History Now: Truth-Telling and Histories of Genocide Now

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jesse Adams Stein (00:10):
Well, good evening and good morning,
depending on where you are.
Hello everyone, and thank youso much for joining us for this
online special session ofHistory Now, particularly
exciting because we've gotpeople from all over the world
joining us.
And also a special thank you tothose who are joining us at an
unusual time, for example lateat night.
We really appreciate it.

(00:31):
My name's Jesse Adams-Stein andI'm here in my capacity as
Program Director of History Now2024.
And I represent both theHistory Council of New South
Wales and the Australian Centrefor Public History at UTS, and
I'm also a DECRA History at UTSand I'm also a DECRA Fellow at
UTS School of Design.
So thanks for coming along tothe fifth History Now 2024 event

(00:52):
Truth Telling and Histories ofGenocide, with speakers Lorena
Allam, Umit Kurt and DirkMoses and with Chair Nancy
Cushing.
Before we begin, I'd like tostart by acknowledging First
Nations, people and traditionalcustodians of country throughout
the place we call Australia andinternationally as well.
I'm zooming in from Gadigalcountry, but I know we have

(01:15):
people joining us from manydifferent places around the
world and I know this topic oftruth telling and histories of
genocide has strong meaning andresonance for First People
internationally as well as here,I'd like to pay my respects to
elders, past and present, andacknowledge that sovereignty was
never ceded in this place.
Colonisation and genocide are,of course, intertwined subjects

(01:37):
and we will be hearing or maybehearing some about that as the
speakers present.
Before I hand over to our chairfor today's session, associate
Professor Nancy Cushing, I willjust introduce History Now as a
whole series.
It's sort of had a bit of a bitof a revival this year.
It's been a long-running publichistory talk series.
Actually it's always had theaim to bring what you might call

(01:59):
cutting-edge historicalpractice into public discourse.
The vibe of the event hasalways been candid and
conversational, featuringprofessional and academic
historians as well as expertswhose work relates to historical
subject matter and practices.
History Now has had severaliterations, organisers and homes
over the years.

(02:19):
Sometimes it's been online, forexample during COVID, other
times in person in Sydney.
This year I'm coordinating itin my multiple hats capacity at
the History Council and at theAustralian Centre for Public
History at UTS.
And this particular event, thissession for this topic, is a
collaboration with NewcastleUniversity of Newcastle's Centre

(02:41):
for the Study Vi olence.
And currently Nancy Cushing isDirector of the Centre for the
Study of Violence.
In History Now 2024, we've gotnine sessions.
We started in March run throughto November.
The full event program can beeasily found on the History
Council website and through aquick search engine inquiry.
But for now I'd like tointroduce you to our chair for

(03:03):
tonight's session, associateProfessor Nancy Cushing from the
University of Newcastle,australia.
Aside from being the Directorof the Centre for the Study of
Violence, nancy is also anenvironmental historian
specialising in human-otheranimal relations.
Nancy is also the 2024-25 CoralThomas Fellow of the State
Library of New South Wales andthe Deputy President of the

(03:26):
University of Newcastle'sAcademic Senate for Research.
Nancy is also a strongsupporter of the History Council
for New South Wales and wethank her so much for accepting
the invitation to chair today'sevent.
I'll now hand over to Nancy,who will introduce today's topic
, and our speakers.
Thank you, nancy.

Nancy Cushing (03:43):
Thank you so much , Jesse, and thanks everyone
who's come along this morning,this evening, wherever you are
situated in the temporal zones.
So, yeah, welcome to thesession.
I would also like toacknowledge the owners of the
unceded land from which I amcoming to you this evening, the
Dharamarigal people of what'snow northern Sydney.

(04:06):
I thank them for their care ofthis land and I extend my
respects to their elders, pastand present, and, as Jesse was
suggesting, these are people whoknow firsthand the gravity and
power of both truth telling andgenocide.
So these are weighty topics andnot to be taken lightly.

(04:26):
As the current violence hascontinued in Palestine, many
historians and historicalassociations have debated over
how to respond, what isappropriate from us, and I think
we all have our own personalopinions, and many have taken
action, signing petitions,participating in demonstrations,

(04:48):
making donations, for example.
Professionally, I think we actmost ethically and effectively
when we remain within our sphereof expertise, and I certainly
cannot claim any expertise inthis area, and so my role
tonight is purely as afacilitator and a careful

(05:09):
listener.
But my three guests thisevening Lorena Allam, dirk Moses
and Umut Kurt have all spentmany years working towards
deeper understandings in theseareas.
They approach the topics fromdiffering perspectives, but in
each case they show the value tothe present and future of

(05:31):
having a solid understanding ofthe past.
This is not a matter of pullingout simplistic lessons from the
past you know, what can thepast teach us but an awareness
of how the past reaches into thepresent, informing current
attitudes, assumptions andactions.
Such critical perspectives aregreatly needed to avoid the

(05:55):
blind perpetuation of pastwrongs, and so I'm going to be
inviting each of the speakers toaddress us for about 15 minutes
this evening.
So we begin with Lorena Allam.
Lorena is a multi-Walkleyaward-winning journalist
descended from Gamilaraay andYawalaray nations of

(06:17):
Northwestern New South Wales.
Lorena's substantive role is asthe Guardian's Indigenous
Affairs Editor.
I first became aware of herwork in 2022 through the Killing
Times project, which drew uponthe colonial massacres map that

(06:37):
was developed by the lateEmeritus Professor Lyndall Ryan,
who was a longtime member ofthe Centre for the Study of
Violence and also a dear friend.
Lorena's work helped totranslate that research for a
mass audience.
In 2023, she was awarded aChurchill Fellowship to
investigate the role of themedia in Indigenous
truth-telling, and so that'sgoing to be her topic tonight.

(07:00):
She's going to share with ussomething of the insights that
she's developed into thecomplexities of this role of the
media.
So I'll hand over to you,Lorena.
Thanks.

Lorena Allam (07:11):
Thank you, Nancy, and thank you for mentioning
Professor Emeritus, ProfessorLyndall Ryan.
She's much loved and missed andwas a fantastic colleague to
collaborate with on the KillingTimes, which was a very
transformative project, I think,for the media.
As Nancy said, I'm Lorena Allum.
I'm a Gamilaraayiwalaraayiwoman from northwest New South

(07:33):
Wales and the Guardian'sIndigenous Affairs editor, and I
live and work on the uncededsovereign lands of the Wangal
clan of the Dharug Nation and Ipay my respects to all of our
mob who are tuning in tonightand all of you who are tuning in
, you could be watching theOlympics.
So thanks for that, thanks foryour time.
Australia is almost a year onfrom the failed referendum to

(07:56):
enshrine an Indigenous voice toParliament in the Constitution.
The voice was designed as oneof three reforms.
It was supposed to be followedby treaty-making and
truth-telling.
The Uluru Statement from theHeart called for a Makarrata
Commission.
Makarrata is a Yolngu word,meaning coming together after a
struggle was meant to overseethose processes.

(08:17):
If the voice was successful andwe know the voice failed so
resoundingly.
The governments appear to havehit the brakes on the other
ambitious reforms called for inthe Uluru Statement.
It's now unlikely there will beany progress on a federal
treaty and the Albanesegovernment says it won't be
rushed on announcing the nextsteps in any truth-telling

(08:39):
process.
The focus is on practicaloutcomes for now, but
nevertheless these issues remainvitally important and
truth-telling is the one thingthat Aboriginal communities are
calling for.
The tone of the debate duringthe referendum showed that many
Australians remain ignorant ofthe history of colonisation and

(09:00):
how that dispossession continuesto affect Aboriginal lives
today.
Those gaps in understandinghave consequences for the health
and wellbeing of Aboriginalpeople and the future of a
reconciled Australia.
Like we all know, australia'shistory is complex and layered.
There is no one narrative thatdefines us, but there is so much

(09:22):
more we need to acknowledgeabout our past us.
But there is so much more weneed to acknowledge about our
past, and the voice may havebeen successful had people
understood a bit more thereasons why it was so necessary
in our history, alongside thehorrors of stories of defiance
and resistance, and bravery andkindness and compassion that all
need to be told and celebrated,I think our descendants deserve

(09:44):
to know the full history of thenation, and that's why
truth-telling matters.
What is truth-telling in themedia context?
I mean.
The broader concept oftruth-telling emerged in the
late 20th century, in placeswhere people were coming out of,
you know, dictatorships orcivil war and moving to
democracy, from the idea thattransitional justice could be

(10:07):
reached via commissions or otherpublic processes that allowed
people to tell their experiences.
So we know there have beenprominent processes in South
Africa, uganda, rwanda, northernIreland, timor-leste in 2001,
and, of course, canada'smonumental Reconciliation
Commission from 2008 to 2015.

(10:30):
And Sweden, norway and Finlandare currently at various stages
of conducting truth-tellingcommissions for Sámi people.
But that model has many critics.
It's argued that few of theseprocesses have led to
substantive change and if you'refollowing the news in Australia
, there was the release of theDisability Royal Commission

(10:51):
report today and disabilityadvocates were saying exactly
that.
Why did we share our storieswith you when it seems to be
leading to very little change?
It's argued that theseprocesses should be which we can
think about truth-telling in anumber of ways, but localised
and bottom-up approachesdesigned by people, indigenous

(11:15):
people, seem to be the mostsuccessful.
Like the annual Myall CreekMassacre, so Myall creek
massacre in 1838 was the killingof at least 28 men, women and
children by eight colonists onthe 10th of June at the Myall
Creek near the Goyder River, onwhere I land in northern New

(11:37):
South Wales.
After two trials, seven of the12 accused were found guilty of
murder and they were hanged.
It is one of the best knownmassacres because I think it was
the first one where the whiteperpetrators were brought to
justice.
Of course we know, thanks tothe work of Emeritus Professor
Lyndall Ryan, that there werehundreds and hundreds of

(11:59):
massacre sites across Australia,massacres that continued right
up until the late 1920s and infact increased in size over time
and severity, and despite manyof those public truth-telling
processes at the time, includinga royal commission in West
Australia into the mass killingof Aboriginal people and the

(12:22):
burning of their bodies led tono change.
But at Myall Creek these daysthe descendants of that terrible
event, the descendants of thesite survivors and the
perpetrators, gather togetherevery year to remember.
It began as a very smallgathering and it's grown and
grown over time to the point nowthat there's a memorial on the

(12:44):
site where people can gather atany time of the year to
acknowledge those who lost theirlives and the perpetrators, of
course, and those whocourageously contributed to the
pursuit of justice in that story.
That's probably the clearestexample of that organic, ground
up style of truth telling thatmany people are now advocating

(13:04):
for, as opposed to theperformative, often heavily
regulated commission model thatmight be based on a letters
patent in the case of the EuropeCommission a terms of reference
that's beholden to governmentfor funding that are often very
highly regulated in what theycan look at and how.
So the organic style oftruth-telling, because it's

(13:27):
created and owned and cared forby the community, people are
invested in it and it has greatbenefits for a localised
understanding of frontierhistory.
I mean, things are always moreimpactful if you comprehend that
they've happened in yourneighbourhood or to your
ancestors, or they take on avery personal meaning to which
people can feel a greaterresponsibility.

(13:48):
Of course, there are many otherforms of truth telling in
between the community localmodel and those big,
performative commissions, and Iwould argue that they are all
valid and whichever path peoplechoose to take should be their
own community driven decision tomake.
There's scholarshipinternationally that

(14:08):
interrogates the idea of truthtelling as justice.
In a sense, it is a form ofjustice, but it cannot be an end
in itself.
So, University of New SouthWales Professor Megan Davis,
who's also an architect of theUluru Statement, said in 2021,

(14:29):
revisiting trauma is not theroad to justice for Aboriginal
people.
Australian history is repletewith examples of the
Commonwealth detaching justiceoutcomes from truth.
There's two I can think ofstraight away the Royal
Commission into AboriginalDeaths in Custody, which in 1991
released 339 recommendationsaimed at reducing incarceration
rates and therefore deaths incustody of Indigenous people.

(14:51):
30 years later, we are stillthe most incarcerated people in
the world and thoseincarceration rates are rising.
Tomorrow the Closing the Gapfigures will be out and they
will show that the incarcerationrates among adults have grown
worse in the last 12 months, notbetter.
And even our children, now thatwhile the incarceration rates

(15:13):
of young people have remainedbad, they haven't gotten worse.
But but even now we've.
We are dealing with the factthat a 16 year old boy in WA is
the first child to die,aboriginal child to die in
custody.
These are horrific milestonesnobody wants to know about.

(15:34):
The other time, I think wherewe've had a big performative
truth-telling process thathasn't led to substantive change
, despite our best efforts, isthe Bringing them Home Inquiry
in 1997.
It was a landmark report thattold the story of the stolen
generations and the devastatingintergenerational impacts of

(15:54):
forcible removal on our families.
It made more than a dozenrecommendations, including
better access to records, moresupport for family reunions and
for families sufferingintergenerational trauma.
Yet it took the Australiangovernment 11 years to issue a
formal apology, and so much ofwhat we recommended in that

(16:15):
inquiry is still unresolved.
The issue of records is still aproblem.
Churches still retain crucialrecords that they were
recommended to be made public 30years ago to their survivors
and their descendants, andfederal government data
continues to show that theStolen Generations are the
poorest and most disadvantagedamong Aboriginal people, with

(16:36):
significantly worse health,housing, employment and family
outcomes.
The intergenerational impact issignificant.
The Healing Foundationestimates that almost half the
population in Western Australiahave Stolen Generations Links.
And despite that importantreport a very important report

(16:59):
our children are still beingremoved at alarming rates.
They make up almost half of allchildren in out-of-home care,
despite being less than 4% ofthe population.
So you could clearly argue thatthese truth processes have
required a great emotionalinvestment and participation
from Aboriginal people, some ofour most vulnerable community

(17:20):
members, who placed their trustin these processes but have been
disappointed over and over thatthey've led to little
substantive change, and Ibelieve we can't continue to ask
our people to tell theirstories of pain for just another
report that will sit on a shelf.
So whatever form truth-tellingtakes in Australia will need to
account for this.
It has to account for this.

(17:41):
We can't just replicate that.
Um, I've been tracking.
There's been some work about howtruth-telling might develop in
australia and and so two, twoacademics from the Uni of New
South Wales released a studyearlier this year.
Dr Ann Maree Payne and Dr HeidiNorman made - produced a report

(18:02):
for Reconciliation Australiaabout what truth-telling could
look like and what are thebarriers to it in Australia.
They say that being realisticabout what truth-telling can
achieve is important.
Got to be clear about what it'sfor.
Is it done for healing?
Is it done to seek justice?
Is it done to educateAustralians about the full
history of colonisation?

(18:22):
Therefore, what is everyone'srole in that process?
Because everybody has a role.
So they found a significant gapbetween Aboriginal people and
non-Aboriginal people inunderstanding what they thought
truth-telling was and their rolein it.
Their report said truth-tellingneeded to be led by Aboriginal
people and communities,recognise the continuing impact

(18:45):
of the past on their lives today, be ongoing and aim to achieve
lasting change.
People need to feel safe tospeak and to listen.
So Heidi Norman saidtruth-telling may involve
difficult emotions and thepotential for conflict, and
strategies need to be put inplace to manage these.
They found that there was wideagreement about what

(19:08):
truth-telling, that it was anessential step forward, but
Indigenous and non-Indigenouspeople had very different
understandings of what it couldlook like and they would need to
be very carefully navigated.
So here we come up against thejustice issue again.
If you think about the bringingthem home report, one of the
the most um controversial uhrecommendations that meet the

(19:32):
media made it controversial wasthat people who were taken from
their families ought to becompensated.
So here, when you start toconnect justice to truth, people
get extremely uncomfortable.
Anne-marie Payne saidtruth-telling is not a panacea
that will fix every problemfacing Indigenous communities.
It is one step as part of abigger journey, not a

(19:55):
destination in itself, and Ithink that will be a difficult
thing to convince the media andthe general Australian public of
that.
Truth-telling is not one anddone.
It is a process that weundertake and we continue to do,
because once you start downthis path, you have to keep
going.
I think the Sydney Friends ofMile Creek said there is no

(20:18):
shortcut to the future.
We have to do this work.
So what's the role in all ofthis for the media?
Well, I think the coverage ofthe voice to parliament
referendum should provide somevery fertile ground for media
academics in coming years.
I mean, we saw an avalanche ofmisinformation.
There was lies andfear-mongering circulated on

(20:39):
social media.
It was very hard to keep tofact check.
One claim before another onepopped up.
It was like an endless game ofinformation whack-a-mole.
And all of that played out at atime where news fatigue is
generally high and people areswitching off from traditional
sources of news gathering.
The general faith in thereliability of old school news

(21:00):
is at a low ebb.
We have conspiracy theoriesrampant.
People are getting theirinformation from a range of
sources, opinions, people theyfollow on YouTube.
It's not always subject to thesame rigour as old-fashioned
journalism is and consequentlythere is a growing group of news
consumers who are immune toanything the mainstream media

(21:21):
will report.
They are truth-seeking but notnecessarily truth-binding, and I
guess in that landscape we allhave to be very media literate
about the info we're given andwe all need to be reporters in a
way and interrogate that.
It's definitely a challengingtime to work in the media and,
as an Indigenous journalist tobe exposed to the level of

(21:43):
racist trolling online andcomments on social media.
It really does take its toll,but there are opportunities for
the kind of truth-telling thatis transformational and
meaningful for the tellers andthose who hear them, and the
Killing Times is one of thoseprojects, if you Google it on
the Guardian.
What we attempted to do was totake Lyndall's map and analyse

(22:07):
the data that it was showing usand to talk to descendants of
people from all sides of thatmassacre history about how they
were personally coming to termswith this very complex and
painful past.
I think I was going to talkabout another project we've done
, which is working with theuncles of Kinchela Boys Home,
but I'm mindful of time so Ijust want to sort of finish by

(22:30):
saying that, as I said earlier,the flip side of truth-telling,
especially in the media, ofaccountability, makes people
uncomfortable.
The media has a clear role toplay in helping break the code
of silence that surrounds muchof our colonial history, but it
also has to acknowledge its roleas a pillar of colonization in
the past.
One thing we found over andover during the killing times

(22:53):
was that that we were veryreliant on colonial newspapers
for information about massacres.
So, on the one hand and andsome of them were, you know,
quite encouraging of frontierviolence.
In fact, the Sydney MorningHerald recently did a project
acknowledging its role andapologising for its role in

(23:13):
running a campaign to defend theperpetrators of Myall Creek.
So I think, there are probably alot more cases like that one
worth exploring in themainstream media.
I also think at some point verysoon, the media needs to
consider establishing aframework for responsible
reporting about truth-tellingthat is trauma-informed and
respectful of people's privacy,and it might include things like

(23:36):
guidelines and protocols forreporting on Indigenous
vulnerable people and a greaterawareness among journalism
educators of the importance ofhistorical context in covering
Indigenous affairs.
A lot of journos are graduatingfrom universities and they
don't have enough of thatknowledge.
It is a real gap in theirlearning.
As I say, help understand thepast role of the media as a

(23:59):
pillar of colonisation and helpprovide a trauma-informed
process of reporting aroundvulnerable people in Indigenous
truth-telling.
As truth-telling involves inAustralia, so must the media's
relationship to it.
Thank you, I'll leave it there.
Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for starting us off.
That was really powerful and awonderful start for the evening.
Our second speaker is ProfessorDirk Moses.
Dirk is originally fromAustralia and has had long
stints at the University ofSydney, but is currently
teaching international relationsat the City College of New York

(24:41):
of genocide in memory.
Two anthologies he hasappearing this year are
Holocaust Museum and HumanRights, transnational
Perspectives on ContemporaryMemorials from the University of
Pennsylvania Press and theRussian Invasion of Ukraine
Victims, perpetrators, justiceand the Question of Genocide,

(25:04):
with Routledge.
Dirk supports the developmentof the field as a senior editor
of the Journal of GenocideResearch and he's a public
intellectual who's generous insharing his research in online
writing and podcasts, links forwhich can be found on his
webpage, dirkmoses.
com.
Tonight, he's going to take onan issue that has troubled many

(25:28):
in the last 10 months whether itis possible to prove genocidal
intent.

Dirk Moses (25:42):
Okay, thanks very much for the generous
introduction and, of course, forthe invitation to participate
in this important forum thatLorena mentioned the Stolen
Generations Report and relatedissues, because when it came out
I think it's in 96, I was a PhDstudent in the US and then in
Germany doing my research, whichwas on West German

(26:04):
intellectuals and the Nazi past.
So it was about the post-warperiod and the way the collapse
of the Weimar Republic and therise of the Nazis and its many
crimes had been debated anddiscussed in West Germany.
So it was really abouthistorical justice and the
lessons one draws from it.
And I studied Australianhistory as an undergrad at the

(26:27):
University of Queensland withRay Evans and we'd read the work
of Lindell, among others, andthat generation of scholars.
This is now in the second halfof the 1980s and so I was quite
aware of, at least according tothe scholarship at the time, of
what had been going on inAustralia and especially in

(26:48):
Queensland, which was theepicenter of genocidal violence
against Indigenous people.
I thought and I ended up,although working on post-war
Germany in the late 90s,starting to write about
Australia and the debateregarding the genocide question,

(27:08):
which is also in the reportthat Lorena mentioned, and from
memory it wasn't just the issueof reparations which exercised
Australian commentators,particularly conservative ones.
It was also the question ofgenocide, and there was
widespread confusion about whatis genocide, what are its legal

(27:30):
requirements.
And then there are a lot ofinstant experts who are writing
columns in newspapers, and Iguess I was one of them as well.
I was just a young postgraduateat the time.
In any event, I ended up writingan article about how you
conceptualize genocide in a sortof dynamic, decentralized
process like the colonization ofAustralia came out in the year

(27:50):
2000, which was also the yearthat I started a lectureship at
the University of Sydney, andwhen I got there I wanted to
offer a class on the globalhistory of genocide, with
obviously a week or two onAustralia, and I couldn't find a
textbook that would cover thatand it just didn't exist.
Of course there was plenty ofresearch on frontier violence

(28:12):
and also on stolen Indigenouschildren, but not in relation to
the genocide concept.
They were kept apart.
So I ran a small workshop onthe subject in Sydney, you know
Henry Reynolds and others camealong.
I established contact with theIndigenous Centre at the
University of Sydney, where itsmembers were very supportive and

(28:37):
in a way helped open my eyes toa lot of things, because I was
educated in a very Eurocentricway, working on Germany as I did
and I also then did.
A conference in 2003 ongenocide and colonialism at
Sydney University was the firstof its kind.
I mean there was a littlewriting on the subject but not
much.

(28:58):
The most people working ongenocide in the 90s were
concerned with totalitarianregimes like the Cambodian Khmer
Rouge, or authoritarian onesand dysfunctional non-Western
ones like Rwanda, and genocidewasn't seen to occur in the West

(29:18):
.
The West was seen as thevehicle for preventing genocide.
That was the discourse ofhumanitarian intervention which
culminated in the NATOintervention in Kosovo and
Serbia in 1999.
So you can see those dates it'sall very fresh, you know, and
the 90s were a really convulsiveperiod for these debates.
So you know, had the StolenGenerations Report in 96, you

(29:41):
had, you know, Rwanda andSrebrenica the year or two
earlier.
Then you had the conflagrationin Kosovo and the whole
humanitarian intervention debatethroughout this period.
Samantha Power's important book,a Problem from Hell about US
non-intervention and genocidescame out in 2001.
And that was very much a Biblefor a certain generation of

(30:04):
older genocide scholars for whomthe West was a vehicle for
genocide prevention rather thana vehicle for genocide.
There was really just nointerest in genocide and settler
colonialism.
So that's the sort of aresearch angle I tried to
promote and eventually I becameinvolved in that journal that
was mentioned in theintroduction by Nancy, the

(30:27):
Journal of Genocide Research,which I've been the senior
editor of since 2011 and anassociate editor since 2005.
And we have been promoting thistheme in that journal and
you'll find quite a few articlesabout settler colonial
genocides in Africa, australiaand in North America in the

(30:47):
journal, if you care to look.
And that's affected what wewould call a colonial turn in
genocide studies.
Now, genocide studies is onething.
There's just scholars who canrange far and wide, do as they
wish.
The law of genocide is quiteanother, and we're seeing, in

(31:08):
relation to the proceedings atthe International Court of
Justice instituted by SouthAfrica against Israel in January
and onwards, how strict thatdefinition is.
I mean, those who areinternational lawyers know this
well, of course, already, butit's become much more of a
publicly conscious issue becausethe war is such a divisive

(31:32):
public conflict outside theregion in the US yes, in Germany
, which I study carefully verymuch, and also in Australia.
I've been watching, you knowwatching the media coverage of
that closely as well, and theencampments and so forth at the
universities are onemanifestation of that.
And certainly for the Palestineadvocacy movement, it's just an

(31:55):
article of faith that genocideis taking place.
Likewise for the Israelsolidarity movement, this is an
armed conflict, israel isengaged in legitimate
self-defense and there's noquestion of genocide.
What you've got is theinstrumentalization of um, this
so-called crime of crimesagainst Israel for political

(32:15):
reasons.
But it's not legally serious.
Uh, and and those are basicallythe the positions at the ICJ by
of the of the two legal teams,South Africa and Israel.
So versions of this argumentare taking place on campuses and
among lawyers.
But why is it that it's sodifficult to prove?
I mean, a lot of those who aresympathetic to the Palestinian

(32:38):
situation will admit that itcould quite well be the case
that when the ICJ comes todecide on the merits of the
genocide case by South Africa,that they may well say genocide
is not taking place, preciselybecause of the very strict legal
definition.

(32:59):
Now, one thing you don't hearenough from international
lawyers is why is it that wehave this very strict legal
definition?
Why is it so different from themore general understanding of
genocide, which is, you know,basically a synonym for the
destruction of nations, groups,ethnic groups and so forth?
Why is there disparity?
Now, when the concept ofgenocide was invented really is

(33:22):
around 1943.
It was then published in a in abook by raphael, polish-jewish
jurist, in 1944.
There was a sort of a time lagof a year between the time he
invented the concept and thenwhen it came out in a book, but
it's during the Second World War.
He had a very broad definitionof what genocide was and that
was then narrowed down in lawwhen it was codified in the

(33:46):
United Nations Convention fouryears later, in 1948.
Now I think we need to talk abit about how and why that
occurred and how his originaldefinition of genocide is one
that, if you like, has anIndigenous sensibility that I
think would that I seeIndigenous peoples, whether in
Australia or elsewhere,reflecting accurately.

(34:07):
Now we have to talk a little bitabout Lemkin, who he was.
To understand this, if you like, indigenous sensibility.
He was a Polish patriot as wellas a Jewish, a Zionist as well,
growing up in the 1920s and 30s.
As a young man, he was born in1900 in what is now Poland.
The town in which he was bornwas in what is now Belarus was

(34:33):
all part of the Russian Empireuntil the end of the First World
War, when Poland became aseparate state.
In any event, he grew up therein what historians of the region
called small nations Smallnations, although Poland is
actually a large nation.
But the small nations are thatband of countries from the
Baltic to the Black Sea betweenRussia and Germany that have

(34:55):
always felt crushed by theselarge major land powers and
which didn't have independentstatehood until the end of the
First War because they were partof the Russian Empire or, bits
and pieces, the German andAustro-Hungarian empires.
So there was always thisprecarious sense of statehood
and being subsumed into largernations and being culturally

(35:16):
under pressure and indeed withthe fear that one may disappear
from history by being absorbedinto larger entities.
Now, although this isn't quitethe same as a settler, colonial
situation, you can see theparallels and the notion of
nationhood that Lemkin was usingwhen he invented this concept

(35:41):
of genocide as a policy ofoccupation is a term he used by
the Germans.
He was thinking very broadly.
What constituted a nation wasnot just the bare lives of, say,
poles or Czechoslovaks or Jewsunder German occupation.
It was their culture, it wastheir natural resources, it was

(36:03):
their political autonomy.
He even talks about morality.
He listed eight techniques ofgenocide we would say policies
today which the Germansperpetrated against these
occupied nations in order todestroy them.
So you could destroy a nation,according to Lemkin, in a
variety of ways, and one of themtoday we would call cultural

(36:25):
genocide.
Cultural genocide.
Now, when it came to codifyinggenocide in international law,
after a General Assemblyresolution calling for a
convention, in late 1946, adraft convention was produced by
the Secretariat of the UnitedNations.
It was written by a committeeof three international lawyers
One of them was Lemkin and itreflected his very broad

(36:45):
definition and includedbiological genocide, physical
genocide and cultural genocide.
Now then it went through allthese committees for the next
two years from late, you know,1947 and 1948.
And if you read the transcriptsof those committee
deliberations, which amount toabout 2,000 pages they've been
collected in a book you can seethat the majority of delegates

(37:10):
were very uncomfortable withthis very broad definition of
genocide, because it would bevery easy for, say, an
indigenous group to say thatthese forced assimilation
policies from, say, latinAmerican countries or Australia
or Canada or what have, weregenocidal because they aimed to

(37:30):
destroy their peoples.
Okay, though assimilationpolicies were seen in the 40s
and 50s and 60s is veryprogressive, as many of you know
, but of course not for thepeople it was affecting.
Now, all these sort of broadelements of genocide were
stripped from the conventiondrafts and we ended up with a

(37:51):
very narrow definition at theend of 1948, which reflected the
interests of states.
And the interests of stateswere not to establish a
convention, which means aninternational treaty which could
be used to impugn them.
They wanted their sovereignright to put down, to assimilate

(38:12):
minorities, indigenous people,and to put down rebellions and
to engage in degraded forms ofwarfare against their neighbours
if they wanted to.
So the convention's narrowdefinition not only excluded
genocide and politicalmotivations for committing

(38:33):
genocide, it also excludedethnic cleansing and was very
careful to demarcate genocide, agenocidal logic, from a
military logic.
A genocidal logic aims todestroy.
A military logic aims to defeat, even though, in the course of
which many civilians may bekilled, collaterally or

(38:55):
incidentally, as human shields,as a language we hear a lot
about Now.
The reason they did that isbecause the Allies, of course,
had killed hundreds of thousandsof Axis civilians in bombing
German and in Japanese cities.
In fact they'd used two atomicweapons which had killed
civilians.

(39:17):
So a definition of genocidewhich was broad, in the sense
that it protected civilians as acategory, could not be allowed.
And so the convention is veryclear that the destruction of a
people as such is what isrequired for genocide and the as
such it's curious two wordsmeans that members of a group

(39:38):
are targeted solely because theyare members of a group, because
of their group attributes, notfor anything they've done so,
it's for who they are.
It's an identity crime ratherthan for anything they've done

(40:02):
so, which would entail politicallogics.
Colonial Queensland ofindigenous people.
It can be argued that theperpetrators are not, they're
not attacking members of thisgroup because they're members of
this group, they're trying toattack the insurgents, or you
know, the terrorists andcivilians got in the way.

(40:25):
That's regrettable, but that'swhat happens, happens in armed
conflict.
So you can see how armedconflict gets separated
conceptually from genocide,although it's very artificial
because in practice what we nowcall genocide always takes place
in the context of armedconflict.
When we consider the armeniangenocide umit has written about
so much, this was in the contextof the First World War, anzacs,

(40:49):
among others, were invadingthrough the Dardanelles, and
that, coincidentally correct meif I'm wrong was also the week
when the Armenian genocidestarts, in April 1915.
And so security crises arealways the, or virtually always

(41:11):
the locus or context in whichwhat we now call genocidal
attacks take place.
Campaigns is that the leaders ofa state regard themselves as in

(41:33):
an existential emergency or apart of in a border region.
For example, in Myanmar withthe in Rakhine state is a
sensitive area and there's anethnic minority living there
that's not loyal to the majority.
According to the way they'rethinking and this is the way
that the Chinese are thinkingwith Xinjiang province in

(41:54):
relation to the Uyghurs, forexample they're ethnically a
minority, there might be amajority there, but they're not
for the majority of the state asa whole, and we don't regard
them as loyal.
We regard them as loyal to thepeople on the other side of the
border who want part of our land, and so this is a dangerous
separatist movement.
So, rather than deal with, asthey would be entitled to, the

(42:17):
actual insurgents, they decideto deport or incarcerate the
entire population from which theinsurgents come.
So they attack innocent women,men, people who aren't involved
in any uprising or separatismFor a once and for all solution
to this quote unquote separatistproblem.

(42:40):
And it's this once and for allthinking that is very
characteristic of genocide.
I call it a permanent securitylogic, because they're not just
engaging in a regular securityoperation, they are engaging a
once and for all securityoperation so that in the future
there can never be securitythreats.
Now I'm seeing a fair bit ofthat kind of language in

(43:02):
relation to Gaza from Israeliauthorities where they're
suggesting we can't ever againallow Gaza to be a staging point
for this kind of attack on the7th of October.
So we're going to make Gazaunlivable so that eventually all
the Gazans leave one way or theother.
So they're kind offuture-proofing yourself.

(43:22):
So this is, I think, thestrategic logic that's
discernible at the moment.
You know, whether it fits thesevery narrow legal definition of
genocide remains to be seen.
There's certainly plenty ofgenocidal rhetoric by Israeli
authorities, but whether that'staken as a command
responsibility statement by theICJ is another question.

(43:46):
So, as an analyst, I'm moreinterested in trying to
understand, you know, what isdriving states in these kind of
campaigns, which clearly mixgenocidal and military logics.
They really can't be separatedas they are in law, rather than
engaged in pin the tail on thedonkey exercises, which are in

(44:08):
the end legal, and political,tail on the donkey exercises,
which are in the end legal andpolitical.
So I'll finish by noting that itwas 20 years ago that my first
book came out, which is anedited book on genocide in
Australia.
It's called Genocide and SettlerSociety, in which I gathered
historians and other scholarsworking on frontier violence and

(44:30):
the stolen Indigenous childrenclaim.
So that's 20 years ago and thecover of the book is an image of
the Myall Creek Memorial site,which Lorena will know very well
.
And it's in studying colonialviolence that I finally
understood that the securityimperative is really quite

(44:51):
central to genocidal violence.
When you looked at the colonialnewspapers that Lorena
mentioned and that were studiedso importantly in this massacre
map project and the other workthat Lyndall did, you can see

(45:12):
the frontier commentators wereconstantly worried about the
security of the pastoralindustry and the workers in it
and they they understood that ifindigenous resistance prevailed
and that pastoral sheep andcattle farming collapsed, the

(45:33):
colonial economy would collapseand the whole project would fall
apart.
So destroying Indigenousresistance was really central to
the settler colonial project inAustralia and I think that
should be part of thetruth-telling that Lorena
mentioned.
I'll finish with that.

Thank you so much .
And you know, very elegantlytying the two talks that we've
already heard together andpointing to those parallels, and
I enjoyed that brief history ofthe development of genocide
studies to encompass thecolonial, settler colonial
actions as well as the othersthat had the earlier attention.

(46:18):
Thank you so much for that.
Okay, now we go to our finalspeaker, who is my colleague and
fellow member of the Study ofViolence, Dr Umit Kurt.
Umit is a DECRA postdoctoralfellow and award-winning
historian who focuses on thetransformations of imperial
structures in the modern MiddleEast and the late Ottoman Empire

(46:41):
and their role in constitutingthe republican regime.
He is a fellow of the RoyalHistorical Society and the
author of the Armenians ofAintab the Economics of Genocide
in an Ottoman Province,published by Harvard University
Press, and co-author of theSpirit of the Laws the Plunder
of Wealth in the ArmenianGenocide with Bergen.

(47:04):
So Umit is going to talk to usabout what's been labelled
genocide and how it works on theground, drawing on his in-depth
knowledge of the Armeniangenocide as it affected that
small city of Aintab.

Umit Kurt (47:21):
So over to you, Umit.
Thank you so much Nancy, forthis generous introduction , and
I would like to thank theorganizers for bringing this
timely discussion forth withexcellent historians and
researchers.
I'm so happy to be here withyou.
Truth-telling is always a majorproblem for me and I encounter

(47:44):
over the course of my research,writing and talking, especially
when you're talking about thehistorical events which took
place and named as Armeniangenocide in the international
arena but has been denied by themain perpetrator country so far
.
So it's not desirable in Turkeyor post-Ottoman urban and

(48:07):
country landscapes.
This matter and history ofgenocide is a fundamental topic
for modern Turkey, has to dowith its existence, national and
society building, as well asnational identity, and it has to
do with existence, and thatalso resonates with Dirks

(48:32):
beautifully, within theframework security imperative,
because always the mainperpetrators, the ruling lead of
the committee of union progress, the ottoman ruling elite then
always considered and regardedthe Armenian issue or problem as
a security matter.
All their actions were based onthe security imperative and

(48:56):
still denialism actually, whichis an absolute truth in Turkish
context for the time being, andit also came out of exactly the
same security imperative.
So it came out of exactly thesame security imperative to
embrace nihilism, to continue itand to feed it, not only at the
state level but also societylevel.

(49:17):
So therefore it's reallydifficult to deconstruct, this
kind of history writing, andthis kind of truth-telling or
state discourse and also itsreflections on the different
walks of life and society,affects one's upbringing, just

(49:38):
like me.
Discussion of the "Armenianissue, quote-unquote in Turkey
is dominated by claims ofatrocities committed by Armenian
groups against Muslims,reflecting a position that
official Turkish historiographyimposed on our collective memory

(49:59):
.
So on the rare occasions whenrevisionist Turkish historians
conceded that Armenians wereindeed massacred, the proclivity
is often to fall back the falseequivalency discourse of
quote-unquote.
But the Armenians killed Turkstoo.
So this phenomenon can beweaved as a natural kind of

(50:20):
natural instinct of individualsand societies to disassociate
themselves from wrongdoings inorder to elevate feelings of
guilt.
So, understandably, it'sdifficult for a society like
Turkey to talk openly aboutcrimes that are claimed to have
been committed for the good ofthe nation, although as
individuals they may not havetaken part in or even approved

(50:43):
of such actions.
So to have these conversationseven is to open the door to
confronting collectiveresponsibility in the Turkish
context.
So, unfortunately, we are justat this level.
So, while investigating thehistory of the Armenian Genocide
, I uncovered the problematicroots of Turkish national

(51:05):
identity and how many ofTurkey's current problems can be
traced back to these events.
Notably, the construction andvisibility of Turkish national
identity was made possible bythe destruction and erosion of
other identities, such asAssyrian, greek, arab, kurdish
and, of course, armenian, so itsexistence required the negation

(51:27):
of other identities.
Which brings to mind RaphaelLemkin's description of the two

faces of genocide (51:41):
one the destruction of the national
pattern of the oppressed group,the other the the imposition of
the national pattern of theoppressor.
Growing up in a multilingualhousehold, but being taught only
Turkish, I was a livingmanifestation of the national
pattern of the oppressor, whichcontinued over the course of my
entire education, and myawakening began in late 2009 by
questioning one of the tabooissues in Turkish political

(52:02):
history, that of the Armenianquestion .
I reoriented my PhD studies toArmenian genocide and the
concomitant exploration of thehow and why of the hegemony of
the official denialist ideologyand the widespread lack of
expertise necessary forsupervising genuine scholarship

(52:26):
made this a risky quest for astudent in Turkey.
Scholarship made this a riskyquest for a student in Turkey.
Consequently, I chose to pursuemy doctorate in the United
States, where I would be grantedintellectual freedoms
unavailable in Turkey, bystudying at Clark University
under the supervision of TanerAkça, a renowned scholar of the
Armenian genocide.
Embarking on my PhD in theHolocaust and Genocide Studies

(52:50):
at Clark was a crucial turningpoint for me in breaking with
any residual influences ofTurkey's official ideology,
which nearly universallypervades all research in the
country relating to issuesdeemed sensitive or detrimental
to state interest, and so Ilearned a lot at Clark.

(53:16):
I mastered the West literatureon the most infamous genocide in
history Shoah and Holocausthistorians have been raising
questions on the nature of humanbehavior that pertain to every
case of mass violence.
But why do people come to commitsuch brutal acts?
From the first day of myinvestigation into why and how

(53:40):
the genocide was perpetrated inmy hometown of Ain Taab, where I
was born and raised, I wish tobe able to pose this question to
Muslim civilians who executedthe Armenians' neighbors during
the genocidal rule of theCommittee of Union Progress
regime and those members of theCUP whose single-party
dictatorship lasted from January1913 to October 1918.

(54:05):
To understand why the locals ofAyentap undertook genocidal
acts, I decided to conduct myresearch and write the book
titled the Armenians of Ayentapthe Economics of Genocide in an
Ottoman Province.
As historian Max Berkholz aptlyputs in his groundbreaking work

(54:25):
.
Violence can be bothdestructive and generative
forces.
The same holds true for theArmenian genocide.
As a mass violence event,destruction of the Armenians
went parallel with the processof the birth of new modern
Turkey, its bourgeoisie.
Rise of violent middle classentrepreneurs with fists, which

(54:48):
I term people who became rise upto the social ladder, not
because they own the means ofproduction, but they confiscated
, then expropriated them.
It is equally interesting tosee how this rather quiet,
somewhat an uneasy and easycoexistence between the
Armenians and Muslims wasshattered within such a short

(55:11):
amount of time during the WorldWar I four years.
So the concept of genocideitself I'm following the Dirks
elites the concept of genocideitself was created not as an
analytical concept forhistorians but as a legal

(55:32):
category, and rightly so.
There is a history behind it,as they have just pointed out.
When it's used in the analysisof the past, it brings
attentions and creates a kind ofmoral urgency about instances
of violence, which is important.
But it also, I think, tends toblind us as historians in

(55:56):
certain ways by dividing off thepast in black and the white
categories of perpetrators andvictims.
The way the category is definedin the UN Convention also sets
up a certain type of analyticalquestions that also tend to lead
towards looking at elites,ideologies and the way in which

(56:17):
my book also tries to approachthe telling of the history of
genocide in this smallish cityor town by looking at the more
meso-level analysis andmicro-level, but without losing
the side of the micro-dimension.
So to have something likegenocide is institute.
The kind of questions thatemerge here are to perpetrate

(56:41):
violence on the scale, how arepeople mobilized to do so?
To assume that hatred or deepideological convictions is
dominated in a society is partof the problem that labeled what
happened as genocide to theseevents of mass violence.
In this respect, it's importantto get down to the ground level

(57:06):
, the crime scene itself, and totry to understand how and why
local people in certain momentsthink and decide that
persecution is the right way togo from one day to the next.
Various motivations, includingeconomic ones, play a role in
that process, particularly inrelation to my work, and that is

(57:29):
one of the ways in which thisinstance of violence at the
local level, which needs to beunderstood and researched and
memorised in its own terms.
Also, it can be compared invery significant ways with other
instances of other small towns,the change from one regime to

(57:49):
the next in the midst of acrisis, which is often a time
triggering factor, which we alsosee in this instance usually
provides unprecedentedopportunities for people to
achieve objectives that wouldhave never been possible.
And those can be people who mayalready sit in certain kinds of

(58:11):
positions of power, certainkinds of economic assets, and
this provides opportunity toacquire things that would have
never been able to, or peoplewho are very marginal to hold
any kind of power.
All of a sudden, they can findthemselves with this opportunity

(58:32):
to accumulate things that theycould only have dreamed of.
And studies like this that lookat small, discrete units and
understand something likegenocide as a process with a lot
of contingencies and a lot ofdifferent kinds of motivations
that are not always reducibledown to long-term hatred among

(58:58):
people on the basis of ethnicity, ideology, religion and so on
and so forth.
So a local history of a complexand, for some, still
controversial events manages toshed a new light, both on its
wider historical context and howspecifically unfolded on the

(59:20):
ground.
This approach that combineslongue durée with the close
focus on one location as thepotential fully realized in my
work of revising the entirehistoriography of the event as a
whole.
For instance, this is preciselywhat Umair Bartok tried to do

(59:41):
in his book Anatomy of aGenocide, published in 2018.
There is almost ethnographic,archaeological approach of just
walking through these areas, theneighborhoods and seeing.
In fact, the traces of thisviolence are still visible to
this day and beginning to reveallayers back, and this type of

(01:00:07):
work cannot be carried out froma distance and from only the top
down.
It absolutely resonates withthe field of genocide studies
and it's subversive in a way.
It does not dispute thenecessary nature of that
designation of this violence,but allows us to understand it
more historically than some ofthe previous literature has.

(01:00:31):
Let me briefly introduce my book.
The Armenians of Aint aabprovides precisely a kind of
archaeology of the forgotten,erased and denied past of the
course of the 20th centuryrequired, denied past of the
course of the 20th centuryrequired.
It makes what appears asnatural and comforting, such as
the landscapes of one'schildhood, appear in a different
, troubling, indeed terrible,light, as it excavates the past.

(01:00:54):
It reveals the genocide andethnic cleansing is not just a
matter of governmental policy,but also a social event, a
communal eruption whereneighbors turn against neighbors
.
So you have killed and alsotaken possession become a daily
mundane reality, as genocide isnot only profitable for the

(01:01:16):
genocides, but also a mechanismfor creating a new social
reality.
In the case of the OttomanEmpire and the nascent
republican regime, this meansthe creation of a new Turkish
middle class that replaced theArmenian population deported
from the town and in large partsmurdered, using the Armenian
property as a very basis ofelevating itself materially and

(01:01:39):
socially.
For anyone familiar with thecase of the Jews of Eastern
Europe, who were blamed forhindering the creation of an
indigenous middle class byoccupying that socio-economic
niche, this sounds very familiar.
Just as the Turks living inArmenian houses prefer not to
talk about or remember of formerinhabitants, so the Lithuanians

(01:02:03):
and Poles, Ukrainians,Hungarians and Romanians prefer
not to remember what was of theroot of the demographic and
economic transformation of theircountries, facilitated by
ethnic cleansing and genocide.
So all genocides combine adynamic of organization and
instructions from the top andactive engagement and

(01:02:25):
initiatives at the local level.
These two have becomeincreasingly evident in the case
of the Holocaust, as localstudies have shown the extent to
which Gentile populations oftowns occupied by Germans
participated in and profitedfrom the killing of the Jews.
So not solely because they wereforced to do because that was

(01:02:48):
or became part of their agenda,namely elevating themselves into
a higher socioeconomic nichenow vacated by their Jewish
neighbors.
So if we want to understand whypeople turn against their
neighbors turn against Armeniansor Poles and Ukrainians against
Jews it's insufficient toinvoke all this from above or

(01:03:12):
even long-term prejudice.
We need to remember the might,strength of resentment, potency
of greed and the will to improve.
This is also the deep root ofthe subsequent forgetting and
denial, which resonatesespecially with the Turkish
context for the time being.
But one should bear in mind thedeeper causes for the
disintegration of theinter-ethnic relations and

(01:03:34):
relative communal harmony.
So I think I should.
Yeah, I can stop here.

Nancy Cushing (01:03:43):
Yeah, thank you very much, jumin, and that was
really fascinating andespecially you were drawing
attention, as Lorena did, to theimportance of the really micro
approach and to understandthings we need to drill right

(01:04:04):
down to, to neighbors andinterpersonal relations on a
very basic level.
So thank you to all three ofour speakers and we've we've all
pretty much kept to time, so wedo have about 15 minutes for
questions.
So the way that we're going todo it is using this Mentimeter,

(01:04:27):
which perhaps you've come acrossbefore, so you just need to
hold your phone with the cameraactivated up to the screen and
that will take you through to awebsite where you can enter your
question, the other way as well.

Jesse Adams Stein (01:04:43):
Sorry to interrupt, Nancy if you don't
want to do the QR code option,you can also just go to menti.
com and put in the code that'son the screen there.
That's another option if that'seasier for some.
I'll also just note on theMentimeter system it's a fairly
short character count, so eitherkeep your question short or, if
you want to, you can go over toquestions.

(01:05:05):
But just make sure you put yourname on both the questions so
it's a bit easier for us totrack who said what.

thank, you okay, so we'll give people a few
minutes to do that before thequestions start coming through.
And I guess what struck me inlistening to each of the
presentations was this idea,that of the power of that's
accorded to very small and oftenmarginalized groups to to bring

(01:05:35):
down entire nation states andthen this is the power of that
state has to be turned againstthese small groups, and I
wondered if any of the speakerswould like to speak to that.
I guess boom, it was suggestingat some level it becomes kind

(01:05:56):
of instrumental that it'seconomically driven.
But yeah, I just wondered ifanybody would like to talk about
the way that these, the groupswho become subjected to
genocidal violence, areconstructed as such threats when
objectively that seemsquestionable.

Lorena Allam (01:06:29):
I would say Nancy, in the Australian context the
media has played a big role inthat.
Historically, we were not quitehuman.
The language that was used todescribe our peoples was very
dehumanising.
We were like animals and vermin.
The language that was used inthe massacre to kind of justify

(01:06:54):
massacres was land clearing.
They were seeking retributionand seeking justice, and the
justice that was meted out wasalways wildly out of proportion
to the alleged crime.
So someone might steal a sheepand in retaliation the settlers

(01:07:17):
would ride out in the posse andmassacre hundreds of people
indiscriminately, massacrehundreds of people
indiscriminately, so, and themedia over time helped make that
possible.
It's easier, I imagine, to killpeople if you don't think of
them as people and if you thinkof them as an impediment to your

(01:07:38):
fair and justified occupationof the country.
Yeah, I could say more, butI'll leave it there.

Thank you.

Umit Kurt (01:07:52):
Yeah.
I can say a few words regardingthe late Ottoman and the modern
Middle East context.
Actually, there has been thisconventional understanding which
has argued that the ethnic andsectarian identities and

(01:08:15):
national identities that led toviolence.
But when you get down to theground level and when you look
at the different provinces,towns of the late Ottoman Empire
and also in the modern MiddleEast, especially Lebanon in the
1860s and 1880s, in the late19th century, what we have seen

(01:08:35):
as historian Laura Robsonactually demonstrated it aptly,
demonstrated it aptly violencegave rise, violence gives rise
to this ethnic sectarian, youknow, divisions and violence

(01:08:58):
mapped.
This demarcation liesethnically and nationally
Because it also explains adifferent dimension of how a
relatively harmonious societywith, you know, Muslims and the
Christians and the Jews who usedto live, you know, relatively
speaking, harmoniously, all of asudden, in the midst of crisis,
especially the political crisisand in the war context, how the

(01:09:21):
societies start to definethemselves with their
ethno-religious identitiesrather than defining themselves
as their occupations or theirnames or their neighbors and etc
.
So I think this aspect doesreally matter.
And also in the Ottoman context, of course, there were

(01:09:41):
different reasons, differentmotivations that made
perpetrators partake in thismass violence event.
In the case of my own hometown,economic motivations became
much more, you know, vocal inthat context.
But I think there is a regionalvariation in the Ottoman

(01:10:01):
context so we can talk about notonly one genocide.
We can talk about differentgenocides in different contexts.
So that's why I think the casestudies and biography of the
post-Ottoman cities shows usmore concrete and also critical

(01:10:22):
insights about how thishistorical event unfolded in
different contexts and differentregions in the Ottoman
landscape.

Thank you.
Okay, so we have some questionscoming in now.
So the first one is thank youfor the talks.
Could someone please elaborateon the economic drivers in the
frontier wars in Australia?
Would you like to say a littlebit more about that, lorena Sure

(01:10:55):
?

Lorena Allam (01:10:57):
I think you should .
Probably too, nancy, but I think, yeah, of course there were
economic drivers.
A lot of the massacres we foundoccurred in conflicts over water
, conflicts over land.
Obviously the settlers, theinvaders, were wanting to run

(01:11:17):
their sheep and get rich quick.
So there was absolutely aneconomic imperative and it was
more important to clear us offland that they wanted.
So that happened for over acentury and then when, towards
the end of that phase ofcolonisation, they started to

(01:11:38):
round everybody up and put us onmissions and reserves and
generally we were put in placesthat didn't have any great
economic value, where we couldbe contained and trained and
developed to be a labour forcesent out to work for pocket
money or rations, or sometimesneither in the service of the

(01:11:59):
colony and in the service ofthose squatters who had come and
taken the land, or in the roleof native police, in the case in
Queensland, who were brutallyeffective.
So there, of course, there wasan economic imperative.
We got in the way of that ofthe expansion of the nation.

(01:12:20):
We were a nuisance needed to bedealt with.
And often I mean, if you readthe record, the historical
record that is how we'reperceived.
As I said before massacres werecalled land clearing exercises
and so forth.

So the language tells you that definitely it was
an economic driver and youmentioned being placed in
locations that were considerednot to have economic value, but
if anything shifted and that didrise, then those people were
moved off as well.

(01:13:00):
Time to go somewhere else thatwe don't know, much about.
Dirk.
Did you want to come in on thatone?
Just no, okay, all right.
Our second question is for umitum.
Given that turkey has beenoutspoken in denouncing israel's
attacks on gaza, have anyreferences to the Armenian

(01:13:22):
genocide seeped into thecritique of opposition
intellectuals?

Umit Kurt (01:13:29):
Yeah, thank you for the question.
There is a few critical voiceswith respect to this the
government discourse vis-a-visthe Israeli attacks and
genocidal policies in Gaza andthe full-fledged ethnic
cleansing in Gaza.
And besides that, there havebeen some court cases for some

(01:13:58):
intellectuals who commemorated24th of April 1915, the
commemoration of the Armeniangenocide and paying their
respects to victims.
There were even court casesagainst these people amidst of
all these events taking place.
So it's a trademark.
This kind of duplication andhypocrisy is a trademark of the

(01:14:21):
ruling government in Turkey andit's way beyond the perennial
populism, it's way beyond thepragmatism.
It's another way for thegovernment or the state
establishment to divertattention from Armenian genocide
or other historical wrongdoings, not only against the Ottoman

(01:14:44):
Armenians but also Greeks andthe Assyrians as well.
So therefore, the government isvery capable of using what has
been happening in Gaza so faragainst Israels.

(01:15:04):
But of course, Netanyahu is theone who kind of reminds of the
historical wrongdoings of people, especially the Kurds, because,
you know, Armenian genocide hasnot been acknowledged by the
Israeli Knesset, Israeliparliament as well, because they
don't want to break down thesediplomatic relations between

(01:15:26):
Turkey and Israel.
It's just they are playing withone another, Both Erdogan and
Netanyahu.
They are like twin brothers,you know.
So that has been the case, butthere is still there few
intellectuals and scholars andhistorians who are trying to

(01:15:47):
remind of the this historicalwrongdoings of the Turkish
government regarding Armeniansand the Ottoman Greeks as well,
when the government or Erdoganis making any statement about
what has been happening in Gaza.

Thank you.
Now, dirk, there's a questionfrom Jessie and it's actually
one that I was trying toformulate something about as
well, and so she says it's kindof a what next question, and
that she asks for forgivenessbecause she's not a legal
scholar.
Are there enough progressivejurists on the ICJ to

(01:16:27):
potentially change the legalprecedent that you've been
telling us about allowing adefinition of genocide that
encompasses military logics tobe included and not seen as
separate, or are we just kind ofstuck in this limited
definition that you've set outfor us?

Dirk Moses (01:16:48):
Yeah, I fear we're stuck.
Lawyers like to operate withthe doctrine of precedent.
So if the ICJ in a judgment afew years ago, as it did, said
that in inferring genocidalintention from a pattern of

(01:17:09):
events, because states don't saywe're committing genocide, they
hide their intentions, so thecourts understand that and they
allow the prosecution to infer agenocidal intention from a
pattern of events.
But in doing so the court hassaid that the only inference

(01:17:31):
that can be drawn from a patternof events to meet the threshold
of genocidal intention must bethat it's genocide and not
anything else.
So it can't be mixed as thingsare in practice.
Okay, so that's, that's howit's limiting, uh, the category
of genocide to very exceptionalcases.

(01:17:52):
If we think about the wars inthe former Yugoslavia, so from
1990 to 95, you know, only oneof the massacres and there were
many was classified as genocide,the one in Srebrenica, when
about 8,000 Bosnian men and boyswere killed, and even that was

(01:18:15):
controversial for many in thelegal community.
A broader definition ofgenocide which was interested in
protecting civilians moregenerally, a definition of
genocide which was interested inprotecting civilians more
generally, would have classified, you know, many episodes of
that war, although a series ofconflicts because there are many
different conflicts uh asgenocidal, and it would also, in

(01:18:36):
my view, you know, be much moreopen to classifying many types
of modern warfare as genocidal,For example, the conduct of the
Syrian government with Russianhelp in Syria, Russia's conduct
in Chechnya in the 1990s, whereit indiscriminately flattened

(01:18:59):
cities like Grozny and engagedin, you know, vicious
counterinsurgency, and you knowwho knows what's happening uh in
in gaza right now.
Just to show you howcomplicated these things are and
how messy these logics are intheir in in their entwinement,
let's just, let's justinvestigate uh one case uh, the

(01:19:22):
the 972 mag, which is thisprogressive Israeli uh online
magazine that does investigativejournalism, came out with an
article a few months ago aboutthe ai technology that the
Israeli drone operators areusing to to target uh Hamas
operatives in Gaza and then bombthem.

(01:19:45):
So the bombing is quite it'snot indiscriminate, it's quite
discriminant, you know it's verytargeted.
But what they revealed is that,with this AI technology, which
is based on their phone usage,they actually waited for these
low-level operatives you couldbe police officers or what have
you to come home.

(01:20:06):
That was the AI technologycalled Where's Daddy.
So they didn't bomb them whilethey were on the street,
relatively isolated, they waitedtill they got home and then
they dropped the entire buildingin which there were many
families, and this is how youaccount for the high number of
women and children who are beingkilled, right?

(01:20:27):
So it was quite deliberate andthis is that this is
inconsistent with the line thatthe, that Hamas are using
civilians as human shields,which would imply that they're
cowering amid the population andthat the Israelis have no
choice but to, incidentally,kill civilians while targeting

(01:20:48):
particular Hamas individuals.
What they're actually waitingis until they're within civilian
context.
So now, a one-off of these maybe a war crime, but once it's
serial and it's a policy, uh,you can see the outcome.
So entire neighborhoods andcities have been destroyed and
tens of thousands of peoplekilled and many, many more

(01:21:10):
maimed.
That people are forgetting the,the amputations of all these
children and so forth.
You know, without anesthetic,right now, this is quite
calculated.
We now know Now this is leadingto the destruction of a group
in that place.
Now we're also in numbers farhigher than in the Srebrenica

(01:21:32):
case, where it was 8,000.
But it's also a military logic,because they're not just
flattening entire neighborhoodslike carpet bombing in World War
II.
They are targeting, you know,putatively, military objects,
but in the course of whichthey're willingly, consciously,
in a calculated way, alsokilling lots of civilians, women

(01:21:53):
and children.
Okay, this is not accidental,it's not incidental, it's not
the human shields argument.
So you can see there how amilitary and a genocidal logic
of destruction are entwined andthat messiness in reality is not
reflected in the way the lawoperates at the moment.
Certainly there areinternational lawyers I've
published several in the Journalof Genocide Research who are

(01:22:15):
arguing for what's called aknowledge-based interpretation
of genocidal intent, where, thatis, it's sufficient for the
perpetrators to know that theirintentions, that their acts will
lead to these outcomes, ratherthan intending those outcomes
from the beginning as a matterof policy, in a sort of
genocidal way.
But those have been rejected bythe courts over the last 20

(01:22:37):
years, first in theInternational Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda, and then for the onein four weeks, yugoslavia,
which began in the second halfof the 90s and finished several
years ago, and now then at theICC and now at the ICJ as well.
So Philippe Sands, the Britishjurist, gave a talk recently you

(01:22:58):
know, online, you can downloadit if you want where he's asked
this very question and he'ssomeone who appears before these
courts and he said that thejudges you know and they will
know each other.
You have to understand thatthese are fairly small circles.
These people like have coffeein the cafeteria at the Hague
and so forth, and they chat andthey know their associates.
You know the people, thestudents interning there writing

(01:23:20):
their judgments, and they arereluctant to what he calls open
the floodgates, which would meanthat there would be genocidal
uh prosecutions in basicallyevery armed conflict and they
want to avoid that.
They don't have the resourcesto cover it.
It would break downinternational relations and that
goes back to my earlier pointthat states wanted to devise a

(01:23:42):
very narrow definition ofgenocide which gave them a free
hand in running conflicts, likein Gaza, or occupations, and in
putting down internal securitythreats quote unquote threats
like in Myanmar with theRohingya or with the Uyghurs in

(01:24:04):
China.
States aren't interested in aninternational legal system which
potentially puts them on thedock in the dock.

Okay, that has clarified things a lot for me.
Thank you for that.
All right, well, well done.
All this has been a fascinating, challenging, but I think
really ultimately very rewardingdiscussion, and we're all
fortunate to have such carefuland sincere people investing so
much of their time and intellectinto areas so subject to

(01:24:42):
superficial understandings as Ithink Dirk mentioned and to gut
responses.
So I really thank you for whatyou do and wish you all the best
as you continue to do it.
So now I'm just going to handback over to Jessie for a couple
of wrapping up remarks.

Jesse Adams Stein (01:25:02):
Thank you, Nancy.
And look, I just want toreiterate the thanks to Lorena
Allam, Dirk Moses, Umit Kurt,and also to Nancy as well.
I have to say, in a world whereso much that is said about
contemporary conflicts is eithermisinformation or propaganda or
bias reporting or just veryshort, well-meaning social media

(01:25:22):
blips that say very little, itis so important and refreshing
indeed to listen to people whoare, who are experts, who talk
so carefully, in such consideredways and in such historically
informed ways.
So thank you all so much forbeing part of this and thank you
to our audience as well.
I just wanted to um as have afew acknowledgements and thank

(01:25:44):
yous for the people thatcontribute to running History
Now, of course, the HistoryCouncil of New South Wales team,
Catherine Shirley, Amanda Wellsand Lauren Chater in particular
, but also the ExecutiveCommittee.
Also thank you to the AustralianCentre for Public History.
I also want to acknowledgeEugene Schofield-Georgison for
coming up with the idea of thisparticular theme and allowing me

(01:26:06):
to talk about it endlessly withhim pretty much every day since
we came up with the idea.
I also, as always let me justflick to the next slide History
Council, new South Wales wouldlike to acknowledge our cultural
partners.
In particular, we receivedfunding from the New South Wales
government via Create New SouthWales.
And a very quick mention of thenext History Now event coming

(01:26:30):
up next week a very differentkind of an event but should be
really fascinating.
In fact, I think one of thespeakers was in the audience
today transnational designhistories with Livia Resende and
Isabel Rousset and I'll besharing that one and that will
be an in-person session inSydney in the maps room at the
State Library of New SouthWales, 5pm on the 7th of August.

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