Amarangamutima ntayararimo wagiraga amarangamutima abandi bakabikubuza wakoraga icyo bagutegetse, nta marangamutima yarahari bwari ubwicanyi gusa ntayandi marangamutima iyo watinyukaga kubikora ubwo wabaga ubigiyemo nyine ntakandi kazi wakoraga kandi.
There were no emotions, you were not allowed to have emotions, and you were supposed to do what you were told. There were no emotions, it was about killing and whenever you started killing, it would become your full-time job, you wouldn’t have any other occupation.
In 2018, while attending a scientific conference in Krakow in Poland, I visited the memorial of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz concentration camp has become the symbol of the atrocities conducted during World War II (1939–1945), as it is estimated that 1,100,000 people died in this camp. As I was working on obedience to authority, I wanted to have a better view of the camps and of what happened during the Nazi genocide. Of course, as powerful as visiting this historical site is, it is impossible to fully comprehend the suffering that happened there. But it is important to remember what humans are capable of in certain circumstances.
The visit started in the original concentration camp, Auschwitz-I. Before entering the camp, we had to pass under the iron sign that spanned the main entrance bearing the slogan “Arbeit macht frei,” which literally means “Work sets you free.” The Nazis wanted to justify the existence of their labor camps, but the sign was ironic because in the huge majority of cases, only death could set people free.
Some of the barracks have been transformed into exhibition rooms, where thousands of the belongings that the Nazis stole from those who were brought to the camp are on display. Before entering the rooms, the guide reminded us that each of those items belonged to a human being. A person who had a family, friends, and dreams. In the first room we saw thousands of shoes piled up, forming a small mountain. There are so many that they are just impossible to count. In another room, we saw additional mountains of objects, such as suitcases, glasses, kitchen pots, etc. Again, thousands of them. The last room is even more horrific. It contains the hair that the Nazis cut from the persons who were delivered to the camp. Hair from men and women, gray hair from elderly people, and also, recognizable in the mass, hair from children. It is estimated that 7 tons of hair were found in 1945 when the camp was liberated. The Nazis cut the hair to dehumanize them, but also for the textile industry.
In the second camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, where the biggest gas chambers were actually located, we walked along the rail track, which transported people to their death. At the end of the rail track, near the main gas chambers, small identical stones are exposed. Each stone has an inscription written in a different language. I looked around until I could find one written either in French or in English. I eventually found the stone where the text was written in English:
A warning to humanity.
If only.
It is estimated that at least 262 million people were murdered by governments via genocide, massacres, mass murders, and intentional famines in the twentieth century alone. It was the bloodiest century in human history. Even if people claimed “Never again” after the Nazi genocide, many more events happened after that and are still happening in the twenty-first century, again and again.
Still, even in a history plagued by wars and acts of destruction, recognized genocides are not that frequent. In Article II of the Genocide Convention adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 9, 1948 a genocide is defined as “any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”
The genocide caused by the Nazis between 1941 and 1945 and the mass killing of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 were rapidly categorized as genocides by the countries where the atrocities happened. On June 7, 2013, nearly forty years after its perpetration, the National Assembly of Cambodia made it illegal to deny the Khmer Rouge regime’s atrocities, thus officializing the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. More recently, in 2021, Germany officially acknowledged committing genocide during its colonial occupation of Namibia in the early twentieth century.
However, there are many more examples in human history that could easily fit within the definition of a genocide, even though some are still denied or largely intentionally diminished, especially by those accused of having participated and by their allies who stood by. This is the case for instance with the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1922, during which an estimated 90 percent of the Armenian population died.Reference Suny26 Or the genocide in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation between 1975 and 1999 that led to the deaths of between 100,000 and 300,000 persons. Or the famine in Ukraine caused by the Soviet army between 1932 and 1933, which caused the deaths of between 3.5 and 5 million people.
The list is longer, as I have only mentioned a very few examples. And such events continue to happen worldwide: the jihadist group Islamic State killing Christian, Yazidi, and Shia minorities in Iraq and Syria is a contemporary example, as is the mass killing of Rohingya people in Myanmar and the credible cases of forced sterilizations, labour, rape, and torture of Uighurs in China, to name but a few.
Why have so many people on Earth and across the centuries been – and still are – capable of inducing so much suffering in other human beings? What reason could justify these acts? By exploring the first-person narrative perspectives of perpetrators, this chapter brings elements of answers to these crucial questions.
From the many interviews conducted in Rwanda and in Cambodia, the majority of the respondents indicate that the main reason is that they were simply following orders.Reference Caspar27 They were being obedient. Often, therefore, they feel that they were not responsible. But additional elements of their answers show how complex each situation was, and offer insight into the circumstances that led them to become perpetrators.
The Challenge of Conducting Interviews in Rwanda and Cambodia
In August and September 2021, we drove every day into different villages in Rwanda. Given the restrictions of movement due to the Covid pandemic, we only interviewed former genocide perpetrators living in the districts of Kayonza and of Bugesera. We interviewed fifty-five former genocide perpetrators, all released from prison.
The genocide perpetrators that we interviewed were all male. The first reason is that there were far fewer female perpetrators than male perpetrators.Reference Verwimp28 The second reason is that after the genocide, while many men were put in jail, women were not generally considered to be direct perpetrators. Moreover, most of the acknowledged female perpetrators had been judged and sentenced to jail during the Gacaca courts, and they were still in jail at the time of testing.
The mean age of our respondents was 60 years old, but with a variability ranging from 41 to 79 years old. In fact, some of the respondents were minors when they participated in the genocide. Our youngest respondent told us that a group of people asked him when he was 13 years old to kill a woman they had caught, which he did. He was found guilty by the Gacaca court and spent six months in prison instead of many years because he was a child when this happened.
We faced many unexpected obstacles while interviewing. For example, on one of the days, we faced an unexpected “strike” from some of the interviewees. We arrived at the planned location but there was no one there. We had no idea what was happening, and we called Silas, another representative of Prison Fellowship Rwanda. Over two hours later, he was able to find out that the interviewees had decided to boycott the research activities. No one was able to explain why. We knew only that some kind of rumor had circulated, and no one would return. We thus packed up our material and went back to Kigali, a bit disappointed by the lost day. Amazingly, the day after, all the interviewees on strike came to be interviewed and everything went smoothly. That is an event that still puzzles me, and I really have no clue about what happened.
Individual actions and beliefs also impacted our study. Among the perpetrators interviewed, one was too drunk to consider his responses reliable. We actually tried to make him come several times to conduct the interviews, which he did. But no matter whether the interviews were conducted in the morning or in the evening, he was always drunk. We thus gave up on him. Five of our respondents also claimed that they were entirely innocent and did not conduct any crimes despite having been prosecuted by the Gacaca courts. We thus did not include them in the final analyses of the interviews, as we wanted to keep the focus on those who confirmed that they had participated actively in the genocide and agreed to answer all the questions. Those claiming innocence indeed did not answer the questions, except by saying that they were innocent.
Overall, there were three main categories of crimes for which our respondents had been convicted. The crimes included group attacks, murder,Footnote * and looting. Some of our respondents were actually convicted for several of those crimes, and sometimes, being in a group attack also included having murdered people. As examples, some of our interviewees report the following:
The crime I committed against the Tutsis, I was taught to go and kill the Tutsis and I went to grab a machete and slaughter them and looted their cows.
This respondent was categorized as committing murder and looting.
I committed genocide, killed people, I reported myself and asked for forgiveness, they released me, and I did community work. How it was that time, it was back and forth, you could see a Tutsi and just hit him with a machete or a spear it would depend on what you had in your arms. I killed three people, I would also join troops that killed people, and if they hadn’t killed them, I would kill them because that was my intention.
This respondent was categorized as committing murder and group attacks.
It is Genocide. I committed murder; I went into group attacks and killed. I killed four people, but I killed two by myself and the other two I killed them with the help of others that we were together at time.
This respondent was categorized as committing murder and group attacks.
We analyzed the frequencies of each reported crime among our sample: Out of 49 respondents, 19 reported that they participated in group attacks; 29 reported that they were convicted for murdering people; and 11 indicated that they were sentenced for looting or damaging the goods of others.
Overall, the perpetrators that we interviewed spent in average nine years in prison and were released around 2004. The Gacaca courts started in 2002 and lasted many years. Our participants had been judged guilty during the Gacaca courts and sentenced to prison, but because the majority had been caught and imprisoned directly after the genocide, the years they already spent in prison were taken into account.
Considering the atrocities committed, I was often surprised at the prison sentences given. Some perpetrators murdered many people yet only spent seven to nine years in custody. In Belgium – where I am from – such crimes involve at least twenty years of imprisonment. But Rwanda was facing several problems. First, the country had to be rebuilt and the economy had to restart. With so many men who would, in normal times, labor in fields or build houses or roads, keeping them in jail would not have been beneficial for the country. Second, the prisons were totally overcrowded. While they could host 40,000 detainees, some 120,000 men were put in jail after the genocide.Reference Clark29 Upon pleading guilty, many men were released from prison and were able to go back to their lands despite the crimes they committed.
Indeed, one of the genocide victims interviewed by the author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld in the aftermath of the genocide reported that they felt that justice was stolen from them in this way.Reference Hatzfeld30 Instead of being able to ensure that the person who attacked them and their family would be properly punished, they had to witness the perpetrator being freed.
Some of the interviewees spoke French, as this language was taught at school before the genocide, but we decided to conduct all the interviews in Kinyarwanda. Two research assistants from the University of Rwanda were thus trained to conduct the interviews. The interviewees were given the choice of answering the questions orally or in written form. We let them decide in order to adapt to their preferences and to ensure that they would feel more comfortable answering the questions.
Some of those who could write reported that they would feel more comfortable answering our questions on their own and not talking to someone directly. Others preferred to discuss verbally, either because they could not write or because Rwanda has a culture of oral transmission. In the case of oral interviews, we first asked the interviewees if they agreed to us recording the conversation with an audio recorder. After having obtained their consent, the entire conversation was thus recorded, then transcribed by the research assistants, and finally translated into English by an independent translator. All the interviews were anonymous in order for the respondents to feel entirely free to talk and to protect their identity.
I prepared several questions to be asked to the interviewees, but the interviewees were free to comment on other aspects if they wanted to. After indicating which crime(s) they committed during the genocide, we asked them why they did so, what their thoughts were when they committed those crimes, and what made them stop killing.
In cases where they did not mention having stopped their participation in the genocide by themselves, interviewees were also asked what internal factors, according to them, could have helped them stop. This is a critical question strangely largely ignored by previous academics. If the aim is to conduct such interviews to be able to develop prevention methods in the future, it is critical to also ask the people who have been in this “killing” state-of-mind what could have stopped them.
Conducting interviews in Cambodia was a radically different task.
When I first contacted Youk Chhang from Documentation Center Cambodia and mentioned that I was looking for victims and perpetrators of the Cambodian genocide for the research project, he seemed upset, but I could not understand why. For me, the distinction between victims and perpetrators was very clear, as mentioned in previous academic research. But he told me that in Cambodia, they are all considered as “survivors,” no matter what they did during the genocide.
I had no idea how else to refer to those who were “responsible” for the death of a quarter of the Cambodian population at that time. In Rwanda, the word “survivor” is used for victims only, who actually prefer the term “survivor” instead of “victim” as it shows their strength in overcoming their trauma. I expected to be able to resolve this issue once I arrived in Cambodia, as it is always better to talk to the people from the country than reading scientific articles written by foreigners to really understand their perspective.
Once again with Guillaume, my partner, I arrived in Cambodia in January 2023. We started our journey by driving up to the city of Anlong Veng, located in the northern part of the country, close to the Thai border. This region was crucial for the research project because after the Vietnamese army took over the country and ended the genocide, a huge number of Khmer Rouge fled there and continued to resist until 1998. Anlong Veng district was the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge and also where Pol Pot ended his life. Many of the Khmer Rouge cadres were – and still are – living in Anlong Veng.
I explained to the director of the center located in Anlong Veng and his staff that I needed to know who was a “victim” and who was “a former member of the Khmer Rouge organization.” I did not dare to use the word “perpetrator,” because clearly people appeared systematically upset. The distinction was important because the interviews were for “the former members of the Khmer Rouge organization” only. I thus needed to know who was who.
I faced many obstacles from the start. When interviewees were asked, they almost all reported that they were victims. Even among the research assistants helping us with the translations, they indicated that this or that person was a victim, but the director of the center told me afterwards that they were also former Khmer Rouge. It was really a much more complex exercise than expected. Even in the next centers, after explaining the distinction, the confusion persisted: I was told many times that this or that person was a former Khmer Rouge cadre, “but you know, at a very low level of responsibility, (s)he just followed orders.”
I have heard this caveat so many times across Cambodia that it really started to puzzle me. Why do they systematically reduce the responsibility of the interviewees by saying that they just followed orders? I expected to hear this reasoning from the interviewees themselves, but not from others.
In Cambodia, the reduction of responsibility after following orders appears to be an accepted reason for conducting acts that should have been prohibited. The number of individuals condemned at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) is actually a good illustration, as only five persons in sixteen years have been condemned. They considered that only the main leaders of the Khmer Rouge had to be judged, not the others, even cadres or direct executioners, as they were just following orders.
But another key element to consider is that when the Khmer Rouge took over the country, they split families and started to give roles to everyone, whether they were children or adults, women or men. Somehow the entire population was part of the Khmer Rouge. The “real victims,” as I was told by Cambodians, are dead because they did not take part in the regime. Everyone is guilty, or no one is guilty. Therefore, on the one hand, there are almost no real victims left – only members of the regime. And on the other hand, there are only victims left, as they all suffered during the regime and “just obeyed orders” to cause suffering.
Figure 1.1 depicts the number of events that the people I interviewed experienced between 1975 and 1979, either by those identified as former Khmer Rouge members or by those identified as former victims, based on what the directors of the centers told us. As one can note, these two groups experienced relatively similar suffering across all categories.
Figure 1.1 Reported traumatic experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime. In Cambodia, a clear distinction between “victims” and “perpetrators” is very difficult to make. As this graph shows, both former Khmer Rouge members and victims reported similar traumatic experiences during the Khmer Rouge regime.
As mentioned in the Introduction, there were many roles assigned during the regime: Palm Unit, Medical Unit, Mobile Work Unit, Middle-Age Mobile Work, Women’s Mobile Unit, Teacher, Military, prison guards, and so on. I thus asked interviewees what their role was during the Khmer Rouge regime. I thought that knowing their role would probably help me identify those who were “responsible for injuring or killing others” and those who were simply executing their low-level roles without hurting anyone. For instance, the job of those working in the Palm Unit was to collect coconuts from the palm trees daily, and the Mobile Work Unit had to transport the rice that was collected. But I rapidly realized that knowing someone’s role was not that easy when it came to determining their role as potential perpetrators. For instance, I thought that the medical unit was only taking care of people injured or ill. But I learned that some awful acts were carried out by some medical units during the Khmer Rouge regime. With the purpose of refusing anything coming from the West, the Khmer Rouge entirely rejected western medicine. People were selected to work in the Medical Unit, often without any medical qualification at all, some of them being only in their early teens.Reference Tayner31 It resulted in countless acts of torture and deaths. For instance, reports have indicated that they opened the bodies of people still alive and injected coconut milk into them to see if it had any positive effect on their health. Or they removed the livers of living people, without anesthesia, which resulted in immediate death. Most of them had no idea what they were doing or about traditional Cambodian medicine.
I thus decided to include in the interviews anyone who had been part of the Khmer Rouge. Regardless of whether they had killed or injured anyone, I found it very interesting to understand the perspective of everyone at that time, no matter what their position was in the Khmer Rouge chain. This is crucial to understand better how such organization and diffusion of responsibility was implemented and how it lasted for so many years.
I also asked the local staff from the centers to conduct the interviews instead of the research assistants from the university in the hopes that the interviewees might be more at ease with answering questions posed by them. Former Khmer Rouge members rarely talk about what happened, even to their own families. I talked to several people from the first generation born after the genocide, and almost all of them told me that they had no idea about the role of their parents during the regime. Some reported that they knew their parents were soldiers at that time, but added that they never ever talked about what they did.
Overall, I did not expect much from the interviews. And my fear regarding the difficulty of them not talking during the interviews was confirmed. While in Rwanda, people openly admitted their potential crimes; in Cambodia, of the sixty interviews conducted, they all answered “No” to the question “Did you hurt someone between 1975 and 1979?”
Of course, it may be the case that I only recruited people who actually did nothing during this period. However, ten admitted working as soldiers or as prison guards transporting prisoners to the killing fieldsFootnote † between 1975 and 1979. These individuals all reported that they never hurt anyone at that time, and one declined to answer. Yet all the sixty interviewees said that they witnessed or heard about people being systematically murdered. With more than 1 million persons killed at that time and all people acknowledging witnessing or hearing about such events but no one admitting having participated in one way or another, we rapidly realized that the interviews would not be as informative as in Rwanda.
Other academics had faced similar difficulty in conducting interviews with those involved in the violence committed during the Khmer Rouge regime. Alexander Hinton, a US anthropologist, spent months in Cambodia doing research for his postdoctoral thesis. In one of his articles, he describes a conversation he had with an ex-soldier who had worked at Tuol Sleng, the infamous detention center also known as S-21, where thousands of people were tortured and died.Reference Hinton32 Hinton learned from other people that this ex-soldier had killed at least 400 people between 1975 and 1979. Another person, who was a former prisoner of the S-21, even reported that this man executed more than 2,000 men, women, and children. However, Hinton never succeeded in getting him to talk about such acts. The interviewee only admitted being a guard and transporting prisoners, but denied having executed anyone. After further questioning by Hinton, he barely admitted killing one or two people but added that he did that to avoid having others accuse him of being unreliable.
Beyond the difficulty of getting interviewees to talk to us, another difficulty was that the events happened almost fifty years ago, and most of our interviewees were quite old. We realized that in some interviews, the dates – and sometimes roles – were not consistent. For instance, a woman reported that in 1975 she returned to live with her husband, but that she got married in 1977. She also reported that between 1976 and 1977 she worked in a kitchen and cooked. However, she also briefly mentioned during that same interview that she was sent to join the army at that time and was the leader of a unit of ninety-seven people.
As a result, the following sections mostly focus on the answers that were obtained from the former genocide perpetrators in Rwanda. Whenever possible, however, I will integrate the stories of former Khmer Rouge members.
Interpreting the Interviews
In the pages to come, I introduce the key questions asked in each interview, such as the reasons for participating in the genocide or what the respondents felt when they participated. I suggest commonalities, highlight challenges, and offer interpretation. Throughout, I offer copious examples of translated answers in the perpetrators’ own words. Doing so enables us to see the complexity of genocide as a phenomenon, as it arises from the interplay of various psychological, social, political, economic, and cultural factors.
Why Did You Commit Those Crimes?
In Rwanda, the huge majority of our respondents reported that they carried out their crimes because they were following the orders of the “bad government.” Others reported that they were forced to commit those crimes, and others because they were influenced by the group. These three rationales represent three distinct forms of social influence that can affect people’s behaviors: obedience, compliance, and social conformity.
Conformity can be defined as changing your behavior to fit with the group, even if you do not agree with the group. When they conform, individuals simply want to be accepted by the majority. The difference between obedience and compliance, however, is subtle. Obedience refers to a form of social influence in which a person gives in to direct instructions or orders from an authority figure without question, while compliance involves following the request of another person or of a group.
Examples of compliance could be a student who submits their assignment on time to avoid penalties after the teacher announces a strict deadline, or a person who donates money to a charity when approached by a persuasive fundraiser on the street. Examples of obedience would rather be soldiers following orders to engage in combat during wartime, even if they personally have moral objections, or employees follow following a company policy that they may not fully agree with, but they do so because it is mandated by upper management. Obedience is thus a more formal form of influence, as it involves obeying the orders of an official authority, while compliance refers to agreeing to follow the orders of anyone, for one reason or another. Notably, compliance can be increased by using intimidation or punishment. Compliance and obedience can be difficult to distinguish, because it depends on how the person perceives the authority and its legitimacy. Thus, a main category of “obedience” is presented below.
Group Attacks
As mentioned the introduction, in Rwanda, an armed militia, the Interahamwe, is held responsible for the 1994 genocide because its members led the killings and influenced others to join them. The word Interahamwe can be literally translated as “Those who attack together.” Indeed, when asked about their crimes, many former Rwandan perpetrators used the word igitero (pl. ibitero) to explain how they killed, which means group attack.Reference Mironko33 Before coming to Rwanda, I read the work of several academics who had conducted interviews there. I knew just a few words of Kinyarwanda, but igitero was definitely one of them.
Our first interview was with a 61-year-old man who spent seven years in prison. He actually did not want to talk about what he did during the genocide but agreed to answer our questionnaires in written form and then to talk if we had additional questions. After he completed the questionnaires, I read his answers with one of the research assistants as he wrote in Kinyarwanda. To the question “Why did you participate in the killing acts?”, I saw written in capital letters IBITERO.
I had been hoping to obtain very detailed and more precise reasons than, simply, “the group did it” – a phrase repeated in the previously published interviews I had read before my arrival. We thus talked to him as agreed, and he confirmed that there were actually no other reasons. Conducting the killing acts in a group critically influenced him and allowed him to kill even if he had never done so before. Of the 49 perpetrators that we interviewed, 19 respondents indicated that they were convicted for taking part in group attacks and 9 indicated that igitero was the reason for committing the killing acts.
The following examples are drawn from our interviews:
My armed group killed 7 people. Sorry, it was actually rather 7 children and their mother, making it 8 in total.
I joined group attacks to run after the Tutsis and went on patrol killing many Tutsis.
I committed a crime by joining a group attack that killed and looted.
I went on a raid and it killed someone, I played a part in that.
It is difficult to know if using the group to justify their action really reflects their understanding of their involvement or if they have developed this rationale to avoid feeling too guilty. They probably do not even know the answer themselves. As we will see in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, the group is a powerful social construct that can drastically influence behaviors.
Obedience to (Bad) Authority
In 1992, Christopher Browning, a US historian, published a book in which he reports his analysis of the psychological profile of 125 men from the Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police (Ordnungspolizei, Orpo) during World War II, whose testimonies during interrogation had been recorded.Reference Browning34 Many of them were middle-aged family men. They were considered too old to be useful in the German army, so they were sent to be part of the German police. In 1942, when those men arrived in Poland, their group leader, Major Wilhelm Trapp, told them to round up the Jews in the city of Józefów, to take the men to the camps and to kill the women and children.
But Trapp offered something unexpected. He told his men that any man who did not want to participate in the shooting would be excused. Trapp himself apparently did not like what they were tasked to do, but, as the orders came from the highest authority, the job had to be done.
Of the 125 men, only one, Otto-Julius Schimke, refused. Twelve more joined when they saw that Trapp’s promise was real and that he protected Schimke from Captain Hoffman, the company leader, who was furious to see one of his men refusing to do the job. On July 13, 1942, that battalion executed 1,500 Jews. In total, it is estimated that the battalion was involved in the direct shooting of 38,000 persons. Taking into account those who died as a result of deportation in the death trains, the total number killed by this battalion is estimated to be 83,000. A few more men were excused duties during the executions and were given other tasks, but in total, still 80 to 90 percent of the battalion participated despite the lack of consequences if they refused such orders. And there was no element of coercion. Christopher Browning argued that obedience to authority was a critical factor in explaining why so many of those ordinary men became killers.
Expressing an absence of responsibility is one of the main reasons people use the justification that they were just following orders. They thus avoid being held responsible and accountable for their actions. The most infamous historical example is certainly the justification “Befehl ist Befehl” (literally “An order is an order”) evoked by senior Nazi officers during the Nuremberg trials after World War II. It refers to the idea that a subordinate cannot be held responsible for a crime as he was following superior orders.Reference Badar35 Senior Nazi officers claimed that they followed the leader principle (i.e., Führerprinzip) that governed the Nazi regime. This principle basically states that absolute or near‐absolute obedience was to be given by all members of the society to the Führer.Reference King and King36 The Führer’s word was considered to be above the law. Since they pledged allegiance to Hitler, Nazi officers had to follow orders. As a result, they should not be held responsible for their acts.
This claim of diminished responsibility under an obligation to obey orders has actually been observed in every genocide in the history of nations. In Rwanda, a twist to this standard response is the idea that perpetrators were following the orders of “bad” leaders.Reference Anderson17, Reference Moss37 In the interviews I conducted, 33 of the 49 interviewees reported that they conducted the genocide because the “bad” government asked them to do so. The interviewees reported justifications such as:
The reason why I did it was because of bad government that trained us to kill Tutsis.
The bad government commanded us to kill the Tutsis. It was not our intention, but the bad government convinced us.
It is bad leadership that instructed us to kill people and become animals, even though we were not animals. Yes, it is the leadership that did this, not us.
I committed the crime because of the bad government that was there at that time. It was not me as they instructed us to kill.
The crime that I committed was a massive killing that I was told to do by the leaders who were there at the time, who encouraged us to kill Tutsis saying that they are bad people.
What made me do it was the bad government that led us and encouraged us to kill our fellow countrymen.
Significantly, there was not a single overlap between the “group attack” justification and the “obedience to the bad government” justification. People reported either one or the other. This is interesting as it suggests that people may differ regarding their sensibility to different forms of social influence. As the genocide in Rwanda involved official orders from the self-proclaimed government to start the killings, and because the killings were mostly performed in groups, it actually represented a fertile ground to ensure that a majority of people would participate as well.
Respect and deference to authority are culturally important in Rwanda. Many academics and journalists have reported that deference to authority is an important factor in explaining the genocide.Reference Paluck and Green38, Reference Prunier39 Some have reported that this “entrenched culture of obedience,” for instance, allowed many Hutus to kill their Tutsi wives.Reference Lacey40 It was therefore expected that the authority argument used by the genocide perpetrators would be widespread.
But obedience to authority, despite being an important part of the local culture, is relative and context-dependent rather than absolute. For instance, during the worldwide coffee crisis in the 1980s, prices of coffee crashed, and many farmers were tempted to shift their production to other crops. Despite being forbidden under the Rwandan Penal Code (1978), a few peasants nonetheless uprooted the coffee trees and transgressed the law.Reference Mukashema, Veldkamp and Amer41 Other examples involve farmers running into the banana groves to avoid local officials compelling them to attend the Gacaca courts or peasants bypassing the mandatory communal labor, known as umugandaReference Waldorf42 – a traditional Rwandan activity had been re-established after the genocide as a way to help reconciliation.
Also during the genocide acts of disobedience were observed. Some individuals refused to participate in the massacres and even risked their own lives to rescue people. Though obedience to authority is an important factor in understanding the genocide in Rwanda, it is thus crucial to keep the agency of perpetrators in the equation, as well as the many other factors responsible for the atrocities and acts of torture, beyond “simply” killing.Reference Hatzfeld43, Reference Nowrojee44 Indeed, several genocide perpetrators went far beyond the received orders. In its darkest moments, the genocide in Rwanda involved numerous acts of torture perpetrated with rural tools, even against relatives.
And that is the main problem with obedience to authority. If one wants to kill without feeling too guilty, hiding behind the mantra “I just obeyed orders” is a perfect excuse. As the examples here suggest, even when respect for authority is an important part of the culture, citizens also chose to obey or disobey when it was convenient for them.
Being Forced to Participate
Ten of our 49 interviewees responded that they participated because they felt forced. Many of them actually reported that they feared consequences if they did not join in the group attacks, such as being killed themselves. Interestingly, there were some overlaps with the “group attacks” (igitero) in the respondents’ justifications, as several of them reported that they joined in the group attacks because they considered that they had no choice or would risk their lives.
For the government that was in place at the time, the killings were almost law, which is why people were afraid for their lives. And I chose to do what they told me.
When you refused to join them, they would take you by force since you were a young man. I joined group attacks as a way of self-defense because if one refused to join forces with them, they would beat you up, break you and you could possibly derive problems from that.
At that time, when you didn’t collaborate with others you were likely to be in danger so it was a way of protecting myself. They even killed my dad because they found a person hiding in our home and butchered our cow so it was a way of protecting myself.
Hence, what made me agree to do it was that I left my house and was cut. I wasn’t cut while home, so I would not deny it but you understand that I didn’t do it on purpose; it was so my kids wouldn’t be tortured that I didn’t go yet I was the only one remaining at home.
The reason why I went is that they took us by force. There is no other reason.
One of the people claiming his innocence actually told us the following during the interviews:
During the time of genocide, we were told that the Tutsi were enemies of the country and wanted to attack Rwanda and that’s why they were being killed. We were scared and that’s why some people went to kill but there are some who didn’t go. However, if you didn’t go, you had to pay a fine. I paid an amount of twenty-one thousand Rwandan francs (21,000rwf). At the time, I was a businessman, they took my money because I refused to go.
While some people reported that they killed because they were obeying orders or because of the influence of the group, it appears that some individuals were really afraid for their lives if they did not join. This is consistent with some reports indicating that the Interahamwe went door by door to tell the men to join the killings. Killing Tutsis was somehow an obligation at that time and refusing to join could have consequences, unless you could pay. Plenty of moderate Hutus, who did not go along with being forced to participate, also died during the genocide, even though they are less frequently mentioned in the histories.
Other Rationales
Among the other reasons mentioned for why they committed acts of violence, four respondents indicated that they participated because they wanted to loot:
The reason why I joined group attacks was the encouragement from the government, for the looting part; we would go because the owners would have been killed or had fled.
What made me do that crime of genocide is because they had said that the Tutsi must be killed, when I saw that I was not able to kill, I went after possessions, I ran around looking for possessions.
According to Jean Hatzfeld, many perpetrators reported that their wives, even if they did not take part in the genocide itself, motivated their husbands to continue killing when they came back home after their “working day” in order to steal and loot more. In the church of Nyamata, where 10,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, many women came to steal the kitengeFootnote ‡ or other personal belongings from the dead. After some families were killed, the killers’ wives came inside the house and took everything that was valuable or exchangeable for money.
Only two participants said that they killed Tutsis because of their race. This is astonishing because it was the main justification given by the government to start the ethnic cleansing. Yet only two reported this reason.
I killed the Tutsi because of their race. The authorities said that Tutsis are bad because they killed the country’s leader so they should be killed, and because I was taught in class that the Hutus should stand up for the political parties of CDRFootnote § who also taught us that Tutsis are bad.
The infrequent reporting of dehumanization or ethnic hatred is noteworthy. Based on this observation, the literature suggests that social dynamics, including authority and group conformity, played a more significant role than pure ethnic hatred.Reference Fujii321
Three respondents said that they participated in the genocide because of ignorance or because they were lured by the government.
In Rwanda, the results of the interviews show that obedience to authority was the most widespread reason given to explain interviewees’ participation in the genocide. Some also reported group influence or being forced to participate. However, only ten reported having felt forced to participate, which could show that elements of coercion were not necessarily used to convince people to participate in the genocide.
In Cambodia, we interviewed 60 former Khmer Rouge, but we did not obtain systematic answers to all our questions. Sometimes, respondents said it was too difficult to explain or to remember, or they preferred not to answer. In one of the questions, we asked those identified as former Khmer Rouge members, irrespective of their roles, why they participated in the regime. All of the forty respondents who answered that question explained that they just followed orders, most of the time in very succinct answers. Most of them also reported clear elements of coercion, by saying that they were risking their lives if they did not obey orders.
Of course it was so difficult living [in] hard [conditions], and it was a bitter life. There is no comparison, but we didn’t know how to leave that situation. We needed to do what they told us to do.
We followed all their orders. If we did not follow them, they said we did not obey the organisation. We could be killed.
We were under them. They controlled us.
At that time, I did not hold any specific role. I was just a member of the women’s unit, and I had to do anything that I was told to do. If I refused, I risked being taken away and killed.
I was ordered to do it, so I had to.
It is clear from historical reports that the regime murdered people very easily between 1975 and 1979.Reference Tyner, Kimsroy, Fu, Wang and Ye45 Being considered a traitor to the ideology or not working hard enough for the regime, with or without proof, could lead to being killed, most of the time also with family members, who were considered as potential accomplices. People were living in fear of being executed at any time, an aspect that many respondents reported in much more detail than when asked to explain their participation in the regime.
They forced us to work until death, and we did not dare to argue because we were afraid of getting killed. We did all kinds of work as they told us, and it was extremely challenging. Some people broke their arms or legs and became disabled. At that time, I was the leader of the cooperative, and sometimes they took us by car, and we did not know where they were taking us. We thought that if we died, we would die. If we were accused of betrayal, we would be killed. Fortunately, we survived. When going to sleep, we did not know if we would wake up alive because some people were called and disappeared, and it scared me.
At that time, I worked in a mobile unit, working day and night and not getting enough food. When we were sick, they still did not let us get rest unless we were unable to get out of bed. There was no medicine in those days, we did not dare to talk to them because we were very afraid of them. Second, in 1977, they tortured us so badly, they beat us. We were punished for small problems such as taking the food to eat even if that food was grown on our land. They would kill us.
It is a very hard task to compare the two different situations in Rwanda and Cambodia. However, in broad terms, despite very different historical, economic, and political situations, two main elements emerged from the question of why people committed the acts they did. First, it seems that obedience to authority was a critical factor in both Rwanda and Cambodia, with many people openly reporting that this is the reason why they participated, no matter what their role was during the genocide. Second, elements of coercion were also present, even though the extent to which coercion was systematically used is less clear.
In Rwanda, many did not feel forced to participate, but they nonetheless did so because they believed in the ideology of the genocide. In Cambodia, people reported that they were afraid of being tortured and killed if they did not participate. But many people also supported the ideology of the Khmer Rouge and their vision of creating a classless society. The more than 1 million deaths suggests that many people acted for the “good” of that ideology, by ensuring systematic killings of those with a different vision. Previous reports also indicated that some individuals killed others in order to be promoted at a higher rank.Reference Williams and Neilsen46 But, as mentioned, in Cambodia, those who participated in the killings are very hard to identify and even harder to interview. While they talk openly about what happened to them or to others during that period, they almost never indicate what they may have done to others.
What Were Your Thoughts at the Moment of the Act?
This is a question that was not asked in Cambodia, considering that none of the interviewees admitted hurting anyone. This question was thus only put to the former genocide perpetrators in Rwanda. I was not sure what to expect from the question at first because I had not seen past interviews asking anything similar. I wanted to have a better overview of the state-of-mind of the genocide perpetrators when they conducted the crimes they have been convicted of. Perhaps they would report that they were proud to participate in this ethnic cleansing, but perhaps they would also report very negative emotions or thoughts.
The responses were less consistent and much more variable than when the interviewees were asked why they participated in the genocide. Twelve different categories of answers were derived from the analysis, while we had only six categories when they were asked why they participated. Several respondents indicated several emotions or thoughts and were thus included in different categories.
Interestingly, 14 out of 49 reported that they were afraid when they participated in the genocide. They offered responses such as:
I would say that the emotion I had was the fear of dying.
I would be afraid, because they took us against our will. When you refused, they could even kill you.
The thought I had, I didn’t plan to harass anyone or to cause conflict. Because when we refused there were consequences. My younger brother was killed and older brother too, because they refused to go in the group attacks, so as the ones left behind, we were afraid that they would take us by force.
At that time, it was sad because we did it as a way of protecting ourselves since anyone who refused to go on the hunt was called an accomplice of the Tutsi. Even finding out that you hid someone would make them kill you so that’s why we engaged in the killing.
In that time of genocide, I thought that I would die.
In fact I thought that people were not supposed to die but the bad government encouraged us to go kill each other, forcibly. It used force to encourage us because if you refused to participate, you would be punished and pay a fine. That’s what I can explain.
Twelve of the respondents again mentioned that their thoughts were to obey the orders received, saying things like:
We didn’t have those ideas, the bad government that was in power instructed us to kill and put bad ideologies into us.
As a citizen, I wasn’t thinking of anything else except following the laws set by the government of that time because they were the ones encouraging us.
Because of being ordered around and coerced by the government; we had no individual thoughts or feelings.
We were young at that time and joined others without knowing how it was planned; it was planned by the high-level leaders.
Seven respondents indicated that they had no emotions or feelings during the genocide. Their responses included reflections such as:
At that time, we didn’t have emotions. We were full of heinousness and nothing good was in us.
The thoughts were to kill a Tutsi only, no emotions.
There were no emotions, you were not allowed to have emotions, and you were supposed to do what you were told. There were no emotions, it was about killing and whenever you started killing, it would become your full-time job, you wouldn’t have any other occupation.
Oh well, we didn’t have any conscience, we were like animals because the things we would do were very bad things that are inhumane.
Six respondents indicated that they felt like awful or cruel individuals. One, in particular, captured the tenor of these responses:
I felt like an awful killer. Imagine seeing someone who hasn’t insulted you and slaughtering them and their cows. As you can understand I was a cruel person. In your opinion, do you think I was normal? It was insanity and greed, would you say I was a normal person then? Taking someone who used to be your neighbor, who you used to share everything with and take a machete and slaughter them, is there any inhumane act worse than that? I was heinous. I am not going to lie to you, during that time it was pure cruelty. Imagine seeing a cow and taking a machete and slaughtering it and you see the owner and slaughter them as well, and destroy their house, yet s/he hasn’t stolen from you or insulted you, isn’t that just more than cruelty? They were brutal killings.
Among the participants, several emotions and thoughts were reported. Eight participants expressed that the events troubled them, while two admitted having bad intentions. Additionally, four participants held negative views about the Tutsis, and two others admitted being motivated by personal greed. Two individuals reported feeling heinous, one mentioned ignorance, and another one thought about the absence of consequences for committing the crimes.
From this section, it is clear that answers varied considerably, from not thinking at all and acting as mere machines, to considering oneself as a bad or cruel person. It may be the case that, indeed, humans vary greatly in how they feel in such situations. Whether these different feelings could be associated with the possibility of acting differently, however, remains unanswered.
What (Would Have) Stopped You from Participating in the Genocide?
Little research has been done on how genocides end or why they end.Reference Rafter47 It has been argued that only external entities can stop a genocidal killing process. Of course, the first that should act is the government of the country where such events are happening. However, most of the time, the government is the entity that gave the authorization to murder another part of the population. Other nations must thus intervene to stop the process.
Past historical examples have indeed shown that genocides almost never stop by themselves, except when the targeted population had been exterminated. The Allied troops stopped the Holocaust by defeating the Nazis, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia ended the genocide by defeating the Khmer Rouge, the Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR) stopped the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda when they took over the country, the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended in 1995 following an offensive in Croatia and intervention by NATO.
In Rwanda, we observed during the interviews that participants did not expect to be asked what could have stopped them, and they were far more hesitant about how to answer this question than the other questions we asked. Because it seems that no one had asked them this question before, it would be interesting in future research to see if their answers would be different if they could have time to prepare their answers.
Thirty-three interviewees indicated that only the intervention of the Inkotanyi was able to stop them. The Inkotanyi is the Kinyarwanda name given to the Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR) troops and can be translated as “those who fight with the most courage.” The FPR was led at that time by the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. On July 4, 1994, they took over Kigali and ended the genocide.
For me, what stopped the killings was the fact that Inkotanyi took over and those bad leaders that have propagated lies fled and left us in Rwanda. Basically, the genocide was stopped by Inkotanyi when they arrived in Rwanda, otherwise we would have all killed each other, we were monstrous; we would have finished killing all the Tutsis and start killing each other as well. […]. Then Inkotanyi came and arrested me. When I got released, I had regained humanity but before I was a monster, deciding to slaughter a person? Don’t you think I was monstrous?
The genocide was stopped by the FPR. Otherwise, for my part when I committed the crimes I did I thought of them as easy.
It is the Inkotanyi that came and stopped the killings. I was sent to prison. Otherwise, I might have repeated the crime and motivated my children to do the same.
There is nothing else that stopped this apart from the fact that Inkotanyi came; otherwise, due to wanting property and other things that people were hungry for, we would have killed off each other as well.
Such results actually emphasize the importance for other nations or governments of stopping an ongoing genocide. Some genocides could have been stopped earlier if international governments had decided to act faster. This is notably the case in Rwanda, as the international community required all their military to leave Rwanda when the killings started, leaving the entire population at the mercy of the killers. A woman interviewed by Jean Hatzfeld reports that at the beginning of the genocide the killers were afraid of the white men, because they had terrible and powerful weapons that could stop them. However, when the white men fled, they saw this as an incredible opportunity to continue to perpetrate the massacre without intervention.Reference Hatzfeld30
In Cambodia, the answers were all strongly consistent. Out of the 35 interviewees who answered this question, 34 reported that they would not have stopped if the Vietnamese had not taken over the country in 1979. One respondent reported that he could have stopped on his own, but did not give further details as to how. Cambodian interviewees shared some of the following thoughts:
Until they [Vietnamese soldiers] disbanded it [the Khmer Rouge regime], I did not dare to leave as I was afraid.
I believe that without Vietnam’s intervention, we would not have known what happened to our country because it was very confusing. Even I, myself, did not understand the regime’s motives. I did as they told and did not oppose them; otherwise, death awaited me.
I did not dare to leave it [the Khmer Rouge regime] because I was afraid.
I don’t think I could have found a way to liberate Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge regime.
If it could not be stopped, we all would die and become extinct.
But in both contexts, by the time other nations or groups agreed to act and succeeded at stopping the genocide, tens of thousands of people had already been massacred. This is why it is also crucial to understand if some personal elements in the minds of the perpetrators could help them stop killing. Elements that could perhaps be emphasized in order to prevent people from joining in the killing in the first place.
Eighteen interviewees in Rwanda reported that they did stop by themselves at some point. But the reasons for stopping were quite different. Two explained that they stopped for very practical reasons. One reports, “What enabled me to stop was that the Tutsis who were left lived far away; that stopped me from going anywhere else” (P164) and another one reports, “It was fatigue, you see if you go from here to there you would get tired and stop there, so it was fatigue, I would get tired” (P171). In this regard, we could consider that they would have continued if it weren’t for the distances involved.
Four of them, however, mentioned that it was God who helped them to stop or to refuse to kill others:
That was because of the bad government, my heart pushed me, it pushed to feel that I shouldn’t do such a thing. So those who did it were used by the government, they did it. As for me God stood by me, I never abused people or shed blood.
What enabled me? on my own I didn’t have any strength or power. It was only God who helped me; otherwise, it seemed like the end for me.
It’s because of God. Because even having not killed everyone and how Inkotanyi came it was only God. I couldn’t stop myself because we were driven by the laws.
In life, the first thing is to trust in God even if we are running most of the time. I can say that it is God, it is not my might rather it is God’s ability.
The role of religion appears to be crucial for some, as it prevented them from committing crimes that their religion would prohibit. However, during the genocide, highly religious individuals also actively participated in the genocide. In June 2001, an unusual trial took place in Belgium. Two Hutu nuns from a convent in Sovu, Consolata Mukangango and Julienne Mukabutera, were found guilty of having handed over to the Interahamwe militia the Tutsi families who had taken refuge in the convent compound. Indeed, we can find survivors and perpetrators in Rwanda from the same religions, showing that religion does not always offer a protection from committing terrible acts.
Among those who reported stopping for personal values and reporting external influence, seven reported that they realized that what they were doing was not good. They reported things like:
Without external influence I thought about how I demolished a brother’s home yet we had no dispute. I then pleaded guilty when I went to prison. I accepted to repay the house and I’ve finished repaying.
I thought about it as well in my heart. When I observed what we were doing to Rwandans I found it bad, I thought about that in my heart and I still do. That is why we interact and asked for forgiveness from survivors, I still seek for their forgiveness and sometimes go to lend them a hand without a problem. It was all due to the corrupt government that made us do evil crimes.
What caused me to stop, I would look at consequences associated with it, I would see my fellows dying and we were neighbors with whom we had no problems. So I decided to run away and my people died and I ended up in prison, I was under a lot of stress which led to my illness, so it showed me that what we were doing was wrong but the root cause was our leaders who sensitized us.
Three also indicated that they felt sad about what was happening. One, for example, shared:
The reason … what motivated me to stop doing it was, I saw how people were chased out and dying and I was sad and sorrowful … and I said that what we are doing has no use. After sometime things went quiet for a while, Inkotanyi liberated the country and I fled but I came back in July. I didn’t stay out of the country long because I didn’t feel guilty, but in the month of 12 [December],1994, the government of reconciliation wanted to imprison those who committed crimes and then do a follow up. The government took care of us, the President of the country gave a presidential decree in 2003. In 2003 I had confessed, that’s when I went home although I was convicted again later.
Among those who reported that they could not have been stopped, answers were much more difficult to obtain. Perhaps a mind blinded by hate and violence cannot be rescued. Yet five could describe feelings or emotions that could have helped them to stop – although they did not feel them at the time. Two said that they would have stopped if they had felt guilt, two indicated that compassion would have been a key emotion, and one reported love for others.
Conclusion
This chapter showed that by interviewing perpetrators, researchers can gain valuable insights into the psychological and social factors that contribute to participating in a genocide. Whether it was by asking what their motivations or feelings were at the time, or the way they stopped, or could have stopped, their responses help to capture the complexity of their participation.
But conducting such interviews is a sensitive and difficult process and must be carried out with caution to avoid causing further harm to survivors or perpetuating stereotypes. In addition, one should never forget that the insights obtained from these interviews only rely on what people agree to share or remember. Relying on interviews only is thus not sufficient to grasp the complexity of obedience to orders to hurt another person. Another important element is that genocides are extreme and rare events, and drawing conclusions about human behavior based solely on them may not provide a complete picture.
Experimental research helps to investigate obedience in a more general context, which can then be applied to a broader range of situations and populations. Such research allows for a controlled and systematic investigation of obedience, which is not possible in real-world scenarios like genocides. These experiments enable researchers to manipulate specific factors and measure their effects on obedience, thereby enhancing our understanding of the underlying psychological processes. However, as will be discussed in the next chapter, a gap will nonetheless always persist between what is observed in a lab context and its generalization to real-life events, hence confirming the need for an interdisciplinary perspective.
In the following chapter, we will go through the many experimental studies in psychology and neuroscience that have tried to bring elements of answers to help us understand participation is mass atrocities. And as we will see, people are also extremely obedient in experimental set-ups, even when they are asked to physically hurt another, unknown, individual.
