Genocide in the formation of modern Britain

This expanding genocide literature has forged a number of interpretative frames, but these have never been systematically applied to the British case. In this article I remedy this deficiency by considering in turn five themes: the role of genocide in the origins of the British state; the problem of genocide in the Empire and British settler colonialism; Britain's relationships to twentieth-century European genocide; its role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation; and finally, Britain's role in the genocidal crises of the post-Cold War world. This is a broad agenda and so I shall be sparse with empirical detail; I have drawn on numerous specialist literatures and, although I have tried to make the necessary qualifications, inevitably some of my generalisations may seem a little sweeping.

The role of genocide in the origins of the British state may be the least expected theme. Certainly, problems of genocidal dispossession have been widely examined in the origins of relatively new states, such as Australia, the US and Israel,Footnote ¹⁷ and in east-central Europe.Footnote ¹⁸ However the British tend to regard their state as formed by gradual processes of accretion, as an English state emerged out of the various Anglo-Saxon and Danish kingdoms, was conquered by the Normans, separated from their large possessions in modern France, conquered Wales, united with Scotland and incorporated Ireland to form the United Kingdom – from which the Irish Republic separated in the twentieth century. Clearly there was, in this long history, no single foundational genocide as has been argued in other cases. However genocide is not only a matter of large-scale, coordinated campaigns like the Holocaust, but also of more episodic, localised ‘genocidal massacres’Footnote ¹⁹ and expulsions, in the context of military campaigns and religious and political persecution.

Of these there have been plenty in the history of the English and British states. I give as examples two medieval episodes from my home county, Yorkshire. First, Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley argue, the Norman dynasty owed its hegemony to an extensive destruction of the indigenous population: ‘William the Conqueror […] commanded that Yorkshire be cleared of its population in order to break the ability of the Anglo-Saxon lords of that region to continue their resistance of the Norman Conquest. No one is sure how many died, but the systematic destruction of villages and crops, the widespread murder and flights into the surrounding mountains, where enslavement by Scottish tribes or starvation awaited the refugees, greatly reduced the population.’Footnote ²⁰ I don't entirely recognise the geography to which these American historians refer (the Yorkshire I know is hardly surrounded by mountains), but the point that a brutal counter-insurgency made the Anglo-Saxons victims of what would now be called ‘ethnic cleansing’ or genocide, is well taken. However a century or so later, some of the English (as they were coming to regard themselves) were implicated in a different violent episode in roughly the same locale, against the Jewish population. Here I strike a personal note, as the site of the violence was Clifford's Tower, the keep of the Norman castle in York, in whose shadow my mother was born and down whose steep, grassy hillside my own children later liked to roll. Yet in 1190, the wooden predecessor of the surviving stone edifice had been burnt down together with about 150 Jews who had taken refuge in it from a mob; many of them took their own lives rather than be killed, while others were massacred. The Tower's tourist website rightly links this event, which we might now call a genocidal massacre, with the accession of Richard I, the Crusader king.Footnote ²¹ He is an iconic figure in English history, the hero of another of my boyhood experiences, the TV series of Robin Hood with a catchy theme tune and Richard Greene in the title role. It was Richard who promoted anti-Jewish sentiment – although the website reassures us that his Chancellor ‘imposed a heavy fine on York's citizens’ as punishment for the massacre. Yet before we build up an anti-heroic version of English history, let us recall that while Richard was King of England, he hardly spoke English and spent most of his reign – when he was not fighting the Crusades, concerning which perhaps other questions of genocidal violence arise – in his Duchy of Aquitaine in modern France.

More directly pertinent to the role of genocide in the formation of the British state is the long-controversial Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. There is no doubt that this was a brutal military campaign; but Cromwell's Irish policy was also, genocide historian Mark Levene contends, ‘a conscious attempt to reduce a distinct ethnic population, not simply on the grounds of their religious disposition, but also for demonstrating their potential to challenge the mono-directional and monopolistic thrust of an Anglo-Protestant dominated British Isles. The genocidal process which emerged after 1651 was [not] simply a short-term military strategy […] It was a long-term political policy.’ The 1652 Act for the Settlement of Ireland is, he argues, ‘the nearest thing on paper, in the English and more broadly British domestic record, to a programme of state-sanctioned and systematic ethnic cleansing of another people […] The expropriated were to be required to move, on pain of death, to a designated area the most westerly corner of Ireland and so make way for a massive new wave of Anglo-Scottish settlers who would supersede them.’Footnote ²² This was not extermination in the sense of the Final Solution, Levene says, but it was – like ‘the Nazis’ 1939–40 projected removal of Polish Jewry’ – the eviction of ‘a troublesome population whose place within the national or colonial frame had been definitively and permanently revoked’.Footnote ²³ However, a decade earlier, in 1641–1642, Irish insurgents in Ulster had killed between 4,000 and 12,000 Protestants who had settled on land whose former Catholic owners had been evicted. If these massacres ‘were magnified for propagandist purposes to justify Cromwell's subsequent genocide’,Footnote ²⁴ nevertheless they demonstrate something which modern genocide studies increasingly emphasises: genocidal violence often begins in the resistance of ‘subaltern’ peoples, only to be followed by the even greater violence of the imperial power.Footnote ²⁵

As Michael Hechter argued, this Irish history anticipates the wider history of British empire and colonisation.Footnote ²⁶ Within the British Isles, the closest comparison is the destruction of the Gaelic-speaking clan society in the Scottish Highlands between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Over this century, a combination of anti-Jacobite repression, including suppression of traditional culture (seen as necessary for the consolidation of the Anglo-Scottish imperial British state), and landlord dispossession reduced a once-thriving society to a shadow of its former self. If Levene is right to say that there was no singular genocidal policy of the kind that was seen in Ireland,Footnote ²⁷ this was a case, similar to more distant colonial experiences on which I comment below, in which the combination of different kinds of political and economic policies over time resulted in the destruction of traditional society. Indeed even in England in the same period, brutal law-enforcement was directed against the rural and urban poor,Footnote ²⁸ with sharp (if not genocidal) repression of the emergent trade unions and the Chartist movement. Only from the second half of that century did Britain increasingly deserve a reputation for the peaceful gradualism of its political change, showing less political violence than many other European countries.

Genocide in British imperialism and colonialism

Yet despite the subduing of the state's internal foes, international violence continued. As Leon Trotsky argued, ‘the whole history of Great Britain is first of all the history of violent changes which the British governing classes have made in the life of other nations’.Footnote ²⁹ An even more drastic verdict was recently proposed by the Native American scholar-activist, Ward Churchill. For him the English are ‘global leaders in genocidal activities, both in terms of overall efficiency – as they consummated the total extinction of the Tasmanians in 1876 – and a flair for innovation embodied in their deliberate use of alcohol to effect the total extinction of the many of North America's indigenous peoples’.Footnote ³⁰ I am unsure if this comparative judgement would survive a careful study of other European countries' colonial records, but it challenges the relatively benign view of British colonialism in some of the literature,Footnote ³¹ which has led to a particular ‘smugness’ about British imperialism.Footnote ³² Indeed if there is a problem with Trotsky's dictum, it is that it was not only the ‘governing’ classes and those acting directly on their orders, but also more ‘ordinary’ British people acting on their own accounts who were involved in violence.Footnote ³³ If the growing literature on empire and genocide has a dominant theme, it is that settler colonialism is the main problem. Michael Mann, who uses the term ‘murderous cleansing’ for what I call genocide, concludes from a broad historical survey: ‘The more settlers controlled colonial institutions, the more murderous the cleansing […] It is the most direct relationship I have found between democratic regimes and mass murder.’Footnote ³⁴ Dirk Moses had earlier made a similar argument about Australia, where about six hundred Indigenous cultural-linguistic groups, many of whom regarded themselves as separate peoples, were either wiped out or drastically reduced in numbers and displaced from their traditional lands. Although much Aboriginal decline was an indirect result of British settlement, he suggests that ‘each willed act of extermination by settlers and/or the state of an Aboriginal group could be regarded as genocide. In that case, many genocides took place in Australia, rather than [its] being the site of a single genocidal event.’Footnote ³⁵ Moses' conclusion is that settler colonialism was structurally prone to genocide, and the process involved serial ‘genocidal moments’.Footnote ³⁶ He agrees that settlers and local militia were the main perpetrators: ‘rarely can exterminatory intent be discerned in British authorities’, yet ‘there was a greater degree of consciousness about the fatal impact of their presence’ than defenders of the official role have contended.Footnote ³⁷ British authorities in London and Australia willed colonial settlement knowing that it foretold the often-brutal removal of the indigenous inhabitants, even if they sometimes condemned the specific means that settlers adopted. In the light of this conclusion, it is surprising that while Australia has had a vigorous national debate on genocide, British commentators have mostly regarded this as a purely local affair, without implications for the ‘home country’ from which most settlers came – or, indeed, were sent as a matter of state policy.Footnote ³⁸

The converse of the case that settler colonialism is particularly prone to genocide is that empire without large-scale settlement is less so. In the British Empire, whereas settler colonies in North America and Australasia generally overwhelmed indigenous peoples, colonies in Africa often combined seizure of agricultural lands with rule over large indigenous populations, and the jewel in the imperial crown, the Indian Raj, saw a situation in which a small imperial caste ruled over hundreds of millions of Indians (Adolf Hitler notoriously saw this as a model for his empire in eastern Europe).Footnote ³⁹ Thus imperial rule in India was not generally genocidal; but nevertheless, in the light of current debates, major questions arise about two types of nineteenth century episode. First, genocide studies have increasingly highlighted the importance of war as the occasion of genocide.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the context of empire, this means that moments of conquest and rebellion are more dangerous than periods of successful or stable imperial rule. In Indian history, the Mutiny of 1857 demands attention, first because of the murderous ‘subaltern’ animus of the rebel soldiers towards the European population, including women and children (the subject of much Victorian propaganda concerning the events), but also because of the brutality of the British military repression which went far beyond the defeat of the rebels to extensive massacres of Indian civilians.Footnote ⁴¹ Second, genocide studies have delved into the murky histories of large-scale famine. In several important cases, such as the Stalinist ‘terror-famine’ in the Ukraine in the early 1930s and the even larger famine resulting from Mao Zedong's ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958–1961, it has been argued that state policy disastrously exacerbated the human consequences of climatic failures, and that leaders who ignored peasant suffering effectively willed mass death.Footnote ⁴² But similar claims have been made about famines in British India in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴³ In these ‘late Victorian holocausts’, as Mike Davis calls them, British policies exacerbated natural problems: ‘those with the power to relieve famine convinced themselves that overly heroic exertions against implacable natural laws, whether of market prices or population growth, were worse than no effort at all’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The result of British inaction was that millions of Indians died.Footnote ⁴⁵

Insurgencies and counter-insurgencies during decolonisation in the third quarter of the twentieth century raised similar questions to the Mutiny. During the insurrection of the Land and Freedom Army (known to the British as Mau Mau) in Kenya from 1952–1960, for example, the British detained 160,000 ‘suspected terrorists’ in camps, while concentrating almost the entire Kikuyu population (1.5 million) in villages ringed with barbed wire. Counter-insurgency tactics included summary executions; electric shock; mass deportations; slave labour; the burning down of villages and similar collective punishments; starvation; and rape. Tens of thousands died from the combined effects of exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. In contrast, the ‘savage’ insurgents had killed about eighteen hundred Kenyan loyalists as well as thirty-two settlers out of a total of ninety-five ‘Europeans’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here, as often before and since and at many hands, degenerate counter-insurgency war, much more than insurgency itself, approached the borderline between extreme repression and the partial destruction of society. Yet this aroused little opposition in 1950s Britain: as Stephen Howe has commented, there was nothing like ‘the engagement of Sartre, Camus and others with France's crimes in Algeria. Liberal Britain's muted reaction to the Kenyan crisis remains puzzling, and shaming.’Footnote ⁴⁷ And in today's Britain, despite the recent scholarly attention, it is almost forgotten.

There is more to say about this issue in the context of the Empire, but let me draw some interim conclusions. Clearly the literature does not support facile equations of British imperialism, or even settler colonialism, everywhere and always with genocide. Nor does it suggest that central authorities in the British state developed overall genocidal policies: rather, genocidal moments seem to be mainly the direct responsibility of settlers, local administrations and military commanders. But it does suggest that genocide was a repeated problem of British – as of most other – imperial and colonial expansions, in which the imperial centre was often, if usually indirectly, implicated.

Britain's role in twentieth-century European genocide

I move now to twentieth-century Europe, the locus not only of the Holocaust and the wider Nazi genocideFootnote ⁴⁸ but of complex, multi-centred genocidal dynamics. This is the terrain on which nationalist and Communist regimes were the perpetrators of some of the most monstrous historical crimes. Indeed genocide became endemic in important parts of the European international system between roughly 1875 and 1949, from the Balkans before the First World War to eastern and central Europe as a whole in the Second.Footnote ⁴⁹ Britain did not commit genocide, but as a repeatedly victorious great power could not avoid being implicated in various ways in wider European developments.

As Donald Bloxham puts it, there was a ‘great game of genocide’ in south-eastern Europe during the final crisis of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman-Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915 was the nadir of a half-century of anti-population violence between 1875 and 1923, in which both the Empire and the emergent nation-states carried out genocidal expulsions from their territories. Throughout this ‘great game’, the British espoused ‘humanitarian’ principles, while tacitly encouraging Armenian and other Christian nationalists against the Ottomans, to the point of condoning their expulsions of Muslims and helping provoke Ottoman atrocities. In British responses to the Armenian genocide, as later with the Holocaust, ‘the warning of punishment for the chief perpetrators substituted for any overall policy of assistance to the victims’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Following the First World War, the British government of David Lloyd George was central, with the USA and France, to the attempt to manage nationalist ‘population politics’ which dominated the Paris settlement.Footnote ⁵¹ However this process stimulated the national conflicts it was meant to control: states and nationalist movements manoeuvred militarily to secure conditions on the ground prior to international agreement. Notoriously, Britain supported the Greek army when it invaded Anatolia in 1919, provoking ‘inter-communal atrocities […] in which the Greeks were the greater perpetrators’,Footnote ⁵² only to be beaten back by the Turkish army which in its turn brutally attacked the historic Greek populations, notoriously at Smyrna (Izmir) in 1922. Bloxham notes the fate of orthodox archbishop Chrystosomos – who in 1919 blessed the disembarking Greek troops – who was now torn to pieces by a Turkish mob. ‘Such’, he writes, ‘was the outcome of Greco-British imperialism in Anatolia’.Footnote ⁵³ The conclusion to this episode was the Lausanne treaty of 1923 through which the new Turkey completed by great power legitimation – and with the Greek-Turkish ‘population exchange’ – the process of ethnic homogenisation begun in the 1915 genocide.

Elsewhere, too, ‘majority’ national states and movements used the Paris framework to press home their advantages over minorities, even to the point of violent expulsion; and the provisions were as successful in provoking powerful nationalists as in protecting minorities. Indeed Hitler invoked these provisions to justify his invasion of the Czech Sudetenland in 1938. It would be facile to simply blame British politicians for these outcomes; but it would be equally facile to see Britain as apart from the increasingly genocidal logic of much Continental politics. This conclusion is borne out by an examination of British policies during the Second World War. Winston Churchill's well-known reluctance to prioritise action to stop the Holocaust is one side of this story.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Cesarani summarises: ‘Documents show that the British Government knew about the slaughter the Jews from the moment it began, but did not issue any official condemnation of the genocide until very late. There was no attempt to prevent the genocide, even when counter measures were feasible. Nor were restrictions on refugee immigration to Britain or Palestine eased. British policy was to defeat the Nazis without paying too much attention to distractions such as the persecution and mass murder of the Jews, or wasting resources on humanitarian initiatives.’Footnote ⁵⁵ The other side, however, is Britain's reaction when its allies advocated their own genocidal moves to counter those of the Germans. When in 1942 the exiled Czechoslovak President, Edvard Beneš, suggested expelling the remaining ethnic German populations from their countries after the war, the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, conveyed his government's approval.Footnote ⁵⁶ When Stalin proposed pushing Poles westwards into former German territories and expelling Germans from the USSR as well as Czechoslovakia and Poland, the British and Americans argued over the extent, but not the principles, of territorial revision and expulsion.Footnote ⁵⁷ When, in the concluding stages of the war and afterwards, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia implemented their German expulsions, the Western Allies did little even to ensure that they were ‘orderly and humane’, as their Potsdam agreement with Stalin had required.Footnote ⁵⁸ Over ten million were forced out, at the cost of half a million lives, with the British, Americans and French receiving many expellees into their occupation zones.Footnote ⁵⁹ The destruction of German society avenged, of course, the Nazis' destructive policies towards the Slav and other east-central European peoples, rather than their extermination of the Jews, which was of less concern to the post-war central European governments. (Thus the broader genocide perspective advocated in this article – and at the time by Lemkin, who always referred to the general ‘Nazi genocide’ of the occupied peoples in general – better explains this development than the more common Holocaust-centric approach). There was some British resistance to these developments, and even Churchill was discomfited by some of the atrocity reports;Footnote ⁶⁰ a few, Bertrand Russell for example, protested strongly.Footnote ⁶¹ However for most British people, these expulsions, which destroyed historic communities on a scale – if not with a murderousness – comparable to that of the destruction of Jewish communities in the same regions, barely registered. Many tacitly accepted, like the Soviet, Czech and Polish leaders, the principle of collective responsibility which made all Germans guilty of Nazi crimes, although this idea was exactly how Nazism itself viewed Jews, Russians, Czechs, Poles and others.

The principle of collective punishment also provided secondary justification for the most problematic of Britain's own wartime policies, the extensive bombing of German cities. This was not, in itself, genocide: Britain's prime aim was not to destroy German society as such, but to destroy the ‘morale’ of the German population, in order to weaken the Nazi regime.Footnote ⁶² Nevertheless the methods had much in common with overtly genocidal policies: ‘terror-bombing’,Footnote ⁶³ ‘dehousing’ entire populations,Footnote ⁶⁴ destroying whole towns and many of their inhabitants by flooding, fire and burying them under their ruined buildings. Likewise the mentality: if it was the US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., who notoriously articulated the idea of permanently destroying Germany's cultural and industrial fabric – of ‘pastoralising’ Germany – it was Britain's Bomber Command which, in the words of A. C. Grayling, ‘continued to act in ways that gave every impression of trying to bring about such a result’.Footnote ⁶⁵ For the Royal Air Force had begun its campaign to destroy Germany's cities by attacking their historic centres – provoking the retaliatory ‘Baedeker raids’ on British cities listed in the famous guide – and continued with ‘a concerted smashing of as much of Germany, its people and its cultural heritage as possible’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The campaign was similar in scope to the US bombing of Japan: both are testimony to the general degeneration of warfare – already manifested in the brutalities of the Japanese and German invasions of China and Europe respectively, to which Allied policies responded – and to its affinity with the specifically genocidal developments of the same period.Footnote ⁶⁷

Britain's role in the genocidal violence of decolonisation

The last two discussions have emphasised that the British state was mostly not a direct perpetrator of genocide – although it practised degenerate war in the colonies as well as against Germany – but it was complicit in genocide committed by others, particularly British colonists and its allies in European wars. I shall now argue that this character of official British involvement continued after the Second World War. But important general changes were taking place in the late 1940s, a major turning-point in the history of genocide. First, the phenomenon was named by Lemkin and then criminalised by the UN.Footnote ⁶⁸ Second, after three-quarters of a century in which genocide had become an ever more serious strand of European history, it disappeared from the continent for four decades. It would be nice to think that this shift resulted from the UN Convention. In reality, however, both were results of the definitive Allied victory – which in east-central Europe involved the triumph of Soviet over Nazi population policies – and the subsequent Cold War which firmly embedded its outcomes. Indeed the progress involved in these twin developments appears even more doubtful when viewed in its historical context. Even in the Convention's own terms, one of the its main authors, the Soviet Union, could be regarded as a genocidal state: both its wartime deportations of the ‘treasonable’ peoples – which in a striking coincidence were ratified ‘in perpetuity’ only two weeks before the Convention was adopted – and the expulsions of the Germans, arguably fell within its general definition,Footnote ⁶⁹ even if as noted above, it had been drafted to exclude specific reference to this form of genocidal violence.Footnote ⁷⁰ (Indeed in the perspective argued here, the USSR had a larger genocidal record, including the pre-war ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ and the terror-famine and the wartime liquidation of the Polish elite; but the better-known exclusion of political groups and social classes from the Convention's remit meant that in its terms, these would not count).Footnote ⁷¹

Moreover, the late 1940s saw major new genocidal violence outside Europe, which was to continue throughout and beyond the Cold War period. The new waves were chiefly but not only in Asia, where the war's shake-up of old imperial arrangements caused new conflicts. As the UN drafted the Convention and the Soviets concluded the elimination of Germans from central Europe, Mao Zedong's Communists came to power in China with the aid of large-scale killing of ‘class enemies’.Footnote ⁷² Meanwhile in India, where the war shifted power away from Britain, the triumph of the national movement was soured by the massive violence of Partition, in which the number expelled or forced to flee (estimated at twelve million) and the number of deaths (at least a quarter of a million) roughly matched those in the expulsions of the Germans.Footnote ⁷³ Clearly these events were not orchestrated by a central party or state machine, as in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; but the actions (and failures to act) of the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League (the ruling party of emergent Pakistan) and the British Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, fatefully influenced them. The first large massacres pre-dated the Partition plan by nine months, but the imperial authorities drew it up with cavalier disregard for its probable consequences and, like the nationalist leaderships, continued with their course although the outcomes were disastrous.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover these were not purely spontaneous outpourings: ‘Everywhere there was an element of planning and organisation involved and a sense of immunity from the governing provincial party – whether League or Congress.’Footnote ⁷⁵ In this sense the Indian massacres have rightly been seen by some recent historians as genocidal actions, carried out by militia and party organisations.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Indian Partition offered, indeed, a new, post-colonial model of genocide: partial in its attack on the ‘enemy’ population; localised and regionalised in the scope of its destruction; decentralised in its political leadership; implemented by paramilitaries rather than regular forces or central state institutions; and yet the product of conflict over the post-colonial state at the national level, informed by ethnic or religious politics in a context of electoral democracy. This model appeared in the moment of transition from the imperial order, and was replicated in some later decolonisations – for example the handover from Belgian rule in Rwanda. Indeed it is echoed in conflicts to this day; thus the massacres in Kenya in 1998 showed (on a smaller scale) a similar pattern of ethnically targeted violence mobilised by local and regional, party and communal organisations, but focused on national elections and with nefarious links to national party leaders.Footnote ⁷⁷ These events are currently the subject of a pioneering investigation by the International Criminal Court,Footnote ⁷⁸ but similar violence has occurred in many post-colonial situations. Britain bears no unique blame for the emergence of this new form, but its original Indian manifestation is testimony to how genocide can be exacerbated when great powers mismanage their responsibilities, a theme to which I shall have cause to return.

I cannot leave this topic without mentioning another case from the same period, the dispossession of Palestinian Arabs during the creation of Israel in 1948. This can be regarded as a case of genocide (in the broad sense of deliberate social destruction argued above) because a campaign was launched, in the context of war, with the aim of destroying the larger part of Arab society in Israeli-controlled Palestine, and accomplished through massacres and terror which caused the flight of those who were not directly expelled.Footnote ⁷⁹ Controversy rages, of course, over these events, with a major divergence between Ilan Pappé and others who emphasise the degree of central planning by the Zionist leadership, and those like Benny Morris who see Israeli violence as more circumstantial, opportunist and decentralised.Footnote ⁸⁰ It is not my aim here to adjudicate these differences,Footnote ⁸¹ but to note that here another major episode of organised social destruction occurred, as in India but on a smaller scale and with many fewer deaths, on the British watch. From Palestine I can pull together the themes of the last three sections: here was dispossession as a result of settler violence, following from the post-First World War settlement of nationalities issues (including of course the Balfour Declaration), and in the context once more of a mismanaged British retreat from empire. But there is also a new element: here Britain acted not just on its own account as in India, nor only on its old League of Nations mandate, but in the context of the new UN's own proposals for partition, whose implementation stimulated violent conflict. Here, the forms of genocidal violence were depressingly familiar – as Levene says, ‘given that [Zionist] operations occurred just two or three years after the end of the Holocaust, the ease with which they took on the aspect of a standard operating procedure is little short of sickening’.Footnote ⁸² However Britain's role was changing – from an autonomous empire to a component of a global conglomerate centred on the USA and UN. Responsibility for disaster was being internationalised, even if Britain, as the power on the ground, retained a particular share.

Britain and the genocidal crises of the post-Cold War world

This is the context in which the final part of my argument unfolds. For fifty years now, Britain has no longer been a major world empire: if genocide continued to rear its head in former British territories in Africa or South Asia, for example, as it did in Biafra in 1967 and Bangladesh in 1971, British governments were less directly responsible than in the Indian and Palestinian partitions, although they and Britain's colonial legacy played a significant role in each crisis. Although the UK continued to claim great-power status through its possession of nuclear weapons and permanent membership of the UN Security Council, this status was evidently diminished. There are still residual post-imperial entanglements – such as those which drove Blair's government to its unilateral intervention to end the genocidal civil war in Sierra LeoneFootnote ⁸³ – but the UK has mostly been involved in multilateral enterprises led by the USA and/or UN.

This is not the place for a full evaluation of international responses to genocide in recent decades. Suffice it to say that despite unprecedented international moves to halt and punish genocide, the record is often underwhelming. At their worst, the UN and its peacekeepers have simply handed over threatened civilians to génocidaires, as happened in Bosnia, Rwanda and East Timor. British governments and armed forces bear no special shame for one of the worst episodes, as the Dutch do for the Srebrenica massacre (although British SAS observers ‘stood aside, powerless’ as the Serbians overran the UN enclave),Footnote ⁸⁴ but they have particular shares in the general Western responsibility. When, after the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi Kurds rebelled and Saddam Hussein's forces terrorised almost the entire population to flee into the snow-covered mountains bordering Turkey, British Prime Minister John Major was asked if the West hadn't encouraged the Kurds to rebel, Major responded: ‘I don't recall asking the Kurds to mount this particular insurrection.’Footnote ⁸⁵ Only a campaign in the media, coupled with Turkey's refusal to admit the Kurds, pushed Major to join President George Bush in creating a Kurdish ‘safe haven’ in northern Iraq.Footnote ⁸⁶ The following year, over Bosnia, Major and his Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, manoeuvred to avoid committing British forces to halt the first genocide in Europe for four decades, and tried to maintain ‘impartiality’ between the principal perpetrators and their victims. As Brendan Simms has argued, this represented Britain's ‘unfinest hour’: the Conservative government ‘sat astride the international management of the Bosnian war like an enormous dog in the manger, by turns resentful and self-congratulatory, firmly blocking any attempt at an alternative strategy’. Eventually Britain committed troops for ‘humanitarian’ purposes, but this ‘was a particularly pernicious case of misplaced pseudo-activism’Footnote ⁸⁷ since it was unwilling to directly oppose genocidal violence. Moreover, Simms points out, ‘Britain's failure over Bosnia was not confined to government. Unlike their American counterparts, parliament and the opposition failed to mount any significant challenge to the executive.’Footnote ⁸⁸ The media mostly followed the government line.Footnote ⁸⁹ Only after Srebrenica, when President Clinton (who for three years had defaulted on his election-campaign concern for Bosnia) finally decided for action, did British forces and commanders play their part in breaking the deadlock and lifting the siege of Sarajevo. Even then, however, the West was in tacit alliance with Croatia, which carried out its own destruction of Serb communities in the re-conquered ‘Krajina’; and the Dayton settlement entrenched the results of genocide, in the division of Bosnia which continues to this day. Moreover international responses in 1994 to the crisis in Rwanda, where genocide was even more obvious than in Bosnia, were even weaker. James Woods, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Clinton, has said that ‘it was […] a […] spectacle of the US in disarray and retreat, leading the international community away from doing the right things and I think that everybody was perfectly happy to follow our lead – in retreat’.Footnote ⁹⁰ In fact not everybody was happy – there were dissenting voices among the non-permanent members of the Security Council – but the British government seems to have been. As Michael Barnett records, ‘Britain fought against the initial push for intervention in April, and then shifted position in May when it had overwhelming evidence of the genocide. Still, it contributed no real resources.’Footnote ⁹¹ Even a year afterwards, the Foreign Office did not accept that ‘genocide’ had taken place, and called discussion of whether it had ‘sterile’.Footnote ⁹²

Reacting against Major's record, and perhaps to their own weakness in opposition, Labour leaders took different stances after 1997. Britain became one of the Rwandan Patriotic Front government's main international donors, accepting its share of international guilt for the failure to prevent the genocide. Yet there was a downside to this position: when Rwanda played a major part in the new war (which involved localised genocidal massacres and mass rapes) in the Congo, Clare Short, the Overseas Development minister, ‘was persuaded of the Rwandan regime's absolute innocence’ despite evidence of its troops’ ‘extreme violence’ against civilians.Footnote ⁹³ When Serbian repression grew in Kosovo in 1998–1999, Blair took the stand to which I referred above. Yet while NATO's intervention was ultimately successful in halting genocide, in other ways this was a more problematic venture. NATO ‘fought’ exclusively from the air, because most of its nineteen governments did not dare to risk soldiers on the ground. This led to unprecedented successes in force protection (no NATO personnel died at Serbian hands) but condemned several hundred Serb and Albanian civilians to immolation by bombing.Footnote ⁹⁴ And although NATO ensured the return of the expelled Albanians, it failed to prevent revenge expulsions of Serbs. Thus even the relative success of British and NATO policy was tarnished, both by the transfer of risk to civilians during the war and by lack of determination in the aftermath. Indeed Kosovo shows that Western governments face formidable problems in the use of military power to halt genocidal violence. Anything less than direct, dedicated protection of civilians – and high-altitude bombing can rarely provide that – risks encouraging a genocidally inclined enemy to escalate its violence, as Milošević did after NATO began bombing. And military intervention loads formidable post-conflict responsibilities onto Western governments and international institutions, to which they are often inadequate.Footnote ⁹⁵

These dangers are not confined to professed ‘humanitarian’ interventions, but are general problems in the Western use of military power. Many of the West's enemies have ethnicised ideologies and agendas, hence many interventions risk them turning their guns on civilians as well as Western forces. Nowhere has this been clearer than in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein's regime already had a formidable genocidal record, and where US and UK sanctions policies, combined with his response, had already produced mass death and suffering in the 1990s.Footnote ⁹⁶ But questions of genocide also arise in relation to events since the invasion of 2003. The reality has been somewhat obscured by the debate about whether civilian casualties since 2003 number around 100,000 as organisations tabulating recorded deaths estimate, or upwards of 600,000 as estimated by indirect methods.Footnote ⁹⁷ For even on the lower figure, it is evident that the majority of casualties have not resulted directly from US or Coalition military actions, but from what is called ‘sectarian violence’ by Sunni-based Iraqi nationalists and some of the Shi'ite militia. In the terms of this article, this violence has had a genocidal character: Al-Qaeda in Iraq and other militia have deliberately targeted Shia and other non-Sunni communities in Baghdad and elsewhere, using murder and terror to force them out of, and destroy non-Sunni communities in the areas they control; and some of the opposing militia have turned on the Sunni population. Possibly the greatest scandal of Iraq today is the extent to which they succeeded: 1.9 million people, mainly Shia but including nearly all Iraq's remaining Jews, Christians and other minorities, have been forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries, while 2.6 million are estimated to be internally displaced.Footnote ⁹⁸ Tempting as it might be to blame this entirely on the Iraqi factions, it raises large questions about the indirect responsibility of US and British leaders. In opting for ‘invasion lite’ to topple rather than crush Saddam's regime, and precipitating a transition in which Shia politicians would inevitably prevail over the previously dominant Sunni, the Coalition provoked a lengthy insurgency, turned against the Shia population as well as itself. Since George W. Bush and Tony Blair emphasised the link between the War on Terror and Iraq, they should not have been surprised that Al-Qaeda and similar groups – known for both their mass killings of civilians and their violent sectarianism against Christians, Jews and Shia Muslims – should have turned their ‘resistance’ against the softer target of the civilian population. The gravest charge, therefore, that we can lay against the Bush and Blair governments is that their invasion provoked a low-level genocidal conflict in Baghdad and elsewhere, whose consequences are still being felt by millions of Iraqis.

Iraq underlines the inevitable contradictions of official Western positions today. Governments and international organisations proclaim unprecedented commitment to the prevention of genocide – over Darfur, the Bush administration even acknowledged ‘genocide’ as it happened, even if the British government, like the UN, failed to follow this lead. Yet they continue to use military power in ways determined primarily by perceptions of national interest, calibrated by considerations of force-protection enmeshed with electoral calculation, in which the interests of civilians in war zones are well down the list of priorities.Footnote ⁹⁹ If the failure to respond to genocide is a clear pattern in recent decades, so too is partial, ineffective and (as in Iraq) fundamentally misconceived intervention, which stokes the very fires it claims to put out. It is tempting, in the British context, to frame this as the dilemma between the Major and Blair paths of national irresponsibility. But this might trivialise a structural dilemma on whose horns Western politicians in general are very deeply impaled.

At this point we should remember that responsibility for addressing genocide does not rest only with governments. Armed conflict in general, including genocidal crises, is now subjected to unprecedented, multi-centred global surveillance, not only from states but also from media, civil society, public opinion, law and academia. To Western policymakers and military leaders, it may often seem as though this constrains their room for manoeuvre more than that of genocidal states and movements. Yet the latter are also sometimes forced to trim their policies in the light of international pressure resulting from tribunals, media and NGO campaigns.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the Internet age, even individual citizens have new means of influencing national and global policies. This is not to suggest that global civil society is riding confidently to the rescue:Footnote ¹⁰¹ the evidence of the last two decades suggests that building a global public sphere that can decisively impact on these issues will be altogether more difficult than some believed after 1989.

Is there a special British responsibility to respond to genocidal violence in today's world? If so, it is not only because much of it occurs in countries to which Britain is linked by imperial legacies – and new histories of intervention. Nor is it because Britain has an intrinsically privileged role in the world, as envisaged on the one hand by the proponents of the ‘special relationship’ with the USA, and on the other in the kind of liberal ‘moral imperialism’ which believes that if only Britain would lead, the whole world would follow.Footnote ¹⁰² Britain's responsibility has more prosaic sources: its continuing centrality to global state networks, with overlapping memberships of the UN Security Council, NATO, the EU, the G8, G20 and other major international organisations; and its high-profile roles in the global media, NGO and academic spheres. All of these mean that despite the country's secular decline relative to greater powers, British politicians, broadcasters, campaigners and even academics are well placed to influence wider responses. Hence the current weakness of genocide studies in Britain, compared to the USA or even Australia, is a matter of regret, not least because British traditions in historical and social research could offer correctives to the willingness of some American scholars to tie their work too closely to specific victim-group agendas.Footnote ¹⁰³

This article has shown the complex and changing parameters of British responsibility for genocide. It is not just that, as David Cesarani argued, the Holocaust is ‘a part of British history’;Footnote ¹⁰⁴ the wider history of genocide has touched and been touched by British history in many different ways. We cannot assume that other countries are the problem, Britain part of the solution. The idea of ‘bad/guilty’ and ‘good/vigilant’ nations belongs more to genocidal myth than to anti-genocidal understanding. Whole nations never stand unequivocally on one side of the historical process: complexity and ambiguity are the norm. British governments and people have been part of the problem, possibly as or more often as they have been part of the solution. As British citizens and as scholars, we have responsibilities not just to be vigilant, but to investigate the reasons why our politicians, state and social institutions have not always been vigilant, and why indeed they have sometimes been complicit in or indifferent to genocide. The historical lessons are varied, but they leave no reasons for complacency.