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Israel capable of ethnic cleansing of Bedouin

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Israel capable of ethnic cleansing of Bedouin

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Israel capable of ethnic cleansing of Bedouins_ J. Catron.mp4

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Ethnic Cleansing

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Ethnic Cleansing - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Ethnic Cleansing, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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Ethnic Conflict Leading to Ethnic Cleansing

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Ethnic Conflict Leading to Ethnic Cleansing

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Anthropologists who study warfare disagree about how much war there is, how far back it goes, and why it happens. Certainly there is a lot of war in the ethnographic record, though it is far from universal. Dozens of peoples never sent out groups of men with the intent to kill others. Many have sophisticated value and institutional systems that prevent organized violence. Still, well over 90 percent of known peoples have made war, some frequently and quite brutally. Among some peoples it is not rare for 25 percent of adult men to end their lives in combat.

The existence of so many warlike peoples has fed speculation about human nature for centuries. But archaeology tells a different story. At the end of prehistory-before ancient states arose and began to write, or before literate explorers arrived among non-state peoples-signs of war were plentiful. Yet in the early archaeological record of many regions, there are no traces of war, even in places where we have good recovery of the skeletons and settlements that would have revealed war if it had occurred. In later archaeological remains, signs of war appear, spread, and over time become much more common.

Humanity's peaceable deep past contradicts the common notion that war is the result of human nature or an evolved impulse to bond with our own kind and kill members of other groups. Ethnography further undermines this position. Of course in war there must be a division between "us" and "them," otherwise one would not know whom to shoot. But it is not group loyalty that makes the conflict. Rather it is conflict that makes group loyalties. Cases, such as hostilities between Australian tribes or New Guinea clans, reveal that divides between "us" and "them" are flexible and fluid until forged by death, and sometimes not even then. Inbred xenophobia and other biological explanations do not explain why war happens.

So what does explain the advent of war? Archeological explanations include larger regional populations that increased competition; more anchored living that prevented people from moving away from conflict; social structures such as clans that provided flexible frameworks for splitting into "us" and "them"; the emergence of a distinct political elite with its own interests; trade in goods that provided something to fight over; and ecological reverses such as droughts or large-game extinction. As these factors became more common around the world, so did war. War was frequent across Anatolia by around 5,500 B.C., central Europe by 4,300 B.C., and northern China by 2,500 B.C. Ancient states encouraged more militarism along their "barbarian" boundaries and trade routes. European colonial expansion from 1500 A.D. forward generated much more war-not just resistance to colonial powers, but between peoples as they were pushed onto others' lands, enlisted in colonial rivalries, sent out as slave raiders, or given new goods to fight over or weapons with which to fight. This explains why the indigenous peoples of later prehistory, and those indigenous peoples observed from the time of Columbus to today, have lived through much more war than their distant ancestors.

The experiences of the Yanomami peoples in Venezuela illustrate some of these points. While the Yanomami have not been investigated archaeologically, in Venezuela the first signs of war appear around 550 A.D. in chiefdoms in densely settled river lands along major trade routes (about 500 kilometers from ancestral Yanomami lands). Over the next thousand years archaeological evidence shows war spreading and intensifying through the Orinoco area. By the time of European contact, chiefs could field armies in the thousands. Those militaristic chiefdoms were soon wiped out by disease and warfare, but before expiring they took slaving for the Europeans deep into the Yanomami highlands. The Yanomami's on-off reputation for ferocity began with tales told by slavers, and was reinforced when the Yanomami began to attack other Native Americans who were better supplied with steel tools. In the 20th century, most Yanomami war has been the outgrowth of antagonisms over unequally distributed trade goods, especially steel.

In deciding to fight, Yanomami leaders appealed to bellicose values to persuade others and to justify self-interests. With time and war, such values became so elaborate and powerful that they made future violence more likely. Even today, Yanomami in the remote Parima highlands kill each other with shotguns in fights started by theft of Western goods, though they talk about it in terms of reciprocity, revenge, and witchcraft.

The moral of this story is that war by even the most isolated indigenous peoples is not "traditional." While the decision to go to war is made by local actors, the fights are in response to changes coming from the outside world. The same goes for the recent large-scale "tribal" and "ethnic" violence in Africa, Central Asia, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. In all of these cases conflict has been shaped by outside global processes, from colonial policies that froze formerly fluid ethnic groups and then used artificial borders to divide them, to crashing international commodity markets that made poor nations poorer, to well-meaning non-governmental organizations that provided aid that was misappropriated by men with guns. At the same time, the violence has been local, involving the control of valuable resources, existing social divisions, and local political institutions and leaders. Commentary that blames contemporary large-scale violence on "weak" or "failed" states misses the critical point that the fighting is about who controls the state, and who and what the state controls. Simply pouring resources into a contested state government, without dealing with the inequalities in how regimes operate, only makes control of government a more valuable prize for contenders.

Leaders, of course, are key. They make the decisions that lead to war. Whether they are pursuing political power or pure plunder, they are the main potential beneficiaries of violence. Whether they do so out of greed or out of a sense of being wronged, they play up grievances and call on local values, symbols, and historic victimization to mobilize followers to join their warring enterprise. Followers, in turn, are led to expect tangible and symbolic benefits and sometimes push leaders onward. Because no self-interest is more fundamental than self-preservation, leaders manufacture or exaggerate threats and provoke violence to force people to choose sides and follow their command. Often, leaders favor war because war favors leaders.

A good, if horrifying, example is the Rwandan genocide. The opposition of Tutsis and Hutus was constructed, shaped, and used by successive colonial administrators, and hostility between them heated up in the passage to independence. Hutu and Tutsi are culturally identical, not distinct ethnic groups. Never were they two organized tribes. They are political categories that were constantly reworked before, during, and after the colonial era. This artificially generated fault line became more tense and unstable in the years before the genocide, as the market for Rwanda's main export (coffee) collapsed, foreign military aid poured in, regional tensions increased, and international agencies took greater control. Negotiated power sharing arrangements between Tutsi and Hutu were on the verge of cutting out the northern Hutu clans that had previously been the main beneficiaries of state power. Hutu leaders unleashed a ferocious propaganda campaign blaming Tutsi for everything. In doing so, they tapped deep cultural themes and symbols, and created panic over an imagined Tutsi plot to kill and enslave the Hutu. When the killing began, the army and militia were given orders, but many other Hutu were recruited with a mix of threats, bribes, and propaganda. The Rwandan genocide was not simply a matter of Hutu killing Tutsi. Many Hutu (especially southern) were also targeted for death. Many Hutu would not kill, and shielded Tutsi.

To call this tragedy "tribal" or "ethnic" violence makes it more difficult to understand. The same is true in many other conflicts around the world labeled religious, tribal, clan, or ethnic. These labels suggest that the fighting is between long-standing groups over long-standing grievances. They also imply that the fighting is "irrational" (as compared to "civilized war"). Such suggestions obscure the calculated interests that are at stake. And they leave no appropriate way of talking about the worldwide array of such deadly quarrels. Thus "ethnic conflict" has become a catch-all phrase, applied even to conflicts where there is little or no cultural difference, such as in Northern Ireland or parts of the former Yugoslavia.

It is imperative to move beyond these misleading labels. If we are to find solutions to large-scale violence, we must understand its genesis. Doing so begins by recognizing that there are many different bases of identity. Geographic region, social class, and place on the continuum from urban capital to country village all affect how people gain or lose as a result of government policies and national trends. So can religion, ethnicity, race, or language, though these also provide broad and symbolically laden bases for calling people together. Castes, clans, and tribes have their own structures and leaders. Gender and generation are major filters through which broader social trends are translated into lived experience. These different factors come together in kaleidoscopic combinations. And in those different combinations, identity and interest are not separated, but are fused together. Who you are largely determines how you are doing, and how you are doing largely determines your receptivity to leaders' calls for violent action.

Going beyond simple labels reveals core groups of dedicated militarists, and secondary rings of followers that are cobbled together by political entrepreneurs seeking their own advantage. I call these politically mobilized factions "identerest groups," a term which directs attention to key facts that are often ignored by the public and policy makers. First, there are many different kinds of identity involved in recent conflicts around the world. Second, different kinds of identities come together in group and individual composites. Third, groups taking the lead in conflict are not ancient holdovers, but recent creations. Fourth, these groups exist not just because of interaction with other groups, but through a process of interaction between leaders and followers, who may have distinct interests in any situation. Fifth, identity gets its power in these situations because identity is closely linked with experience and practical interests.

New terminology helps bring these facts to light, in place of common-language terms that suggest age-old loyalties and antagonisms. With a better idea of the complex process by which identerest groups are put together, we can better imagine the alternatives. Because killing is much harder to stop once it gets started, a better understanding of how identerest violence is brought about might strengthen our capacity to prevent it.

R. Brian Ferguson is on the faculty of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. His work has focused primarily on war, including ethnohistorical reconstructions and analyses of warfare on the Pacific Northwest Coast and among the Yanomami.

References and further reading

Ferguson, R.B. (2001). Materialist, Cultural and Biological Theories on Why Yanomami Make War. Anthropological Theory 1(1). pp 99-116.

Ferguson, R.B. (in press). From Tribal Warfare, through 'Identerest' Conflicts, to Terrorism and the War in Iraq, In Psychology and War. Fitzduff, M. and Stout, C., Eds. Westport, Connecticut: Prager.

Ferguson, R.B. (2003, July). The Birth of War. Natural History, pp 28-35.

Ferguson, R.B. and Whitehead, N.L., Eds. (2000). War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Ferguson, R.B. (1995). Yanomami Warfare: A Political History. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Ferguson, R.B., Ed. (2003). Introduction: Violent Conflict and Control of the State. In The State, Identity, and Violence: Political Disintegration in the Post Cold War World. Oxford, U.K.: Routledge.

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Anthropologists who study warfare disagree about how much war there is, how far back it goes, and why it happens. Certainly there is a lot of war in the ethnographic record, though it is far from universal. Dozens of peoples never sent out groups of men with the intent to kill others.

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Article on Ethnic Conflict in South Sudan

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Article on Ethnic Conflict in South Sudan

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(Nairobi) - South Sudan has committed serious abuses against civilians in its anti-insurgency campaign in Jonglei state, Human Rights Watch said today. Soldiers' abuses and conflict with rebels have caused thousands of civilians to flee, making them especially vulnerable to recent large-scale attacks in an ethnic conflict in the same region. At the same time, the army, massed in largely empty towns, has failed to protect civilians from these attacks.

President Salva Kiir should publicly condemn the attacks and ensure that authorities immediately investigate and identify all those responsible, including government officials. He should also publicly order the military to investigate and hold to account any abusive soldiers.

"Yet again the government of South Sudan has utterly failed to stop armed Lou Nuer youth from moving into ethnic Murle areas, despite advance warnings that they were mobilizing," said Daniel Bekele, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. "This failure, together with a spate of serious abuses by soldiers in the area, only reinforces the perception that South Sudan's leaders are taking sides in this ethnic conflict."

The anti-insurgency campaign started in earnest in March 2013 against David Yau Yau, a rebel leader and political aspirant from the Murle ethnic group. South Sudan's army and government have blamed a lack of command and control and the actions of rogue soldiers for the abuses and have said civilians were killed in crossfire between rebels and the army.

Fighting between the Lou Nuer and Murle erupted in Jonglei state in the first week of July, when thousands of armed Lou Nuer men traveling on foot moved into remote areas of Jonglei's Pibor county, an ethnic Murle area.

The total number of casualties is not known. But on July 15, South Sudan's army, the SPLA, and the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) airlifted nearly 200 injured Lou Nuer men to Bor, the state capital. Injured Murle, presumed to be in the hundreds, have yet to be located.

Military officials told Human Rights Watch in July that the soldiers, hampered by rain and a shortage of troops, would only be able to protect civilians in towns, not in remote areas. However, almost all Murle civilians had already fled the towns during the anti-insurgency campaign, often after soldiers committed serious abuses against civilians.

"People fled to the bush because of the conflict between soldiers and rebels but also because of soldiers' abuses that have made them afraid to return," Bekele said. "Outside of the towns Murle have no health or other services and are even more vulnerable to ethnic attacks."

Murle and international organizations working in Jonglei allege that the army supported Lou Nuer groups with weapons and other supplies. They say that soldiers provided water and food to the Lou Nuer attackers in the town of Manyabol during the first week of July. They also say that soldiers provided ammunition to Lou Nuer groups in Waat and Nyandit ahead of the Lou Nuer mobilization.

Human Rights Watch has not been able to confirm the allegations, but they are serious and the government should urgently investigate them. The UN mission should also conduct a full human rights investigation and report publicly on the conflict and the human rights abuses in Pibor county since the conflict between Yau Yau and the government intensified in August 2012.

South Sudan's army deployed thousands of soldiers to Pibor county's main towns - Pibor, Gumruk, Boma, and Manyabol - as part of the 2013 anti-insurgency campaign. Tens of thousands of civilians have fled towns after fighting between soldiers and Yau Yau's group, and a string of serious abuses by soldiers against Murle civilians that Human Rights Watch documented, include killings and widespread intimidation.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on July 18, 2013, that all six major population centers in Pibor had been abandoned with about 40,000 inhabitants displaced. At least 8,500 Murle are estimated to have fled to neighboring countries this year and around 7,000 to Juba, South Sudan's capital.

In Manyabol, for example, almost all civilians fled after soldiers shot a group of three chiefs and five other men in the center of the town on May 26. Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that the men who were killed were all unarmed. Community members and authorities from the area said that another four men from the community, including two policemen, were killed the same evening in the army barracks.

In interviews with Human Rights Watch, witnesses reported a number of killings of civilians, including women and children, by soldiers in December, January, March, April, and May in or around the town of Pibor. Human Rights Watch also heard numerous accounts of verbal and physical abuse and looting of civilian property by soldiers over the months, especially in mid-May.

These latest abuses follow serious abuses, including killings and torture, by the army during a disarmament campaign in 2012 and failures by the government to hold perpetrators of earlier ethnic violence to account (see below for details), creating an environment of impunity.

Yau Yau's forces have fought near the town of Pibor since late 2012, according to the UN, government authorities and others. Rebels have shelled the town, contributing to panic, and Yau Yau has publicly warned civilians to leave, saying his forces plan to attack it.

However, dozens of displaced Murle interviewed by Human Rights Watch in June and July said that it was fear of further killings and looting by the soldiers in the town that made them flee.

"We were hoping that the soldiers were coming to protect us (from Yau Yau's forces), but instead they are killing us," said a Murle civilian from Pibor who fled to Juba.

The attacks in July have caused more displacement. Aid workers told Human Rights Watch that the recent attack caused most civilians to flee Gumuruk, the only remaining town in Pibor county with a significant Murle civilian population.

Officials from South Sudan's government and army should urgently condemn the attacks and ensure that all Lou Nuer fighters leave Pibor county and that those suspected of supporting or carrying out the attacks are investigated and arrested, Human Rights Watch said.

"Soldiers have repeatedly committed serious crimes against civilians, which has fuelled distrust of the military and the depopulation of towns," Bekele said. "South Sudan's leaders should ensure that soldiers protect civilians rather than abuse them, and the starting point is to hold abusive soldiers to account."

Earlier Ethnic Conflict, Failed Government Response
The government has repeatedly failed to protect civilians from similar ethnic conflict, including large-scale attacks in Jonglei, despite warnings, in 2009, and again in December 2011 and January 2012. At that time, an estimated 6,000 armed Lou Nuer attacked Murle civilians in remote areas of Pibor county, killing hundreds.

A report by the UN mission on the 2011-2012 attacks and counter-attacks found that the army was too late to deploy adequate forces to protect Murle communities even though the mission had warned that Lou Nuer fighters were approaching. The mission documented the deaths of 612 Murle, and of 276 Bor Dinka and Lou Nuer in revenge attacks by Murle during the same period.

The government's response, however, did not effectively address the cycle of violence or fully carry out the mission's recommendations. The government has supported piecemeal peace processes in Jonglei since 2012. But, it has not investigated the ethnic violence, taken steps to prosecute leaders responsible for attacks on civilians, or investigated claims that government officials may have been involved in organizing the violence.

Rather than ensuring accountability for the crimes, the government delayed forming an investigation committee. Its primary response to the 2011-2012 conflict was an abusive disarmament campaign. In early 2012, South Sudanese forces began "Operation Restore Peace," during which soldiers committed serious human rights violations.

These violations have been widely cited as a major reason why large numbers of Murle youth joined the rebellion led by Yau Yau. The government has sent emissaries to try to persuade Yau Yau to accept a peace deal and have offered the Murle rebels amnesty.

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South Sudan: Army Making Ethnic Conflict Worse

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(Nairobi) - South Sudan has committed serious abuses against civilians in its anti-insurgency campaign in Jonglei state, Human Rights Watch said today. Soldiers' abuses and conflict with rebels have caused thousands of civilians to flee, making them especially vulnerable to recent large-scale attacks in an ethnic conflict in the same region.