Genocide studies is a fun field, says professor Ugur Ümit Üngör with a cheerful look in his eyes. “Yes, it may sound strange, but it is intellectually very attractive. It crosses so many disciplines, and it poses big questions about human nature and societies. The profession is also grueling of course, you also have to take a lot of vacation in addition to it.”
His fascination for the subject was aroused during a summer vacation in Turkey, where he was visiting family after his bachelor’s degree in sociology. He was sitting in his grandmother’s living room when he heard Turkish historians say on television that there was certainly no genocide against the Armenians. It was the first time he heard of the subject.
“So I asked my grandmother who was in the kitchen if there were any Armenians in our village. And she said, ‘Yes, of course, they were all killed in the First World War. Your great-grandmother saw the deportation convoys as far as the bridge over the Euphrates, where the Armenians were stabbed or thrown into the river.’ And then she moved on to cleaning vegetables.”
The moment marks the start of a quest that, back in the Netherlands, will lead to Üngör being awarded a doctorate for the Armenian Genocide. “And then you can’t easily become a business consultant – so I continued.” On Thursday 23 September he gave his inaugural lecture as professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD. The focus of his research is the violence in Syria and Iraq over the past half century.
What is genocide?
Genocide is the organized destruction of a group. Destruction is a general term that does not necessarily involve physical violence, although it almost always does. There are also cultural genocides – such as with the Aboriginal people – that are also classified under the heading of genocide because the Australian government’s attack on Aboriginal culture is aimed at the entire group. My proposal is to see such a group that becomes the target of organized destruction as abstractly as possible. The group is a construct – that is in the minds of the perpetrators. For example, the Nazis destroyed ‘the Jews’, but who the hell decides who they are?”
In your inaugural lecture you criticize the definition of the UN Genocide Convention.
„I think there is a original sin underlying the Genocide Convention. Before the concept went to the General Assembly in 1948, Stalin wanted to see it one more time. And what is he doing with his red pencil? He removes ‘political groups’ as a category in which genocide can be committed, and he removes the phenomenon of ‘cultural genocide’ – he had already deported the Tatars and Chechens to Siberia by then. And that will become international law. So we have to look more autonomously: I don’t want to work with Stalin’s definition of genocide.”
Doesn’t this lead to a kind of genocide inflation?
“No, inflation would occur if violent processes that are not so serious are unfairly included in the pantheon of genocides. But what we see now is that genocidal processes that are sometimes more serious than the genocides that are in that pantheon don’t count. Scale also matters. The Srebrenica massacre happened on the basis of religious ethnicity. Should we count those 8,000 men as genocide, but not those millions of ‘kulaks’, the supposedly rich peasants who killed Stalin? Including those political groups actually leads to a better, sharper genocide concept.”
You do a lot of research yourself into the perpetrators of genocidal violence, for example in Syria. How does that work?
Üngör takes out his smartphone and opens Facebook. “Which perpetrator shall we call? Can we do it now, let’s chat for a while and ask him some questions. Look, this is a commander of the Syrian secret service, professional torturer since the 90s.”
He scrolls down his timeline and reads some comments. “Social media has completely changed the criminal investigation. During World War II, you couldn’t pop into an SS headquarters and ask some anthropological questions. These people on Facebook are willing to talk because they know they won’t be charged.”
What came out of the conversations with perpetrators?
“When people say afterwards, ‘We couldn’t refuse, otherwise we would be killed ourselves’, they usually lie. Some of ‘my’ perpetrators have said that there were several moments when they could have walked away. Another finding is that perpetrators do not actually think much about what they have done. That’s because of the pressure they’re under: being a torturer or executioner is a very tough job. They are often afraid, because they are eyewitnesses to the violence, they can be eliminated from above.”
Are perpetrators different now than in the past?
“They are millennials. They have smartphones and they take a lot of selfies – a lot of selfies – including while killing. The violence is now more of a performance, which gives a new, 21st-century dynamic. Because they have that camera, they look for interesting things to film. They then send those images around in closed Telegram groups of perpetrators, some of which we have seen.”
Is what Assad is actually doing genocide?
“I don’t like to see genocide as a kind of light switch that you can switch on or off. It’s more of a dimmer. There are certainly aspects to Assad’s violence that you could call genocidal. In a city like Damascus you had neighborhoods of 100,000 people, where at most 3,000 took to the streets to demonstrate. If you then wipe out the entire area with chemical weapons, you’re attacking a group identity that doesn’t distinguish who did what. That is violence against people for what they are. And so I can only conclude that it should at least be discussed in our field of research. ”
For the future of your field, in addition to a better understanding of genocide, you also argue against over-specialization.
“You have scientists who are so involved in their ‘own’ genocide that they no longer have any distance. Then you get a lack of empathy. Everyone thinks that his own genocide was the worst and deserves all the attention. I get it, but you also have to think about the suffering of others. And it can cause younger generations to abuse genocide and think ‘only we are important’.
“Aggravated self-pity like ‘the holocaust gets all the attention, we never get anything,’ can lead to narcissistic nationalism. Whatever you see among right-wing politicians in Israel, or even in Germany, our genocide was the ‘best’! You can never understand genocide that way.”