REGULAR readers of this column will have noted that recent articles touched on the history of the Jews in one way or another. My interest is not, as some detractors have alleged, spurred by anti-Islamic web sites or Zionist sympathies.

Long before those three little words World Wide Web became popular, I'd already been poring over books about WWII, especially on European theatres of war and biographies of wartime leaders like Churchill and war architects like Hitler.

You might think it strange that a woman should be keenly interested in this period of history but I say that my interest is wholly understandable. As one living in Malaysia (go ahead and connect the dots) and a student of linguistics and mass communication, it had intrigued me how Nazi propaganda so successfully brainwashed so many people so widely.

The Third Reich also presented a fascinating study of two opposing facets of human nature. One, how could otherwise smart people so wilfully delude themselves that all human beings behave rationally? Two, how could otherwise ordinary people turn into such cold-blooded mass murderers? There are many possible and valid answers but working in the local newspaper industry for over a decade, I have naturally looked most deeply into the state propaganda angle.

And here's an observation: The Holocaust shares some striking similarities with a genocide committed more than 50 years later by a different people on another continent. Incitement by racists in positions of power and influence had a lot to do with this convergence.

Nazi Tutsi, aggressor victim

I won't retread familiar ground on the Holocaust. The Rwandan genocide occurred over a roughly 100-day period in 1994.

The majority Hutu carried out a campaign of annihilation against some 800,000 minority Tutsi victims as well as political targets, including Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana (a Tutsi woman) and prominent moderate Hutus. The perpetrators were Rwandan government troops, Hutu militia and youth squads.

Warning signs were there from the outset. The Final Solution envisioned by Hitler for international Jewry was readily apparent to anyone who took 'Mein Kampf' seriously. The Reich Chancellor's racist philosophy was embodied in his book, the first volume which appeared July 1925 and by 1945 had sold 10 million copies in Germany, many more millions abroad and translated into 16 languages.

The Fuhrer's world view was extreme but had enough supporters. Historian Ian Kershaw wrote in 'Hitler 1889-1936 Hubris' that the 'bacterial imagery (in 'Mein Kampf') implied that Jews should be treated in the way germs were dealt with: by extermination'. Compare this with the Hutu body politic advocating 'pawa' or Hutu power: Tutsi are 'inyenzi', cockroaches to be hacked to pieces.

Germany's Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and their supplemental decrees crystallised discrimination against Jews. The Reich Citizenship Law disenfranchised Jews as second class citizens who cannot hold public office. Jewish serving officials were also barred from promotion according to seniority.

The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour prohibited marriage or sexual relations between Germans and Jews. It also forbade Jews from employing Aryan women under 45 as household help. The Defence Law of May 1935 banned members of the Wehrmacht (armed forces) from marrying persons of non-Aryan origin.

Hutu propaganda carried an unerring echo: Any Hutu who has a Tutsi wife or girlfriend is considered a traitor to his race and similarly, any Hutu who employs a Tutsi secretary. No member of the Hutu military shall marry a Tutsi.

State propaganda demonising Tutsi preceded the violence which erupted on April 6, 1994 when the presidential plane of President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. As early as December 1990, the Hutu paper Kangura ('Wake up!') published its Ten Commandments of the Hutu.

Ten Commandments of the Hutu

1. Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, wherever she is, works for the interests of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who:

  • marries a Tutsi woman;
  • befriends a Tutsi woman;
  • employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or concubine.

2. Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?

3. Hutu women, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands, brothers and sons back to reason.

4. Every Hutu should know that every Tutsi is dishonest in business. His only aim is the supremacy of his ethnic group. As a result any Hutu who does the following is a traitor:

  • makes a partnership with a Tutsi in business;
  • invests his money or the government's money in a Tutsi enterprise;
  • lends or borrows money from a Tutsi;
  • gives favours to a Tutsi in business (obtaining import licences, bank loans, construction sites, public markets )

5. All strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military and security should be entrusted to Hutu.

6. The education sector (school pupils, students, teachers) must be majority Hutu.

7. The Rwandese Armed Forces should be exclusively Hutu. The experience of the October [1990] war has taught us a lesson. No member of the military shall marry a Tutsi.

8. The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi.

9. The Hutu, wherever they are, must have unity and solidarity, and be concerned with the fate of their Hutu brothers.

  • The Hutu inside and outside Rwanda must constantly look for friends and allies for the Hutu cause, starting with their Bantu brothers;
  • They must constantly counteract the Tutsi propaganda;
  • The Hutu must be firm and vigilant against their common Tutsi enemy.

10. The Social Revolution of 1959, the Referendum of 1961, and the Hutu Ideology, must be taught to every Hutu at every level. Every Hutu must spread this ideology widely. Any Hutu who persecutes his brother Hutu for having read, spread and taught this ideology, is a traitor.

Reprinted and translated by human rights organisation African Rights, 'Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance' (New York: African Rights, 1995). Excerpt above from Samantha Power's 'A Problem from Hell America and the Age of Genocide' (London: Flamingo, 2002).

Majority's dominance eroded

The state also played a role in directly fanning the racial hatred. Germany's November 1938 pogrom dubbed Kristallnacht Night of Broken Glass came at the urging of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. In Rwanda's 100-day murderous orgy, Radio Mille Collines transmitted hate broadcasts agitating for continued bloodletting.

Race politics and past grievances fuelled the massacres. Under Hutu rule, the Tutsi were systematically discriminated against and in 1990, Tutsi exiles launched their guerrilla war from the Ugandan border. The Arusha Accords, a power-sharing agreement brokered after peace talks in 1993 ended the Tutsi rebellion, did not sit well with Hutu who believed it compromised their dominance of the country.

The BBC in a retrospective review 'Rwanda: How the genocide happened' (April 1, 2004) recalls the country's history of ethnic conflict. Under Belgian rule, Tutsi were better off than their Hutu neighbours in terms of jobs and education. This caused resentment among Hutu to gradually build up, culminating in a series of riots in 1959. 'More than 20,000 Tutsis were killed, and many more fled to the neighbouring countries of Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda.'

The BBC explains that when Belgium granted independence to Rwanda in 1962, Hutu took over places occupied by the colonialists. Over subsequent decades, Tutsi like Jew following Germany's defeat in WWI 'were portrayed as the scapegoats for every crisis'.

As the term 'ethnic cleansing' implies, the killings were carried out based on the victims' ethnicity and/or its concomitant, religion. 'Checkpoints were set up at which anyone whose identity card showed they were Tutsi was killed; either shot or more often hacked to death with machetes.' (BBC, 'Q & A: Rwanda's long search for justice', March 10, 2005)

An example of religion coming into play is the slaughter of Christian Armenians by Ottoman Turks. A New York Times correspondent warned in July 1915: "It is safe to say that unless Turkey is beaten to its knees very speedily there will soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman empire". An estimated one million Armenians died in the subsequent genocide.

Apartheid and Pandora's Box

How had state propaganda shaped bigoted perceptions leading to the ultimate evil that was unleashed? Lawyer Binaifer Nowrojee, who undertook field research in Rwanda under the aegis of Human Rights Watch, believes that concerted stereotyping and the prejudices it engendered had influenced the Hutu rapists.

Systematic brutality against Tutsi women was a Hutu weapon of war. Testifying before the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda on May 16, 2005, Nowrojee said: 'When I interviewed the rape victims in Rwanda and they recounted to me the statements that were made to them in the course of those rapes that were occurring, the statements that were said to them that they recounted to me mirrored very closely those stereotypes that I had read about in the gender propaganda.'

What lessons can we draw from history? Both the Hutu and the Nazi were clearly apartheid regimes. A certain amount of naivety in common folks makes us indulge in the wishful thinking that everyone should rightly believe 'all men are equal'. In an Orwellian world order, some men insist they and their kind are more equal than others.

It is fortunate that this attempt to impose racial supremacy and wipe out an entire people failed, albeit not due to the civilised world rushing to the rescue in either case.

When the Nazis forced Jews to wear the Star of David to mark them as outsiders, it is the bullies who without a hint of self-awareness wear the badge of shame. When bullies repress other cultures and other identities, they fail to realise that they have diminished not enriched their own.

When they try to render their fellow citizens undesirables or Unpeople germs and cockroaches they opened the lid to Pandora's Box. That's why nation states which claim to be moderate democracies must be mindful of history. They must be wary of that fatal first step of allowing one people within its borders to assault the dignity of another.