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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by Braille. I'm Leach on Greco, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. I'm talking with Dr. Philip Drew and Dr.
Bruce Oswald. So we've talked so much about the consequences of what happened in Rwanda. And like you have just mentioned, legal lessons that you took away. Dr.
Drew, wondering if you can take us a couple of steps back and talk about the lead-up to the genocide. You drop parallels between the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust, noting that genocide just don't happen, but earned fact planned out by certain ethnic, racial, or religious groups. Can you talk about the similarities between those two genocides and how do you identify that a genocide is happening or is going to happen? Identifying that a genocide is happening, I think, is the easy part.
Because if you take a look at what the definition of genocide is in the International Criminal Court statute, for example, it tells us that a genocide is a planned activity. In which, or that is designed to destroy a segment of the population. And we can see a genocide when it happens. We can recognize a genocide when it happens.
For example, the genocide against the Rohingya, the genocide against the Tutsi, the genocide against the Jews, the genocide against the Armenians. These were acts that were designed to destroy a segment of the population. And the thing being is often we see these only when they're occurring. And the reason we see them only when they're occurring is on many cases, we don't see them as they are developing.
When I came back from Rwanda, I'm going to step back a little bit in history because I was the son of a military family in Germany when I was a young boy. And I was very fortunate to have parents who did not nearly sit around the Canadian armed forces based on weekends, but took us out everywhere that you could think of. And I can remember vividly when I was eight years old visiting the concentration time in Daukau, which was a Soviet Union. And I was horrified.
As an eight-year-old, I knew that there was evil there. After that, I started to really start reading about genocide and the activities surrounding the Holocaust. And I must say, this was the 1970s. We did not have television in Germany.
So when we were kids in the evenings, the long winter evenings in Germany, we read. And I started reading about genocide, et cetera. So when I showed up in Rwanda and landed in that incredibly horrific situation that we arrived, I looked around and I said, how can this happen? Like, at the end of the Second World War, we said, this will never happen again.
We gave it a name. We called it genocide. Raphael Lincoln gave it that name, I should say. He gave it the name.
He accepted the name eventually. So while I was there and after I came back, I started to think about genocide. And I was doing more reading. And I had read about the Civil War in Bangladesh and the awful things that happened during that.
And the author, I believe it was Michael Payne at the time, a ready in 1973, had set out these indicators that this was coming. And he started my interest in comparative genocide and how we can prevent a genocide from occurring. Because I took what he wrote and I started comparing it to what I had learned about the genocide and the development genocide in Germany. And this has been expanded upon a significant revised and very significant work by Dr.
Gregory Stanton, who came up with originally the eight stages of genocide and in the 10. What that does is it sets out a framework that talks to us about how society changes. In order to permit a genocide to occur. Because as I noted in my article on the comparative article between Rwanda and the Holocaust, these genocides take a lot of work to actually create and make happen.
And what is required in the case of genocide is for a government or or another organization to create in its population a sense of divisiveness within the state and a attitude amongst people that they really don't first they don't care about their fellow person who is different from them. And when I say different from them, I need part of the target group. And then to move from not really caring to actively hunting them down and or participating in their demise or at the very best just being willfully blank at what's going on around them. So as as Dr.
Stanton said out, there are things that we that we do in societies that move us toward the acceptance of genocidal curating. And one of the first things we do is we classify people and we call them something. It could be that we're calling them Jews. It could be that we're calling them gypsies.
We could be calling them Twitter. We could be calling them socialists. We could be calling them fascists. However, socialists and fascists, those are political groups.
So we need to be careful with our definition of genocide here. But what we're generally looking at is a racial characteristic that sets one group of people against another. Usually it's the majority population against a smaller population that looks or acts differently than they do. So part and parcel that is the development of a concept of discrimination against people.
You know, you are foreign. You don't belong here. You came from somewhere else. And you know, the Nazis always depicted Jews as having invaded Europe from the Middle East.
And part of that invasion is also a dehumanization of them. So the Rwandans similarly depicted, or the Hutus and Rwandans similarly depicted the Tutsi as coming from somewhere else. And they depicted them as coming from a Ethiopian area and invading Rwanda. And part of, as I said, part of this foreign theory or this foreign theory is that they begin to depict these people as different and then they dehumanize.
And in the case of the Nazis, they often symbolize Jewish people as rats or as spiders or some type of insect or pest. In the case of Rwanda, the Hutu government and the propaganda machine that it controls characterized the Tutsi as cockroaches and yinzi is the name. And when we look at that, you say, okay, so they're calling people names. But when you characterize somebody as a pest or as a rodent, especially one that is depicted as carrying disease or being dangerous, that dehumanization actually makes it easier in the minds of the people to engage in activities designed to eliminate that group of people.
So for example, if you told me that I should go and kill a person, I'm probably going to go, no, I don't think so. But if you tell me to go and kill a rat or you tell me to kill a cockroach or you tell me to kill a spider, the chances are I'll probably say, yes, if you're not going to kill a person, if there are any type of threat to me or my health. And that is the type of discrimination, the type of classification and the type of mentality that we're trying to develop. Like you are foreign, you are not like us, and it's time to get rid of you.
So these are the types of things that we see going on. And you organize, one of the big factors in most genocides is the requirement for people to carry identification papers. And in Massey, Germany, for example, everybody had to have their papers that they had to show and Jewish people had a big J, for example, on their papers to show that they were Jewish in Rwanda. And I have some of these Rwandan identity papers that I was able to retreat from various massacre sites.
Inevitably, the Rwandan papers, there were three categories of race in Rwanda. One was Tutsi, one was Hutu, and one was Twaw. And the Twaw were a very small minority of the people. But in the massacre sites, the papers were always identified as Tutsi.
And it makes it very easy when you require somebody to carry papers to identify them. They may not be identifiable otherwise. You take Jewish people and who can tell a Jewish person from any other person, who can tell a Tutsi from Hutu. I can't most of the time, but if they've got a piece of paper in their pocket that says I'm Jewish or I'm Tutsi, then if I'm one of those who is inclined toward engaging in genocidal activity, I have my identifier that I need and then I'm, then I need nearly to set to work and eliminate that rodent or that pest.
So there's so many of these steps that we missed in Rwanda. There are so many of these steps that are occurring in our everyday societies. And I'm not saying that we're necessarily going to turn genocidal, but the lack of respect for people and the creation of the us and them categories in our Western societies is to me incredibly disturbing. And so we've talked about places in the world where unfortunately this is still happening.
You mentioned the Ruhingas in Myanmar. I'm also thinking of places where maybe those steps toward genocide are happening or maybe it's already gone far enough thinking of the Uighurs in China, for example. Are there parts of the world where you see those ingredients that you mentioned sort of brewing and perhaps there's a genocide on the horizon? And if so, what are either the legal actions that could be taken or diplomatic actions that could be taken to put us off to that?
Genocide exists wherever we have a society that is divided and society in which people are characterized by their race, their religion, their creed. In many societies, some of these steps have already been taken. When you call a group of people all rapists or something along that line, those are steps that are very, very disconcerting. How can we stop it?
I don't think that we necessarily stop it through legal measures because quite often legal measures don't encompass the tools that we need in order to stop it. We have human rights tribunals and human rights tribunals are always acting after the fact. But we do have in our societies the ability, at least in most of our societies, the ability to speak out and to not tolerate governments and other organizations that engage in racist or discriminatory activity. We also have the ability as individuals to call out governments and to call out our leaders when they are engaging in activity that creates divisiveness in our societies.
On the international level, it's often difficult unless you have people inside a country to understand what is going on. And this is a problem that we have as well in the West. And I'm going to go back to Rwanda in this case in 1994. If you turn on most television news channels these days, you will see a bunch of talking heads who are yelling at each other about something that is probably a minor issue and that has occurred within a country.
We very rarely see really good reporting and real in-depth analysis as to what's going on in the world. With the exception of perhaps the British Broadcasting Corporation and PBS, we don't get a lot of good journalists anymore. And this came to light for me in Rwanda as we were getting ready to go in because I was the Canadian intelligence officer. I'm the guy who should know what's going on in the country.
But in the case of Rwanda, most of the journalists, in fact, by the time I got there, all of them had left the country. There were no journalists when I arrived. And with the exception of one BBC journalist, there had been very, very few people who stuck around through most of the genocide. But the telling part is that as I was trying to get ready to go to Rwanda, I was desperately looking for anything, any bite, any type of information that I could get my hands on as to what was going on.
This was at the time that OJ Simpson had just killed his wife. And when I was turning on the news, all I could get was hours and hours of coverage of this person called OJ Simpson and the fact that he was accused of having murdered his wife and her lover. And the Western news was absolutely engaged in that activity. And meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of people being slaughtered in Rwanda and there's not a soundbite of there.
And this is what happens when our journalists, or when our journalism becomes entertainment rather than journalism. But since that time, it has gotten worse. When I turn on most television stations today, I see nothing of what's going on in the world. I see nothing of what's going on in Syria today.
I see nothing of what's going on with the Rohingya. I see nothing of what's going on with the Uyghurs in China. I see absolutely nothing about any activity that's occurring against minorities anywhere in the world. And it's happening every day under our nose, but nobody's telling us about it.
Why? Because it doesn't do well in the ratings and it doesn't sell books. So it's up to us to demand better. We must demand better out of our governments.
We must demand better out of our organizations that are supposed to be providing us with news. Again, two white guys sitting across the table yelling at each other about whether something is socialist or fascist isn't news, it's entertainment. And unfortunately, entertainment sells news doesn't. And we are in a situation right now where in the world generally we don't know what's going on.
We don't know what's going on next door. So a little owner in the world. So we're sort of stuck in that situation right now. But I hope desperately that we can get out of it.
But it's going to take a little bit of effort and a little bit of naval gazing in order for us to understand that we are generally ignorant of what's going on in the world. And we don't even see stuff happening inside our communities. Dr. Drew and Dr.
Oswald, thank you again so much for taking the time to talk with us about this very important period in history. And hopefully we can take a look back and take a look around now and learn some lessons from it. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Philip Drew and Dr.
Bruce Oswald. They are the authors of Rwanda, Revisited, Genocide, Civil War and Transformation of International Law. Thank you both for being here. Thank you, Lee.
Thanks, Lee. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple podcast, Spotify and Google podcast.