Cold War Decolonization and Postcolonial Genocide

6
| Cold War, decolonization and

post-colonial genocide
In this chapter I explore transformations of the international system

during the Cold War period and their implications for genocide. The
transition in genocide in the 1940s reflected significant changes in
the international system itself. One was the United Nations, conceived
by the victorious powers as a more ambitious replacement for the
defunct League of Nations, and the raft of global economic institutions
developed by the USA and Western states after 1945. There had been a
secular growth of international institutions during the inter-imperial
era (Murphy 1994), but the post-1945 world saw their qualitative
expansion, despite Cold War rivalries. Neither bloc could dispense
with them and soon they provided fora for the many new independent
states. Nevertheless, there were tensions from the very beginnings of
the UN in the wartime alliance, as the incipient superpowers combined
ambitions for a new international order with preparations for rivalry.
Relations both among major imperial powers and between them, other
states and societies were drastically changed in what came to be seen as
a Cold War international system. These changes and the processes of
change had profound consequences for the pattern of genocide.
The changing international system: the Cold War and genocide

The ‘world’ wars that had produced extensive genocide represented
two quickly succeeding crises of the inter-imperial system, which rad-
ically changed its composition and dynamics. The First World War led
to the end of the old East European empires and the emergence of
smaller nation-states in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe. The
Second led directly to the end of the German, Japanese and Italian
empires and indirectly to the end of the British, French and other
European empires, which except for the Portuguese were dismantled
by the mid 1960s. Thus the first war left a large number of rival
empires – Britain, France, the USA, Japan, Germany (although it lost
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The changing international system: the Cold War and genocide 99
its colonies) and the USSR (which quickly restored much of the Tsarist
empire) – intact as autonomous centres of military-political power. The
second war, in contrast, subordinated not only the defeated German
and Japanese but also the ‘victorious’ but indebted British and French
militarily and economically to the USA. The latter became the centre of
a gigantic Western political, military and economic bloc, while the
USSR established its own (repressively quasi-imperial) bloc among its
‘satellites’ in Eastern Europe.
The post-1945 changes represented, therefore, a more radical trans-
formation of the international system than the post-1918 changes.
Inter-imperial military competition was largely transformed into
inter-bloc competition. Nation-states mostly lost the ‘territorial mon-
opoly of violence’ that Max Weber classically described. The control
of violence, the core of sovereignty, was increasingly exercised at the
bloc level. The reconstituted West German and Japanese states were
militarily neutered and, like most of the smaller Western European
states and Canada, thoroughly subordinated to the USA. Even Britain
and France, which maintained great-power ambitions, lost much of
their military sovereignty: the limits were dramatically demonstrated in
the Suez debacle of 1956. Within the Western bloc, nation-states
retained a reduced, domestic sovereignty, with administrative control
over their territory and borders, enhanced through new economic
powers. In the Soviet bloc, the USSR was the only major power after
the ending in the late 1950s of the short-lived alliance with Maoist
China; the smaller states’ domestic sovereignty even in the economic
sphere was weak.
Bloc competition centred on the military-political rivalry of the two
‘superpowers’. At a world level, this ‘bipolar’ system can be seen as the
rivalry of two ‘ultra-imperialisms’ (in the terminology prophetically
coined by Karl Kautsky in 1895: Salvatori 1979), with China as
a lesser third contender. This transformation of interstate power rela-
tions was more radical than the surface bipolarity suggested. Although
the USSR managed to compete militarily with the West, economically
and politically it was far weaker; China was much weaker still.
In reality, the West dominated the world economy and politics:
its regional alliances with non-Western states were stronger than
Soviet alliances, and its core political model (democracy) possessed
more cohesion and legitimacy. Although Western supremacy was
offset by the appeal of Soviet ‘socialism’ in the post-colonial Third

100 Cold War, decolonization and post-colonial genocide
World, the collapse of the Soviet empire and the USSR in 1989–91
dramatically exposed their underlying weaknesses, allowing the West
to triumph.
The outcome of the Second World War represented, therefore, a
more definitive resolution of the crisis of the inter-imperial inter-
national system than that of the First. It also involved, as we have
seen, a more or less definitive resolution of the empire–territory–
population issues in east-central Europe that had produced genocide
over the previous three-quarters of a century. The USSR’s successful
expansion stabilized this situation in the coming decades, and its
control over the ‘satellites’ ensured that no Eastern European state
could revive its own population agenda in the new order. In
Yugoslavia, the independently victorious Josip Broz Tito imposed his
own territory–population solution in the federal structure of the new
Communist state. The West accepted these outcomes, and in the ensu-
ing Cold War, the balance of nuclear terror underwrote the stability of
the settlement. There is no small irony in the fact that further genocide
was partly prevented by the threat of unprecedented mass killing.
In European terms the four decades from the late 1940s to the late
1980s are easily seen, therefore, as a period of Cold War military,
political and ideological competition, suppressing historic rivalries and
potentially genocidal fractures. However, the Western and Soviet blocs
pursued their rivalries through alliances and interventions in political
and armed conflicts across the world. Odd Arne Westad (2005: 5)
therefore sees North–South power relations in the Cold War period in
terms of the competition of Western and Soviet neo-imperialism and
neo-colonialism, the ‘continuation of European colonial interventions
and of European attempts at controlling Third World peoples’. Indeed
Westad (2005: 396) claims that ‘the most important aspects of the
Cold War were neither military nor strategic, nor Europe-centred, but
connected to political and social development in the Third World . . . In
a historical sense . . . the Cold War was a continuation of colonialism
through slightly different means.’ Yet if in one sense this period can be
seen as part of ‘the longue durée of attempted European domination’,
it can also be seen – as the very ideas of the ‘Third World’ and
‘global South’ suggest – as the period in which the colonized regions
began to regain strong, independent roles in world history. Many post-
colonial states had substantial autonomy, and some saw considerable
economic development, whether industrial (recognized in the idea of

The changing international system: the Cold War and genocide 101
the ‘newly industrializing countries’) or commodity-based (especially

the oil-producing states). The period was one in which some of the
great non-Western economic powers of the twenty-first century
(including what are now called the BRICS countries, after Brazil,
Russia, India, China and South Africa) first became significant forces.
Thus although the Cold War certainly had huge effects outside
Europe, it is fundamentally insufficient to understand the international
system in this era on a world scale in these bipolar, inter-bloc terms.
Outside Europe, major new centres of state power were forming,
offsetting the two-way concentration of power in the Cold War, and
(as we can see from the perspective of the twenty-first century) laying
the foundations for a later transformation. The decline of West
European empires led to a great proliferation of independent states,
which was to more than triple the UN’s membership during this
period. Many of these new states were small and weak, rather like
the principalities of the Westphalian era, and remained dependent on
great powers: either one of the superpowers and/or former colonial
powers such as Britain and France. Others, however, such as Com-
munist China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria, were large,
populous, multi-ethnic countries – in some cases inheritors of historic
empires from the period before European world domination as well as
of the European empires. In these massive states, central elites
mobilized substantial power and often ruled in a quasi-imperial
manner themselves, suppressing peripheral nationalities and ethnicities
as well as subordinating masses of poor peasants and labourers.
Many medium-sized and even small new ‘nation-states’ were likewise
quasi-imperial entities, in which elites based their power on one popu-
lation group to the detriment of others. Even in less developed regions
such as sub-Saharan Africa, most post-colonial state and military
elites had enough autonomous power to enrich themselves, suppress
minorities and coerce populations, even if they remained dependent on
Northern states.
Therefore we should recognize that the international system in the
Cold War period simultaneously saw great concentration of state
power in the two ultra-imperial blocs (especially the West) and its
systematic diffusion among a hundred new, post-colonial but often
also quasi-imperial states and their elites. Moreover the nationalisms
that developed in the multi-ethnic societies of the non-Western world,
like those of Europe, would often have exclusive tendencies, which in

crises would frequently reproduce genocide. In what follows, I outline

the Cold War, decolonizing and post-colonial parameters of genocide
in the second half of the twentieth century.
The Asian Cold War, Maoism and genocide

Of the four transitional genocides of 1945–9 (Chapter 5), only one led
more or less directly into an escalating series of genocidal processes in
the Cold War era. In Europe, it would be almost forty years before
genocide reappeared in the Soviet and Yugoslav break-ups. In South
Asia after 1948, violent Indo-Pakistani conflict was mainly confined to
Kashmir; it would be over twenty years before the next great genocidal
crisis in Bengal, although the Indian state also violently repressed the
Naga people in the north-east of the country from the early 1960s. In
the Middle East, Israel would not be challenged again for two decades:
its remaining Arab minority settled into an uneasy existence within
the Jewish state while other Palestinians remained in exile. All these
episodes of the late 1940s would reverberate in international politics
even beyond the Cold War, but they did not lead immediately to new
cycles of genocide. In East Asia, in contrast, from the late 1940s there
were three decades in which genocide was repeatedly committed, in
the context of international conflict, war and radical Maoist projects.
The idea of the Cold War international system as Eurocentric and
bipolar is belied by the significance of East Asia as a crucial theatre
and of China as a third pole of conflict in the system. Although Europe
was seen as the central theatre of the Cold War, it was East Asia where
‘hot’ war first erupted, often with a genocidal edge, and which was
the main region of genocide in this whole historical period.
China in the middle of the twentieth century was a poor peasant
country, which had been subordinated (but not generally colonized) by
European empires since the mid nineteenth century, had long lacked a
strong central state, and had been racked by decades of civil war and
occupation. It was not in a position fully to rival the superpowers, but
Mao Zedong’s Communists, who had fought a long and often mur-
derous campaign to seize and recentralize state power, were deter-
mined to raise China up and reassert its role in the world. This led
rapidly to new conflicts not only with the USA (which had resisted their
rise) but also with the USSR (their erstwhile ally). The international
priorities of the new Communist state were to restore the territorial

The Asian Cold War, Maoism and genocide 103
scope of Chinese imperial authority, by incorporating the island of

Taiwan and other offshore islands that remained under GMD rule,
together with Tibet, then de facto independent but regarded as part of
China (by the GMD as well as by the Communists). Mao moved to
assert partial control over Tibet in 1950, beginning a process that
would eventually destroy much of traditional Tibetan society.
However it was the support of China, together with the USSR, for
the Communists in Korea that led to its involvement in major war in
the same year, and here genocidal violence was initiated by right-wing
Korean nationalists. After liberation from Japanese rule, Korea had
seen civil conflict between Communists led by Kim Il-Sung who
had resisted the Japanese (in China as well as in Korea itself) and the
right wing, many of whom had collaborated. The country was arbi-
trarily divided by the USA and USSR in 1945, leaving the North under
the control of the Communists and the South under US military occu-
pation, under which a right-wing Korean regime led by Syngman Rhee
was installed. Each regime suppressed its opponents, but after the
North invaded the South in 1950, Southern forces massacred thou-
sands of leftists and burnt hundreds of villages on Cheju island off
South Korea.
US forces – who were able to operate under the banner of the UN
because the USSR had boycotted the Security Council when Korea was
discussed – succeeded through a highly destructive campaign in expel-
ling Northern forces from the South. Most Korean cities were com-
pletely levelled and around 2 million civilians died, mostly from
extremely degenerate warfare in which civilian casualties were normal-
ized. The war was driven on both sides by the aim of destroying the
political enemy, including at times the sections of the population
deemed to support it. Populations were frequently moved because they
were seen as actual or potential supporters of the enemy, and violence
frequently escalated to genocidal massacres of civilians. Both South
and North Korean forces (and in the South, police and right-wing
political groups) were responsible for mass killings at various stages
of the conflict, and the USA was not only complicit in many Southern
massacres but committed its own atrocities, notoriously when soldiers
killed refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950. The Korean Truth and Recon-
ciliation Commission, which investigated massacres on all sides, esti-
mated that Communist forces were responsible for only one in six of
massacre victims (Cumings 2011). In this, the biggest war directly

involving major Cold War adversaries during four decades of inter-

bloc conflict, the Soviets and Chinese both supported the North, but it
was not long before the two Communist powers fell out. By the late
1950s, tensions dating from the earliest days of the Chinese movement
in the 1920s led to a decisive breach, so that China now faced hostility
from both superpowers.
These international conflicts in which Mao’s regime was involved
helped sharpen the sense of crisis inside the Chinese party and state,
stimulating genocidal policies. Just as Stalin had imposed forced col-
lectivization and industrialization when he felt the USSR threatened by
a resurgent Germany, so Mao launched his Great Leap Forward in
1958, seeking rapid industrialization through the fantastical means of
forced collectivization and backyard industries in rural communes.
The resulting famine between 1959 and 1962 was probably the largest
episode of policy-driven mass death in world history. Although esti-
mated death tolls range upwards from 16 million (Wemheuer 2010),
Dikötter (2011) presents a strong case for 45 million. While Mao did
not initially intend to cause mass starvation, his policies were designed
to destroy peasants’ autonomy and subordinate them to the state,
squeezing their labour for breakneck development. The intentional
elements of the famine were the regime’s prevention of access to grain
supplies for starving populations, subordinating consumption to
exports, violent suppression of resistance, and refusal to change direc-
tion even after millions had died. The famine clearly demonstrated the
genocidal mentality ingrained in Maoism, in which huge numbers of
peasants were considered physically dispensable and catastrophic
mass death an acceptable price to pay for policy goals. It also showed
how this was institutionalized in the Communist Party, preventing
challenges to Mao: those who criticized, even afterwards, were
removed from power or physically liquidated. The extent of this
man-made disaster was concealed from the world. Partly this was
because food shortages in the cities were not allowed to become as
bad as those in the countryside, where even cannibalism became wide-
spread. But it was also because China was a highly closed society, from
which only foreign Communist propagandists were allowed to report.
(Becker 1998, Dikötter 2011)
Just as the Stalinist terror-famine hit hardest in the Ukraine, where
the regime perceived nationalism as an enemy, so the effects of the
Great Leap Forward were particularly severe and combined with

The Asian Cold War, Maoism and genocide 105
national repression in Tibet. Here land reforms had already provoked

rebellions, leading in 1959 to a major uprising and an extensive
military crackdown, massacres and the widespread suppression of
Buddhist monasteries, which struck at the core of Tibetan culture.
Mao’s famine deepened this destruction of traditional Tibetan society.
Within China proper, although the Great Leap Forward was aban-
doned after 1961, this terrible crisis created instability in the party that
appeared to threaten Mao’s control later in the decade. In response he
launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, attacking
‘bourgeois’ and ‘revisionist’ elements in the party and state machines,
and mobilizing youth in the Red Guards to physically attack these
enemies. The Cultural Revolution was directed not only at party
leaders but also at whole sections of the educated, urban middle classes
in Chinese society, whose social milieux were destroyed through dis-
missal, dispersal to labour camps in remote rural areas, indoctrination,
intimidation and killing. Although this attack on urban society did not
repeat the mammoth death toll of the Great Leap Forward, it was
another great phase of violence in China, in which over a million
probably died.
The Cultural Revolution ended definitively only with the arrest of
Mao’s allies the Gang of Four and his own death, both in 1976, but by
the early 1970s he had begun to seek an end to China’s international
isolation. In 1972 US President Richard Nixon famously visited China,
a visit which led to a partial rapprochement that for both sides
balanced their competition with the USSR. In 1979, tensions with the
latter led to a Sino-Soviet border war and China briefly invaded
the USSR’s ally, Vietnam – the nadir of international relations within
the Communist world. Inside China, however, Deng Xiaoping
attempted the kind of bureaucratic normalization achieved in the
Soviet Union after Stalin’s death. From the 1980s he opened the
Chinese economy to capitalism and world markets, leading to unpre-
cedented development in subsequent decades. The Chinese regime
remained brutally repressive, but Deng’s reforms marked the end of
the long period in which it regularly produced genocidal violence.
Internationally, Maoism remained implicated in its allies’ genocide.
China represented from the 1960s not just a third international pole
but an alternative model of Communism, which was divided world-
wide between pro-Soviet and Maoist movements. Since Vietnam was a
Soviet ally, the Cambodian Communists (Khmer Rouge) under Pol

Pot, in rivalry with the Vietnamese, aligned to China. Under the impact
of a destructive US bombing campaign against Cambodia, the Khmer
Rouge underwent an extreme radicalization and, after seizing power in
1975, embarked on a genocidal restructuring of society. In a policy
even more radical than Mao’s Cultural Revolution, they emptied
the cities, attacked Buddhism and traditional rural society, and turned
the country into a giant labour camp, in a multi-targeted destructive
process involving extensive killing and torture. Ethnic minorities, espe-
cially the Vietnamese who were linked to the international enemy, were
disproportionally targeted (Kiernan 1996). The Khmer Rouge was
overthrown and genocide was ended by Vietnam’s invasion in 1979;
however, for Cold War reasons the USA and Britain as well as China
continued to support the Khmer Rouge’s retention of Cambodia’s UN
seat in the 1980s.
Genocide in wars of decolonization

If the overarching structure of the international system after 1945 was
the Cold War rivalry of Northern powers, the underlying process was
the decline in European empires and their replacement across large
parts of the South by independent nation-states, of which Mao’s
assertion of Chinese power was also an example. Genocide was a
recurring feature of the world-historical process of decolonization, in
many places part of armed conflicts between European empires and
independence movements. Where open warfare broke out, insurgents
often attacked colonists and sections of the indigenous population
loyal to the colonial power, while imperial counter-insurgency targeted
sections of the population believed to support insurgents. In these
conflicts, the line between degenerate war – in which civilians were
attacked as a means of defeating the armed enemy – and genocide – in
which they were attacked as an enemy in themselves – was often
unclear. The truth about ‘national liberation’ wars is therefore that,
despite the myth of liberating anti-colonial violence (Fanon 2004), they
were often experiences of oppression and destruction for many indi-
genous people as well as colonists. Despite the inclusive ideas of
nationality of some nationalists, one group’s liberation often meant a
new form of subordination or even destruction for others.
The fundamental reason for this was the same as it had been in
eastern Europe: society within any given set of state boundaries was

Genocide in wars of decolonization 107
almost always complex and plural, so that nationalists could only

create homogeneous nations by attacking and removing groups whose
presence did not fit their projects. European empires had generally
practised ‘divide and rule’, setting up or accentuating conflictual
political understandings of social and cultural differences. These were
deepened both through insurgency and counter-insurgency and later
through the struggle for control of the post-colonial state. Despite
the general association, especially in the earlier part of the Cold
War period, of nationalism with ‘socialism’ of one kind or another,
nationalists often based themselves mainly on certain communal
groups in the population and built particularistic bases after they
achieved power, leading to the subordination of excluded groups. In
this sense, independence often involved the formation of quasi-imperial
statehood.
Although from the vantage point of the twenty-first century it is easy
to see European colonial empires as doomed, few government leaders,
colonial officials or colonists understood this clearly at the time. The
historic changes in the international system resulting from the Second
World War were not quickly or universally grasped: Mazower (2009)
even argues that the Allies originally saw the UN as a means of
maintaining empire. When nationalists began to contest the continu-
ation or reimposition of western European colonial rule (in countries in
Asia and North Africa overrun by Axis powers this can be traced to
their defeat in 1944–5), the empires almost always resisted in the first
decade after 1945. Moreover in cases where there were enough colon-
ists to provide – at least in their own eyes – the basis for the settler
states achieved earlier in the New World, the defence of the old order
was often reinforced by the colonists’ own determination to rule. Even
in countries without large colonial settlement, European powers were
reluctant to concede independence: some like France and Portugal had
invested in the fictions that their colonies were integral parts of the
home nation. Even Indian independence was not widely expected until
very late and, when it happened, was hardly recognized as entailing the
liquidation of the British empire elsewhere. In Africa, more than a
decade of nationalist agitation would be needed before a British prime
minister, Harold Macmillan, famously acknowledged in 1961 the
‘winds of change’ sweeping the continent.
Thus genocide had structural roots in processes of decolonization as
it had had in European imperialism and colonialism, although no more

than in the earlier case was it a general or universal accompaniment.

Most nationalists recognized the need to keep at least some colonists
for their productive expertise, as well as to maintain continuing
relationships with former colonial powers who protected their colon-
ists. But colonists who were identified strongly with imperial counter-
insurgency became targets of violence. Usually there was a strategic or
tactical lure in this process, but it could also become an end in itself, so
that forcing out masses of colonists together with the imperial powers
became at times an insurgent goal. On the other side – as earlier in the
German genocide in South West Africa in 1904–5 – colonial adminis-
trations, armies and colonists often perpetrated atrocities against
sections of the population assumed to support insurgents. All
European empires were involved in important cases of this kind, from
the Dutch in their attempt to foil the independence of Indonesia after
1945 (Luttikhuis and Moses 2012), to the Portuguese in their late
defence of empire in the 1970s.
The three major Western powers were involved in key cases. In
French-ruled Algeria, symbolic nationalist demands during the com-
memoration of Victory in Europe on 8 May 1945 had been met by
a massacre in Sétif by the colonial authorities; Algerian reprisals
brought around a hundred deaths among the surrounding French
colons (Vétillard 2008). Jean-Paul Sartre (1968) wrote: ‘The Nurem-
berg Tribunal was fresh in the memory when the French, to make an
example, massacred 45,000 Algerians at Sétif. This was such a
common occurrence that no one then thought of judging the French
government as the Nazis had been judged.’ Sartre’s figure is contested
and he mistook the sequence (Nuremberg began a few months after
Sétif), but the point that colonial massacres were internationally unre-
markable is well made. The subsequent war of national liberation
(1954–62) was marked by direct attacks on populations by both sides,
the Front de Libération National (FLN) attacking colons and pro-
French Algerians, while the French counter-insurgency collectively
punished many villages with the regroupement (concentration) of
around 2 million villagers in camps. In 1961, police also massacred
Algerians in Paris itself.
Britain too was involved in genocidal counter-insurgency, notori-
ously in Kenya during the insurrection of the Land and Freedom Army
(known to the British as Mau Mau) from 1952 to 1960. British forces
detained 160,000 ‘suspected terrorists’ in camps, while concentrating

Genocide in wars of decolonization 109
almost the entire Kikuyu population of one and a half million in

villages ringed with barbed wire. Counter-insurgency tactics included
summary executions, electric shocks, mass deportations, slave labour,
the burning down of villages, and similar collective punishments,
starvation and rape. Tens of thousands died from the combined effects
of exhaustion, disease, starvation and systematic physical brutality. In
contrast, the ‘savage’ insurgents killed about eighteen hundred Kenyan
loyalists as well as thirty-two settlers out of a total of ninety-five
‘Europeans’ (Elkins 2005: 366).
The USA went down the same road in Vietnam. By the 1950s,
nationalist movements usually adopted some kind of ‘socialist’ ideol-
ogy and colonial authorities equated their challenge with Communism,
so merging decolonization war with Cold War. In South East Asia, the
anti-colonial struggle was dominated by Communists, so that when
the French empire was no longer able to withstand Vietnamese nation-
alism, the USA took on the challenge of defeating it on behalf of the
‘free world’. The US war, attempting to bolster the anti-Communist
regime established in Saigon after the French departure, was generally
degenerate in the sense of using methods that indiscriminately affected
the civilian population: aerial bombing, chemical defoliation and mass
concentration of population. Its genocidal aspect became explicit in
atrocities such as the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by
US forces at My Lai in 1968.
The violence of wars of decolonization also sometimes continued, or
took new forms, in the post-colonial aftermath. Regimes and militaries
forged in liberation struggles turned their armed forces on domestic
enemies. Indonesia was formed in the late 1940s out of the independ-
ence war to prevent the reimposition of the Dutch East Indian empire,
after the expulsion of the Japanese. The new state had to struggle from
the outset to assert its control over the far-flung archipelago, suppress-
ing local nationalisms fostered by the Dutch in their attempt to retain
control, and containing social antagonisms, one expression of which
was the Indonesian Communist Party, the largest non-ruling party in
the world in the 1950s and early 1960s. The armed forces played a
key part in the consolidation of the new state, and in 1965 a military
group seized power, possibly in response to the threat of a Communist
coup, suppressing the Communist Party. The military and their varied
‘coalition’ of local allies (Gerlach 2010: 17–91) killed an estimated half
a million presumed party members, supporters and family members,

the largest anti-Communist mass murder of the Cold War. They forced
a million more into camps (Cribb 2010: 450–4). Similarly, the
Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe, which came to power
in 1979 after a bitter liberation war against Rhodesian colonists,
deployed North Korean-trained army units to massacre Ndebele sup-
porters of his political opponents in Matabeleland in the mid 1980s.
Post-colonial states, contested power

In cases of decolonization without armed struggle, power usually
passed from European empires to local elites without the genocidal
violence seen in India, but genocidal violence often occurred in subse-
quent power struggles. Nearly all post-colonial states contained ethnic-
ally, religiously and linguistically diverse populations, and in many
cases central state power was monopolized by groups that ruled in
the interest of one section of the population over others. Political
opposition often mobilized social differences, leading to conflicts and
civil wars in which sections of the population were treated as enemies
to be destroyed. Political conflict, war and genocidal violence were not,
however, simply processes that occurred within states. They were often
linked to conflicts between neighbouring states and larger international
power struggles, not only between the Cold War blocs but also involv-
ing great regional powers such as China and India.
There were two basic patterns of conflict, each of which could
produce genocide. Oppositions could challenge for control over the
existing state in its entirety, changing the dominant population-
balance, or they could seek to partition the territory through secession-
ist war. The most important cases of the former were in the Great
Lakes region of central Africa, especially the former Belgian territories
of Rwanda and Burundi – where movements based in the Hutu and
Tutsi sections of the population contested power – and neighbouring
formerly British Uganda. In Rwanda, independence in 1961 was
accompanied by the so-called Hutu Revolution, in which nationalists
based on the Hutu majority overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and ruling
elite sustained by Belgian rule. This led to the massacre of tens of
thousands of Tutsi in 1963, prompting mass emigration to Uganda.
In Burundi, rivalry between parties based in the same groups led to
the killing of over a hundred thousand Hutu in a 1972 genocide
(Lemarchand 1996: xii). These genocidal conflicts were reflected in

Quasi-imperial states 111
Congo-Kinshasa (later Zaire, currently the Democratic Republic of

Congo or DRC) where the civil war of 1960–4 led to the little-known
1963–6 Kanyarwanda war in the east of the country, involving large-
scale massacres of Hutu and Tutsi (Lemarchand 2009).
In Uganda, the 1972–9 government of Idi Amin massacred political
opponents, often identified with enemy ethnicities. After Amin over-
reached himself by invading Tanzania, it repulsed Ugandan forces,
leading to his overthrow in what Nicholas Wheeler (2000) sees as an
early ‘humanitarian intervention’. Amin’s predecessor Milton Obote
was restored, but his forces too carried out large reprisal killings
against population groups presumed to support Amin and later the
rebellion led by Yoweri Museveni (Kasozi 1994, Harff 2003: 60). After
Museveni took power in 1986, civil war continued, including large-
scale population removal by the regime’s army in the late 1980s, and
the emergence of the Lord’s Resistance Army which continued exten-
sive violence against civilians across the region into the 2000s. The
linkage of Uganda and Rwanda proved very important for the subse-
quent history of genocide: exiled Tutsis who fought with Museveni
went on to form the Rwandan Patriotic Front which invaded Rwanda
in 1990, initiating the events leading to the 1994 genocide. Connec-
tions between political violence in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo and
Uganda showed the importance of regional international and trans-
national linkages in generating patterns of genocide (Chapter 9).
Quasi-imperial states: territorial conflicts and secessionist wars

Most genocidal post-colonial conflicts were linked, however, to crises
of territorial control, where ruling elites sought to expand a state’s
territory or opposing elites sought to break it up. Many of these
conflicts centred on the larger colonial entities with disparate popula-
tions created by the European empires. Post-colonial states inherited
their unwieldy agglomerations of power and developed new quasi-
imperial rule. States’ territorial integrity was not underpinned by social
cohesion, so political conflict often took the form of secessionist wars
by movements based on regional majorities. Genocidal violence arose
in many territorial conflicts between the 1950s and the 1980s. This
type of genocide is often represented by minority nationalists as one-
sided violence by the dominant state nationalism, but this simple
narrative does not work in many cases. Secessionists as well as central

powers were involved in anti-population violence, and conflicts were

often messy with numerous genocidal actors.
In Pakistan, created as a state in two parts in 1947, conflicts between
East Pakistan (Bengal)-based parties and the preponderantly West
Pakistani state erupted into open war in 1971. The Pakistani army
committed extensive violence against Bengali civilians, mainly tar-
geting presumed secessionists (assumed, moreover, to be collaborat-
ing with the international enemy, India) rather than Bengalis as
such. However, significant anti-civilian violence was also committed
by Bengali nationalists, themselves divided into a variety of forces.
Sarmila Bose (2011: 403) notes that even in ‘commentary that acknow-
ledges some violence by Bengali nationalists against non-Bengalis, it is
often assumed that not only was this violence sporadic and excep-
tional, but that violence committed by non-state actors such as Bengali
rebels had to be insignificant compared to that perpetrated by the
organized forces of the state. In other words, non-state actors are
assumed to be able to do less harm, for instance, killing fewer people.’
But Bose concludes: ‘[i]n the case of 1971, such distinctions and
assumptions do not hold’: ‘it is clear from available evidence that the
“non-state” actors killed significant numbers of people and drove
out many more’ (Bose 2011: 404). While Pakistani forces at times
targeted Hindus, so did many Bengali nationalists, who drove many
Hindus and non-Bengali Muslims over the border into India. Thus this
was not a one-sided genocide by Pakistan; rather, like the genocidal
violence of Partition, some of which had occurred in Bengal, this was
many-sided violence. Gerlach (2010) sees it as an example of an
‘extremely violent society’; it can also be seen as a complex political
and armed conflict with a combination of civil and international war
and multi-targeted genocide. Levene (1999) has argued, moreover, that
genocide continued in independent Bangladesh, against hill peoples in
the Chittagong region.
In Ceylon, renamed Sri Lanka in 1972, the emergence of majority
(Buddhist) Sinhalese nationalism led to the growing exclusion of the
minority (Hindu) Tamil population (Rotberg 1999: 41–2, shows how
‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ markers are entwined). Several waves of ‘cleans-
ings’ of ‘plantation Tamils’, as well as urban political discrimination,
escalated periodically to direct anti-Tamil violence. In response to
increasing repression, Tamil opposition radicalized into the full-scale
insurgency of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), partly in

the expectation of Indian support in the aftermath of Bangladeshi

independence. When the Sri Lankan military began to gain the upper
hand against the LTTE, Indian peacekeepers were introduced, but as
they were defeated by the LTTE, India withdrew in 1990. The LTTE’s
assassination of the Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi ended Indian
involvement; the LTTE’s rule within its zone was draconian, and it
carried out its own expulsions of Muslims (Sivanandan 2009).
In Indonesia, conflict arose from the ambitions of Suharto’s regime
(formed through the mass murder of Communists in 1965) to annex
areas of the archipelago that remained under European colonial con-
trol. Western New Guinea (Irian Jaya), under Dutch rule, was seized
after a military-controlled consultation exercise in 1969. In Portuguese
East Timor, the colonial power abdicated after the 1974 revolution in
Portugal, and the Fretilin movement declared Timorese independence
in 1975. Indonesia’s response, under the pretext of preventing a
‘Communist’ regime from being established, was a full-scale invasion.
When Fretilin resisted the occupation, the Indonesian counter-
insurgency caused many civilians to flee their homes, destroyed food
stocks, and interned large numbers in camps where they were inad-
equately fed. At least 100,000 civilians are estimated to have died, the
majority from hunger and illness caused by the ‘starvation strategy’ of
the Indonesian army (CAVR 2005).
Similar conflicts arose in Africa. Nigeria, the most populous African
state, was a British imperial creation uniting diverse peoples that had
previously had separate political systems. After independence in 1961,
Nigeria quickly saw sharp political conflicts, expressed in rivalries
between different sections of the military linked to the main peoples,
the mainly Muslim Hausa and the largely Christian Yoruba and Igbo.
An attempted coup and counter-coup led to genocidal massacres of
thousands of Igbo civilians in the mainly Muslim North, which in turn
led the military governor of the Igbo-dominated south-east, Colonel
Odumegwu Ojukwu, to proclaim the secession of the south-eastern
region as the Republic of Biafra in 1967. In the subsequent war, both
Nigerian and Biafran forces killed members of minority populations,
causing hundreds of thousands to flee in both directions, and the
Nigerian drive to crush the secessionist state caused extensive hunger
and disease from which large numbers of civilians died.
Similarly, modern Sudan was a British imperial creation, formed
only in 1946 from two previously separate colonial territories, each

containing very mixed populations. After independence in 1953,

opposition emerged in the south, where the people were mainly
Christians and animists, to the rule of northern Arab Muslim elites.
Insurgency produced a devastating civil war from 1955 until 1972,
when an agreement for autonomy was reached. However the conflict
revived in 1983 after the formation of the Southern People’s Liberation
Movement and lasted until the early 2000s. This was one of the most
destructive of all civil wars in the second half of the twentieth century,
with over 2 million casualties and 5 million people displaced. Although
most deaths and displacements were indirect consequences of the
fighting, Alex de Waal (2007) argues that ‘at least half a dozen epi-
sodes in the Sudanese civil war would be genocide’ in terms of the
definition of the Convention, in the sense of an ‘attempt to inflict harm
on members of a racial, religious or ethnic group, with the intent to
destroy them in whole or in part’. The Khartoum government repeat-
edly mobilized paramilitary militias to destroy the crops, farmlands
and homes of the populations assumed to support rebels, a modus
operandi that was to be repeated in Darfur in the 2000s.
In the Middle East, the main case concerns Iraq, a state with a very
mixed population, created under British auspices after the First World
War following the defeat of the Ottoman empire. The British-installed
monarchy was overthrown in a 1958 coup, leading in turn to the
seizure of power by the Arab-nationalist Ba’ath party in 1963. The
Ba’athist regime aimed to ‘Arabize’ the population in the Kurdish-
dominated north, partly because of security concerns related to
regional conflicts, as Human Rights Watch (2009) summarizes:
In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Iraqi central governments attempted to change the
ethnic composition of northern Iraq by expelling hundreds of thousands of
Kurds and other minorities from their homes, and repopulating the areas with
Arabs transferred from central and southern Iraq. The government policy,
known as ‘arabization’ (ta’rib), intensified in the second half of the 1970s
with the aim of reducing minority populations whom authorities considered
to be of questionable loyalty in this strategic area. The government responded
to Kurdish insurgencies by mounting a concerted campaign to alter the
demographic makeup of northern Iraq, especially in areas bordering Turkey
and Iran. The government used military force and intimidation as the primary
methods. These policies completely depopulated entire non-Arab villages that
authorities then bulldozed. By the late 1970s the Iraqi government had
forcibly evacuated as least a quarter of a million Kurds and other non-Arabs.

After the rise to full power of Saddam Hussein in 1979 – with apparent
support from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and in the
same year as the revolution in neighbouring Iran – the Ba’athist
regime’s international and domestic policies radicalized. Saddam took
advantage of Iran’s internal instability to attack it, which led to the
1980–8 war, the bloodiest of the late Cold War period. Iraq was
supported and supplied with arms by Western and Soviet bloc as well
as Gulf Arab states, since all feared the dominance of a (Shia) Islamist
Iran in the Middle East and the wider political effects of the revolution.
However Kurdish nationalists’ control of parts of northern Iraq led
Saddam to massacre Kurds and other minority groups in 1983. In the
Anfal campaign of 1986–9, thousands of Kurdish villages were razed,
tens of thousands of civilians were killed – most notoriously in the
chemical bombing of Halabja (Hiltermann 2007) – and hundreds of
thousands were displaced. Violence was also directed at Shia,
Assyrians and Yezidis. Western states showed little concern at Sad-
dam’s policies, but this was to change with the end of the Cold War
(Chapter 7). In the same period, Kurds were increasingly repressed in
Turkey – where three thousand villages were wiped off the map and
hundreds of thousands were displaced – and Iran. Turkish armies
expelled Greeks from Northern Cyprus after their invasion in 1974
(Anderson 2008). The Syrian regime killed many thousands in the city
of Hama in 1982.
Not all the quasi-imperial states in which genocidal episodes took
place were simple inheritors of colonial empires. Ethiopia was a his-
toric empire never colonized by Europeans, although it was brutally
conquered by Fascist Italy in 1936–41, and later annexed the Italian
colony of Eritrea after the liquidation of the Italian empire. After the
Marxist-Leninist Dergue movement led by Mengistu Haile Miriam
overthrew Emperor Haile Selassi in 1974, it faced armed opposition
from the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) as well as the
Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which sought to separate
Eritrea from Ethiopia. The Dergue, supported by the Soviet bloc,
carried out a ‘red terror’ against its enemies: according to Edward
Kissi (2006: xxii–xxiii) ‘it was the revolutionary regime’s ideology of
national unity that tempted the Dergue to convert particular groups
into enemies to be destroyed’. Kissi argues that ‘the extent of the
Dergue’s atrocities against political groups are clear’, but he is sceptical
of ‘an overall intent of the military regime to completely or partially

annihilate the ethnic groups from which its opponents came’ (2006:
xxiii). Eventually, military pressure from the regime’s opponents and
reduced support from the USSR in its terminal crisis led to the collapse
of Mengistu’s regime and the independence of Eritrea.
Consolidation of settler states and the special case of apartheid

Amidst wars of decolonization and secession in Asia and Africa, the
earlier waves of settler-colonial independence continued to have ram-
ifications. Settler colonies in the Americas and Australasia had already
overwhelmed indigenous populations in the nineteenth century; their
independent states faced few real indigenous challenges in the second
half of the twentieth. Therefore new genocides were not common, but
measures consolidating earlier episodes continued: in Australia, indi-
genous children continued to be transferred to European families until
the 1960s; in North America, indigenous people were confined to
reservations; and in Israel, where the partial destruction of indigenous
society was much more recent, additional territories were occupied
after 1967 and the gradual ‘legal’ confiscation of Arab land would last
into the twenty-first century. Israel also had responsibility for the
massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982, carried
out by its (Christian) Phalangist militia allies. (Phalangists had previ-
ously massacred Muslims in 1976, provoking a retaliatory massacre
of Christians by the Palestine Liberation Organization, during the
Lebanese civil war.)
In South Africa, a European settler minority had long ruled over a
black and mixed-race majority, in a state unified in 1910 from British
colonies and the settler republics of Dutch origin defeated in the
1899–1901 war. In 1948 the Afrikaner-based Nationalist party
came to power and formalized long-standing racial segregation into
the system of apartheid. To an extent not matched except in Nazi
Germany, this involved a complex, pseudo-scientific, rigidly delimited
hierarchy of racial ‘groups’ (Dubow 1995), proscribing interracial
contact except under defined, unequal conditions. In theory, unequal
‘separate development’ represented a mode of rule over rather than
destruction of the non-white population, and so was not intrinsically
genocidal. However in the given conditions of mixed South African
society, its implementation had genocidal consequences. In the radical
form envisaged by the Nationalists, its prime aim was the extinction

Consolidation of settler states and the case of apartheid 117
of the Black political presence in the country. There were to be ‘no

more Black South Africans’, as the Nationalist minister Connie Mulder
put it in 1978 (Platzky and Walker 1985: 17).
Apartheid therefore involved ‘a programme for the removal of
as many Blacks from the White zone of South Africa as possible’.
So-called ‘black spots’, pockets of Black-owned land in the territory
zoned for the White state, were ‘to be expunged from the map’,
while the practices of labour tenancy and sharecropping, through
which black labourers used land, were abolished. Over 1.7 million
rural blacks considered surplus to the needs of White farmers were
‘resettled’: rounded up with dogs and guns, they were trucked to
distant, barren zones in the Black statelets or ‘bantustans’ that the
apartheid regime established. Here they were frequently dumped in
tented camps among the poorest communities, generally without
access to land for either grazing or cultivation (Christopher 2001: 66,
73, 82). From the cities, too, there was mass displacement. Frequently
‘only the unemployed, the women and children, the elderly and
the disabled, were moved, leaving the workers to live in single-sex
hostels’. Sometimes there was a slow whittling away of Black and
mixed communities; sometimes, as in the Johannesburg suburb of
Sophiatown in 1955, ‘a dramatic uprooting and relocating of people
in a single swoop. One week there is a community, with its own
particular life and institutions. The next week it is destroyed, the
people gone, the buildings in ruin, its history wiped out’ (Platzky and
Walker 1985: 33, 326).
Thus although apartheid involved ‘an extremely sophisticated . . .
system of control over the African population’ (Platzky and Walker
1985: 18, emphasis added), it was predicated on the ruthless destruc-
tion of a large number of black communities. The policy produced
many deaths, but direct physical casualties were fewer than in most
genocides because the regime’s goal was removal, there was little
violent resistance, and the regime always retained overall control.
Nevertheless, the consequences for blacks’ physical survival were
severe, especially since in many relocation areas ‘the struggle [of the
dispossessed was] fought on the very boundaries of life. It [was] about
the most basic requirements for mere existence’ (Platzky and Walker
1985: 132).
Apartheid became embedded in the Cold War international order.
Although it was abjured by Western states and the UN as well as the

Soviet bloc, Western investment in the South African economy con-

tinued on a large scale throughout the almost half-century of apart-
heid. The state was a ‘bulwark against Communism’, effectively a
regional extension of the Western bloc, as it had been earlier of the
British empire. The main political and military resistance organization,
the African National Congress (ANC), depended on the USSR as well
as Western civil-society support, and so the international politics of
apartheid were partly polarized in Cold War terms. The system sur-
vived, indeed, until the end of the Cold War: only then did the
Nationalists and the ANC begin to seek – as their respective Cold
War support systems dissolved – a compromise to end apartheid.
However, as in some other transitions of the end of the Cold War
(Chapter 7), the contested process of change produced a low-level civil
war involving multi-sided violence against opposing politically and
ethnically defined populations.
Anti-leftist genocide: Latin America

In Latin America, states formed as a result of colonization over several
hundred years, mostly independent since the early nineteenth century,
continued to see ‘frontier’ expansion in the second half of the twenti-
eth. In the Amazonian region of Brazil, new settlement partially or
wholly eliminated indigenous communities such as the Yanomami
through the characteristic mixture of economic displacement and deg-
radation, coercion and violence, including small massacres, seen
throughout the history of modern colonization. However new geno-
cidal issues, more closely connected to the Cold War, were also posed
in Latin America. In several countries, military dictatorships allied to
the USA targeted sections of the population presumed to support
leftist movements, in episodes of mass killing, ‘disappearances’ and
child-stealing from the 1970s to the 1990s.
In Chile after General Pinochet’s military coup in 1973 and in
Argentina during the ‘dirty war’ between 1974 and 1983, presumed
members and supporters of left-wing organizations were targeted,
together with their families, with death tolls of around five thousand
in Chile (Hiebert and Policzer 2010) and thirty thousand in Argentina
(Feierstein 2007, 2010). In Colombia between 1985 and 2002, those
viewed as associated with the left-wing party Unión Patriótica were
attacked by a ‘bloc’ comprising right-wing paramilitaries and drug

Conclusion 119
cartels as well as elements of the military, which led to several thou-

sand deaths (Gómez-Suárez 2007, 2010). In Guatemala, decades of
political violence climaxed between 1981 and 1983 in a more extensive
campaign of violence targeting the indigenous Mayan population gen-
erally, as well as supporters of rural social movements and left-wing
organizations. In 1999 a UN-sponsored truth commission counted 669
massacres (over 90 per cent of which were attributed to state forces)
and estimated a loss of over 200,000 civilian lives between 1960 and
1996; many more were displaced (Drouin 2010: 87). Likewise in El
Salvador and Honduras, counter-insurgencies of the 1970s and 1980s
saw targeted mass killing, while earlier in Haiti the notorious regime of
‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier used death squads against its presumed oppon-
ents. In Peru during the 1980s, the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso
massacred peasants in its brutal war against the Peruvian state.
In all these Latin American cases (as in Korea, Indonesia, Iraq, etc.,
discussed above), local powerholders defined their enemies as Com-
munists and invoked the anti-Communist ideology promoted by the
USA. The emerging scholarship of late twentieth-century Latin
American genocide attributes a crucial role to US ‘hemispheric hegem-
ony’ (Roniger 2010) and US-backed counter-insurgency programmes
(McSherry 2010). However Marcia Esparza (2010: 13) argues that
‘extreme class, race and ethnic polarization in the region’ lay behind
the resort to genocidal violence, leading to ‘the construction of
el pueblo as an entity that can be considered as the “hostage group”’.
Esparza’s analytically interesting implication is that, rather than there
having been a single type of polarization, common but complex and
overlapping cleavages, rooted in colonial as well as post-colonial
history, produced in the ruling classes a ‘neocolonial mentality . . .
transmitted from generation to generation’, which informed the
specific violence of the Cold War period conditioned by ‘US-led
geopolitical projects’.
Conclusion
In the four decades from 1949 to 1989, genocide continued to be
widespread. Yet comparative genocide studies does not generally
include even the largest episodes of this period among its paradigmatic
cases. The Khmer Rouge campaign in Cambodia, although widely
considered a major genocide, is still considered atypical because the

regime had a wide range of targets. Indeed the Khmer Rouge attacked
Cambodian society as a whole, the majority of whose members
belonged to the same Khmer ethnicity to which the perpetrators them-
selves belonged. This led some who consider genocide necessarily
ethnic in character to produce the bizarre idea that this was an ‘auto-
genocide’, in the sense of an attack by members of a group on their
fellow members. This notion is truly the reductio ad absurdum of the
assumption that genocide is predicated on given ethnic identities. The
Khmer Rouge were not, after all, attacking the Cambodian people
because they shared their identity, but because they saw the people’s
various class, religious and ethnic identities as incompatible with the
new Cambodian society that they were building. And their multi-
targeting, far from being unusual, has certainly been the norm not only
for classically totalitarian regimes such as those of Hitler, Stalin and
Mao, but also for many other genocidal actors, from New World
colonists to recent Sudanese and Iraqi regimes.
If we overcome the prejudices that classify out Cambodia from the
core genocidal canon, and understand genocide broadly as purposeful
destructive action against civilian populations, then Mao’s campaigns
jump out from the record of this period. Mao was probably respon-
sible for more civilian deaths than any other ruler in modern times, and
the Great Leap Forward was probably the largest single such episode in
modern world history – surely ‘mega-genocidal’ if the idea has any
meaning. Other events in this period involved hundreds of thousands
of deaths, but have similarly failed to register strongly in the canon of
comparative genocide studies. For example, the Indonesian military-
led campaign against the Communists in 1965 is generally accepted to
have caused around half a million deaths, a toll of a similar order to
that in Rwanda in 1994, yet unlike the latter is never considered a
prime case of genocide because its targets were ‘political’ rather than
‘ethnic’.
Yet if the Cold War record makes one thing clear, it is that such
thinking is an obstacle to understanding genocide. Without improb-
ably full knowledge of the mental processes of perpetrators we shall
never know in very many cases how far they saw their targets in
‘political’, ‘ethnic’ or other terms. In any case these are merely categor-
ies that analysts impose to classify phenomena, not constitutive ideas
of the actions that make these up. What we do know is that throughout
this period, political and other identity markers were intertwined.

Conclusion 121
Although many genocidal episodes occurred in conflicts fought for

nationalist goals, the Cold War political and ideological context
led many insurgent nationalisms to adopt Marxist ideology and
counter-insurgency campaigns to be defined as anti-Communist. For
this reason alone, the genocide of this period often defies classification
as either ‘political’ or ‘ethnic/national’, but was usually both at the
same time.
It is clear that international relations in several senses – notably Cold
War rivalries and ideologies, rivalries between regional powers, and
cross-border linkages of peoples – were central to the genocidal con-
flicts in this period. However the Cold War ‘system’ of conflict, centred
on US–Soviet relations, was not the only driver of genocidal violence as
it was of the nuclear arms race. Instead, the Cold War worked vari-
ably, interacting with regional and national conflicts. Indeed it was
not a simple bipolar system. Maoist China emerged from bitter
international and civil war into the new rivalry between the Soviet
bloc, with which it was initially aligned, and the USA. Its high-
genocidal period, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, was when
Mao perceived enemies on both sides of the Cold War. He sought
to compensate for China’s economic and military inferiority to the
USSR and the USA with fantastic development plans, as well as to
preserve his own power through social terror. Pol Pot’s Kampuchea,
likewise, saw itself threatened by pro-Soviet Vietnam as well as by the
USA, and supported only by China, as it embarked on its destructive
experiment.
Outside East and South East Asia, the Cold War was a world-level
framework within which diverse regional and national conflicts oper-
ated. Crucially, the Cold War was a system of regional alliances,
through which the resources – political, ideological, military, diplo-
matic and financial – necessary for insurgency and counter-insurgency
were obtained. The USA, USSR and their allies provided support for
regimes and their opponents across the world, raising the capacities of
both states and (especially) rebels, and leading the latter to develop
what Stathis Kalyvas and Laia Balcells (2010) call ‘robust insurgency’.
Marxism-Leninism(-Maoism) and anti-Communism provided univer-
sal political vocabularies for local struggles, and Soviet and US backers
provided military training and doctrine. To this extent many of these
struggles were indeed ‘proxy wars’ for superpower and bloc rivalries,
and, not surprisingly, the end of the Cold War in 1989–91 coincided

with a decline in the number of civil wars and especially insurgencies

(Kalyvas and Balcells 2010: 423).
A crucial driver of the conflicts that fostered genocide was the
emergence of post-colonial nation-states, in competition not only with
the superpowers and old European empires, but with each other and
subaltern nationalisms within their territories or on their borders. The
creation, expansion and consolidation of large and medium-sized
quasi-imperial states in Asia and Africa, and the challenges to them,
were at the centre of the genocidal processes in this period. In Latin
America, on the other hand, where states were more securely estab-
lished and more closely tied to the USA, genocidal violence was a
response to largely class-based challenges to social and political power,
linked to US strategies to maintain regional dominance. Here the
language of Marxism and anti-Communism was most coherently and
meaningfully used to interpret conflicts.
The modalities and organization of genocidal violence varied hugely
in the Cold War period – so much so, of course, that the narrow
definitions of comparative genocide studies would not admit to the
field many of the cases I have discussed. Only in some cases was
genocide in this period a matter of a concerted national campaign by
a central regime or powerful elements within it against whole popula-
tion groups, as in Chile, Argentina and Saddam’s Iraq. Mostly geno-
cide did not take the form of such campaigns. Often it comprised the
loosely coordinated actions of coalitions of state and non-state actors,
as in India in 1946–8, Indonesia in 1965 and Bengal in 1971. In some
counter-insurgencies, genocidal policies were centrally determined, but
perhaps more often they were produced by elements within armies,
either in a relatively concerted way across broad areas, or in local
‘genocidal massacres’ without a clear overall aim to destroy a popula-
tion even regionally. Sometimes genocide was overwhelmingly a policy
or practice of one side in a political or armed conflict; sometimes it was
a two- or many-sided, even ‘mutual’ process. However Gerlach’s
(2010) idea that ‘mass violence’ is the product of ‘extremely violent
societies’ may be taken too far in de-emphasizing the role of state
actors in this period. ‘Non-state’ violence still reflected national polit-
ical fractures, and usually the roles of elements of state machines were
pronounced. If there were often ‘coalitions’ of non-state and state
actors, the latter were often crucial in initiating or coordinating
violence.

Conclusion 123
Since genocidal violence was a phenomenon of political conflict and

counter-insurgency war, it is often difficult to separate from these
processes. The difficulty is exacerbated because many cases discussed
here are only now being seriously investigated, decades after the events
concerned, or are only now being investigated from a genocide per-
spective. Often we are still some way from fully establishing the
dynamics of genocidal conflict and the relationships between different
violent actors and targets of violence. Indeed we are often still fighting
our way through the nationalist myths that surround all these events to
try to establish credible scholarly narratives.

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| Cold War, decolonization and

In this chapter I explore transformations of the international system

The changing international system: the Cold War and genocide

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the ‘newly industrializing countries’) or commodity-based (especially

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crises would frequently reproduce genocide. In what follows, I outline

The Asian Cold War, Maoism and genocide

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scope of Chinese imperial authority, by incorporating the island of

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involving major Cold War adversaries during four decades of inter-

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national repression in Tibet. Here land reforms had already provoked

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Genocide in wars of decolonization

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almost always complex and plural, so that nationalists could only

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than in the earlier case was it a general or universal accompaniment.

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almost the entire Kikuyu population of one and a half million in

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Post-colonial states, contested power

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Congo-Kinshasa (later Zaire, currently the Democratic Republic of

Quasi-imperial states: territorial conﬂicts and secessionist wars

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

powers were involved in anti-population violence, and conﬂicts were

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

the expectation of Indian support in the aftermath of Bangladeshi

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

containing very mixed populations. After independence in 1953,

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Consolidation of settler states and the special case of apartheid

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

of the Black political presence in the country. There were to be ‘no

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Soviet bloc, Western investment in the South African economy con-

Anti-leftist genocide: Latin America

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cartels as well as elements of the military, which led to several thou-

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Although many genocidal episodes occurred in conﬂicts fought for

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

with a decline in the number of civil wars and especially insurgencies

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Since genocidal violence was a phenomenon of political conﬂict and

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139030694.009 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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