days, up to 4,000 Armenians were killed. It is a percentage of population comparable to Ukraine’s losses in the ongoing war.

Unsurprisingly, Russia refused to interfere, and the West showed even less interest. In the end, Putin drafted a ceasefire agreement and dispatched 2,000 of his troops to serve as peacekeepers in what was left of Armenian-held Karabakh. And, three years later, with Russia distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan launched a military operation against the remainder of Nagorno-Karabakh. As the Armenian population fled, Russian peacekeepers stood by and so did the Armenian leadership.

More from this author

Eduard Limonov and the death of a bohemian contrarian

By Grigor Atanesian

A century of tragedies culminated in this. “With the carelessness of inexperienced and ignorant men we did not know what forces Turkey had mustered on our frontiers,” Armenia’s first Prime Minister Kajaznuni wrote in 1923 of the fall of the first independent republic, and his verdict largely stands true today. The Armenian elites, Kajaznuni complained a century ago, failed to see that their cause “was an incidental and trivial phase for the Russians, so trivial that, if necessary, they would trample on our corpses without a moment’s hesitation”.

In April 2023, Pashinyan made a similar confession. He told the Parliament he was “guilty of not surrendering lands”, a decision that “resulted in thousands of victims”. After presiding over a defeat, he was disabused of nationalist notions and said he would pursue “a peace agenda”.

But a year after the fall of Karabakh, the peace between the two neighbours still has not materialised. With the tables now fully turned, Azerbaijan has little incentive to compromise. It is both stronger militarily and more important globally, with its oil reserves and natural gas deals with both Russia and the EU, as well as close cooperation with Israel.

In Turkey, Azerbaijan has a powerful and steadfast ally, something that Armenia lacks altogether. Whatever hopes it put in Russia, the fall of Karabakh buried them for good. But its dramatic turn to the West is a bold and dangerous gamble: overly dependent on Russian money, tourists, and natural gas, Armenia is playing a risky game.

Meanwhile, nationalist dogmas still dominate the conversation. For many, the role that the occupation and mistaken policies played in Armenia’s troubles are still taboo. Instead, the government blames everything on Russia, hoping to find a sympathetic audience in the West. Some point to the Biden Administration’s broken promise to prevent the expulsion of Armenians from Karabakh, while for others the European Union is to blame for cosying up to Baku and its gas exports. Finally, many are bitter with Israel, as it became a leading arms supplier to Azerbaijan in recent years. But very few mention Armenia’s hubris.

Over the past 30 years, various options safeguarding Armenian presence in Karabakh were on the table, but they were never good enough. “Freedom or death — we did not see a different option. So we chose death,” wrote the journalist Tatul Hakobyan. And, for small nations tempted by the phantoms of a glorious past, that should sound a warning.

None of these films takes genocide as their primary subject per se. Nor indeed have they been recognised as “genocide” films in the classic mould of Schindler’s List and The Killing Fields. In fact, their chief source of dramatic tension, and sense of artistic danger, comes from the decision to throw their dramatic weight behind the perpetrators and facilitators of mass murder rather than, as is more traditional, its victims and their champions. This has elicited some nervous gulps from critics. “Although its moral ambition is to honor the tribulations of an Indigenous people, it keeps getting pulled back into the orbit — emotional, social, and eventually legal— of white men,” wrote The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. “If [Oppenheimer] is three hours, I would like to add some more minutes about what happened to the Japanese people,” said director Spike Lee of Nolan’s film, while critic Manohla Darghis said The Zone of Interest “is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone”.

Yet the convergence of all three films at the Oscars seems proof of something more than just the dictum “Hollywood loves a bad guy”. Historically, the subject has brought out both the best and the worst in Hollywood. From Lawrence of Arabia to Schindler’s List, with such lesser examples as Hotel Rwanda and The Promise, the genre is a bastion of “white saviourism”, in which an outsider comes to sympathise with the victimised group and enacts the audience’s own powers of empathy, which are rewarded as solution enough. We weep with Schindler because he did not do enough, but that is enough for us. “American movies, English books —remember how they all end?” asks Gamini, a citizen of Sri Lanka, in Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost. “The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it… That’s enough reality for the West… Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit.”

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The excoriating comedy of Auschwitz

By Boyd Tonkin

If sanctimony is the genre’s besetting sin, complacency is its most likely outcome. If the backlash over Green Book’s Oscar win in 2018 marked the white-saviour trope for the scrap-heap, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon administers last rites. After making the film, Scorsese and DiCaprio did indeed “hit the circuit” to reveal the changes wrought unto David Grann’s book, which focused largely on the efforts of one of the newly formed FBI’s most upstanding agents, Tom White, to solve the murders of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, originally to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio. “After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys,” said Scorsese. Instead, together with DiCaprio and screenwriter Eric Roth, he took the story away from the FBI agent, and let the focus fall on the marriage of Ernest Burkhart, one of the co-conspirators, and the Osage woman, Molly Kyle, whose property rights Burkhart and his uncle were trying to steal.

The violence is entirely devoid of the giddy glamour that marked Scorsese’s earlier work, such as Goodfellas. The murders are filmed with Weegee flatness, mostly in long-shot, the bodies slumping to the ground like the proverbial sack of potatoes. But perhaps most remarkable of all is the ending. After the convictions of Ernest, Hale and their co-conspirators, we cut to a Fifties-style radio revue, in which a troupe of voice actors and foley artists update the listeners back home on what happened next, including Scorsese himself, who steps up to the microphone to read Molly’s sad obituary, which omitted all mention of the Osage murders. As Scorsese told one interviewer. “Yes, I am part of the system. Yes, I am European American. And yes, I am culpable.” In other words: if audience empathy is not enough, then maybe transparency on the part of the filmmaker will do — alongside a weary acknowledgement of the limited efficacy of filmed entertainment.

A similar ambivalence marks Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The film is written in the first-person, a device generally used by unreliable narrators gently veering toward crack-up. And the film plays, in its first half, as a high-end biopic, in which we witness the rise of a great man or woman who advances the cause of human progress in some way. But at the climax, Oppenheimer’s victory falls away from him, and the film executes a very Nolan-like pivot into a Kafkaesque court-room drama, in which all of Oppenheimer’s nuanced expressions of moral ambivalence about nuclear weaponry serve only to damn him. The movie sets a trap for its audience, just as Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), the story’s shadowy Quilty figure, sets a trap for Oppenheimer — engaging our sympathies so that we urge on Oppenheimer in the race against the Nazis, before pulling the rug out from under us. At the film’s central point, Oppenheimer’s triumph literally turns to nuclear ash in his hands: as he gives a jingoistic speech to his fellow physicists, the sound drops away, and in eerie silence, he imagines his audience ravaged by nuclear fire. Blink and you’ll miss it but there in the credits, listed as a “burn victim”, is Nolan’s own 18-year-old daughter, Flora, who happened to be visiting the set. “The point is that if you create the ultimate destructive power, it will also destroy those who are near and dear to you,” Nolan said. “This was my way of expressing that in what, to me, were the strongest possible terms.”

The use of sound to summon unimaginable horrors off-screen is the central device, too, of The Zone of Interest. Set in the shadow of Auschwitz, where the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and their children go about their daily lives, the film is a sustained exercise in moral disquiet void of catharsis. What we see is the Hösses going about their daily lives — the children wishing father “auf Wiedersehen” as he departs for work, Hedwig receiving guests for tea, tending to the garden, swimming in the pool — as, over the garden wall, we hear the screams of prisoners, gunshots, and the infernal rumble of the crematoria, an “ambient genocide”, in the filmmaker’s words. Like Oppenheimer, the film uses the disjunction between sound and image to convey the intense dissociation practiced by the Hösses to divorce the mundanity of their lives from the horror that surrounds them. But where they experience that dissociation as numbing, we experience it as nightmarish.

Only at the end, as Höss exits a conference in which the fate of the Hungarian Jews is decided, and finds himself convulsively retching in the stairwell, do his actions seem to catch up with him, or in any way correspond to the horror we feel. Glazer has said the scene was inspired by a similar scene at the end of Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, in which the Indonesian butcher Anwar Congo, after merrily re-enacting his methods of murder for the cameras, is bent double with dry heaves upon trying to answer the question of why he killed his victims. No matter how dissociated from his own guilt he is, his body cannot lie. All three films — The Zone of Interest, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon — are to varying degrees studies of dissociative guilt: men who have no idea how guilty they are, who find out only after the fact that they are damned. In Gitta Sereny’s biography of Albert Speer, the Dutch Protestant theologian W.A. Visser ‘t Hooft is quoted saying of the Holocaust that “people could find no place in their consciousness for such an unimaginable horror and that they did not have the imagination, together with the courage, to face it. It is possible to live in a twilight between knowing and not knowing.”

That twilight between knowing and unknowing is where all three films live, eat, sleep and breathe. You might be tempted to say that all three films deal with “white guilt”, and yet their audience ambit feels wider than that. It’s probably safe to say that, among the citizens of the industrialised West — certainly those with the freedom and inclination to watch Oscar nominees about mass murder — the great majority of us are more likely to find ourselves bystanders to genocidal or genocidal-adjacent policies than we are to find ourselves the victim of them. “It is easy to sanctify policies or identities by the deaths of the victims,” writes Timothy Snyder in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. “It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander.”

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By David Samuels

That is the unnerving thrust of all three films, but Glazer’s in particular. By the end of The Zone of Interest, the Höss’s garden wall is more than just a wall. It symbolises the bureaucratic structures that allowed the Nazis to see themselves as merely “getting on with the job”; or the gas chambers themselves, which Himmler intended to shield German soldiers from the damaging psychological effects of point-blank executions; or the “compartmentalisation” that allowed Oppenheimer to divorce the “technical success” of Trinity from its ghastly human effects. Is it any wonder Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest feel more like horror movies than war movies? The absence of victims from both films is not some act of artistic negligence or authorial oversight, but a deliberate absence that haunts both dramas, ionically charging what we do see: technocrats haunted by their own eerie success, numbed by a sense of mission, dogged by miasmic guilt.

Every development in warfare since the Trinity Test — the atomic bomb, the hydrogen bomb, ICBMs, proxy wars, drone technology, cyber-weaponry — has served to further shield civilian populations from the killing done in their name and the sacrifices that make countries so reluctant to enter into wars in the first place. “You cannot surrender to a Reaper,” points out Durham University professor John Williams. “Ambient genocide” comes very close to describing if not the modern state of war, then the state to which it secretly aspires. Most citizens of the US have little idea they are currently pursuing anywhere between five and 15 wars or shadow wars, depending on your definition. All of these killing zones are off-camera; all its kills are “clean”. If the government you have empowered with your vote enacts a policy which kills a group to which you bear no ill will, and of which you may not even have even heard, what exactly is the extent of your moral culpability?

Perhaps that is the wrong question — not “How guilty should you feel?” but “What does guilt, at that distance, even feel like?” Nothing like the war guilt of old, perhaps, but something far more fleeting, diffuse, pixellated. Something like the feeling you get from this year’s Oscar nominees.

The word “plausible” does heavy lifting in the recent ruling from the International Court of Justice regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza, and the way that ruling has been interpreted. The Court ruled that there is a plausible case that South Africa has rights under the Genocide Convention to seek a determination whether Israel had violated the Convention by committing genocide. What does this tortured legalese mean? Essentially that South Africa, who brought the case, plausibly has a right to raise the question of genocide before the Court, and present further evidence. Whether South Africa does in fact have such a right is yet to be fully determined.

The Court expressly stated that at this stage “it was not required to ascertain whether any violations of Israel’s obligations under the Genocide Convention have occurred”. You could be forgiven for thinking, however, that the Court has found that Israel has plausibly committed genocide. That is because those who welcomed the judgment have spun it that way.

Shortly after the ruling, South Africa’s Foreign Minister said: “We think [the ICJ finding] makes it clear that it is plausible that genocide is taking place against the Palestinian people in Gaza. This necessarily imposes an obligation on all states to cease funding and facilitating Israel’s military actions.” Similarly, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen claimed that the ICJ ruled that Israel faces “plausible” allegations that it is committing the crime of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The court made it expressly clear that all it is required to do at this stage is ascertain whether South Africa’s allegations, if true, fit the definition of genocide in the Convention. The issue of “plausibility” arises because the court has in recent times expanded its power to issue provisional orders preserving the respective claimed “rights” of the parties pending the outcome of the actual trial “if the rights asserted by the party requesting such measures are at least plausible”.

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By Yehudah Mirsky

What that means in English is that the Court can intervene if something seems plausible to it. Since lawyers are trained to sound plausible when asserting whatever nonsense their clients would like to put forward, the standard on which this court purports to act is, to put it neutrally, rather low. It is, as this case demonstrates, an invitation to lawfare by litigious busybodies for whom a cheap propaganda victory is achieved by meeting the low bar of “plausibility”. Say “plausible” often enough and it sounds a bit like “credible”.

In its consideration of plausibility, the court in this case began by reminding itself that the crime of genocide under the Genocide Convention (which was the only basis of the court’s authority) requires that the actions in question be committed with the intention “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such”. War carried out in self-defence, or even for bad reasons, no matter how destructive and lethal, is not to be characterised as genocidal unless that is the intention of the perpetrator. All war would be genocidal if it only requires that the casualties and destruction be great, and the crime of “genocide” would cease to have any meaning.

In this case, an assertion, even by a lawyer, that Israel is carrying out a genocide with the intention of eliminating all the population of Gaza, would seem somewhat implausible given common sense and the uncontested reality of the situation. Despite several wars and clashes, the population of Gaza increased from 394,000 in 1967, when Israel captured the area in the Six Day War, to well over 2 million in 2023. With regard to the current war alone, Israel has the military and technical means to flatten Gaza entirely in one day and kill all its inhabitants. If genocide were its intention, why bother spending billions of dollars on a war involving a ground invasion which has tanked its economy, and resulted in thousands of its own casualties both killed and injured?

Astonishingly, in reaching its conclusion that South Africa’s allegations were “plausibly” capable of falling with the Genocide Convention, the Court deliberately avoided considering the issue of Israel’s intention at all.

Instead, the Court first referred to the death toll in the conflict, and the resulting dreadful conditions of life for the residents, as described by various UN functionaries. On the figures, it cited reports by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which claimed that, at the time of South Africa’s application, 27,500 persons out of a population of more than 2 million had been killed in Gaza since 7 October, and many more injured. OCHA gets its figures exclusively from the Gazan Ministry of Health; OCHA notes that “It is nearly impossible at the moment to provide any UN verification on a day-to-day basis.” It is fair to consider the Gazan Health Ministry as being an emanation of Hamas, which has been the sole authority in Gaza since its seizure of power almost 20 years ago, eliminating its opponents. Perhaps the court thought it would not be a good look to cite Hamas itself as the source of the evidence, even when considering so low a bar as “plausibility”.

But even if we accept these figures as plausible, let’s also observe that this figure conflates militant and civilian deaths, as well as deaths caused by missiles and rockets fired by Hamas but falling short within Gaza itself. This is an obvious point, and really only bears repeating because one judge claimed in his judgment that “more than 25,000 civilians have reportedly lost their lives as a result of Israel’s military campaign”.

It’s not clear at all how one gets from stating casualty figures such as these, and the describing the awful conditions of war, to a finding that South Africa plausibly has rights to complain about under the Genocide Convention without some consideration of intentionality, which the court deliberately eschewed. Some reports claim that, for example, during the campaign to clear Isis from the city of Mosul in Iraq in 2017, which involved US and UK air support, 40,000 civilians were killed. All the rest fled. A plausible case of genocide?

In place of dealing with the essential issue of Israel’s intentions, the court cited, and then riffed off on, a statement by the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) which said that the crisis in Gaza is “compounded by dehumanising language”. In this regard, the court singled out three examples of “dehumanising language” by Israeli officials: Yoav Gallant, the Defence Minister, the only one of the three who is a member of the War Cabinet, and thus responsible for the conduct and objectives of the war; President Herzog, a noted lifelong liberal, and the then Minister of Energy, Israel Katz.

South Africa had placed great emphasis in its written and oral submissions on what Mr Gallant is alleged to have said to soldiers on 9 October (two days after the massacre), of which the court duly “took note”:

South Africa’s written representations quoted short extracts from various video clips of Gallant and claimed that he had made the following statements, which were dramatically read out at the oral hearing:

1. “I have released all restraints”.
2. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
3. “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day it will take a week”

The problem is that all three quotations are incomplete: the South African legal submissions omitted the qualifying phrases or words which show what Mr Gallant was really talking about. Below I have inserted numbers in the court’s collected passage to indicate the three separate South African quotations above, and I have rendered the South African omissions in bold:

1. “I have released all restraints… We are activating everything. We are taking off the gloves. We will kill anyone who fights against us.”
2. “You saw what we are fighting against. We are fighting human animals. This is the Isis of Gaza. This is what we are fighting against…”
3. “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything. If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week, it will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”

As Yair Rosenberg pointed out in The Atlantic, where you can check all these references for yourself, by removing these references to “the Isis of Gaza”, “those who fight against us” and ‘There will be no Hamas’, South Africa turned a specific threat against Hamas into a general unspecific threat, enabling it to argue that Gallant was threatening genocide and using dehumanising language against Palestinians in Gaza generally. Moreover, Rosenberg adds, there are plenty of examples of Gallant making clear what his intentions were around that time:

“On October 8, Gallant declared, “Hamas has become the ISIS of Gaza. In this war, we are fighting against a murderous terrorist organization that harms the elderly, women, and babies.” On October 12, the defence minister told NATO, “The IDF will destroy Hamas.” On October 27, while urging Gazan civilians in the north to evacuate to the south, Gallant said, “We are not fighting the Palestinian multitude and the Palestinian people in Gaza.” The list goes on. The only way to misunderstand Gallant’s intentions is to ignore pretty much everything he has said on this subject.”

The second Israeli politician quoted was Israel Katz, then Minister of Energy and a prolific tweeter. (He would do well to remember Lord Cameron’s aphorism, that “too many tweets make a tw*t”.) He was replying on X to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the United States House of Representatives, who takes a keen interest in Israel. He tweeted: “We will fight the terrorist organization Hamas and destroy it. All the civilian population in [G]aza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”

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By Aris Roussinos

South Africa left out the sentence in bold which clearly enunciates Katz’s stance. In fact, it’s the only part of his tweet that makes any sense. The rest is baffling, not genocidal; I assume English is not his first language. How can anyone who has “left the world” receive water and batteries?

The only other Israeli politician whose utterances were referred to by the court was an astounding choice in itself: Israel’s President Isaac Herzog. Israel’s presidency is ceremonial; Herzog is not part of its War Cabinet, and he does not determine Israeli war policy. In the course of a lengthy live press conference held by the President on 12 October 2023 he said this (with the words in bold omitted from South Africa’s submissions):

“First of all we have to understand there is a state, there is a state, in a way that has built a machine of evil right at our doorstep. It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware not involved, it is absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat, murdering their family members who were in Fatah… Israel evacuated Gaza. I was a member of the cabinet… We are working, operating militarily according to rules of international law period. Unequivocally. But we are at war…”

Nineteen minutes of the press conference can be seen in the video embedded in this article cited. In the course of it, he specifically denies that innocent civilians are legitimate targets and repeatedly states Israel’s commitment to acting in accordance with international law. His comments on civilians are an attempt to explain why innocent civilians are inevitably going to be harmed when fighting terrorists embedded amongst civilians. It is difficult to think how any of that could fairly be characterised as “dehumanising language”, let alone as evidence of an intention to commit genocide whilst simultaneously operating “according to the rules of international law”.

By now you will have got the picture: every quotation emanating from South Africa’s representatives which was relied on by the Court as “dehumanising language” omitted key words and context that rendered the meaning of the quotation different from, if not the exact opposite of, what South Africa had asserted.

There is a further strange feature of all this. Although South Africa omitted the qualifying, emboldened words in all of these quotations, somebody subsequently inserted some of the missing words which I have highlighted into the court’s own citation, thus rendering its conclusions completely absurd. Why is it evidence of genocidal intent, or of use of “dehumanising language” for Mr Gallant to say that Hamas are human animals, or that there will be no Hamas in the future of Gaza, or that Israel will kill those who fight against it in the war?

Rosenberg suggests one possibility (or should I say, plausibility), namely, that the judgment was originally based on the misleading South African quotes but that someone in the course of preparation later noticed some of the errors and inserted some of the missing words without drawing it to the attention of the judges, who did not change their opinions even though the quotes as eventually printed contradict their conclusions.

Apart from this highly unsatisfactory account of what Israeli politicians actually said, the ICJ took note of a statement by 37 Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and officials or representatives of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in which they “voiced alarm over ‘discernibly genocidal and dehumanising rhetoric coming from senior Israeli government officials’”. It is not at all clear from the list of “experts” what expertise they possess in relation to issues of genocide, or why their opinions should be taken into account rather than those of experts less biased in relation to Israel’s plight.

It certainly would have rendered its decision to rely on these “experts” less convincing if the court had drawn attention to another passage in the same press release from these 37 “experts” where they assert that Israel has no right to wage war in self-defence after the attacks of 7 October because “Israel remains the occupying power in the occupied Palestinian territory, which also includes the Gaza Strip, and therefore cannot wage a war against the population under its belligerent occupation”. Israel completely withdrew from Gaza almost 20 years ago.

Perhaps conscious of this flawed basis of its finding of “plausibility”, the court did not issue the main order which South Africa had requested, namely: “The State of Israel shall immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza.” One can only presume that by this formulation South Africa intended to leave Hamas free to continue its operations inside Israel unopposed.

In fact, of the six orders the ICJ in fact issued, the first three were rightly described by the dissenting judge (Judge Sebutinde of Uganda) as effectively just mirroring the obligations on Israel imposed by the Genocide Convention itself, and thus unnecessary, namely:

• Israel was ordered, in accordance with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, to take all measures within its powers to prevent all acts within the scope of the Convention,
• to ensure that its military does not commit such acts, and
• to take measures to prevent and punish incitement to commit genocide of the Palestinian people.

The fourth order — to take measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip — was unnecessary as Israel had already informed the court of the arrangements being made in this connection, and the fifth order — to prevent the destruction of evidence — was plainly unjustified. As Judge Sebutinde pointed out, there was no evidence to suggest that Israel was engaged in destroying evidence. She also derided the absurdity of requiring one party to a conflict (Israel) unilaterally to ensure evidence was not destroyed whilst leaving the other (Hamas) “free to carry on unabated”. The court also ordered Israel to report back on its compliance with these orders within a month, with South Africa given an opportunity to respond. The lawfare continues.

Judge Sebutinde also made this interesting observation: “It was brought to the attention of the Court that South Africa, and in particular certain organs of government, have enjoyed and continue to enjoy a cordial relationship with the leadership of Hamas. If that is the case, then one would encourage South Africa as a party to these proceedings and to the Genocide Convention, to use whatever influence they might wield, to try and persuade Hamas to immediately and unconditionally release the remaining hostages, as a goodwill gesture. I have no doubt that such a gesture of goodwill would go a very long way in defusing the current conflict in Gaza.” That the court chose not to order South Africa to do so, is telling, particularly since the court had specifically recorded that it had the power to issue orders other than those requested by the parties. If there is one thing which would bring hostilities to an end it is the release of the hostages.

As the novelist Howard Jacobson has said regarding Israel and its opponents, the words “genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, settler-colonialism… simply flutter like so many pennants at a medieval joust. Denoting, in the fading light, which side you’re on, no more”. By issuing even its very limited order based on a foundation as flimsy as this one, the ICJ has achieved nothing more than showing which side it’s chosen. That is at least plausible, isn’t it?

In recent years, however, the people of Oberammergau have significantly reworked the play; Jesus and the Apostles are now clearly Jewish themselves, the Judaism of Jesus’s time is presented with nuance and understanding, and crucially, Roman imperial power is depicted as pervasively as it was. Yet though Oberammergau has changed, the Passion Play endures — most recently on stage last week at the International Court of Justice, northwest of Bavaria, in the Hague. There, South Africa initiated proceedings against the State of Israel, alleging that it is actively committing genocide in its war in Gaza.

The texts being invoked are no longer the Gospels but treatises of international law; the figure in the dock is not the traditional Jew living by centuries-old laws, but a sovereign, in many ways, secular state, with considerable military and political power. Yet again, the Jews are charged with being the criminal outliers of global society; whether they are, in a devilishly complicated situation, acting wisely or unwisely, proportionally or disproportionately, is beside the point. Their guilt is total and collective.

The magisterial historian Gershom Scholem remarked that one of Zionism’s consequences is that the Jews will no longer have to play the symbol in other people’s myths. Great a scholar as he was, he was wrong.

That Israel’s allegedly genocidal war is a response to a religious terror movement’s gleeful, forthrightly genocidal marauding was largely unmentioned by Israel’s accusers at the Hague. That the terrorists retreated, hostages in hand, to a painstakingly prepared and boobytrapped subterranean city below mosques, hospitals and schools, mentioned even less. Amid these gaping omissions, one can’t but wearily conclude that Israel was bound to be accused of genocide, no matter what it did following October 7, short of bowing its head in surrender.

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Human rights died in Gaza

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Hypocrisy is at work here, of course, but that is almost trivially beside the point. Genocide is more than a justifiably hideous characterisation: as a legal category, as rhetoric and policy framing, it is a doomsday weapon of epic proportions. It is, in its heightening ignominy to the nth degree, almost uniquely totalising.

Under the terms of the Genocide Convention, passed by the United Nations in 1948, states can be called upon “to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide”. In other words, designating something as genocide brings with it a duty to act — and it is the fear of that duty that paradoxically encourages responsible states to desist from using the term and thus draw on its moral and mobilising force.  That is why the US took 40 years to ratify the Genocide Convention and has been so hesitant to invoke it long after it did. When I served in the US State Department we deployed an ensemble of verbal acrobatics — “acts tantamount to genocide”, “acts constituting genocide”, “acts of a genocidal nature” — rather than plain old “genocide”, since we knew what it entailed.

None of this is to say that Israel is immune to criticism. So much of what makes this war so very miserable is its happening on the watch of the worst government in Israel’s history. Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners, each for their own reasons, spent most of 2023 trying to replace the country’s flawed but vibrant democracy with an ultra-Right, mercenary dictatorship. They, like Hamas, badly misjudged the ranks of Israel’s civil society, who mounted massive efforts to preserve judicial independence and the rule of law, and then, come October 7, pivoted to military service, and to offering as much as they could of the social services that their hollowed-out state was unable to provide.

Netanyahu deliberately kept Hamas in power, on a low flame, rather than deal with the Palestinian Authority, whose own fecklessness made his life easier. And for years, many Israelis, myself included, went along with Netanyahu here, at least as regards not militarily confronting Hamas, because we knew that doing so would necessarily entail the nightmarish urban warfare and civilian suffering unfolding now. This was a trade-off, and one that ended very badly. But my very mentioning of the term “trade-off” reminds us that we live in a complicated world, one in which moral clarity is a hard, unending challenge, with myriad decision points along the way.

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Fortunately, we have a branch of international law to help guide us in wartime: International Humanitarian Law, including the Laws of Armed Conflict. Here, Israel has laid out its understandings of that body of law as it pertains to this conflict, and its interpretations. Those interpretations are of course open to criticism, particularly around the issue of “proportionality”, as any warfighting might be. But that requires attending to the actual facts on the ground; and that is precisely what South Africa’s presentation last week at the Hague deliberately did not do.

As Itamar Mann, a well-respected Israeli scholar, himself strongly critical of the present war, has carefully pointed out, precisely because South Africa itself is not a party to the conflict, it was perfectly positioned to lay out a more complex picture of the facts than it did. By acknowledging, for instance, Hamas’s deliberate shelling of Israeli civilians since October 7, and subsequent warfighting from its tunnels, it could have presented a much stronger case.

South Africa, of course, had reasons of its own for presenting the case as it did. It is, after all, attempting to position itself as a leader of the blocs of countries increasingly challenging the already-tottering US-led world order. But even so, pressing a case of genocide still requires proving two elements of the crime: genocidal intent and genocidal actions.

South Africa was able to present evidence of genocidal-sounding intent from any number of political actors in the Netanyahu government. None of them, though, have direct decision-making authority over the conduct of the war, leading to open hostility between some of them (Itamar Ben-Gvir above all) with the IDF high command. That direct authority is reserved not just to the military professionals, but to the war cabinet, convened by Netanyahu to insulate him from his own coalition partners, and in which the political opposition to Netanyahu is well-represented; given Israeli public fury at Netanyahu, he would no longer be in power if they weren’t in the room. Moreover, if genocide were Israel’s aim, issuing warnings before bombings, creating humanitarian corridors (however limited), and allowing in food and other necessities would be a pretty poor way of going about it.

And if this is genocide, its meaning has been far removed from its usage following the Second World War, when the term, along with “human rights”, entered the global lexicon. The two designations are far from identical, and in some respects push in different directions. But both resulted from well-meaning efforts to wrest from the teeth of unimaginable horror some new, bedrock principles on which there could hopefully rise a better world.

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People from a range of countries, religions and cultures worked to establish these new ideas, Jews and Zionists among them. For Jews, human rights’ grant of individual rights separate from citizenship was a welcome solution to the trauma of statelessness that doomed so many in the years before the war; “genocide”, meanwhile, reflected the understandings that groups, national and ethnic groups, have a personality all their own.

The crucial figure here was the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and is widely regarded as the Godfather of the Genocide Convention. Well before the Second World War, he had been thinking and working, along with a number of other jurists, on a central question vexing modern nation-states: the rights of national minorities.

He recognised that national groups, like individuals, exist prior to the state — and sought to reconcile their group-belonging with the individualised nature of citizenship. In 1919, this idea found hopeful expression in the national minority treaty system of the nascent League of Nations, under which member states pledged to honour the collective rights of national minorities within their borders.

We know how well that all worked out. The point, though, is that while the League was a disastrous political and moral failure, it was a legal failure too — and it was those treaties for minority protection that failed, for Jews above all.

After this collapse, Jewish jurists sought alternatives — the framework of human rights, the nation-state of Israel — and sometimes both at once, as James Loeffler’s magnificent scholarship has shown. Lemkin (though himself a Zionist in his early years, as Loeffler has shown), took a different tack. To him, the idea of human rights was amorphous and unenforceable. As for Zionism, while it had indeed contributed to his own thinking on minorities’ group rights, he chose to downplay its role — largely to avoid genocide’s politicisation in a solely Jewish context.

For Lemkin, if Human Rights was a way of granting individuals rights prior to the state and even if they had no citizenship at all, the Genocide Convention was a way of preserving collective groups from the modern state’s uniquely centralised, industrialised and murderous power. Implicit in the Genocide Convention is the notion that the extermination of the Jews was paradigmatic but sui generis. The Holocaust, in other words, was not to be seen as utterly and unreservedly unique, not least because then we would be left with nothing to learn from it. Vicious regimes have savaged innocent groups of people throughout history. Rather, what is so striking about the Holocaust is the way nearly every form of degradation and slaughter known to history, compounded by such modern creatures as industrialised mass murder and racial ideology, made for an apotheosis of physical cruelty and cultural extermination.

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The Holocaust was thus the model, the catalogue, of all that hatred of groups could bring and all that international law was meant to prevent. Despite his deeply held differences with Jewish architects of human rights such as Hersh Lauterpacht (who was responsible for the idea of “crimes against humanity” at the Nuremberg Trials) and Jacob Robinson (a key drafter of the UN’s Refugee Convention), he shared their fundamental conviction that Jewish suffering yielded powerful new lessons for the world.

Which brings us back to last week’s activities in the Hague. Israel, too, emerged in 1948 in the aftermath of monumental genocide, and the circumstances of its birth are joined to the concept of genocide at the root. If it practises genocide, one might conclude that it therefore forfeits its “right to exist”. Indeed, Israel appears to be the only country regularly talked of in terms of having, or not having, “a right to exist”.

This is a marked shift from Lemkin’s vision, which hoped that extending the idea of personhood from individuals to groups would help those groups survive. The “right to exist” euphemism, by contrast, inverts and weaponises the language of individual rights to facilitate the kind of mass murder we saw on October 7. It contorts the immense, pained complexity of the Jewish State, the cruelties and injustices attending its birth, as well as those it has itself committed, into a vicious contest, in which one side is always on the defensive, just an argumentative slip away from offering itself up for destruction.

What’s worse, the always conditional nature of Israel’s existence in so many precincts is exactly what Netanyahu and his ultranationalist partners count on to keep them from coming to terms with Palestinian national identity. Pile-ons like those we have seen these last months in the end disserve the Palestinians and their genuine needs, and serve the ends of the most malignant actors involved, Hamas not least among them.

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Jihadism, the stated ideology of Hamas, doesn’t accept the legitimate personhood of national groups and is in both theory and practice genocidal to the core. Its accusing Israel of genocide, in a fact-free way that undercuts the legitimacy of the idea of genocide as a whole, works to erode the rules-based international legal order that Hamas rejects to begin with. That international legal order and its aspirations to universalism is far from perfect, to say the least. Yet what might take its place? If another universalism, then of what? Not all universalisms are benign — and as universalisms go, Jihadism is singularly unforgiving.

Several nephews of mine serve in the Israeli Army and have been in the thick of fighting in Gaza. I asked one of them, a reservist in a commando unit and a bohemian neuroscientist in civilian life, what he thought of last week’s proceedings at the Hague. He didn’t get defensive, but told me that he and some comrades had been talking about it. He calmly asked: “What is the value of doing this now? I’m not doing genocide. Are others? I didn’t see it. Is the state? I don’t think so. But what’s going on there? What exactly do they want to get out of this?”

The answer, I’d venture, is much — and also nothing at all.

Much — in that some of what motivated the proceedings has to be the result of genuine concern for Palestinian suffering. But so much of it seems to be foisting onto Israel blame for all that colonialism wrought, and all that post-colonialism failed to do; beating up on America via its Israeli client; keeping alive Soviet-style Third Worldism for the sake of Western progressives; blaming the failures of the Gods — of ideologies, of utopian legalism — on the all-too-human Jews; retreating from a confrontation with Jihadism by hoping that one day Israel will simply go away.

And nothing at all — in that there is no attempt in these proceedings to ease the very real suffering of Palestinians on the ground from all that Hamas has brought upon them on its own, and by bringing down upon them the full force of Israel; and no attempt to convey to moderate Israelis that there actually is an international community trying to use international law to end conflicts rather than carry them on by other means.

Few doubt that our world needs International Humanitarian Law now more than ever. But that law needs to be credible — or it will be worse than nothing at all.

Since the Russian invasion began, Poland has been one of Ukraine’s most assertive military, financial and diplomatic supporters. The Polish people have also welcomed fleeing Ukrainians into their homes with open arms. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that the two countries had always been the closest of allies.

But Ukraine couldn’t always count on Poland. For much of their history, the two nations have harboured deep resentment against each other. And Ukraine has, at times, seen Poland as just as much of an antagonist as Russia. Centuries of mistrust between the two, starting with a Ukrainian Cossack rebellion against Polish authority back in the 17th century, culminated in Poland’s forced deportation of 150,000 Ukrainians and related ethnic minorities from its from Poland’s southeastern borderlands in 1947 — an act that the post-Cold War Polish government has formally condemned.

And for their part, the Poles are yet to forgive the Ukrainians for the grisly Volhynia massacres of 1943-1945, when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a far-Right paramilitary, killed as many as 100,000 Poles — many of them women and children — in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. These places today lie in western Ukraine, but were part of Poland before the Second World War. The killing spree was bound up with a Ukrainian nationalist campaign to establish an independent Ukrainian state and prevent post-war Poland taking back its former territory.

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The two nations still don’t see eye-to-eye on the issue: while the Ukrainians tend to refer to the massacres as a “tragedy”, the Polish talk about the Volhynia “genocide” or “slaughter”. One reason Ukrainians are reluctant to look too closely at the matter is that the UPA, the organisation responsible for the massacres, was founded by followers of Stepan Bandera — one of the revered, if controversial, fathers of Ukrainian nationalism. He is lionised by many Ukrainians today — though certainly not all — because of his stalwart, uncompromising fight against the Soviet Union. Since Russia’s invasion last year, Ukrainian public figures have been especially nervous of sullying his legacy, as the country is in need of historical symbols to rally around. According to one poll, Bandera is now viewed favourably by 74% of Ukrainians.

But Poland wants to present a united front with Ukraine against Russia. Wary of vindicating Putin’s dehumanising depiction of Ukraine as a nation of murderous fascists, it has called for “reconciliation and forgiveness” over the Volhynia killings. Zelenskyy, too, has shown goodwill. And so, earlier this month, he joined Duda in honouring Polish victims on the 80th anniversary of the massacre’s start. He has also promised to exhume the bodies of Polish victims from mass graves on Ukrainian territory so that they can be given proper burials — a courtesy long demanded by Poland.

It is in Ukraine’s interests to settle the issue. By coming to terms with the UPA atrocities in Volhynia, Ukraine would be able to craft a more nuanced view of its history and national identity, which would better suit its current pluralistic, democratic character than the narrow, authoritarian and racialised vision of Bandera. This in turn will make it harder for Russia to distort Ukrainian history and demonise its national heritage, depriving Putin of a key weapon in his fight against Ukraine.

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Yet coming to terms with the massacre won’t be easy. Ukraine’s government has never denied the killings took place; the trouble is in the detail and framing. Some Ukrainian officials have used reprisals by Polish self-defence units at the time to suggest that the massacres were the result of a tit-for-tat territorial dispute — even though far fewer Ukrainians, between 10,000 and 20,000 civilians and UPA militants, were killed by Poles in these attacks. A common phrase used by Ukrainian public figures is “We forgive and ask for forgiveness”, which sounds nice, but creates a sense of equal and mutual wrongdoing.

Even more concerning are the Ukrainian scholars who cast doubt on how closely involved the UPA leadership was in orchestrating the killings. And here is the heart of the problem: for many Ukrainians, the UPA and its parent organisation, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), played a crucial role in Ukraine’s struggle for independence — and so cannot simply be erased from the national narrative. Because Ukrainians have historically viewed themselves exclusively as victims of foreign domination, implicating the UPA and OUN in an arguably genocidal campaign would challenge central elements of their self-image, and would complicate their perception of figures such Bandera as righteous rebels against oppression.

The Volhynia massacres took place at a desperate juncture in Ukrainian’s journey towards freedom. At the end of the First World War, Ukrainians twice attempted to establish independent states on the territory of modern Ukraine. However, by 1921, both efforts had failed, and Ukrainians were once again a subjugated people, split between the USSR and Poland. While Ukrainian identity was encouraged for a time in Soviet-annexed Ukraine, by the Thirties, Stalin’s collectivisation policies had led to the devastating, man-made Holodomor famine that killed millions of Ukrainians. In the inter-war Second Polish Republic, Ukrainian desires for autonomy were tolerated to varying degrees depending on who was in charge, but by and large Ukrainians were treated as second-class citizens.

In response to both the famine in the communist USSR and the oppressive Polish state, certain Ukrainian nationalists adopted an increasingly militant far-Right ideology. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later the USSR, these Ukrainian nationalists, including Bandera, joined forces with the Germans, believing that they had finally found their ticket to independence. However, when Bandera and the OUN declared an independent Ukrainian state in 1941 under German auspices, he and other OUN leaders were arrested by occupying Nazi authorities and their hopes were dashed yet again. The UPA and local OUN commanders loyal to Bandera turned against the Germans, but remained convinced that the only way to bring about the ethnically-pure Ukrainian state they envisioned would be to act against the local Polish population while the German occupiers were still in charge — leading them to instigate the Volhynia massacres in 1943.

This has given Russia plenty of fodder for propaganda. The Kremlin has tried to paint Bandera as a hardened Nazi for years in order to brand modern Ukraine as a fascist state — in 2021, Putin baselessly claimed Bandera’s “followers” in Ukraine were making plans to massacre Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, and called Ukrainians “neo-Nazis and Banderites” shortly after touching off his invasion last year. Yet Moscow has conveniently ignored the fact that the modern Ukrainian state that emerged in 1991 was entirely unaffiliated with the visions of Bandera, the OUN and the UPA, and that Bandera was simply one of many Ukrainian independence fighters who didn’t all share the same ideology.

Resolving a decades-old historical dispute with a country it now considers one of its closest allies feels like an issue of only passing importance while Ukraine is under attack. But it is precisely because of the Russian invasion that it should be confronted. The war has catalysed a dramatic renaissance of Ukrainian culture and identity as Ukrainians demonstrated that theirs is an independent nation worth dying for, creating the perfect opportunity for them to build a more holistic and critical perspective on the early 20th-century nationalism that helped to forge their country.

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There are indications Ukraine is keen to take up the challenge. This May, the head of Ukraine’s parliament said during a speech to Poland’s parliament that Ukraine “will work with you, dear Polish friends, accepting the truth no matter how ruthless it may be”. To make a statement like this about such a bitter period of ethnic violence is practically unheard of in Eastern Europe. From the Balkans to the Caucasus, issues like these tend to be left to fester into simmering ethnic hatreds — but Poland and Ukraine are showing that it is possible to some extent to move on.

Every day, Ukraine finds new war heroes to worship: from soldiers dying on the front line to grandmothers making Molotov cocktails. With this new generation of freedom fighters, the need to venerate divisive 20th-century nationalists such as Bandera may well diminish, allowing Ukraine and Poland to finally put their differences behind them and ensure that their friendship will stand the test of time.

On a hillside overlooking the capital is Armenia’s last line of defence in the event of war. Squeezed between a junkyard and a Soviet-era apartment block is a dusty assault course littered with rusting cars, discarded water bottles and a replica rocket launcher. This is the training ground of Voma, a paramilitary group that prepares ordinary citizens to fight for the future of their country. That future is looking increasingly uncertain.

“Last week, we had just 15 people attending training,” says Nanée, a 24-year-old volunteer teaching first aid. “Now, we have more than 150. Old, young, men, women — everyone wants to know how to act in case there’s another invasion.”

Days before, on 13 September, Armenian towns and villages came under a heavy artillery barrage from neighbouring Azerbaijan, which lasted for two days. Baku insists its forces were attacked first, but after the blasts came its troops, pushing across the frontier and capturing territory inside Armenia in the most dramatic escalation since the two nations fought a bloody war in 2020. There are fears a humanitarian ceasefire could collapse at any moment.

At the heart of the conflict is the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is situated within Azerbaijan’s internationally-recognised borders, but has been held since the fall of the USSR by ethnic Armenian separatists. Two years ago, Baku’s well-armed forces pushed past the barricades and across the minefields to take back swathes of territory in a shock-and-awe offensive. But Moscow swiftly intervened, brokering a peace deal that left the Karabakh Armenians in control of only around a third of the area.

This time, though, it’s different. Baku is insisting that Yerevan formally recognises its sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh and ending the three-decades-long stand-off over the region; Azerbaijan says it’s a matter of international law, while Armenians in the breakaway territory fear ethnic cleansing if they are abandoned. The sudden outbreak of hostility towards Armenia, which many see as a tactic to force a deal, has reportedly killed 105 Armenian troops and 71 Azerbaijanis.

To make matters worse, Moscow is refusing to play peacemaker. Armenia is formally an ally of Russia, as a member of the Moscow-led CSTO mutual defence pact. But its pleas for Kremlin support have fallen on deaf ears, with other member states like Kazakhstan ruling out sending troops to de-occupy the territory. Russia is clearly reluctant to spare any resources or manpower from its war in Ukraine, leaving the Armenians on their own.

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“My uncle was one of those killed in the shelling,” says 18-year-old Aram. He signed up to take part in civil defence training the next day, spending his evenings drilling with a heavy wooden mock assault rifle and running laps with other volunteers. “My parents have mixed feelings about it. They don’t want me to go to war and die — but my dad bought me my new uniform.”

Voma is dependent on donations of cash and military surplus gear from the public to train volunteers — many of whom then formally enlist. However, once they are part of the armed forces, many find there’s still not enough equipment to go around.

Lusine, 38, also decided to join up after going through civil defence training. “They gave me a list of everything I need to provide myself — a sleeping bag, a flashlight, a hunting knife, even a spoon. They’ll give me an AK-47 but, as a woman, being captured isn’t an option, so I need to get hold of a pistol as well and save a bullet for myself.”

Armenian society was shaken when reports surfaced days after the latest offensive about the fate of several female soldiers who were captured by Azerbaijani forces. In one video shared online, 36-year-old mother of three Anush Apetyan is raped, murdered and mutilated, her dismembered finger pushed into her mouth. While Baku has not responded to the video, in neighbouring Turkey — a close ally of Azerbaijan — women’s groups gathered to condemn the apparent atrocity, holding placards reading “no to femicide”.

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The incident has left many Armenians feeling they are fighting a battle for their very existence. “This is my home. And they’re trying to invade and destroy something that I’ve come to love,” says Joe Kasabian, an American-Armenian and former US soldier who first moved to the country last year. “We just want to be left alone, and they won’t let us. The fight is here whether we want it or not.” Now, he says, when the time comes, he’s ready to serve again.

Many see the conflict through an ethnic and religious lens, priding themselves on being the first country in the world to adopt Christianity, bordered on two sides by Turkic Muslim nations. Armenia is also a place where genocide lingers within living memory. From 1915 to 1917, shortly before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Armenians living in what is now modern-day Turkey were rounded up and purged, loaded onto boats and sunk, forced into death marches or made to flee their homes for Western Europe. Turkey and Azerbaijan insist the events never took place, despite growing international recognition from countries like the US, France, Germany and Russia.

Now, once again, Armenians are hearing echoes of ethnic cleansing in rhetoric coming from their neighbours. “Make up your mind,” ultranationalist Turkish MP Mustafa Destici told Armenians in mid-September, as pressure built from Azerbaijan to recognise Baku’s sovereignty over the entirety of Nagorno-Karabakh. “I remind you once again that the Turkish Nation has the power to erase Armenia from history and geography, and that they stand at the limit of our patience.”

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Others though have sought to downplay ethnic tensions. “This isn’t about hatred for Armenians,” a top Azerbaijani official tells me on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve lived together side by side for centuries; we’re a secular nation with many ethnic and religious minorities. This is just about respecting international law. Karabakh is ours, and we will take it back one way or the other. They’re preparing for war when they should be negotiating for peace.”

Yet Armenia’s domestic political situation has made any kind of peaceful deal even harder to reach. Following the heavy shelling in September, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan indicated he could be about to secure a deal recognising Azerbaijani sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh. Within hours, massive protests had been organised, with marchers climbing the gates of the parliament building and demanding he step down.

“No document has been signed,” the Prime Minister said in a surprise statement, designed to calm tensions, “and I can say that no document will be signed”. And yet, while the U-turn may have prevented an all-out riot, it’s not clear that officials have any alternative plan to avert further conflict. In a nation that sees surviving genocide as a core part of its identity, political concessions are often viewed a milestone on the road to total obliteration.

That said, the Armenian government has so far refused to begin mass mobilisation. Having come to power following a wave of street protests in 2018, known as the “Velvet Revolution”, many local analysts say embattled Pashinyan has purposefully kept the army relatively weak. He is distrustful of the top brass, after senior officers called on him to resign following military defeats in the 2020 war. The post of Chief of the General Staff was left vacant for most of this year, making top-down reforms harder.

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As a result, the army is woefully underprepared for war. Near the village of Nurevan, just a stone’s throw from the border, a detachment of troops are fortifying their positions and bracing for what many see as an imminent onslaught. However, the young soldiers — many of whom are 18-year-old conscripts — are kitted out with uniforms that are falling apart at the seams, their foam lining breaking out through the camouflage. Few have modern helmets and even fewer have body armour. “Our troops need everything from socks to weapons to coffee,” says Armen Hagopjanyan, the head of the local district.

Feeling their government is doing too little to prepare, ordinary citizens are taking matters into their own hands. Seventeen-year-olds Edwin and Serge are among those who have set up an all-night collection point in Yerevan, calling on locals to donate whatever they can to those standing guard on the border. “I’m too young to serve,” Edwin says, manning the bench and packing up boxes of supplies at 1am, “but this is how I can contribute”. As well as clothing and long-life instant noodles, the most popular donations are cigarettes and lighters, which those who have done military service say are as valuable as bullets at the front.

Few Armenians truly believe they can beat Azerbaijan on the battlefield. But with their government unwilling and unable to grant political concessions, many are bracing for an inevitable fight.

Former foreign minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan is among those calling for the country to get ready to defend itself. “God bless our Army — we can win even when it seems impossible,” he says. At the same time though, he quotes one of Winston Churchill’s more morose lines: “You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”

With this image, Sullivan ends her book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation. Her subtitle, less a mystery unsolved than a secret well kept, trails the book’s bombshell: that a Jewish Council member, Arnold van den Bergh, was in their view “the betrayer”.

It took five years, a €100,000 public subsidy, cutting edge artificial intelligence and a retired FBI special agent, Vince Pankoke, to reach this conclusion — which was launched less than a month ago by an international publishing machine. Sullivan outlines the theory of the Cold Case Diary team: that Van den Bergh “saved his family by giving up addresses, including Prinsengracht 163, to the SD”.

The team described itself as “confident” of this conclusion, which was based on an anonymous note sent to Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived two years hiding from the Nazis in The Secret Annex. But the global publicity campaign, promoting the idea that it was a Jewish man who betrayed the Franks, unleashed a wave of criticism.

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Some scholars and historians immediately questioned the claim, sources distanced themselves, the Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos apologised for any offence caused and paused distribution, influential German magazine Die Zeit accused Sullivan of “sensationalism”, and the heads of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Anne Frank Fonds in Basel expressed doubts about the work. The team fiercely defended their conclusions in their blog. But they did  backpedal on earlier interviews, in which they had stated that there was an “85% probability” that they were correct, saying this was not an 85% certainty but a “conditional probability”.

While the book predicts a strong reaction to its “powerful” and “unsettling” conclusions — which are presented like a “true crime” documentary and with the certainty of a court verdict — the team has apparently been surprised and shocked by the backlash. They feel like victims of a kind of witch hunt.

The Dutch wounds of Nazi occupation are clearly so close to the surface that, at a scratch, they still bleed. The Netherlands has the worst record of Jewish deaths in Western Europe: an estimated 73% of the Jewish population died. Professor Frank van Vree — a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies — points out that Remembrance Day on 4 May was named one of the most important national unifiers in a recent, wide-ranging study by the Netherlands Institute for Social Research.

But just as the Dutch self-image of a tolerant, open society has been challenged by admissions of systemic racism, looking closely at the reality of the Holocaust reveals some uncomfortable truths. “From the mid-Sixties, the story of the destruction of Dutch Jewry and the complicity of the non-Jewish Dutch is a permanent struggle with the rosy Dutch self-image,” says Van Vree. “The knowledge that this really happened… in a society that considered itself a haven of tolerance… It never disappeared, this feeling of guilt”.

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And the story of Anne Frank brings a lot of these tensions to the surface. After it was published in 1947 (and with the 1955 Broadway play that brought it to American attention), the diary weathered claims that it was fake, as well as initial hesitancy from international publishers to make Anne Frank, as some historians have it, the centrepiece of Holocaust memorial.

Her story is also perfectly designed for a global audience. “She comes from a very humanist, Frankfurt-based family; she counts as one of the famous Dutch but in reality she’s German,” says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, emeritus professor and chair of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. “And the way Judaism was practised in the Anne Frank family comes very close to the American reform tradition.

“Anne Frank is ideal for identification,” he goes on. “She keeps her faith in humanity, she has all the dreams 13-year-old girls have”. And we fulfil Anne’s dream of becoming a writer by the positive act of reading. “The Anne Frank diary has become a sort of mirror of our society”.

There’s one conspicuous absence in the book, though. “Anne Frank is of course the most famous Holocaust victim”, says ten Cate, “because her book is not about the Holocaust”. The diary ends abruptly; we know where she went, and what happened to her. But “the Holocaust is not mentioned in the book.” The great question the reader is left with is: who betrayed her?

Past theories include warehouse worker Willem van Maaren, Dutch national socialist Tonny Ahlers, famous “Jew-hunter” Ans van Dijk, and a bureaucratic investigation into food stamp fraud. But while ever more books come out to present a new villain to counter Anne Frank’s heroism, the truth of the Dutch war experience was different: collaborating with the Nazis was not the occasional act of the rare individual.

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The Netherlands suffered military defeat in five days. There is evidence of sustained civil service and economic collaboration with Nazism after this — the state railway company, for instance, recently agreed to pay €50m in compensation for transporting people to Nazi camps. The population, meanwhile, mostly kept its head down. But many police and civilians betrayed Jewish people in hiding and received financial rewards: kopgeld or “head bounty” (Pankoke, the retired special agent, discovered a microfilm of 956 kopgeld receipts in an American archive).

Solidarity with Jewish people was greater in France and Belgium, which had experience of resistance movements, and where the Germans did not institute a civilian government. The geography there also made hiding easier.

But after the war, the Dutch popular narrative did not recognise that particular groups had suffered more. Stories of the treatment received by Jewish people returning from the camps are appalling: they were given no preferential state help, and sometimes found their possessions taken by other citizens not keen to return them. They even faced housing tax bills for the time when they were imprisoned by Nazis.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the Protestant Church in 2020 declared its sense of guilt for failing to protect the Jewish population. That year, Dutch king Willem-Alexander said in his Remembrance Day speech that his great-grandmother Queen Wilhelmina — while in exile in London — did not do enough to support the Jewish community, even “if only by words”.

But it’s very late in the day to recognise some of these injustices. When, in 2016, Amsterdam announced a €10m payment to Holocaust survivors for taxing them while they were in the camps, there were not enough of them left to take it, and the money was instead given to Jewish-related causes.

Meanwhile, after years of examining the cases of museums exhibiting art looted by the Nazis, Dutch restitutions policy has only just been changed to show “more humanity and goodwill”. This year, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum is expected to hand back a Kandinsky painting, considered a “forced sale”, to the Jewish heirs. Other claim cases are still rumbling.

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During this moment of reckoning, the aim of the Cold Case Diary team was, to quote Pankoke, to “provide some closure to the descendants of those who were captured”. But the fact that it points the finger at a Jewish man has been a source of much controversy. Van Vree feels this kind of conclusion should only be made when it is beyond any reasonable doubt. “That’s the last thing that you should suggest — only at the very end, if you are absolutely sure about it”, he says. “The critics are almost all people who are very aware of the non-Jewish guilt about what happened. This is very improper, and if you accept it, you might imply that actually the non-Jews are innocent, so to speak”.

For relatives of Van den Burgh, including his great-niece Elise Tak, the accusation is “appalling”. She questions the proof that any list of hiding places existed, and where the accusatory, anonymous note sent to Otto Frank came from.

Meanwhile the Dutch population is left wondering how to feel about the behaviour of its ancestors. Which is ironic, given that the filmmaker Thijs Bayens started the “cold case” project to try to understand what happens to a population if life is “threaded with fear”.

“The truth never is about the past — it always is about us,” says ten Cate, who expects to see another four or five ‘betrayers’ named in his lifetime. “If it’s only about the past, we don’t give a damn. Historians … isolate particular facts and events from the past and bring them into focus because we want to re-form them to something that is relevant for our own identity. Often it takes the form: what would I have done and what exactly is the relation between us, our identity, our self-image, and what happened in the past? Are we entitled to have a better self-image than our parents?”

Whatever your answer, and whatever you think of Sullivan’s book and the team’s conclusions, we have to confront the facts. Reparations can still be made, especially while there are survivors. “It is important to have these conversations now,” he says. “Belated justice is justice.” And even after attempts at justice, it is important to remember, and to trip over, the painful stumbling stones of the past.

His actions brought fame and a United States presidential medal of freedom. But he was dismayed to see his nation become snared in fresh horrors under the one-time rebel turned president Paul Kagame; there was the invasion and looting of next-door Democratic Republic of Congo that left millions dead, as well as the routine killings, detentions and disappearances of Rwandans who questioned their leader’s rule.

Why, he asked me ten years ago, was Britain propping up this despot with big dollops of aid when his democracy was such an obvious sham? “We know what happened in the past. But that does not mean we close our eyes to what is happening now,” he said. “I did not keep silent in 1994 and I cannot keep silent now. We need justice, not aid.”

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Today, Rusesabagina stands in a Kigali court clad in prison pink, the latest victim of Kagame’s paranoid misrule. He was seemingly set up by an agent posing as a Burundian priest, lured six months ago from his Texan home to Dubai and then flown on a privately-hired jet to the Rwandan capital. Three days later he was paraded in handcuffs, facing charges on nine offences including murder, armed robbery and membership of a terror group. The president crowed about a “flawless” operation.

Rusesabagina had told me several times about the smears, the death threats and the assassination attempts he endured, which eventually forced him to move from Belgium to a gated community in the US. He is 66 years old with some health issues, so he knows there may be little hope of seeing freedom again.

Kagame is sending out a clear message to his critics with this kidnapping and show trial: no-one is safe from his reach, whoever they are and wherever they live. Only on Sunday, another leading opposition member was killed in Cape Town in a shooting that bears all the hallmarks of a targeted assassination, according to one man who survived such a hit.

There should be little doubt now about the true nature of Kagame’s regime. Slowly but surely, the sheen has come off the self-styled saviour of his nation, exposing the reality of his Tutsi dictatorship along with more complex and often-murkier insights into the genocide and its aftermath. More and more former loyalists have spoken out in dismay at their nation’s descent into darkness. Even with such a skilled Rwandan diplomatic and public relations machine, there are only so many times another Kagame critic can be accused of being a sympathiser of génocidaires. 

Yet there is disturbing irony underlying this latest show trial as Rusesabagina’s presence in that Kigali court reminds us again of the validity of his words when we spoke a decade ago: why is Britain backing this barbarous figure? Even now, even today.

Britain pumps huge sums into this tiny central African nation — £111m over the past two years alone — while its president spends a reported £30m sponsoring Arsenal FC, his favourite football club. Our officials churn out pathetic reports talking about “building effective government institutions” and “development of an open and inclusive society” while Kagame kills his critics, overturns term limits, jails political foes, squashes free expression and shuts down the slightest space for civil society.

Only last week he told CNN that “democracy is not defined by the West”, and spoke about the “imperfections” in those countries which “elect their leaders” only for voters to “turn around and start complaining about the same leaders they elected”. Perish the thought that there might be any complaints from people under his style of “democracy”.

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It gets worse, however. Rwanda was a German, then a Belgian, colony. But Kagame preferred the adulation from British and US leaders over rising criticism in the Francophone world of his rule and the RPF’s role in the 1994 bloodshed. So he imposed English as an official language, encouraged cricket and was permitted to join the Commonwealth. Now he is preparing to host royals, presidents and prime ministers from around the world, having been handed the bi-annual Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, due to be held in Kigali in June.

Yet why has this monstrous dictator been handed such a prestigious event when, for example, it has never gone to Ghana, despite its far closer ties to Britain, its genuine democracy and its symbolic significance as the first African nation to gain independence?

The answer lies in the legacy of guilt over the world’s failure to prevent the sickening genocide, fused with the desperate desire of Western leaders to find an aid success story. So they hail Kagame and hold Rwanda up as the lonely poster child for their tarnished policy of throwing cash at problems of conflict and poverty. They praise its economic growth, ignoring that it was built on the back of rampant pillaging in the Congo. They point to its enterprise and openness to business, yet front companies for a one-party state that dominate vast chunks of the economy. Yes, visitors admire Kigali’s order and clean streets, though those with longer memories say the smooth roads and sober officials existed before the genocide.

Even if Rwanda was a runaway success, there would be no excuse for Kagame’s persistent meddling in neighbouring states and savage repression. Yet politicians across the political spectrum have fallen at the strongman’s feet. Tony Blair called Kagame a “visionary”, congratulated him for a sham election victory, borrowed his private jet, defended his intervention in DRC — and used his bond with the president to help build an advisory empire.

Bill Clinton called Kagame one of the “greatest leaders of our time”. David Cameron claimed Rwanda was “a success story” and “a role model for development”. His former development minister Andrew Mitchell remains a constant cheerleader — and, coincidentally, collects £39,600 for nine days work a year advising a bank in Kigali run by the former finance minister. Meanwhile, big development charities appease this brutal regime with their silence to keep their hefty revenues flowing.

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The flow of funds from British taxpayers did not even stop when Scotland Yard warned two human rights activists in this country that a Rwandan hit squad had been sent to kill them, or when MI6 gave the government tape recordings of senior regime officials plotting to kill opposition leaders. The author Anjan Sundaram has also written that anti-terror experts provided him with armed protection in the UK when he promoted his superb exposé of Kagame’s dictatorship, based on several years trying to teach journalism in Rwanda on an aid-funded project. Rwandans living here have told me of regular events organised by intelligence operatives based in the London embassy, at which they must pledge loyalty to the RPF on pain of death for them or their families

In Do Not Disturb, a forthcoming book by journalist Michela Wrong investigating the brazen murder of former intelligence chief and Kagame’s political rival Patrick Karegeya in Johannesburg, there is a Kagame quote that rings all too true to explain his unperturbed approach to eliminating foes: “Those wazungus [white people] make noise but over time they forget it.” His regime has become so arrogant that it barely hides its actions now. “When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog — and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink,” said Kagame’s defence minister after that killing. His president, in that CNN interview, absurdly claims Rusesabagina “more or less brought himself” into Kigali.

Kagame’s defenders argue that he brought stability to a troubled country. Gerard Prunier, the French historian, rightly responds that such attitudes display lingering racism, since they suggest a tough ruler is needed to control the inherent violence of Africans. Meanwhile, some prominent defectors claim the president sneers in private at his Western backers. “He calls those British politicians who sing his praises all the time his stooges,” said David Himbara, who spent six years working with Kagame as his policy chief and principal private secretary. He added that “behind Blair’s back, Kagame laughs at how he deploys a former prime minister of Great Britain as his praise-singer on the cheap.”

Yet could this current show trial, following the trapping of a simple man who stood firm in the face of unimaginable hell, finally spark a change in attitudes towards this regime and its mendacious president? The European Union has condemned the rendition, while 37 members of the US Congress have called for Rusesabagina’s release. Even Britain has tentatively showed concern over “continued restrictions to civil and political rights and media freedom”.

But as Kagame says, this is just noise. We need to cut off all his flows of aid, then ensure Prince Charles does not have to shake his bloodstained hand at a Commonwealth summit in Kigali. This ruthless president will only see that the West does not fall for his phoney talk of democracy and facade of “development” when he becomes a toxic pariah. We should be in awe of human rights heroes like Rusesabagina, not murderous dictators who crush dissent.

There’s a moist sentimentality to these nostalgic reveries that needs to be questioned though. For there’s a particularly persuasive case to be made that the legacy of the fall of communism was wasted in Russia and eastern Europe – it’s particularly true if one happens to be a Bosnian Muslim. While the United States and Britain were basking in post-Cold War triumphalism, Bosnian Muslims were being hoarded into the first concentration camps to be erected on European soil since the Second World War. History had not come to a juddering halt after all. Rather, on Europe’s periphery it was being discovered that communist totalitarianism had merely kept a lid on older resentments that were about to bloodily resurface.

I travelled to Bosnia — the most ethnically diverse of the new republics following the fall of communist Yugoslavia — five years ago, shortly before the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. I spent most of my time in Sarajevo, a beautiful multi-ethnic town that 20 years earlier was besieged for 1,425 days (nearly four years) by Bosnian-Serb forces – the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. The pockmarks made by the bullets and shells of forces positioned in the hills around the city were still visible. More than 10,000 residents had died as a result of snipers and the 3,000 shells that fell on the city each day.

The war’s bloody nadir took place 80 kilometres away, in Srebrenica, where between the 11th and the 22nd of July 1995, 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. While there, I visited the Srebrenica gallery, a deeply moving memorial to those killed, and a damning indictment of the international community’s failure to stand up to genocidal chauvinism. The gallery’s walls are lined with photos of some of those who were killed. Men — for it is overwhelmingly men — stare back at you from fly-blown photographs that were taken in another era.

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Not all the victims have yet been found, and so the relatives wait. This weekend, another eight Bosnian men and boys will be buried in a cemetery on the outskirts of Srebrenica. A quarter of century after the slaughter, the process of locating, exhuming and identifying the victims of a military operation codenamed ‘Krivaja 95’ goes on.

Back in 1995, the Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, and backed in Belgrade by Serb president Slobodan Milosevic, had decided that they wanted to conclude the war by the year’s end. This meant capturing the three UN-protected ‘safe’ areas of Zepa, Gorazde and Srebrenica. Bosnian Serb forces would henceforth move troops into Sarajevo before the year was out and capture the city they had been lobbing mortars at for four years.

The purpose of the war was to ‘ethnically cleanse’ —a phrase used openly by the Bosnian Serb leadership — swathes of the former Yugoslavia so that Serbs and only Serbs could live there. As the Cambridge scholar Brendan Simms wrote in Unfinest Hour, his book on the Bosnian war, the bloodshed that culminated in the genocide at Srebrenica was not the by-product of war or civil breakdown, “rather, ethnic cleansing was the purpose of the war”.

When the safe zones were initially set up, Philippe Morillon, a French UN general, had told Bosnia’s Muslim population: “You are now under UN protection of the United Nations… I will never abandon you.” Yet Dutch UN peacekeepers stood aside two years later as the Bosnian Serb assault on Srebrenica began. Over the course of three days in the summer of 1995, as politicians and pundits in western capitals basked in a triumphalist post-Cold War glow, those 8,372 Muslim men and boys were pumped full of bullets and thrown into mass graves.

As the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia described it:

“They [members of the Bosnian Serb army] stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and young, of their personal belongings and identification, and deliberately and methodically killed them solely on the basis of their identity.”

As a result, the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are today serving life sentences for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Slobodan Milosevic died while on trial for war crimes at the Hague.

During the trials, a chilling conversation that had been intercepted during the genocide was used as evidence to demonstrate intent on the part of the Bosnian Serb chain of command. A group of Bosnian men had attempted to break through from Srebrenica to the town of Tuzla but were captured by Bosnian Serb forces. “Kill them all, god damn it!” Serb General Radislav Krstić can be heard saying to Colonel Milan Obrenović, the chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army’s Zvornik Brigade. “Don’t leave a single one alive.”

The massacre at Srebrenica was able to take place partly because western powers had spent the preceding year labouring under the pretence that there was no belligerent party in the conflict. The Serbs controlled the fourth largest army in Europe yet a one-sided arms embargo, imposed on the region by the European Community and its member states in 1991, remained in place until near the end of the war, preventing the Bosnians from protecting themselves.

The British government of John Major played a shameful role in keeping the arms embargo in place, a policy it justified by adopting an obfuscatory tone which stressed that the conflict was a civil war and emphasised “complexity” and “warring sides”. “We should remember,” British defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind told parliament, “that the Serbs in Bosnia are not uniquely guilty”.

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Platitudes —rare are there conflicts in which one side is uniquely guilty — stood in place of an ethical foreign policy. Britain’s foreign secretary at the time was Douglas Hurd, a politician whom Margaret Thatcher said would “make Neville Chamberlin look like a warmonger”. Thatcher supported hitting the Serbs and lifting the embargo. Hurd, however, took Thatcherism to mean something altogether different, and said that there was “no such thing as the international community”. As Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Poland, observed in 1993: “Any time there was a likelihood of effective action [in Bosnia], a particular western statesman [Hurd] intervened to prevent it.”

A host of institutional failures, led the way to Srebrenica, along with a pernicious narrative of false equivalences and a widespread indifference to the plight of the Bosnian Muslims. This unfortunately extended beyond the moral turpitude of the British government. Sounding more like a resentful humanities student than the leader of an international organisation, the General Secretary of the UN at the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, brushed off the conflict in the former Yugoslavia as a “white man’s war”.

In October 1994, Boutros-Ghali even flew into the besieged city of Sarajevo and lectured the city’s residents, who were being shot at by snipers when they ventured out to collect water, about the plight of black Africa. Boutros-Ghali’s point was clear: the residents of Sarajevo, undergoing the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, should think themselves lucky that they were not wallowing in mud and rags in the ‘global south’.

It was in August 1995 that Nato finally decided to act against Serb forces, launching Operation Deliberate Force, a massive bombing campaign which consequently brought Serb leaders, fearful of further American bombardment, to the negotiating table. Predictably, pseudo-humanitarians who had said nothing as tens of thousands of Muslims were being slaughtered, suddenly found a cause to rally behind, and rushed to denounce the bombing.

Since the Soviet Union had disappeared, misguided sections of the Left had looked hopefully upon Slobodan Milosevic (and by extension his proteges in Republika Srpska, the proto-Serb state inside Bosnia) as a benevolent guardian of the established order – that order being communist Yugoslavia. The Serbs were thus cast as plucky anti-imperialists engaged in an intransigent last-ditch struggle against capitalism. In actuality, the Serbian leaders had long-ago sloughed off any remnant of Tito’s liberal Stalinism and replaced it with blood and soil nationalism. What the Serb leadership had inherited from Tito’s regime was a vast army and a repressive state apparatus – assets which they used to wage a genocidal war against Bosnia’s Muslim population.

In this vein, Labour Party national treasure Tony Benn blamed everyone but the Serbs for the bloodshed. This included the International Monetary Fund, Germany and Nato. When the White House finally decided to act following the massacre at Srebrenica, Benn pompously declared that the “main enemy is Nato”, and called for the arms embargo against the Bosnians to be “strictly enforced”.

A short time later, the celebrated American professor Noam Chomsky — along with others including Tariq Ali — signed an open letter to an obscure Swedish magazine defending a book which claimed that the genocide at Srebrenica was a fabricated hoax. Elsewhere, the contrarian magazine Living Marxism (later renamed Spiked), the mouthpiece of the British Revolutionary Communist Party, claimed in print that the Guardian’s Ed Vulliamy and ITN’s Penny Marshall — two journalists who had witnessed first-hand the Serb concentration camps in Trnopolje in northern Bosnia — were telling lies. Living Marxism was subsequently sued by ITN and lost, incurring vast damages.

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War is never a glorious thing and the loudest cheerleaders for it are usually those who know they will be somewhere else when the first rounds are fired. But as any credible account of events during the Bosnian war demonstrates, pacifists and ‘realists’ do sometimes end up on the wrong side of history. During the Bosnian war of the early 90s, thousands of people were rounded into concentration camps and exterminated based on their ethnicity in a continent where a few decades earlier the words ‘never again’ had been piously recited following the obscenities of the Holocaust.

We’ve grown accustomed to hearing lectures on the ‘lessons’ contained in the rush to war in Iraq in 2003. Regrettably, we hear less about the things we might learn from the racist murder of 8,372 innocent men and boys on European soil a quarter of a century ago. While the conflict raged in Bosnia politicians brandished words like ‘complexity’, or else shrugged and pointed to incomprehensible ethnic resentments as a device to excuse indifference and inaction. The fashionable doctrine of ‘realism’ engendered a worldview in which smaller states were the mere playthings of larger entities; the human victims of this brutal statecraft were ignored as the mere flotsam of history.

This goes some way to explaining the failures on the part of the British state. Among the activist class, it was a different set of doctrines at work. As the Serbian armies went on the rampage, Bosnian Muslims were looked upon as not quite victims to those whose worldview came marinated in stale ‘anti-imperialist’ dogmas. In their failure to identify the genocidal intent implicit in Serb imperialism, pseudo-humanitarians proved a point once made by Arthur Koestler: ideology is apt to make a person believe that a goldfish is a racehorse. A procession of leftist grandees — Tony Benn, Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman and Tariq Ali — all filtered events in Bosnia through this narrow and distorting ideological lens. As a consequence, each lent credence to a grotesque pack of lies that was used to slander those who had lost the ability to answer back.

One of the lessons of Srebrenica is surely that doing nothing can come at its own terrible cost, even if the bill is settled years later in the bureaucratic and anodyne atmosphere of international courts and tribunals. It was once said that Bosnia would be written on Douglas Hurd’s tombstone. A quarter of a century after that sorry episode and one wonders what posterity will see fit to inscribe as the epitaph of our own era. Syria I am sure. And unless something alters about our current trajectory, perhaps the enslaved Uighurs of China too.

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This lesson has been lost in the fallout from Iraq, but the responsibility to protect — a principle enshrined in the United Nations since 2005 — is not something that ought to be sloughed off lightly, even if the UN itself is a rather toothless instrument when it comes to enforcing the principle. Moreover, do we really want democratic nations to sit out fights with the Slobodan Miloševićs of the world?

Perhaps we do. But then, we must at least be honest about what that entails. Staying on the side-lines is not, and never has been, the same as bringing an end to war and killing.You may not be altogether interested in fascism, but its victims deserve more than mere pity after the fact. Or, as Primo Levi wrote of the Holocaust,

“If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again… For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.”

Under the current constitution, one quarter of parliament’s members are military officers, and the constitution cannot be changed unless more than three quarters of MPs vote in favour. The constitution also says the ministers of defence, home affairs and border affairs must be serving military officers, and it gives the head of the armed forces the right to take over the country in a state of emergency. The army has the country in a headlock.

These are all things that Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, wants to address; but discussions are going nowhere. Four years after her party, the National League for Democracy, won an election landslide, and with less than a year to go before the next national vote, there is little sign of change. Meanwhile the rest of the country is growing frustrated and angry at the amount of time devoted to constitutional change while so many day-to-day problems remain unaddressed.

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This political stalemate is key to understanding why Aung San Suu Kyi has so conspicuously failed to address what the rest of the world regards as the country’s key crisis: the military’s crimes against its Muslim Rohingya minority. Suu Kyi believes the only way she can persuade the army to relax its grip on politics is to stand steadfastly with them in the court of public opinion. This week she also stood with them in the International Court of Justice, where the country is facing charges of genocide.

The case has been brought by Gambia on behalf of the 57 members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). It is not a whimsical venture: Gambia has brought some of the world’s top lawyers to The Hague. Its minister of justice, Ba Tambadou, was formerly a prosecutor at the Rwanda war crimes tribunal and Gambia has hired the Washington firm Foley Hoag as its advisors. The company won famous victories for Nicaragua against the United States in 1986 and for the Philippines against China in 2016. ‘Rockstar’ counsel Philippe Sands is acting for Gambia in court.

That the Myanmar military — the Tatmadaw — has committed massive human rights violations over decades is beyond doubt. The abuses peaked around August 2017 during a massive security operation in the north-western part of Rakhine state. Amnesty International estimates that around 10,000 civilians were killed. Over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims were expelled to Bangladesh in what the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

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Proving genocide, however, is notoriously difficult. The 1948 UN Genocide Convention defines it as an “act committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. Despite all the horrors, it is not clear that the Tatmadaw were intent on destroying all Rohingya. As Amnesty itself has demonstrated, the military operation was limited to the area of Rakhine between the Mayu River and the border with Bangladesh. Rohingya communities in other parts of Rakhine state were not targeted in anything like the same ways.

What the ICJ case may achieve is a rapid ruling on ‘emergency measures’ to protect the Rohingya while the merits of the case are awaiting judgement. Such a ruling would be legally binding, but there must be considerable doubt about whether the Myanmar military would actually obey it. And if it ignores the ruling, will other countries be willing and able to put meaningful pressure on the government in Naypidaw to force it to comply?

Over the past two and a half years of the current Rohingya crisis, Myanmar’s neighbours have demonstrated extreme reluctance to pressure Aung San Suu Kyi over the Tatmadaw’s behaviour. The reason is simple: China. China has made clear that it will not sanction Myanmar for the security forces’ behaviour in Rakhine – or in any of its other insurgencies. Chinese diplomats have actively sought to protect Myanmar from criticism at the United Nations Security Council and elsewhere.

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If Myanmar’s largest trading partner won’t support sanctions, then there seems little point in others imposing them. India sees itself locked in a zero-sum game with China for influence in Southeast Asia, so it is very unlikely to support punitive measures. Myanmar’s Southeast Asian neighbours are committed to the principle of non-interference in each other’s affairs, so they will continue to take a hands-off approach. General sanctions on the country as a whole seem unlikely to win sufficient support to make them effective.

It seems likely that, for the foreseeable future, the 740,000 expelled Rohingya and their descendants will continue to fester in the world’s largest refugee camp, built on sand dunes and mudflats on the Bangladesh side of the border. At the same time, that part of the Muslim Rohingya population that was not expelled from Rakhine will continue to exist under an extreme form of apartheid: corralled into camps, prevented from living their regular lives and subjected to daily abuse.

Is there a way forward? Is there any way to convince the Myanmar government to accept the Rohingya as an equal part of the population, deserving of rights and fair treatment? There have been mass expulsions of Rohingya before: in 1978 and in 1991. In both those cases the Myanmar/Burmese authorities were persuaded to reverse the expulsions. However, the critical factor then was a threat from Bangladesh to arm the refugees if they were not allowed to return. These days governments are more wary of supplying weapons to Muslim militants and that option does not seem to be part of the current discussions.

More from this author

What I learned about freedom in Xinjiang

By Geordie Stewart

This week the United States imposed targeted financial sanctions on four senior military figures: the Tatmadaw commander-in chief, Min Aung Hlaing, his deputy and the commanders of the two Light Infantry Divisions, the 33rd and 99th, that committed the vast majority of the killings and abuses in Rakhine. Even if the EU follows suit, however, it is unlikely that these measures will do more than annoy the generals.

It seems that the liberal West is out of tools. Perhaps Myanmar is a harbinger of things to come. The rise of China is giving authoritarian governments new options: they no longer need to kowtow before the arbiters of human rights standards. Will the 57 member states of the OIC succeed with their legal case where the trans-Atlantic powers have so far failed? It seems unlikely.

Instead, it seems that we’re moving into a world where state sovereignty comes first and governments will be able to do what they want to their minorities. Chinese ideologues have a name for it: ‘the community of common destiny for mankind’. The rest of us will just have to get used to sitting idly by while atrocities go unpunished.

In compliance with the convention, the UK has laws criminalising genocide. However, as it stands, the UK does not have any mechanism to recognise mass atrocities, which meet the threshold, as genocide. This ultimately means that, by default, the UK is not able to fulfil its obligations under the convention. In fact, over the years, the UK Government’s position has been that ‘any judgements on whether genocide has occurred should be a matter for the international judicial system rather than legislatures, governments or other non-judicial bodies.’

However, in this blind reliance on the ‘international judicial system’, be it the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court or other, the UK fails to consider one fundamental challenge: time. The time that is at essence when the annihilation of a protected group is being perpetrated. Put it differently; if the UK does not have a mechanism to recognise genocide (or attempted genocide), the UK is not able to take necessary steps to prevent or stop the atrocities under the convention obligations. Furthermore, if the UK does not have a mechanism to recognise genocide, the UK is not able to prosecute the perpetrators of the crime under the convention obligations. Awaiting the decision from an ‘international judicial system’ deems the UK’s convention obligations unfulfilled until it is too late.

This means, that over the last 70 years, the UK has been in breach of the convention obligations. To address the UK’s long-standing failures under the convention, Lord Alton introduced the Genocide Determination Bill, a private members’ bill. The bill aims to ‘provide for the High Court of England and Wales to make a preliminary finding on cases of alleged genocide; and for the subsequent referral of such findings to the International Criminal Court or a special tribunal.’ The bill that has a potential of ensuring that the UK can fulfil its convention obligations will be considered at the House of Lords in 2018.

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Introduction to this Under-reported series.

Summary guide to all under-reported articles in this series.

But for all the horrors of the twentieth century – and those more recently – the Holocaust stands as the most thoroughgoing and explicit demonstration of humanity’s capacity for evil. As Churchill wrote: “The Final Solution is probably the greatest, most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.”

This is not about some sick contest of suffering in which the Jews are declared the winner. It is, rather, that we can only truly understand the lessons of the Holocaust if we acknowledge what made it unique.

A useful starting point is with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim, himself a survivor who escaped to Britain after a year at Sachsenhausen concentration camp. (His elder brother, who would not leave Germany, was murdered by the Nazis.) For Fackenheim, four characteristics of the Holocaust separated it from other examples of mass murder.

First, the mere fact of being born Jewish was itself enough to merit extermination. (And the definition was – in modern parlance – as inclusive as possible, to ensure that no trace of Judaism would be left on earth.) Many Poles and Russians were also murdered by the Nazis, but their death was not pre-determined by Nazi ideology as a fundamental requirement – although Gypsies were also murdered for the crime of existing.

So secondly, the sole purpose of the Final Solution was to wipe out every Jew from the face of the earth. An entire people would be extinguished. Other genocides have targeted groups or races for mass murder; but they were not designed to remove them in their entirety. The Turkish genocide of Armenians or the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda, for example, were both unspeakable crimes. But they did not have all of Fackenheim’s four characteristics of the Holocaust.

Thus Fackenheim’s third unique characteristic was that there was no economic, political or territorial goal which the Final Solution was designed to leverage. The Final Solution was its own purpose. It was not part of the larger territorial war but it was nonetheless considered to a fundamental part of the Third Reich’s war effort. The two were equal in importance and so there was no significant internal dissent from the idea that resources that could have been used in war were instead used to exterminate the Jews.

It is this third characteristic that is perhaps the most rationally inexplicable of all elements of the Holocaust – that it had no purpose other than the murder of an entire people for the sake of their murder.

Fourthly, as Daniel Goldhagen further elaborated in his seminal 1996 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the Holocaust was carried out not by a cadre of committed ideologues or committed soldiers but by ordinary Germans – what Fackenheim described as “ordinary job holders with an extraordinary job.”

Goldhagen argued that the overwhelming majority of Germans were “willing executioners” because of the “eliminationist antisemitism” which had taken hold in German political culture over many centuries. Crucially, he destroyed the comfortable myths that most Germans knew nothing of the Holocaust – and that it was only the SS and not the Wehmarcht who murdered Jews. As the Holocaust scholar Franklin Littell wrote: “The death camps were designed by professors and built by Ph.D.s.” Civilised Germans – doctors, architects and writers – tortured and murdered Jews while Bach and Wagner played in the background, testing to see what levels of pain could be survived or, as Auschwitz’s chief physician, Dr Joseph Mengele, enjoyed himself, sewing twin children together to create a “Siamese pair” to test their behaviour.

Why does it matter if the Holocaust was unique? For Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, also a survivor, the memory and the potency of the Holocaust have to be permanently renewed because “to forget would mean to kill the victims a second time. We could not prevent their first death; we must not allow them to be killed again.”

But there is something more obvious, too. As George Santanya put it: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Repeat the Holocaust? That is unthinkable. But repeat elements of it? It happened once. That alone ought to be enough to worry us.