When an exiled South African journalist reluctantly explained the Holocaust to his seven-year-old son, the boy knew that no adult in Germany could have legitimately claimed “we did not know”.
That boy grew up to cover two back-to-back “official” genocides in the 1990s, in Bosnia and Rwanda. In the former Yugoslavia he saw Muslims hunted for sport in Sarajevo and whole streets curtained to hide civilian shoppers from Serb snipers.
In Rwanda, a million people were murdered in three months. A Nazi rate of annihilation – but all the killing was done by hand and the victims clogged rivers into human soup.
And now we’re all witnesses to a third round of attempted annihilations in Ukraine and in Gaza. None of these could be described as “hidden”.
The outside world intervened, far too late, in the former Yugoslavia to stop the ethnic cleansing after Srebrenica.
It did nothing in Rwanda a year before. And shied away from even using the term “genocide”, even though the UN had been warned that the total eradication of the Tutsis was being planned before it was unleashed on 7 April 1994.
Now Russia is facing sanctions and Vladimir Putin has been indicted for alleged war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Ukraine is getting backing from the West for its defence. Putin is paying a price for his aggression.
Israel, though, is still being armed by the US, and there’s no whiff of economic sanctions.
The pattern is that the West takes the mass killing of Christian white people more seriously than the eradication of other ethnic groups and Muslims.
The Allies knew of Hitler’s “final solution” by 1942, but did nothing to stop it.
We have to ask of history, and of ourselves now, whether the looking away when the innocent are being led to their deaths isn’t just a little bit easier if they’re “different”? Jews, Muslims, Black Africans and now Palestinians.
The 1951 UN General Assembly’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide requires states to punish and prevent genocides.
The international community has had a patchy record on punishing, and an appalling record on preventing, genocide or acts of genocide.
As we mark the 30-year anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 or more Muslim men and boys murdered in the genocide of Bosnians by ethnic Serbs in 1995, it’s clear that “never again” has been a slogan as empty as it is old.
The truth is that human beings find it very easy to kill each other – especially if that effort is state-sanctioned. And it’s even easier to kill – and aid the killers by looking away – if the victims are “different”.
The key to undoing the instinct that human beings have to massacre their rivals in industrial quantities lies in ending impunity. We have to stop ourselves getting away with it. We have to see all people as actually, truly, human.
To do that we have to end impunity. To end impunity we have to confront what we see before us.
Serb murderers were tried and convicted for their crimes by the International Criminal Court for Yugoslavia. The process allowed for a reckoning.
Serbia apologised for the Bosnia atrocities in 2010, and called for the arrest of their main author, Ratko Mladic.
Germany has a compound noun for what it did to acknowledge, repair, and reconcile with its own past: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. That process was started with the war crimes tribunals in Nuremberg.
Rwanda’s Tutsi survivors of the 1994 genocide brought a Truth and Reconciliation process through gacaca courts – mass tribunals where confessions were traded for reduced sentences among the ethnic Hutu genocidaires. There were also some prosecutions in the International Criminal Court for Rwanda.
But many of the worst offenders from 1994 fled into exile, where they faced no justice process for their crimes. Rather, they plotted to return and finish the job while spreading the ideology of murder wider, into what was then Zaire.
The ideology of murder-thy-neighbour-before-he-murders-you has extended for 30 years across the region and has, among other things, led to “operation clean the slate”, in which 40 per cent of ethnic pygmies were killed in central Africa in 2002-3. Pygmies, or, more accurately, Batwa, are different – they’re small.
Seeing only differences allows for attempts to wipe people out, erase their cultures, or drive them from their homelands, to continue around the world.
The Soviets banned Ukraine’s language, snuffed out its poets and artists and rewrote its history. Some 3-5 million people were killed in Moscow’s deliberate famine of 1932-3, the Holodomor. Now, Russia is back. Putin again insists there’s no such thing as Ukraine.
The Russian president enjoys impunity at home. Abroad he has been indicted by the ICC for war crimes.
But he is unlikely ever to be arrested. Donald Trump, after all, sees him as a friend and has issued sanctions against the very body, the ICC, that hopes to prosecute him.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu has just been at the White House for his third visit this year. Like Putin, he is under ICC indictment for alleged war crimes.
His government includes extremists who proselytise with demands that Gaza’s population be encouraged to leave the enclave “voluntarily”. The population of 2.2 million people will have little choice but to leave when the shooting stops because there is nowhere left to live in Gaza. It has been pancaked by Israel’s bombs.
More than half of the 57,000 people that the local authorities say have been killed by Israel are women and children. The UN freely uses the term “genocide” when referring to Israel’s conduct towards its neighbours.
Baroness Helena Kennedy, KC, one of the UK’s leading human rights lawyers, has made it clear what she believes Israel is doing in Gaza.
“I have been moved to the position to where I now believe that we are witnessing a genocide taking place before our eyes ... I was very reluctant to go there because the threshold has to be very high, there has to be specific intent for genocide, but what we are now seeing is genocidal behaviour,” she told the BBC.
In turn, Hamas, which rules what’s left of Gaza, has a foundational document which calls for the eradication of Israel as a political entity. Hamas is widely considered a terrorist organisation and led the murder of nearly 1,200 people in Israel and the kidnapping of another 250 on 7 October 2023.
Hamas doesn’t act with impunity. It is being attacked by Israel. Its surviving leaders should, one day, be rounded up and prosecuted for their massacres of 7 October.
Meanwhile, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, said recently: “The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is apocalyptic. Israel is responsible for one of the cruellest genocides in modern history”.
Mass killings are rare in societies that respect the humanity of their rivals. In Rwanda, Tutsis were called “cockroaches” by their own government. Antisemitic slurs have been used to galvanise millennia of pogroms against Jews.
Meanwhile, the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has “othered” Palestinians with the same tone used by the Soviets towards Ukraine.
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language,” he has said.
Heidi Kingstone, author of the book Genocide: Personal Stories Big Questions, said: “Perpetrators can persuade everyone that victims are not human and should be destroyed.
“Once you begin to other people, dehumanise them and justify the actions, isolate them, catalogue them, round them up and finally exterminate them. Look at what's going on in Palestine and Israel now. It’s happening. And the same from the other side – not all Jews support what’s going, not all Israelis either.”
On the day we remember the massacre of Muslims in Bosnia we cannot say “we did not know” what is happening in Gaza. Those are not insects crawling through the rubble.
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