ABSTRACT
Even before the 1994 Rwandan genocide ended, some began wondering when “the next Rwanda” would be. Not “if,” but when. Despite Indonesia in 1965, Burundi in 1972, and Cambodia from 1975 to 1978, genocide had receded in the public consciousness. From the late 1960s, it is true, memory of the Holocaust was in full bloom. But the Holocaust was treated as almost a self-contained phenomenon separate from “ordinary” genocide. Indeed, the Herero's extermination by the Germans in southwest Africa in 1904 was unknown beyond a few experts, and any attention paid to the earlier Armenian genocide was mainly the crusade of Armenians. As for the post-Holocaust massacres of half-a-million Communists in Indonesia, the slaughter by the Tutsi army of perhaps two hundred thousand Hutu in Burundi, including all those with secondary education, and the deaths by beating, starving, or torture by the Khmer Rouge of a million and a half Cambodians, none quite seemed to meet the standards set down in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (UNCG).
