Editorial

National Identity: E Pluribus Unum or E Pluribus “Pluribus”? 2

Rémy M. Mauduit

Articles

Some Thoughts on the Utilization of the Past in the Military 4

Floribert Baudet, PhD

Truth and Justice

Establishing an Appropriate Accountability Mechanism for Crimes

against Humanity and War Crimes in Africa 15

Kofi Nsia-Pepra, PhD

Strategic Distraction

The Consequence of Neglecting Organizational Design 48

Col John F. Price Jr., United States Air Force

War as the Key to Unlocking Mass Murder

The Rwandan Genocide Revisited 57

Arthur N. Gilbert, PhD

Kristina Hook

Essay

Street, Shrine, Square, and Soccer Pitch

Comparative Protest Spaces in Asia and the Middle East 80

Teresita Cruz-del Rosario, PhD

James M. Dorsey

National Identity: E Pluribus Unum or E Pluribus “Pluribus”?

Globalization not only increases contacts between people but also changes their values, ideas, and ways of life. People travel more frequently and farther. All forms of the media, especially television, now reach families living in the deepest rural areas of the world. As many experts have warned, globalization presents an unusual challenge to national identities. Today’s society appears to be experiencing an accelerating deterioration of such identities through cultural and economic globalization. Pessimists maintain that even if these identities have not yet completely disappeared, they tend to regress and give way to dominant cultural models such as the Western model. Thus, globalization is redefining identities from national to continental dimensions; therefore, maintaining the old national identities is very difficult. This trend will continue since our economic well-being depends indirectly upon the free movement of goods and commodities. In this case, is the nation-state still the most suitable political form? For some individuals, this new diversity is stimulating—even enriching; for them, the nationalism of the past produced bellicose patriotism, xenophobia, and isolationism. For others, the nation would find itself in jeopardy—and with it, the structure of social life, collective solidarity, and even democracy. They fear that their country will fragment, that they will gradually lose their values as the rising number of immigrants brings new customs, and that international trade and modern means of communication will supplant local cultures.

The issue of national identity is eminently present for at least two reasons. First, it is related to wider problems posed by immigration. Second, reactions to dominant identities can sometimes lead to terrorism. In reality, however, the fundamental question in regard to these two very different problems is the same: what is national identity? According to Erik H. Erikson, “The term ‘identity’ expresses . . . a mutual relation in that it connotes both a persistent sameness within oneself (selfsameness) and a persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others.”1 Immigration is one of the major reasons for the weakening of national identity, but immigration alone is not sufficient to explain that phenomenon. We identify the United States as a country of immigrants—one built on their efforts. What makes a person an American is commitment to the national “creed” of democracy and individualism. Belonging to the nation is equated not with shared blood but with common beliefs and customs. Anyone, regardless of ancestry, can become an American through adherence to the dominant set of ideals and the “American’s Creed.”2 But the debate on national identity has resurfaced due to the growth of international migration in the last decades. Because this movement takes place almost entirely from poor to rich countries, immigration policies become an element of social division in many nation-states. The debate is about not only competition for jobs and resources for social assistance but also culture. National identity involves being part of the same group of people—a nation—and giving sovereignty to the general will. In short, it is about social cohesion. Consequently, problems with such cohesion arise as a result of unemployment, inequality, immigration, and so forth, all of which create a crisis of national identity. Remedies are usually expressed by rejection, such as a repudiation of immigration.

The alternative to an e pluribus unum or an e pluribus “pluribus” national identity could take the form of a larger “continental identity,” as predicted by the French historian Ernest Renan for Europe more than a century ago: “Nations are not eternal. They had a beginning and they will have an end. And they will probably be replaced by a European confederation.”3 Otherwise, national identity remains a balance to be won consistently—a balance between “persistent sameness within oneself” and the “persistent sharing of some kind of essential character with others,” as defined by Erikson. If its two components are balanced, then the country lives in harmony, a healthy patriotism exists, and the nation is open to the world. If, instead, discord reigns, then national identity can create a phenomenon of withdrawal and xenophobia that will ultimately prove detrimental to the country. According to this perspective, national identity is constantly changing.

Rémy M. Mauduit, Editor

Air and Space Power Journal–Africa and Francophonie

Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Notes

1. Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1980), 109.

2. William Tyler Page, “The American’s Creed,” 1917, ushistory.org, accessed 2 December 2013, http://www.ushistory.org/documents/creed.htm. The US House of Representatives adopted this creed on 3 April 1918.

3. Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” [What is a nation?] (lecture given at the Sorbonne, Paris, 11 March 1882). See Anne-Marie Thiesse, “Inventing National Identity,” Le Monde Diplomatique, June 1999, http://mondediplo.com/1999/06

/05thiesse.

Some Thoughts on the Utilization of the Past in the Military

Floribert Baudet, PhD*

This article addresses the question of whether military organizations fully exploit the benefits of employing academically trained historians and, as a consequence, discusses the way the military treats the past. Do military organizations still predominantly treat the past as a mirror of the present—a pool of easily accessible knowledge from which to draw clear-cut lessons—as they have for most of recorded history? What exactly do they hope to learn from studying the past? Do the military’s expectations match well with what professional historians can offer since they usually have been taught to question the idea that the past can offer unambiguous guidance and are accustomed to the idea of academic freedom? Are there ways to optimize the utilization of the past?

As it is nigh impossible to discuss all military history in all countries, the article concentrates on Western writing of military history and Western ideas on the relation between the military profession and its history. After all, one may argue that the Western “army model” has become dominant across the globe. The same applies for academic standards. The analysis presented here, therefore, will be relevant to anyone who hopes to learn from the past.

Uses of History in the Military

For most of recorded time, philosophers, historians, and soldiers have argued that history is an important source of practical knowledge and lessons, either for the conduct of campaigns or for the nature of humankind.1 Although past experience does provide useful knowledge, examples of slavish imitation and blind veneration of tradition abound. In 1926 British major general and prominent military theorist J. F. C. Fuller (1878–1966) argued that by obstinately clinging to tradition, officers deprived themselves of a tool to make sense of the complexities of warfare, which had resulted in the carnage of the Great War. A critical, scientific study of past wars would have revealed the nature of the phenomenon of warfare and its likely shape in the future.2 Fuller is far from the only writer to criticize the military’s approach to the past. Such criticism is implicit in the oft-quoted commonplace that the military always prepares for the previous war in order to fight the next one.3

During the twentieth century, the importance that military organizations accorded to the past has had its ups and downs. In spite of Fuller’s vitriolic comments, armed forces were seen increasingly as a huge company that could be managed much the same way as, let’s say, a car factory. That is, all actions and processes were broken down into a sequence of smaller, ever-repeatable acts that conformed to a fixed pattern.4 During the Cold War, many individuals believed that the past could offer no guidance since at no previous time did the future of mankind seem to depend on a single decision. After America’s defeat in Vietnam and following the Israeli-Arab wars, interest in the past rose markedly, to the point that one could speak of a comeback although military history never regained its pre-1914 dominance.

Even so, Fuller’s criticism remains relevant. Whatever the dominant ideas on the utility of the past, the military never stopped producing doctrines and prescripts essentially based on past examples (i.e., on military history). One studies earlier battles and campaigns because they offer an armchair version of military exercises and partially remedy a lack of personal experience in war.5 Since warfare is the most confusing, chaotic, and stressful activity in which humans engage, an enhanced understanding of this activity would enable commanders and units to perform better in terms of effectiveness and force protection. Military organizations study the past in the hope of finding tools for understanding war and preparing commanders and units for it. This interest primarily concerns principles of war, best practices, and unit cohesion.

The idea that principles of war exist originated in the eighteenth century CE and underpinned the foundation of military schools and academies, as well as the development of general staffs. That is, one assumed that the systematic and rational study of campaigns led to an understanding of the nature of war that the military could successfully apply in battle. Adhering to these principles would bring about victory. Once identified, they also found their way into military doctrine, which translated them into practical prescripts for action. This approach, epitomized by Swiss theorist Antoine-Henri de Jomini (1779–1869), remained paramount until well after World War 2.6

In line with the age-old idea that studying “great captains” would produce great captains, there is considerable interest in “lessons learned” and “best practices.” General staffs engage in such endeavors; units must produce after-action reports; military academies and operational units conduct staff rides to obtain insights into the importance of terrain, geography, and leadership; and so forth. The military believes that the past offers clear examples of dos and don’ts that can be internalized and incorporated into training programs.

Additionally, history (dubbed “tradition”) is considered a vital element in unit cohesion, an indispensable quality in battle effectiveness. Units bear historic appellations and have banners that show the names of historic battles in which the unit participated. These banners are displayed during parades and ceremonies, instilling pride. They suggest that the present unit is identical to the one which fought that particular heroic battle. Oftentimes, historical truth is subordinate to this notion. After World War 2, for instance, when the Netherlands had to rebuild its army from scratch, a ministerial decree held that new units “continued” the traditions of the old prewar ones dissolved by the German occupiers. Thus, today, Dutch army units date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7

Fundamentals of the Historical Discipline

The Jominian approach to the past described above is at odds with the fundamental convictions of academically trained historians who, as part of a professionalization impetus in the last decades, have entered the service of Western military organizations to teach and research military history and strategy. Even though this “civilianization” was hardly the “unprecedented disaster” that some old drum-and-trumpet military historians and soldiers believed it to be, an unexpected problem arose—the utility of the past came under question.8 Reasons of space do not permit a discussion of the theories behind the convictions of academically trained historians. Nonetheless the subject is too important to gloss it over completely. The questions of how to establish what actually happened in the past, how we know it happened, what meaning we should attach to it, and how we know we are right are fundamental because they pertain directly to the value of military history to the military.

Most but by no means all of the academically trained military historians would argue that their research methods allow for a fairly accurate reconstruction of past events, not of the past as such—certainly too daunting a task. Professional historians in other historical subdisciplines usually prefer the view that historical inquiry can provide only a construction—the relation between events in the past is not part of that same past but the product of the informed imagination of the historian. Academically trained military historians would agree to a certain point: causal relations between events are real but do not conform to preexisting “laws.” They also would hesitate to suggest future developments on the basis of past events. As a consequence, they take issue with the belief that “immutable principles” exist. The past doesn’t repeat itself.

Generally, historians also reject the idea that it is possible to distill clear-cut lessons from the past. What we know about the past is based on sources that do not simply list all that happened. Instead, they are rife with conjecture, interpretations, (un)intentional simplifications, and hidden agendas. Historians, nonetheless, must base their accounts on those sources since they have nothing else to go by. Additionally, many events either lack trustworthy sources or enjoy a surplus so large that it inhibits thorough study. Any “lesson” drawn is therefore a construct rather than something that the past unmistakably offers. Lastly, while acknowledging that traditions may prove useful in cementing a sense of shared destiny, historians consider the way the military conceives “traditions” as outright folklore and myth.

In short, according to academics, the value and utility of the past to the present do not lie in traditions, lessons, or immutable principles but in the fact that it is different. In this view, understanding just how it differs promotes a deeper understanding of both past and present because it challenges assumptions and ingrained beliefs. Studying the past involves change rather than continuity and coping with uncertainty rather than establishing eternal truths.

This approach to the past resembles the one developed by Prussian general and theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831), which, in turn, had much in common with the methods preached by his near contemporary and conational Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), one of the founding fathers of the academic discipline of history.9 Like his contemporaries, Clausewitz strongly believed that one could learn from the past, but, unlike them, he was interested in the nature of war rather than in practical prescripts. Clausewitz held that one could understand war by meticulously studying a single, particular phenomenon.10 The likes of Jomini, however, tended to heap together various cases and impose their own models upon them. In Clausewitz’s view, war is always a political instrument, but the shape it takes is determined by the interplay among rational choice, irrational factors such as hatred and the use of violence, and chance. This interplay, which exists in each warring side and, of course, in the exchanges on the battlefield, is different in each era.

Not What to Think but How to Think

Clausewitz’s premature death and the complexity of his analysis precluded a large following during his lifetime. Recommended by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, Clausewitz enjoyed a surge in popularity in the late nineteenth century. Although most armed forces today pay lip service to Clausewitz, the Jominian model with its focus on principles, lessons, and best practices has remained preeminent.11

In their belief in immutable principles, military organizations are prone to project historical phenomena both forward and backward. They hold that history repeats itself, if not literally, because human nature does not change.12 Even military theorist Basil Liddell Hart (1895–1970), who often has much useful to say, took some pride in working according to this procedure.13 This practice is at odds with the idea of constant change prevalent among professional academic historians.

Consequently, important questions (e.g., to what extent accounts of past battles are truthful reflections of what actually happened and the problem of establishing causal relations between events) more often than not are passed over. Thus, failure in battle is attributed primarily to ignoring the principles or not drawing the “correct” lessons. But what lessons can be learned when the information is incorrect or biased or when conclusions are actually much less firm than presented?

This situation is aggravated by the fact that writers who lack academic training still produce most military history and cannot be bothered by such questions. They seek to glorify and to warn or rehabilitate, much less to understand. This may lead to grotesque distortions of reality such as books that framed the crushing defeat of the Netherlands at the hand of the Germans in 1940 as a contribution to Allied victory.14 Further, compare recent discussions on the professional networking website LinkedIn about which British or Commonwealth unit was the most gallant. But how could we compare, say, Waterloo, Vimy Ridge, and El Alamein? The net result of the fact that there are many varieties on offer implies that the military can choose the history of its liking. It might well choose to pass by the brand written by academically trained historians as it is the least useful to the military when it comes to distilling practical lessons—that commodity which military organizations crave most. Historians cannot teach practical lessons, provide clear solutions for problems in the present, or predict. We are no prophets.15

Actually passing by academically trained historians would be counterproductive to say the least. Precisely because they are sensitive to methodological problems and question the existence of immutable principles, such historians produce (re)constructions that take into account the fact that we cannot always establish with certainty what really happened. As such they are equipped to help the armed forces prepare for the uncertainties of the battlefield. We cannot offer best practices or prove the existence of eternal principles, but we can offer something more valuable: an idea of the complexity, chaos, and untidiness of war. We can show how and why decisions were made, both rationally and intuitively. Many, if not most, acts and decisions in war come about in a mixture of rational deliberation and intuition—even impulse—regardless of the official view that commanders make decisions rationally. For instance, the ability to intuitively “read” a battlefield or a situation is a vital asset for commanders at every level. To ignore irrational and intuitive elements, friction and chance, would reduce war to something that it is not—a game of chess in which generals move pawns at will. Rather it is a manifestation of the interplay among chance and rational as well as irrational, even subconscious, factors. We may also identify underlying patterns of thought (“military culture”) that influenced them, and we can show the actual outcome of those decisions. In so doing, we may be able to instill an intuitive understanding of what war is all about and what cadets and midshipmen may expect. Such knowledge does not arise from a quick run-through of a few pages in a textbook but from hard thinking and would fit in the current philosophy of many military academies in the West tasked with training “thinking soldiers.”16 Apart from stimulating cultural awareness, an understanding of the complexity and unpredictability of warfare will hopefully encourage junior officers to think critically, ask the right questions, and perform a crucial role as advisers to their commanding officers.

Contrastingly, in their (understandable) quest for certainty, military organizations that turn to the other varieties of military history may unknowingly spread half-truths and myths which impair proper understanding of the dynamics of war and may inhibit rather than improve the armed forces’ performance on the battlefield. Academically trained historians, therefore, have a vital role to perform in the training of officers and in the evaluation of military operations.

To capitalize on these benefits, though, one must meet an important precondition. If historians are to truly contribute to an improved battlefield performance, they need access to all of the material pertaining to a particular event. Only then can they establish what actually happened. This is desirable not simply from a scholarly perspective. If the military wishes to learn from abysmal failures, then covering them up, distorting them, or downplaying their importance surely is not the best way to proceed. The only possible way to learn and prevent their recurrence is to involve professionals specifically trained to conduct research. They may include not only historians but also people from other disciplines. It is important, however, that they study the past for what it is—not for what it should have been. Accessing the magisterial potential of past battles and operations occurs only when historians are free to analyze all of the sources. Studying the past in a truthful manner is difficult enough with an abundance of sources; withholding access to them makes it even more difficult. The resulting picture will be distorted and biased, effectively destroying the possibility of learning from the past. Equally important, researchers must be free to select their own subject and case studies and have access to facilities for a free discussion about their findings. Although military authorities may think differently, this is not just a scholarly interest. As Liddell Hart wrote, “Camouflaged history not only conceals faults and deficiencies that could otherwise be remedied, but engenders false confidence—and false confidence underlies most of the failures that military history records. It is the dry rot of armies.”17

Constraints

Even if military organizations fully shared this view (as yet, they do not), military historians working within military organizations will always encounter a number of limitations to the topics they can address. Four come to mind. First, whatever the official position on academic freedom, tension exists between official spokespersons and academics in the military. The former are employed to inform the public, explain a certain course of action, and limit political damage resulting from it. Historical research may produce unsettling results that potentially affect the position of the minister.

Second, because historians working for the military will be either civil servants or professional soldiers, they must swear an oath of allegiance, in most cases to the constitution. The oath obligates them not to disclose secrets, among other things. However, what constitutes a secret is not for historians to decide. Abysmal failure is often a cause for censorship. The actual limiting effects of the oath depend upon the political system and situation of a particular country. Conceivably, its impact may be alleviated by some sort of negotiation: historians working for the military may study all of the relevant documents but not refer to them directly, and they must submit their publication for approval. Such requirements, however, might very well prompt the question to what extent such publications may still be considered academic since any debate on them will be hampered by the fact that access to the sources is restricted to historians working for the military. For the military itself, such “camouflaged” material would (or should) prove equally problematic.

A third limitation, the security of ongoing operations, is a legitimate concern, and historians working for the military would generally accept this restriction. But authorities may invoke the argument of security at will, and military-employed historians are hardly in a position to challenge them successfully. Apart from security reasons, methodological considerations present themselves. Although the argument that camouflaged history “is the dry rot of armies,” of course, remains valid for ongoing operations, military-employed historians generally refrain from publicly commenting on such operations.18

The last limitation, which differs somewhat from the others, may also be found in civilian universities: the need to be “relevant,” which may slowly erode academic freedom in the military. Of course, researchers working with the military will have to address subjects relevant to the institution, but how does one establish military relevance? This situation is aggravated by the fact that bureaucratic organizations are inclined to respond to actual needs and that they demand quick answers. More often than not, solving field problems in the ongoing operation is the only concern for the military—and even for its long-term planners. For researchers working for the military, however, this may pose a problem since research programs are financed on the basis of “relevance,” so they are expected to concentrate on such field problems. Proper (historical) research usually takes time; therefore, upon its completion, another field problem requiring a “relevant” solution may have arisen. The criterion of relevance is also problematic since it assumes that the outcome of a given research project can be known beforehand. Oftentimes, however, the unexpected outcomes have proven most relevant.19

A Code of Ethics

These four types of tension cannot be solved, at least not permanently, but one can alleviate them. Potentially, the most effective way involves tapping into the military’s interest in learning because we can be sure that whatever there is to learn from the past suffers from the impediments described above. To instill such an understanding would require a sustained effort on the part of professional historians to clarify what they can and cannot provide.

Part of this effort to enhance their “utility” would entail adopting and then invoking a code that sets professional standards. This may even be the case when a legal or political guarantee of academic freedom applies. Their added value lies in the fact that historians can present military organizations with an explicit formulation of the academic foundations of their profession. Since these codes also list obligations, such as the one to report their findings truthfully and the one to do proper heuristics, military organizations can ascertain the standards that historians are to uphold.

Because military organizations care for their public image, a situation in which the output of scholars in their service is markedly less, qualitatively, than the academic standards may be a cause for (some) concern. As such, it may give historians some breathing and negotiating space. Many Western military organizations—and probably a few others too—subscribe to the idea of accountability. This primarily means accountability towards society that funds it, but it also includes the willingness to account for past actions. Enter the historian.

Additionally, an ethical code may be of service to both historians and their employer by offering a litmus test of quality and acting as a moral compass in the negotiation process between military historians and the military. It supplies the bandwidth for these negotiations and may carry home the idea that historical reality itself is nonnegotiable. Even so, military historians are not the equals of the military. As civil servants or members of the military hierarchy, they may question the judgment of their employer and try to increase their leeway. In the end, though, it all comes down to the willingness of this employer to learn from or account for its acts. If this is fundamentally absent, then an ethical code or a right to know can do hardly anything.

Conclusion

Some 50 years ago, eminent military historian Michael Howard summarized the relevance of military history to the military profession, noting that it would make “both professions wiser forever.”20 His remark went against the military and academic grain since he was speaking at a moment when the relevance of the past seemed very much in doubt. Its magisterial potential had been questioned, and most military history writing remained below academic standards. Since then, much has changed; among other things, the concept of the thinking soldier has inspired a reappraisal of military history. In several military organizations, the magisterial potential of the past is no longer sought in what to think but in how to think.

Nonetheless, military historians face legal, institutional, political, and security-related limitations that affect the way they work. These limitations occur everywhere, albeit in different shapes and with different effects. In accountability-minded organizations, military historians are in a much better position than their colleagues in an inward-looking organization. The irony, of course, is that by placing limitations on their historians, military organizations may very well erode the authoritative potential of the past they hope to tap into. There is nothing to learn from intentionally distorted accounts. Only full access to the sources (both documentary and living) and freedom to discuss them, as well as to write and disseminate their findings, will enable military historians to complete sound research and produce insights that will contribute to the improvement of the military’s performance.

At the same time, it is clear that such an ideal situation will rarely materialize. The actual leeway that historians will acquire depends upon the outcome of a negotiation process of sorts. In this process, historians may profit from the codes of ethics that several of their colleagues in civilian institutions have adopted because they establish clear academic standards that should be upheld. Failure to attain those standards may contribute (or even lead) to battlefield failure and will diminish the standing of the military. In the end, although this nonarmed struggle may prove hard and long drawn, it is one that must be fought. It is the only way to make both professions wiser forever.

*The author is an associate professor of strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy. A historian by training, he received his PhD from Utrecht University in 2001. He has published widely on Dutch foreign and defense policy during the Cold War, human rights, the wars of the Yugoslav succession, and historical methodology. His current book, Het vierde wapen (The fourth weapon [Amsterdam: Boom, 2013]), focuses on the home front in Dutch post–World War 2 defense planning and the covert actions to bolster its morale.

Notes

1. Cf. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (London: J. M. Dent, 1910), bk. 1, chap. 22, sec. 4; and Plutarch, The Life of Alexander (New York: Random House, 2004), sec. 8.1. On Maurice of Nassau, another prime example, see Gerhard Oestreich, “Der Römische Stoizismus und die Oranische Heeresreform,” Historische Zeitschrift 176 (1953): 17–43. See also Petra H. M. Groen, ed., De tachtigjarige oorlog: Van opstand naar geregelde oorlog, 1568–1648 (Amsterdam: Boom, 2013).

2. J. F. C. Fuller, The Foundations of the Science of War (London: Hutchinson, 1926).

3. Reality is rather more complex than that. Compare the ways the Germans, British, and French reassessed their World War One experience. Williamson Murray, “Thoughts on Military History and the Profession of Arms,” in The Past as Prologue: The Importance of History to the Military Profession, ed. Williamson Murray and Richard Hart Sinnreich (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 78–94.

4. Eric Sibul, “Military History in Professional Military Education to Prepare for a Complex and Dangerous World” (paper presented at the International Society of Military Sciences conference, Amsterdam, 26 November 2009); and Richard Hart Sinnreich, “Awkward Partners: Military History and American Military Education,” in Murray and Sinnreich, Past as Prologue, 55–77.

5. Murray, “Thoughts on Military History,” 87–88; and Michael Howard, “The Uses and Abuses of Military History,” Journal of the Royal United Services Institute 107 (February 1962): 4–10.

6. Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic, What Is Military History? (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2006), 29–36. Cf. Peter Paret, ed., with the collaboration of Gordon A. Craig and Felix Gilbert, Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 143ff.

7. Dutch standing order 1946, no. 286; and ministerial decree, 19 August 1946, MK-B II, no. 917.

8. Allan R. Millet, “American Military History: Clio and Mars as ‘Pards,’ ” in Military History and the Military Profession, ed. David A. Charters, Marc Milner, and J. Brent Wilson (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 14.

9. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), xv.

10. Carl von Clausewitz, Vom Kriege (Berlin: Dümmlers Verlag, 1832–35), II, 6, 91.

11. See, for instance, Christopher Bassford, Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe, eds., Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).

12. W. C. Fuller Jr., “What Is a Military Lesson?,” in Strategic Studies: A Reader, ed. Thomas G. Mahnken and Joseph A. Maiolo (London: Routledge, 2008), 34–50.

13. B. H. Liddell Hart, Why Don’t We Learn from History?, rev. and expanded ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), 16.

14. This is expressed in the series of works by retired Dutch lieutenant colonel E. H. Brongers. For a scholarly analysis of the same war, see Herman Amersfoort and Piet Kamphuis, eds., May 1940: The Battle for the Netherlands (Leyden: Brill, 2010). For a typology of the current varieties of military history, see Morillo and Pavkovic, What Is Military History?; and Millet, “American Military History.’’

15. Cf. Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 8; and Fuller, “What Is a Military Lesson?”

16. Charles C. Krulak, “The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War,” Marines Magazine, January 1999, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/strategic_corporal.htm; and Maj Lynda Liddy, “The Strategic Corporal: Some Requirements in Training and Education,” Australian Army Journal 2, no. 2 (Autumn 2005): 139–48.

17. Liddell Hart, Why Don’t We Learn?, 27.

18. They might of course resort to the Chatham House Rules: speaker and audience agree that the speaker will share sensitive information on the condition that this information will not be referred to directly in public and that the identity of the source will be not be disclosed.

19. Unintentional discoveries include penicillin, radioactivity, and phosphorus. On these, see Ola Olsson, “Why Does Technology Advance in Cycles?,” Journal of Economic Growth 10 (2005): 31–53; Donald W. McRobbie et al., MRI from Picture to Proton (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2; and Herbert Ellern, Military and Civilian Pyrotechnics (New York: Chemical Publishing Company, 1968), 33. In military history, research on the causes of the German victory over France in 1940 produced unexpected findings. See Karl-Heinz Frieser, Blitzkrieg-Legende: Der Westfeldzug 1940 (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1995).

20. Howard, “Uses and Abuses,” 8.

Truth and Justice

Establishing an Appropriate Accountability Mechanism for Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes in Africa

Kofi Nsia-Pepra, PhD*

The end of the Cold War precipitated optimism regarding a peaceful world order based on ideals of international solidarity and respect for human rights. However, this new attitude slipped into a state of hopelessness with the emergence of devastating conflicts along ethnic, religious, and political fault lines, together with shocking mass human-rights violations such as murder, rape, ethnic cleansing, and other acts of aggression against civilians—especially in Africa.1 Post–Cold War Africa is blighted by brutish civil wars, such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, that target innocent civilians. African conflicts have been responsible for more than half of all war-related deaths in the world and have produced millions of refugees and displaced persons.2 Egregious atrocities against civilians have necessitated the establishment of accountability mechanisms by successor regimes in Africa to redress human-rights abuses and end a tradition of impunity, deter future abuses, and create a social order to advance the process of reconciliation. However, policy makers and practitioners differ on the appropriate mechanism of accountability. Contemporary debate is fixated on the choice between truth commissions and tribunals. While proponents of the former argue for forgiveness to ensure reconciliation, others advocate punishment to stop the cycle of impunity and deter future violations. Proponents of restorative justice—individuals who favor reconciliation among former foes over punishment of the perpetrators of crimes—contend that lasting peace necessitates starting afresh by forgiving and forgetting, as does the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).3 People who favor retributive justice—those who invoke a moral obligation to prosecute violators—maintain that punishment institutionalizes the rule of law and assures the citizenry of states’ capacity to safeguard their security and deter future violations.4 Africa has experimented with both truth commissions and trials, but each has produced mixed results of failure and success.

Truth commissions have existed in Africa since 1974, the South African TRC the most prominent among them. Uganda, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Central African Republic, Ghana, Liberia, Morocco, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Nigeria also have such commissions, but none has produced the desired results.5 Uganda’s Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances of People in Uganda, established by President Idi Amin in 1974, did not prevent him from committing serious atrocities against his people.6 Despite global admiration, the South African TRC has been criticized for subjecting powerful individuals such as Winnie Mandela and F. W. de Klerk to a lesser form of accountability despite their involvement in human-rights violations.7 The Ethiopian War Crimes Trials did not stop the ruling government, which established the trials, from committing such violations. Ethiopians’ mistrust in the government, caused by its human-rights record, undermined their confidence in the court as well as its legitimacy.8 The International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda (ICTR) has been accused of partiality for prosecuting only Hutus without indicting members of a Tutsi rebel movement—the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF)—which reportedly killed thousands of civilians.9

A survey of literature on transitional justice in Africa reveals many scholarly works on either truth commissions or tribunals but only a limited number of studies of a hybrid model of truth and justice. This article evaluates the success of South Africa’s TRC, Rwanda’s ICTR, and Sierra Leone’s hybrid model of a national TRC and special court, focusing on transitional justice goals of impartiality, accountability, reconciliation, and deterrence, and proposing an appropriate hybrid model of accountability for Africa. Toward that end, it examines theoretical arguments by proponents of truth commissions, trials, and a hybrid mechanism of truth and trials; addresses the cases of Rwanda’s ICTR, South Africa’s TRC, and Sierra Leone’s hybrid model; and then proposes an appropriate hybrid accountability mechanism for Africa.

Theoretical Arguments:

Truth, Trial, or a Hybrid Model of Truth and Trial?

Truth Commissions

Generally, truth commissions are established to investigate and obtain an accurate record of war crimes and human-rights violations by a government or armed opposition. For the most part, they are created at a point of political transition within a country to underscore a break with a horrific record of human-rights abuses and to promote national reconciliation.10 The mechanism requires acknowledging the truth, which entails perpetrators admitting violations and the concomitant forgiveness by victims—ultimately culminating in healing and reconciliation. According to Aryeh Neier, an acknowledgment of violations at least begins to heal the wounds.11 Proponents argue that truth telling provides opportunities to heal, restore human dignity, demonstrate censure for horrific acts, facilitate democracy, and promote reconciliation when past abuses are confronted and perpetrators acknowledge them directly to victims.12 Priscilla Hayner observes that truth commissions elicit values beyond criminal liability, essentially ensuring accountability, preventing further abuses, and promoting political reforms, stability, and reconciliation.13 The basic thrust of this position is that an honest account of the violence prevents a loss of history and allows society to learn from its past to deter appalling acts in the future.14 An accurate record of atrocities offers hope that a more knowledgeable citizenry would be emboldened to resist future repressive rule.15 Charles Krauthammer argues that truth telling promotes reconciliation but that trials are vindictive.16

Proponents note that truth commissions are a more viable option than trials, whose political and practical realities make prosecution impracticable.17 The commissions prove useful when many people have committed atrocities, as in South Africa, making it difficult to prosecute all perpetrators—including the civil service in the previous regime, which was manipulated to commit violations. Jonathan Tepperman observes that the new democracy would discover the impossibility of prosecuting and purging all of its experienced technocrats.18 A formal objection to prosecution maintains that resource scarcity and an incapacitated domestic judicial system prevent the prosecution of all perpetrators. Additionally, trials would prove expensive for fledgling democracies often strapped for funds. Since not all violators can be prosecuted, trials often face accusations of selectivity that discredit their legitimacy because such charges connote discrimination and favoritism.19 Skeptics of prosecution further argue that warring factions would not give up fighting and sign peace agreements when they know they would be prosecuted and jailed. Fear of imprisonment may discourage dictators from leaving power, leading to further violations and dashing any hopes for peace.20 The argument for leniency involves the salience of reconciliation to build a more peaceful society. The Chilean government, for example, criticized the British and Spanish courts for disturbing the delicate balance between justice and stability reached by all Chilean parties when they arrested former president Augusto Pinochet for crimes against humanity.21 Stephan Landsman notes that where the balance of power favors the departing regime, amnesty becomes a better option.22 He contends that since the ultimate goal of ending conflict is reconciliation of combatants and their full reintegration into society, prosecution may destroy the fragile compromise reached by the parties and jeopardize the reconciliation process.23 Paul van Zyl also observes that the balance of power between the new and old regimes in Chile and South Africa made amnesty the more viable mechanism to secure a transition.24 Carlos Santiago Nino concurs, writing that a successor regime struggling to consolidate power might avoid stability-threatening prosecution and, to ensure its survivability, would pragmatically co-opt established institutions still loyal to the disposed regime.25 Some argue that truth commissions, unlike trials, can make reform recommendations to prevent future occurrences of atrocities, establish norms of accountability, create security sectors, strengthen the legal system, instill the practice of human rights, and promote democratic governance.26

Despite these cogent arguments in support of truth commissions, some scholars hold that the evidence is decidedly mixed.27 Jonathan Allen notes that justice often becomes the casualty of political calculation with the choice of truth commissions.28 As evident in the Ugandan Commission, some truth commissions are farcical and manipulated, subject to criticism as a second-best alternative to criminal prosecution.29 Diane Orentlicher states that “whatever salutary effects it can produce, [a truth commission] . . . is no substitute for . . . prosecutions. Indeed, to the extent that such an undertaking purports to replace criminal punishment . . . it diminishes the authority of the legal process.”30 Eric Brahm points to anecdotal evidence that “truth can rekindle anger and trigger posttraumatic stress among victims” at the individual level and that it may generate resentment and insecurity at the aggregate level.31 Juan Méndez and Javier Mariezcurrena also note that truth telling often reappears in states that have conducted truth commissions, suggesting that the commissions themselves do not provide closure to abuses.32 To skeptics, the ability of such commissions to hold violators accountable seems illusory; consequently, they demand trials as a more appropriate mechanism of accountability.33

Tribunals

International or domestic tribunals are established for the prosecution and punishment of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Retributive justice or prosecution dates back to the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials of individuals who committed atrocities during World War II.34 The recent establishment of ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, as well as the newly created International Criminal Court, manifests the contemporary demand for prosecutions as appropriate responses to mass atrocity. The basic goal is criminal accountability for violators who committed and masterminded gross abuses of human rights. Other objectives of prosecution include exorcising a culture of impunity that breeds future despots, breaking the cycle of violence, and achieving a sense of justice for victims to promote reconciliation and deter similar acts in the future. Proponents of tribunals declare that international law obliges states to investigate and punish violations of human rights, pointing out that the policy of impunity by way of repeated amnesty laws or simply de facto refusal to investigate crimes encourages further human-rights violations.35 Further, they declare that, “together with deterrence, retribution is the object traditionally assigned to criminal punishment,” that modern society strives for rehabilitation of the offender, and that rehabilitation is not a policy of vindictiveness.36

Proponents of the tribunal argue that society punishes atrocious acts to underscore the importance of norms that prohibit genocide and crimes against humanity.37 Méndez also notes that prosecution assures citizens of their importance and that offenses against their inherent human rights will not be tolerated. In its simplest form, punishment signals to would-be violators that society does not brook behavior which breaches the rule of law designed to protect the innocent.38 Society, therefore, punishes because it is imperative to demonstrate to the victim that his or her rights will be protected. Furthermore, some scholars argue that prosecution is the most effective means of separating collective guilt from individual guilt and thus removes the stigma of historic misdeeds from the innocent members of communities collectively blamed for atrocities committed against other communities, averting future vengeance on them.39 Tribunals increasingly appear indispensable in upholding the rule of law on a global scale, especially when elementary forms of humanitarian and human rights are blatantly trampled upon. Prosecution reasserts confidence in the rule of law in states emerging from a horrendous past and in a transitional democracy.

Critics of prosecution, however, point to some inherent shortcomings of trials. Some critics believe that the adversarial nature of trials reduces the likelihood of restoring fractured relationships and enhances the possibility of provoking further violence and putting democratic rule at risk.40 Trials, critics argue, also appear less effective in dealing with systematic injustices and collective offenses.41 The pursuit of legal accountability may be unfair, morally inappropriate, and practically difficult because of the virtual impossibility of trying everyone where crimes have been widespread and occurred long ago. Thus, trials bear the stigma of selective justice since, in most cases, lower-level perpetrators are held accountable—not the leadership.42

Hybrid Model: Truth and Justice

In view of the limitations of both truth commissions and courts in fully capturing transitional justice goals on their own, some practitioners and advocates have cautioned against relying solely on either prosecution or truth commissions, suggesting a hybrid model of truth and trials as the appropriate accountability mechanism for meeting the goals of transitional justice.43 Martha Minow notes the “incompleteness and inescapable inadequacy of each possible response to collective atrocities” and indicates that structures of retributive and restorative justice can coexist.44 According to Bill Rolston, “To seek truth without justice is to risk achieving neither.”45 Van Zyl writes that “properly confronting the past cannot be accomplished successfully by any single institution or approach,” suggesting a “holistic approach to transitional justice” that combines truth and trials.46 Accountability mechanisms of transitional justice, it seems, should not be restricted to a choice between truths and trials; rather, they can include both.47 According to Elizabeth Evenson, truth commissions and trials have unique institutional competencies, and their concurrent operation would be complementary. She believes that truth commissions can augment prosecutions by providing additional values, such as clarification and acknowledgement of truth, and can recommend reforms, which are neither fully nor adequately captured by prosecutions alone.48 Proponents identify truth and punishment as legitimate conditions for any policy of accountability for violations of human rights, noting that in such a policy, the truth must be known and punishment must be carried out with due respect for international principles of due process.49 Truth commissions capture the overflow from prosecutions.

Together, both tribunals and truth commissions create a new paradigm for a society in transition from a ravaged, horrible past to peace by addressing systematic abuses of human rights. One needs prosecution alongside truth because the norms of extrajudicial execution, torture, and genocide—clearly stated in major human-rights instruments—provide a legal and moral obligation to punish. Moreover, in a state where both truth and justice command support (e.g., the South African case), it is appropriate to balance legitimate interest for prosecution against the desire for a truth commission since neither by itself can achieve reconciliation and stability. More precisely, an adequate model must consider that the operation of prosecution in tandem with truth commissions would satisfy the supporters of both truth and trial, leading to healing and reconciliation. Neither truth nor justice is an alternative but an integral part of a holistic approach to reconciliation and peace. A true and lasting peace should comprise a mix of the truth, forgiveness, and justice to bridge the gap between tribunals and truth commissions. A paradigm shift occurs with the choice of either truth or trial or a hybrid model of truth and justice in which truth commissions concurrently operate in tandem with trials—as in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Peru, and East Timor.50 In view of the persuasive arguments by advocates for each of the mechanisms, we should ascertain the capacity of each accountability mechanism to realize the goals of transitional justice. This study does so by using the criteria of impartiality, accountability, deterrence, and reconciliation.

Criteria of Evaluating the Accountability Mechanism’s Success

Analysts differ on the appropriate framework for analysis in evaluating the success of both truth and trials. Evenson identifies individual criminal accountability, deterrence, punishment, and truth telling as the four general objectives of transitional justice that heal and reconcile a society emerging from egregious crimes.51 She notes, however, that the particular political, economic, and social contexts of each country in transition will shape its specific goals. Miriam Aukerman also identifies retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, restoration, and condemnation / social solidarity as the five separate goals for any justice process.52 This study uses “success” in the sense of the attainment of transitional justice aims of impartiality, accountability, reconciliation, and deterrence. It evaluates the success of South Africa’s TRC, Rwanda’s ICTR, and Sierra Leone’s hybrid model of a national TRC and Special Court that uses these goals of transitional justice.

Accountability for human-rights atrocities involves holding individuals responsible for acts that violate the most cherished, fundamental human rights. It is the state of being answerable, liable, or accountable for crimes committed. Individuals are held culpable or responsible for egregious conduct toward fellow humans, and accountability is a means of protecting human dignity.53 An accountability mechanism for human-rights violations—truth or trial—designates the procedure of investigation and the determination of individual accountability for such violations, specifying measures to deter future violations. “Criminal responsibility varies from place to place but, in general, to be responsible for a criminal act implies the perpetrator must understand that what they are doing and that it is wrong.”54 Primarily, it entails the violator’s acknowledgement and assumption of responsibility for actions and his suffering punishment for the misconduct.55

Impartiality, a principle of justice, holds that violators of human rights should be held accountable for their actions without any prejudice, bias, or favoritism; thus, the accountability mechanism’s decisions should be based on objective criteria, and one should hold all violators to the same standard of justice. The theory of judicial independence and impartiality asserts that judges in a court of law must render decisions and punishments in accordance with established legal principles—free from any social, cultural, or political bias.56 This theory lies at the heart of not only domestic legal systems but also the concept of justice itself. In the realm of international criminal justice, a frequent criticism of this theory is the occurrence of a “victor’s justice,” which occurs when observers believe that a victorious party is applying different rules to judge the defeated party in the postwar era.57 Since the victorious party now has control and power to institute a judicial process to prosecute former enemies, it can act in its own interest by simply punishing them instead of pursuing true justice. Victor’s justice can also refer to the deliberate refusal to use war-crimes tribunals to prosecute the victors themselves for any crimes.58

Reconciliation as an objective of transitional justice denotes the process of reestablishing cordial relations between violators and victims that would lead to peace. The concern is whether conflicting parties can establish a common basis for statehood and acceptance of past atrocities. Closely related to reconciliation is the sense of justice for victims and their families—justice that is necessary for the personal and psychological healing which allows for reconciliation. It also dampens motives for revenge killings. Moreover, reconciliation asserts that one must make a concerted effort to educate members of the public on the process of accountability so that they may view it as legitimate in the search for social and political cohesion.

The theory of deterrence—the act of discouraging actions or preventing occurrences through fear of an existing credible threat of unacceptable counteraction or punishment against the violator—considers the violator a rational, utility-maximizing actor. That is to say, the possibility of facing punishment for criminal activity is a sufficiently strong deterrent to persuade him not to commit the act at all. Persons commit crimes when the expected value of doing so exceeds the cost of punishment.59 This article examines the accountability mechanism’s capacity to deter the recurrence of human-rights violations by examining the success of Rwanda’s tribunal, South Africa’s TRC, and Sierra Leone’s hybrid model of truth and justice, using the above-mentioned criteria.

Cases

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

In 1994 Rwanda was engulfed in a horrific genocide perpetuated by the Hutu majority, who killed about 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. To hold all perpetrators of genocide accountable, Rwanda established three mechanisms: the ICTR for Rwanda, the formal domestic justice system, and gacaca, an indigenous conflict-resolution process. Further, the United Nations (UN) created a Commission of Experts to investigate and make recommendations concerning grave violations of international law and genocide. The committee recommended establishment of an international tribunal to prosecute offenders, and on 8 November 1994, UN Security Council Resolution 955 did so in the form of the ICTR for Rwanda, which would hold violators accountable. Prior to its creation, debate took place on whether an international or a local tribunal was more suitable. In a report, the Commission of Experts argued that prosecution would be better under an international court rather than a municipal tribunal, warning that convictions by the Rwandan courts would likely be perceived not as justice but as vindictive retribution.60 An alternate argument offered that domestic courts could enhance the legitimacy of the new Rwandan government and judiciary. The UN decided that acts of genocide would be prosecuted by the ICTR established in Arusha, Tanzania, and other crimes tried by a Rwandan court in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. The ICTR received funds from the UN and voluntary contributions of money, personnel, and equipment from various countries.61 The Rwandan court could impose the death penalty, but the UN’s international tribunal would not. The Arusha tribunal dealt with the central core of culprits known as the “zero network” of about 100–300 persons who organized and planned the genocide. The Kigali court dealt with local leaders not part of the zero network but who ordered the killing and all those who killed atrociously.

Rwanda’s national courts operated in parallel with the ICTR, but the country’s formal justice system was so decimated that the government and international observers estimated that at the current pace, it would take more than a century to prosecute the more than 100,000 suspects languishing in Rwandan prisons.62 Rwanda’s judicial system lost over 80 percent of its legal officials, and many legal facilities incurred damage as well.63 By early 2004, the nation’s formal courts had tried approximately 5,500 suspects.64 The Rwandan government found itself frustratingly wracked in a judicial conundrum because the two Western-inspired justice systems proved incapable of holding all genocide suspects accountable, so it began to look at other options. By 1999 Rwanda authorities felt they needed an alternate system to augment the work of the courts in expeditiously ensuring justice for both suspects and victims of the genocide. The government recognized that some measured use of restorative justice in tandem with retributive justice would help attain better accountability.65 Consequently, it decided to blend gacaca with the Western legal tradition, considering gacaca the best option for dealing with the overcrowding of prisons and backlog of cases in the decimated Rwandan courts.66

Gacaca—literally “justice on the grass”—is a traditional form of citizen-based, populist conflict-resolution involving the community at every level. It consists of an open, public, participatory tribunal that contextually responds to the needs of the Rwandan communitarian society. Gacaca was used at the local level to settle family disputes and minor offenses between neighbors to restore social order and harmony in the community. Adaptation of a traditional, grassroots conflict-resolution mechanism—the gacaca tribunals—represents an affordable and expedient alternative. Gacaca seeks to incorporate the truth-telling elements of a truth commission into a judicial system that punishes offenders. Consequently, in 2001 the government resurrected and modified the traditional gacaca to deal with the more serious genocidal cases that had clogged the Rwandan prisons and courts. During the period of its operation from 2001 to 2012, the government established about 11,000 gacaca community courts, through which the Rwandan public tried and judged those who wished to confess or had been accused of genocide crimes. The courts would prosecute cases ranging from those involving property (heard at the smallest, or cellule, level) to assaults (heard at the next-higher level) to international and unintentional homicides (at the top level). Those accused of sexual crimes or organizing or inciting genocide would be tried in the formal courts or before the ICTR.67 The government estimated that it could try all of the accused within five years; indeed, the process proved much faster than the traditional Western legal system.

Assessment of Efforts in Rwanda

The right of the accused to a fair trial and an impartial tribunal is guaranteed in Article 20 of the ICTR statute.68 The ICTR has been criticized for delays in both bringing detainees to trial and the duration of the latter. By late 2003, the tribunal had adjudicated 17 defendants, and another 50 suspects remained in detention. The ICTR had made a priority of prosecuting those most responsible for the Rwandan genocide. However, the ICTR has been accused of partiality for prosecuting only Hutus despite evidence that the Tutsi-led RPF reportedly killed thousands of civilians.69 Part of the problem lies in the hindrances posed by the Tutsi-dominated government of Paul Kagame. For instance, in 2002, when the chief prosecutor launched investigations of several high-ranking RPF officers for such crimes, the Rwandan government restricted travel on Rwandans, making it impossible for witnesses to leave the country to travel to the tribunal in Arusha.70 As a result, the ICTR had to suspend three trials in June 2002 for lack of witnesses. In addition, the UN Security Council has continuously put pressure on the ICTR to bring its prosecutions to a swift conclusion.71

Although designed to “contribute to the process of national reconciliation” in Rwanda, the ICTR has not effectively done so because of accusations of partiality by holding only Hutu violators accountable.72 As the International Crisis Group notes, “The victims of the crimes of the RPF denounce [the ICTR] . . . as an instrument of the Kigali regime, seeing the ICTR as a symbol of victor’s justice.”73 The ICTR had limited impact on reconciliation within Rwanda because a majority of the Rwandan public remains unaware of the tribunal’s work. In a survey conducted in 2002 in four Rwandan communities, 87.2 percent of the respondents claimed that they were either not well informed or not at all informed about the tribunal.74 Its distant location in Tanzania and the prevalence of illiteracy among most Rwandans in rural areas also explain the tribunal’s limited impact on reconciliation. Eric Stover and Harry Weinstein found that many Rwandans felt that the work of the ICTR was far removed from their daily lives. They complained that the trials were held far away from Rwanda, in Arusha, and followed Western-style judicial practices, which heavily emphasize procedure with little concern for community interests.75 Additionally, the respondents pointed out that the tribunal offers survivors of the genocide no formal role other than as witnesses.76 The adversarial legal approach, whereby two sides of the conflict attempt to make their claims the most credible and truthful—as applied in the ICTR—is regarded as foreign to traditional Rwandan methods of conflict resolution. During the latter, communities come together and determine the nature of events as well as the punishments and reparations needed to reestablish social equilibrium.77 Rwandans see the ICTR as an activity of the international community conducted for its own benefit rather than a process of reconciliation in Rwanda.

The ICTR could not end the cycle of impunity or achieve deterrence because many Hutu extremists fled to neighboring countries such as Cameroon, Tanzania, Burundi, and the DRC. These individuals included Maj Gen Augustin Bizmungu, the former regime’s military commander, and Robert Kajuga, head of the Interahamwe militia, accused of masterminding the genocide. The Hutu-led Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda rebel group, comprising the 1994 perpetrators of genocide and based in eastern DRC, actively supports the DRC government troops’ war against the Tutsi-government-backed Rally for Congolese Democracy–Goma rebels in the DRC.78 Although the statute of the ICTR obliged all states to comply without delay with any request by the tribunal to assist in locating, detaining, or transferring accused persons, most neighboring countries refused to cooperate. Cameroon, for example, did not extradite 12 Rwandan war-crime suspects despite threats of sanctions from the UN. The rules of the tribunal also hindered expedient detention and prosecution of suspects, enabling them to flee Rwanda. The prosecutor could not issue orders and warrants of arrest, detention, and surrender or transfer persons until he satisfied a tribunal judge that a prima facie case existed and the judge confirmed the indictment.79 This requirement greatly delayed the issuing of detention orders, allowing the principal suspects to flee to refugee camps and disappear. The deterrent effect of the ICTR has had little impact on Hutu hard-liners who see this temporary diaspora as part of the larger Rwandan struggle that they will eventually win. In addition, the slow judicial process in a politically unstable east African region hinders the deterrent objective of the ICTR.80 The effective and immediate deterrence of criminal activities demands that punishments be meted out with swiftness and certainty.81 Prof. Mark Drumbl notes that “many [domestic] detainees see themselves as prisoners of war, simply ending up on the losing side. In fact, the prisoners do not even call the events of April to July 1994 ‘genocide,’ but, instead, refer to these events as ‘the war.’ ”82 As long as the perpetrators of the genocide remained free and unpunished, a climate of fear and hatred and the desire to exact revenge would continue, ultimately resulting in further violence as people took the law into their own hands.83 The ICTR failed as an effective mechanism of holding all violators accountable, ending the cycle of impunity, and bringing reconciliation to a country ravaged by ethnic division and hatred.

International human-rights leaders and legal scholars also criticized the national courts for failing to meet international standards of justice: “Some defendants had no legal representation; others had lawyers without time to prepare. . . . Rather than ending the cycles of revenge, the trials themselves were revenge.”84 The courts’ judicial process was so excruciatingly slow that it became an insufficient and inadequate mechanism to hold all suspects under its jurisdiction accountable and consequently failed to achieve justice, accountability, and reconciliation and end the cycle of impunity.

Gacaca officially sought to establish the truth, fight impunity, and promote reconciliation through reintegrating the guilty parties into society. The government argued that the tried system of gacaca offered an alternative to attaining not only justice but also the truth, reconciliation, and grassroots empowerment. It would promote reconciliation by providing a platform for victims to express themselves. Encouraging acknowledgements and apologies from the perpetrators, gacaca aimed to build trust between victims and perpetrators to facilitate healing and social harmony. It encouraged forgiveness and offered a means of reconciliation, justice, and reparation for the victims. The convicted prisoner physically helped the victim in a meaningful way through community service. Gacaca’s strength lies in its communal, participatory nature, which promotes participatory justice and democratic decision making in the community by involving its members in dispensing justice to reweave the destroyed fabric of the nation. Most Rwandans, including the prisoners of genocide-related crimes, were profoundly supportive of the process.85 Drumbl believes that shaming is the only way to stop the cycle of genocide, arguing that because of the normalization of brutality, many prisoners do not realize that the killing was wrong since most of them consider themselves prisoners of war.86 This is very important because some Hutus deny the genocide and believe that there is no need for collective atonement or for individual acknowledgement of culpability.87 Gacaca that offers shaming fosters emotional acknowledgement of responsibility which would lead to forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation and bring to an end the cycle of impunity in Rwanda. By its punitive character, gacaca avoids the pitfalls of an amnesty and ensures individual responsibility for crimes committed, thus reducing suspicion and encouraging trust within communities. Individual accountability would also eliminate collective guilt of the Hutus and potentially end the cycle of impunity.

Gacaca, however, is legally and operationally flawed and has come under criticism for failing to meet international standards of justice. The accused has no legal representation, and the judges have very little training, depriving suspects of their due process of rights and evidentiary rules.88 The independence and impartiality of gacaca judges may be compromised since most of them were intrinsically involved in the events of the genocide to some degree.89 Judges and jury members with pent-up anger could manipulate sentences to exact their own vengeance. Thus, justice in the gacaca could be vulnerable to a judge’s bias and political manipulation. Another concern involves the possibility of disparities that could arise from the localized sentencing system applied by untrained judges, undermining equity of justice for criminals and victims alike. If judges are incompetent or biased and if communities conspire to use gacaca to settle scores, then both justice and reconciliation would suffer.

Although gacaca is a potential source of the truth, its provisions for confessions and guilty pleas represent one of its most cited shortcomings. Under these provisions, if someone confesses before being denounced, he or she is eligible for a substantial decrease in the length of the sentence. The concern has to do with the fact that confessions are acceptable only if they include the incrimination of one’s coconspirators, thereby raising questions about the validity of the truth of the confessions, given the offer of incentives. One might say that confessions are coerced and that the incentives could lead to false allegations, “witch hunting,” and the settling of personal scores.90 The truth could prove elusive in gacaca because, with an eye on reduced sentences, suspects could manufacture the truth or their confessions, making them fit the situation.

Widespread intimidation, disappearances, and extrajudicial killings of potential witnesses occurred in the countryside—particularly where perpetrators presumably far outnumbered survivors—to stop them from testifying at a gacaca hearing and therefore undermined the process.91 The virtual absence of safeguards to ensure the protection of witnesses from the accused or authorities subverts open participation by both victims and witnesses.92 In such a volatile political climate, rather than improve ethnic tensions and rivalries in Rwanda, gacaca could actually inflame them.

In fact, gacaca is a version of victor’s justice because the jurisdiction of the gacaca courts was limited to crimes committed between 1 October 1990 and 31 December 1994, thus eliminating Tutsi killings of Hutu civilians. The gacaca tribunals had jurisdiction only over individuals who committed genocide or crimes against humanity under the previous government.93 The politically manipulated gacaca process did not prosecute the Tutsis’ RPF troops—the current regime’s military, which committed serious war crimes against Hutu civilians. In the rhetoric of the government, these “war crimes” are considered separate from the genocide and not tried by gacaca courts. Exclusion of these crimes from the gacaca process establishes an ethnic divide and amounts to an unequal application of the law.94 The Tutsi-dominated government’s dichotomy of victims and perpetrators along ethnic fault lines imposed collective guilt on Hutus, who would see themselves as victims and interpret the process as victor’s justice. They would deem the politicized and selective justice of the gacaca process as vengeance rather than reconciliation, ultimately undermining the latter and the security of Rwanda. This application of the gacaca process appears destined to exacerbate the recurring cycles of impunity and subvert reconciliation. Inaction with respect to RPF crimes and punishment of only those who lost the war would prevent the gacaca process from forcefully deterring future genocide.

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa

In 1995 South Africa’s new parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (no. 34), creating the TRC so that the country could come to terms with its horrific past on a morally acceptable basis and thereby advance the cause of healing and reconciliation.95 The main objective was to “promote national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past.”96 It was mandated to establish the causes, nature, and extent of the gross violations committed between 1 March 1960 and December 1993 as well as determine the identity and whereabouts of victims for the purpose of restoring their dignity. The TRC had the power to grant amnesty to those who fully disclosed their crimes and to recommend measures for preventing the recurrence of human-rights violations.97 The commission that sat for no more than two years consisted of three subcommittees: the Human Rights Violations Committee, which inquired into gross violations; the Reparation and Reconciliation Committee, which rehabilitated and compensated victims; and the Amnesty Committee, which dealt with indemnities and amnesty. The TRC conditioned amnesty from legal prosecution on perpetrators individually, depending upon their guilt, and victims forfeited their right to prosecute perpetrators in criminal court. It granted amnesty to violators who narrated and accepted their guilt in public and applied for it; the commission did so in respect of acts associated with political objectives and subject to a proportionality test that required the committee’s conviction that acts were politically driven. The TRC could also search and seize to compel witnesses to give evidence and to answer incriminating questions. Further, it could rely on information from nongovernmental or human-rights organizations to complement its work. Persons who appeared before the commission were provided with legal assistance. Composed entirely of South Africans, the TRC conducted public hearings; however, to serve the interests of justice, the security of persons, state security, or public order, hearings were held in camera.

Assessment of Efforts in South Africa

Arguably, a truth commission seems the better mechanism than a tribunal, especially in a situation like South Africa, where the use of trials would have subjected almost all of the population to prosecution—an impossibility. Moreover, selective prosecution would have prompted accusations of witch hunting, thereby hindering healing, reconciliation, and societal stability. Truth commissions also ensured a smooth transition from apartheid to democracy because the ruling National Party of de Klerk declared that it would not hand over power to the African National Congress if trials remained a possibility.98 Had South Africa chosen trials, it would not have undergone peaceful change. According to James Gibson, “the truth and reconciliation process has done little to harm race relations in South Africa”; rather, it has had a positive effect on white and colored persons as well as those of Asian origin.99 He argues that the truth process has caused “a salutary change in racial attitudes” with a net benefit to South Africa and adduces that truth may have led to reconciliation in South Africa.100 Commissioner Mary Burton argues that giving public testimony had a healing effect on many survivors: “The right to be heard and acknowledged, with respect and empathy, did contribute to a process of healing in many cases.”101 The South African TRC differed from its predecessors in Latin America and Eastern Europe, for it claimed that it practiced neither impunity nor vengeance.102

Despite its global admiration, the TRC has encountered criticism for failing to achieve accountability, impartiality, reconciliation, and deterrence. Elizabeth Stanley questions the validity of the “truth” predominantly drawn from individual points of view, pointing out that, given the right to reparation for victims and the desire of perpetrators to avoid persecution, the truths told were censored with an eye on benefits, resulting in “truth made to fit.”103 The TRC was accused of partiality for not holding all violators to the same standard of accountability. Stanley observes that some powerful individuals such as Winnie Mandela and de Klerk negotiated a lesser form of truth and accountability by using their influence, legal representation, and money despite their involvement in human-rights violations.104 The TRC suffered from biased selectivity, damaging its credibility since it “placed a disproportionate emphasis on crimes committed against nonblack South Africans.”105 Limited time and finances also prevented a full recording of the truth in South Africa, negatively affecting reconciliation and societal transformation with the growing perception that state personnel involved in atrocities were not subject to accountability and the rule of law. Indeed, they still held official positions.106 Gibson finds that the TRC did not move blacks toward reconciliation and that political tolerance—one of his measures of reconciliation—remains scarce in the political culture of southern Africa.107 All South Africans did not accept the TRC; in fact, many of them, including the wife of the late Steve Biko, challenged the commission in court, seeking justice instead of pardon. According to Tepperman, a poll conducted in South Africa indicated that only 17 percent of the respondents believed that the TRC would lead to forgiveness and real healing.108 Attacks on South African whites by South African blacks attest to the reality that the TRC failed to realize the objectives of true forgiveness, healing, reconciliation, and deterrence.109 Mahmood Mamdani summarizes South Africa’s failure, arguing that the country compromised justice and chose politically expedient amnesty to attain reconciliation, finding a new democracy based on a flawed judicial response to systemic crime against humanity.110 The question is, will the dissatisfied resurrect the problem in the future? Reports of attacks on South African whites by South African blacks and xenophobia against immigrants paint a bleak future for reconciliation and breaking the cycle of impunity in South Africa.111

Truth and Trials in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone was wracked by a devastating conflict (1991–2002) characterized by gross human-rights violations that left more than 50,000 dead.112 With the support of Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor, Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) entered southeastern Sierra Leone in March 1991. The RUF claimed to reignite radical Pan-African revolution in Sierra Leone by acts of protracted insurgencies against incumbent governments that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands and the displacement of millions. Local and international pressure led to presidential elections in February 1996 won by former UN official Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. Pressured by regional and international stakeholders and on the brink of defeat at the hands of the Civil Defense Forces, the RUF acquiesced in peace negotiations. The resulting Abidjan Agreement of November 1996, however, collapsed within a year.113 In 1997 the Kabbah administration was overthrown by the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) led by Johnny Paul Koromah, who invited the RUF rebels to join the coalition government. The rule of law collapsed over subsequent months amid serious human-rights violations. Under international and local influence, the AFRC/RUF agreed to return Kabbah to power in October 1997 but reneged. Nigerian forces, acting under regional mandate, finally ousted the AFRC in February 1998, forcing the RUF to retreat to guerrilla-war tactics backed by significant numbers of Sierra Leone soldiers living off the land and financed by “blood diamond” trade. Despite Nigerian intervention, the RUF/AFRC continued to fight voraciously in the countryside, and the conflict reached a stalemate. The presence of forces from the Economic Community of West African States weakened the RUF and the position of Sankoh, who had been captured in Nigeria at the time of the breakdown of the Abidjan Agreement and sentenced to death following Kabbah’s reinstatement in 1998, paving the way for renewed peace efforts.114 A number of cease-fires followed, including the Lomé Peace Accord, intended to end the Sierra Leonean civil war between the RUF rebel alliances and the government of Sierra Leone. With the military standoff continuing, in July 1999 Kabbah and the RUF signed the Lomé agreement, which granted blanket amnesty to RUF rebels and made Sankoh vice president.

This agreement, brokered by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, included an “absolute and free pardon and reprieve to all combatants and collaborators in respect of anything done by them in pursuit of their objectives, up to the time of the signing of the present Agreement.”115 However, a reservation to the Lomé Peace Accord held that amnesty provisions “shall not apply to international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law.”116 The agreement also provided for establishment of the TRC, mandated “to address impunity, break the cycle of violence, provide a forum for both the victims and perpetrators of human rights violations to tell their story, [and] get a clear picture of the past in order to facilitate genuine healing and reconciliation.”117

The RUF, however, showed little commitment to the terms of the agreement and continued the hostilities. Consequently, the UN Security Council in October 1999 authorized establishment of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) to assist with implementation of the Lomé Peace Accord. UN peacekeepers were often denied freedom of movement amid violations of the cease-fire, including RUF attacks against civilians and UNAMSIL peacekeepers.118 A bipolar situation existed, with the RUF controlling the north and east of the country and the government of Sierra Leone or UNAMSIL controlling the west and south.119 Realizing the mission’s incapacitation due to its lack of strength, inadequate resources, and defensive posture, the RUF attacked peacekeepers and civilians, culminating in widespread killings of civilians and the taking of 500 UN peacekeepers hostage in May 2000.120 Following continued human-rights violations and instability, the government of Sierra Leone wrote to the UN secretary-general requesting the establishment of a special court to bring RUF leaders to justice.121 In accordance with Security Council Resolution 1315, the UN and the Sierra Leonean government signed an agreement on 16 January 2002, establishing the Special Court, which would prosecute “persons who bear the greatest responsibility for the commission of crimes against humanity, war crimes and other serious violations of international humanitarian law, as well as crimes under relevant Sierra Leonean law committed within the territory of Sierra Leone.”122

Sierra Leone’s hybrid model of truth and court was coincidentally established because the TRC was already in place on paper when the special court came into being. Created as a condition of the Lomé Peace Accord with the assistance of the international community, the TRC was approved by President Kabbah and RUF leader Sankoh on 7 July 1999. Its mandate called for “creat[ing] an impartial historical record of violations and abuses of human rights and international humanitarian law related to the armed conflict in Sierra Leone, from the beginning of the Conflict in 1991 to the signing of the Lome Peace Agreement; to address impunity, to respond to the needs of the victims, to promote healing and reconciliation and to prevent a repetition of the violations and abuses suffered.”123 Many leading figures, including President Kabbah and Valentine Strasser, as well as perpetrators and victims, appeared before the TRC, which operated from November 2002 to October 2004. It submitted a final report to both the Sierra Leonean government and the UN Security Council in 2004. The commission’s main recommendations concerned the fight against corruption, a new bill of rights developed in a participatory constitutional process, judicial independence, efforts to strengthen the role of parliament, stricter control over the security forces, decentralization and enhanced economic autonomy for the provinces, a commitment by the government to deliver basic public services, and the inclusion of youth and women in political decision making.

The Special Court, jointly administered by the UN and the Sierra Leone government, had a mandate to try only those “who bear the greatest responsibility” for the atrocities of the war; a total of 20 defendants would be prosecuted, including Koromah, Sankoh, and Taylor.124 The latter’s trial was moved to the Hague for security reasons. Violators such as forcibly conscripted children and women were held accountable by the truth commission. As mentioned earlier, 70 percent of ex-combatants were children; 80 percent of the female combatants and 72 percent of all combatants claimed forced conscription.125 On 26 April 2012, former Liberian president Charles Taylor became the first African head of state to be convicted for his part in war crimes.

Assessment of Efforts in Sierra Leone

The Sierra Leonean hybrid model, though coincidental, enjoyed a modicum of success in meeting our criteria, compared to the other cases. In Sierra Leone, unconditional amnesty did not end the conflict, for the rebels continued to commit atrocities, prompting creation of the Special Court to operate in tandem with the truth commission. The model achieved accountability and impartiality by holding all sides responsible, a fact reflected by the daring indictment of Taylor, the former Liberian president, and Sam Hinga Norman, the incumbent Kabbah regime’s minister of internal affairs at that time and previously the deputy minister of defense and coordinator of the Civil Defense Forces that opposed the rebel attack.126 Impartial trials and the truth told at the truth commission enhanced forgiveness and ended the cycle of impunity; they also reconciled and reintegrated former combatants into mainstream Sierra Leonean life, as manifested by the peaceful, democratic transfer of power from the Kabbah government to the current one.

However, the accidental and uncoordinated concurrent operation of both mechanisms proved problematic and expectedly elicited issues on conflict over respective powers, coordination, information sharing, and rivalry. Unlike the intentionally designed East Timorese hybrid model, the Sierra Leonean model lacked a formal, legally binding agreement in advance on issues of coordination, relative legal positions, and common transitional justice goals in their respective statutes; neither did it make arrangements to best reach these goals and thereby realize full benefits for both institutions.127 Conflicts arose regarding coordination and information sharing on whether statements obtained by truth commissions should be admissible in criminal prosecutions and, conversely, whether the commissions should have access to evidence collected in criminal investigations.128 For example, the court denied the TRC’s request to interview Special Court detainees Sam Hinga Norman and Augustine Gbao.129 The decision that denied a public hearing for Norman elicited public displeasure. Lack of coordination and information sharing could have undermined the credibility of the process of accountability, reconciliation, and durable peace if both institutions had reached opposing conclusions about a suspect, such as Norman, appearing before both institutions and giving conflicting testimony to the two bodies. Luckily, the Sierra Leone process avoided this quandary.

There was also disagreement concerning their respective powers since Article 8 of the statute gave the Special Court primacy over the national bodies, including the TRC, by rendering its premises, archives, and documents inviolable. Arguably, the Special Court Ratification Act empowered the court to use coercive measures to force the TRC to share information without giving the latter reciprocal ability to force disclosure of the Special Court’s materials.130 Further, the Special Court could override protections granted by Article 7(3) of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act 2000.131 The subpoena powers of the TRC also conflicted with the Special Agreement Act that secured the inviolability of the Special Court premises.132 The unequal structural power relationship proved counterproductive, deepening the conflicts on coordination and information sharing.133 Moreover, unlike the ad hoc tribunal in Rwanda established by chapter 7 of the UN Charter, Sierra Leone’s Special Court was a treaty-based institution, depriving it of the power to issue binding orders to third-party states to cooperate with the extradition of suspects as well as assert primacy over the prosecution of suspects in other states.134 The alleged dominance of foreigners on the Special Court, coupled with the difficulty of accessibility to the court, also caused Sierra Leoneans to become detached from it despite geographical proximity.

Reconciliation depends heavily upon the ease of reintegrating perpetrators into their communities without fear of reprisal. The Sierra Leonean Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act 2000, however, did not make provisions for a specific process of rehabilitation, as did the East Timorese model, which reconciled perpetrators to their communities after full confessions and acts of penance.135 In the absence of these arrangements, perpetrators in Sierra Leone feared reprisals from their communities and found it difficult to cooperate with the commission.136 Nevertheless, the TRC facilitated symbolic acts of reconciliation—such as traditional and religious ceremonies to consecrate sites of mass killing and to erect memorials—alongside its taking of statements, which fostered forgiveness, reintegration, and reconciliation.137 Perpetrators came forward to ask their communities for forgiveness, granted by local traditional leaders.138

The Way Forward for Africa: Demand for a Hybrid Model of Accountability for Truth and Justice

A comparative analysis of the three cases of transitional justice mechanisms has revealed the incompleteness and inescapable inadequacy of either the truth commission or court to hold violators of human rights accountable. The relative success of Sierra Leone suggests that the operation of truth commissions in tandem with trials seems a more appropriate accountability mechanism for Africa. Despite its global admiration, the South African TRC came under criticism for selectivity by subjecting powerful individuals such as Winnie Mandela and F. W. de Klerk to a lesser form of accountability. Thus, many others—such as Mrs. Biko—did not accept the TRC, challenging it in court and seeking justice instead of pardon. The commission could not reconcile South Africans—witness the attacks on South African whites by South African blacks. As mentioned earlier, a poll conducted in South Africa indicated that only 17 percent of the respondents believed that the TRC would lead to real healing. Other African truth commissions, such as those in Uganda and Kenya, failed to reach the desired goals. Uganda’s 1974 Commission of Inquiry into Disappearances of People in Uganda, established by President Amin, did not prevent him from committing serious atrocities against his people. Abuses by Amin’s forces increased markedly in the following years, earning him the nickname “butcher of Uganda” for killing an estimated 300,000 people.139 The 2008 Kenyan Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission lost credibility because of concerns of bias in favor of the government by its chairman, Bethuel Kiplagat—linked to the killings of dozens of Somali Muslims in northern Kenya in 1984 during what is known as the Wagalla massacre. This situation culminated in the resignation of American law professor Ronald Slye from the commission after he lost faith in the commission’s ability to succeed because of credibility issues involving the chairman.140

Similarly, incompetence and manipulation have prevented trials from holding violators accountable in Africa. The Rwandan tribunal seems a failed case because of accusations of partiality and selectivity for prosecuting only Hutus without indicting members of the RPF—the Tutsi rebellious movement, which reportedly killed thousands of civilians—thus earning the tribunal the tag of victor’s justice. The TRC could not achieve deterrence and reconciliation since many of the Hutu extremists who fled to neighboring countries were bent on avenging personal losses and establishing ethnic hegemony.141 Other African trials, such as the Ethiopian tribunal—the Ethiopian War Crimes Court—also failed, flawed by legal frailties and manipulations of the government. The process lacked popular support because the moral legitimacy of the Ethiopian government to conduct the exercise came into question in light of its abysmal human-rights record. The government’s mass arrests of opponents and tampering with judicial independence tainted its reputation. Ethiopians’ mistrust in the government subverted their confidence in the court and its moral legitimacy to pursue justice, democratization, and development.142

The relative success of Sierra Leone’s coincidental but concurrent operation of both truth commission and court, despite some inherent weaknesses, demonstrates that a unified mechanism which recognizes both truth and trials as integral to a holistic approach to obtaining both forgiveness and justice is more efficacious for Africa than either truth commission or court operating on its own. A hybrid model is a broadly integrated justice-and-reconciliation mechanism functioning on the basis of interdependent and complementary prosecution and reconciliation mechanisms. Such a concurrent operation of the unique institutional competencies of truth commissions and trials would facilitate attainment of the transitional justice goals of accountability in Africa. The two accountability mechanisms augment each other, offsetting mutual deficiencies, supplying mutual needs, and thereby bridging the gap between the two. A true and lasting peace in Africa should comprise a mix of truth and justice, as demonstrated in the comparative peace and democratization of Sierra Leone after years of brutality.

As argued, the truth commission is a more viable option than the trial in a state such as South Africa where mass violations have occurred because the sheer number of violators, limited resources, time constraints, and the unwillingness of witnesses to testify for fear of reprisal prevent the court from prosecuting all perpetrators. Truth commissions can also address systematic causes of mass human-rights abuses and make reform recommendations not fully or adequately captured by prosecutions alone, such as applying human-rights practices, the rule of law, security-sector reforms, democratic values to prevent future occurrences of atrocities, or measures to break the cycle of impunity. However the Sierra Leonean and South African cases demonstrate that granting amnesty without prosecuting those who mastermind atrocities would not end the cycle of impunity and atrocities and would undermine healing, reconciliation, and the rule of law. Despite amnesty, the RUF in Sierra Leone continued its atrocities against civilians until creation of the Special Court. A truth commission alone is not an adequate response when violations have been severe and widespread, as in South Africa where some people (e.g., Mrs. Biko) demanded prosecution. James Gibson finds that the South African truth commission seemed to contribute little to reconciliation among black Africans, confirming the argument for prosecution.143 The TRC has shown that knowing the truth alone is inadequate for the healing process. A truth commission is good in its own right, but it will be discredited from the start if it does not focus on rendering justice. The principles of human rights and concern for human dignity and the rule of law debunk a blanket forgive-and-forget policy for the most egregious violations.

Prosecution gives victims a sense of justice, confidence in the legal system, and security from the state. In hindsight, South African TRCs also aimed to seek justice alongside truth telling but lacked governmental and judicial commitment to deal with those cases recommended for prosecution. The trial and sentence of former police colonel Eugene de Kock—known as the “Prime Evil”—to a 212-year prison term embody the relevance of both trial and truth to transitional-justice accountability in South Africa. Unless those who mastermind the atrocities are prosecuted, the pursuit of trust, reconciliation, reunification, and peace would become an illusion. The concurrent operation of truth in tandem with trials would capture the full benefits of the goals of transitional justice and satisfy different parties that demand either truth or trial, as in South Africa. As long as high-level violators remain free and unpunished, a climate of fear and hatred as well as the desire for revenge will continue, ultimately resulting in further violence.144 At least prosecution of the perpetrators of high-level crimes would command popular respect for the process and make them contribute toward the success of the truth commission’s reform recommendations. Impartial trials that hold accountable individual violators rather than entire religious, political, or ethnic groups eliminate collective blame, guilt, retribution, and continued or reawakened hostility and contribute to long-term reconciliation. Trials also become the foundation of an independent judicial system that bolsters the rule of law and democratic values in a state emerging from horrendous atrocities. The following discussion offers a framework for an appropriate hybrid mechanism of accountability for Africa informed by the strengths and weaknesses of our cases.

In view of the inherent necessity of both truth commissions and courts, a coordinated and intentionally designed hybrid model of truth and trials established by chapter 7 of the UN Charter and based on the model of the East Timorese example would prove a most viable accountability mechanism for human-rights violations in Africa. The United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor incorporated truth seeking (the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation) into a larger prosecution mechanism, thereby strategically eliminating the rivalry between them.145 A hybrid model jointly administered by the afflicted state and the UN should be empowered to assert primacy over prosecutions of suspects and issue binding orders to third-party states to cooperate with the extradition of suspects.

Since the operations of truth commissions and courts overlap, they are more likely to use the same resources, events, witnesses, victims, perpetrators, and evidence. To avert potential conflict over their respective powers, coordination, and information sharing, organizers of the two institutions should conclude a formal, legally binding agreement in advance of their operation that addresses issues of coordination, relative legal positions, and common transitional justice goals as well as the best means of attaining them in their respective statutes in order to benefit both institutions. Unlike the Sierra Leone case, both the truth commission and court must have equal authority to obtain information from each other. Primacy of one institution over the other would lead to a power struggle and discord between officials of both institutions that might vitiate the legitimacy of both mechanisms. In the absence of coordination and information sharing, special detainees such as Sam Hinga Norman of Sierra Leone, appearing before a truth commission and a trial court, might give different testimony to the two bodies, causing them to reach conflicting conclusions about individual accountability. Accountability, reconciliation, and durable peace would suffer if a suspect were exonerated by a truth commission but convicted by the court. Better coordination and information flow between the two would avert this potential calamity of transitional justice. Both institutions require impartiality, independence from politics, and adequate resources to function effectively and attain their strategic objectives.

The composition of members on both the court and truth commission is significant in terms of instilling confidence in the process. Biased institutions—allegedly true of the South African and Rwandan TRCs—adversely affect confidence in the process as well as reconciliation. An organization composed of neutral members (both local and international, representing all sides of the conflict), politically untainted by the violence and perceived to provide unbiased prosecution and an account of the past, would instill trust in the process, enhance its credibility, give it legitimacy and authority, and promote reconciliation.146 Individuals with adequate knowledge of the political and social context of the violence and of conflict-resolution dynamics would prove beneficial in investigating and interviewing the locals, whose involvement also would elicit ownership and thereby boost confidence in the process, ultimately maximizing their cooperation. Foreign involvement is important, especially if the factions become too polarized, by lending credibility to the process. At the onset of the Special Court of Sierra Leone, the government was so concerned about the court’s credibility that it included international staff members. A statement by John Leigh, Sierra Leone ambassador to the United States, reflects that concern: “We don’t want the court to be seen as victor’s justice . . . and international involvement will prevent this perception.”147 US ambassador Richard Holbrooke called for the United States to demonstrate leadership on this important moral issue. Moreover, the international community can provide qualified judges, prosecutors, or defense attorneys as well as resources that the state lacks.148

Of great significance to successful accountability is the location and timing of the process. A number of arguments have arisen regarding locating trials or commissions where the atrocities occurred, especially when the security of suspects, witnesses, and board members could not be guaranteed (e.g., the ICTR located in Arusha, Tanzania). However, as noted earlier, Rwandans had difficulty in following the ICTR’s proceedings, and the process had little effect on reconciliation.149 For the sake of reconciliation, this study supports locating the hybrid mechanism at the place where atrocities occurred. UN forces, alongside the police and military of the new government, can address security concerns and ensure the safety of defendants and witnesses as well as prevent the flight of violators. With the exception of Charles Taylor, whose trial was moved to the Hague for security concerns, Sierra Leone’s Special Court heard cases at home, having a greater effect on accountability, reconciliation, and democratization than Rwanda’s ICTR. Location of the accountability mechanism in the afflicted state has the additional benefit of facilitating the diffusion of legal knowledge from international to local judicial officials, who will assist in rebuilding and strengthening the country’s decimated judicial system as well as the rule of law and human-rights practices.150

The expedience and timing of accountability are critical because delays in indictments, arrests, extradition, and prosecution allow violators bent on vengeance to flee and regroup for further violence. In Rwanda, delays in the investigation and arrest of Hutu extremists allowed them to move to neighboring states and plan for revenge on the Tutsi-dominated government. Drawing on the popular dictum “justice delayed, justice denied,” one finds that delays in the prosecution of violators deplete the impact of deterrence, reconciliation, and durable peace, thereby impairing citizens’ confidence in the process. Prompt accountability demonstrates to the public the readiness of the government and the international community to restore the rule of law and gain citizens’ confidence and support for the legal system. Expedience strengthens the message that the international community will not tolerate such crimes. Swift prosecution also demonstrates that people need not take personal vengeance—a key element in the renewal of conflict.

Since a lack of resources and time limitations prevent the court from trying myriad violators, statutes establishing the hybrid model should specifically call for the court to prosecute people who bear the greatest responsibility for crimes against humanity, leaving those who acted either on compulsion or less atrociously to face the truth commission. Because the statute establishing the ICTR excluded such language, that tribunal was criticized for wasting valuable resources on prosecuting “small fish.”151 The prosecution of leaders who—through false indoctrination and misinformation—incited hatred and inflicted atrocities on other groups would eliminate extremists with vested interests in exacerbating the violence and strengthen the position of constructive political forces committed to democratic pluralism.152 For the sake of enhancing reconciliation, the statutes of the truth commissions and the courts’ specific processes should include formal provisions to facilitate the rehabilitation of perpetrators and their reintegration into communities without fear of reprisal.153

Most importantly, sustained international cooperation and political will are vital to the accountability mechanism’s effectiveness in investigating, arresting, detaining, extraditing, and prosecuting perpetrators as well as providing funding and resources. Delays and lack of cooperation by the international community undermine the possibilities of deterring future atrocities and damage the potential for healing and reconciliation, as occurred in the Rwandan case. Despite UN efforts to ensure that member states cooperate in the arrest and extradition of individuals charged with genocide to face the Rwandan tribunal, Cameroon and the DRC did not extradite war-crime suspects. The statute establishing the mechanism should oblige all member states to comply without delay with any request to assist in locating, detaining, and extraditing suspects. Furthermore, the UN must demonstrate leadership and political will by applying appropriate punitive measures that would compel defiant member states to cooperate with the accountability mechanisms. The model’s success depends upon the moral suasion role of the civil society and the international community as well as the political will of the people.

Conclusion

Egregious atrocities committed against civilians in Africa have necessitated the establishment of accountability mechanisms by successor regimes in Africa to redress human-rights abuses, end the tradition of impunity, deter future abuses, and create a social order to advance the process of reconciliation. Contemporary debate hinges on the question of whether a tribunal or truth commission is the more appropriate means of holding individuals accountable for war crimes. Proponents of commissions argue for forgiveness to ensure reconciliation, but others advocate punishment to stop the cycle of impunity and deter future violations. Both mechanisms have produced mixed results. This article has evaluated the success of South Africa’s TRC, Rwanda’s ICTR, and Sierra Leone’s hybrid model of a national TRC and Special Court that emphasizes the transitional justice goals of impartiality, accountability, reconciliation, and deterrence. It found that neither the commission nor the court on its own adequately holds violators of human rights accountable. However, the relative success in Sierra Leone suggests that truth commissions in tandem with trials seem a more appropriate accountability mechanism for Africa. Consequently, this article proposes a framework for an appropriate hybrid mechanism of accountability for Africa—one informed by the strengths and weaknesses of the cases examined.

*The author is an assistant professor of political science (international relations / comparative politics) at Ohio Northern University, having previously taught at the University of Michigan–Dearborn, Wayne State University, Central Michigan University, and Hanyang University, South Korea. Dr. Nsia-Pepra’s research and teaching interests include international relations, conflict analysis and resolution, critical international security, human rights, and United Nations (UN) peacekeeping and governance. He received a bachelor’s degree (with honors) in social sciences and a diploma in education from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana; a master of laws degree (international human rights law, specializing in international armed conflict law, international refugee law, international peacekeeping law, international law of the child, and public international law) from Essex University, United Kingdom; and a PhD in political science (international relations, public policy, and American government) from Wayne State University, United States. A former officer of the Ghana air force, a trained administrator, and a paratrooper, Professor Nsia-Pepra served with the UN Assisted Mission in Rwanda and with the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group as the Ghana air force’s detachment commander during the Sierra Leonean War.

Notes

1. Report of the Secretary-General, Supplement to an Agenda for Peace: Position Paper of the Secretary-General on the Occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the United Nations, UN Document A/50/60–S/1995/1, 3 January 1995, par. 4, http://www.un.org/documents/ga/docs/50/plenary/a50-60.htm.

2. Report of the Secretary-General, The Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa, UN Document A/52/871–S/1998/318, 13 April 1998, par. 4, http://www.un.org

/africa/osaa/reports/A_52_871_Causes%20of%20Confict%201998.pdf.

3. Jonathan D. Tepperman, “Truth and Consequences,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 2 (March–April 2002): 128.

4. Juan E. Méndez, “National Reconciliation, Transnational Justice, and the International Criminal Court,” Ethics and International Affairs 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 30, 32.

5. Lyn Graybill and Kimberly Lanegran, “Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation in Africa: Issues and Cases,” African Studies Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 1, http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v8/v8i1a1.pdf.

6. Priscilla B. Hayner, “Fifteen Truth Commissions—1974 to 1994: A Comparative Study,” Human Rights Quarterly 16, no. 4 (November 1994): 597–655.

7. Elizabeth Stanley, “Evaluating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Journal of Modern African Studies 39, no. 3 (September 2001): 525–46.

8. Damian Zane, “Red Terror ‘Hard to Forgive,’ ” BBC Africa Live, 31 July 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2

/hi/africa/3112875.stm.

9. Carol Off, The Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle: A Study of Generals and Justice in Rwanda and Yugoslavia (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2000), 330.

10. Hayner, “Fifteen Truth Commissions,” 604.

11. Aryeh Neier, “What Should Be Done about the Guilty?,” New York Review of Books, 1 February 1990, 32, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1990/feb/01/what-should-be-done-about-the-guilty/?pagination=false. See also William J. Long, “Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: An Interim Assessment,” International Journal of Peace Studies 13, no. 2 (Autumn/Winter 2008): 3, http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar

/ijps/vol13_2/IJPS13n2%20LONG.pdf.

12. Stanley, “Evaluating,” 528. See Eric Brahm, “Uncovering the Truth: Examining Truth Commission Success and Impact,” International Studies Perspectives 8, no. 1 (February 2007): 24–25.

13. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, 2001), 291–97, 24–31.

14. Tepperman, “Truth and Consequences,” 140.

15. Neil A. Lewis, “Nuremberg Isn’t Repeating Itself,” New York Times, 19 November 1995, E5, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/19/weekinreview/the-nation-nuremberg-isn-t-repeating-itself.html.

16. Charles Krauthammer, “Truth, Not Trials: A Way for the Newly Liberated to Deal with Crimes of the Past,” Washington Post, 9 September 1994, 27.

17. Tepperman, “Truth and Consequences,” 130.

18. Ibid., 128.

19. Juan E. Méndez, “Accountability for Past Abuses,” Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 2 (May 1997): 267.

20. Tepperman, “Truth and Consequences,” 130.

21. Méndez, “National Reconciliation,” 27.

22. Stephan Landsman, “Alternative Responses to Serious Human Rights Abuses: Of Prosecution and Truth Commissions,” Law & Contemporary Problems 59, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 81, 85.

23. Ibid.

24. Paul van Zyl, “Dilemmas of Transitional Justice: The Case of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Journal of International Affairs 52, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 648–51.

25. Carlos Santiago Nino, Radical Evil on Trial (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 39. Obstacles to punishing perpetrators of human-rights violations include “power relationships, since those who perpetuate the violation frequently retain influence and access to the coercive apparatus.” Elizabeth M. Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone: Coordination between Commission and Court,” Columbia Law Review 104, no. 3 (April 2004): 748.

26. Brahm, “Uncovering the Truth,” 16–35.

27. Jonathan Allen, “Balancing Justice and Social Unity: Political Theory and the Idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” University of Toronto Law Journal 49, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 315–53.

28. Ibid., 315.

29. Diane F. Orentlicher, “Settling Accounts: The Duty to Prosecute Human Rights Violations of a Prior Regime,” Yale Law Journal 100, no. 8 (June 1991): 2537, 2546, http://jodoran.files.wordpress.com/2009/10

/settling-accounts.pdf.

30. Ibid., 2546n32.

31. Brahm, “Uncovering the Truth,” 23.

32. Juan E. Méndez and Javier Mariezcurrena, “Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions,” Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 1 (February 2003): 237–56.

33. Méndez, “Accountability for Past Abuses,” 259–60, 276–78. See also Méndez, “National Reconciliation,” 32–33, 37.

34. Orentlicher, “Settling Accounts,” 2555–56. See also Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone,” 748.

35. Payam Akhavan, “Punishing War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia: A Critical Juncture for the New World Order,” Human Rights Quarterly 15, no. 2 (May 1993): 274, 289.

36. Méndez, “Accountability for Past Abuses,” 276.

37. Ibid., 277.

38. Ibid., 276.

39. Ibid., 277.

40. Nino, Radical Evil on Trial, 188.

41. Ibid.

42. Brahm, “Uncovering the Truth,” 19.

43. Carsten Stahn, “Accommodating Individual Criminal Responsibility and National Reconciliation: The UN Truth Commission for East Timor,” American Journal of International Law 95, no. 4 (October 2001): 952. See also Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone,” 730–67.

44. Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 5.

45. Bill Rolston, Turning the Page without Closing the Book: The Right to Truth in the Irish Context (Dublin: Irish Reporter Publications, 1996), 50.

46. Van Zyl, “Dilemmas of Transitional Justice,” 665, 667.

47. Stahn, “Accommodating Individual Criminal Responsibility,” 953–54.

48. Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone,” 752.

49. Ibid., 731, 752–53. See also Van Zyl, “Dilemmas of Transitional Justice,” 665–67.

50. Neil J. Kritz, “Accounting for International Crimes and Serious Violations of Fundamental Human Rights: Coming to Terms with Atrocities—A Review of Accountability Mechanisms for Mass Violations of Human Rights,” Law and Contemporary Problems 59, no. 4 (Autumn 1996): 128.

51. Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone,” 761.

52. Miriam J. Aukerman, “Extraordinary Evil, Ordinary Crime: A Framework for Understanding Transitional Justice,” Harvard Law School Human Rights Journal 15 (2002): 39–97.

53. Steven R. Ratner et al., Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy, 3rd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.

54. “The Concept of Criminal Responsibility and the Defense in the Nigerian Legal System,” ArticlesNG, 5 June 2013, http://articlesng.com/criminal-responsibility-defense-nigerian-legal-system/.

55. Andreas Schedler, “Conceptualizing Accountability,” in Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner, eds., The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), 13–28.

56. Marshall Freeman Harris et al., Making Justice Work (New York: Century Foundation Press, 1998), 14.

57. Ibid., 17.

58. Judith Goldstein et al., “Introduction: Legalization and World Politics,” International Organization 54, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 385–99, http://www.princeton.edu/~slaughtr/Articles/IOIntro.pdf.

59. Harris et al., Making Justice Work, 32. See also Jackson Nyamuya Maogoto, “The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: A Paper Umbrella in the Rain? Initial Pitfalls and Bright Prospects,” Nordic Journal of International Law 73, no. 2 (2004): 28, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=901221.

60. Final Report of the Commission of Experts on Rwanda, 1994, pars. 11, 24, 49, and 100, http://www.ess

.uwe.ac.uk/documents/rwanda1.htm.

61. Lyal S. Sunga, “The First Indictments of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” Human Rights Law Journal 18, nos. 9–12 (December 1997): 335.

62. “Rwanda,” US Department of State, 28 February 2005, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2004/41621

.htm. See also “Justice and Reconciliation: The Gacaca Process,” International Alert, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.badgerdesigns.com/alert/v1/our_work/regional/great_lakes/gacaca_process.php.

63. Alana Erin Tiemessen, “After Arusha: Gacaca Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda,” African Studies Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 59, http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v8/v8i1a4.pdf. See also Toran Hansen, The Gacaca Tribunals in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Minneapolis and St. Paul: Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, University of Minnesota, 27 November 2005), 2 http://www.cehd.umn.edu/ssw/rjp/resources

/rj_dialogue_resources/RJ_Dialogue%20Approaches/Gacaca_Tribunals.pdf.

64. Allison Corey and Sandra F. Joireman, “Retributive Justice: The Gacaca Courts in Rwanda,” African Affairs 103, no. 410 (January 2004): 81.

65. Kenneth Roth and Alison DesForges, “Justice or Therapy?,” Boston Review 27, nos. 3–4 (Summer 2002): 51–52, http://helenacobban.org/Rwanda-exchange.html.

66. Hansen, Gacaca Tribunals in Post-Genocide Rwanda, 2.

67. Ibid., 3.

68. United Nations Security Council Resolution 955, S/RES/955, Establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and Adoption of the Statute of the Tribunal, 8 November 1994, http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/RES/955(1994).

69. Stacey Mitchell, “The Next Genocide? Ignorance and Miscalculation in American Foreign Policy toward Rwanda” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association 67th Annual National Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, IL, 2011), 7.

70. Philip Gourevitch, “Letter from Rwanda: After the Genocide,” New Yorker, 18 December 1995, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/12/18/1995_12_18_078_TNY_CARDS_000372942?currentPage=all.

71. Off, Lion, the Fox, and the Eagle, 355–80.

72. United Nations Security Council Resolution 955, 1.

73. International Crisis Group, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda: Justice Delayed, Africa Report no. 30 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, 7 June 2001), iii, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files

/africa/central-africa/rwanda/International%20Criminal%20Tribunal%20for%20Rwanda%20Justice%20Delayed.pdf.

74. Alana Tiemessen, “Rwandan Gacaca: Competing and Collaborating for Justice after Genocide” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Montreal, Canada, 17 March 2004), 23.

75. Eric Stover and Harry Weinstein, My Neighbor, My Enemy: Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 214, 218.

76. Ibid., 220.

77. Ibid.

78. “Hutu Rebels ‘Retake Congo Bases,’ ” BBC News, 24 February 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7908350.stm.

79. “23. War Crimes Tribunals / Truth Commissions,” Toolbox, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.creativeassociatesinternational.com/CAIIStaff/Dashboard_GIROAdminCAIIStaff/Dashboard_CAIIAdminDatabase/resources/ghai/toolbox23.htm.

80. Maogoto, “International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” 28.

81. Ibid., 15.

82. Mark A. Drumbl, “Punishment, Postgenocide: From Guilt to Shame to Civis in Rwanda,” New York University Law Review 75 (November 2000): 1290, http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files

/pdf/NYULawReview-75-5-Drumbl.pdf.

83. Jacquie Cassette, “Towards Justice in the Wake of Armed Conflicts? The Evolution of War Crime Tribunals,” African Security Review 9, no. 5/6 (2000): 1–12, http://www.iss.org.za/pubs/ASR/9No5And6

/Cassette.html.

84. Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, 124.

85. Nasra Bishumba, “Gacaca Lacking in Political Support,” News from Africa, 16 March 2005, http://www.newsfromafrica.org/newsfromafrica/articles/art_10144.html.

86. Drumbl, “Punishment, Postgenocide,” 1232.

87. Mark A. Drumbl, “Law and Atrocity: Settling Accounts in Rwanda,” Ohio Northern University Law Review 31 (2005): 41, 50–51.

88. Amnesty International, Rwanda: Gacaca; A Question of Justice (London: Amnesty International, December 2002), http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR47/007/2002/en/b65d04e4-d769-11dd-b024-21932cd2170d/afr470072002en.pdf.

89. Hansen, Gacaca Tribunals in Post-Genocide Rwanda, 2.

90. “Rwanda,” World Report 2003, Human Rights Watch, accessed 18 June 2013, http://www.hrw.org

/wr2k3/africa9.html.

91. “Rwanda,” US Department of State.

92. Jennifer G. Riddell, “Addressing Crimes against International Law: Rwanda’s Gacaca in Practice” (LLM thesis, University of Aberdeen, 2005), 103, http://www.restorativejustice.org/10fulltext/ridelljennifer.

93. Amnesty International, Rwanda: Gacaca, 37.

94. Corey and Joireman, “Retributive Justice,” 86.

95. South Africa Parliament, “Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, 1995 [No. 34 of 1995] - G 16579,” 26 July 1995, http://www.saflii.org/za/legis/num_act/ponuara1995477/.

96. Peter Parker, “The Politics of Indemnities, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in South Africa: Ending Apartheid without Forgetting,” Human Rights Law Journal 17 (1996): 7.

97. Ibid.

98. Tepperman, “Truth and Consequences,” 133.

99. James L. Gibson, “Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation? Testing the Casual Assumptions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Process,” American Journal of Political Science 48, no. 2 (April 2004): 215, http://jameslgibson.wustl.edu/ajps2004.pdf.

100. Ibid.

101. Quoted in Graybill and Lanegran, “Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation,” 6.

102. Mahmood Mamdani, “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa,” Diacritics 32, no. 3/4 (Autumn–Winter 2002): 32, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/diacritics/vo32/32.3mamdani.html.

103. Stanley, “Evaluating,” 528, 531.

104. Ibid., 525–46.

105. Tepperman, “Truth and Consequences,” 140.

106. Stanley, “Evaluating,” 536.

107. Gibson, “Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation?,” 215.

108. Tepperman, “Truth and Consequences,” 135.

109. Ian Evans, “White South African Granted Asylum in Canada after Attacks from Blacks,” Telegraph, 31 August 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/6118402

/White-South-African-granted-asylum-in-Canada-after-attacks-from-blacks.html.

110. Mahmood Mamdani, “The Truth According to TRC,” in The Politics of Memory: Truth, Healing and Social Justice, ed. Ifi Amadiume and Abdullahi An-Na’im (London: Zed Books, 2000), 176–83.

111. Evans, “White South African Granted Asylum.”

112. Lansana Gberie, “Truth and Justice on Trial in Liberia,” African Affairs 107, no. 428 (July 2008): 455–65.

113. Nicole Fritz and Alison Smith, “Current Apathy for Coming Anarchy: Building the Special Court for Sierra Leone,” Fordham International Law Journal 25, no. 2 (2001): 391, 427.

114. Ibid., 396.

115. Peace Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, art. 9, no. 2, 3 June 1999, http://www.sierra-leone.org/lomeaccord.html.

116. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1315, S/RES/1315 (2000), Adopted by the Security Council at Its 4186th Meeting, on 14 August 2000, [1], http://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFC

F9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/IJ%20SRES1315.pdf.

117. Peace Agreement between the Government of Sierra Leone and the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone, art. 26, no. 1, 3 June 1999, http://www.sierra-leone.org/lomeaccord.html.

118. Third Report of the Secretary-General on the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone, UN Document S/2000/186, 7 March 2000, par. 10, http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N00/325/91

/IMG/N0032591.pdf?OpenElement.

119. Mark Malan, Phenyo Rakate, and Angela McIntyre, “Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone: UNAMSIL Hits the Home Straight,” Monograph no. 68 (Pretoria, South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 1 January 2002), 6, http://www.issafrica.org/publications/monographs/monograph-68-peacekeeping-in-sierra-leone-unamsil-hits-the-home-straight-mark-malan-phenyo-rakate-and-angela-mcintyre.

120. John L. Hirsch, Sierra Leone: Diamonds and the Struggle for Democracy (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner, 2001), 86–89.

121. Ibid., 89.

122. Report of the Secretary-General on the Establishment of a Special Court for Sierra Leone, UN Doc. S/2000/915, 4 October 2000, [1], http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N00/661/77

/PDF/N0066177.pdf?OpenElement. See also Act no. 9, Special Agreement, 2002 (Ratification Act), reprinted in Supplement to the Gazette, vol. 133, no. 22, 25 April 2002, 2 (hereinafter Special Court Ratification Act).

123. Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act 2000, pt. III, 6(1), p. [3], http://unipsil.unmissions.org

/portals/unipsil/sierraleone/laws/20004trc.pdf.

124. Statute of the Special Court of Sierra Leone, art. 1, Competence of the Special Court, 1, http://www.sc-sl.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=uClnd1MJeEw%3d&tabid=176. See also Special Court Agreement, 2002 (Ratification) Act, 2002, 28, http://www.sierra-leone.org/Laws/2002-9.pdf; “UN War Crimes to Try 20 Suspects in Sierra Leone,” New York Times, 4 January 2002, A8; and “Sierra Leone’s UN Special Court Indicts Another Junta Member,” Panafrican News Agency Daily Newswire, 18 September 2003.

125. Post-conflict Reintegration Initiative for Development and Empowerment (PRIDE), Ex-Combatant Views of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Special Court in Sierra Leone (Freetown, Sierra Leone: PRIDE in partnership with the International Center for Transitional Justice, 12 September 2002), 3, 13, http://ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-SierraLeone-Combatants-TRC-2002-English.pdf.

126. International Crisis Group, The Special Court for Sierra Leone: Promises and Pitfalls of a “New Model,” Africa Briefing (Freetown, Sierra Leone: International Crisis Group, 4 August 2003), 1, http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/africa/west-africa/sierra-leone/B016%20The%20Special%20Court%20for%20Sierra%20Leone%20Promises%20and%20Pitfalls%20of%20a%20New%20Model.pdf.

127. Amnesty International, Sierra Leone: Renewed Commitment Needed to End Impunity (London: Amnesty International, 24 September 2001), 13–15, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR51/007/2001

/en/e66d82e8-d8f0-11dd-ad8c-f3d4445c118e/afr510072001en.pdf.

128. Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone,” 732.

129. Special Court for Sierra Leone, Prosecutor v. Norman, CDF Case. SCSL-03-08-PT-122-Part 1, 28 November 2003, 1, http://www.worldcourts.com/scsl/eng/decisions/2003.11.28_Prosecutor_v_Norman.PDF.

130. Special Court Ratification Act (2002) Implementing Article 8 of the Special Court Agreement Rendering Premises, Archives, and Documents Inviolable. Case no. SCSL-2003-08-pt-122, 3.

131. Ibid.

132. “The Interrelationship between the Sierra Leone Special Court and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Human Rights Watch, 18 April 2002, http://www.hrw.org/news/2002/04/18/interrelationship-between-sierra-leone-special-court-and-truth-and-reconciliation-co.

133. Marieke Wierda et al., Exploring the Relationship between the Special Court and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone (New York: International Center for Transitional Justice, 24 June 2002), 20–22, http://ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-SierraLeone-Court-TRC-2002-English.pdf.

134. Michelle Sieff, “A Special Court for Sierra Leone’s War Crimes,” Global Policy Forum, 2001, http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/203-sierra-leone/39438.html?tmp.

135. Regulation no. 2001/10, On the Establishment of a Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor, UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET), UN Document

UNTAET/REG/2001/10, 13 July 2001, http://www.un.org/peace/etimor/untaetR/Reg10e.pdf.

136. Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone,” 763.

137. “Sierra Leone: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings Summary,” Standard Times (Sierra Leone), 1 July 2003, WL.

138. Ibid.

139. Hayner, “Fifteen Truth Commissions,” 597–655. See also “Truth Commission in Uganda,” TRIAL, 30 May 2013, http://www.trial-ch.org/index.php?id=962&L=5.

140. Mike Pflanz, “US Professor Quits Kenyan Truth Commission, Citing Lack of Confidence,” Christian Science Monitor, 22 October 2010, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2010/1022/US-professor

-quits-Kenyan-truth-commission-citing-lack-of-confidence.

141. “Hutu Rebels ‘Retake Congo Bases.’ ”

142. Kebede Tiba Firew, “The Menguistu Genocide Trial in Ethiopia,” Journal of International Criminal Justice 5 (2007): 517.

143. Gibson, “Does Truth Lead to Reconciliation?,” 201–17.

144. Cassette, “Towards Justice,” 5.

145. Stahn, “Accommodating Individual Criminal Responsibility,” 962–65.

146. Brahm, “Uncovering the Truth,” 31; and Mike Kaye, “The Role of Truth Commissions in the Search for Justice, Reconciliation and Democratisation: The Salvadorian and Honduran Cases,” Journal of Latin American Studies 29, no. 3 (October 1997): 693–716.

147. Sieff, “Special Court.”

148. Ibid.

149. Stover and Weinstein, My Neighbor, My Enemy, 214.

150. Sieff, “Special Court.”

151. Ibid.

152. Akhavan, “Punishing War Crimes,” 262.

153. Regulation no. 2001/10 (see note 135). See also Evenson, “Truth and Justice in Sierra Leone,” 763.

Strategic Distraction

The Consequence of Neglecting Organizational Design

Col John F. Price Jr., United States Air Force*

It seems that something happens to the concept of design during transition from the worlds of architecture, manufacturing, and engineering to the realm of organizational leadership. The clear principles of design that give it a revered position as foundational to success in the technical world are somehow lost when the focus shifts away from schematics and micrometer tolerances. Instead of embracing a discipline that brings precision and aligns organizational actions, one finds that its exacting standards often become blurred to the point that organizational design loses its significance. This devaluation results in leaders’ failure to fully implement and execute organizational design, which leaves their institutions vulnerable to strategic distraction and misalignment. Even the Department of Defense (DOD), with its penchant for exactitude, has fallen prey to this neglect of organizational design and is suffering the consequences. A renewed understanding of such design is essential to ensuring that military and civilian leaders embrace and execute this critical process, thereby preventing strategic distraction.

What’s Wrong?

In a scathing critique, Prof. Bernard Finel of the Naval War College argues that the “focus on the now” by former secretary of defense Robert Gates and his “failure to act strategically has left the Defense Department weakened and in disarray.”1 He attributes the secretary’s shortfalls to the fact that his approach “was dominated by his inbox.”2 Without the corrective emphasis on design within the organization, the DOD has begun what many individuals deem a decade-long “strategic honeymoon” in which political pressures and a myopic focus on current operations have led to the neglect of future plans. The gradual cessation of hostilities in the Middle East and severe budgetary pressures are now bringing this negligence to light. The absence of a clear strategy for approaching existing and emerging threats with available resources and the hollow nature of the Quadrennial Defense Review as an aligning mechanism have created a precarious situation. Although America’s wars may seem a worthy distraction, the country cannot afford to have its most senior leaders spending significant amounts of their time worried about the acquisition and movement of mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles to Afghanistan or the number of water bottles on pallets heading to Haiti for earthquake relief. The essence of organizational design demands that leaders at each level of the organization understand and assume the responsibilities associated with that level.

Seeking Clarity

Sufficient comprehension of the role of organizational design and the hazards of its neglect calls for mastering several key concepts. Thanks to the complexity of the English language, much of the confusion with design comes from the term itself. In a bizarre arrangement, design addresses the intent of the process, the process itself, and its desired outcome. That is, the organizational leader has a design (intent) to design (plan, process) the design (product, structure). This confusion has created a situation in which no generally accepted definition of design exists, and the term has different connotations in different fields.3 Despite this lack of clarity, great leaders continue to describe design as an essential element of organizational success. The late Steve Jobs referred to design as “the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”4 To compound this emphasis, Tom Peters argues that “the dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding that it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.”5

Design appears in a number of managerial texts but often with shockingly little depth. Take for example Richard Daft’s capstone text Organization Theory and Design. One might consider this study a treasure trove of design information, yet the author often seems deliberately to avoid addressing the topic directly. His rather expansive glossary includes no definition of design, and, despite hundreds of textual references to the term, only one minor sentence 60 pages into the text provides any explanation of it: “Organization design is the administration and execution of the strategic plan.”6 This delayed and obscured explanation is unfortunate because a perfect presentation of the concept appears almost 50 pages earlier. Without clearly identifying it as his core concept, Daft explains design as the actions by which “managers deliberately structure and coordinate organizational resources to achieve the organization’s purpose.”7 This statement, which captures the enduring intentionality of design and its role in driving structure and resources toward the purpose, seems to embody the essence of organization design. Daft does supply a valuable depiction of what he terms “the structural and contextual dimensions of design” but fails to sustain the emphasis of those three pages in the following 500.8

Unfortunately, Daft is not alone in his mistreatment of the design concept. The otherwise marvelous text Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience by Richard Hughes, Robert Ginnett, and Gordon Curphy of the Center for Creative Leadership addresses design for the first time two-thirds of the way into the discussion—and then only as a synonym for organizational structure. The authors treat design not as an active process but as a collection of characteristics—complexity, formalization, and centralization.9 Even Bernard Bass’s tome on leadership deals with the concept directly only twice, briefly discussing its structural aspects.10

In Jay Galbraith’s Designing Organizations, yet again the reader is treated to a game of hide-and-seek with the concept. One finds his best attempt to address design in the blurb on the dust jacket. There he includes an indirect reference to the book as “a leader’s concise guide to the process of creating and managing an organization—no matter how complex—that will be positioned to respond effectively and rapidly to customer demands and have the ability to achieve unique competitive advantage.”11 This definition captures the multidimensional nature of design and its importance to success, but one finds it nowhere in the actual text. Only late in the discussion of the concept does Galbraith note that “organization design is a process; it is a continuous process and not a single event. . . . Leaders must learn to think of organize as a verb, an action verb.”12 Unfortunately, he immediately clouds the idea by replacing design in the next sentence with the term organizing and fails to distinguish between them.

Given the pervasive mistreatment of the term and the associated confusion it creates, the managerial tool kits of many senior leaders understandably fail to appropriately include organizational design. For the purposes of this discussion, it encompasses leadership actions to structure and coordinate personnel, processes, and resources that fulfill the organization’s purpose. Having clarified design, the article now looks at a consequence that leaders should try to avoid.

Path to Distraction

Organizational distraction entails the misallocation of leadership’s focus from important strategic issues to those less significant but more pressing, thus resulting in degraded organizational performance. Although a simple route, the path to such distraction comes in several forms—each beginning with partial understanding of the concept of design. Leaders grasp the latter’s structural aspects but fail to connect design concepts to other processes. Other leaders establish initial connections to implement design across the organization but fail to view it as a continuous process, resulting in the emergence of alignment problems over time. The final path to distraction is trod by leaders who grasp the concept and understand the enduring nature of their responsibilities but abdicate their role because of the complexity associated with managing organizational design. In each case, the lack of an understanding of design leads to decreased emphasis on the concept and partial implementation. Leaders can avoid this pitfall by renewing their comprehension of the purpose of design.

Such avoidance may seem simple, but distraction is an insidious threat not easy to safeguard against, especially in today’s semichaotic operating environment. By way of analogy, most drivers are well aware of the myriad distractions that can quickly create hazards for themselves, passengers, and others on the road. This awareness allows responsible drivers to take actions to mitigate those distractions—at least the ones they can control. This leaves a significant number that they must still guard against. Senior leaders face this same challenge in terms of attending to the important aspects of organizational activity.

Part of the genius of organizational design resides in the creation of clear operating responsibilities for the senior leader. This role definition lays out a distinct path to ensure that executives focus on the strategic dimensions of the organization and are not distracted by those assigned to other levels. However, today’s operating environment exerts strong “downward pressures” that can drive the unwitting leader’s attention away from strategic responsibilities and into operational or even tactical issues—a situation especially true for senior military leaders. The enticement of reverting to lower levels of leadership based on their previous experience becomes potentially overwhelming. In these cases, one of the first steps toward avoiding distraction involves recognition and awareness of these pressures.

Downward Pressures

Four significant pressures warrant leaders’ consideration, the first of which is the availability of real-time information on all aspects of organizational activities, including those at the lowest levels. Unless treated appropriately, access to this information by senior leaders can quickly divert their attention from concerns more appropriate to their position. The natural human fascination with “frontline” operations and the familiarity often resident in senior leaders who have experienced those activities create a significant source of distraction if safeguards of organizational design are not in place and enforced.

The same information technology that generates real-time internal distractions fuels the 24/7 global-media enterprise that can comprise a second source of downward pressure on leaders. Most organizations do not serve as topics for cable news discussions or business-magazine articles, but the advent of social media forums has created the “every man a journalist” culture. Strategic aspects of organizational vision and objectives probably will not go viral in this environment; however, lower-level policies and practices will likely engender significant attention and draw leadership to those levels. Additionally, the ever-present eye of external media fosters an attitude of self-protection that can drive the leader away from long-term strategic concentration and communication into a reactive cycle attuned to the latest hot topic.

The third downward pressure comes from internal performance pressure that accompanies the high-stakes nature of many organizational leadership positions. The military’s evaluation and promotion cycle feeds this short-term emphasis. The desire for quick victories and expectations of improvements to fleeting metrics drive leaders to a fascination with tactical details to the neglect of their strategic roles. Ironically, in seeking short-term gains, distracted leaders undermine the likelihood of long-term organizational success.

Finally, leaders are distracted by their own penchant for the tangible results and clarity rarely found in the boardroom (Pentagon conference rooms) but readily available on the production floor (operational squadrons). This personal pressure is exacerbated by enticements of real-time information and continuous scrutiny from higher echelons. Although leaders naturally desire day-to-day relevance, they must learn how to satisfy this need without abandoning their responsibilities as strategic guides for the organization. This neglect of essential leadership roles, induced by undue attention on internal or external issues not related to the strategic direction of the organization, represents the essence of strategic distraction. Leaders must become aware of this hazard and take action to prevent it.

Strategic Inversion

When properly implemented, design plays several critical roles for the organization. First, it is the guiding intent that frames the basic path that the organization will follow. The design concept espoused by the founder or leading coalition provides the fundamental context for decision making and sets the benchmark for aligning the organization. Second, the design process, as a source of continuous refinement, coordinates or synchronizes the basic design elements of structure, process, incentives, and personnel. Galbraith calls the result of this coordination “strategic fit,” which occurs when all of the design elements “are aligned with the strategy and reinforce one another. A strategic fit means effectiveness because congruence among the policies sends a clear and consistent signal to organization members and guides their behavior.”13 Finally, design acts as the objective or end state for the organization to target. In this aspect, it becomes the strategic goal that helps keep the leader’s attention on long-term results and sustainability. Each of these aspects of design must be implemented and sustained to counteract downward pressures and their adverse effects on organizational alignment.

The consequences of abdicating responsibility for strategic design are rarely immediate due to the natural inertia of an organization, but the results soon manifest themselves in organizational performance as flaws in alignment become apparent. The DOD, an agency renowned for its disciplined strategic focus and processes, has become a case study for the consequences of neglecting or misapplying design. The personalities, politics, and operational pressures of two major conflicts have created the potential for a strategic inversion in the department. In a fascinating twist driven by technology and media, some of the most junior enlisted members execute tactical actions that produce strategic effects on the front lines. The resulting media attention pressures some of the most senior officers to delve into tactical minutiae through the portals of worldwide surveillance and global communications. Thus, the clear demarcations among tactical, operational, and strategic roles blur, and the organizational pyramid can become inverted. Without proper restraint, the continuous stream of information back to Washington can feed an infatuation with operational and tactical details that distract from strategic responsibilities.

Succeeding by Design

The success of either the DOD or a much smaller organization depends upon ensuring that leadership understands and implements the basic aspects of design. Any leader seeking to walk this path should start by clearly defining the concept. The following definition offers a useful starting point: design is “a strategic approach that defines the plans, parameters, processes and actions within a specific context and its constraints to realize a desired outcome.” Next, leaders need to think of design as a unique change lever available all of the time and at multiple levels throughout the organization.14 As such, it should be an active part of all leadership conversations. Lastly, design should emerge as the direct product of a well-developed strategy, executed through the four primary design elements that protect against strategic distraction: structure, process, incentives, and personnel.15

Before properly executing the design elements, one must establish a relationship between organizational strategy and design. In a proper connection, these two form a symbiotic relationship wherein design both flows from and informs the organizational strategy. As the foundational concept, design shapes the range of possible strategy options. Once selected, the strategy guides the design process through adjustment of the key managerial levers. As the organization moves forward, a robust design process supplies feedback to strategic-planning efforts and shapes adjustments to the future strategy. Leaders must maintain clarity between these two important concepts in order to ensure fulfillment of each role and sustainment of their complementary nature.

After determining the strategic direction, one can fold design into each of the previously mentioned areas; collectively, they will form an institutional safeguard against strategic distraction. Although the efforts across the organization occur simultaneously, for clarity the article addresses them sequentially, starting with structure.

Organizational structure, the most visible manifestation of the design process, is often treated as synonymous with design. In fact, design is the metaconcept that applies to all organizational aspects whereas structure primarily involves the distribution of power within the organization as well as the size and nature of operations conducted by the organization. Creation of an appropriate structure acts as an important preventive against strategic distraction because it aligns individuals with lanes of authority and responsibilities and establishes habitual relationships between those persons at different levels. Although not sufficient alone, a well-designed structure is an important initial barrier for maintaining organizational alignment.

Despite all of the attention usually paid to structure, Galbraith claims that “most design efforts invest far too much time drawing the organization chart and far too little on processes and rewards.”16 This critique is important because structure provides only the starting point for organizational execution. The day-to-day processes and incentives drive performance and foster an organizational culture. Through incentives, design efforts can ensure the success of strategic processes and the elimination of a singular concern with short-term achievements. One can tailor incentives to guarantee that performance cultivates organizational alignment as well as “the bottom line.” Similarly, organizational processes must be designed to support strategy, structure, and incentives. Process design also helps ensure the execution of recurring validations of strategic alignment. Establishment of processes that repeatedly cycle back to the foundational design and strategy will make the organization both synchronized and adaptive to a changing environment.

The final lever of design implementation involves the organization’s most valuable resource—its people. The transitory nature of some employees forces leaders not to depend too much on them for guarding against strategic distraction, but leadership can do a great deal through job descriptions, role definitions, and reporting responsibilities that go well beyond any particular individual. Implementing design through employees calls for deliberate hiring processes, robust developmental programs, and focused evaluation systems. Design in personnel requires that those who directly affect operations clearly grasp the intent of the organization and their role in ensuring its success.

Conclusion

Not a difficult process, the proper implementation of design must nevertheless be deliberate and continuous to produce the desired result of driving the organization forward and helping it avoid the perils of strategic distraction and misalignment. Senior leaders execute design as one of their strategic functions, but often they apply it only at the surface. The lack of thorough integration causes an organization to constantly pull the leader’s view downward. Without appropriate safeguards or leadership intervention, institutional pressures undermine effective organizational design and drive misalignment. In the absence of rigorous design efforts, senior leaders become distracted from their strategic roles and succumb to the pressures of the tactical level. They must remain aware of this downward pull and ensure that organizational design goes beyond structural considerations and into all aspects of daily execution.

*The author serves as the vice wing commander for the 375th Air Mobility Wing at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. Previously, he served on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon and was a National Defense Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a C-17 squadron commander, and a strategic planner at Headquarters US Pacific Command. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the United States Air Force Academy and master’s degrees from the National Defense University, George Washington University, and Regent University. A graduate of Squadron Officer School, Air Command and Staff College, the Joint Advanced Warfighting School, and Air War College, as well as an Air Force Fellow for senior developmental education, Colonel Price is completing a doctorate in strategic leadership at Regent University.

Notes

1. Bernard I. Finel, “The Failed Secretary,” Armed Forces Journal 149, no. 2 (September 2011): 25.

2. Ibid., 26.

3. Paul Ralph and Yair Wand, “A Proposal for a Formal Definition of the Design Concept,” in Design Requirements Engineering: A Ten-Year Perspective, LNBIP 14, ed. Kalle Lyytinen et al. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2009), 103–36.

4. Steve Jobs, “Apple’s One-Dollar-a-Year Man,” Fortune, 24 January 2000, http://money.cnn.com

/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/01/24/272277/index.htm.

5. Tom Peters, “Tom Peters on Design,” @issue: The Journal of Business and Design 6, no. 1 (Spring 2000), http://www.cdf.org/issue_journal/tom_peters_on_design.html.

6. Richard L. Daft, Organization Theory and Design, 10th ed. (Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning, 2010), 59.

7. Ibid., 11.

8. Ibid., 14–18.

9. Richard L. Hughes, Robert C. Ginnett, and Gordon J. Curphy, Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience (Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1993), 323.

10. Bernard M. Bass with Ruth Bass, The Bass Handbook of Leadership: Theory, Research, and Managerial Applications, 4th ed. (New York: Free Press, 2008), 294–95, 738–39.

11. Jay R. Galbraith, Designing Organizations: An Executive Guide to Strategy, Structure and Process, new and rev. ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002).

12. Ibid., 154.

13. Ibid., 171.

14. David A. Nadler and Michael L. Tushman with Mark B. Nadler, Competing by Design: The Power of Organizational Architecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 11.

15. Galbraith, Designing Organizations, 10.

16. Ibid., 14.

War as the Key to Unlocking Mass Murder

The Rwandan Genocide Revisited

Arthur N. Gilbert, PhD*

Kristina Hook

Since the term genocide was coined in the 1940s to classify specific crimes committed with the intent to destroy the existence of a group of people, this field of study has emerged as one of the most diverse and perhaps even the most divisive in modern academe. In his classic study Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, Robert Melson argues that war, revolution, and genocide are intertwined as revolutionary regimes concurrently turn outward to fight wars and inward to exterminate enemies in their midst.1 Despite the influence of Melson’s framework in this scholastic field, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen dissents, arguing that genocide has little to do with war. In his view, genocide originates in the minds of people, who are in turn affected by culture and ideology.2 Such strong differences in opinion are of more than academic interest. Understanding genocide through the proper scholastic paradigm may aid in the prevention of future instances of mass murder. We have therefore identified Rwanda as an important test case for these two diverse hypotheses. Drawing from a wide range of influential scholars and historical information, this article seeks to place the Rwandan case study within the general debate on mass murder. By doing so, we are able to identify not only current trends in genocide scholarship but also some important gaps in present Rwanda-related research.

The Melson Hypothesis

We have recently marked the 20th anniversary of the publication of Melson’s influential Revolution and Genocide. Moving away from theoretical concepts like totalitarianism, fascism, and communism, Melson, whose family members were Holocaust survivors, pointed genocide studies in new and fruitful directions by introducing a framework that concentrated on structural dynamics, allowing him to compare genocidal events—an important step because he could move beyond beliefs of Holocaust uniqueness, a path later taken by historians such as Steven T. Katz.3 Consequently, Melson was able to observe similarities more universal and less dependent on the specificities of the Western tradition. Away from Western Europe, a particularly vicious genocide had taken place in Cambodia, a place far removed from the previously suggested ethnic animosities, religious traditions, or historical political hostilities that had characterized theories of European-based mass violence.4 A broadening of the genocide text is obvious in the construction of his book, which begins with a comparison between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide of 1915 and then morphs into thoughts on what Melson refers to as two illustrative and confirming cases of genocide: the Stalinist destruction of the Kulaks and the “autogenocide” in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. We have no doubt that if Melson were writing his book 20 years later, he would include references to the recently “discovered” genocide by Germany in Southwest Africa against the Herero people in the first decade of the twentieth century and, most importantly for our purposes, the Rwandan genocide, which took place only two years after the publication of Melson’s book.

At the heart of his structural analysis is the linkage between revolution and war. Theoretically, the Melsonian viewpoint consists of a triad of revolution, war, and genocide. With bloodshed binding this destructive package together, it is dangerous to ignore the fact that the tentacles of violence make all three blood brothers. One important implication of this theory necessitates that praising either war or revolution as necessary and proper must take into account the potentiality of genocidal consequences. Melson spells out this repercussion clearly in both the introduction and four historical case studies. To include a more modern example, we might point to the widely reported instances of escalating violence against the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt following the Arab Revolution and suggest vigilant monitoring by fields ranging from human rights to international security.5

Returning again to Melson’s conceptual framework, we see that the author begins by presenting four major points:

1. Revolutions created the conditions for genocidal movements to come to power.

2. Revolutions made possible the imposition of radical ideologies and new orders that legitimized genocide.

3. The social mobilization of low status or despised groups helped to make them targets of genocide.

4. Revolutions leading to wars facilitated the implementation of genocide as a policy of the state.6

For the purposes of this article, proposition four is most important since Melson claims that war is a facilitator of genocide in revolutionary states. To be clear, he is aware that not all revolutions cause genocide; rather, we are talking about tendencies often avoided. Nonetheless, this propensity for violence, which can snowball into mass killing, stems from the need for revolutionary regimes to legitimize themselves, often by creating categories of “insider” versus “outsider.” Such a phenomenon is of course standard fare with regard to the process of state building as well as revolutionary regimes. For example, Marx brilliantly explores exclusionary nationalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when both expulsion and murder are woven into the foundation of states like Great Britain, France, and Spain.7 R. I. Moore, who also adopts it as a major theme, contends that the creation of new states in Western Europe depended upon the exclusion of heretics, lepers, and Jews.8 Other scholastic efforts have sought to continue such chains of reasoning centuries later in Western Europe. However, whether the nations studied in such works can accurately be described as revolutionary in the post–French Revolution era remains problematic. Still, analyses of the French Revolution by scholars like François Furet expound upon the fear of an aristocratic plot among revolutionaries, indicating that many of the same purgative impulses that Melson would anticipate are at work in the process of state building.9

At this point in his analysis, Melson argues that “war itself . . . is intimately related to revolution,” thus closing the revolution-war-genocide triangle.10 He asserts that

1. War gives rise to feelings of vulnerability and/or exultation. Such feelings engender or intensify the fear that the state’s internal enemies, those that earlier have been labeled as the “enemies of the revolution,” are part of an insidious plot with the regime’s international foes to undo the revolution or even to destroy the state and the political community itself....

2. War increases the autonomy of the state from internal social forces, including public opinion and its moral constraints.

3. War closes off other policy options of dealing with internal “enemies,” such as expulsion, assimilation, or segregation.11

Our analysis found point three of particular interest because it places genocide along a continuum of political behavior and in so doing makes it, in a very literal sense, the “final solution” when expulsion, assimilation, or segregation have failed. At this point, we suspect that Melson clearly is thinking of Holocaust debate between intentionalists and functionalists, the latter position viewing genocide as one of several possible options in the process of purging the state and eliminating the enemy within the borders. Here again we note that Melson is writing before the 1994 Rwandan genocide; therefore, his triad is not tested against this event.

The Goldhagen Paradigm

Daniel Goldhagen, another vastly influential figure in genocide research, also shares a family history of Holocaust survivors, a fact explored in his documentary film Worse than War (based on his book of the same name).12 Despite this similarity, Goldhagen has travelled a very different intellectual path than Melson. For Goldhagen, the structuralist arguments of Melson miss the point. Instead, Goldhagen’s constant refrain becomes, “Mass murder begins in the minds of men.”13 Indeed, with his important but controversial book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Goldhagen began his search for the genocidal impulse not in revolution and war but in culture and ideology.14 In his view, the energy and passion of ordinary German citizens were directed to the persecution and slaughter of Jews because these Germans had been nurtured in an ideology of eliminationist anti-Semitism. As the Jews became the symbol of evil, their murder was predicated less on domestic and international conditions and more on culture. We have neither the space nor time to deal with the long, angry debate over this thesis. Suffice it to say that it was certainly received with considerably less enthusiasm than Melson’s study of Holocaust events.

Goldhagen’s second major book, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfilled Duty of Repair, also focuses almost exclusively on culture and ideology.15 Goldhagen now expands blame assigned to ordinary Germans to advance a perspective that views the Catholic Church as fomenting anti-Semitism throughout its history. Essentially, he creates a long-chain argument that transitions the space and time component of his previous work into a religious tradition which began during the Roman Empire—before Germany was a nation-state. In Goldhagen’s own words, the “Germaness” of anti-Semitism was embedded in a larger framework of Catholicism: “The Christian age-old view of the Jews as authors of so much evil was naturally adopted by racist antisemites, most noticeably in Germany. Germaness was fused with Christianity, rendering Jewishness the nefarious Other, not just for Christendom but also for Germania.”16

Thus, in Goldhagen’s culturally and ideologically influenced paradigm, he attributes the murder of six million Jews to Catholicism, Christianity as a whole, and even the Gospels in the New Testament. Although not claiming that the Catholic Church was the sole purveyor of the Holocaust, Goldhagen nonetheless asserts that Christianity provided a cultural text for promoting anti-Semitism. Because he strongly believes that Christianity paved the way for the devaluing of the Jewish people and allowed for the creation of the nefarious Other, Goldhagen’s stance centers around a combination of religious ideology and cultural predilection in the perpetuation of the Holocaust.

As discussed above, Melson’s structural emphasis on a triad of war, revolution, and genocide is quite distinct from Goldhagen’s perspective. The tension between Goldhagen’s cultural and ideological approach and Melson’s structuralism reaches its apotheosis in Goldhagen’s book Worse than War:

Mass murder and elimination are also not the stepchildren of the euphoria of military victory. If vanquishing an opponent creates a sense of omnipotence and a desire (not previously existing) to annihilate entire populations, then all or certainly many more victors would annihilate their enemies. . . .

Our era’s differing landscapes of war and of mass murder belie the common belief that war itself causes annihilationist programs. War has provided the occasion for would-be mass murderers to finally act and has therefore been an arena for mass murder. But that is different from war itself producing it.17 (emphasis in original)

To establish his point, Goldhagen then turns to specific examples of genocide in the twentieth century in order to separate mass killing from war.18 For example, he writes that Stalin’s genocidal practices in the Soviet Union predated World War II and indeed abated during the war. Similarly, most of Mao’s mass killing in China transpired when he had total control of the country. Further, slaughter in Tibet took place during occupation and not war. Again, the Indonesians’ slaughter of their left-wing opponents in the mid-1960s occurred during peacetime, as did instances of mass violence and killing in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala. Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, however, is Goldhagen’s first foray into Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. He explicitly writes that the “Tutsi slaughter of at least 100,000 Hutu in Burundi in 1972, and smaller numbers three other times, had nothing to do with war.”19 Such a statement would then view the Rwandan genocide, which forms the heart of this article, as not precipitated by war but prompted by internal power relationships in a single country.

Having now discussed the important difference between the Melson and Goldhagen frameworks, we argue that the Rwandan genocide of 1994 serves as an important test case for disciples of each school of thought. Scholars have approached this now-infamous example of genocide from a variety of perspectives. Yet, as we gauge where genocide scholarship is moving in our time, we contend that a major question boils down to a comparison of Melson’s and Goldhagen’s divergent views. Is the horrific slaughter of an estimated 800,000–1,000,000 people over a three-month span due to war and revolution, or is it a result of the distinct history, ideology, and cultural features in this central African country? To answer this important question, we now delve into this nation’s past, gauging whether notions of war and revolution are consistent with the historical reality of Rwanda.

The Rwandan Genocide and Revolution

If Melson had written his book after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we believe he would have most likely treated conditions in this nation as revolutionary. Like that of any nation, Rwanda’s history is extremely complex, and space constraints preclude a more thorough detailing of the myriad of significant events. In summary, however, we believe that the Rwandan genocide had its roots even in the origins of Rwandan independence, a fact to which we shortly return.

By the time of the genocide in 1994, Rwanda’s population included three ethnic groups: Hutu (approximately 85 percent), Tutsi (14 percent), and Twa (1 percent).20 Social, economic, and political pressures that had been building throughout the 1990s reached a breaking point on 6 April 1994 when an airplane carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down as it prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda.21 This assassination is now considered the catalyst of the Rwandan genocide. Responsibility for the attack remains a subject of debate, with some pointing to the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and others blaming government-aligned Hutu extremists, claiming that they were trying to halt negotiations with the RPF.22

A tidal wave of violence began immediately after this event, and Hutu extremists seized control of the government, slaying the more moderate political leaders who might have tempered the killing.23 Both Tutsis and Hutus were murdered, but Tutsis bore the brunt of the violence as men, women, and children died in their homes or as they tried to flee. Although the number of people who participated in and who fell victim to this 100-day period of mass murder is still disputed, the United Human Rights Council estimates that up to 800,000 were killed—almost three-quarters of the Tutsi population. The council also believes that as many as 200,000 people participated in the slaughter.24

Melson does not offer a precise definition of genocide, but it appears self-evident that state breakdown over time in the case of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust is broad enough to include the Rwanda case. In a telling comment, he argues that “a revolutionary regime needs to construct a new system of legitimation and to redefine the identity of the political community as the ‘people,’ the ‘nation,’ the ‘class,’ or the ‘race.’ ”25 The period from independence to genocide in Rwanda was indeed characterized by such a struggle for legitimation and identity. Indeed, Scott Straus argues that historical periods of violence throughout Rwanda’s history exhibited the same (or at least similar) dynamics of violence that would later be at work during the genocide.26 After describing such periods, he concludes that violence against Tutsi civilians transpired during periods characterized by looming political change, a destabilized nation, and volatile power politics—all factors that support the Melsonian hypothesis.

Historical periods supplied by Straus do support his conjectures.27 The first period of violence occurred from 1957 to 1962, during the eve of Rwanda’s independence from its colonial authorities. At the time, four major political actors existed: (1) the Belgian colonial authorities, who had traditionally supported the Tutsi aristocracy but had capitulated to international pressure for reforms that benefited Hutus; (2) Tutsi traditionalists, who argued against ethnic boundaries and who sought to promote pan-Rwandan nationalism united against European colonial powers; (3) Hutu and Tutsi moderates, who sought gradual change through political compromise; and (4) a nascent Hutu counterelite, who denounced Hutu oppression by Tutsi authorities and saw Rwandan independence as an opportunity for an ethnic redistribution of power. In the wake of the Rwandan king’s sudden and mysterious death, a tense political environment materialized, consisting of impending decolonization, a swiftly deteriorating national relationship with Belgian authorities, and the formation of oppositional political parties. Thus, the coming of independence created political tensions and power uncertainties not unlike the collapse of the monarchy in Germany and the Ottoman Empire and the rise of a new, smaller Turkish state.

As political leaders, both Hutu and Tutsi, became the target of beatings, arrests, and torture, attacks also spread until violence was turned against Tutsi civilians, committed mainly by young Hutu men. The role of Belgium in this historical episode of violence remains significant. In its effort to quell violence, that country consolidated the political relevance of ethnicity by siding with the Hutu insurgency and even restructuring Rwanda’s local administration along ethnic lines.28 Consequently, the Rwandan revolution and impending independence not only created societal insecurity, upheaval, volatility, and political maneuvering in the face of imminent political change but also intensified forms of retaliation.

The second episode of historically significant violence took place in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan revolution when two separate occurrences of massacres erupted, the first in 1962 and the second in 1963–64.29 Scholars agree that these massacres, which involved the killing of men, women, and children, took place solely on the basis of categorical ethnicity—that is, the victims were killed simply because they were Tutsis.30 Pertinent trends included a cause-and-effect relationship between retaliation and escalation as attacks by militant Tutsi exiles based outside Rwanda led to counterattacks against Tutsi civilians within Rwanda’s borders.31 Additionally, it is notable that the 1963–64 massacre took place in the context of eroding power and political fragmentation within President Grégoire Kayibanda’s regime. Similar to the dynamics of 1994, Straus explains that “here, as elsewhere, threatened authorities used violence to keep power when their power was most unsettled and at risk.”32

We think it is important to note here that even though cursory examinations of these events have led some to place blame on notions along the lines of “ancient tribal hatred” or “entrenched ethnic animosity,” more careful appraisals of violent episodes in Rwanda’s history, including Straus’s assessment, appear to indicate that blaming conflicts solely on ethnicity is an insufficient explanation for the full range of dynamics present. The latter include eroding political power and the fragmentation of President Kayibanda’s administration.33 Additionally, in historical examples such as those mentioned above, topics of “categorical ethnicity” are addressed but, typically, only to indicate that a group was targeted due to its ethnic membership. Such statements do not point exclusively to using ethnicity as a motivating force for killing but as an identifier for who was killed.

The third period of historical violence, occurring in the year 1973, is no exception. Straus notes that during this time of strife and the purging of Tutsis from positions of power, government authorities were responding to feelings of political insecurity and employing violence as a means to wield power.34 Again, ethnic conflict is only part of the story since political fragmentation within Rwanda was supplemented by the rise of militant Tutsi exiles based outside Rwanda in neighboring countries such as Uganda. Unlike the events of 1963, no Tutsi attack precipitated the violence in 1973, but speculation exists that unrest in Rwanda was driven by violence in neighboring Burundi, in which a rebellion led by Burundian Hutus resulted in military-led counterattack, killing 100,000–200,000 Hutu civilians.35 We can therefore speculate that these massacres in turn stoked the fear and insecurity in Rwanda that civil war and contentious political party rivalries had previously lit.

The last major historical period of violence began in 1990 and would eventually culminate in the 1994 genocide. One surprising feature of the immediate pregenocide phase in Rwanda is that prior to 1994, the country had been characterized by improvements in national infrastructure, economic growth, international support, diplomatic gains, and general political stability under the regime of President Habyarimana.36 In fact, before the genocide, many considered Rwanda a model of political and economic consistency in an otherwise troubled East African region.37 Therefore, it seems that politics rather than economic issues lay at the heart of the problem. In 1990 highly charged political change, fermenting since the 1980s when Rwanda’s one-party political system ended, turned violent with an invasion by the Tutsi-led RPF rebel army on 1 October 1990.38 Hard-liner ideology emerged as exemplified by Léon Mugesera, an ideologue belonging to President Habyarimana’s political party, who painted a picture of Tutsis as foreigners in Rwanda and vowed that they should be sent to their real home in Ethiopia via the Nyabarongo River.39 A case in point—note that exclusionary nationalism from Hutu radicals escalated as fear of Tutsi military power grew.

This cause-and-effect relationship suggests that the role of elites was of prime importance in touching off the mass killings in 1994. As students of the Rwandan genocide know, the role of leaders and ordinary people has been a major bone of contention since reports of the horror emerged during the 100 days of slaughter. The emphasis on elites in Rwanda owes a great deal to the work of Benjamin Valentino, who notes that they “saw the events of the early 1990s as a threat to the preservation of Hutu political and economic predominance more generally. They appear to have feared not only the loss of their personal privileges but a return to the system of Tutsi domination that had prevailed before 1959.”40

Valentino later argues that Hutu radicals pointed to Burundi as an example of how a minority of Tutsis might rise up and murder Hutus, noting that the minority Tutsi community in Rwanda had a powerful ally in the RPF army in Uganda—a force that would be used to massacre the majority Hutus if it were not stopped.41 In his perspective, then, mass killing became politically useful to elites. The strategy of killing, therefore, was simply another policy tool in the hands of elites—an instrument used to achieve their prioritized political and/or ideological objectives. A deadly logic operates behind elite decision making, according to Valentino’s model, for clearly a Tutsi victory would usher in a reversal of fortune, and surely the radical Hutu leaders would themselves be the first to die. Thus, the rhetoric of the radical Hutu leaders sought to wield terror in order to cement Hutu political status and preserve the new status quo. Mugesera, the ideologue mentioned previously, insisted in a public speech, “Are we really waiting for them [Tutsis] to come and exterminate us?. . . . I do not think we are going to allow them to shoot us!”42 With such rhetoric, Mugesera urges his audience to unite and crush any Tutsi infiltrators lest the Hutus be killed first: “Do not be afraid, know that anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck.”43 By doing so, he opens the door to painting genocide as self-preservation. Again, elite exclusionary nationalism looks similar to the process of state building in Europe in the sixteenth century when religious killing, fomented by parties attached to both the Catholic and Protestant denominations of the Christian faith, was the precursor of ethnic killing today.44 As we return once more to Melson on the link between revolution and genocide, it is important to note that he stressed that not all revolutions cause genocide.45 Instead, we are talking about increased possibility—not prediction—in the same sense that Jack Snyder discussed the increase in the probability of war as states transition to democracy. Here, he conjectures that electoral triumphalism emerges as states overturn oppressive regimes, in turn creating international violence as the power given to the euphoric majority can lead to genocidal violence.46

The Rwanda Genocide and War

Turning next to Melson’s connection of genocide to war, we find this relationship more problematic for the case of Rwanda.47 The early literature on the 1994 Rwandan genocide focused intensely on the internal maelstrom; consequently, some time passed before scholars placed the killing in a regional and, indeed, international context. The idea that war was a major variable in Rwanda emerged slowly and fitfully in the scholastic world as scholars have been able to conduct fieldwork in more peaceful times and have gathered information from both perpetrators and victims. Clearly, Goldhagen has more room to maneuver and make his case when war is factored into the genocide story.

In this short article, we cannot review all of the literature written in the almost 20-year period since the Rwandan genocide, but we have chosen to apply several important works that we feel are representative. One of the first and most influential writers on the Rwandan genocide, Gérard Prunier, focuses on history and geography, including the colonial effect on the definition of Hutu and Tutsi, the impact of land scarcity, and the effects of high population density. Most importantly, Prunier argues that there was no trace of violence between Hutus and Tutsis before the arrival of Europeans, which ushered in what can be considered a mythic past and an ethnic narrative that would ultimately result in genocide.48 The international aspects of the Rwandan genocide center on the diaspora, as large numbers of Tutsis crossed national boundaries into neighboring countries, including Uganda.

Although later writers put more emphasis on war and genocide, Prunier firmly places the events of 1994 into a war text that begins with the October 1990 invasion of the RPF from Uganda.49 After a discussion of the role of France and Great Britain in the dangerous situation, he turns to the deteriorating internal political situation, examining Rwandan tribal violence during 1994:

If tribes did not exist, they would have to be invented. In a world where illiteracy is still the rule, where most of the population has horizons which are limited to their parochial world, where ideologies are bizarre foreign gadgets reserved for intellectuals, solidarity is best understood in terms of close community. In turn, these positive (or negative) group feelings are manipulated by the elite in their struggles for controlling scarce and even shrinking financial, cultural and political resources.50

According to such a perspective, then, the heart of the genocidal matter is the manipulation of a pliable population by elites in an overpopulated country where the RPF was the dominant Hutu concern. Elites were thus able to convince Hutu peasant masses that “they had no choice but to kill to protect themselves from an evil that was both facelessly abstract and embodied in the most ordinary person living next door.”51 Moreover, this internal dynamic was augmented by chaos in Burundi to the south, where the Tutsi army staged a mass killing of Hutus and where hundreds of thousands of refugees were fleeing over the southern Rwanda border for a safe haven from the Tutsi onslaught. Therefore, when President Habyarimana died in the airplane crash in 1994, fear of the Tutsi Other escalated. As Prunier states, “Killing had become an act of self-defence because evil incarnate was now threatening to destroy the peaceful agrarian democratic Hutu republic.”52 An invading RPF army from the north and an army of refugees from the south are an important part of the genocide story, but the emphasis of Prunier’s account remains primarily on internal dynamics.

Three years later, Philip Gourevitch published his enormously popular account.53 Contributing much to the postgenocide story, Gourevitch adds little on the international political dimensions of the genocide. Instead he concentrates on internal dynamics, particularly the role played by extreme Hutu elites in promoting the uprising that snowballed into genocide.

In 2001 a pivotal book by Mahmood Mamdani pointed Rwanda research in new directions.54 Unlike Gourevitch, Mamdani examines Hutu-Tutsi dynamics with particular reference to the creation of societal fear, a dynamic greatly affected by current events taking place in the nations that bordered Rwanda. Mamdani’s account of the early years of independence examines the unusual nature of the diaspora that emerged during independence. This diaspora became primarily Tutsi, a result of the shift in power between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. During the transition, this minority lost the political ascendency given by the Belgian colonial rulers. Consequently, they began leaving Rwanda out of fear, becoming, as Mamdani puts it, “ethnic strangers everywhere.”55 Given this pattern, it is not a large stretch to see the Tutsi as an equivalent of the wandering Jew. Stateless in Central Africa, lacking the prospect of return to their home nation, and at the mercy of other political entities and groups, the Tutsi exiles were—in every sense of the word—homeless. For many, Uganda became a second home as well as a safe haven for planning their return. “Next year in Kigali” became the equivalent of “next year in Jerusalem.”

In addition to Uganda, Tutsi refugees made their way to the Congo, Burundi, and Tanzania, a fact that created understandable fears of a fifth column within Rwanda itself. In this scenario, a commonplace one throughout history, the enemy without forms an alliance with the enemy within. As a result, fear of subversion and, indeed, destruction by this unholy alliance creates unbearable tension. Mamdani beautifully summarizes this possibility as he writes on the motivation for genocide:

This is why one needs to recognize that it was not greed—not even hatred—but fear which was the reason why the multitudes responded to the call of Hutu Power the closer the war came to home. Hutu Power extremists prevailed not because they promised farmers more land if they killed their Tutsi neighbors—which they did—but because they told farmers that the alternative would be to let RPF take their land and return it to the Tutsi who had been expropriated after 1959.56 (emphasis in original)

A later comment from Mamdani reiterates this theme: “They think they have only the choice to kill or be killed.”57 Thus, he believes that the genocide essentially boiled down to fear of a dramatically altered body of politics as Hutus felt threatened by the possibility of an outside invasion and/or the Tutsis’ perceived right to return. For Mamdani, neither scarce resources nor cultural variables (e.g., Rwanda’s “culture of obedience”) explain very much about this outburst of mass slaughter. To this author, the answer lies in war and the displacement of one in every seven people in the country—a factor that birthed the great Rwandan diaspora and concomitantly resulted in an ingathering of Hutus fleeing for their lives from Burundi. The collapse of the Rwandan army in the face of the RPF added to the violence, and paramilitary detachments simply joined in the killing. Prevailing logic appears to have emerged that if one could not defeat the enemy at the gates, at least one could defeat the enemy within. This notion would account for the public nature of the genocide. It also prompts Mamdani to claim that this is why institutions such as churches and participants such as hospital workers, teachers, and even human rights workers facilitated the slaughter.58 He writes that such entities, normally the providers of refuge, became the most enthusiastic purveyors of death. His answer to this puzzle becomes a variant of the healing/killing paradox that we often associate with the role of the Nazi doctors during the Holocaust. Although not every Rwandan researcher may agree with Mamdani’s viewpoint here, he does write at length about the role of institutions such as the church in the genocide.59 In the end, according to Mamdani, war and fear of a revolution that would turn their world upside down appear to have motivated those who perceived that they had the most to lose in the reshuffling of power in Rwanda as they utilized fear and enlisted killers to their cause.60 Certainly, the Mamdani account of the genocide fits nicely into the more general framework of Melson.

More recent Rwandan studies feature much on-site research, including interviews conducted with survivors and, even more intriguingly, participants and bystanders. Among these, the previously mentioned work by Straus stands out. Like Mamdani, Straus begins his exploration with war:

Without a war in Rwanda, genocide would not have happened (by war, I mean the civil war that began on April 7, 1994, after the president was assassinated and which the hardliners were losing). War matters for several reasons. First, war provided the essentials for mass killing: security. . . . Second, war legitimized the killing. . . . Third, the war that took place during the genocide was intense and defensive. The war thus created a climate of acute uncertainty and insecurity.61

Straus then declares, “In short, war underpinned the logic of genocide, war legitimized killing, war empowered hardliners, and war led specialists in violence to engage the domestic political arena.”62 Additionally, he firmly states that his research illustrates that this genocide was not about “ethnic prejudice, preexisting ethnic antipathy, manipulation from racist propaganda, or nationalist commitments.”63 In a claim reminiscent of Christopher Browning’s famous work on the role of ordinary men as genocidal killers, Straus observes that “Rwanda’s perpetrators were not especially mad, sadistic, hateful, poor, uneducated, ideologically committed, or young.”64 If he is correct, it also follows that scholars like Goldhagen who focus on ideologies and authoritarian regimes are incorrect in the case of Rwanda.

Straus’s conclusions, like Browning’s, are remarkably similar to the “banality of evil” argument advanced during the Adolf Eichmann trial by Hannah Arendt.65 They also follow the work of genocide scholars like James Waller, who sees the potential for genocide in every person.66 Straus’s empirical studies also seem to confirm Ervin Staub’s well-known book, which stresses the everyday nature of genocidal potential.67 When Straus firmly rejects “preexisting ethnic animosity, widespread prejudice, deeply held ideological beliefs, blind obedience, deprivation, or even greed,” he aligns himself with the writers mentioned above, who deny the significance of culture and long-chain historical arguments of the type that characterize the work of Goldhagen and many others.68 For Straus, “the overwhelming majority of perpetrators in rural areas were ordinary men. They were fathers, husbands, and farmers who had average levels of education and who had no prior history of violence.”69

In his final paragraph, Straus reflects on a query he is frequently asked regarding whether he believes that anyone is capable of committing genocide and whether it could happen anywhere. His answer is indirect, but he does hold that “a more accurate claim is that genocide tends to happen under particular conditions.”70 For our purposes, one of these particular conditions would be war, and we contend that this possibility is bolstered by many of the authors previously addressed.

Lee Ann Fujii is another Rwandan author who follows Browning’s footprints.71 Her interview-based research also soundly rejects the ethnic-hatred arguments as the source of genocide in Rwanda although she places much less emphasis on war than Straus. Explicitly tying her work to Browning’s by applying his findings, she notes that he “explain[s] how the most ordinary . . . men became . . . killers . . . [by] point[ing] not to ideology, anti-Semitism, or obedience to authority, but to the obligation the men felt toward their fellow soldiers—their unwillingness to leave the ‘dirty work’ to others.”72

Essentially, Fujii’s argument boils down to the notion that the need to belong to a group and to achieve a group-based identity will prompt a person to perform a wide range of behaviors, including mass murder.73 Ranging then from Browning to Fujii, this perspective argues that from the Nazis in Poland to the Hutus in Rwanda, mass killing is about small-group dynamics—the need to belong to the group that you will sup with that night and then awaken with to another day of mass killing. For Fujii, not only does ethnic hatred recede into the background but also there is no attempt to validate or deny war as a variable, as is the case with Melson and Straus. Neither can one use her work to support Goldhagen, who appears in the bibliography but not in the index. We also found no real attempt here to raise or answer the question about the genocidal potential in everyone.

The Rwandan Genocide and Cultural Ideology

In the conclusion of his book, Straus approvingly quotes from Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, without any comment on Lifton’s critics: “The disturbing psychological truth [is] that participation in mass murder need not require emotions as extreme or demonic as would seem appropriate for such a malignant project. . . . Ordinary people can commit demonic acts.”74 However, as critics of Lifton have complained, interviewing perpetrators of heinous acts long after the events themselves (whether Holocaust or, in our case, the Rwanda genocide) inherently carries the types of risk that can bias the results. Michael Burleigh, an early critic of Lifton, argues that having “coffee and cakes” with ex-Nazi doctors long after World War II allows these doctors to adapt to the “new” Germany, rehearse their stories, and appear, as it were, to be ordinary doctors.75 Similarly, Rwanda’s “génocidaires” were at a decreased likelihood of confessing a preexisting hatred of Tutsis to researchers who interviewed them years after the genocide. They were also less likely to admit or perhaps even realize the subtle ways that culturally indoctrinated visions of the “diabolical Tutsis” motivated killing. Hence, the fact that both Straus and Fujii came to conclusions that stressed nonideological factors is not in the least surprising. Again referencing Burleigh’s terminology, we find that this would be the Rwandan equivalent of having coffee and cakes with Rwandan killers in a present where admission of such hatred would be out of fashion. In this type of research, admissions of peer pressure, group dynamics, and the desire to be part of an in-group will trump admittance of ideology and never-ending hatred every time. Unlike Fujii, Straus at the very least looks beyond village dynamics to larger issues of war, revolution, violence, and genocide. In doing so, his work—along with that of Mamdani—seems to support the original Melson hypothesis and the triad of revolution, war, and genocide.

Yet, does this negate Goldhagen’s thesis that genocide begins in the minds of men and that war and revolution are less significant than the particularity of culture and ideology?76 At such a stage, we cannot go that far despite the lack of current evidence from the Rwandan experience. Goldhagen is not alone in claiming that culture and context matter and that mass killing cannot be “universalized” into models of revolution and war. He has come under ferocious attack for planting German genocidal behavior into “eliminationist” anti-Semitism, which supposedly reached new heights in Germany, and for blaming the Catholic Church and religious texts for ideological attacks on Jews.77 However, this author does have his supporters, including David Kertzer. Writing in response to the Catholic Church’s apologia We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah, which drew a sharp distinction between religious anti-Semitism and modern-era, race-based anti-Semitism, Kertzer nonetheless contends that the possible distinctions between racial and religious attitudes were less important than the ties that bound them together.78 Important distinctions exist between Goldhagen and Kertzer, the former emphasizing a particularly virulent German form of eliminationist anti-Semitism and the latter stressing anti-Semitism as a tool of the papacy against the threat of post–French Revolution modernism. However, both men agree with the aphorism that genocide begins in the minds of men as deleterious cultural imaging of the Jews opened the door to mid-twentieth-century genocide.

Similarly, the distinguished historian Isabel Hull, while rejecting eliminationist anti-Semitism as the text for genocide, has argued that German military culture encouraged and actualized mass killing of people deemed inferior in the first genocide of the twentieth century—the slaughter of the Herero and Nama people in southwest Africa (now Namibia) by German armies.79 More recently, in David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen’s devastating account of these same events, the authors claim that a particularly Germanic strain of colonial racism, held not only by colonial elites but also by ordinary German settlers, is more important than the behavior of a few evil men and, by implication, more important than revolution and war.80

From such examples, which span Nazi Germany to the post–French Revolution Vatican to colonial Namibia, we see a common thread pointing to cultural and ideological factors as precipitating genocide.81 This common link presents a powerful argument that challenges the reduction of the Rwandan genocide to structural arguments which either include (à la Straus) or exclude (à la Fujii) war but collectively ascribe little importance to culture or ideology in the Rwandan mass killings of 1994. Here, as mentioned previously, we find a disconnect between the 1904 Namibian genocide and the 1994 Rwandan genocide since cultural ideology is assigned an important role in explaining the first but not the second. Such a disconnect is telling, and given the growing notion that cultural factors played a central role in the first African genocide of the twentieth century, we question why the Goldhagen paradigm has received only a cursory examination with reference to Rwanda.

Conclusion and Recommendations

Despite research that points to structural events like revolution and war as precipitating factors for mass murder, we cannot yet conclude that the final word has been written on the Rwandan genocide. We cannot reach such a verdict until innovative research methods are devised that can cut through the problematic elements of ground-level research, particularly the fact that most examinations of genocide are conducted years, if not decades, after the event occurs. Until the advent of pioneering methods that can explore modern genocides in a time-sensitive manner, we cannot properly counter Burleigh’s coffee-and-cakes critique of interviewing génocidaires in a decontextualized environment. Answering such a critique is a critical challenge for this field insofar as the genocide-prevention techniques reflect that practitioner’s perspective of why genocides typically occur, most viewpoints tracing back either to structuralism or cultural ideology explanations. On the one hand, structuralists like Melson, who blame genocide on specific conditions or events, may advocate for structural responses to genocide, such as policy changes or definition modifications. For example, as the definition of national interest has expanded in the modern era to recognize the inherent danger of allowing unimpeded mass violence beyond one’s national borders, the structuralist viewpoint calls for policy changes designed to ostracize or stop perpetrators of such violence as a component of a country’s national interest.82 Other structural recommendations for preventing genocide single out “poverty and inequality, population growth and the ‘youth bulge,’ ethnic nationalism, and climate change as . . . [the chief] drivers of deadly violence.”83

Yet, Goldhagen warns that structural explanations of genocide have achieved a “near-consensual status.”84 Along with Goldhagen, we feel that such consensus could be dangerous because, as we have pointed out, it is hard to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that structural explanations—even compelling, evidence-backed explanations such as revolution and war—may always clarify why genocide occurs. If the concerns we have raised about the weaknesses of the data that supports the Melsonian hypothesis are true, then structural explanations for preventing future genocides may also break down. By placing the genocidal blame on culture and ideology, Goldhagen stresses the importance of what one believes. In contrast to structuralists, his emphasis on genocidal eliminationism as the greatest moral problem of our time compels him to eschew the idea of national interest as he argues that “invocations of the national interest . . . routinely facilitate mass murder by rationalizing a passive response.”85 Ignoring the critique that moral arguments break down in policy making, he further insists that such arguments can do the most practical good because one can more easily rally public opinion through an appeal to conscience—not to national interests.

In light of these considerations, weighing the evidence for either the Goldhagen or Melson hypothesis takes on new importance. It would seem that either side calls for far different, perhaps even incompatible, responses to preventing future genocides. Goldhagen’s emphasis on extreme moralism is not without its own risks, including hyperbolic rhetoric and absolutist recommendations. Is eliminationist violence truly the greatest threat of our time, as Goldhagen claims? Further, how can one even test such a theory due to the serious research shortcoming of non-real-time data? The need for researcher security is understandable, but time lapses in genocide interviews pose a major challenge to gathering accurate data.

We strongly recommend that the development of innovative, real-time data-collection methods be prioritized for future genocide research. Interestingly, the advent of technology may hold intriguing implications for this field, and it may even shed light on the Goldhagen/Melson debate. The incorporation of new technology into human-rights research is growing. For example, organizations like Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) combine satellite imagery, data-pattern imagery, and information from ground sources with the goal of deterring and documenting mass atrocities in Sudan.86 SSP marks the first public effort to systematically analyze, monitor, and report threats to human security in near real time. We suggest that, given the right research framework, new information sources such as “crowdsourcing” software, social media, pioneering “big data” predictive analytic tools, or hate-speech databases may also hold fresh insights for the genocide field.

Social media, which refers to the creation and sharing of user-generated content in highly interactive virtual networks and platforms, is now being used in groundbreaking ways in the humanitarian-assistance and security fields.87 For example, new research from the Harvard Medical School suggests that an accumulation of “tweets” from the social network Twitter may aid paramedics in pinpointing unanticipated health crises like the Boston Marathon bombings.88 Consequently, these researchers suggest that tweets may further be useful in emergencies if they are integrated into statewide systems. Social media has also been used in humanitarian disasters for purposes ranging from disseminating information about such events in Southeast Asia to tracking the real-time distribution of food during the 2010 Pakistani floods.89 The rise of social media has also resulted in free and open-source (i.e., updateable by users) software for data collection and visual mapping, most notably Ushahidi.90 This software, created after the disputed Kenyan elections of 2007, collected eyewitness accounts of violence reported by e-mail and text messages, placing them in standardized Google Maps diagrams. Now expanded, Ushahidi allows local witnesses to submit reports via mobile phones or the Internet, concurrently creating a geospatial and real-time archive of events. This concept, referred to crowdsourcing, utilizes a combination of citizen journalism, social activism, and geospatial information for the purposes of violence prevention and public accountability.

Other emerging data sources include cutting-edge data-gathering technology such as that used by the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. Arguing that such technology saves physical and financial conflict costs, the bureau analyzes “‘large data sets’ as well as ‘civil society’ generated data—essentially the sum of patterns, human behaviors, electronic signals, [and] social media elements.”91 The fact that perpetrators of mass violence in developing nations lack Internet data availability and thus are not expected to cease genocide simply to send text messages or update their social media profiles represents a potential obstacle to incorporating these new data sources. However, such a situation can be resolved through cutting-edge information-gathering tools like Senturion, a “large data” predictive analysis instrument pioneered in conjunction with the National Defense University.92 Despite a lack of cyber-data availability in developing nations, such technology has been employed there by mining from economic sources, analyzing “what people are buying in stores, what cars they are driving, what kinds of phones are they using, refugee flows, the direction of their move, mobile use.”93 Trends such as “where the business leaders gather, what they talk about, where are the religious leaders . . . sermons, political and religious statements, public meetings, [and] statements in commerce and business areas” have been gathered from previously explored, less-developed nations like Syria.94 Given the research themes that emerged as we reviewed Rwandan genocide literature throughout this article, information on that country’s pregenocide period would have certainly been useful in testing the structuralist Melsonian hypothesis or in offering fresh evidence to the debate.

We feel that these sources, though not without their challenges and restrictions, are overripe with data for the traditional scholarly field of genocide research. Certain limitations to new cyber sources are anticipated, such as the disruption of technological networks during an outbreak of violence, the difficulty of accuracy verification, and the willful manipulation of information sources by third parties. Additionally, new sources of information may not necessarily support a particular genocide theory. “Hatebase,” a crowdsourced database of multilingual hate speech, endeavors to catalogue inflammatory words and phrases that may point to early stages of genocide.95 Although this kind of database offers certain benefits, registering a new slur does not in itself indicate that the utterance was initiated by political elites in a revolutionary climate in the manner of Melson, nor does it indicate that this slur originated in ideologically influenced minds bent on genocide à la Goldhagen.

Despite the difficulty of devising ways to appropriately utilize these new sources of information for future genocide analyses, we feel that the potential for substantiating established genocide theories with new data pools is too important to ignore. In our case, access to such information certainly may have answered some of the concerns we raised about the accuracy of coffee-and-cake discussions with Rwandan génocidaires years after they committed acts of mass violence.96 Although génocidaires, from Rwandan killers to Nazi doctors, might use the time following a genocide to justify their behavior to themselves and to interviewers, real-time genocide data could have offered an important check to their statements. That is, crowdsourced information and hate speech posted to social media networks are date stamped and would have to be explained. It is our opinion that new information-gathering technologies, which can only hint at genocide dynamics, can complement—not compete with—the traditional research methods employed by scholars like Straus and Fujii. Incorporating these new sources of real-time data into genocide research in ethically responsible, well-framed methods may bring new dimensions of genocide motivation to light as real-time data stands unmoved despite the passage of time or the development of a guilty conscience.

The field of genocide research has benefited from Melson’s structuralist and Goldhagen’s ideological divide, which has prompted new heights of research that seek to support either theory. In this way, continuing and expanding the genocide debate by incorporating real-time data will provide new insights for traditional researchers. The challenge now lies in devising useful ways of incorporating massive amounts of data. Such an issue reinforces the notion that traditional scholarship, with its emphasis on analysis and scholastic debate, is vital even in the technological age. On this note, we recommend a pooling of resources from the field of genocide research and other spheres, such as information technology, not only to substantiate either Melson or Goldhagen but also to gain further insight into the motivating forces for genocide and, therefore, prevent future atrocities.

*An associate professor of international studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, for many years, Arthur N. Gilbert teaches graduate courses on war and genocide. In addition to teaching and research, he collects and exhibits graphic art on the Holocaust produced by survivors and well-known artists who have memorialized it in etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts. His most recent illustrated article, “Etched in Memory: The Graphic Art of the Holocaust,” is in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of the Print World.

Kristina Hook graduated as a valedictorian of the University of Florida with a BA in anthropology before earning her MA in international development at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies. She has published articles and presented papers at international conferences on topics including genocide and mass violence, postconflict reconstruction and coordination, humanitarian lessons learned, and methods of merging theory and practice in sustainable development programming. She is currently a 2013 US Presidential Management Fellows Program finalist.

Notes

1. Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

2. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).

3. Steven T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1, The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994).

4. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, 16–25, 264–78.

5. Ross Douthat, “Democracy’s Collateral Damage,” New York Times, 15 October 2011, http://www

.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/douthat-democracys-collateral-damage.html?_r=0; and Kurt J. Werthmuller, “Copt’s Murder a Test of Egypt’s New Anti-Discrimination Law,” National Review Online, 31 October 2011, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/281728/copts-murder-test-egypts-new-anti-discrimination-law-kurt-j-werthmuller.

6. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, 18.

7. Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

8. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1987).

9. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

10. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, 19.

11. Ibid.

12. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, host, and Michael DeWitt, director, Worse than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (Arlington, VA: PBS, 2010), DVD.

13. Goldhagen, Worse than War, 485.

14. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

15. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Random House, 2002).

16. Ibid., 77.

17. Goldhagen, Worse than War, 42.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 43.

20. United Human Rights Council (UHRC), “Genocide in Rwanda,” UHRC News Bulletin, 26 May 2009, http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/2009/05/the-genocide-in-rwanda.

21. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 41–262.

22. See United Nations Security Council, Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the United Nations during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, S/1999/1257 (New York: United Nations, 16 December 1999), http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/395/47/IMG/N9939547.pdf?OpenElement.

23. UHRC, “Genocide in Rwanda.”

24. Ibid.

25. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, 18.

26. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).

27. Ibid., 175–200.

28. Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 180–206.

29. Straus, Order of Genocide, 175–200.

30. Aaron Segal, “Massacre in Rwanda,” Fabian Research Series 240 (April 1964): 3–28; and Straus, Order of Genocide, 175–200.

31. Segal, “Massacre in Rwanda,” 3–28.

32. Straus, Order of Genocide, 188.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid., 175–200.

35. René Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996); and Stanley Meisler, “Holocaust in Burundi, 1972,” in The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, ed. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 384–93.

36. Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998), 40–50.

37. Ibid. See also Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf, eds., Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 3–8.

38. Straus, Order of Genocide, 175–200.

39. Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), 84–105.

40. Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 182.

41. Ibid.

42. Straus, Order of Genocide, 197, 196.

43. Ibid., 197.

44. Marx, Faith in Nation, 3–112.

45. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, 280–84.

46. Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).

47. Melson, Revolution and Genocide, 18.

48. Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 26–40.

49. Ibid., 93–126.

50. Ibid., 140–41.

51. Ibid., 170.

52. Ibid., 226.

53. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).

54. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers.

55. Ibid., 156.

56. Ibid., 191.

57. Ibid.

58. Ibid., 232.

59. See, for example, Déogratias Ndayishimiye, The Role of Church before, during and after Burundi and Rwanda Genocides, Workshop on the Role of Religion in Armed Conflicts (Jakarta: Media Project, 2009), http://themediaproject.org/sites/default/files/The%20Church%20and%20the%20Burundi-Rwanda%20Genocide.pdf. See also Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 232–33.

60. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 232–33.

61. Straus, Order of Genocide, 7.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid., 9.

64. Ibid., 10. See also Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

65. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Classics, 1963).

66. James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007).

67. Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

68. Straus, Order of Genocide, 96.

69. Ibid.

70. Ibid., 245.

71. Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

72. Ibid., 187.

73. Ibid.

74. Straus, Order of Genocide, 228; and Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 5.

75. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: “Euthanasia” in Germany c. 1990–1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 294.

76. See Goldhagen, Worse than War.

77. See Goldhagen, Moral Reckoning.

78. David I. Kertzer, The Popes against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

79. Isabel V. Hull, “Military Culture and the Production of ‘Final Solutions’ in the Colonies: The Example of Wilhelminian Germany,” in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141–62; and Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

80. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

81. Goldhagen, Moral Reckoning; Kertzer, Popes against the Jews; Hull, Absolute Destruction; and Olusoga and Erichsen, Kaiser’s Holocaust.

82. James Traub, “Patterns of Genocide, New York Times, 15 October 2009, http://www.nytimes

.com/2009/10/18/books/review/Traub-t.html?_r=0.

83. Frank Chalk et al., Mobilizing the Will to Intervene: Leadership to Prevent Mass Atrocities (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 9.

84. Traub, “Patterns of Genocide.”

85. Ibid. See also Goldhagen, Worse than War.

86. “Our Story,” Satellite Sentinel Project, http://www.satsentinel.org/our-story.

87. Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons 53, no. 1 (January–February 2010): 61.

88. Nidhi Subbaraman, “When Disaster Strikes, Tweets Point to Ground Zero,” NBC News, 9 July 2013, http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/when-disaster-strikes-tweets-point-ground-zero-6C10578539.

89. “Aid Policy: Hitching Social Media to Humanitarian Assistance,” IRIN News, 17 July 2012, http://www.irinnews.org/report/95880/aid-policy-hitching-social-media-to-humanitarian-assistance.

90. “About Us,” Ushahidi, http://www.ushahidi.com/about-us.

91. Tara Kangarlou, “State Department Hopes It Can Find Peace among Data,” CNN, 1 May 2013, http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/30/politics/state-data-analysis/.

92. Mark Abdollahian et al., Senturion: A Predictive Political Simulation Model (Washington, DC: Center for Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense University, July 2006), http://www.google

.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dtic.mil%2Fcgi-bin%2FGetTRDoc%3FAD%3DADA454175&ei=D-dfUtiGDYrq9ATgmoGgDw&usg=AFQjCNF8Ny2Y3LSy76klq1AZUfPjseFqrg.

93. Kangarlou, “State Department.”

94. Ibid.

95. “About Hatebase,” Hatebase, http://www.hatebase.org/about.

96. See Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, 294.

Street, Shrine, Square, and Soccer Pitch

Comparative Protest Spaces in Asia and the Middle East

Teresita Cruz-del Rosario, PhD*

James M. Dorsey

A shrine to the Virgin Mary on a once empty parking lot on the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA) symbolizes Filipino people power. It lies at the intersection with Ortigas Avenue, the main thoroughfare that cuts across the upper and middle class as well as expatriate commercial and residential areas of San Juan and Pasig, just shy of the Asian Development Bank.

EDSA is Manila’s gateway, a 26-kilometer stretch of asphalt and concrete that traverses the city’s eight municipalities from Caloocan City in the north to Pasay City in the south. It is no coincidence that the shrine rose at this particular intersection as a site for secular pilgrims in search of a home for their moral vision.

Soccer stadiums, thousands of miles to the west from where ancestors of the Arab community in the Philippines and Southeast Asia set sail, symbolize the battle in the Middle East and North Africa for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious, and national identity; and gender rights. The soccer pitch (the playing field) constituted a world in which the game was played as much on as off the pitch. Until the eruption of the Arab revolt in December 2010, the stadium—alongside the mosque—was the only alternative public space available for the venting of pent-up anger and frustration against regimes dominated by military and security forces. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant soccer fans prepared for a day in which their organization, militancy, and street-battle experience would serve them in the final showdown with autocratic rulers determined to hang on to power.

Soccer had its own unique thrill—a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militant enthusiasts and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup: the future of a region. The soccer match offered the disenfranchised a voice in an environment of forced silence and official misrepresentation, challenged the political and social boundaries set by authoritarian regimes, and thrived on goalposts enlarged by globalization.

Nonviolent revolts such as those in the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and Morocco have changed and are changing the political landscape in emerging nations. Protestors transform public spaces—what William Sewell calls “spatial agency”—from constrained physical landscapes into venues of people power.1 The revolts in Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, Cairo, Tunis, Manama, Amman, Casablanca, and Sana’a turned pedestrian streets, corridors, avenues, and roundabouts into stages for uninhibited political expression. Many of these venues have acquired the aura of a holy ground, a pilgrimage site where protestors seek redemption and deliverance from various forms of social and political injustice.

This article compares the various protest spaces in Asia and the Middle East. Whether street, square, or soccer pitch, these sites have created the political architecture for collective enactment as protestors across both regions turn the constraints of a built-up environment to their political advantage in a unique act of shared creativity aimed at advancing the social and political struggle. In doing so, protestors refashion political meanings and reconstruct and renovate physical spaces. They convert them into battlefields over competing visions of the future of a country or region with demands for greater transparency, accountability, accommodation, and tolerance. They turn them into venues that give a voice to the disenfranchised and provide a unique platform for building bridges across gaping divides.

The article projects EDSA and the soccer stadium as venues of political enactment. Over a matter of years, both became the stages for political expression in an environment of repression and autocratic rule. It employs Sewell’s notions of “spatial structure” and “spatial agency,” both based on Dingxin Zhao’s description of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square as the ideal ecology for a student protest, to explore EDSA and the soccer stadium as perfect settings for popular uprisings.2 The term shrine connotes a demarcation in people’s minds. For Filipinos, EDSA is a sort of political “promised land” perceived in terms of time, place, and sentiment. For Middle Easterners and North Africans, the soccer stadium represents the reclamation of dignity and the assertion of identity in a show of strength and force bolstered by numbers.

Street, Shrine, Stadium, and Era

The shrine was erected within a year after the first Filipino uprising in 1986 to commemorate what many Filipinos see as a shining moment in their history. A gigantic statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary painted in gold rose on an elevated portion of the parking lot. Her image is a reminder of the first supposed EDSA miracle in which rosaries, statues, scapulars, and medals bearing her image stopped the tanks of President Ferdinand Marcos and ended his 21-year dictatorship.

Mass is held in a chapel beneath her statue. Surrounding the chapel are shopping malls, high-rise condominiums, a bus stop, and an underground parking lot. A flyover above the shrine and across both avenues affords commuters and passengers a full view of the Virgin Mary, a religious reminder of the sanctity of popular protest in a world of hypersecularism.

The shrine is large enough to contain a stage. The anniversary of the people-power uprising was celebrated every February with a Mass officiated by the late Archbishop Jaime Sin and a host of other church luminaries, followed by a program recalling the dramatic events of the four-day uprising. Key actors return to the shrine garbed in the clothes they wore during the protests, embellished by flab and wrinkles acquired with each passing year. After the reenactments, the stage is transformed into an entertainment platform with showbiz celebrities celebrating Marcos’s departure from the Philippines. The combination of pious, political, and leisure activities marks the popular uprising as an ecclesiastically approved kind of political struggle-cum-all-night-revelry.

The Ecology of EDSA

In the consideration of contentious politics, Sewell notes the vital role of spatial structures: “Geographical structures [that] might be regarded as parallel to economic structures, occupational structures, political structures, or demographic structures—that is, as entrenched facts of social life that have their own autonomous (or at least relatively autonomous) logics and that determine or at least tightly constrain social action.”3 Echoing Anthony Giddens, Sewell argues further that although structures are “durable and constraining,” they also provide an enabling effect that allows “humans to reproduce themselves and their social world . . . [and] also are subject to transformation as a consequence of the very social action that they shape.” In studying contentious politics, Sewell directs attention to spatial agency—the ways in which protestors confront the constraints of space and convert these into political advantages that will advance the social struggle, refashion political meanings, and restructure the “strategic valence of space.”4 Thus, while space is characterized by immobile fixtures, it is also subject to reconstruction. Protestors create, produce, and renovate space—not just to imbue fresh meanings to it but to convert it into a strategic resource that transforms the overall environment for protest.

If the soccer stadium, with its enclosed infrastructure designed to evoke competition, passion, rivalry, and confrontation, is a natural site for an uprising, then EDSA would seem at first glance a strange, if not curious, venue for protest. Unlike China’s expansive Tiananmen Square or Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo, EDSA in 1986 was a comparatively narrow six-lane highway divided by an island that organized, albeit unconvincingly, the flow of traffic. Instead of a vast quadrangle on which most collective action tends to take place, EDSA is a long, narrow asphalt worm traversing metropolitan Manila that hosts thousands of vehicles transporting urbanites across the city. The omnipresence of vehicular traffic alone would already pose a ready-made limitation to any massive gathering.

EDSA’s long stretch of highway is an artery fed by thousands of road capillaries that run in both directions, making it easy for the public to get to the highway from anywhere. A network of commercial establishments—shops, eateries, banks, and hotels—as well as outdoor vendors hawking towels, bottled water, cigarettes, paper fans, and snacks abets the road network. Daily commuters negotiate the highway in both directions, the quickest way to traverse the metropolis, their trek made slightly more convenient by the various amenities on offer.

EDSA’s built environment includes gated communities for the upper and middle class that are surrounded by thick walls to keep out vehicular noise. The artery branches out into these communities and the amenities that provide them the comforts of urban life. As one travels deeper into these tentacles, one encounters the enclaves of the poor—the squatter settlements. They are relatively far from the main artery but close enough to be visible from the middle-class households. This is particularly true in Makati, Mandaluyong, and San Juan, where wealthy communities dot both sides of EDSA.

Gen Fidel Ramos and Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, whose defection in February 1986 from the Marcos regime marked the beginning of the popular revolt, may not have realized that their choice of Camp Crame as their base was the perfect site for protestors to negotiate the fine balance between structure and agency. Located along EDSA on the borders of San Juan, Mandaluyong, and Quezon City, the military camp was easily accessible to the residential communities.

On the evening of 22 February 1986, when Archbishop Sin called on the public in a Catholic radio broadcast to go to EDSA to protect the mutineers, neighbors offered one another transportation to one of the road capillaries where they would park and then walk to EDSA. From the north, the Quezon City residents drove to the commercial district of Cubao, where they left their cars to join protestors ready for the march to Camp Crame. To the east of Quezon City, within a one-kilometer radius or so from the military camps, were the communities of White Plains, Blue Ridge, and St. Ignatius Village, whose residents converged with those of Loyola Heights and the university further up north. On the western side were Greenhills, Wack Wack Subdivision, and the residents of Little Baguio in San Juan. Directly adjacent to the south of Camp Crame is Corinthian Gardens and Valle Verde. This network of neighborhoods provided the warm bodies in the first hours of the revolt. One of the more famous meeting places was the Isetan Department Store, located in the heart of the Araneta Center, a commercial area in Cubao. Agapito “Butz” Aquino, the younger brother of slain senator Ninoy Aquino, went on the air on Radio Veritas to call on friends and volunteers “to meet me at Isetan in Cubao . . . to join us and increase our number so that we can prevent a bloody confrontation.”5

Shortly after the cardinal’s and Aquino’s radio announcements, approximately 100,000 people gathered in front of the gates of Camp Crame.6 Networks of neighborhoods mobilized quickly in response to the radio calls, achieving what David Harvey calls “time-space compression.”7 People poured out continuously from the side roads of EDSA into the main avenue with the crowds swelling through the night, achieving instant “copresence” and the bodily force of numbers.8 They brought food for the mutineers and soldiers, as the cardinal had asked them to do. The camps welcomed the arrival of local and foreign journalists.

This scenario repeated itself 15 years later in January 2001 during a second uprising. On 19 January at around 9 a.m., several university professors and hundreds of students from universities and schools in Quezon City marched from the Diliman campus down EDSA. Marchers formed groups along the 10-kilometer stretch to join them on their way to the shrine. By the time they arrived around noon, their ranks had swelled to approximately 30,000. It was a “traveling copresence,” facilitated by past experience and text messages on the ubiquitous cellular phone network urging users to gather at EDSA, whose narrow lanes swelled into wide avenues of protest. The artery hosted a new generation of protestors—a young constituency raised with the advantage of advanced technology. From the southern business district of Makati City, protestors formed a human chain that ran the seven-kilometer stretch from Ayala Avenue to the EDSA shrine, forcing the redirection of traffic.

From an avenue that seemingly limits large gatherings because of its architecture, EDSA was transformed by protestors into a roadway that led them to their shrine of political change. They converted a mundane avenue into “a matrix of power.”9 As the protestors took over EDSA, the notion of people power was born, and the term entered Philippine political discourse for the first time. EDSA was “power charged”; it no longer was a neutral, empty territory. With the achievement of a Durkheimian sense of “collective efflorescence” during the uprisings, EDSA became permanently transformed.

The Shrine as Stage and Sentiment

The shrine, built shortly after the first uprising, constitutes a “setting” that involves

furniture, décor, physical layout, and other background items which supply the scenery and stage props for the spate of human action played out before, within, or upon it. A setting tends to stay put, geographically speaking, so that those who would use a particular setting as part of their performance cannot begin their act until they have brought themselves to the appropriate place and must terminate their performance when they leave it.10

The shrine was the physical setting of people power in both uprisings, the locus of performance where human actors played out their social roles. In 1986 Cory Aquino was the quintessential bida, the animator of the protest theater, supported by a cast of millions—all determined to bring down the curtain on Marcos’s presidency. The stage décor was an avalanche of banners, streamers, and insignias wrapped in unmistakable yellow. It was a grand symphony of people surrounding themselves with the colors of protest—a sudden burst of expression against a repressive regime gone pale and colorless in 21 years of misrule. The theatrical backstage fuelled people power: a public address system to keep the protestors informed; a hookup to Radyo Bandido (Bandit Radio), which operated in secrecy from an undisclosed transmission tower after Marcos loyalists raided and destroyed Radio Veritas, the Catholic radio station; an endless supply of food and water for the rebel soldiers; portable toilets installed at strategic locations along the highway; and, of course, the rosaries and religious statues of the Virgin Mary with which protestors confronted Marcos’s army and weapons. Communication networks were mobilized via telephone and citizen-band radios. Taxi drivers spontaneously organized themselves to transport protestors to the shrine.11

The evening vigils extended into mornings that transformed EDSA into an entertainment stage on which showbiz personalities adopted a political stance and the posture of protest. Freddie Aguilar, one of the Philippines’ best-known singers, left the club where he regularly sang to head for EDSA on the second night of the uprising. On an improvised stage on the roof of a six-wheel truck, he and his band played past midnight. Television crews provided the floodlights, converting EDSA into a big outdoor ballroom.

Nonetheless, EDSA is also a venerated public space, a repository of meanings collectively crafted and brought into fruition by shared sentiments, sanctified by the Church and the rituals of adoration and blessing. During the early hours of the second day of the first uprising, Enrile recalls the active mobilization of religious rites:

When daylight came Father Niko of the Magallanes Village Parish arrived with Father Bernas and Jimmy Ongpin [business and former minister of finance in the Aquino government], and we held mass at the social hall [in Camp Crame]. Read to us during the mass was the story of the Exodus, the liberation of the Israelites from bondage. We all attended the mass and received communion. Afterwards, General [Ramon] Farolan and I were asked to kneel by Father Nico and President Bernas of the Ateneo [a Jesuit university]. And they gave us the blessing and poured holy water on us.12

A central meaning of EDSA, like that of soccer stadiums in the Middle East and North Africa, was conquest of the fear that governed life for decades of martial law and hindered the effective galvanizing of oppositional energies. Martial law enabled military forces accused of human-rights violations to keep the population quiescent. The millions who gathered at EDSA to defy Marcos’s military machinery and the thousands who confronted security forces in the stadiums rediscovered their courage to end a long tyranny of silence. Many who participated at EDSA and in stadium protests and confrontations feared a military attack—yet, bolstered by large numbers of others, they experienced a newfound bravery with which to stop tanks, security forces, and loyalist thugs dead in their tracks.

More importantly, the meaning of EDSA and the stadium was passed on to the next generation as protestors turned their revolts into a family affair. The depth of meaning that this evoked was boundless as parents witnessed the success and continuation of the spirit of EDSA and the stadium as well as the power of collective sentiment, channeled towards political change in the generation that succeeded them.

The shrine is more than just a vessel that contains the historical memories of a nation in protest. In the words of David Cole, the shrine is the embodiment of an “illud tempus,” “a time of origins, the period of Creation and just after, when gods walked the earth, men visited the sky, and the great archetypal events of myth—war in heaven, battles with monsters, the Quest, the Flood, the Fall—took place.”13

For Filipinos, EDSA is a gathering place for the expression of a collective sentiment. It represents an era when it all began, a symbol of a political cosmology in which Filipino society was said to have truly emerged—not from the artificial demarcations created by the past maneuverings of competing colonial powers but from the singular action of millions of anonymous citizens who left the security of their homes to craft a nation in their own image. For a country whose 500-year history was a series of colonial misadventures, political letdowns, and bungled attempts at nationhood, those four days at EDSA marked a grandiose departure from an overburdened past. For once in five centuries, Filipinos experienced the nation as truly their own creation—a tangible possibility, an “imagined community” with which to display to the world the result of their own handiwork.14

Soccer: Playing for the Future of a Region

If EDSA is a shrine, then Middle Eastern and North African soccer stadiums are battlefields layered with multiple struggles. They often are also simultaneous symbols of resistance and of the price tag that autocratic rulers put on expressions of dissent.

Autocratic rulers and militant soccer fans fought in recent decades for control of the pitch and the credibility that emanates from the one institution and venue which commands the kind of deep-seated passion evoked by religion in a conservative swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the oil-rich sheikhdoms of the Gulf. For militant soccer fans known as “ultras” (die-hard, highly politicized, violence-prone support groups modeled on similar organizations in Serbia and Italy), who emerged as soccer increasingly became a

political football, it is a battle against the yoke of autocratic rule, economic mismanagement, and corruption. It also signifies the quest for dignity—for national, ethnic, and sectarian identity and women’s rights.

The ultras’ key role in the 2011 popular revolt extended a tradition of soccer’s close association with politics across the Middle East and North Africa evident until today in derbies in cities like Cairo, Amman, Tehran, and Riyadh. In Egypt the tradition dates back to when the British colonial power introduced the game to the North African country in the early twentieth century. Founded as an Egyptians-only meeting place for opponents of Britain’s colonial rule, Al Ahly (the National) was a nationalistic rallying ground for common Egyptians. Its players still wear the red colors of the precolonial Egyptian flag. Dressed in white, Zamalek—first named Al Mohtalet (the Mix) and then Farouk in honor of the hated and later deposed Egyptian monarch—was the club of the British imperial administrators and military brass as well as the Cairo upper class. The clubs’ bitter feud has been no less political since Egypt became independent.15

For rulers the soccer pitch is a key tool to polish their tarnished images and distract attention from simmering discontent—and at times a symbol of their brutality. Former Egyptian and Iranian presidents Hosni Mubarak and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as well as Al Saadi al Gadhafi, son of the late Libyan leader Col Mu‘ammar Gadhafi, identified themselves with their country’s national teams, turning their successes and failures into barometers of how their regimes were faring. Uday Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator’s sadistic son, humiliated players for a missed penalty or errant pass by having their heads publicly shaved in Baghdad’s Stadium of the People. Football legend and former Iraqi goalkeeper Hashim Hassan recalled that, after losing a 1997 World Cup qualifier against Kazakhstan, he was forced to lie with his whole team on the stadium’s grass where Uday’s goons beat them with sticks on their feet and backs; afterward, they were imprisoned for a week.16 Mr. Mubarak and his sons fanned the flames of nationalism in late 2009 after Egypt lost its chance to qualify for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, bringing Egypt and Algeria to the brink of a soccer war. Gadhafi adorned his country’s stadiums with quotations from his Green Book that explained his idiosyncratic theories of democracy.17

Soccer also goes a long way to explain the military’s support and involvement in the game in various Middle Eastern and North African nations. In football-crazy Egypt, at least half of the Egyptian Premier League’s 16 teams are owned by the military, the police, government ministries, or provincial authorities. Military-owned construction companies built 22 of Egypt’s soccer stadiums. Similarly, in recent years Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have taken control of a number of prominent soccer teams.

In times of crisis, stadiums often become mass-detention centers and killing fields. Syrian security forces have herded antigovernment protestors into stadiums in Latakia, Dera’a, and Baniyas. The use of the stadiums evoked memories of the 1982 assault on the Syrian city of Hama to crush an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in which at least 10,000 people were killed. A 1983 Amnesty International report charged that the city’s stadium was used at the time to detain large numbers of residents who were left for days in the open without either food or shelter.18

US and Iraqi forces discovered mass graves in several Iraqi stadiums after the overthrow of Saddam in 2003. Shortly after their 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, US-led international forces played soccer against an Afghan team in Kabul’s Ghazi Stadium to highlight the change they were bringing to the war-ravaged country. The Taliban had used the stadium for public executions. Believing it still haunted by the dead, Afghans are afraid of entering the stadium after dark. Even the night watchmen limit their patrols to its perimeter. Christian militiamen responsible for the 1982 massacres in the Beirut Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, to which Israeli invasion forces turned a blind eye, converted a local soccer stadium into an interrogation center and execution ground. Some 800 Palestinians were killed in the two camps. Somali jihadists used Mogadishu’s

stadium—once one of East Africa’s most impressive, filled with 70,000 passionate fans during games—as an Islamist training and recruitment center until government forces backed by the African Union forced them to abandon the city.

Fans from Algeria to Iran have resisted efforts by the region’s autocratic rulers to control stadiums politically by repeatedly turning them into venues to express pent-up anger and frustration; assert national, ethnic, and sectarian identity; and demand women’s rights. “There is no competition in politics, so competition moved to the soccer pitch. We do what we have to do against the rules and regulations when we think they are wrong. . . . You don’t change things in Egypt talking about politics. We’re not political; the government knows that and has to deal with us,” said a militant Egyptian fan after his group last year overran a police barricade erected to prevent it from bringing flares, fireworks, and banners into a stadium.19

If defeat created political opportunity, then so did victory. Thousands of women stormed the stadium in Tehran when the Iranian national team triumphed against Australia in the 1998 World Cup, protesting their banning from attending soccer matches. Rumor has it that attacks on banks and public offices by fans shouting antiregime slogans during the qualifiers for the 2002 World Cup prompted the government to order the national team to lose its final match against underdog Bahrain because it feared the protests that a victory would produce.

Weekly battles in Egyptian stadiums with security forces and rival fan groups prepared Cairo’s militant soccer supporters for clashes on the city’s Tahrir Square that forced Mubarak from office in February 2011.20 Similarly, antigovernment protests on the football pitch preceded mass demonstrations that erupted in Tunisia in December 2010 and sparked the wave of protests sweeping the Middle East and North Africa. Tunisian fans jeered Confederation of African Football (CAF) president Issa Hayatou in November during the Orange CAF Champions League return final between Esperance Tunis and TP Mazembe from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the first encounter between the two teams in Congo, lost by Esperance, the fans charged that the Togolese referee had been corrupt and waved banknotes at Hayatou. The protests led to clashes between the fans who, like their counterparts in Egypt, became street-battle-hardened.

The eruption of popular revolts across the Middle East and North Africa starting in December 2010 prompted embattled autocratic rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen to cancel all professional matches in a bid to prevent the soccer pitch from becoming an opposition rallying point. The suspension failed to produce dividends. On the contrary, the ultras—at the vanguard of a people-power uprising—won their first major victories when the battle spilled out of the stadium into the streets of Tunis and Cairo’s Tahrir Square. A sense of empowerment, coupled with the organizational skills and street-battle experience garnered in four years of weekly clashes with security forces that the ultras of crowned Cairo archrivals Al Ahly SC and Al Zamalek SC brought to Tahrir Square, made them a force to be reckoned with.

The ultras’ influence was evident in the organization and social services as well as the division of labor established on the square as tens of thousands camped out for 18 days, leaving Mubarak no choice other than stepping down on 11 February. Much in the way that a municipality would organize services, protestors were assigned tasks such as the collection of trash. They wore masking tape that identified them by their role—medic or media contact, for example.

Meanwhile, the ultras—often committed anarchists who oppose hierarchical systems of government—joined those who patrolled the perimeters of the square and controlled entry. They manned the front lines in clashes with security forces and progovernment supporters. Their faces were frequently covered so that the police, who had warned them by phone to stay away from Tahrir Square, would not recognize them. Their experience benefited them in the struggle for control of the square when the president’s loyalists employed brute force in a bid to dislodge them. The ultras’ battle order included designated rock hurlers, specialists in turning over and torching vehicles for defensive purposes, and a machine-like quartermaster crew that delivered projectiles like clockwork on cardboard platters.

Theirs was a battle in which they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Weekly stadium battles with the police and rival fans were a zero-sum game for ownership of a space they saw as theirs. Much like hooligans in Britain whose attitudes were shaped by the decaying condition of stadiums, Egyptian and Tunisian ultras were driven by the regime’s attempt to control their space by turning it into a virtual fortress ringed by black steel. The struggle for control produced a complete breakdown—social decay in a microcosm. If the space was expendable, then so was life. As a result, militant fans would confront the police each weekend with total abandon.

Breaking Down the Barrier of Fear

The militants’ street-battle experience enabled them to help protestors break down barriers of fear that had kept them from confronting the regime in the past. “We were in the front line. When the police attacked we encouraged people. We told them not to run or be afraid. We started firing flares. People took courage and joined us; they know that we understand injustice and liked the fact that we fight the devil,” said Mohamed Hassan, “a soft-spoken 20-year-old computer science student, aspiring photographer, and a leader of the Ultras White Knights” (UWK)—militant supporters of the Zamalek team.21

Marching from the Cairo neighborhood of Shubra, Mohamed, a small-framed man with a carefully trimmed three-day stubble, led a crowd that grew to 10,000 people; they marched through seven security barricades to Tahrir Square on 25 January, the first day of the protests. This was the day that he and his cohorts had been preparing for in the past four years, honing their fighting skills in running battles with the police (widely viewed as Mubarak’s henchmen) and with rivals from other teams:

A group of White Knights, including Mohamed, sought at one point to break through a police barrier to reach the nearby parliament building. “When I see the security forces, I go crazy. I will kill you or I will be killed. The ultras killed my fear. I learnt the meaning of brotherhood and got the courage of the stadium,” he said. He pointed to a scar on the left side of his forehead from a stone thrown by police who stymied the fans’ first attempt to break through to parliament. As blood streamed down his face, he regained his courage from the crowd behind him: “They are our brothers. We can do this.”22

“We fought for our rights in the stadium for four years. That prepared us for this day. We told our people that this was our litmus test. Failure was not an option,” said Ahmed Fondu, another UWK leader, who proudly describes how he captured camel-mounted Mubarak loyalists attacking the protestors and held them captive in the Sadat metro station near Tahrir Square.23 The battles on Tahrir Square—like those on Sana’a’s Change Square and Manama’s now-destroyed Pearl Monument, like those years earlier on Manila’s EDSA—have changed society and imbued significant segments of the population with a sense of unity and power that inevitably weakens but remains a distinct memory marking an entire generation. A transition of power had taken place even before presidents like Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali were forced to resign after decades in office and as thousands in Syria for months faced down tanks and naval vessels. The courage to take a stand, exercised initially by activist soccer fans in Tunisia and Egypt, was embraced by a wider population no longer afraid to speak or assemble.

Twenty-five years ago, the same wall of fear broke down in the Philippines. Ana, a middle-class housewife, recalls her outrage at the shooting of Benigno Aquino, the opposition senator. It was her anger that broke through the wall. Hundreds of thousands of Filipinos gathered in the streets to express their rage and their pride. “There was a groundswell of people,” she said. “It felt so good to see all of those people, hundreds and thousands of people, day in day out. It made me feel good to know that there are still many, many Filipinos who love our country.”24

Soccer as Background to the Benghazi Revolt

Gadhafi’s controversial soccer-playing son, Saadi, a leader in his father’s fight for survival, took manipulation of the game to garner public support to the extreme. Football became an arena of confrontation between Gadhafi supporters and opponents long before the eruption of the revolt in 2011. Resentment against the Gadhafis in the eastern opposition stronghold of Benghazi started to build up when the fortunes of the city’s soccer team, Al Ahli (Benghazi), tumbled on and off the field a decade ago when Saadi took a majority stake and became captain of its Tripoli namesake and archrival.

Saadi’s association with Al Ahli (Tripoli) meant that the prestige of the regime was on the line whenever the team played. Politics rather than performance dictated the outcome of its matches. When Al Ahli Benghazi had a 1–0 lead on its Tripoli namesake in the first half of a match in the summer of 2000, the referee helpfully imposed two penalties against it and allowed Al Ahli Tripoli an offside goal in the second half. Benghazi’s players walked off the pitch but were ordered to return by Saadi’s guards, and Tripoli won 3–1.

That summer, Al Ahli Benghazi also played against a team from Al-Baydah, the hometown of Saadi’s mother and the place where the first anti-Gadhafi demonstrations against corruption in public housing were staged. Benghazi fans were so outraged by a penalty that they invaded the pitch, forcing the game to be abandoned. Off the pitch, the angry fans set fire to the local branch of the Libyan Football Federation, headed by Saadi. In response, the government dissolved the Benghazi club, demolished its headquarters, and arrested 50 of its fans. Public outrage over the retaliation against Benghazi forced Saadi to resign as head of the federation, only to be reinstated by his father in response to the federation’s alleged claim that it needed Gadhafi’s son as its leader.

The Benghazi-Tripoli rivalry played out as opponents, aided by the imposition of a no-fly zone above Libya by an international military coalition, and supporters of Gadhafi battled for the future of Libya. For fans of Al Ahli Benghazi, the wresting of control of the city from Gadhafi’s forces represented payback time. By contrast, “Al Ahli Tripoli fans cheered Saadi [in March] as he toured Tripoli’s Green Square on the roof of a car, waving and shaking the hands of supporters, who chanted ‘God, Libya and Muammar only.’ ”25

Redefining Protest Space, Reconquering Territory

Egypt’s postrevolution mood is marked by a newly acquired sense of entitlement and demand for far-reaching reform. Protestors imbued with what people power can achieve continue to demonstrate in a bid to clean out the remnants of the former regime, ensure that Mubarak-era officials are held accountable, and maintain pressure on the country’s military rulers to fulfill their pledge to lead Egypt to democracy. The road to reform and nation building in a post-people-power context promises to be very long and arduous, much like what the EDSA experience has become—an illustration of the challenges that confront a country after a peaceful uprising has successfully dethroned dictators. A grandiose battle in public discourse over a vision of society continues long after the departure of President Marcos.

The shrine itself has hosted far fewer numbers every year during the people-power anniversaries. Gone are the lengthy ceremonies to reenact the events of February 1986 that brought together the urban middle class, the Church, and the military. In the ensuing years after a few other failed attempts at people power, many celebrants and well-wishers decided to stay home instead. During the 16th anniversary in February 2002, the rector of the shrine, Father Socrates Villegas, declared it “off-limits” to political activities. Former president Fidel Ramos, himself a beneficiary of people power, echoed the same sentiment: “I do not think there should be another momentous event like EDSA. . . . What we Filipinos have to do is to strengthen our democratic institutions that will lead to sustainable development and peace and security.”26 An entire contingent of police cordoned off the shrine. Their presence was so ominous that it elicited public reaction to what the shrine has become: a heavily patrolled arena that was once a symbol of freedom and openness.

In February 2008, 21 years after EDSA, protestors again besieged the shrine—though in far smaller numbers—over a whistle-blower’s confession to a corrupt deal that allegedly involved the Philippine president. To calm fears of another people-power uprising, the protestors gathered there to hold a “prayer vigil.” Officials of the Catholic Church, nonetheless, requested that the Philippine National Police prevent protestors from using the shrine for political purposes, much in the same way that the Egyptian military has cordoned off Tahrir Square to ensure it is no longer a protest site. The shrine is now exclusively religious territory and no longer available for protest, the Church said, eager to put people power firmly in the past. The Egyptian military has restored Tahrir to its decades-old role as a key traffic artery. Both are sites where people power began, and both were being demystified by forces that had played a key role in the revolt’s success—the Catholic Church and the military.

Confusion and uncertainty attend Filipinos’ and Egyptians’ grappling with the contested meanings unleashed by people power. Discourse about the direction of social and political development is being reshaped in ways that echo former Philippine president Ramos’s emphasis on building and strengthening the institutions of governance to deepen and consolidate democracy and preserve the military’s perks and privileges in the process.

As the national conversation in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa proceeds with a renewed spirit of citizenship, protest spaces will continue to be reconfigured. The soccer pitch and the shrine will evolve as collective meanings and values slowly take form. In the post-EDSA Philippines, this conversation occurred off-site—away from the shrine, the street, and the stage. Instead, it took place in the structures of decision making, among groups of officials, citizens, and ordinary people who participate in these socially sanctioned mechanisms. It was an often tedious and painstaking process that required the skills of negotiation and compromise rather than the slogans and media sound bytes of a protest site.

The struggle in the Middle East and North Africa has moved out of the stadium into larger public spaces and in some cases into the smoke-filled rooms of political horse-trading. Tunisia has already embarked on the road charted by the Philippines as political forces negotiate the precise structure of their future democracy. In Egypt the terms of the transition are still being negotiated in and off the street in a process that is far more convoluted and contentious. In Jordan and Morocco, the street maintains pressure on a monarch who, unlike most Arab rulers, has opted for engagement of protestors rather than oppression in his bid to retain power. Elsewhere in the region, fierce battles involving varying degrees of violence, ranging from the postrevolt Libyan government’s inability to disarm a plethora of militias to brutal civil war in Syria, will shape the outcome of the revolts and the transition to a more open, transparent society.

*Dr. Teresita Cruz-del Rosario was a visiting associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, where she taught graduate courses in Development Policy in Southeast Asia and Social Movements in Asia. She obtained her PhD in sociology from Boston College in Massachusetts, where she wrote her dissertation on three Philippine uprisings. She also obtained her master’s degree in public administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a master’s degree in social anthropology from the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is an award-winning foreign correspondent whose career focuses on ethnic, religious, and social conflict with a particular emphasis on the Middle East and North Africa. A widely published syndicated columnist, he is the author of the acclaimed blog The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer and a speaker at major international academic and policy conferences.

This article is based upon a paper presented at the first workshop on Asia’s Civil Spheres: New Media, Urban Public Space, Social Movements; Asian Research Institute; National University of Singapore, 29–30 September 2011.

Notes

1. William H. Sewell Jr., “Space in Contentious Politics,” in Ronald R. Aminzade et al., Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 55.

2. Ibid.; and Dingxin Zhao, “Ecologies of Social Movements: Student Mobilization during the 1989 Prodemocracy Movement in Beijing,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 6 (May 1998): 1502.

3. Sewell, “Space in Contentious Politics,” 54.

4. Ibid., 55. See also Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984), 161.

5. Monina Allarey Mercado, ed., People Power: The Philippine Revolution of 1986; An Eyewitness History (Manila: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1986), 106.

6. Quijano De Manila, Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Scenes from the People Power Apocalypse (Manila: Book Stop, 1986), 27.

7. Sewell, “Space in Contentious Politics,” 60.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 68.

10. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 97.

11. Herminio Astorga, former vice-mayor of Manila, recounts that a group of taxi drivers congregated at the Luneta Park in downtown Manila, about 10 kilometers from where the uprising was taking place, to shuttle hundreds to the uprising for free. Mercado, People Power, 109.

12. De Manila, Quartet of the Tiger Moon, 36.

13. David Cole, The Theatrical Event: A Mythos, a Vocabulary, a Perspective (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 7.

14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Books, 1991).

15 James M. Dorsey, “Football Pitches: A Battleground for North Africa’s Future,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (blog), 24 March 2011, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.com/2011/03/football-pitches

-battleground-for-north.html.

16. James M. Dorsey, “Syria’s Latakia Stadium Joins Long List of Region’s Politically Abused Soccer Pitches,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (blog), 18 August 2011, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot

.com/2011/08/syrias-latakia-stadium-joins-long-list.html.

17. Dorsey, “Football Pitches.”

18. Amnesty International, Report from Amnesty International to the Government of the Syrian Arab Republic (Brussels: Amnesty International, November 1983), 23, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset

/MDE24/004/1983/en/bb665737-3669-4719-949b-0b30f8266ad1/mde240041983en.pdf.

19. James M. Dorsey, “Soccer Fans Play Key Role in Egyptian Protests,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (blog), 27 January 2011, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.com/2011/01/soccer-fans-play-key-role

-in-egyptian.html.

20. James M. Dorsey, “Emboldened Fans Rewrite the Politics of Egyptian Soccer,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (blog), 6 March 2011, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.com/2011/03/emboldened-fans

-rewrite-politics-of.html.

21. James M. Dorsey, “Pitched Battles: The Role of Ultra Soccer Fans in the Arab Spring—Analysis,” Eurasia Review, 24 December 2012, http://www.eurasiareview.com/24122012-pitched-battles-the-role-of

-ultra-soccer-fans-in-the-arab-spring-analysis-2/.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Interview with Ana, a Filipino housewife, 29 March 2001.

25. James M. Dorsey, “Libyan Soccer Players Defect in Symbolic Blow to Qaddafi,” The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer (blog), 25 June 2011, http://mideastsoccer.blogspot.com/2011/06/libyan-soccer-players

-defect-in_25.html.

26. Edith Regalado, “Cory FVR Shun New People Power,” Philippine Star, 25 February 2002, http://www.philstar.com/headlines/151834/cory-fvr-shun-new-people-power.

Table of Contents

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00Contents-E

01Editorial-E

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06Dorsey-E