Counting the horror cost

A friend sent me a chain email the other day that said, in part: ‘It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended [sic] . This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated with the German and Russian Peoples looking the other way!

‘Now, more than ever, with Iraq, Iran and others claiming the Holocaust to be 'a myth’, it's imperative to make sure the world never forgets, because there are others who would like to do it again.’

While I agree entirely with this message as far as it goes, I’m disappointed that it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough.

For one thing it fails to recall the countless other groups - Gypsies, homosexuals, physically and mentally disabled people and other minorities - that were also systematically slaughtered in the Holocaust.

And for another, with the words “there are others who would like to do it again”, it implies that the Holocaust, or at least its equivalent, has never happened since - when, in fact, Holocausts, under a variety of newer labels like ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ have been happening with horrifying regularity to this day.

In the People’s Republic of China, for example, Mao Tse Tung’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ of 1958 and the ‘Cultural Revolution’ in the 1980s caused the deaths of untold millions of peasants, intellectuals and dissidents.

The Nigerian civil war in the 1960s saw the slaughter and starvation of millions of Biafrans by elements of the Ibo tribe.

In 1965, following a coup in which General Suharto ousted President Sukarno, the army and civilian mobs killed an estimated 300,000 to 500,000 Chinese Indonesians, a great many of them women and children, on the pretext that they were all communists or communist sympathisers.

The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in the 1970s murdered an estimated two million fellow Cambodians in a holocaust committed in what are known as 'The Killing Fields’.

During the 1973-90 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, many thousands of Chileans were tortured and murdered, or ‘disappeared’ in the so-called ‘dirty war’ against opponents of the regime.

In 1994 hundreds of thousands of Tutsi men, women and children were hacked or beaten to death by Hutu militia in Rwanda.

Also in the 1990s, the Serbs under Slobodan Milosevic set out to rid Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo of their Muslim populations, while in Iraq Saddam Hussein waged chemical warfare on his nation’s Kurds.

In 1999, following a UN-sponsored vote in which the people of East Timor voted to secede from Indonesia, Indonesian troops, special forces and ‘militia’ went on a rampage in which they killed over 1,000 civilians.

For years now, the government of Sudan has been sponsoring a campaign of terror, rape and killing against the people of the Darfur Region.

Simultaneously, in the process of dispossessing Zimbabwe’s white farmers in favour of his Zanu-PF cronies and supporters, Robert Mugabe has plunged his nation into bankruptcy, disorder and, most recently, a deadly cholera epidemic.

Meanwhile, in Burma...

And ever since the end of World War II, a succession of murderous Burmese governments have been doing their damnedest to defeat or destroy ethnic groups like the Karen and the Rohingya.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported the other day that Burma’s envoy to Hong Kong, Ye Myint Aung, has written a letter to foreign missions and the media justifying his government’s persecution of the Rohingya on the grounds that they are “as ugly as ogres”. They are not Burmese, he added, as evidenced by the fact that their skin is dark, “not fair and soft like a Myanmar gentleman”.

These remarks smack depressingly to me of claims by Nazi apologists for the World War II Holocaust that Jews and others were not as fair and pure as Aryan gentlemen. So nothing much has changed but the names and skin colour of both the culprits and their victims. Nor has justice become much swifter or more certain.

Saddam and Milosevic both got their come-uppance, I grant you. But three decades since Year Zero the first Khmer Rouge suspect has yet to be convicted. The mass murderers of Rwanda are still awaiting trial. And most regrettably of all, death beat the law to the punch in the cases of Mao, Suharto, Pinochet and Pol Pot.

Mortality may yet save Mugabe’s skin too. But meanwhile he’s always sure of a safe refuge in Malaysia or at his US$5.8 million hideaway in Hong Kong, as he looks forward to his 85th birthday celebration featuring, according to an AFP report, 2,000 bottles of French champagne, 500 bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label whisky and 8,000 lobsters.

And his supporters are planning to present him with the ultimate gift: the forcible eviction of Zimbabwe’s few hundred remaining white farmers.

But the party may soon be over for Mugabe and his ilk. The New York Times reports that, for the first time in its history, the International Criminal Court has decided to issue an arrest warrant for a sitting head of state, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan.

Despite such hopeful, progressive steps, however, the holocausts keep happening faster than the world can summon the will or capacity to prevent them.

Even Israel, the very nation born of the Jewish Holocaust, sees fit to kill thousands of innocents in the ghettos in which it imprisons its Palestinian neighbours, and cold-bloodedly writes the victims off as collateral damage in its self-defence.

As long as the world tolerates such holocaust hypocrisy, along with holocaust denial in a great many quarters and holocaust apathy if not outright assistance on the part of so many nations, there’ll clearly be no end to the horror cost of it all.