Prof. Marcuse
Oct. 15, 1998
UCSB Hist 133C
GERMAN HISTORY SINCE 1945

Lecture 6: Establishing a "Democratic" State in the West

1. Administrative / Announcements / Preliminary
   • Q1
   • Wed./Thu., Oct. 21/22: Classroom walkout to protest Prop. 209 (no ethnicity in admissions)
   • Film "The Promise" will be shown twice: Tue Oct. 20, 7pm, HSSB 1173; Wed. HSSB 1174.
   • Additional question on Böll?
2. Ways of coming to terms with the past-select only certain aspects:
   • Nazism as glory
   • Nazism as selfishness, corruption, opportunism
   • Nazism as crime, violence, destruction, inhumanity
     • Nuremberg Trials
     • "Genocide:"
3. Guest speaker UCSB graduate student Scopas Sekwat Poggo: Genocide/Atrocities in the Southern Sudan
   • Rich country with primarily Arab-Islamic North (20 mio. people), African-Christian South (7 mio.)
   • History: British policy to develop north first, give independence, then develop South
     • 1955: conflicts prior to independence from Britain (Jan. 1, 1956); British supported North
     • 1963-72: Anya-Nya Southern guerrilla movement wages war against North
     • 1965 roundtable talks in Khartoum: unitary Islamic state or confederation?
     • July 1965: massacres in JUBA, WAU and MALAKAL.
       Reports to Amnesty Int'l, Int'l Jurists Org., Org. of African Unity, All African Conf. of Churches
       Media reporting on the massacres: The Vigilant (S. Sudan), times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian, …
     • What did WE know? What did "we" do?
     • 1968 pact between South and North
     • 1969-1985: General Gaffar Mohammed NIMEIRY takes over power
       1969-71 tried to suppress S. rebels, used Soviet MIGs to bomb villages
     • 1972-1983 peace agreement
       1983 Colonel Dr. John GARANG de Mabior founds the Sudan People's Liberation Army
     • 1985: civilian uprising overthrows Nimeiry; 1985-86 transitional period to civilian rule
     • 1986: Prime Min. Sadiq AL-MAHDI elected, civil war continues, with intermittent peace talks
     • 1989: al-Mahdi overthrown by General Omer HASSAN AL-BASHIR in bloodless coup
       period of extreme repression begins: Southern villages bombed by Sudanese and Soviet Antonov planes; 1991 massacre of intellectuals in Juba
     • "condemnation" by United Nations, United States gov't, and human rights organizations
       crisis of famine, disease, refugees
   • News sources on the Sudan: New Sudan Online, http://members.aol.com/NewSudan/Online.html
     (link on the course web page), also US newspapers, BBC Focus on Africa, Voice of America

• United Nations Genocide Convention, 1951 (Art. 2): "… genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: 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.
• Harff and Gurr, 1988: "genocides and politicides are the promotion and execution of policies by a state or its agents which result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a group.
  The difference between genocides and politicides is in the characteristics by which members of the group are identified by the state.
  In genocides the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity, religion or nationality.
  In politicides the victim groups are defined primarily in terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups."
• Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990: "a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."
• Charny, 1994: "the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims."
• Katz, 1994: "the concept of genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent, however successfully carried out, to physically destroy an entire group (as such a group is defined by the perpetrators)."