Cruelty or Humanity. Rees, Stuart
month.19 Details of British fascination with violence as the means of governance are discussed in the next chapter, ‘Values, attitudes, behaviour’.
Less than 10 years after the British brutalities in Kenya, between October 1965 and March 1966, anyone suspected of being a member of the Indonesian Communist Party was hunted down and murdered. Published estimates indicate that between 500,000 and one million Indonesians were killed by the Indonesian Army, who were aided by civilian militias mostly from Islamic groups.20
The record of this mass murder and incarceration of Indonesians displays a couple of issues. For decades, information about the massacres, and about the roles played by the US, Britain and other major powers, was suppressed. Detailed analyses are now coming to light.21
Between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia, with the objective of establishing the Khmer Rouge version of agrarian socialism under the leadership of Pol Pot, 3,314,768 people died, an estimated 25% of the population. The deaths were caused by several factors: forced relocation from urban centres, torture, mass executions, forced labour and malnutrition.22
In 1975, with the connivance of Western powers such as Australia and the US, Indonesian forces invaded East Timor and occupied the country for the following 24 years. In 2002, the Timorese Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation estimated that during the years of occupation, and in excess of normal rates of mortality, well over 100,000 Timorese died from starvation and deprivation, five times higher than the number of targeted killings and disappearances, estimated to be at least 18,000. The Truth Commission found that by formulating policies to cause mass starvation and death, members of the Indonesian armed forces and government officials committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.23 The Department of Demography and Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, concluded that even with the most conservative assumptions, the total number of excess deaths in East Timor during the entire Indonesian occupation ranged from 150,000 to 200,000. Those estimates included the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre of 271 protesting civilians. In 1999, after the Timorese voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia, pro-Indonesian militia killed an estimated 1,000 supporters of independence. One quarter of a million East Timorese fled to West Timor, and in their final scorched earth policy the Indonesians destroyed more than 70% of East Timorese housing.
In 1988, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwah for the killing of prisoners identified as intellectuals, students, left wingers, members of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, of ethnic and religious minorities, many of whom had been sentenced for non-violent offences, such as taking part in demonstrations and collecting funds for prisoners.24 The people charged appeared before summary Islamic courts to answer questions ‘Are you a Muslim?’, ‘Do you pray?’, ‘Do you recant your beliefs and political activities?’ If the answers were judged insufficient, they were sent for execution. In June 2012, a London Tribunal estimated that as many as 5,000 prisoners were executed. The prisoners, including women and teenagers, ‘were loaded onto forklift trucks and at half hour intervals were hanged from cranes and beams in groups of five or six’.
In 2011, barrister Geoffrey Robertson reported on ‘The Massacre of Political Prisoners in Iran, 1988’. Following a detailed inquiry, he concluded that the state of Iran had broken the rules of international law, and had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. His account of breath-taking brutality in the name of a religion reveals an unrelenting sadism, an issue explored in Chapter 3. Robertson’s conclusions exposed Iran’s ‘policy of systematic denial, historical falsification and destruction of evidence of the mass executions’.25
A year after the mass graves of Iranian victims had been covered and concealed, in June 1989, thousands of young Chinese democracy protesters set up camp in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. As many as 10,000 Chinese troops moved in and massacred large numbers of protesters. The exact number of deaths is unknown. Since that time, Chinese authorities have censored information about the massacre. Such suppression links cruelty to denial. In his poem Tiananmen, written less than two weeks after the massacre, James Fenton conveys the suppression of a story.
Tiananmen
Is broad and clean
and you can’t tell
where the dead have been
and you can’t tell
what happened then
and you can’t speak
of Tiananmen.
You must not speak.
You must not think.
You must not dip
your brush in ink.
You must not say
what happened then,
what happened there
in Tiananmen. 26
Between April and July 1994 in Rwanda, mass slaughter occurred in 100 days. The violence emerged from a century or more of injustice and brutality from both the Hutu majority and the minority Tutsis. Following the shooting down of a Hutu President, and with a view to hanging on to power, extremist Hutus acted to wipe out the Tutsi completely. The genocidal slaughter of the Tutsi people by members of the Hutu majority claimed up to one million victims, including moderate Hutus.27
In 1995, in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, over 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were murdered by forces under the command of Serb General Ratko Mladic. Despite overwhelming evidence about the victims and the perpetrators, the atrocities have been denied by Serbian leaders. A group of 200 ‘Srebrenica Mothers’ continue to fight the official silence and denials.
In a resolution passed by the General Assembly of the UN, these killings were judged to be a genocide, part of an ethnic cleansing which targeted Bosnian Muslims and Croats. The ‘cleansing’ included murder, rape, torture, beatings and other inhumane treatment of civilians.28
In 2003, in Darfur, the western region of Sudan, government armed and funded Arab militias, the Janjaweed, ‘devils on horseback’, burned villages, polluted water supplies, murdered, raped and tortured civilians. An estimated 500,000 were killed and up to 2.8 million people displaced.
In March 2009, as a result of the Darfur atrocities, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity. A year later Bashir was charged with genocide. His oppressive rule continued. In 2019, in response to protests about the cost of living, corruption and mismanagement of the economy, protesters demanded Bashir’s resignation. In response the President quoted verses from the Quran to justify the killing of protesters, dissolved the government and appointed military and security officials to run Sudan’s 18 states.29 In May 2019, following massive public protests seeking democracy, Bashir was overthrown, his regime replaced by a Military Council but not by civilian rule.
In all these slaughters, the perpetrators were leaders of governments, politicians, military and religious personnel, self-appointed vigilantes and diverse groups usually referred to as rebels or terrorists. This gruesome list does not return to the days of the Inquisition, to the enslavement of 20 million Africans, to the slaughter of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, in Australia and the Indian sub-continent, a consequence of violent colonial invasions and economic domination of a black and brown world, but there has to be a time limit to the examples. Hereafter, with a few dips into earlier decades, examples will come mostly from events in the last part of the 20th century and from 2000 to 2020.
Silence and denial
From 2000, participants in cruelty could include media personnel poised with their microphones or sitting upright at their keyboards. They may say or write nothing about inhumanities presented to them. They can enable the public to remain ignorant or indifferent to