 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third annual Naval War College Genocide Conference. I am Hayat Alvi, I'm an associate professor at the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College. We are extremely honored to have the president of the U.S. Naval War College, Admiral Chatfield, to present us with her opening remarks for our conference. Admiral? Hello, and thank you, Hayat. I am so proud to be here to kick off this conference, as I was also proud to meet your guests last year and to kick off that conference. And so I wanted to thank you for carrying on, even though this is the COVID timeframe, and I want to commend everybody who is logged on today, and thank you for keeping up with your natural interest and coming together in community to talk about such an important topic. I would like to first thank our Naval War College Foundation and any connected alumni who might be here today, our partners in many academic institutions across the country who might be in our faculty and students who might be participating today. Thank you so much. Now we also have quite a robust group that I must mention who are always engaged in our events. So our public affairs officer, our event staff, our audio visual team, who are doing such a great job to incorporate new technologies that will allow us to get to the discussion and the collaboration which has such a rich outcome in a conference like this one. And of course, to Professor Alvi, thank you so much again for organizing and continuing on, particularly this year during COVID. So this is the third annual Genestide Studies Conference and First Annual Webinar, I think. So for the past three years, the Naval War College and the Genestide Studies have been convening key leaders from around the world to explore critical issues that are affecting us globally in the area of genocide. And we expect to have every year between 30 and 40 participants who will come together to have these robust discussions and create new ideas across a wide spectrum in the field. And this year's theme, I want to thank you and commend you for your selection, genocidal ideologies, warning signs, and prevention. And I think that that is so appropriate as we look at things that happen, trends that happen, historic references that we can recall to look at warning signs and prevention. And this is so important in military operations generally to know what warnings and indicators are in any operation and in any environment. And so I think that that is so appropriate today. So I want to talk a little bit about our role here at the United States Naval War College. I know many of you have been here before, but there might be some who are new to our environment at the Naval War College. And we've really looked at all aspects of war and the prevention of war. And so I want to say that very forcefully that our institution has, since its inception, looked at the study of all facets of war, including the prevention of war. And we bring together our students who are not just naval officers, but also joint officers. So all of the services are represented here, as well as many of our interagency civilian partners. And we also have an international component here so that we don't get stuck in our own U.S. groupthink, but we're exposed to many different perspectives and many different individuals who can bring in regional and local stories and histories that we may not know of or understand the way somebody from that region or locality may understand them. And this enriches the experience of all of our students, and it forms lasting and enduring partnerships globally. We also perform a wide variety of research and wargaming, as well as our academic pursuits. And this research and wargaming allows us to envision times in the future where aspects of our scholarship or history may repeat itself or we may see that trends will lend us to assume that things could happen that would be destabilizing. And our military forces will either unilaterally or multilaterally be called upon to respond to those kinds of destabilizing events. And so for me, understanding things and trends that are happening, activities, ideologies, things that are happening that could be destabilizing are very important. And seeing those particular aspects in the context of indicators and warnings are also so important. So I encourage this dialogue to be as robust as possible for new associations and new work to be generated out of this conference and to move forward very robustly in delivering a new understanding of warning signs, of genocidal ideologies. So for that, I want to say, please have a wonderful conference. I really am proud to be here at the helm of the United States Naval War College from our Naval War College Foundation to support conferences such as these. And I encourage all who are attending today to put down your cell phones and kind of move into the intellectual space to have a wonderful and enriching dialogue and to commit to being at the Naval War College again next year to continue to further this dialogue. And so please have a wonderful conference. And again, welcome to our United States Naval War College. Admiral, thank you very much. Really appreciate those wonderful words and insights. It's a great way to kick off our conference. Thank you very much again. The thing for this year's conference, as the Admiral mentioned, is genocidal ideologies, warning signs, and prevention. We have esteemed scholars in the field of genocide studies and political science presenting in today's conference. Each panelist will have 20 minutes to present. Once all five panelists have finished, we will have the Q&A session. Anyone in the audience can type questions in the chat. And please indicate to whom you are directing your questions. Please note that all views are personal, and this event is being recorded. Also, we have a slight change in the order of speakers. We will begin with Dr. Mudassir Kumar, then Dr. Azim Ibrahim, Dr. Ben Kiernan, Dr. Dawn Simi, and Dr. Scott Strauss. Their bios have been provided in the webinar program, which you should have received. Before we begin, I would like to sincerely thank the Naval War College Events Department, the Public Affairs Office, the Graphics Department, Andrea Gonzalez and Karen Sellers and Events, Andrea Cameron, Peter Norris and Linda Specht, the three of whom will be helping me with the Q&A session. And specifically, as the Admiral mentioned, the Naval War College Foundation for always supporting the faculty. And finally, I wish to thank my students in my seminars and the general audience for attending this very important event. Sadly, genocide continues to be perpetrated in the 21st century. As the organizer of this annual event, I fervently hope that we are making a difference in the efforts to prevent and end genocidal acts. To quote Raphael Lemkin, genocide is not war. Genocide is more dangerous than war. And now let's begin with our first speaker, Dr. Mudassar Kumar, who is joining us from India. He is speaking about the Indian experience of dealing with the ISIS threat. Whenever you're ready, Dr. Kumar. Thank you, Dr. Hayat Alvi. It is indeed a great pleasure for me to be joining all of you here today via Zoom, virtually, to participate in this very timely and important conference on genocidal ideology and genocide prevention. First of all, I would like to formally thank the US Naval War College for having me here and also like to thank President Admiral Chatfield for her very encouraging words and setting the tone for the conference this afternoon and for me this evening from New Delhi. And having said that, the issue that I'll be speaking today is Indian experience of dealing with the ideology of ISIS. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. And how India has really dealt with that in both in terms of an issue of national security as well as an issue of prevention of ideologies that can create mayhem in the society. And I was really excited when Dr. Alvi suggested me that I should share some of my thoughts on this issue. I have been a student of Middle East Studies and I have been studying the ideal jihad and Islamism both in the Middle East and South Asia for over four or five years. And I'm part of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis in New Delhi. And as part of that institute, I have been researching on the subject. And I thought perhaps I can also learn some of ideas from my co-panelist as well as maybe able to share some of my own thoughts on this subject. So I'll begin by a quote from a 1995 journal article on Ideology of Genocide written by Alison Forbes. He was writing in the context of the Rwandan genocide. And I begin the quote, mobilizing thousands of Rwandans to slaughter tens of thousands of others required effective organization. Far from the failed state syndrome that appears to be plague to plague some parts of Africa, Rwanda was too successful as a state. Extremists used its administrative apparatus, its military and its party organizations to carry out a cottage industry genocide that reached out to all levels of the population and produced between 500,000 and 1 million victims. Why I chose, quote ends here, why I chose this quote from Rwanda is because it draws a path. I mean, if one looks at it, there is a parallel between what happened in Iraq after the rise of ISIS and how the situation unraveled in Rwanda. According to the Iraq body count, since 2003, Iraq had witnessed over 283,000 violent deaths. Obviously most of the deaths were the result of the insurgency and the sectarian strife that engulfed the country between 2006 and 2010. But since the rise of the ISIS after the Arab Spring, the country witnessed nearly 100,000 deaths and nearly 25% of them were perpetrated by the ISIS. A vast majority of the victims of the ISIS attacks and killings were minorities, were minorities from Yazidi background, Yazidi ethnicity, also sectarian opponents as well as Kurdish women and other vulnerable sections of the society. And these were not just random incidents. Obviously there were some random incidents as well. But these were organized crimes and killings at industrial scale, wherein Kurdish and Yazidi villages were attacked, raised and destroyed by the ISIS fighters and the women were abducted and enslaved. And we have seen the kind of heinous crime stories that have come out after the fall of ISIS from Iraq or the fall of the so-called caliphate. It is because of this industrial scale killing and the way ISIS used the existing state structure in Iraq that I drew a parallel in the beginning from the Rwandan genocide. And it is even though the killing began, the number of victims in the case in Iraq was not at the same scale, it is lesser, there are several other parallels. Iraq 2 was a better performing state in the region when it comes to its, at least before the 1990s, when it comes to its economy and its education system, as well as its bureaucracy and the state structures for public administration. Similarly, ISIS used the administrative apparatus and military structure in the and party organization in Iraq to create that industrial scale genocide and that reached all level of population. But what makes the ISIS ideology or ISIS genocidal ideology more, far more explosive and far more threatening is the mayhem, it's not only the mayhem it created in Iraq and Syria but also the way it is spread to other parts of the world, not only the Middle East, but also to other parts of the world going beyond the boundaries of the state, going to the, it became a genocidal ideology at the global stage, reaching to South Asia, Central Asia and other parts of the world and creating franchises and low-on-volve attacks in Europe, in Asia, in the United States and in many other parts of the world, for example, in Australia. And despite the military defeat of the group and the way it has, its structures have been destroyed in Iraq and Syria, its remnants remains present in both countries and the ideology remains alive. And I think it is because of this threat that it is far more dangerous and it is far more problematic as far as the ISIS ideology is concerned. And my concern here is mostly related to India and South Asia, but I'll very briefly give you an idea as to why, how the ISIS remains a threat in Iraq and Syria as well. For example, if you look at this map, in 2019, in Iraq and Syria, the Black Tots represent the attacks perpetrated by ISIS three years or two years after the declaration of its defeat. That is something which gives us an idea that while the ideology also remains intact, the remnants of ISIS remains, remain a threat as far as even Iraq and Syria and the Middle East is concerned. If you look at this map of Syria in 2000, early first quarter of 2020, again the Black Tots show the areas where ISIS remains active. The same can be said about Iraq as well. I don't exactly have a map to show for Iraq for 2020, but if you look at this map of Syria in April, June 2020, these are the dark brown dots are the places where ISIS has perpetrated attacks. And similarly, one can see the situation in Iraq where the remnants of ISIS, ISIS fighters who have not yet been captured have continued to create mayhem in Iraq, despite being defeated. Now, let me come to the hybrid ideology the ISIS represents. And why I call this ideology a hybrid is because of how it has taken different strands in the existing Islamist, you know, various branches within the Islamist ideas to create an ideology which is genocidal. And Shiraz Mahir in his book has called it Salafi jihadism. But it is in my understanding, it consists of four major strands. Apocalyptic ideas, puritanical Wahhabism, extremist Salafism as against pacifist Salafism, and radical Islamism. And if you look at it, it is this idea of Salafi jihadism, which is genocidal. It is based on hatred towards the other as created within the context of the extremist and radical Islamist thought, which believes in indiscriminate killing of all human beings if they do not adhere to the extremist beliefs that this ideology is based on. It is for this reason that many within the Islamist establishments in different parts of the world have also termed ISIS or Daesh as the Khawarij, the rejectionist, the group that emerged during the first fitna in the early stages of Islam, and that rejected the position of both, both two sides, the sides which were with Ali and Aisha, because they declared both of them as having been ousted of Islam or have left Islam. And if one looks deeper into the ideology, this hybrid ideology, it is, and there are five aspects that need to be understood. And I'll not really go into the details of it, the capacity of time, but there are five issues that really make this ideology genocidal. The first is jihad. Jihad, very briefly, we know that jihad can be of different types, but jihad in the concept of olivar has been present in Islamic theology, and ISIS has used that particular aspect for its own ideological ideas. Similarly, it uses takfir. Takfir, again, is an idea which is present in Islamic theology, but very rarely used. But ISIS uses this idea of takfir in abundance and more or less accept itself. It has declared everyone to be non-Muslim or having left Islam. And it is based on this takfiri ideology that ISIS also justifies killing of any, the others within the context of the idea of Islamic, Islamic ummah or Islamic caliphate. The third idea, which largely emanates from Wahhabism, is of al-wala wal-bara, and then the idea of tawhid and hakimiyah, which goes back to the teachings of both Sayyidqutub and Abulala Maududi. All these strands of thought that can be found in radical Islamic theology, and by bringing them together, the ISIS has formed a genocidal ideology that has created one of the most globalized jihadi terrorist organization in our recent history, and which has created mayhem in different parts of the world, as well as in, obviously, in the Middle East and North Africa, but also has emerged as one of the latest, one of the major threats in South Asia. If you look at from the Indian point of view, ISIS and its growing activities in South Asia is a threat, is considered a threat, and one of the provinces of ISIS, the Horasan province, which is largely focused in Af-Pak region, is also a major threat. Within India, the issue of online radicalization efforts to infiltrate in the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, and the issue of Indians joining ISIS by migrating to Iraq and Syria or anywhere where the caliphate has been declared is something which is important. So, if you look at this map and data here, one can figure out that since 2000, between 2019 and 2020, how many attacks have been carried out by ISIS in South Asia, and this is something not only confined to the Af-Pak region, but also in Sri Lanka, in Bangladesh, in Maldives, and in other parts of the region. In addition to these attacks, if you look at the ISIS activities in South Asia, its provinces have grown. There is an ISIS-Horasan province, there is ISIS-Pakistan province, there is ISIS-Hind province, which have actively involved in creating or in recruiting fighters from South Asia and in inciting them to create, to attack, to mount attacks in different parts of South Asia. From the Indian point of view, one of the major problems which India faced over the last few years has been the issue of online radicalization. Recently, we have seen that ISIS has also started to focus more on India, especially to to use or to take the opportunity of rising problems with related to minorities in India, to try and create, to try and attract vulnerable youths or disgruntled youths to its ideology. And that has become a major problem for security agencies in India, and there has been instances where families themselves have complained to the security agencies, wherein they have found that the youth has been online, radicalized through online media. And ISIS has been focusing significantly on this aspect. Most of the cases in India where there has been an issue of somebody joining the ISIS has been of online radicalization. Recently, ISIS has started its own Mac, a new magazine, which is specifically focused on India called South Al-Hind or the Voice of India. And it specifically focuses on India. Now, the second issue has been the issue of Indians joining ISIS. And if you look at it in comparison to other parts of South Asia, the number or even other parts of the world, the number has been low. It is only estimated that around 200 Indians have so far joined ISIS and compared to the population of Indian Muslims or Muslims in India, which is almost 200 million or at least 180 million, it is very minuscule number. And it is also important to note that it is because of the syncretic culture in India and the different kind of Islam which is practiced in India that has played a role. But again, one cannot really take satisfaction from this fact because to be very fair, you don't really need thousands of people to create bomb attacks or create problems. For example, especially in the Indian context, which has faced religion-based rights over the years. And this can really be, I mean, one small attack can create social divides and political problems as well. That makes India much more vulnerable in my understanding. The third issue, as far as the Indian context is concerned, is again, using the existing conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, which is a conflict region, to try and infiltrate in them inside Jammu and Kashmir. And there is, there was an attempt to create a Kashmir province. And both in recent times, both Al Qaeda and ISIS have kind of wide for, competed for trying to infiltrate in Jammu and Kashmir. And several of youths have been attracted to their ideology. And to join them, some of them have been kind of killed in security, action by security forces. But the effort continues. And this is a major security threat for India, as far as India's national security is concerned, which can actually, again, drawing parallel from the you know, problem of the communal problems in India, religious problems in India, because of certain historical and other issues. This can really create a large-scale mayhem. Not only in India, but the entire of South Asia, which has had its shares of conflicts and problems. And we know that there are two nuclear states, which can certainly be a major problem. From the Indian point of view, apart from the national security issue, as I was mentioning earlier, there is also the civil society, which has tried to create awareness and tried to create, to prevent people joining the ISIS and creating awareness, for example, about how genocidal this ideology is. For example, in 2014 and 15, a number of religious scholars within India, sometimes who have been one of the pillars of conservatism in Muslim groups in India, have come out. At least in this case, their role can be appreciated. They came out and issue the fatwa saying that ISIS is not Islam. They do not represent Islam. They actually misrepresent Islam. And that, I think, also has created some awareness among Muslim youths who have not really joined ISIS in large numbers. So, I will come to my concluding thoughts. India was among the least affected countries from the phenomenon of ISIS, both in terms of number of people who joined the ISIS, as well as the terrorist strikes and lone wolf attacks, mounted by the terrorist groups. And as I noted earlier, by most liberal estimates, keeping the number of Indian Muslims, which is very high, the number of Indians who were found involved in ISIS activities was between only 250 and 300. Somewhere around 200 had joined, went to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to join the group, and around 100 odd cases were found where people were trying to join and they were prevented and arrested. At its peak, the ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2016 and 17 had somewhere around 150,000 foreign fighters and only about 200 were of Indian origin. The majority of foreign fighters came from Middle East and North Africa, also from Europe, Central Asia and other parts of Asia. Even in terms of direct fallout, India was not a major destination for those fleeing Iraq and Syria, unlike Europe, that felt the brunt of large refugee inflow due to the rise of ISIS and the mayhem it created in Iraq and Syria. Likewise, India did not experience many ISIS inspired attacks, unlike several other countries, including in the Maina region and other parts of the world. But increasingly India's neighboring countries such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka have faced attacks. For example, the Easter attack in Sri Lanka last year, or the recent attack in Afghanistan on the Gurudwara, the Sikh religious temple, where around 30 people were killed. However, the discovery of several modules and arrests of suspects in various parts of India underlined the dangers of ISIS appeal, self-radicalization among Muslim youths, and the terrorist groups attempt to lure Indians to join its ranks and also its genocidal ideology. Therefore, despite the defeat, the threat perception and challenges from the ISIS and other global jihadist terrorist groups to not only India, but also to South Asia and other parts of the world cannot be ruled out. The ISIS ideology remains potent, and in the past such groups have found ways to revive themselves under new autars. And because of its genocidal ideology, I think it remains extremely potent. And in the case of India, both a security and a civil society approach has helped India reduce the number of people who have joined ISIS, but the problem remains. And I don't think there can be any, you know, if there can be a situation where one can actually take this threat lightly. I'll stop here and we'll be happy to have to answer any questions. Thank you. Dr. Kumar, thank you very much for your insightful presentation. We will again have Q&A after all five of our presenters have presented their thoughts and ideas. Our next speaker is Dr. Azim Ibrahim. Whenever you're ready. Excellent. Can you see that? Okay, everybody. Fantastic. First of all, let me give my sincere thanks to Hayat and to Admiral for putting this together. It's unfortunate that we can't meet in person as we did last year, but this is obviously the next best thing. So let me start off just by giving you a highlight of what I intend to talk about. Fascism as an ideology has always been very difficult to define. Even the most famous cases of fascism back in the 1930s came in many different forms. So in this presentation today, in this short presentation, I'd like to focus on the risks, not necessarily by fascism, but on majoritarian parties in the circumstances of what we now call managed democracies. The key to these is they operate within the formal trappings of a normal democracy, a normal democratic system like Hungary, Myanmar, India, and there's plenty of other examples as well. You know, one could add on Bolsonaro or Duterte's Philippines, but these regimes do not accept the normal democratic process. They also have a position of the winner takes all that there's only one route to making the country a success. And they do not believe to govern as to reflect the views of the of their policy. So that's what I'll be speaking about today. So if there's one thing that Genocide Studies tells us is that there's no society that moves from the belief in shared values and rights and a degree of social integration state to straight to genocide. They may be scarred by ethnic tensions, but by categorization on the basis of religion. But this is not the same as mass murder or expulsion. The shift from this has to be prepared is sometimes a long journey, and it may draw on long established prejudices, such as anti-Semitism or Hindu Muslim relations in India. The Nazi genocide of Europe, for example, is often seen as the classic instance of genocide, well, at least in terms of Germany itself and occupied Western Europe. But mass murder only became the formal policy in 1942, which was 10 years after they actually came to power. So it did take quite some time to lay the foundations of this genocidal process. So our understanding of European politics in the 1930s is to see movements such as fascism as the antithesis of democracy. They're the exact opposite of democracy, fascism and democracy as you know, essentially the polar opposites. But these were single state parties and they had no meaningful elections. The only engagement with conventional politics was through various plebiscites, most of them which were fixed. In the 20th century, genocide was linked to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes where it's the Ottoman Empire, whether it's Stalin's, Russia, Nazi Germany. These are the most common examples that we know. But the emerging threat today is from what we now call managed democracies. When these are captured by populists, usually right-wing, majoritarian regimes, Myanmar should be the warning sign here. It holds regular elections, but at the same time, which by all intents and purposes are relatively free and fair, but is also at the same time just expelled over one million Rohingya and has been engaged in genocidal policies against not just the Rohingya but other minority groups. One of the reasons of this new form of threat is that ruling parties in these regimes all believe that mythically, they are the only ones that truly embody the will of the people, that they encapsulate what the people really want and it can only be translated through them. And such movements always need a clear enemy. They need an identifiable enemy. In some, it is anti-Semitism, which is very popular with regimes in Hungary and Poland, for example. In others, it is Islamophobia. And for some, the enemy is actually critical, which is either you hear this very regularly, is either liberals, is a vague elite, the elite bankers, elite something else, the insiders, a shadow government. And these are the individuals that vote for them, when people vote for them, but the external enemy is absolutely critical for this group to have traction. And this is essentially the tyranny of an elected majority, electorally constructed majority. And anybody who disagrees with them are not just political opponents to be debated with, as in a normal democratic system, or they negotiate with them, they are to be outmaneuvered. They are essentially the enemy, and they are not really part of this country. They are the enemies of the state and have to be treated accordingly. So when or where might a majority in government cross the line from demonising to actually terrorising when, do they actually pass the fulcrum in which they go from just defining this people to actually terrorising and targeting them. It seems that there is a group within the wider excluded communities who are deemed to have no place in the reconstituted and defined nation space. Some traditional fascist regimes use murder and eternal exile to deal with their opponents. But even here mass murder and certainly genocide was never their normal policy. Mussolini and Franco, for example, both murdered their opponents, but they never engaged in simply just trying to murder everybody that disagreed with them. On the modern managed democracy, Orban has no such target, ready target. Despite his rhetoric, the Muslim and Jewish populations of Hungary remain, the threats to them remain quite minimal. But in India and Myanmar, there is a group that can be targeted exclusively, the group that can be very clearly targeted, that they argue has no place in this nation. And we seek to expel them for both the targets this minority groups, Muslims and even Christian minority groups in these countries. So while ethnicity has sometimes been the fault line, such as in Rwanda, for example, the Hutus and the Tutsis, most genocides are aimed at groups identifiable by religion. The Christian Armenians were seen as a threat as they might ally with Tsarist Russia in the First World War. And to the Nazis, the mortal threat to the German nation was the Jews and those which they believed had no place in modern Germany. Today, many of the modern day authoritarians tend to identify their targets by religion. There are exceptions, of course, like Bolsonaro in Brazil. And the most, but in most cases, the most common target is Islam. Islamophobia is the key ideology of choice of many of these newly emergent far right groups and the standard message of both right wing newspapers, television channels and prevalent on social media. In Myanmar, for example, the Rohingya have been uniquely singled out amongst the many ethnic minorities placed into Burma where it gained independence. As Muslims, the narrative became that their presence and the country within the country forms an existential threat to the body politic of the country and to the survival of the Buddhist majority. And in a similar way, Modi uses ideology of Hindutva, the extremist Hindutva ideology, to argue that Muslims simply do not belong in India and they're certainly not part of this ideal Indian nation which he aspires to create. That's not to say that there's no other groups that they target, but those are the primary ones. So let's look at this case study of India for these trends. Modi has won elections both regionally and nationally. If there are legitimate concerns about voter suppression, there is little doubt that Modi did win a landslide majority with the popular vote. At the last election, there was lots of gerrymandering to remove over 70 million Muslims from the voter registration and low caste Dalits. So it's not just the Muslims as other minority groups that they also target. And as with very other fellow travellers in the journey, Modi also likes to target NGOs and those with international links are particularly vulnerable, such as Amnesty International Human Rights Watch, most of whom cannot work in India anymore. So to understand Modi, underlying ideology is necessary to go back to the early kind of roots of British rule when they suppressed Indian mutiny in 1857. At that time, as is so often the case, they said about categorising their new subjects, some communities were easily identifiable as Muslim, Buddhist or Christians, something that the British often used for their own particular purposes. And this had consequences by the 1920s. British rule was under immense pressure. The Congress party took a secular view of who was Indian on the basis for the future independence date that they wanted to carve out from the British Empire and who actually lives within India. But there were also other strands in the national movements, one of which was followed by traditional Indian religions, which could be a real, in order to be a real citizen, one can only has to be what they call off this land, which is essentially Hindu or Buddhist. And anybody else simply cannot be loyal to India. So clearly at first the Congress vision won. Congress is a party that brought independence to India and won the elections for a considerable amount of time. But Gandhi was eventually assassinated by an RSS, militant from the RSS. The RSS gained, a political party gained around 4% of the vote in post-independence, but fused with previous other Hindu extremist groups to oppose Congress and gave a small electoral, but they only had very little electoral support amongst the populace. But over time, Congress became more authoritarian and the RSS, which eventually became the BJP, briefly was part of the governing coalition in the late 1970s. It also came to dominate regions such as Gujarat, where Muslim Hindu tensions were longstanding and often marked by communal violence. So what's been the impact of the BJP in power and Modi? Generally, the BJP and Modi have stoked these tensions leading to the 2002 riots that led to many deaths, most of them Muslim deaths, and the ongoing demands for the removal of mosques, what they claim to be traditional Hindu sites. In power, notionally, the BJP has started to remove Muslim voters from the electorate. In Assam, for example, many Muslims arrived from Bangladesh, which was East Pakistan at the time in the 1940s, 1950s. The right to live in India has been undermined by the BJP who have told them that they need to pack their bags and leave, otherwise they'll be forced into detention camps. In Kashmir, which is India's only Muslim majority state, martial law has been imposed by the BJP and all the legal rights that gave the community some sort of protection are being stripped away, ending any special status that Kashmir had, which has always been one of the goals of the BJP. So Modi is not necessarily an isolated incident. Far-right voices such as Steve Bannon have supported his anti-Muslim policies and his undermining of Indian democracy. His predecessors were vocal in their admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, so this was they were completely open about this. They don't even try to hide it. And his assault on democracy follows a very well-developed playbook who wants the trappings of democracy without any of the actual constraints of a democratic system, very similar to many other regimes around the globe. So what do we mean by managed democracy? The old fascist right simply did not bother with democracy. Democracy and electoral politics were seen as decadent and had no part in their politics. Today, authoritarian regimes are much more subtle, much more sophisticated. Even Putin bothers to create the image of a very political landscape, even if he violently suppresses any really independent opposition. There are obviously huge advantages to keeping the trappings of democracy, keeping the illusion of democracy going. Hungary can remain a member of the European Union and even get European Union funds for its projects and development and to benefit its own supporters and take control of the bulk of the media and judiciary. They can then rig elections and they can win with huge majorities. But even so, the legacy of civil society and the rule of law can be frustrated by these new authoritarians. So what happens if they start to lose support? Despite their best efforts, you might still lose an election. So if you still have the trappings of democracy, you still have the illusion. There's a possibility you may actually still lose an election. So Modi is making serious strides to ensure that any non-Hindu or non-Buddhist can vote. He can't so readily ensure that the remaining electorate will vote for him. So because his economic policies are failing, his mismanagement of the COVID situation is quite shocking. It's one of the worst cases in the world, I believe, some of the highest rates in the world of COVID because of the mismanagement. And many Hindus actually don't like his anti-Muslim rhetoric. So if the BJP was a normal party, this may not matter. It wins an election, it pushes India towards its goals, it loses an election and another party cup takes over. But the BJP is not a normal party. They want India in a very different form from what they inherited in 2012. They want to take it in a completely different direction. So losing power for them is not acceptable. So it will undermine its fundamental principles of democracy. So for that, it needs to show up its vote. And for that, a crisis and an enemy is very useful to essentially draw the attention of the people in a completely different direction. And for this, we can have another very interesting case today of where this has happened very successfully. I start warning where this can lead as Myanmar. The return of relative democracy in Myanmar in 2010, the NLD, the National League of Democracy, which was Aung San Suu Kyi's party, instead of pandering to, instead of developing and building the democratic constitution, instead they pandered to the local allies and ethnic rakhine and essentially did nothing when the tensions rose. And at every stage they stood to one side and have recently started to defend the military and their campaign of murder, arson and ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority and other minorities, even at the ICJ and International Court of Justice. So all of this rhetoric actually has huge consequences and parties like the BJP can trigger genocide, even if all they want to do is create a hostile environment and they simply lack the normal human sympathy. And this is a warning of what might happen in India. The anti-Muslim rhetoric is now being normalized by the BJP as politicians are happy to stoke ethnic tensions in search for votes. Even in Assam, some 2 million Muslims are in detention camps. Detention camps are very suspiciously modelled, very similar to the ones in Myanmar. So if Modi starts to suspect he has lost support in the Hindu community, he has plenty of means to create this tension. Relations with a very marginalized India, very marginalized Pakistan are very poor and are being worsened due to the BJP's actions in Kashmir. So one threat is of an external war with a suitably Muslim foe. This will obviously draw lots of attention away. Or another possibility to say that Muslims in Assam need to be evicted using any pretense that come to his mind, comes to a hand. And if this starts, given the history of Assam and Gujarat, it will not involve just those who lack the requisite documentation from 70 years ago, which is the kind of criteria that they've developed, as it will essentially target anybody. So in effect, Modi is deadly serious about his ideology. If the price of continuing that agenda by avoiding electoral defeat is war or mass expulsion, we should not be surprised that this is the option that he chooses. So to this day, genocides do not happen very often out of the blue. They do not appear suddenly. They need to be carefully prepared where the wider populace needs to be brought on board, and they need to be acquiescing and accepting it. Even if they decline to participate themselves directly, they have to essentially accept that this is the way things have to go. Our assumption until recently has always been that genocides and ethnic cleansing was a feature of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, essentially dictatorships. But the stark reality is that they can happen in even managed democracies. So even countries that have the trappings and the benchmarks of democracy can also engage in this kind of behavior when they are run by populace, majoritarian regimes. The NLD and Myanmar, led by a Nobel Prize, a Nobel Prize winner has overseen the genocide against the Rohingya minority. It was even prepared to go to the ICJ and defend this genocidal policy against the genocidal policy of the military. Modi's BJP is on the same dangerous path. It leaves no space for mistakes. It may not be really looking for ethnic cleansing or genocide, but it has created the basic situation for one of these things to happen, a local riot and attack by ISIS or another extremist kind of group or even one that could be manufactured could easily be the trigger to slip into one of these situations. So far, the world has been very tolerant of these managed democracies, whether it's in Europe or elsewhere. Often in Myanmar, it's seen as a step out of dictatorship towards conventional democracy. Sometimes as with Putin, it's seen as a permanent disruption to the process, but both these states really change. And what we are now seeing is that we need to stop hoping that their rhetoric is purely for electoral gain is increasingly becoming the official state policy of these governments. And once the state turns its back on universal human rights, it is on the track to first deem certain groups not real citizens. These people have never belonged here. They are not part of this land. And then to marginalize them from society, to demonize them, to make sure that an independent judiciary no longer exists to defend them. And then not far after that lies ethnic cleansing and genocide. But it's still a notionally democratic environment. And to restate if there's any doubt about this managed democracy thesis, just look at Myanmar. This is the strongest case study that we have. To finish off, not all is hopeless, the situation. India still remains a functioning democracy, just about. But the scope of internal opposition there, just like in Russia and in Hungary and Turkey and Brazil is very limited. The electoral system and the state structure are increasingly rigged against them, against the media, against opposition parties, against NGOs or anybody else that wishes to speak up against the government. Even Bollywood, the huge mammoth has been silenced against the government. This means an international level is very important for Western democratic countries and institutions to stop tolerating these limited democracies. They are not a stage in the transition from dictatorships. They can become permanent states or something that a democracy regresses to. All we need is a majoritarian populist party to entrench itself. So we should have no qualms about using international law. The EU in particular really needs to start challenging countries like Hungary and Poland and not tolerate them any longer. The reference of Myanmar to the International Court of Justice is obviously most welcome. It means its notionally democratic status does not excuse itself and its behavior and the expectations of what we should have or what a democracy should actually behave like. So thank you so much for listening. I'll leave it there. Dr Ibrahim, thank you very much. We will now turn to our next speaker with Dr Ben Kiranen. Thank you Hayat and thank you to the Naval War College for the invitation to speak here. It's a great pleasure to return even in this virtual format. Genocidal ideologies, warning signs and prevention is our topic and I'm going to be talking about the genocidal ideologies of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and I'm going to argue that genocidal ideologies are one of the most important warning signs for the prevention of genocide. The one of the most important signs that allows the outside world and people inside the country to get an idea of what the intentions and future actions of genocide perpetrators may be. We've heard from Mudasa Kumar about ISIS and its hybrid ideology and I'm going to be talking about that very kind of ideology, a hybrid ideology in the case of the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia and we've also heard from Azim Ibrahim about the kinds of regimes that claim they represent the real will of the people and yet ride roughshod over many of the people that they claim to represent. I want to read a little bit from a magazine put out by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in December of 1976, a magazine called Revolutionary Flag and it talked about seizing the people. They believe not only that they represented the real real will of the people but that that gave them the right to seize the people. Attacking the enemy politically the magazine said taking just one example fighting to seize the people. Our line was to fight and seize the people. 100,000 people we took them and so on until we fought for and seized the people from Phnom Penh too. The line of drying up the people from the enemy was very correct and then looking back in other examples quote, we took everyone in Ban Am town expelling the ethnic Vietnamese, the ethnic Chinese, the military, the police. We took everyone drying up the people from the enemy. We liberated Udong in 1974. We pulled out all the people. When the enemy took it back they had no forces. So there you have the idea of a regime that claims to represent the real will of the people so much that they believe they could seize, grasp the people. It was the Cambodian term. So what kind of ideology inspires those kinds of actions? I'm going to show first that the ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime was a hybrid ideology in the same sense that ISIS has been shown to be by Mudasa Khmer. It was composed of a hybridization, a eclectic mix of Stalinism and Maoism and Cambodian racism. I'll go through each of those components one after another but I'll show also I believe that it is more complex than that. It's not just a matter of these formal ideologies that go into the composition of a genocidal ideology that there are other components that I want to draw attention to towards the end of my talk. In 1979 when the Pol Pot regime was overthrown by the Vietnamese forces which retaliated to the attacks on Vietnamese territory by the Pol Pot regime, for the first time the world came to know about the prison in Cambodia, the secret prison that the Khmer Rouge regime called S-21 and one of the journalists who visited Cambodia in 1980 and brought back some of the documents from that secret prison of S-21 where 14,000 prisoners were tortured, forced to write false confessions and then murdered. One of the journalists was Anthony Barnett, the British journalist for the New Statesman in London and he described viewing in Penang Pen and the archives of the prison fantastic charts of lines drawn up in coloured inks showing the connections allegedly that had existed between the different prisoners according to their forced confessions and he brought back to London one of the long confessions of a minister in the Khmer Rouge regime who was tortured to death and forced to write this confession and at that time I was a graduate student and I participated in writing the story of what had happened to this man who named his name was and we compared the story and the documents that remained left behind by the Khmer Rouge when they fled Penang Pen and left this huge archive of 100,000 pages of the S-21 prison we compared that to the archives of Stalinism. In 1980 the next year I spent four months doing my field work as a graduate student in Cambodia and I spent a lot more time photographing photocopying the prison records of the S-21 and on return to Australia I read Robert Conquest's book The Great Terror about the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and one particular passage caught my attention quote from for the 1936 trial Mulchanov had prepared for Stalin a special diagram a system of many coloured lines on the diagram indicated when and through whom Trotsky had communicated with the leaders of the conspiracy and so when I read that in Robert Conquest's The Great Terror my mind immediately went back to the charts that Anthony Barnett Barnett had referred to and that I had photocopied of alleged rebel or foreign agent contact net networks that have been drawn up by the security cadre of Pol Pot's regime at S-21 prison in Penang Pen there too were many coloured lines connecting rows of boxes with data on each person implicated and it seemed a direct imitation of the Soviet techniques of the 1930s and Robert Conquest also talked about the dossiers in Moscow of the leading figures targeted by Stalin and now all of the leading prisoners like Radek and Piatakov and Sokolnikov they were all given Roman numerals and of course I knew having just been there that the leading prisoners in the Penang Pen prison in S-21 all had Roman numerals indicating their important status and it just seemed much more than a coincidence that these two communist regimes should have produced interrogation and dossiers that looked so similar with their charts of many coloured lines connecting boxes of supposed traitorous networks headed by people who were denoted by Roman numerals in early 1977 Pol Pot's brother-in-law and deputy prime minister Yang Suri said we are not communists we are revolutionaries this was of course disinformation the communist party of Camperchia was officially unveiled just a few months later but Yang Suri's statement was also a signal of a conscious departure from Marxist orthodoxy as the CPK's internal magazine Tung Padiwat the revolutionary flag from which I already quoted have put it in late 1970s left or not left we must stand by the movement we must not stand by the scriptures and by the scriptures they meant the communist texts and in fact an examination of the communist party of Camperchia's philosophy as expressed in party documents suggests that it was a truncated an ill-understood version of Stalin's mechanical dialectical materialism in which Stalinism was mixed with and even overshadowed by nationalist and racialist ideas in one case the magazine published an article on dialectical materialism and it was a virtual copy of Stalin's 1938 study dialectical and historical materialism it followed that article very closely but only for a short period now interestingly Stalin's article had been published in 1950 when Pol Pot was a young student in Paris and a member of the French communist party so he would have come across this dialectical and historical materialism now Stalin's article was divided into the three parts the dialectical method was the first part philosophical materialism was the second and historical materialism was the third so the two later parts were the materialist parts the first was the dialectical method and very interestingly what the Camerouge magazine Tung Paddy what called dialectical materialism was limited just to the first part the dialectical method and it completely excluded and omitted the two second parts philosophical materialism and historical materialism there was no materialism in the Camerouge understanding of dialectical materialism and of course you can imagine what the dialectics meant conflict dialectics was translated as to no in Cambodian conflict and of course they gave examples of what dialectics was in this article called dialectical materialism example in a situation of a person who has injured a buffalo's leg we must analyze we must ask if the child or the old man who tends the animal injured it or who else did and if it was done why was it unintentional or was it to oppose the cooperative look for a person who has something to do with this matter the cowherd what background was he from what class stand what political stand which milieu is his stand in contact with we follow up following up is a measure if we cannot find out in one or two days we will find out in two or three days unquote so in this way the first feature of the marxist dialectical method that all phenomena are organically interrelated was perceived in the cpk ideology in terms of the rationale for a witch hunt of course witch hunts took place in Stalinism the destruction of the huge number of members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was quite similar to what happened to the Communist Party of Cambodia but I think what we've got here is an ideology that borrows from Stalinism but also selects from it and omits large sections of it and completely omits the material conception of history that was common to orthodox marxism and the material factors in human behavior so here we have another quote from the same magazine pull out weeds add water and fertilizer by pushing the socialist revolutionary consciousness and stance so here is the idea of volunteerism it's not materialism it's volunteerism it's all about willpower and not the material factors in history and it comes down to when there's a problem quote look for a person who has something to do with this matter somebody who hasn't been committed enough to the revolutionary cause that's the problem not the material factors in history and if you think about that particular example of what the party was saying in its own magazine to its own members in Cambodia in the 1970s when it was in power look for a person who has something to do with this matter where questions arise about the political function of the leadership in Phnom Penh and what what they are saying about how witch hunts need to be set in motion even in the case of an injury to a buffalo's leg in another example is the great leap forward in China the Cambodian model or the Cambodian slogan was moha luk ploh moha cha which could be translated as a super great leap forward or even more a super great great leap forward so they were modeling it on the Chinese great leap forward of 1958 to 60 but they wanted to have an extreme version of that they wanted to go even further and out to the Chinese great leap forward I think what we're talking about here is the influence of Stalinism and Maoism but in the Stalinist case detracting or omitting some elements of it and in the mouse case adding to it outdoing it surpassing it so this is a highly selective ideology a hybrid ideology that is being used and I think what we're also seeing here is the Cambodian Communist Party under Pol Pot adding particularly if you can see it in the form of the super great leap forward showing the superiority of the Cambodian example and constantly through the documents of the Pol Pot regime and its party magazine revolutionary flag you see examples like the super great leap forward you can see the way it claimed its own ideological superiority and here we have the third factor not just Stalinism and not just Maoism but also the national grandiosity of the Cambodian model of the Cambodian ideology they wanted to outdo other communist regimes they believed that they were the most advanced and successful and most pure form of communism and this comes from a third factor as well as Stalinism and Maoism which I put down to national grandiosity is one way of saying it but racism is another they believe they were superior to other communist revolutions they also believe they were superior Cambodians were superior to other races they believed in racism they believed unlike orthodox Marxists that there was such a thing as hereditary enemies Pol Pot used that term to describe the Vietnamese in January of 1979 that the Cambodian people had a hereditary enemy which is quite unmarxist I would say thing to say and it's quite clear that the this kind of attitude led to the mass murder of the ethnic Vietnamese minority in Cambodia which was the reason the reason why the recent UN sponsored tribunal in Phnom Penh convicted Pol Pot's deputy party secretary Nguyen Chieh and the head of state of the Pol Pot regime Q-Symphorn convicted both of them of genocide against the ethnic Vietnamese minority and also convicted Nguyen Chieh for a second count of genocide against the Muslim charm minority in Cambodia as well so we have to take into account the factor of racism that led to genocide against two minority groups that occurred in the Pol Pot period from 1975 to 1979 but I think we can also see that racism was combined not only with Maoism and Stalinism but with a number of other ideological currents which are not so easy to formally detect and I just want to give you some examples of what I'm talking about here. Now this is Cambodia in its geographic position with Thailand in the west, Laos in the north and Vietnam in the east, the Mekong Delta being on the southern part of the flat Mekong Delta plane you can see there in the southern part of the map all three of those countries were subjected to attacks by the Pol Pot regime when it was in power particularly from 1977 the third year of the regime saw attacks across the northern border into Thailand and Laos but particularly across the southern border into the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. Here is just a list of the main leaders of the Pol Pot regime, this is the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Pol Pot and Nguyen Chieh who died after being convicted on two counts of genocide just last year, Yang Suri who died while he was in jail on trial for genocide and then Mok number seven was the military commander of the Khmer Rouge regime. I'll get back to him in a minute. There is Pol Pot himself in a more formal photograph after taking power sorry that and here is Nguyen Chieh in the middle and then the group of these are the Standing Committee of the Central Committee themselves in Phnom Penh. This is a map of the zones of Cambodia that they divided the country into after they'd taken power. The Cambodian map here it is in English the eastern zone on the right and the southwest zone bottom left were the two most powerful zones. The southwest was headed by Mok the military commander of the Khmer Rouge army and we'll see how important that was in a minute in the actual administration of the genocide. There is Mok himself commander of the southwest zone and of the army. Here is the prison S21 where 14,000 prisoners were tortured and here is the nationwide network of prisons. This is the death toll of about 101.7 million people who perished in that less than four years. This was confirmed by the UN demographic expert who worked for the IC in the Hague in the Yugoslav Tribunal in the Hague looked into the death toll the demographic expert and here we have a ID card held by an ethnic Vietnamese which the ethnic Vietnamese and Cambodia were compelled to carry and this is the ethnic group that was subjected to genocide. Here you have a quote from one of the monthly reports in the western zone talking about how 1,100 Vietnamese people small and big young and old have been smashed which means killed. These are the death tolls amongst Islamic leaders the Muslims so here we have a description of the ethnic genocides names of Islamic officials who perished during the D.K. Democratic Kampuchea period of Pol Pot's regime and here we have another ideological element which I think is extremely important and this is the cult of antiquity it's on top of racism I think you find in most genocidal regimes there is this glorification of the past an attempt to return to a pristine past. I think we see this with Al Qaeda and other groups that want to go back to the 12th century or an earlier version of the pure Islamic era we see it in Nazi Germany's veneration of the period when they defeated Roman legions German insurgents defeated Roman legions we see this in many cases this is the Angkor temple of the 11th and 12th centuries which was built by Cambodians and the Pol Pot regime talked about surpassing this not just restoring this glory of the Cambodian empire of the medieval period but surpassing it. Now this is a statue that was put together by a French colonial sculptor and it's to be found today on the railway station steps at Marseille. Pol Pot would have seen this as a 24 year old student arriving in France from his ship from Saigon to Marseille and he would have traveled up these steps to get the train to Paris to study radio electricity the course that he failed before he was sent back to Cambodia and he would have seen this statue group and it represents the French colonial view of French Indochina which comprised Vietnam Cambodia and Laos but what you see here is the Cambodian woman the Apsara presiding over the Laos boy on the right hand side presenting her with fruit and the Vietnamese boy lying on his stomach presenting her with a Buddha image and this is the French colonial image of the higher place of Cambodia in that colonial ideology and I think Pol Pot and his group who grew up in French colonial times imbibe that French romantic view of Cambodia as a romanticised superior place than Vietnam and Laos and during World War II we have the the not just the cult of antiquity but a fascination with agrarianism which I think is also very important in genocidal ideology this is Marseille Pétain the collaborator with Hitler who ruled Vichy France this is his ideology talking about agrarianism during World War II and this ideology was transmitted from France to Cambodia during Pol Pot's youth and Cusampon himself his youth as well this was the ideology of that agriculture and the peasant lifestyle was the superior lifestyle and it contributed towards the Khmer Rouge decision to evacuate the cities of Cambodia and turn everyone into farmers I think I'll leave it there thank you very much for listening Dr Kiran and thank you very much we don't mind to stop sharing your screen and we'll move on to our next speaker thank you our next speaker is Dr Don Simi whenever you're ready you need to unmute can you hear me now okay so let's try that again so before I get started what I would like to do first of all is to welcome one of my absolute best friends in the world Dr Jonathan Weber and his amazing wife Connie who are with us tonight from their home in Krakow, Poland. So the question we have to take a look at is how can we define much less interdict the unknowable I believe we have to peer deep into the abyss of humaneness to define, detect, deter, and prevent ideologies as expressed from becoming actionable ideologies of moral consequence only when we fully understand ourselves as individuals and as organizational humans can we begin to fully apprehend the possible as Dr. W Stowe said last week understanding ourselves may in fact be the greatest discovery we can make to do this I think we can analyze genocidal ideologies in three basic categories now on any given day we have no real way of knowing of testing of assessing the pipes and the pressure and the that delivers the water to our schools to our businesses our factories in our homes it just shows up and we don't really know how that actually works but you can be certain that after the water main breaks and the investigation is complete everyone will understand precisely what happened when how and why because now they have evidence of what that failure but in the moment right before the water main broke and began to obey the laws of physics it was impossible to actually know what was going to happen the only way you can really know is to pull back the dirt to uncover what is underneath to examine it closely expose it to sunlight and even then you might suspect but it doesn't mean that you'll know in fact you can certify that the pipe is sound and all it takes is one errant term by the backhoe operator when filling the hole in again and the water main explodes anyways in a manner that no one would have assumed to be probable but is nonetheless entirely plausible so too with genocidal ideologies that are pre-catastrophic to know before the act is extraordinarily difficult first we must possess a shared set of definitions about the nature of the thing itself arriving at such concordance is challenging beyond definitions we have to be able to detect events that match the definitions and then account for outliers and false positives this means being able to deter once we've detected this determine it from taking place and then this means making hard decisions and actually committing resources it means being able to observe to assess and determine if deterrence in fact is actually working as intended or if in fact it is acting as an accelerant analyzing capability will and intent helps to uncover the abyss and assess the factors but even now after 75 years of post holocaust research 25 years after Srebrenica and Rwanda nearly 20 years after Darfur we still lack the ability to fully explain the complex causes of those mass atrocities crimes against humanity and genocide as an international community we cannot agree on the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians scholars are still divided over the degree of complicity of Vichy France during world war two and if we were to take the case study of the Congo even if we were to consider just the past three decades it's incredibly complicated and we might search in vain to find the original sin the initiating event that kicked off three decades of this war we know that all of these events took place although we will never know the full extent of each and so I think that Pierre Vidal McKay's comment is a stark admonition toward the hopes and policies of prevention we have the benefit of knowing how events turned out but in the intellectual and policy space that happened before the event that's a far different situation so how then can we better not perfectly detect deter and prevent an eruption of mass hate action from the abyss of human thought and the expression indeed well we must accept that while every one of us is capable of great good each of us is also capable of great crime under the right circumstances in exploring the abyss from Dante's inferno one of the things that we notice is that the visitor is overwhelmed by the presentation of so many forms of mischief navigating through the depths requires a guide one no no doubt laden with an excess of weltschmetz at the knowledge of the world and how it actually works and symbolized in Dante's inferno by the guide actually carrying the visitor at several spots through the descent into the depths and to do this illustrates the point perfectly I think of how one must look into the abyss to first grasp and attempt to understand the potential soul of every human this potential though in many ways it follows the laws of the grade school playground until something actually catalyzes and initiates the action it's merely an ideation now words have powerful meaning as you heard dr. Ibrahim say rhetoric has consequences and they have to be studied in context the meaning is understood frequently fails to capture the essence of the fame and new words of phrases are required so two other schoolboys in this case from levif defined crimes against humanity and genocide to capture the essence of the application of totalitarian industrialized nation state power and their exterminationist attempts against targeted populations even amidst the horrors of the holocaust and the immediate aftermath they understood the enduring power of definitions now another jurist oliver window holmes also tried to determine what was the tipping point between expression and action and he wrote this in his 1919 opinion shank versus united states his phrase is perhaps the best phrase for us to use in analyzing the thoughts and expressions of groups and individuals in their actions before converting them to deeds this approach seeks to identify that transformation from concepts to organize mass action well how then are we supposed to do this well fortunately we have the research of barbara harf scott strouse who you'll hear after me gregory stanton the people you've heard before me and others to help sign post to this for us each of these show the potential outlines of capability will and intent the challenge though is that early warning signs depend on detecting signals of intent rather than waiting for information that the widespread killings have taken place there is a high correlation between certain factors and the potential for mass atrocities but even harf admits to the limits of mathematical models to capture the totality of organized human nature now dr. Strauss whom you'll hear immediately after me identifies eight warning signs he also makes the additive point that while these are listed sequentially they can happen simultaneously or even asynchronously from my own experience in professional research i can tell you that number seven is an absolute bell ranger whether an idiom means ugandan occupied poland stolons soviet union communist china the perpetrators always start with the professors media lawyers clergy and youth leaders now gregory stanton has a slightly expanded version this has a similar list but there are some differences right so and you look at this one you can reorder them like a stack of dominoes or spin it like a rubik's cube for example organization and polarization could in fact take place before symbolization and discrimination now for policymakers who are trying to enable the freedom of expression while averting mass atrocities this is all bewildering and in fact it's downright confusing if some of the most brilliant minds look at the exact same set of historical evidence and the same data driven models and yet they derive a different set of processes how should we apply justice holmes litmus test go too early your government will be accused of all matters of imperial actions go too late the potential cleanup will be immense now one common thread between all of these models and the rest of the research is that there's a triggering event and these can be broken down into five groups so your first are assassinations to which i would add attempted assassinations if you're a leader who survives an assassination you're still alive but your mindset has been changed dramatically by that attempt the same for coups and failed coups in the second group the third group the idea of a radical change in conflict dynamics might be best expressed in the example of angola suddenly rushing to the rescue of the government of congo just as it appeared the capital was about to follow the rebels and then in the fifth group there are symbolic attacks this can be a chechen attack on an opera house in muskau it can be the uss coal in september 11th it could be the madrid train bombings it can be repeated attacks in lunget in paris but one thing i do know is that when you look at these and you look at the context in which they take place the absorbing power of liberal democracy shines through when you compare that to dictatorships and totalitarian systems for all the appearances of outward toughness dictatorships and totalitarian systems tend to be actually quite fragile and brittle now it's hard to simulate the actual outcomes of human group dynamics we do have data informed cones of plausibility but those are not predictive trajectories of certainty in an increasingly censored world which in some places is also a censored world there are hopes that agent-based modeling artificial intelligence and other things can put quantitative assessment and evidence against the qualitative nature of the shank test but if we look at the show up we look at congo rowan to the cultural revolution and kosovo there are some similarities but it's important that we note that the divergences are at least as pronounced and as important as the dot clusters now allison de forge left us rather instead of a predictive model she left us with some lessons number one is a noble aspiration number five is an absolute requirement and this presents us with what i call the karski frankfurter conundrum jan karski snuck in and out of the war saw ghetto in and out of the is beats a transit camp he was captured and tortured by the gestapo and escaped he made his way across europe and in july of 1943 he briefed the president of the united states of america and right after that he then went to see the polish ambassador of the united states and to brief uh supreme court justice felix frankfurter and when he was done justice frankfurter said to a young man i cannot believe you and ambassador chetanovsky was stunned by this and justice frankfurter turned to ambassador chetanovsky and said i did not say he is lying i said i cannot believe him those are two very different things and we see today a similar problem in people who are unable to comprehend the totality of what is being reported to them from kim bodia the balkans and rwanda when humans are confronted with new information they look for an analytical framework in which they can place that information and seek to understand what it tells them but with mass atrocities and crimes against humanity and genocide these are such outlier events that the mind reels before the onslaught of information conflicting reporting and in stream analysis we want clarity from events that defy understanding and we know the perpetrators will almost always try to deceive deny and disguise their actions the earth may eventually groan and reveal her secrets but that revelation will come too late for the lives lost in the typhoon of hate action and systemic violence so all of which brings us to those three critical words again capability will and intent a capability is the easiest of these three and it's the foundation for will and intent capability enables action the challenge though as it is with weapons of mass destruction is to distinguish between what is intended for genocide and what is intended for some other simpler purpose to reflect only what some of the other speakers have already mentioned i would ask where do ideologies pride nationalism and ethnocentrism cross some invisible line that converts a microscopic element or a fringe element you know into a clear and present danger certainly gas chambers at the end of a railroad track are definitely a capability they reflect will and intent and that they cannot be built overnight and they can be sensed and detected as you can see in this picture from september of 1944 but what about edged weapons a pitchfork is a great tool with which to clean out the henhouse it's also a very deadly weapon depending on how you use it and since 1945 the deadliest weapon in the world is a very very simple one the capability and capacity for human organized violence towards other humans is part and parcel of the human condition just as much as empathy agape and altruism so there's a transition point and that's what we're trying to find where ideologies and capabilities move to the cultural and the national level from drifus to drancy reveals how possible this is even in a liberal nation state so one of the warning signs of this transition might be the integration of organizational capabilities and processes organizations will exploit the need to belong and they'll build upon that foundation a sense of duty to others and eventually to an idea christopher brownie made a great point last week when he said when you see an organization creating an inverse moral universe where to not kill someone is to sin against your comrades to sin against your nation and to sin against an ideal that's probably when you're at a pivot point now preventing this germination of a bad idea is the gold standard but then you realize that the ability and the power to determine what's a good idea from a bad idea is to begin to tiptoe through the tulips of tarry so we have to peer more deeply and more intently and look at this thing called will will is what converts capability into action will can be found in expressions of exclusionary and genocidal ideologies and structural crises and under societal pressures we have to consider the will of the potential genocidaires against the will of the potential intervenors it's the perception of will that counts the most if a leader perceives that the will of the potential intervenors is less than the will of his forces it may steal his resolve and in fact accelerate his intent and so the last of the three intent if only we had this picture in the summer of 1941 instead of the summer of 1946 intent is the last of these three it's the most difficult to divine early warning depends on detecting and understanding the signals of intent but how do we know what that is and how do we measure it will added to capability is still not necessarily a clear and present danger like a binary chemical compound or a potent explosive minus an activating event or an actuator it's still a benign binary economy so what are the transitions what are the initiators each human being is unique we cannot predict each action reaction and counteraction but there are discernible trend lines the problem is predicting beyond the plausible to the probable so for example we know the decisive early action in East Timor and Sierra Leone showed what the art of the possible might look like but even in those the leaders on the ground knew that they had exceeded their remit in a perilous fusion of force and diplomacy all wrapped inside a message wrapped again inside a campaign with multiple messages to competing audiences in both cases we think we found success that we prevented the conversion of genocidal ideologies to mass atrocities but the problem with this self-congratulatory perception is that we actually really have no way of knowing part of the tragedy of these offenses that the alternative futures are so starkly different that there's no way to test for them models simulations nascent artificial intelligence they can give us indicators perhaps but they can't tell us mass atrocities and genocides are uniquely human occurrences that yield little to quantitative analysis because the complexity of capability plus will plus intent is laden with so many variables even Gerard Prunier that relentless advocate for greater interventionary action cautions that these are very very difficult to discern so we come back to asking ourselves that question what presents a true clear and present danger it is up to us to remain aware attuned and alert to the possible emergence of radical hate-based ideologies while remaining true to the principles that lead humans to bind together in societies to preserve life liberty and justice and to prevail against man as a wild animal in short brutish lives as history reveals time and again what one leader sees is a fully justified tailorable and scalable intervention another leader will see as neocolonialism a violation of sovereignty and the hopeless naivete of outsiders capability will and intent are each imperfect but taken together they provide what I believe is the greatest opportunity to prevent the conversion of potential genocidal energy to the kinetics of killing as Sierra Leone demonstrates it is possible to get this mostly right but remember for every affirmative example there are scores more that failed due to either inaction or ineptitude genocidal ideologies backed by competent capability intensified intent and forceful will are very powerful when each factor builds upon the other two the greater the convergence of these three factors the harder it will be to untangle that Gordian knot now ideally we fix the problem before the water main erupts realistically we have to be prepared to deal with it when it does we have to peer into the abyss of human nature we have to acknowledge the worst of which everyone is capable and reinforce the good to which each of us is summoned if yonkarski himself standing in the white house could not compel fdr and justice frankfurter that we have to accept the limits of the human capability to comprehend atrocities in action and compel nation states to prevention and introduction we should never cease trying but it must be with our feet firmly on the ground in our eyes wide open to see things as they are not as we might wish them to be and then to deal with the consequences whether it be determined a decision for action or a conscientious choice for inaction thank you very much doctor see me thank you very much as always very compelling and i'm very tempted to go check my sink faucet after that so thanks a lot as we get into dr scott strouse our final speaker um general audience you are welcome to start filling the chat with your uh with your questions to prepare for q and a so please go ahead and also indicate if you have a specific question for a specific panelist who that might be so again to the general audience uh you are welcome to start filling the chat with your questions dr scott strouse you are next whenever you're ready great thank you so much and thank you so much hi for inviting me into the naval war college for this hosting this conference i thought i would go specific rather than general focusing on rwanda and i decided not to use powerpoint and make a relatively brief presentation since we're at the end of a long session already so my presentation is going to focus on how we characterize the past how we characterize histories of violence and on the effects and power of using the label of genocide and this is a different way i think to think about ideology than the way we've been thinking about it in the other presentations which is as a driver of genocide i want to think about the ways in which we use genocide as a as a label as a form of ideology my case is going to be rwanda and rwanda as probably most of you know it has become after years of labor documentation legal proceedings testimony and scholarship a canonical case of mass violence in the 20th century and that place is very well deserved however whether wittingly or not the focus on genocide crimes against the minority tutsi population in 1994 has come to define the history of violence in rwanda in particular during the 90s for many students many policymakers many scholars and other observers and while genocide against the tutsi population indisputably took place in rwanda framing 1994 or the entire 90s period uniquely around that uniquely around the rwandan genocide does not describe accurately the range of mass violence that occurred in this region as i'll talk about in a second mass violence against rwandan hutu populations took place on several occasions as part of the 1990s struggle for state power and narrating the region's history uniquely or solely through the lens of genocide has come to minimize sometimes render invisible these other critical experiences of violence so at base my presentation is a call to conceptualize or reconceptualize the past by not only recognizing the genocide but also by including these other experiences of violence and i think that has a couple implications one of the implications i think is getting rwandan history right and i think that matters for genocide studies because it's such a canonical case the second is that i think that it matters for countering genocide denialism in a way that i think is is important i think third is using language that properly counts for the past and gets the history right i think facilitates reconciliation in the long run and lastly i think that we can use this as a case study of the benefits and costs of labeling history through the lens of genocide in some ways it's a warning sign about how too much of a focus on genocide can be counterproductive in some cases so let me kind of back into some of these points so the rwandan genocide was one of the most intense mass violations of human rights in the second half of the 20th century there were likely somewhere between half a million and as many as 800 000 civilian victims in a period of three months the main targets of government sponsored violence were an identity category the minority tutsi population and this was violence that was state-led deliberate systematic and organized the purpose of the violence was group destruction i think there is should be absolutely no reservations in calling this main form of violence as genocide however the genocide against the resident tutsi population in muwanda and the related violence against opponents of the government at the time were not the only experiences of violence in this period yet 26 years later these other forms of violence which while less intense and not genocide remain largely invisible except as specialists on the region and to dedicated opponents of the current regime these non-genocide crimes remain weekly documented largely outside of public discourse in rwanda and abroad unvalidated by way of justice or official commemoration to speak of these crimes inside rwanda can be politically treacherous and sometimes physically dangerous and so we are left with a severe inequality in our accounts of the past an inequality of memory and an inequality of rendering the path the human rights of the past and i think there are risks to these silences and i think the reason why i'm drawing attention to them in part is because of the risks that i'm observing and what's happening is that a counter narrative is emerging which is saying that by not talking about these all these other crimes our understanding of the genocide is fundamentally wrong that is there has been an effort now to say the foundations of what we know are wrong and they are a form of power and we need to get rid of them and i think that is leading in its own way to a form of denialism so what are these other forms of violence across the 1990s i think there are kind of four major categories i won't go into them in detail in the interest of time but of course i can elaborate on them but the first category is what happened as the rwandan patriotic front this is the rebel army that was fighting what became the genocidal government and this rebel army between 1995 basically committed violence against hudu civilians as they fought the civil war between 1990 1994 as they fought the genocide in 1994 and then as they consolidated power inside of rwanda in 94 and 95 and i won't go through all of the different sources of evidence even though these crimes are not well documented there is evidence to suggest that tens of thousands if not more closer if not closer to a hundred a hundred thousand uh hudu civilians were killed during this period i would not call this genocide i would call it crimes against humanity the second major form of violence would be the violence that happened in the democratic republic of congo which don just referenced and by the way that was a great presentation and thank you and here in this period we had a sort of direct aftermath of the genocide in rwanda where you have in 1996 the rwandan army now led by the rpf that invades congo they they essentially try to direct the large numbers of hudu refugees back inside rwanda but a large number of hudu refugees fled westward and there they were pursued often in systematic ways by rwandan soldiers in collaboration with conglies and there were probably around again poorly documented but around 200 000 civilian deaths in this period not all of which were murders but probably the majority were okay this has been amply documented by the united nations in a so-called mapping exercise um and again there's no accountability for this the third major category of violence would be counterinsurgency that happened inside of rwanda in 1997 and 1998 essentially some of the former genocidal forces that had been in congo and were pushed back to rwand to start a new insurgency and that led to a counterinsurgency which sometimes on the part of the rpf led government in now rwanda which in this case led to hundreds maybe a thousand deaths and then lastly which i think has been the last category which has been more in the conversation lately because of what happened to paul recessa vagina is targeted assassinations inside of rwanda and general oppression since the mid 1990s okay so the main point here is that the uh is that the genocide that the who-to led state committed against the tutsi minority in 1994 was not the only episode of large-scale violence against civilians that took place in this period in this sort of struggle for power in the 1990s there is much to learn about these other episodes of violence the documentation remains sparse in part because of the absence of public trials and other forms of accountability and the research remains thin but rwandans know this they do not forget this if one meets someone who lost family members in this period they know all too well what happened and as outsiders in my view this is a complicated question but in outsiders i think we have a responsibility to speak and to speak responsibly and carefully about what many rwandans fear saying and speaking responsibly and carefully means not making sensationalist claims not making conspiratorial claims now throwing the baby out with the bathwater but using language that allows us to recognize the genocide and these other crimes that occurred a quick word on the question of justice okay in in this field and in the contemporary world i think it's an article of faith to have some type of accountability and justice after mass atrocity and if one approaches rwanda uniquely through the lens of genocide it's possible to reach the conclusion that the justice and reconciliation efforts have been remarkable we have not only the un international criminal tribunal for rwanda but we also have one of the greatest experiments in transitional justice the so-called gachacha processes where we had basically community courts across the country for about a decade we can i don't in the end of time i won't get into assessing each of them but um if we embrace this broader history of violence that i've just narrated then we have a very different assessment of these justice processes that is with that historical perspective in mind the justice processes in post-genocide rwanda look distinctly one-sided one could not talk about these other forms of violence inside rwanda and the rwandan state refused to cooperate with the international criminal tribunal once it began to investigate and therefore the tribunal dropped these other investigations okay the same is true for commemoration for museums for any type of recognition and accountability and commemoration of the past and if one then looks farther to the united nations to the united states to ngos to how rwanda is taught in the classroom again what you see is an abundance of recognition of justice and validation for the genocide crimes against the tutsis but public silence inside rwanda and in most writing and recognition outside of rwanda about the experiences of mass violence that other rwandans suffered in this same period and that disproportion that inequality of rendering the history of violence i think runs contrary to the ideals of transitional justice now perhaps it's not surprising that the rpf government which is led by and holds dear the interests of tutsi anglophone returned exiles would not take punitive actions against its own it's perhaps not surprising that after military victory the state would want to control the narrative and emphasize a kind of mannequin history where they are heroes and the others are deprived but as outsiders as scholars as human rights people genocide studies field we should recognize then that the justice and memorialization are in rwanda inherently political that is inherently political in the sense that these justice and memory efforts processes serve the interests of those in power and those in power exercise a strong hand in which stories get told and how those stories get told now i won't go in in the interest of time to how they're political but i'd be happy to come back to that in q and a so what are the risks here um the risks in my mind as i've said are that uh there's a form of denialism that is if people recognize this justice as political then they think that the history itself that's being told that's been that's our canon of what happened in rwanda inherently is political and we should reject it because they tie it to the government and its interests i think we can also see another risk which is that the victims of mass violence their victims their what their stories are not being recognized and lastly i think the exclusion of those of that history over time is likely to breed resentment and be an impediment to reconciliation in the country why many rwandans ask is only one form of suffering important to recognize now the broader point perhaps that i can pull out of this story has to do with answering the question of why this inequality of memory exists i've argued that politics is one reason but the disproportion is so profound and so successful that i think that there are other sources and here i think i'm going to try to get into the ideological question but in a different way and i think part of the answer to why this disproportion exists lies in the concept of genocide and we should think about the unintended effects of our foundational concept sitting on top a hierarchy of crimes and drawing immediate analogies to the to the holocaust the concept of genocide evokes a unique kind of horror it has a status as the crime of crimes as the ultimate crime and the power of the word demands that observers give genocide a particular kind of attention a special status where it sits alone and apart from other kinds of mass crimes and i agree with that i agree it's a particularly heinous crime one deserving of special attention but what i've also witnessed is that by highlighting genocide one can also blot out or render secondary and less worthy of sustained attention and justice other forms of mass violence against civilians it's as if one cannot say in a single breath there was a state-led genocide of tutsis and extensive rpf crimes against humanity against hutus in rwanda immediately to say that you are facing the charge of making equivalences of relativizing genocide even denying genocide insulting the memory of genocide victims and so forth and that i think speaks to the power and risks of focusing on genocide itself and i think that leaves us with a very polarized and polarizing history one that does not at a minimum serve rwanda well i think there are ways to think about alternatives and in the interest of time i would just say that i would encourage us to think about an alternative of the rwandan genocide and crimes against humanity that is we need to find something in our label that allows us to speak to and recognize these other forms of mass violence in conclusion in the interest of time what are some implications and i've already sketched them one is i think we need better documentation and recognition of these other crimes it that matters i think for getting rwanda right for recognizing the victimization of those who suffered and for helping to build a future with mutual recognition of of past suffering the second is to as i've just articulated to for us to think critically about the unintended consequences of fixing the term genocide to a period of history this is a powerful label but the downside is that such a term can come to define a period of history it can come to not allow us to think about other things that were happening around the same time and i think similarly i think it's important for us to recognize how ripe for instrumental manipulation this powerful term is that using the concept of genocide is an effective tool in other people's hands in a state's hands in the case of rwanda or in other cases in in the hands of victim groups or whatever it's a it's a term that is inherently uh open to political manipulation and lastly i think the silences around the non-genocide crimes has opened a sensationalist and conspiratorial field that reinforces denialism that those who wish to draw attention to these non-genocide crimes use language that suggests that what we know about the past today and what has been documented about the past is fundamentally wrong and inherently politicized and this i think is quite dangerous for the history of rwanda and part of what motivates me to speak on this topic today thank you for your time Dr. Strauss thank you very much that concludes the presentations by all five panelists now we turn to the q and a session we have until three o'clock by my clock that's about 50 minutes from now again please start typing your questions into the chat you will not be able to speak on the camera we have three outstanding volunteers assisting me with the q and a and they're going to take turns reading the questions from the chat okay uh andrea cameron is the first volunteer do we have a question ready to go yes we do first i'd like to congratulate and and all the speakers today this has been an exceptional event and i just really want to encourage you to keep studying this and sharing your expertise thank you so much thank you for question camera it was addressed to don but perhaps azim or the other speakers would like to address this as well what do you think is responsible for the internet uh inability of the international community to bring the rohingya crime violence to a stop well since my name's on it i'll take the first stab and and give uh moona sir and i have a chance to grab a cup of tea and get ready um so if we take a look at capability will and intent for perpetrators we can use the same acronym for intervenors except it would be capability will and interest okay so when you look at who has the actual capability to intervene in a genocide mass atrocities crimes against humanity event all right that that's a really really short list of countries okay um it really comes down to maybe maybe six or seven countries so first of all you narrow it down to what countries those are then you have to do the very um painful candid assessment of watching the sausage get made okay and that's you know as lord palmerston famously said you know we have neither eternal friends nor eternal enemies we have only eternal interest in our duty it is to follow them wherever they may lead us so if we take the palmerston approach and and people are looking at that now you just go okay or is uh one of my teenagers put it what's in it for me okay so what's in it for me for one of those few countries that has the capability to intervene and then finally once they do intervene who's got the will to see it through so part of the reason that sierra leone seemed to work is that when then brigadier richards uh led that force and he insisted on two things first of all he insisted on briefing the prime minister at number 10 downing street and then being given a blank check second thing is he insisted on the ambassador going with him and him going with the ambassador wherever they went while they were in sierra leone and so he put together that that political will and that political capability with his application of military force in a very dynamic operational environment so if we take that as a okay this is what i need then when you take a look at the rohingya and as i was reading the question over here in the q&a part the first thing that came to mind i was reading the question listening to scott and i thought you know in a lot of ways this is like congo and rwanda all over again because you've got lots of forces and lots of different drivers moving people back and cross vast distances and borders um so i i think if you want to say who's responsible for the inability i would say human nature and great power competition and then just the pure brutal harsh factor of logistics you've got to get ships and all their support and you've got and then you know not to put too fine a point on it you've got to get some hard men who are willing to do hard things to make the killing stop so it's a very good question it's a very tough problem to solve um i've done interventions personally in a couple of different places and it's it's a lot harder than you might think it is i mean with that azim or mudasir i'll turn it over to you too yeah i think i'm dawn you had to write the name right on the head i don't think i have much to add to that you know there was simply the reason why there was no intervention from the international community or simply because it was a nobody's interest to intervene i'm uh no no no great power no authority is going to get involved and put their own troops into harm's way and an issue which they really don't understand policy makers that i spoke to during the you know when this crisis was going on that the genocide was occurring and the argument they put forward was that we'll look me and mar is a very fragile democracy and it's just come out of military dictatorship after many decades and the last thing we really want to do is upset that trajectory that money that it's on so and this was obviously a flawed argument you know the military was using even at that time unsung so key as a lightning rod to cover their atrocity crimes they actually had been preparing for this for quite some time and they you know they did a test run of this or the 2017 genocide in 2016 in august 2016 when the military ascertained that they could actually get away with this you know they expelled a couple of hundred thousand the going jar at that time burnt a few dozen villages and uh despite that despite the overwhelming evidence of mass graves and genocide and satellite imagery of the villages being burnt down uh you know the military chief general min angling was still given a vip invitation to europe austria and germany literally rolled out their red carpet from him and he visited the armaments factories to re resupply his military so they kind of ascertained very quickly that we could take this up a couple of notches and engage in a full scale genocide and there'll be very little repercussions and as dawn mentioned as well there's obviously great power politics involved as well me and mar was one of the most suspicious and closed off countries for many years for decades and the last thing that the united states actually wanted and was it to fall in the sphere of influence of china so they you know they didn't want to upset me and mark to that then president obama visited me on modern two occasions and he was very keen to build a relationship with the new civilian leadership to try to keep it outside china's its feet of influence so there's you know great power politics as well involved uh anyone else dr kiernan yeah i would just add to that um that i think there was china's interest it was in china's perceived interest to prevent any intervention so there was not just a lack of interest on the part of the western world but there was a determination on the part of china's leadership that it would not have tolerated any kind of intervention like that and there were further connections i think between the chinese or particularly between the cambodian and the Myanmar case while paul pot was in power and they win the burmese dictator visited in the end of 1977 at the height of the genocide in cambodia and the persecution of the cambodian muslims may win returned to rangoon and in early 1978 started the process that led to the first major expulsion and major refugee flow of Rohingya muslims from from Burma as it then was there's a connection i think in both of these countries were were very much under china's wing at the time and i believe that there was more to it uh than that but we'll we'll never know whether neywin actually spoke to paul pot about it but he did meet with new and cheer and kiusan pahn in uh i think november 1977 and uh it's it's uh extremely interesting that his uh crackdown on the Rohingyas began within a couple of months of his return from cambodia and i wouldn't be surprised if there was a china connection to all of that as well thank you anyone else want to chime in on that okay uh i don't see any hands so moving on to the next question i believe we have professor linda spec who's going to read for us uh thank you um my question or the question is given what we know from the past and what we observe in terms of trends today in india hungary poland and maybe even the united states what is the best institution to counter nationalist ideologies that can present a danger of turning into potentially genocidal ideologies is it the press is it the courts and what kind of institutions do we need to promote in countries as safeguards the author of this question said clearly democracy is not enough dr themy go ahead well i'll i'll take the central european part of the question since um i've spent a significant part of my life there and that's where i i did my first graduate work um i think the first thing you have to do is do you have to put these things in context okay so prior to 1939 poland was an incredibly multicultural country once Stalin was done moving the borders and expelling people uh by 1951 okay poland found itself as a very homogeneous place and of course they were you know under occupation uh up until 1989 so poland is dealing with the effects of that history in the the occupation by the soviet union the fact that they exist now as they have never existed before and and what does that mean okay at the same time hungary most people forget hungary was the front line for hundreds of years between christian europe and muslim autumns there's some very deep deep memories that go with that and budapest used to be actually two cities buda on one side of the river and pesh on the other um and so i i would say to the question i would say democracy actually is i think it is enough it is the last best hope um as churchell once said you know other than all the other systems that have been tried it's the best one we've got um so i think that the way you you do this is a you have to give us some time i think you have to engage uh and at the same time you know one of the the more powerful tools i've seen over the the last quarter century is track two diplomacy okay um very very smart capable people from a wide diversity of backgrounds and professions engaging with their counterparts across a broad range of topics and you know sustained engagement um and just because you try to understand something doesn't mean you can don't it you know but you have to look to work with it um and at the same time you know i mean it is the world series right now okay so depending on where you're from you're either really really happy or really really unhappy in the united states or if you're a pizza fan depending on where you're from pan pizza is best then pan pizza is best okay democracy is sort of like baseball and pizza everybody has their own style and everybody's convinced that theirs is the best and everybody who's ever been one of the away visitors to a stadium in another city or if you're a proper football fan from europe you know if you've been i don't know manchester united was in paris um you get a chance to see that the way you're perceived when you're there is very different it doesn't make it right or wrong it makes it different um so i'm you know you can see on the wall behind me i'm not exactly known for you know coming from a soft and tolerant background um but i'm actually pretty tolerant of of letting people find their own way while holding them to account so i i think democracy is the best answer um and these these things take time the people who are 45 years old today when they were five used to go stand in line at four o'clock in the morning when it was sub zero not knowing what would be in the store that day under martial law all right they see it differently than you do so i that would be my part of the answer i'll turn it over to anybody else to to deal with it as they want to i'd like to chime in i think it's very important to understand that democracy itself is still actually very experimental in 1941 we had 11 democracies in the world today we have over a hundred so most of these democracies that we see around the world are actually less than 70 years old and we have actually become quite complacent we actually believed for a long time that this is the current trajectory of the world that countries as they open up they become democratic and we've seen this obviously after the collapse of the soviet union when we believe that many of these countries were simply slip slip into these petty dictatorships but in fact many of them became quite flourishing democracies because their their ambition was to actually join the european union which had very strict criteria when in fact democracy has actually been under attack um uh and uh no now we have to revisit the question of what it actually means to be democratic and the case studies that we've discussed in today's seminar clearly shows that uh you know whether it's Hungary, Poland, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Modi, you know democracy strong men and it's just men are coming to power through the vehicles of democracy and then undermining those same vehicles it was the questioner asked about an institution that can be used to kind of counter this and the reality is there is no global institution that can actually do this we have seen even recently that the united nations you know many of their agencies are now just controlled by china they have done this so effectively they control four out of the 15 un agencies no country has ever controlled more than one this is a concerted effort to use debt book diplomacy of getting countries votes you know particularly countries in africa and asia to kind of force their vote in china's favor to take over these global institutions we've even seen the human rights commission in the united nations being countries like south arabia pakistan and cuba and china are sitting on the board the greatest human rights violations in the world so these institutions have completely failed to actually be standing bearers of these kinds of values what i think is needed is a new kind of thinking in the global stage and i certainly hope whoever takes over from the us administration looks into this is that what we need is more of an alliance of democracies countries that are like-minded to cooperate and coordinate their efforts particularly when it comes to technological development and you know we've been completely overtaken by chinese technology china investments over 70 billion dollars into huawei to make any global a global standing bearer so they can export they can have values and dominate the scene and we in the west have nothing of the equivalent to even compete against them so what we need is an alliance of democracies to cooperate on these issues to cooperate on these values the un and other institutions have simply failed we even seen this actually in the covid pandemic the world health organization just became a vehicle for chinese talking points and even the you know these questions around the even the chair of the world health organization how he managed to get his position in the first place it was because of chinese influence so democracy is under attack our values are under attack on multiple fronts and you know we do have to cooperate with our allies and with other like-minded democracy to protect those values and protect that to protect that system dr kamar go ahead yeah i think i'll echo the points with dr thiem and dr brahim has already mentioned uh about the strengthening of you know democracy and democratic institutions especially uh and as dr brahim was has highlighted the points with with regard to the indian you know experience of you know the situation in india uh i think it is very important that you know groups which are vulnerable that needs to be strengthened and the democratic institution needs to be strengthened both from within and from outside the second point which which again is it's more of an echo of what has already been said is holding countries or states or groups accountable for their activities or for their you know my mass violence and i'll give you give you again the example of china we have hardly seen any country holding china accountable for its treatment of ugus in the shinjiang region so it's you know one one can't really be you know selective in holding countries accountable and i think that is very important dr kiernan i'd just like to contribute from the point of view of southeast asia the rather optimistic example of indonesia which is in fact the world's largest muslim country and has in recent decades developed a very vibrant democracy on the other hand in the mainland of southeast asia we've seen a lot of backsliding away from democracy or not towards it particularly as in the case of mean ma but in thailand and in cambodia and elsewhere on mainland southeast asia there has been moves away from democracy and one of the problems i think has been uh the failure of the united states to push forward with the trans specific partnership for instance in terms of strengthening democratic institutions the trans specific partnership while excluding china would also have fostered and required freedom for trade unions in vietnam for instance to organize and operate freely but because of the united states refusal to endorse the trans specific partnership vietnam was not required to allow that freedom for trade unions to operate and a trans specific partnership that excluded china but could still operate under those conditions with freedoms for trade unions particularly and others other freedoms like that didn't get the backing of the united states and that opened up a huge opportunity for china to develop new forms of international alliances which have benefited it and have uh made china's position much more powerful which i think has been demonstrated across the mainland tier of states in southeast asia particularly in cambodia but also in thailand and mean ma and in vietnam as well but indonesia is still uh holding a beacon up to the rest southeast asia as the possibility still exists of strengthening democratic institutions thank you anyone else want to chime in on that one i could just say two quick things um so i think it's important to disaggregate the question of democratic backsliding the rise of autocracies and so forth from genocide i mean i think that that the conditions that give rise to genocide are much more complex than just simply the regime type or even having an ideology of exclusion does not in and of itself produce genocide so i guess it's the first point but in the second point which is also on the table which has to do with what are the conditions within international institutions or more broadly in global politics that would lead to some type of collective action to stop mass atrocity stop genocide and so forth um and i think it would not i don't think it's fair just to simply say that china is the problem i think that we see i think there are a number of different issues that that are in play here one of them has to do with with the the the sort of reversal after libya and the backlash that arose after that particular intervention and the damage that did to the atrocity prevention momentum that came out of the 90s and the 2000s i think you also have to acknowledge that at the on the world stage the united states has taken a much more inward trajectory and i think that's also true within europe and so i think that it's it's not certainly i'm not saying that i don't think china china is against intervention for sure on human rights issues but i don't think that's sense the sole problem thank you anyone else okay we'll move on with professor peter norris who's going to read the next question for us a question for anyone on the panel looking at today's conflict between armenia and azerbaijan what indications or warnings do you see that would give us reason to be concerned about behavior that trends toward genocide and if we do see such a trend how could another genocide be prevented in this region thank you anyone professor themy all right well um since i didn't see anybody else jump up and go crazy over answering this one um i i guess it brings to mind so i mean i was a young captain uh during rolanda and jirard prunier for whom i have a great deal of respect he and i spent um um some time arguing um in a few different fora about how easy or hard it would be to get to a place like rolanda um and then to set up shop there and operate and do the things you need to do uh i ran a tabletop exercise gosh 12 years ago now um with one of our military headquarters that looked specifically at this potential um and the first thing that became very very clear was time space distance makes a big deal okay and when time space distance is influenced by to get there you've basically either got to go over russia over turkey or over iran by air um or you've got to force a very narrow corridor open through georgia which means you have to get the turks in accordance with montreux to let a certain tonnage of shipping through i won't bore you with the rest of the details um but amateurs talk tactics and peacekeeping professionals talk logistics and campaign diplomacy um getting there is really really hard um and so i i do think that there are people who realize it's in their interest because you know the last thing we want is something like another georgia 2008 or another first second third shetchen awards um but if you don't have the capability to get there or you don't have the capability to get there with that extraordinary effort then this changes the other factors of will intent and interest um and this this region much like the border between well what is today slovak slovakia ukraine and poland this is one of the great unsettled questions of our side so we're still dealing with it 100 years later um i i think the other thing i alluded to this in my presentation is what is it that we think we know what is it that we need to know and what's the actual reality in contrary to minority report and other movies that you might watch from time to time there is not a persistent eye in the sky that can see and detect every face on every person walking down every street 24 hours a day okay it's actually much harder than that um so putting intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance and all these other things against that campaign objective is really really hard so to answer your question is i i think there are indicators there based on the open source reporting that i'm saying um i've done a couple of these before real time so i know that it's at best you know maybe 10 of what's going on um and how we actually get an organized response that could be timely enough to prevent mass atrocities or crimes against humanity or a genocide that's a really good question i don't know the answer to that and to go back to the scott's point and ben's point you know if you're going to try to do it through the un you know people on the p5 have got permanent vetoes um and that that can be really really hard to get by especially after libya um you know there are some countries that have extreme buyers remorse for for allowing that action to go forward thank you anyone else dr kiernan um i think this case without knowing very much about it uh in a area studies sense illustrates the point that scott made in his presentation which is the long-term denial of the armenian genocide on the part of the republic of turkey even though it wasn't the government that conducted the genocide um the long-term denial of the genocide has um i think inflamed armenian fears uh in particular armenian fears in the enclave of nogono karabakh within the country of azabai jan inflamed fears of another genocide just by the fact of the long-term denial by the turkish government and uh that may have i don't know but it may well i think of course an over active response on the part of armenians are perhaps an inflation of of their fears of what might happen to them given that they are legally under the suzerainty of sovereignty of the azabai jan government um it is a fact that the armenian army occupies not only part of the the ethnic enclave of nogono karabakh but a large area surrounding it that links it to the armenian sovereign territory uh and so this is a a problem that has been compounded by the long-term denial by the turkish republic of the genocide against armenians and uh i think it without getting into all the details of that the don has just uh informed us of about the difficulty of preventing it from getting worse i think we can see the armenian point of view about the danger of another genocide when the first one has not even been recognized or indeed has been flatly denied again and again and in fact the u.s congress has gone close to voting to recognize it several times but has pulled away largely because the united states seems to feel the turkey is such an important ally and that probably only makes armenians particularly those living in an enclave within azabai jan which is backed strongly by by turkey even more nervous and fearful so that only compounds the the problem of a danger of either another genocide or a continuing conflict so i think it backs up the point of view that scott has a prizes of of the the danger of not recognizing mass violence whether it's genocide or not uh and the way this can lead to further violence down the road thank you dr struss yeah just really quickly that that was a great point ben um two quick things i mean one is that this is not the first episode in in negrino carabac and i think it'd be important to think about what happened in the 1990s which had a resolution that was at least did not lead to genocide and i think their rusher played a really important part in in what happened and so i think trying to think about you know the second point is you know what are the risks of genocide here and do we really know i mean clearly there's a war clearly there's a very a very fearful population along the lines that ben just articulated but that doesn't necessarily mean that the dynamics are escalating towards genocide and so i i'd like to i'd like to have a better understanding before we jump to that conclusion thank you anyone else yes mudassir kumar in addition to what has already been said about the conflict i since i was following the developments of the current you know conflict in negrino carabac i think it has a lot to do with the the you know problems between rusher and turkey which has obviously historical you know manifestations but the current you know real politic trying to kind of have a greater influence in south Caucasus laxie very resource rich area it has a lot to do with that and turkish you know a disruptive kind of foreign policy or you can say adhan's disruptive foreign policy to try and maximize you know turkish interest i think it has a lot to do with that and i would agree with the dr sfrost but one cannot really be sure whether we are moving towards a genocide but obviously i think one needs to be more careful about these things thank you dr kumar anyone else all right we'll move on to the next question professor cameron this question is not directed at any particular panelist social media has become a powerful force in society can you talk about how the impacts of social media might affect future genocides so i can i can touch upon that the social media particularly facebook played an absolutely critical role in the rohingya genocide in fact most of the hate speech that was directed against the rohingya minority was perpetuated at facebook and most of it was obviously false and facebook has been called to account for this multiple times they were actually warned of this when the juwiles that was happening by the united nations fact-finding mission and others on the ground and facebook simply ignored it at the time the difficulty is that we have these social media companies which are now so powerful and so pervasive in society that nobody is willing to hold them to account and this is one of the real challenges that we have because not just not only in may anima but also in siri lanka and even in india you know the facebook in particular has been very poor much poorer than any other social media companies to actually moderate and monitor its platforms that have been used to spread fake news and are used to coordinate and you know undertake hate crimes of all sorts you know some of them even genocide in me and mars case and the us government has been actually behind the curve certainly behind the european union in trying to hold these social media companies to account and i know that when john kerry was secretary of state you know one of my friends who worked at the state department told me that you know when they're when they were visiting mark succerberg they had the equivalent protocol as if he's visiting a you know ahead of state that's the kind of esteem that they held him in simply because of the power that these companies exercise and so i think and i watched his testimony as well you know when he was when he was asked about this in the us senate and the house and it was just very poor you know in terms of his explanation his explanation was simply that well look if you censor or if you moderate our companies you know all of our traffic is simply going to china so senator do you want an american company leading this field or do you want a chinese company and obviously most of the senators said well look they might be down downsides to facebook but you know we certainly want an american company at the forefront of global social media but this is certainly a real problem that they've been very slow of the mark and in the dissemination of fake news and the dissemination of hate speech hate crimes coordination between various parties to perpetuate these kinds of these kinds of crimes dr kumar i think this is a very very important question and though i do not i'm not really a student of you know mass media i haven't really done any specific research on social media but you know from my experience of studying the spread of isis ideology and its you know recruitment pattern both in the other parts of the world and in south asia and specifically in india i think online radicalization has played a very important role and for example you know social media facebook another instagram for example or telegram for example not instagram telegram has been very you know often used by recruiters to you know recreate people to the isis on the other hand as as dr brahim was mentioning and this i'm talking more in terms of as a citizen of india for example the whatsapp forwards have played a very significant role in the spread of hatred you know against muslims in india and you know many many have actually requiring the term whatsapp university so many people the only source for them for information is whatsapp forwards which are most of their time fake so i think it is a very dangerous trend and more research needs to be done thank you anyone else okay professor linda specht has the next question so in crimes against humanity or even when you narrow it down to more specifically genocide does catching the perpetrator offer enough closure and and i'm going to add the word do enough to promote reconciliation if not what does good reconciliation look like and how can reconciliation efforts be used to prevent the kinds of history of grievance that dr strauss was talking about that feed into an environment that create create potential future genocides thank you who wants to take that i'm happy to start um it's a great question as many of these are and i guess my view on this has changed over time and so just to start where the question ended i think we should recognize how difficult reconciliation is and even in societies that have lived well beyond episodes of violence uh uh sometimes more than a century it's very difficult to come to terms with the past if you look at the united in germany in some ways is an outlier in terms of our models if you look at the united states and its inability to i think have a mature conversation about slavery or what happened to native populations or or what have you as just an indicator and so i think we should the reason i'm saying that is i think the transitional justice literature which focused on justice as a mechanism to promote reconciliation in my view kind of oversold the ability of either truth commissions or forms of you know public narrations of the past or what the specific question was which was on criminal accountability to bring populations together and i think we've seen in some cases that criminal accountability can also further polarize and the sense that the justice process is not even handed and so forth as my example from rwanda showed um so at the same time i do think accountability is really important i think it does send a message and i think it's very difficult to um not have it and because i think there is a sense of thirst for justice that remains so my view is that it's a kind of minimum not a maximum it's it's something that's an it's a you know criminal accountability for past mass human rights crimes is is really important but that number one we should recognize that that's not where the process ends and number two we should also be open to the ways in which it can be have negative effects in the kinds of ways i was talking about in my presentation thank you anyone else dr themy and then dr kirman i would i would just very quickly add to exactly what scott just said um i actually had my family sit down and watch the recent movie on on eichman you know and it led to a pretty vibrant discussion about you know is it legal to illegally kidnap somebody from another sovereign nation and bring them back to jerusalem um where as hard as you try it's going to sort of be hard and jerusalem less than 20 years after the end of world war two to get a truly non-biased jury trial but it's really really important for the families um and for the children and for the grandchildren so i i can tell you and listening to some friends of mine who were truly world-class scholars in this entire field um there there are generations of damage um because there is no closure and it is really hard to get past so i i think scott is is absolutely bang on that you can seek a minimum but it's like an expanding black hole there there is no maximum it's never completely over all right um and you know for those of us that grew up in the american south um you know 1865 evidently was just a few months ago so i mean these these things they take time but the only way out is to have as many discussions as absolutely possible about all of them and i i think that whether you call it a truth and reconciliation commission you you know you you've got the different processes that took place in south africa um you've had many many different processes take place in germany um germany is in some ways an outlier but if you're to stomp tish late enough at night it's not as much an outlier as you might think it is um you know so there are good trends there but as i said at the very beginning humans are humans okay and there's a depth of the human soul and memory um it's not like taking your car to the mechanic and getting fixed i can just add a few points about accountability and reconciliation in cambodia of course reconciliation and many different things in different societies and a buddhist society like cambodia there is a lot of emphasis on forgiveness and so um a number of buddhist leaders and uh the cambodian king noradam sianu for a time at least emphasized forgiveness at one point the cambodian prime minister once he had obtained the surrender of the Khmer Rouge leaders even said we're going to dig a hole and bury the past for which he was uh rightly criticized but uh he did end up uh putting those two Khmer Rouge leaders nuanchir and kusumpon on trial there uh they were convicted of crimes against humanity and and genocide and nuanchir in fact died in jail last year kusumpon is still serving a life sentence for those two crimes polpot himself died in his sleep in 1998 so it was never brought to justice and on the other hand perhaps tens of thousands i would say perhaps 40 000 other rank and file Khmer Rouge officials and military officers captured in the civil war after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime did serve time they were not put on trial in a fair trial they were captured put in re-education camps or jails mostly camps and served time varying from months to years one case seven years i know of the uh large number of these people have now long been released and they're back in their villages living side by side sometimes with some of their victims so there's an element of injustice about that but of course they've been punished already and can't be retried or punished again for the same crime although their first trial can't be considered to have been a fair one if there was a trial at all so there are difficult issues involved in punishing all the perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge period but the very big top leaders apart from polpot himself have been brought to justice some of them died during their trial or in the case of mock the military commander died while awaiting trial in jail one deputy military commander surrendered and defected to the government and was never jailed but nearly all the others who surrendered did end up serving time in jail or being put on trial but there are others who have been charged second rank but criminal offenders who committed major crimes who have not been brought to justice and the Hun Sen government appears to be allowing them to avoid trial but they were if you're like the deputy commanders of the genocide three at least of those who the UN prosecutors wanted to put on trial but have not been able to get it past the Cambodian co-prosecutors who are under the control of the Cambodian government so it looks like the top ranking people have been brought to justice if they're alive in in everyone but polpot and one other the second rank not but large numbers tens of thousands of others have served time in jail and and or re-education camps and there is a large society-wide sense of Buddhist reconciliation so it's a very mixed picture. Thank you. I think we have time just for one more question. Who's asking that? Is that okay? Professor Royce go ahead. A question addressed to Dr. Ibrahim but I believe several may have valuable input. You spoke of the warning signs displayed by Prime Minister Modi through Hindu nationalism and exclusionary policies. In your assessment what is Modi's next step given his high fever rate? Is there a viable opposition or moderating force against these potentially dangerous policies? Thanks so much for that Peter so very quickly I'm what's Modi's next step? I would imagine considering the economic situation and considering the situation of mismanagement of the COVID crisis that he will continue to try to exacerbate the situation with minority groups particularly the Muslims but also he's targeting other ones as well he's targeting the low-caste Dalits and Christians as well and so you continue to do that to try to distract from his record. He is enjoying quite high poll numbers at the moment but one of the things that we can certainly try to do is to try to hold him to account in terms of normalizing relationships with him. Earlier I mentioned about creating a global democratic alliance. Such an alliance you know even with my limited conversations with various policymakers has indicated that India would have to be a key component in that and this is once again just normalizing his undermining of democracy when he actually does that. In terms of opposition you know one of the reasons we're in this difficulty in India is because the Congress party itself it just became complacent for so long they got involved and written down the road of dynastic politics. Some people from the dynastic family were simply not fit for leadership roles but that's the mechanism that they chose and they just became complacent, they became corrupt. So I think one of the best solutions to this would be to actually for the Congress party itself to you know to figure out to re-empower themselves and figure out with new leadership in terms of how to take back the reins of power from the BJP party which at this moment doesn't seem likely but it seems to me that this is probably one of the only or the or the best way to actually do it but I think Dr. Mudassar could probably talk more upon that. Dr. Kumar do you want to comment? I don't think we really have a lot of time but I'll add the point that you know as far as the Congress party is concerned it really needs to go back to grassroots. It has really kind of kept itself so far away from the grassroots, from the local you know villages that it has completely distanced itself you know from the ground and that has led to a gradual decline. Obviously the dynastic politics has played a very significant role you know I mean when it comes to the political organization and when one goes to the villages and talks to the people on the ground India still is a very you know syncretic society and you know you will find people of different faiths if sometimes even different cards there are problems obviously but living in the same village you know in the same community so there is certainly hope but obviously there needs to be political organizations which can you know leverage these issues and counter the ideology which is currently in power very effectively that needs to be done. Thank you that's it folks so we are out of time sorry for going over a little bit. I want to sincerely thank the panelists our esteemed scholars for your presentations. I want to thank also the volunteers that helped me my fellow faculty colleagues Andrea Cameron, Linda Specht and Peter Norris for helping with the Q&A so thank you for that and I'm very appreciative to everyone who helped make this happen. It has been recorded I will send out links once I receive them for the recording and you will be welcome to share them with whomever you wish. Thank you all very much very very sincerely and hope to see you next year. Stay safe and thank you again have a wonderful day.