Collaboration in Genocide

Collaboration in Genocide: The Ottoman
Empire 1915–1916, the German-Occupied
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hgs/article-abstract/25/3/404/624250 by Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Library user on 11 May 2020
Baltic 1941–1944, and Rwanda 1994
Anton Weiss-Wendt
Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities (Oslo)
Uğur Ümit Üngör

Utrecht University
This article develops a new paradigm for the study of collaboration by

applying the concept to events outside the context of the Second World
War. The authors examine three instances of collaboration in twentieth-
century mass killings, seeking to situate them within the framework of
genocide. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the article questions the
validity of explanations of conflict predicated on the existence of binary
systems—explanations that appear frequently in comparative genocide
studies. The authors relate the decision to participate in mass murder to
the history of structural inequality within a given society. The article
concludes that, however vague, the concept of collaboration is useful in
accentuating a bottom-up approach in the study of genocide.
In this article, we take a comparative approach to the study of collaboration—one

of several concepts underdeveloped in genocide studies, but thoroughly researched
and extensively applied in Holocaust studies. The study of genocide is predicated
on dichotomies (for example, Nazis against Jews; Turks against Armenians; Hutu
against Tutsi), which conventionally render any gray zones black and white.
Indeed, genocide scholarship often draws sharp distinctions between perpetrators
and victims. Such a rigid framework, we argue, tends to overlook the multiple roles
of individuals and groups in processes of collective violence.1 The phenomenon of
collaboration therefore fits poorly into the binary (or dual-system) explanatory
model of conflict.2 In particular, collaboration in genocide suggests a third variable
that cuts through existing hierarchies.
Existing analyses of collaboration elaborated in the field of Holocaust studies
are themselves handicapped by the lack of a comparative perspective. Forms of
collective behavior may be conditioned by various factors, depending on the cir-
cumstances. The victim-bystander-perpetrator typology introduced by the late Raul
doi:10.1093/hgs/dcr057
Holocaust and Genocide Studies 25, no. 3 (Winter 2011): 404–437 404
Hilberg does not account for collaborators, who may, at various times, fit into any
of the three categories.3 Some scholars make no distinction between perpetrator
and collaborator, referring to the outcome of the criminal act as the basis for their
analysis.4 This approach leaves the concept of collaboration elusive and analysis of
the phenomenon impoverished. We treat the collaborator as a separate category,
though we reject any notion of an “ideal type” of collaborator.
All three cases discussed in this article are marked by substantial death tolls
among the primary target group (Armenians, Jews, and Tutsi). Thus far, however,
only local collaboration in the Holocaust has been the subject of extensive analysis.
The purpose of our (inductive) analysis is to establish a critical mass of similarities
that will enable us to develop a more inclusive framework for the study of
collaboration. At the same time, we do not shy away from pinpointing
differences—though this makes our task all the more challenging. Because of the
stark differences in context, a systematic, point-by-point comparison is not always
feasible. Moreover, the amount of evidence available is vastly different for each of
the three cases. Yet, despite these difficulties, we believe that on the basis of these
cases we can establish a new paradigm for the study of collaboration.
The Concept of Collaboration

Collaboration is a complex phenomenon, and one that invites judgment of the
morality of the behavior it entails. An alleged traitor engages in double rationaliza-
tion: he approves of the objectives of the powers that be, at least to an extent, and
justifies his actions as optimal in the current situation. Predictably, in many trials
of collaborators, the defendants argue that they had no choice but to collaborate,
or that by working with the enemy they had sought to avert a worse outcome.
What justifies the notion of collaboration in their eyes is the belief that the joint
effort was carried out in the name of a common purpose.5
The context of the Second World War has strongly influenced the way in
which historians have viewed collaboration, leading them to emphasize the impact
of integral nationalism and the fluidity of loyalties.6 In 1968, John Armstrong
described collaboration as “cooperation between elements of the population of a
defeated state and the representatives of the victorious power.”7 Similarly, scholars
such as Werner Rings and Werner Röhr connect collaboration to foreign occupa-
tion, denying its broad applicability across history. In Röhr’s interpretation, the
population of an occupied country tries to operate within the limitations and
expectations set by the regime. In his Life with the Enemy, Rings advances a typol-
ogy of collaboration that takes into account only political forms of collaboration.8
In comparing across cases, historians have tended to limit themselves to
Nazi-occupied Europe.9 Unsurprisingly, then, collaboration has come to be per-
ceived as a set of dichotomous relationships: victors vs. defeated; accommodation
vs. resistance. In particular, scholars have tended to focus on police/military
Collaboration in Genocide 405

collaboration. As Röhr observes, participation in mass murder opened avenues for
other forms of collaboration. Whether for the Nazi economic policy of
“Aryanization” or for Hitler’s New Europe project, the persecution of the Jews
established a consensual starting point. Thus, by carrying out deportations of Jews
and combating anti-German resistance movements, he argues, the auxiliary police
contributed to the radical restructuring of local authority.10
Historians have struggled to define collaboration. In discussing economic,
political, or ideological forms of the phenomenon, they rarely elaborate on its most
extreme manifestation, namely participation in organized murder.11 Some scholars
view collaboration as a form of inter-organizational relations between occupation
authorities and local elites. However, this premise needs substantial adjustment
once we move beyond the framework of the Second World War. The notions of
enemy, occupation, and even conventional warfare differ significantly from case to
case; sometimes they do not apply at all. Furthermore, power relations are never
static and always involve more than just two actors. To fine-tune our analysis of col-
laboration in genocide, we must take into account the history of ethno-religious
relations between the groups involved. Since the circumstances of war and occupa-
tion are not universally present, we use the term hegemonic power rather than
occupation regime or enemy. The interaction between the subaltern groups and
the hegemonic power is a dynamic process. However, that process is informed by
stable socio-political structures that determine the setting.
Collaboration in genocide is rarely unconditional; that is, collaborators, as a
collectivity, act in anticipation of specific rewards. The task of a historian, then, is
to establish a connection between the coordinated assault on life and limb and the
collaborators’ long-term agenda—an agenda that must be pursued within the limits
established by the dominant power. The question of motivation can be addressed
on four different levels: immediate push and pull factors; the history of relations
between the ethno-religious groups involved; short-term and long-term policies
imposed by the hegemonic force; and calculated consequences for a non-targeted
group resulting from the victimization of the most vulnerable group. The hegem-
onic power and the collaborators engage in a give-and-take relationship that
becomes operational whenever the former positively assesses the latter’s potential
contribution. By the same token, prospective collaborators weigh the extent of
their participation against possible rewards and repercussions. The anticipated
rewards may benefit collaborators either as individuals, or as a collectivity, or both.
Likewise, the expected benefits may be short- or long-term.
Although native groups or institutions as a rule are not involved in decision-
making processes, their collaboration significantly influences all phases of the
genocidal program. However, incitement to partake in genocide is rarely the sole
objective of the criminal regime. Typically, the regime seeks to engage collabora-
tionist entities in keeping in check groups that they have designated as enemies. At
406 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

the local level, collaboration is essential when it comes to identifying potential
victims. In turn, local social, economic, and personal relations not only influence
the initial decision to engage in the act of criminal collaboration, but also inform
its character and extent.
What Tomislav Dulić has found in the case of the Ustaše during the Second
World War applies to the analysis of collaboration in genocide more broadly. The
Germans came to realize as early as summer 1941 that the Ustaše terror against the
Serbs was counterproductive since it played into the hands of Tito’s Partisans and
thus increased the threat to the Germans’ security. The Nazis pressured the Ustaše
to ease the terror, arguing that extensive deportations could be carried out only “by
a people of a hundred million”—that is, by the Germans themselves. Dulić con-
cludes on the basis of this case that non-state perpetrators cannot engage continually
in violence. Though they may be capable of wreaking substantial destruction within
a specific geographical area, their actions are restricted by the fact that they do not
control the administrative apparatus, the means of transportation, or various instru-
ments of coercion traditionally monopolized by the state.12 In other words, there are
objective limits on the extent of native groups’ participation in genocide.
The Legal Framework

The term collaboration entered the lexicon of both international politics and inter-
national law toward the end of the Second World War. The Soviet Union, Poland,
and Yugoslavia—the countries that had incurred the heaviest losses at the hands of
the Nazis—pressured the United States and Great Britain to extradite alleged war
criminals from the West to the Soviet Union. Delegates from these countries
repeatedly raised the issue of “war criminals, traitors, and quislings” in the UN’s
Third (Legal) Committee and at the General Assembly. The Soviets argued that
the extradition and prosecution of collaborators served the cause of peace, and
accused their former allies of warmongering and sheltering war criminals. At a
time when the Soviet role in the Second World War was emerging as a key
element of the historical narrative of the Soviet state, the developing Cold War
stalled any further discussion of extraditing war criminals. Despite the political
underpinning of their own argument, the British correctly pointed out the vague-
ness of the terminology used by Soviet diplomats and insisted on a case-by-case
approach backed by solid evidence.13 On the question of prosecuting collaborators,
the Soviets lost every major battle they took to the UN floor.14
The issue remained dormant until the 1979 establishment within the U.S.
Department of Justice of the Office of Special Investigations, which was entrusted
with identification and denaturalization of war criminals—mainly those of East
European origin.15 In the eyes of many, however, the term collaboration had by
then acquired a connotation of Cold War rhetoric. This association explains in part

why the concept of collaboration is lacking analytical clarity and is seldom used
outside the context of the Second World War.
Historical discourse on collaboration in genocide rarely incorporates the legal
interpretation of the crime.16 For this reason, it may be useful to review elements
of law such as accessory vs. co-perpetration, actus rea vs. mens rea, intent vs.
motive, and duress vs. necessity, as interpreted by international law in general, and
in connection with prosecution of genocide in particular. Once the crime of geno-
cide has been established, a collaborator may be held criminally liable as a princi-
pal perpetrator, a co-perpetrator, or an accomplice. A finding of genocide requires
the presence of both actus rea (killing members of a group) and mens rea (double
intent to kill members of a group and to destroy the group as a whole). A defend-
ant could be prosecuted as a principal perpetrator if he himself performed the
actus rea and possessed genocidal mens rea; as a co-perpetrator if he provided
material assistance to the persons performing the actus rea while himself possess-
ing the genocidal mens rea; and as an accomplice if he provided material assistance
to persons performing the actus rea and was aware that those persons possessed
the genocidal mens rea.
The absence of reasonable moral alternatives constitutes an instance of
duress, and thus can support a variant of the plea of “superior order.” The latter
presupposes a certain type of interaction between the defendant and the person
from whom he received the order. Even if successfully pleaded, neither duress in
general nor the superior order defense in particular alters the criminal character of
the conduct. At most, it diminishes or extinguishes the defendant’s culpability for
the intrinsically wrongful conduct. Altogether, the superior order doctrine does not
generally apply in social conditions in which a member of a subordinate group acts
upon the explicit or implicit wishes of a hegemonic group. In this case, the defend-
ant would be pleading what is known as necessity. Unlike duress, necessity involves
a conscious choice, although constrained by circumstances, on the part of the actor
to pursue the lesser of two evils.17 As we will argue below in the case of the Kurds
and the Baltic peoples, individual collaborators expressed their unwillingness to
descend to the bottom of the social hierarchy as a necessity—as a self-justification
for collaboration in genocide.
Until recently, legal practice distinguished between individual responsibility
and command responsibility. The latter applies to high-ranking officials who know-
ingly pass criminal orders down the chain of command. Not every criminal has
executive powers, but every individual who authorizes an attack on a civilian popu-
lation is a criminal. In other words, the rank-and-file rarely see the “big picture”
(that is, they perform the actus rea of genocide without the requisite genocidal
mens rea). In view of the legal discourse on guilt versus accountability, individuals
charged with collaboration in genocide likely would be considered guilty but not
accountable. At the same time, command responsibility is, strictly speaking, a type

of individual criminal responsibility; that is to say, liability for the war crimes com-
mitted by another person by virtue of having ordered that person to perpetrate
acts that would constitute war crimes. Today’s jurisprudence tends to interpret
command responsibility more broadly as superior responsibility, meaning that
commanding authorities could be either civilian or military. Command responsibil-
ity is less frequently invoked nowadays in the legal pursuit of the masterminds of
genocide, as genocidal leaders can be prosecuted more effectively as principal
offenders.18
Thus, in legal terms, collaboration in genocide falls under the accessory
category. The term accessory implies that the accused is not the mastermind of the
crime and therefore may have been unaware of the ultimate outcome beyond the
actual act of murder. In his original push for a genocide convention, Raphael
Lemkin contemplated the “liability of persons who order genocide practices, as
well as of persons who execute such orders.”19 A person charged with this type of
aiding and abetting, or accessory, usually is not present when the crime is commit-
ted, but has knowledge of the crime before or after the fact, and may assist in its
commission through advice or financial support. The concept of criminal con-
spiracy, on the other hand, implies knowledge of a plan to commit the offense.
Within the context of genocide, the objective requirement for classifying an act of
collaboration as conspiracy would be the knowledge that the principal perpetrator
harbored genocidal intent.20 Without elaborating on the distinction between
knowledge and comprehension, it is safe to suggest that an overwhelming majority
of collaborators do not possess such knowledge. In the case of collaboration in
genocide, we therefore are dealing with accomplices—those who pull the trigger
for reasons that differ from those of the criminal masterminds.
Although criminology, as an auxiliary discipline, can help to elucidate certain
individual and group behavior patterns, the existing typologies only infrequently
account for historical context. This omission limits their applicability.21 Perhaps
most problematic in the application of principles of international criminal law to
historical analysis, however, is that guilt is ascertained by a court on an individual
basis, whereas broader scholarly accounts also deal with group criminality as such.
It is worth asking, then, to what extent the discussion of individual guilt would
apply to groups. One conception of liability addresses this concern effectively: the
doctrine of Joint Criminal Enterprise (JCE), which was upheld in the Statute of
the International Criminal Court in 1998 and formally recognized in a landmark
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) decision in the
Tadić case in 1999. The JCE, a victim-centered doctrine, addresses a form of crim-
inal participation in which a number of persons contribute to the commission of
crimes in pursuit of a common purpose. As the ICTY Appeals Chamber explained:
“To hold criminally liable as a perpetrator only the person who materially performs
the criminal act would disregard the role as co-perpetrators of all those who in

some way made it possible for the perpetrator physically to carry out that criminal
act. At the same time, depending upon the circumstances, to hold the latter liable
only as aiders and abettors might understate the degree of their criminal responsi-
bility.”22 In other words, the JCE links the defendants’ criminal responsibility for
their own acts to that of the group to which they belong. Although they may not
possess the genocidal mens rea of the principal perpetrator, they act with the aim
of furthering the criminal activity or criminal purpose of the group.
Of the three forms of JCE—basic, systemic, and extended—we believe the
last two cover collaboration well. In the basic form, participants bound by common
purpose act with shared intention. However, when applied to any given instance of
genocide, due to basic human nature, it is rather unlikely that individual partici-
pants would have identical intention. The systemic form denotes cases in which
crimes are committed in accordance with a plan, and within the framework of an
organized criminal system such as concentration camps or specific military and
police agencies. As the prerequisites for allocating guilt, courts must establish the
existence of such a criminal system, the defendants’ awareness of the nature of that
system, and the fact that the accused in one way or another participated in enforc-
ing that system. Demonstrating that low-ranking defendants were aware of the ulti-
mate goal of the criminal masterminds or shared the latter’s malevolent designs is
not essential in this case. Finally, the extended form concerns cases in which a
person commits an act that may lie outside the common design, yet is a natural
and foreseeable consequence of the implementation of that common purpose.
That is to say, regardless of his motivation and explicit knowledge of the premedi-
tated plan, a member of a group commits a criminal act expected of him in given
circumstances. The doctrine of JCE is particularly applicable in situations involving
multiple offenses committed out of a common purpose, where it is impossible to
establish with certainty which acts were carried out by which perpetrator and/or
the causal link between each act and the eventual harm caused to the victims.23
Naturally, the JCE concept is not without problems. Above all, it appears to
ascribe guilt by association24 and advance the concept of a “criminal organization”
as set forth in the Nuremberg Charter. As Alexander Zahar has observed, “the
reductionist tendencies of criminal law do not work well with genocide.”25 They
mesh even less well with historical examination of genocide. Even so, the concept
of JCE is a welcome addition not only to international criminal law but also to the
analysis of criminal collaboration, as we will demonstrate below.
Kurdish Tribes in the Armenian Genocide, 1915 – 1916

The tendency to omit the category of collaboration in genocide studies often leads
to oversimplifications. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, the complexity of
interethnic relations in Eastern Anatolia has not been sufficiently taken into
account.

To launch a genocide, political elites require the support of local populations.
Ideally, then, studies of collaboration should pinpoint certain differences between
the titular population and other ethnic groups. For the Armenian Genocide, the
question can be formulated as follows: how did the participation of Kurdish tribes-
men in the violence differ from that of Turkish villagers? In Ottoman society, as in
many others, society was stratified at the local level along ethnic lines. In hierarchi-
cal ethnic systems such as the Ottoman Empire, the direction of ethnic violence
thus tends to be vertical, as it offers upward mobility to a disempowered
minority.26
The Kurds constituted the largest ethnic group in Eastern Anatolia under the
Ottoman Empire. Armenian and Kurdish settlements in the region overlapped
considerably. Many Kurds had been resettled in Eastern Anatolia from more
southern regions in the sixteenth century by Sultan Selim, on condition that they
guard the frontier with Persia. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, the
majority of Armenians in the countryside were beholden to local Kurdish feudal
lords.27 The demographics of the Ottoman Empire are difficult to analyze due to
the absence of reliable data, and to the fact that Kurds often were not counted
separately but were included in the category “Muslims.” In 1914, approximately
440,000 Muslims and 120,000 Armenians lived in Mamuret-ul Aziz province;
180,000 Muslims and 110,000 Armenians in Van province; and 200,000 Kurds and
105,000 Armenians in Diyarbekir province.28 The Kurds thus would prove crucial
to any territorial solution of the “Armenian Question.”29
Kurdish-Armenian relations came to be influenced by the following three
nineteenth-century developments: (1) the 1839 Tanzimat decrees, which attempted
to modernize the Ottoman Empire and strengthen its resistance to internal and exter-
nal pressures; (2) the internationalization of the “Armenian Question” in the Treaty of
San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin of 1878; and (3) the formation in 1890 of the
Hamidiye corps. These irregular Kurdish cavalry units operated in the eastern
regions of the Ottoman Empire with the task of pacifying the area, a task that
involved among other actions the quelling of Armenian revolutionary activity. Within
half a century, these three developments had strained relations between Kurds and
Armenians severely, and especially those between certain Kurdish tribes and
Armenian revolutionaries, resulting in a rather asymmetric low-intensity civil war.30
In its effort to strengthen its control over the vulnerable eastern borderlands,
the Ottoman government forcibly dismantled the nominally autonomous Kurdish
emirates through a series of military campaigns in the 1840s.31 Consequently, the
territorial scope of Kurdish tribal power diminished considerably as large emirates
broke up into smaller tribal units. This cultural and social transformation caused a
shift of power from chieftains to sheikhs, and in doing so exacerbated tribal con-
flicts over territories, loyalties, and resources. Contrary to the regime’s objectives,
Ottoman government policies created only more chaos in the region.32

The rise of Armenian political activity can be attributed in part to this mis-
guided Ottoman policy. In response, Armenians began to organize defense against
increased harassment, abuse of power, violence, administrative corruption, and
expropriations on the part of Kurdish tribes. At the same time, the Armenian
Patriarchate and Armenian elites began demanding reforms from the Ottoman gov-
ernment. The escalating conflict culminated in the 1878 Treaty of San Stefano,
which drew European attention to the Armenian plight. Meanwhile, local Muslim
leaders and urban elites feared that the push for more equality and specific rights
for the Armenian minority would undermine their own power base. Their appre-
hension led them to distance themselves from their Armenian counterparts.33
Although support for revolutionary ideas among the conservative, illiterate
Armenian peasant population was rather limited, the Ottoman state took radical
measures to offset what they perceived as an emerging threat. In 1890, Sultan
Abdulhamid II countered the growing activity and influence of Armenian political
parties by launching irregular Kurdish militias. The thirty-six mounted, well-armed
units each recruited 1,200 members from among the Kurdish tribes (though only
thirteen of fifty-one large tribes contributed troops). These militias were named
the Hamidiye regiments, after the sultan. A ragtag group of irregulars rather than a
disciplined army, they performed poorly in combat, and otherwise exhibited a
great deal of opportunism and greed. Their sudden empowerment led them to
assault not only Armenian but also Turkish and Kurdish villages. Yet, mass rob-
beries, rapes, and murders perpetrated by Kurdish militias went unpunished.34
The first deployment of the militias took place in 1894 at Sassun, where Armenians
had risen against Kurdish chieftains. Following the 1894– 1896 massacres, Kurdish
families moved into many of the villages that had been emptied of Armenians.
Kurdish tribal units during World War I. (Photo taken no later than January 24, 1915.)

Kurdish-Armenian relations were grounded in a pre-modern, nineteenth-
century peasant society and exposed the hierarchical ethnic system of the Ottoman
Empire. Economic structures increased the potential for conflict, as Kurds were
predominantly pastoralists and Armenians predominantly agriculturalists. As
Kurdish pastoralists moved their grazing animals across Armenian lands, the inter-
ethnic contacts ranged from mutually beneficial symbiosis to head-on collision.
Some Armenians charged that Kurdish pastoralists had not compensated them suf-
ficiently for use of their land.35 Many communities in the eastern provinces lived
under the authority of powerful Kurdish tribes that laid claim to both the land and
the peasants working on it. Kurdish and Armenian peasants were expected to pay
taxes to the tribe (and to the state)—a system closely resembling serfdom.36 As
Christians, Armenians were not allowed to bear arms, whereas Kurds tended to be
heavily armed. The Ottoman Empire remained, despite attempts to equalize power
relations, a pseudo-theocracy in which structural (socio-political) inequalities
between Christians and Muslims remained in force.37
The radicalization born of the events of the First World War, and particularly
the rise of the nationalist Young Turks and the Committee of Union and Progress,
set the stage for the Armenian Genocide. The genocide began with the dismissal
of Armenian civil servants in the winter of 1914 – 1915,38 and continued with the
arrest of Armenian elites on April 24, 1915.39 Finally, on May 23, the Young Turk
regime ordered the general deportation of Ottoman Armenians to the Syrian
Desert. Recent research has demonstrated that these orders rendered an existing
policy of persecution more categorical and more violent, leading to the mass
murder of about one million Armenians.40 By the end of the war, some 2,900
Anatolian Armenian settlements (villages, towns, and neighborhoods) had been
depopulated and the majority of their inhabitants annihilated.
Accounts of the Armenian genocide typically have portrayed the perpetra-
tors—both the commanding elites and the rank-and-file executioners—as an undif-
ferentiated mass. Kurdish tribesmen in particular appear in the killing fields of
Anatolia ex nihilo and commit murder for no apparent reason other than intrinsic
cruelty. Needless to say, this essentialist view does not withstand critical scrutiny.
To begin with, the abstract category of Kurds has to be reassessed, for the geno-
cide in Kurdish-populated territories had in part to do with the structure of
Kurdish society. That structure was comprised of sheikhs, chieftains, brigands,
peasants, and intellectuals, and it was organized into tribes, religious sects, political
parties, and brotherhoods. Furthermore, Kurdish society was marked by consider-
able ethnic and religious diversity: most Kurds speak Kurmancı̂, others Zaza. Most
Kurds are Muslims belonging to the Shafi` i school; others are Alevis, Ahl-i Haqqs,
or Yezidis.41 A modern Kurdish identity developed as a cultural and educational
revival rather than as a secessionist movement. There was no unity within Kurdish
politics: while some Kurds joined the Young Turks, others regarded the regime

with suspicion. Remarkably, one of the chief Young Turk ideologists, Ziya Gökalp,
was an ethnic Kurd.42 Due to this fragmentation, Kurdish responses to the
Armenian genocide varied. With notable exceptions, most of these subtleties are
missed in scholarly works and Armenian survivor accounts alike.43 A more accurate
view of Kurdish collaboration in the Armenian genocide emerges when we
examine it from the point of view of ideology, opportunism, and collective hatred.
Political ideology hardly played a role; the Kurdish nationalist movement was
not highly developed, and it was in the interest of Kurdish nationalists to collabo-
rate with their Armenian counterparts. Armenian nationalists such as Garo
Sassouni repeatedly attempted, yet failed, to forge a Kurdo-Armenian coalition.44
Sassouni’s contemporary, Kurdish nationalist Dr. Nuri Dersimi, blamed the failure
to form a Kurdish and Armenian alliance on the Ottoman-Russian war. He argued
that the Young Turk dictatorship had used Kurdish tribes to wage war and mass
murder, while the Russian tsarist government had applied a similar strategy when
forming Armenian bands to keep the Kurds in check.45
More than ideology, opportunism played a major role in fomenting collab-
oration. Young Turk elites offered bribes to third parties to denounce
Armenians in hiding or to guide government forces to their hideouts.
Government officials offered direct payments in foodstuffs or offered the oppor-
tunity to plunder the victims’ possessions. Gendarmes, who were supposed to
protect the deported Armenians, sometimes delivered or sold entire convoys to
mounted Kurds for pillage and murder.46 Some Kurds blackmailed Armenians,
threatening to report them to the local authorities if they did not hand over
money and other valuables. (Sometimes they reported them anyway once the
savings of the destitute Armenians had been exhausted.) The genocide offered
collaborators the opportunity not only to seize goods, valuables, and property,
but also to kidnap women and children.47 Rape and enslavement were ubiqui-
tous in the region in 1915.
Religious hatred was not a major factor; Kurdish sheikhs were known to have
disapproved of the massacres. Whatever their views as Muslims on the supposed
inferiority of Christians, they certainly did not preach destruction. For example,
noted Kurdish religious scholar Bediuzzaman Saidi Nursı̂ helped deliver thousands
of Armenian widows and orphans across the border to Russia.48 According to
Armenian survivors in the Northern Diyarbekir area, another prominent religious
scholar, Sheikh Said, issued a fatwa (religious ruling) against the killings, and in
this way he may have saved Armenian lives.49 Some Kurdish rank-and-file killers,
however, were incited by quasi-Islamic rhetoric that promised a reward to anyone
who had killed an Armenian. Many illiterate villagers acted upon this
religiously-inspired hate speech. The 2006 PBS documentary The Armenian
Genocide included remarkable footage of elderly Kurds speaking candidly about
the genocide. One of the men recalled his father telling him that local authorities

had urged religious leaders to convince the population that killing Armenians
would secure them a place in heaven.50
The push and pull factors of incitement and incentives proved a decisive
tipping mechanism for Kurdish collaboration in the genocide. A majority of the
Kurds who murdered Armenians did so either on orders from high officials, or in
response to the promise of impunity, or both. In any case, the Young Turk dicta-
torship managed to drive a wedge between the Armenian and Kurdish commun-
ities. Typically, Young Turk officials initiated the persecution, segregation, and
dispossession of Armenians, while Kurds who were on retainer were given the task
of killing the victims. An American missionary living in Bitlis reported: “One group
of seven hundred men was taken out to a place about two hours from the city and
lined up on either side of trenches already prepared. Kurds then came upon them,
killing them.”51 Kurdish tribesmen, along with refugees from the Caucasus and the
Balkans, as well as convicts, provided the bulk of the recruits for the notorious
Special Organization. In a cable to the governor of Mamuret-ul Aziz province,
interior minister and mastermind of the genocide Talât Pasha wrote that the Third
Army was “in charge of drafting volunteers from the tribes.”52 This modus oper-
andi denotes careful preparation and coordination on the part of the local
authorities.
The recently published biography of Emı̂nê Perı̂xanê, chieftain of the
Kurdish Raman tribe, sheds additional light on Kurdish collaboration.53 In the
summer of 1914, following a notorious campaign of plunder and provocation,
the government issued an arrest warrant for Perı̂xanê’s infamous brother, Ömer,
who escaped prosecution and retreated into the Xerzan region as an outlaw.54
Emı̂n, on the other hand, organized a paramilitary unit and in the winter of 1914
joined the Ottoman army.55 The governor of Diyarbekir, the rabid Young Turk
nationalist Dr. Mehmed Reshid, summoned Ömer for a secret mission that would
bring him riches and earn him an amnesty.56 Reshid persuaded Ömer that the
Armenians were stabbing the country in the back by helping the Russian army. He
suggested that Ömer and his men escort convoys of Armenians down the Tigris
River on a raft and ultimately murder them; in return, they would receive half of
the booty. Seduced by the prospect of wealth, Ömer gave his consent and the plan
was set in motion.57
Meanwhile, by the end of May of 1915, Reshid had imprisoned the entire
Armenian elite of Diyarbekir (some of the victims died under torture). On Sunday,
May 30, Kurdish militiamen handcuffed 636 local elites, including the Armenian
bishop. They loaded the Armenians onto twenty-three rafts on the Tigris on the
pretext of relocating them to Mosul. Militiamen accompanied the Armenians on
the rafts as they sailed downstream to the Raman gorge. The victims were robbed
of a total of 6,000 Turkish pounds, taken away in batches of six, stripped of their
clothes and valuables, and massacred by Ömer’s tribesmen.58 To the dismay of

Walter Holstein, the German vice-consul at Mosul, the rafts arrived a week later,
empty. Holstein later learned that the men in the convoys had been “completely
slaughtered.” He wrote: “For several days, corpses and human limbs have been
floating down the river.”59
Ömer and his brother Mustafa did not fare well, however. After the massacre,
they were invited to the governor’s house, where they celebrated their accomplish-
ment.60 Reshid congratulated them for their “bravery, patriotism, and services to
the state.” Upon his request to the Interior Ministry, the Directorate for General
Security rewarded the brothers and their men with money and medals for their
performance.61 Subsequently, the brothers destroyed three other convoys. Having
made them complicit in crime, however, Reshid did not trust their loyalty, and so
he ordered their execution. The brothers were set upon by his agents and killed in
their sleep in July 1915.62 Their brother Emı̂n continued to work for the govern-
ment but was ultimately deemed dispensable as well: he was shot and killed by
two Turkish soldiers on April 9, 1933.63
The story of the Raman tribe illustrates three aspects of collaboration in
genocide: incentives vs. coercion, conflict vs. consensus, and marginalization vs.
empowerment. Among the major incentives for depredations against Armenian
deportees or neighbors were scarcity of food, inflation, and the requisitions
imposed on the impoverished Kurdish population under war conditions. Kerop
Bedoukian, who was deported from Sivas, noted in his memoirs that Kurdish
tribesmen were interested in pillage rather than murder. Kurds were competing
for booty as the rumor spread that convoys of deported Armenians were walking
goldmines.64 Coercion played an equally important role. Dr. Reshid clearly black-
mailed Ömer, suggesting that the chieftain carry out the killings in return for
having his criminal record expunged. Moreover, anyone who broke the silence or
let a single Armenian escape was to be killed.65 Threats went a long way toward
persuading Kurds to assault Armenians. Khachadoor Pilibosian, a survivor from
Mamuret-ul Aziz province, described in his memoirs how Kurds kidnapped him as
a young boy and renamed him Mustafa. He suffered as a child slave in a Kurdish
village, but managed to survive. According to Pilibosian, Young Turk government
officials went searching for Armenian survivors in Kurdish homes, and whenever
they discovered one, they would kill his or her Kurdish protectors.66 Through such
violence, the regime attempted to drive a wedge between Kurds and Armenians.
With regard to peripheral marginalization vs. state empowerment, one may ask
why it is that, during the period of crisis, Kurds were to be found among both exe-
cutioners of secret operations and the most insidious groups of bandits and rebels.
Quite simply, the state did not clash with bandits but recruited them.67
The tribal structure of Kurdish society was in a sense advantageous for
Ottoman Armenians as it presented them opportunities for survival. Tribal mecha-
nisms evidently were at work in the southeastern Xerzan and Tur Abdin districts,

where a single individual could be accountable for murder at one time and for
illegal rescue at another. It would be incorrect to assume that Kurdish chieftains
were acting on a nationalist agenda or out of ethnic resentment. They saw
Armenians as property, as inferior and effeminate “infidels” ( fileh), not as a power-
ful community. Often, violence was committed against particular Armenians
because they were considered the property of a rival chieftain. Killing a rival’s
Armenian peasants undermined his economic standing, but in turn provoked
counter-massacres of one’s own Christian peasants. It was seldom in the interest of
a Kurdish chieftain to massacre his own Armenians, because as peasants they were
generally obedient and productive. A dichotomous Kurdish-Armenian conflict did
not exist.68
The massacre of Armenians was constrained likewise by the patriarchal
Kurdish culture of masculinity and martial bravado, in which only specific killings
were condoned. Killings by Kurds during the genocide constituted a breach of
certain Kurdish cultural edicts. According to traditional Kurdish tribal customs
of warfare, the killing of men was considered a necessary evil, but the killing of
women and children was viewed as unacceptable. However, during the war with
Russia and during the persecution of Ottoman Christians, Kurds killed women,
too. In the Russian-occupied zone, Russian officers promised to prosecute and
punish anyone who had collaborated in the genocide. As a result, Armenian
women who had been kidnapped in 1915 were strangled to death by Kurds who
feared that the women might implicate them in the atrocities.69 The following
account of a Kurdish man from the Xerzan region provides an example:
My grandfather was the village elder (muhtar) during the war. He told us when we
were small about the Armenian massacre. There was a man in our village, he used to
hunt pheasants. Now he, the man without honor, was hunting Armenians. Grandpa
saw how he hurled a throwing axe right through a child that a mother was carrying on
her back. Grandpa yelled at him: “Hey, do you have no honor? God will punish you
for this.” But the man threatened my grandfather that if he did not shut up, he would
be next. The man was later expelled from the village.70
The villagers strongly disapproved of the killing of unarmed Armenian men,

let alone Armenian women and children. This was a sign of cowardice and the
opposite of “valor” (mêrxası̂).
Tribal ties persevered after the genocide. An official report of the 1930s
stated that the nomadic Berı̂tan tribe maintained relations with their Armenian
acquaintances and “kin” in Syria.71 According to the daughter of one of the chief-
tains, some of these Armenians were saved—after they converted to Islam—by
Berı̂tan chieftains. They stayed in Bingöl while others escaped to Aleppo after the
war.72 Interviews with children of Armenian survivors confirm that after the war
some Kurdish chieftains actively sought, and often found, other survivors so that

the interviewees’ parents could marry fellow Armenians.73 As far as the chieftains
were concerned, once the period of crisis was over, life could return to traditional
patterns.
Local Collaboration in the Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941 – 1944

The context of the Second World War, with Nazi Germany clearly positioned as
the aggressor/occupier, was obviously different from that of Ottoman authority, in
which the Turkish regime projected a sense of continuity. Yet, some of the factors
contributing to local collaboration with the hegemonic power were the same. Since
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of many previously closed
archives, historians have paid increased attention to the role of local collaboration
in the Holocaust.74 In our analysis, we focus on only one specific region, the
Baltic States.
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia enjoyed only twenty-two years of independ-
ence before they were occupied first by the Soviet Union and a year later by Nazi
Germany. All three Baltic states (with a total population of 6.35 million) had signif-
icant minority populations, of which the largest were Polish, Russian, Jewish, and
German (see table).75
Poles Russians Jews Baltic Germans Total
Lithuania 15.3% 2.5% 7.5% 1.4% 26.7%

Latvia 2.5% 10.6% 4.7% 3.2% 21.0%
Estonia 0.1% 8.2% 0.4% 1.7% 10.4%
As many as three-quarters of the Estonian Jewish population managed to flee

prior to the arrival of German troops in July and August 1941, but fewer than 10
percent of Latvian Jews, and virtually no Lithuanian Jews, were able to do so. A
wave of violence against Jews—in some instances instigated by the Nazis, in others
spontaneous—spread through Lithuania and Latvia. One of the best-documented
massacres took place on June 23– 27 in Kaunas and claimed the lives of 3,800
Jews. The bulk of the killing in 1941, however, was carried out under the auspices
of the German Security Police by the Arājs Commando in Latvia and the Hamann
Commando in Lithuania.76 Staffed by ethnic Latvians and Lithuanians, these units
murdered some 22,000 and 39,000 Jews respectively by the end of the year. The
largest mass executions of Jews took place on October 29 at Ninth Fort in Kaunas
and on November 8 and December 12 at Rumbula near Riga. Later during the
war, Lithuanian, Latvian, and to a lesser extent Estonian police battalions partici-
pated in atrocities in Belorussia and the Ukraine. The 963 Jews who remained in
Estonia were apprehended and executed on an individual basis by the Estonian
Security Police acting on German orders. At the notorious Wannsee Conference in

January 1942, Estonia was proclaimed the first country in Europe to be made
judenrein. By that time, close to 90 percent of Latvian Jews and 80 percent of
Lithuanian Jews had been killed as well. Taking as a basis the number of Jews in
the Baltic States at the beginning of Nazi occupation, the death rates among Jews
in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1941 – 1944 were 100 percent, 90 percent (or
70,000), and 95 percent (or 195,000) respectively.
On the basis of his research, Arūnas Bubnys has divided the mass murder of
Jews in Lithuanian provinces in 1941 into two periods: from the end of June to
mid-July, and from the end of July through November. During the first period,
Jews were executed mainly for political reasons, whereas in the second period
they were targeted on the basis of “race.”77 In Vilnius, the dynamics of
German-Lithuanian relations during the first months of the occupation determined
the pace of the ghettoization and mass murder of Jews. Lithuanian policemen
attached to Einsatzkommando 9 were tasked with drawing up lists of Jews, con-
ducting roundups, and executing victims, while the Vilnius City Council was
assigned the task of managing the ghetto. Members of Lithuanian Police Battalions
1, 2, and 3 assisted in herding Jews into the ghetto and later participated in its
destruction. These units also performed escort and guard duties during mass
executions at Paneriai (Ponary) near Vilnius. Among other activities, the staff of
the 130-member strong Lithuanian Security Police interrogated individual Jews at
the infamous Lukiškės prison in Vilnius, invariably condemning them to death.78
In all instances, local collaborators exercised substantial autonomy in their actions.
The extent of local collaboration was so significant that in many localities, Jewish
victims had barely any interaction with Germans.79
The Lithuanian case exposes a profound analytical problem—namely the
exclusive focus on interaction between two ethno-religious groups (here,
Lithuanians and Jews). As we discussed earlier in the case of the Kurds, and will
argue further in the case of the Twa, binary (or dual) systems rarely exist. Taking
into account the complexity of ethnic conflict may yield a new perspective on col-
laboration in genocide, with particular regard to motivations to commit violence.
In Lithuania, during much of the twentieth century Poland and the Poles were
perceived as the primary threat. For this reason, it was first and foremost local
Poles who found themselves under attack after the dismemberment of Poland in
1939. The Polish underground press consistently reported on crimes committed by
Germans and Lithuanians, accusing the latter of having “changed sides.” In his
account of wartime Polish-Lithuanian relations, Michael MacQueen develops a
universal definition of collaboration as “a device employed to counter the ‘existen-
tial fear’ of a real or imaginary threat of national extinction, with extinction defined
as the loss of state independence, assimilation, or genocide.”80 Soviet terror, and
specifically the mass deportation of June 14, 1941, created the impression among
the Baltic peoples that the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian nations were facing

imminent destruction.81 Yet, such factors tend to be overlooked in the scholarly lit-
erature, especially among some Baltic émigré historians.82 Some Baltic historians
identify collaboration with radical right-wing groups, consciously or unconsciously
following the example of French scholars who distinguish between collaboration
and collaborationism. In this interpretation, the latter term refers to cooperation
between German occupation authorities and indigenous fascist groups. To associ-
ate collaboration with a particular social or political group, however, is a mistake,
as Werner Röhr rightfully warns us.83
As Bernhard Chiari has observed in the case of Belorussia, the local police
played an important role in securing forced labor and exploiting the region eco-
nomically. Moreover, their duties encompassed not only routine administrative
tasks, but also life-and-death decisions concerning members of the targeted
groups. Most police recruits in Belorussia were peasants in their early twenties.
Many joined the auxiliary police units (Schutzmannschaften) or local police posts
in anticipation of career advancement, while others were motivated to join out of a
desire for revenge against the Soviets. In some cases the promise of food and pay
was sufficient incentive. The misappropriation of victims’ property, which was
widespread across the western Soviet borderlands, was another factor.84 The
opportunity to participate in genocide did not feature as a major incentive.
Whereas national self-consciousness was considerably weaker among Belorussians
than among the Baltic peoples, the correlation between anti-Soviet and anti-Jewish
sentiments on the one hand, and the desire for political resolution in the form
of greater autonomy for their respective countries on the other, was present in
both cases.
According to Knut Stang, among the factors that motivated Lithuanian
members of the Hamann Commando to participate in the mass murder were anti-
semitism, the militarization of Lithuanian society in the 1920s, and the desire for
career advancement.85 MacQueen has emphasized that a series of political set-
backs, including the enforced detachment of Memel (Klaipeda) in March 1939,
the establishment of Soviet military bases in fall 1939, and the Soviet annexation
and occupation in the summer 1940, had a demoralizing effect on the Lithuanian
population.86
Saulius Sužiedėlis offers perhaps the most expansive analysis of criminal
collaboration in the Baltics. He suggests a causal relationship between the Soviet
and Nazi periods of rule, arguing that the passivity, fatalism, and defeatism that
engulfed the Lithuanian nation in the wake of the Soviet annexation of 1940 pro-
vided a breeding ground for collaboration. Feelings of betrayal and humiliation
turned many—the youth especially—against the impotent leadership. A process of
radicalization transformed dismay into rage, sowing the seeds of communal hatred.
During that period, pre-existing stereotypes solidified into dogmas about the
collective guilt of groups designated as enemies (Jews and Poles in particular). At

the same time, Lithuanians decried the destruction of their culture by “uncivilized
hordes” from the East. Like Christopher Dieckmann, Sužiedėlis emphasizes the
contribution of antisemitic fringe groups to the ideology of organic nationalism
during the first months of Nazi occupation in Lithuania. Although the influence of
the radical right was limited, it succeeded in mobilizing the populace against
“Jewish power.” According to Sužiedėlis, antisemitic sentiment, both official and
popular, was expressed within the context of revenge, liberation, and the struggle
against Bolshevism, rather than as a rhetoric supporting racially motivated genocide.
Despite the intensity of the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941, the following
period, which saw the institutionalization of mass violence, may be more significant
for understanding the rationale of criminal collaboration. Sužiedėlis’s conclusion,
though, is disquieting and predictable at the same time: “the most extreme
Lithuanian collaborators emulated the value system, rhetoric, and behavior of the
Nazis.”87 This analysis illustrates the tendency of Holocaust historians to focus on
ideological antisemitism as a primary explanation of collaborators’ behavior.
The decision to participate in mass murder cannot be explained exclusively
by the fact that for many men of military age, joining the police force was an alter-
native to deportation to Germany for forced labor. In any case, as Christopher
Browning found in the case of Reserve Police Battalion 101, policemen usually
were given a choice whether to participate in mass executions.88 At Tartu concen-
tration camp in Estonia, for example, firing squads routinely were assembled from
among volunteers—usually off-duty guards. Sometimes there were more volunteers
than needed, which rules out the possibility that anyone was forced to participate
against his will. Indeed, some of the guards at Tartu became almost permanent
members of the firing squad, volunteering whenever they could.89 In his study of
collaboration, Martin Dean found no instances in which a policeman was executed
for refusing to kill a Jew, although severe punishments were issued for disobedi-
ence or disloyalty.90 The conventional “lesser of the two evils” argument does help
to explain the fact of collaboration, but not its murderous extent or the selection
of a target group. Neither are indoctrination and propaganda alone sufficient
ingredients for a viable analysis.
One underlying factor remains the same across the Kurdish and Baltic cases,
namely that of nation-building. In the Republic of Rwanda, however, the process
of nation-building was marked by tribal allegiances that had been heightened
by superimposed racial categorization. This peculiarity shaped the patterns of
collaboration that emerged during the 1994 genocide.
The Twa and the Rwandan Genocide, 1994

The tendency to oversimplify the history of the Rwandan genocide is amplified
by the Rwandan government, which has emphasized the conflict between Tutsi
and Hutu to the exclusion of any other factors. The “Rwandan genocide” has

transformed into the “Tutsi genocide,” which is not incorrect from the legal point
of view, but is too simplistic a representation of events to be considered historically
accurate.91 Scholarly accounts of the Rwandan genocide tend to ignore the dual
role of the Twa—who constitute approximately 0.4 percent of Rwanda’s total popu-
lation, or 33,000—as both victims and victimizers.92 In this way they unwittingly
accept that there exists what Christopher Taylor calls a “dual system,” in which
Hutus and Tutsi are opposed, and other groups’ roles are discounted. The Twa are
typically mentioned in passing as a tiny minority that rarely was targeted in the
genocide, yet partook in the killing in an effort to improve their social status.93
While some Twa participated in the genocide, many others were killed. All that we
know about the role of the Twa in the Rwandan genocide comes from the few
existing accounts by anthropologists and NGO activists; the following account is
therefore necessarily preliminary and represents, ultimately, a call for further
research.
The Twa are a Pygmy people, autochthonous to the area now called Rwanda.
Traditionally, Twa found themselves at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy, having
been ostracized by both Hutu and Tutsi. Popular discourse in Rwanda both before
and after the genocide has reinforced the stereotype of the Twa as a “backward”
people. As foragers, Twa found themselves in the path of agricultural expansion
driven by Tutsi herders and Hutu cultivators. The so-called Hutu Revolution of
1959 brought down the Tutsi monarchy, removing the minimal support that the
Twa received from the royal family. Some of the Twa, whom the Hutu leaders
believed to have sided with the Tutsi, were killed, or died of starvation. In the
wake of the massacres that accompanied the transition to Rwandan independence
in 1961, many Twa fled the country along with tens of thousands of Tutsi.
Remarkably, even while in exile in Uganda, the Tutsi and the Twa did not
mingle.94 Census data from 1978 and 1991 indicate a 40 percent decrease in the
Twa population, at a time when the general Rwandan population was rapidly
increasing.95
Taylor has argued that the Twa, long relegated to pariah status, played a sym-
bolic role in the construction of Hutu and Tutsi identities. Racism against Twa
probably contributed to the subsequent construction of difference between Tutsi
and Hutu.96 For instance, the Hutu would on occasion emphasize their peaceful
coexistence with the Twa to accentuate the difference between the Tutsi and them-
selves.97 In reality, however, both Hutu and Tutsi avoided socializing with the Twa.
Most Hutu and Tutsi would not sit next to a Twa, much less share a meal or drink
with one.98 Forced into the most arid areas of Rwanda, the Twa have lost 75
percent of their land since 1959, and typically have suffered extreme hunger.
According to Jerome Lewis and Judith Knight, who did fieldwork among the Twa
in August and September 1993, some families went without food for three to five
days. Begging had become a vital survival strategy for more than 70 percent of the

Twa. Poverty and a lack of resources led some to commit petty theft, which further
reinforced the negative stereotypes of the Twa and prompted physical violence
against them. Less than 0.5 percent of the Twa population had a secondary school
education, and just a handful of Twa held regular jobs. The literacy rate among the
Twa, who between 1965 and 1990 remained politically unrepresented, is the lowest
of all population groups in Rwanda. As Lewis and Knight have observed, the
greater the Twa’s poverty, the greater the discrimination they suffered. Even prior
to the 1994 genocide, those Hutu who physically abused their Twa neighbors and
misappropriated or destroyed their property did so with impunity. Victims’
complaints to the authorities went unheeded, and occasionally prompted further,
retaliatory violence.99
Remarkably, the abuses intensified in the wake of the 1990 invasion by the
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The Habyarimana regime encouraged ethnic
hatred and violence directed at the Tutsi, and focused attention on the traditional
Twa ties to Tutsi royalty as a way to justify mistreatment of the Twa. Hutu extrem-
ists readily identified the Twa with the Tutsi insurgents. Whereas until then the
majority of abuses suffered by the Twa had been fuelled by a mixture of racism
and economic incentives, from 1990 onwards they became politically motivated.
The Interahamwe—the fearsome militia organized in 1992 by the ruling National
Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND)—hunted down
individual Twa as part of a campaign of political cleansing. The assassination of
Burundi’s first ethnic Hutu president in October 1993 and the subsequent massa-
cres that had left about 50,000 dead and sent up to 300,000 Hutu refugees to
Rwanda had an immediate impact on the situation of the Twa. In the areas border-
ing Burundi, at least eleven Twa villages were torched between December 1993
and March 1994. Extremist propaganda broadcast by the government-backed
Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines incited the killers to take revenge on
the Twa as alleged Tutsi supporters. In fact, few Twa knew about the RPF or
about the war raging in northeastern Rwanda. As they were not involved in politics,
the majority of the Twa had been unaware of the growing tensions in the country.
Tragically, due to their poverty, their inexperience with politics, and the history of
discrimination against them, the Twa proved easy to manipulate. Individual
members of the community were seduced by the material incentives and political
protection offered by MRND. Some of them joined MRND or Interahamwe; the
former mayor of Masango in Gitarama Prefecture, for example, enticed the local
Twa to join the militia on the offer of food, money, and protection. According to
Lewis and Knight, the Hutu Power extremist ideology had very little, if any, impact
on the Twa.100
The majority of the community was displaced, and, according to some
estimates, up to 30 percent of the Twa, or more than 11,000, were murdered as
“accomplices of the enemy.” Threats by the militias, the military, or the

presidential guards to “kill the Tutsi first and then the Twa” often were carried out
in reality. The Twa usually were targeted as RPF sympathizers or, more generally,
as “friends of the Tutsi.” In Ntyazo commune in Gitarama prefecture, the
Interahamwe massacred a group of Twa villagers, including small children, at a
roadblock. Even association with the Interahamwe did not guarantee survival. In
Nyanza sector in Butare prefecture, for example, some twenty Twa members of
the Interahamwe ultimately were killed as accomplices of the RPF. Occasionally,
refusal to join the Interahamwe condemned individual Twa to death. Interahamwe
bands forced their way into Twa homes, forcing the men to join them. In some
cases, Twa were used as human shields. As in the case of the surviving Tutsi, the
rapid advance of the RPF saved the remaining Twa from death at the hands of the
Interahamwe. Ironically, immediately after the RPF takeover, some Twa were
killed by RPF soldiers as alleged supporters of the Hutu extremists.101
The least-explored issue in this triangular relationship, however, remains the
limited participation of the Twa in the mass killing of Tutsi. As we have noted, Twa
were enlisted in the notorious Interahamwe militia as a group that was easy to
manipulate. Some authors insist that Twa participated in the killing and looting in
an effort to improve their social or economic standing. Unexpectedly, the first Twa
to join the militia were dancers and singers.102 More often, however, Twa who
joined the Interahamwe acted out of a desperate need for food and political protec-
tion, and sometimes were forced to kill on pain of death. Some Twa from Shyrongi
sector in central Rwanda had participated in the persecution of the Tutsi population
well before April 1994. Among other actions, they helped loot homes belonging to
the Tutsi murdered by the Interahamwe. Twa participants were allowed to slaughter
and eat the cattle of Tutsi who had been killed, a common economic incentive for
participating in mass violence. As elsewhere in Rwanda, some Twa men from
Shyrongi participated in the genocide as killers and looters, while others were killed
in the massacres. Sometimes individuals were given a choice—to man the road
blocks or to be killed alongside the Tutsi on charges of treason. The natural skills of
the Twa as hunters led the militia and the Hutu authorities to use them, with the
help of hunting dogs, to flush Tutsi fugitives out of their hiding places in the
forest.103 Even among the criminals, the Twa remained a despised and ostracized
minority. According to some reports, on occasion the Interahamwe handed over
Tutsi victims of gang rape to their Twa collaborators. Within the social context of
Rwanda, this was intended as a further humiliation.104
Conclusion
Historians of the Second World War generally take collaboration to mean coopera-
tion of certain segments of the population of an occupied country with the repre-
sentatives of the occupation regime.105 Extended beyond the Second World War
and beyond Europe, however, the term loses the negative connotation of treason.

Neither Ottoman Turkey nor Rwanda was an occupied country when genocide
occurred. The Kurds and the Twa interacted with authorities that posed as legiti-
mate governing bodies. Furthermore, in the case of Rwanda, the center of power
was missing altogether. In regard to collaboration, the word betrayal therefore can
be used only in a strictly moralistic sense. Collaboration remains a viable concept
only insofar as it challenges the existence of binary systems in a conflict—systems
that until now have been a focal point of genocide studies. This, rather than the
difficulty of its conceptualization, is the intellectual discomfort that collaboration
causes to “dual system” theories advanced by scholars in the field.
Since 1994, the Rwandan genocide has stood as a benchmark of inhumanity,
with the example of the Twa serving as perhaps the most extreme and tragic case
of collaboration in modern history. The justification offered by perpetrators of the
Holocaust in the courts of justice—that they had no choice but to participate in
the killing—was nothing but an attempt to avoid punishment. During the one
hundred days of the Rwandan genocide, the command to “kill or be killed”
became a horrific reality. Substantial evidence shows that those Hutu and Twa who
refused to partake in mass murder were killed on the spot. The Interahamwe coer-
cion of individual Twa to join in the killing operations therefore could be viewed as
a form of blackmail. In the case of Rwanda, then, ethnic nationalism and power
struggles involved the Twa exclusively as an object. The history of persecution by
both Tutsi and Hutu effectively made members of the Twa minority into hostages
in the conflict. Perhaps the most distressing feature of Twa participation in the
genocide is that individual acts of collaboration further cemented their inferior
status in the eyes of both Hutu perpetrators and Tutsi victims. This is one major
characteristic that distinguishes the Twa case from the other two. Another is the
lack of a political elite among the Twa, and, consequently, the impossibility of
statehood based on collective identity. This lack of communal organization
rendered individual Twas more vulnerable to exploitation than members of the
other two groups discussed here.
In the complex scenario of the Armenian genocide, Kurdish collaboration
was colored by incitement, incentives, opportunism, coercion, and tribal mecha-
nisms. Yet, although individuals’ motives could differ, the outcomes were often the
same. This finding leads us to conclude that at least some forms of collaboration
are conditioned by a longstanding history of discrimination by the hegemonic
groups. Thus, just as existential fear of national extinction motivated the principal
perpetrators of genocide in all three cases, structural inequalities such as persecu-
tion along ethnic lines may incline collaborators to participate in the violence.
Although the victim group singled out by the perpetrator rarely, if ever, poses a
threat to other ethnic groups, the latter tend to seek out specific negative features
of the targeted collectivity to rationalize their decision to assist in the commission
of the crime.

Structural inequality describes the power relationship that puts a particular
minority, or minorities in general, at a disadvantage. Such imbalances do not nec-
essarily lead to violence.106 They do, however, create a deep-seated resentment
that hegemonic powers can—and often do—manipulate. Structural inequality was
ingrained in inter-ethnic relations in Ottoman Turkey and Rwanda; in the Baltic
states, it emerged in new forms during the year of Soviet occupation (1940– 1941).
Regardless of the number of years under hegemonic power, ethnic resentments
tended to play out in similar ways.
Conceptions of improved status differed from case to case. In the case of the
Twa in Rwanda, the goal was physical security: the will to survive overcame moral
inhibitions against killing fellow human beings. Leaders of the Kurdish tribes in
Eastern Anatolia saw the Armenians’ territorial claims and attempts at political
autonomy as undermining their own; moreover, the prospect of living under a his-
torically “inferior” minority was unacceptable to Kurdish elites. The desire to
prevent such a future was common to nationalists who wished to preclude the
establishment of a greater Armenia and to apolitical tribal chieftains who feared
the loss of land and power. The fact that the Young Turk regime, first under Talât
and Enver and later under Atatürk, did not intend to yield to the Kurds’ demands
for autonomy further demonstrates the extent of their political manipulation.
Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians collectively sought to re-establish their inde-
pendence, or at least to attain equal treatment under the German occupation
authorities. Although pre-existing anti-Jewish sentiment no doubt was a motivating
factor in local collaborators’ decision-making in the Baltic States, the expectation
that participation in the mass murder of Jews would pay off politically was perhaps
of greater weight. All other factors, including economic gain, “settling scores,”
sadism, or even intoxication should be viewed as boosters, not as underlying
motives to partake in the violence.
Our findings support analyses developed by John Armstrong and Roger
D. Petersen (who wrote thirty-five years apart) with regard to Nazi-occupied
Eastern Europe. Although Armstrong did not specifically address the issue of
collaboration in his groundbreaking 1968 article, he argued against the dichotomy
that had emphasized social and ideological factors as opposed to ethnic resentment
as motivation to partake in mass violence. He contended further that in the instan-
ces he had considered—Croatia under the Ustaše and the Nazi-occupied
Ukraine—collaboration was based on pragmatism. According to Armstrong, the
ascription of absolute value to the nation constituted the basis for a short-lived
affinity between Nazism and integral nationalism. The common emphasis on
nationhood generated marginally similar approaches, with both sides identifying
ethnic rather than ideological enemies as the real threat to integral nationalism.107
Petersen identifies three basic emotional responses—fear, hatred, and resent-
ment—that triggered ethnic violence in the Baltic in the summer of 1941.

According to Petersen, emotion-based narratives draw on group experiences to
explain variations in target and timing. He emphasizes the importance of structural
changes in prompting ethnic violence. With each change, power and status rela-
tions among groups shifted, thereby overturning a well-established ethnic hier-
archy. If the dominant emotion is resentment, which Petersen defines as “the
feeling of being politically dominated by a group that has no right to be in a supe-
rior position,” the ethnic target will be the group perceived as highest in the ethnic
hierarchy. In the context of Lithuania, where during the Soviet occupation the
Jewish minority was widely perceived to have been elevated from a subordinate
status, Petersen interprets popular anti-Jewish violence as the desire to re-establish
the former hierarchy.108
Though we are wary of one-size-fits-all definitions, on the basis of the three
case studies of collaboration discussed above we have formulated the following
description of the causal mechanism: collaboration in genocide involves an act of
collective reasoning that leads a minority or subordinate group that has been the
subject of structural inequality to assist the hegemonic power in physically
destroying another such group—one that has been targeted—for the purpose of
improving its own status.
We are careful to emphasize collective reasoning over conscious decision-
making. Otherwise, the preparatory stage would amount to criminal conspiracy—
which it was not. Under conditions of military occupation (the Baltic States) or
hegemony (Rwanda and Ottoman Turkey), there was no centralized authority that
could issue a binding order to assist in the act of mass murder. Rather, we refer to
the unspoken consensus that led the bulk of the minority population tacitly to
support or at least to accept mass murder. In other words, with some exceptions,
the minority group implicated in collaboration as a rule does not actively oppose
the ongoing victimization at either the local or the regional level. Nor do they nec-
essarily perceive collaboration in mass killing—as contemporary commentators
would—as fundamentally distinct from other types of activities in which they may
engage for the purpose of achieving a higher status.
Within the legal interpretation of criminal collaboration, the predicament of
the Twa, who were forced to kill on pain of death, constitutes a clear-cut instance
of duress. In the case of the Kurdish and Baltic elites, however, the choice to
collaborate with the principal perpetrator was seen as a lesser evil, or compensa-
tory, in relation to the real or perceived loss of power, status, or identity, and there-
fore could be construed as necessity. Regardless of the lack of emphasis on motive
in international law, collaboration remains a useful concept for scholars who adopt
a bottom-up approach to the historical study of genocide. The recently introduced
doctrine of Joint Criminal Enterprise provides the legal foundation for advanced
comparative research on collaboration.

In each of our cases, the regime in power promoted collaboration to advance
its particular goals. It appears that among the motivations of the hegemonic force
was a desire to implicate other groups in its crimes. Otherwise, however important
a role local collaboration may play in genocide, it is rarely indispensable.109
Ironically, the minority groups implicated in criminal collaboration were
themselves slated for eventual destruction—often through forced assimilation—by
the primary perpetrator group. The perceived gains achieved through the act of
collaboration would thus ultimately have been rendered void.
Anton Weiss-Wendt is head of research at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust and
Religious Minorities (Oslo). In 2002–2003, he was a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellow
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust
Studies. He is the author of Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (2009)
and Small-Town Russia: Childhood Memories of the Final Soviet Decade (2010); and
the editor of Eradicating Differences: The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-Dominated
Europe (2010) and The Nazi Genocide of the Gypsies: Reevaluation and Commemoration
(forthcoming).
Uğur Ümit Üngör is an assistant professor of history at Utrecht University. He specializes

in the historical sociology of mass violence and is the author of The Making of Modern
Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (2011) and (with Mehmet Polatel)
Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (2011).
Notes
For commenting on early drafts of the article, and helping us to sharpen our argument, we
are grateful to the following individuals: Karel Berkhoff, Donald Bloxham, Hamit Bozarslan,
Trine Eide, Nobuo Hayashi, Chalak Kaveh, Mark Levene, Alexander Prusin, Sigurd Sverre
Stangeland, Saulius Sužiedėlis, Scott Straus, and Christopher Taylor.
1. For a critical study that breaks with this tendency, see Mahmood Mamdani, When
Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2001). Departing from the general trend, Scott Straus, in an
unpublished manuscript, describes the phenomenon of collaboration as “joint production.”
We are grateful to Dr. Straus for sharing his research with us.
2. For a more substantial critique see Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Problems in Comparative

Genocide Scholarship,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke,
UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Studying Mass Violence: Pitfalls,
Problems, and Promises,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 6, no. 3 (forthcoming).
3. Hilberg briefly dealt with the issue of collaboration in one of his later books. See his
Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (London: Lime Tree,
1993), 87–102. It is worth noting that “rescuers” constitute another group that does not fit
easily into these categories.

4. For comprehensive analyses of the motives of genocide perpetrators see James Waller,
Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002); and Alette L. Smeulers, “Perpetrators of International Crimes:
Towards a Typology,” in Supranational Criminology: Towards a Criminology of
International Crimes, ed. A. Smeulers and Roelof Haveman (Antwerp: Intersentia
Publishers, 2008). Although a useful tool, Smeulers’s typology has its limitations when
applied to collaboration. For example, unlike Smeulers, we do not associate with fanaticism
the emotional response prompted by resentment.
5. See, for example, Vidkun Quisling’s defense speech at his trial in Oslo on September 6
and 7, 1945. Vidkun Quislings forsvarstale i lagmannsretten September 1945 (Oslo: Historisk
Forlag, 1987), 87.
6. Hans Lemberg stated unequivocally: “Collaboration is sensu stricto a phenomenon

related to nationalism.” See his “Kollaboration in Europa mit dem Dritten Reich um das
Jahr 1941,” in Das Jahr in der europäischen Politik, ed. Karl Bosl (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
1972), 148.
7. John Armstrong, “Collaborationism in World War II: The Integral Nationalist Variant in
Eastern Europe,” Journal of Modern History 40, no. 3 (1968): 396; Gerhard Hirschfeld,
Fremdherrschaft und Kollaboration: Die Niederlande unter deutscher Besatzung 1940– 1945
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1984), 7.
8. Werner Röhr, “Okkupation und Kollaboration” in Okkupation und Kollaboration (1938–

1945): Beiträge zu Konzepten und Praxis der Kollaboration in der deutschen
Okkupatsionspolitik, ed. Werner Röhr (Berlin: Hüthig, 1994), 63; Werner Röhr, ed., Europa
unterm Hakenkreuz: Analysen, Quellen, Register (Berlin: Hüthig, 1996), 147; Werner Rings,
Leben mit dem Feind: Anpassung und Widerstand in Hitlers Europa 1939–1945 (Munich:
Kindler, 1979).
9. The editors of the volume Kooperation und Verbrechen apparently did not consider the
consequences of this limitation when they suggested examining the causes of collaboration
within the context of multifaceted cooperation with the Germans. See the editorial introduc-
tion to Christoph Dieckmann et al., eds., Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der
‘Kollaboration’ im östlichen Europa 1939– 1945 (Hamburg: Wallstein, 2003), 9.
10. Werner Röhr, “Introduction” in Okkupation und Kollaboration, 26 –27; Röhr, Europa
unterm Hakenkreuz, 156 –62; and Röhr, “Okkupation und Kollaboration,” 73– 74.
11. Cornelis J. Lammers, “Levels of Collaboration: A Comparative Study of German
Occupation Regimes during the Second World War” in Die deutsche Herrschaft in den “ger-
manischen” Ländern 1940–1945, ed. Robert Bohn (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997),
51–52.
12. Tomislav Dulić, “Mass Killing in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–1945: A Case
for Comparative Research” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 3 (2006): 267–68. On the
crucial role of the state in genocide see Anton Weiss-Wendt, “The State and Genocide,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and Dirk Moses (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 81–101.
13. UN General Assembly, Plenary Meetings, 23rd meeting, February 6, 1946, p. 470; ibid.,
84th meeting, September 18, 1947, p. 94; ibid., 89th meeting, September 22, 1947,

pp. 256 –57; ibid., 101st meeting, October 31, 1947, pp. 477–83; ibid., 102nd meeting,
October 31, 1947, pp. 488 –514; UN Economic and Social Council, Official Records, 218th
meeting, August 26, 1948, pp. 711, 715.
14. The Western Allies did not yield to the Soviet request that they surrender citizens of the
former Baltic States staying in DP camps in the Western zones of occupation. The Soviet
proposal to formally equate genocide with fascism and Nazi racial theories had been consis-
tently voted down.
15. See, for example, Allan A. Ryan, Jr., Quiet Neighbors: Prosecuting Nazi War Criminals in
America (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984). For a recent case study see Jerome
S. Legge, “The Karl Linnas Deportation Case, the Office of Special Investigations, and
American Ethnic Politics,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 26–55.
16. See, for example, “Wartime Collaborators: A Comparative Study of the Effect of Their
Trials on the Treason Law of Great Britain, Switzerland, and France” (editorial), Yale Law
Journal 56, no. 7 (1947): 1,210–33; George Ginsburgs, “Laws of War and War Crimes on
the Russian Front during World War II: The Soviet View,” Soviet Studies 11, no. 3 (January
1960): 253 –85.
17. Communication from Nobuo Hayashi, researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo,
August 4, 2010. Gacaca jurisdictions in contemporary Rwanda provide for four categories of
offenders, whereas criminal collaboration in genocide automatically would fall into Category
II, which blends co-perpetrators and accomplices.
18. Ibid.
19. Raphaél Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of
Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 1944), 93.
20. Alex Obote-Odora, “Complicity in Genocide as Understood through the ICTR

Experience,” International Criminal Law Review 22 (2002): 375– 408; Chile Oboje-Osuji,
“‘Complicity in Genocide’ versus ‘Aiding and Abetting Genocide,’” Journal of International
Criminal Justice 3 (2005): 56–81; Grant Dowson and Rachel Boynton, “Reconciling
Complicity in Genocide and Aiding and Abetting Genocide in the Jurisprudence of the
United Nations Ad Hoc Tribunals,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 21 (2008): 241–80;
Elies van Sliedregt, “Complicity to Commit Genocide,” in The UN Genocide Convention—A
Commentary, ed. Paola Gaeta (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), 163–92. We
should add that this requirement has been somewhat relaxed in the case law of the interna-
tional criminal tribunals for Rwanda and ex-Yugoslavia, ICTR and ICTY. See Alexander
Greenwalt, “Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-Based Interpretation,”
Columbia Law Review 99 (1999): 2259–94.
21. See, for example, Alette Smeulers and Lotte Hoex, “Studying the Microdynamics of the
Rwandan Genocide,” British Journal of Criminology 50, no. 1 (2010): 435– 54.
22. Quoted in Gunel Guliyeva, “The Concept of Joint Criminal Enterprise and ICC
Jurisdiction,” Eyes on ICC 5, no. 1 (2008–2009): 51. As of 2008, ICTY had charged sixty-
five persons under the provision of JCE.

23. Jasmina Pjanić, “Joint Criminal Enterprise: New Form of Individual Criminal
Responsibility,” available online at: http://www.okobih.ba/files/docs/Jasmina_Pjanic_ENG_i_
BHS.pdf (accessed August 10, 2011). See also Linda Engvall, “The Future of Extended
Joint Criminal Enterprise—Will the ICTY’s Innovation Meet the Standards of the ICC?”
Nordic Journal of International Law 76, nos. 2– 3 (2007): 241–63; Beatrice Krebs, “Joint
Criminal Enterprise,” The Modern Law Review 73, no. 4 (2010): 578–604.
24. For a critique of the doctrine of JCE see Allison M. Danner and Jenny S. Martinez,
“Guilty Associations: Joint Criminal Enterprise, Command Responsibility, and the
Development of International Criminal Law,” California Law Review 93, no. 1 (January
2005): 71 –169; “Symposium: Guilty by Association—Joint Criminal Enterprise on Trial,”
Journal of International Criminal Law 5, no. 1 (March 2007): 67– 226.
25. Alexander Zahar, “Perpetrators and Co-Perpetrators of Genocide,” in Gaeta, The UN

Genocide Convention—A Commentary, 151.
26. Donald Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000), 22– 23.
27. David McDowall, The Kurds: A Minority Rights Group Report (UK: Minority Rights
Group, 1991), 6.
28. The Ottoman government often redrew provincial borders to reduce the demographic
proportion of Christians to the benefit of Muslims (Vahakn N. Dadrian, Warrant for
Genocide: Key Elements of the Turko-Armenian Conflict [New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 1999], 139 –44). Altogether, the study of early twentieth-century Ottoman demo-
graphics rarely yields reliable statistics. Cf. Kemal H. Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830 –
1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1985); Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and
the End of the Empire (New York: New York University, 1983); Levon Marashlian, Politics
and Demography: Armenians, Turks, and Kurds in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, MA:
Zoryan Institute, 1991).
29. Donald Bloxham, “Three Imperialisms and a Turkish Nationalism: International

Stresses, Imperial Disintegration, and the Armenian Genocide,” Patterns of Prejudice 26,
no. 4 (2002): 55.
30. Gérard Libaridian, “Bir araştırma konusu olarak Ermeni-Kürt ilişkileri ve sorunları,”
Studia Kurdica nos. 2–6 (1990): 70–83.
31. Halil İnalcık, “Application of the Tanzimat and its Social Effects,” Archivum
Ottomanicum 5 (1973): 99 –127.
32. Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of
Kurdistan (London: Zed, 1992), chapters 2, 3, and 4; McDowall, The Kurds, 14.
33. Tessa Hofmann and Gerayer Koutcharian, “The History of Armenian-Kurdish Relations
in the Ottoman Empire,” Armenian Review 39, no. 4 (1986): 1– 45; Ghader Rassoulian,
“Die Kurden und die türkische Genozid an den Armeniern,” master’s thesis (University of
Vienna, 2002), 99.
34. Janet Klein, “Power in the Periphery: The Hamidiye Light Cavalry and the Struggle
over Ottoman Kurdistan, 1880–1914,” doctoral thesis (Princeton University, 2002).

35. Hellmut Christoff, “Kurden und Armenier: Eine Untersuchung über die Abhängigkeit
ihrer Lebensformen und Charakterentwicklung von der Landschaft,” doctoral thesis
(University of Hamburg, 1935).
36. For a cogent study of Kurdish-Armenian relations in the Van region, see Gunnar
Wiessner, Hayoths Dzor-Xavasor: Ethnische, ökonomische und kulturelle Transformation
eines ländlichen Siedlungsgebiets in der östlichen Türkei seit dem 19. Jahrhundert
(Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1997).
37. Dadrian, Warrant for Genocide, 15–28.
38. Uğur Ümit Üngör, “When Persecution Bleeds into Mass Murder: The Processive
Nature of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 2 (2006): 173–96.
39. Cf. four recently published memoirs on the April 24 deportations: Mikayel
Shamtanchian, The Fatal Night: An Eyewitness Account of the Extermination of Armenian
Intellectuals in 1915 (Studio City, CA: H. and K. Majikian Publications, 2007); Teotig,
Monument to April 11 (London: Gomidas, 2010); Aram Andonian, Exile, Trauma and Death:
On the Road to Chankiri with Komitas Vartabed (London: Gomidas, 2010); Yervant Odian,
Accursed Years: My Exile and Return from Der Zor, 1914–1919 (London: Gomidas, 2009).
40. Raymond H. Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2010).
41. Martin van Bruinessen, “Nationalisme kurde et ethnicités intra-kurdes,” Peuples

Méditerranéens no. 68– 69 (1994): 11 –37.
42. Rassoulian, Die Kurden, 30; Mark Levene, “Creating a Modern ‘Zone of Genocide’: The
Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878 –1923,” Holocaust and
Genocide Studies 12, no. 3 (1998): 409 –11; Taha Parla, The Social and Political Thought of
Ziya Gökalp 1876–1924 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1985).
43. Souren A. Papazian, Odyssey of a Survivor (Prince Frederick, MD: Jensen Press, 2002);
Aram Haygaz, Chors Tari Kurdistani Lernerun Metch (Antilias, Lebanon: Tparan
Katoghikosutean Hayots Metsi Tann Kilikioy, 1972); Jacques der Alexanian, Le ciel était noir
sur l’Euphrate: Arménie, Arménies 1900–1922 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1988).
44. Garo Sassouni, Kürt Ulusal Hareketleri ve 15. Yüzyıl’dan Günümüze Ermeni-Kürt
İlişkileri (Istanbul: Med, 1992), 246. This book is a translation of the Armenian original
Kurd Azgayin Sharzumnere yev Hay-Krdakan Haraberutiunnere: 16. daren minchev mer
orere (Beirut: Tparan Hamazgayin, 1969).
45. Nuri Dersimi, Dersim ve Kürt Milli Mücadelesine Dair Hatıratım (Ankara: Öz-Ge,
1992), 44 –45.
46. Hilmar Kaiser, “‘A Scene from the Inferno’: The Armenians of Erzerum and the
Genocide, 1915–1916,” in Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah, ed.
Hans-Lukas Kaiser and Dominick J. Schaller (Zurich: Chronos, 2001), 129–86.
47. Matthias Bjørnlund, “‘A Fate Worse Than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian
Genocide,” in Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century, ed.
Dagmar Herzog (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 16–59.

48. Şükran Vahide, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi: The Author of the Risale-i Nur (Istanbul:
Sözler, 1992), 128 –29.
49. Interview conducted with Dikran E. in Hilversum (the Netherlands), May 29, 2005. A
1941 official Turkish report indeed mentioned the existence of 285 Armenians in his district
(Dr. Münir Soykam to RPP General Secretariat, May 31, 1941); and Dr. Münir Soykam’s
inspection report synopsis, May 27, 1941, Republican Archives in Ankara, 490.01/996.850.1.
50. Andrew Goldberg, The Armenian Genocide (film) (Two Cats Productions, 2006). For a
similar view, emphasizing the impact of the declaration of jihad and its attendant ethno-
religious disturbances, see Bloxham, “Three Imperialisms,” 50.
51. Grisell M. McLaren, “Under the Red Crescent, 1914– 1915” (unpublished typescript,
1918), 29, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archives, ABC 76,
85M-74, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
52. Taner Akçam, “Review Essay: Guenter Lewy’s The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman
Turkey,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 3, no. 1 (April 2008): 130, 132.
53. Hüseyin Demirer, Ha Wer Delal: Emı̂nê Perı̂xanê’nin Hayatı (Istanbul: Avesta, 2008),
63–64. For more on this case, see Uğur Ümit Üngör, “Family Matters: Local Elites and the
Structures of Genocide,” The Armenian Weekly (April 25, 2009), 32–35.
54. Interior Ministry report, August 8, 1914, Prime Ministerial Ottoman Archives in
Istanbul (hereafter: BOA), DH.İD 80/5.
55. Demirer, Ha Wer Delal, chapters 5 and 7. (In the Kurdish language, Emı̂n becomes
Emı̂nê when it precedes the last name.)
56. Thomas Muggerditchian, Dikranagerdee Nahankin Tcharteru yev Kurderou

Kazanioutounneru (Cairo: Djihanian, 1919), 57 –58.
57. Demirer, Ha Wer Delal, 75– 89.

58. Ibid., 82 –84; Cf. Muggerditchian, Dikranagerdee Nahankin Tcharteru; See also Abed
Mshiho Na’man Qarabashi, Dmo Zliho: Verhalen over de Gruweldaden jegens Christenen in
Turkije en over het Leed dat hun in 1895 en in 1914–1918 is Aangedaan (Glanerbrug, the
Netherlands: Bar Hebraeus, 2002), 128; Épisodes des Massacres Armèniens de Diarbekir:
Faits et Documents (Constantinople: Kéchichian Fr., 1920), 28 –30.
59. Botschaft Konstantinopel 169, Holstein to Wangenheim, June 10, 1915, German
Foreign Office Archives (hereafter: PAAA), R14086.
60. Director of the Deutscher Hülfsbund für christliches Liebeswerk im Orient (Frankfurt
am Main) Friedrich Schuchardt to the Auswärtiges Amt, August 21, 1915, enclosure no. 6,
PAAA, R14087.
61. Report by the Directorate of General Security, July 27, 1915, BOA, DH.EUM.MEM
67/31.
62. Demirer, Ha Wer Delal, 87.

63. Ibid., 195 –205.

64. Kerop Bedoukian, The Urchin: An Armenian’s Escape (London: J. Murray, 1978),
24, 29.
65. Tepoyan, “The Massacres of Armenians in and around Diyarbekir,” (unpublished manu-
script, undated, held in the Armenian Church Archives, Amsterdam) 5:15.
66. Khachadoor Pilibosian, They Called Me Mustafa (Watertown, MA: Ohan Press, 1999), 26.
67. See Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).
68. Hamit Bozarslan, “Remarques sur l’histoire des relations kurdo-arméniennes,” The
Journal of Kurdish Studies 1 (1995): 55 –76. A case in point is that of Filı̂tê Qûto, chieftain
of the Reshkotan tribe. According to his children, during the genocide he robbed deporta-
tion convoys yet at the same time “protected his own Christians and did not spill blood of
any Christian.” Kevirbirı̂, Filı̂tê Qûto, 59–75. For a detailed study see David Gaunt,
Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia during
World War I (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006).
69. Michael Reynolds, “The Ottoman-Russian Struggle for Eastern Anatolia and the
Caucasus, 1908–1918: Identity, Ideology and the Geopolitics of World Order,” doctoral
thesis (Princeton University, 2003), 264.
70. Erdal Rênas (from the Xerzan area), interview with Uğur Ümit Üngör, Istanbul, August
18, 2002.
71. Aşiretler Raporu (Istanbul: Kaynak, 2003), 102.

72. Sewger family (Bêrtı̂ tribe), interview with Uğur Ümit Üngör, Kirwan village (Bingöl
province), November 10, 2001.
73. Kemal Yalçın, Seninle Güler Yüreğim (Bochum: self-published, 2003), 356.
74. For an overview of recent Holocaust scholarship see Martin Dean, “Holocaust Research
and Generational Change: Regional and Local Studies since the Cold War” in Lessons and
Legacies VIII: From Generation to Generation, ed. Doris L. Bergen (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2008), 203 –21.
75. We refer here to the number of Poles and Jews in Lithuania after the incorporation of
the Vilna district in September 1939; and the number of Baltic Germans in Latvia and
Estonia prior to the resettlement program (German: Umsiedlung) from October 1939
onwards.
76. Both squads were effectively partial detachments (Teilkommando) of the SS

Einsatzgruppen that operated in Latvia and Lithuania respectively.
77. Arūnas Bubnys, “The Holocaust in the Lithuanian Province in 1941: The Kaunas
District” in Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, ed. David Gaunt et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 311. For a comprehensive
account of the earlier stage of the Holocaust in Lithuania see Christoph Dieckmann and
Saulius Sužiedėlis, Lietuvos žydu˛ persekiojimas ir masinės žudynės 1941 m. vasara˛ ir
rudeni˛/The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews during Summer and Fall of
1941 (Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2006).

78. Joachim Tauber, “Die litauische Verwaltung und die Juden in Vilnius 1941–1943” in
Besatzung, Kollaboration, Holocaust: Neue Studien zur Verfolgung und Ermordung der euro-
päischen Juden ed. Johannes Hürter and Jürgen Zarusky (Munich: R. Oldenburg, 2008),
104– 14. The second ghetto in the city was liquidated on October 24, 1941, and approxi-
mately 5,000 of its inhabitants were executed.
79. Christoph Dieckmann, “Kollaboration? Litauische Nationsbildung und deutsche
Besatzungsherrschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg” in “Kollaboration,” 134.
80. Michael MacQueen, “Collaboration as an Element in the Polish-Lithuanian Struggle
Over Vilnius” in “Kollaboration,” 164. For a recent account of the Polish-Lithuanian conflict
see Alexander V. Prusin, The Lands Between: Conflict in the East European Borderlands,
1870–1992 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 183–90.
81. More than 10,000 Estonian, 15,000 Latvian, and 20,000 Lithuanian nationals were
victims of the deportation. Jews, as business owners, were disproportionately represented
among the deportees. Other categories included political elites, military and police officers,
and so-called asocial elements.
82. Historians such as Andrew Ezergailis appear reluctant to reconsider the view that the
pogroms were organized and supervised exclusively by the Einsatzgruppen in order to impli-
cate the local population (in this case, the Latvians). He downplays the significance of volun-
tary action on the part of the local population, exclaiming: “Neighbors did not kill Jews!”
Arguments to the contrary he dismisses as Nazi or Soviet propaganda. See Andrew
Ezergailis, “‘Neighbors’ Did Not Kill Jews!” in Collaboration and Resistance, 187–221;
Ezergailis, Stockholm Documents: The German Occupation of Latvia, 1941 –1945. What
Did America Know? (Riga: Historical Institute of Latvia, 2002); Ezergailis, “Collaboration in
German Occupied Latvia: Offered and Rejected,” in Latvija nacistiskās vācijas okupācijas
varā, 1941– 1945/Latvia under Nazi German Occupation, 1941–1945 (Riga: Historical
Institute of Latvia, 2004), 17:119–39.
83. Röhr, Europa unterm Hakenkreuz, 153 –54.
84. Bernhard Chiari, Altag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in
Weissrussland 1941 –1944 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998), 162, 170–84, 235–36, 247– 67.
85. Wolfgang Benz and Marion Neiss, introduction to Judenmord in Litauen, 11.
86. Michael MacQueen, “Massenvernichtung im Kontext: Täter und Voraussetzungen des

Holocaust in Litauen,” in Judenmord in Litauen, 16 –21.
87. Saulius Sužiedėlis, “Lithuanian Collaboration during the Second World War: Past
Realities, Present Perceptions” in “Kollaboration, ” 142–54, 162–63; Sužiedėlis, “Foreign
Saviors, Native Disciples,” in Collaboration and Resistance, 319, 328, and 333–51.
88. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).
89. Anton Weiss-Wendt, Murder Without Hatred: Estonians and the Holocaust (Syracuse,
NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), 204.
90. Martin Dean, The ‘Local Police’ in Nazi-Occupied Belarus and Ukraine as the ‘Ideal
Type’ of Collaboration: In Practice, in the Recollections of its Members and in the Verdicts

of the Courts” in Kollaboration, 423; idem, “Microcosm: Collaboration and Resistance
during the Holocaust in the Mir Rayon of Belarus, 1941– 1944” in Collaboration and
Resistance, 242.
91. An academic conference that took place in Kigali in July 2008 bore the title, “Tutsi
Genocide and the Reconstruction of Knowledge.” The fact that among the first victims of
genocide were about 50,000 so-called Hutu moderates is rarely mentioned in today’s
Rwanda. The term “Tutsi genocide” has been buttressed by Rwanda’s 2008 Law on
Genocide Ideology, which stipulates severe punishment for anyone who questions the “offi-
cial” view of the history of the genocide.
92. The estimates vary between 25,000 and 46,000. The most likely figure for the Twa in
Rwanda on the eve of the 1994 genocide is approximately 29,000. Unlike in the case of
ethnic Hutu, there have been no attempts to calculate the number of Twa perpetrators. See
Scott Straus’s article “How Many Perpetrators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? An
Estimate,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 1 (March 2004): 85 –98. On the Rwandan
government’s policy vis-à-vis the Twa since 1994, see Susan M. Thomson, “Ethnic Twa and
Rwandan National Unity and Reconciliation Policy,” Peace Review 21, no. 3 (2009): 313– 20.
93. See, for example, Timothy Longman, “Rwanda” in Encyclopedia of Genocide and
Crimes Against Humanity, ed. Dinah Shelton (Detroit: Thomson-Gale, 2004), 2:930.
94. Jerome Lewis and Judy Knight, The Twa of Rwanda: Assessment of the Situation of the
Twa and Promotion of Twa Rights in Post-War Rwanda (Copenhagen: World Rainforest
Movement, 1995), 19 –21, 30. The Bantu root twa, meaning “foreigner” or “outsider,” was
used traditionally in reference to the hunter-gatherer autochthonous peoples of Central
Africa (M.D.W. Jeffreys, “The Batwa: Who Are They?” Africa: Journal of the International
African Institute 23, no. 1 [January 1953]: 45 –52). In the context of the Rwandan genocide,
we use the conventional “Twa,” as opposed to “Batwa” ( plural).
95. Benon Mugarura with Anicet Ndemeye, Batwa Land Rights in Rwanda (UK: Minority
Rights Group International Microstudy, 2003), 1, available online at www.minorityrights.org/
953/micro-studies/batwa-land-rights-in-rwanda.html (accessed September 20, 2011).
96. Christopher Taylor, “Dual Systems in Rwanda: Have They Ever Really Existed?”
Anthropological Theory 4, no. 3 (2004): 353 –69.
97. Christopher Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford: Berg,
1999), 90.
98. Wouter Thiebou has compared the status of the Twa in Rwanda to that of the Dalit
(untouchables) in India. See his “The Twa Indigenous of Rwanda: A Marginalized People in
a Post-Conflict Society Seen From a Cultural and Human Rights Perspective,” master’s
thesis (University of Utrecht, 2007), 24 –5, available online at www.wouternaardevn.nl/
documents/Thesis_W.Thiebou.pdf (accessed August 10, 2011).
99. Lewis and Knight, The Twa of Rwanda, 32–50; Pauline Overeem, Batwa: Final Report.
A Report of the UNPO Mission With APB, Investigating the Situation of the Batwa People of
Rwanda, September 28 –December 15, 1994 (The Hague: Unrepresented Nations and
Peoples Organization, 1995), 10–13, available online at www.grandslacs.net/doc/0472.pdf
(accessed August 11, 2011).

100. Lewis and Knight, The Twa of Rwanda, 51 –3, 59; Overeem, Batwa, 17, 22.
101. Lewis and Knight, The Twa of Rwanda, 61 –5, 92 –3; Overeem, Batwa, 22– 4.
102. Overeem, Batwa, 25.
103. Christian P. Scherrer, Genocide and Crisis in Central Africa: Conflict Roots, Mass
Violence, and Regional War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 24; Charles Mironko, “Igitero:
Means and Motive in the Rwandan Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 1
(March 2004): 52.
104. African Rights, Rwanda: Death, Despair, Defiance (London: African Rights, 1994),
252– 57.
105. Röhr, introduction to Okkupation und Kollaboration, 24.
106. For the concept of structural violence see Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace
Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91; Galtung, “Violence, War, and
Their Impact on Visible and Invisible Effects of Violence,” Polylog: Forum for Intercultural
Philosophy 5 (2004), available online at http://them.polylog.org/5/fgj-en.htm (accessed
August 10, 2011); Vittorio Bufacchi, “Two Concepts of Violence,” Political Studies Review 3,
no. 2 (2005): 193 –204.
107. Armstrong, “Collaborationism in World War II,” 397, 399, 401– 04.
108. Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in
Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xii, 1, 4, 21– 22,
25, 29 –30, 40 –3, 48 –52, 104– 12, 115. See also Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe
Between Hitler and Stalin (London: The Bodley Head, 2010), 196.
109. Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis make this point for the case of Lithuania (Lietuvos
žydu˛, 176).

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Collaboration in Genocide: The Ottoman

Empire 1915–1916, the German-Occupied

Uğur Ümit Üngör

This article develops a new paradigm for the study of collaboration by

In this article, we take a comparative approach to the study of collaboration—one

The Concept of Collaboration

Collaboration in Genocide 405

406 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

The Legal Framework

Collaboration in Genocide 407

408 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 409

Kurdish Tribes in the Armenian Genocide, 1915 – 1916

410 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 411

412 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 413

414 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 415

416 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

The villagers strongly disapproved of the killing of unarmed Armenian men,

Collaboration in Genocide 417

Local Collaboration in the Nazi-Occupied Baltic States, 1941 – 1944

Poles Russians Jews Baltic Germans Total

Lithuania 15.3% 2.5% 7.5% 1.4% 26.7%

As many as three-quarters of the Estonian Jewish population managed to flee

418 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 419

420 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

The Twa and the Rwandan Genocide, 1994

Collaboration in Genocide 421

422 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 423

424 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 425

426 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Collaboration in Genocide 427

Uğur Ümit Üngör is an assistant professor of history at Utrecht University. He specializes

2. For a more substantial critique see Anton Weiss-Wendt, “Problems in Comparative

428 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

6. Hans Lemberg stated unequivocally: “Collaboration is sensu stricto a phenomenon

8. Werner Röhr, “Okkupation und Kollaboration” in Okkupation und Kollaboration (1938–

Collaboration in Genocide 429

20. Alex Obote-Odora, “Complicity in Genocide as Understood through the ICTR

430 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

25. Alexander Zahar, “Perpetrators and Co-Perpetrators of Genocide,” in Gaeta, The UN

29. Donald Bloxham, “Three Imperialisms and a Turkish Nationalism: International

Collaboration in Genocide 431

41. Martin van Bruinessen, “Nationalisme kurde et ethnicités intra-kurdes,” Peuples

432 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

56. Thomas Muggerditchian, Dikranagerdee Nahankin Tcharteru yev Kurderou

57. Demirer, Ha Wer Delal, 75– 89.

62. Demirer, Ha Wer Delal, 87.

Collaboration in Genocide 433

71. Aşiretler Raporu (Istanbul: Kaynak, 2003), 102.

76. Both squads were effectively partial detachments (Teilkommando) of the SS

434 Holocaust and Genocide Studies

86. Michael MacQueen, “Massenvernichtung im Kontext: Täter und Voraussetzungen des