Forgotten Genocides

by Lemarchand, Rene

• ISBN13: 9780812243352
• ISBN10: 0812243358
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-31
• Publisher: Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

Summary

Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion. Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memorygathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence, understudied. The contributors, scholars in political science, anthropology, history, and other fields, seek to restore these mass killings to the place they deserve in the public consciousness. Remembrance of long forgotten crimes is not the volume's only purpose-equally significant are the rich quarry of empirical data offered in each chapter, the theoretical insights provided, and the comparative perspectives suggested for the analysis of genocidal phenomena. While each genocide is unique in its circumstances and motives, the essays in this volume explain that deliberate concealment and manipulation of the facts by the perpetrators are more often the rule than the exception, and that memory often tends to distort the past and blame the victims while exonerating the killers. Although the cases discussed here are but a sample of a litany going back to biblical times, Forgotten Genocidesoffers an important examination of the diversity of contexts out of which repeatedly emerge the same hideous realities.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Mass Murder in Eastern Congo, 1996-1997	p. 20
Burundi 1972: Genocide Denied, Revised, and Remembered	p. 37
"Every Herero Will Be Shot": Genocide, Concentration Camps, and Slave Labor in German South-West Africa	p. 51
Extermination, Extinction, Genocide: British Colonialism and Tasmanian Aborigines	p. 71
Tibet: A Neo-Colonial Genocide	p. 91
The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds: Chemical Weapons in the Service of Mass Murder	p. 106
The Assyrian Genocide: A Tale of Oblivion and Denial	p. 123
The "Gypsy Problem": An Invisible Genocide	p. 137
Notes	p. 157
List of Contributors	p. 181
Index	p. 185
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