101 ISIS, GENOCIDE AND A “THICK DESCRIPTION” OF POWER
Rochdi Mohan Nazala1
“Here I can really be free” one of ISIS’ fighters says (McCants, 2015).
Introduction
On August 3, 2015, Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters were marching with full military equipment to Kocho, a village that belongs to Yazidi, one of the minorities in Iraq, near Mount Sinjar (Kikoler, 2015). They captured 1200 men, women and children whom in the next two days ISIS told to leave their religious practice, which is a combination of elements of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and to convert to Islam. When the majority of Yazidi's men refused the demand, all of them were taken with their eyes blindfolded around 500 meters outside the village, and upon arriving at the destination, they were lined up, videotaped and shot (Amnesty International Canada, August 18, 2014). The women became sex slaves (Smith, 2014) and the children were transferred to ISIS’s camp to train as soldiers (McLaughlin, 2016).
The story above from Kocho is a one of frames that is used repeatedly to justify the allegation of ISIS conducting genocide toward Yazidi as well as other minorities in Iraq and Syria. The European Union, for instance, announced in the beginning of 2016 that ISIS was "committing genocide against Christians and Yazidis, and other religious and ethnic minorities (Brown, 2016). Later, this statement was followed by the announcement of the US government in March 2016 that stated ISIS “is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christian and Shiite Muslims” (Labott & Kopan, 2016).
Huy (2010) in his comment on the book of one Khmer Rouge’s survivor, Bou Meng, says genocide “has always been a political act, and always will be.” Politics, according to Morgenthou (1985), is about interest defining in terms of power. Indeed, as one of the ISIS's fighters says above, by joining ISIS and subsequently becoming involved in genocidal acts, it brings them the feeling of being free. According to the
1 Mahasiswa Doktoral Rutgers University
102 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), to be free means to be “able to act as one wishes, determining one’s own action or choice; done or made without compulsion or constraint”
(Oxford English Dictionary online, 2016). In other words, the perpetrators acknowledge that their ruthless behaviors are the sign of power because, as it is written in the OED, power creates a sense of the “ability to act or affect something strongly; [exhibiting]
physical or mental strength” (Oxford English Dictionary online, 2016).
How can genocidal acts be political while also creating a sense of power within the perpetrators? To what extent do the atrocious acts of mass killings, sex slavery as well as human trafficking involving children create a sense of power to ISIS’s fighters?
This essay aims to construct a "thick description" of power within ISIS’s genocidal acts.
The ideas brought forth is that genocide as it was against Yazidi reflects the meaning ISIS’s members give to power and how it operates in social life.
Power and Genocide
Genocide, according to the term’s creator, Raphael Lemkin, etymologically is a combination of the “ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cides (killing)”
(Lemkin, 2014). Based on the United Nations Convention on Genocide (UNCG), genocide denotes “any acts committed with the intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” by killing its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm, or even preventing the birth of the next generation (United Nations, 2014).
To link the notions of power and genocide is possible given the nature of genocide itself as one of the extreme forms of political violence. Schmid (2015), for instance, argues that it is by far rare to find a discussion that relates genocide within the sphere of political violence. As he says, genocide is to some extent similar to terrorism as it causes casualties by one-sided mass murder and psychological attacks commonly toward unarmed civilians. Politics, as defined by the OED, is “actions concerned with the acquisition or exercise of power, status or authority,” while violence is “the deliberate use of physical force against a person, property, etc.” (Oxford English Dictionary online, 2016). Therefore, any exercising of capability in term of human acts, particularly violent ones, can be classified as political behaviors, which in turn always have the dimension of power.
103 By examining violent groups, Beeman (1997) argues that a person’s behavior, particularly related to violence, is determined by his perception of power defined as capability or authority he has toward anything surrounding him. Often this understanding then is translated merely as the ability or authority of someone to control other humans’
physical and psychological aspect (Parsons, 1963). Indeed, this is the vivid way of power projection, which can be seen in the reality within, for instance, the power dynamic between master and slave. The sense of power, thus, can be obtained as long as one has the capability to control a physical body as well as a person’s state of mind. Nonetheless, it is also possible to interpret power in a different way, namely, as the capability or authority of an individual to control or manipulate the perception of his/her environment and to act according to this perception. Wallace (1956) suggests the word “mazeway” in order to define how the perception, or “mental image,” toward one’s environment can be maintained or manipulated by the self (p.266). Here, power signifies a second interpretation, which is the capability to maintain or manipulate a “maze” or mental image and to behave based on this “maze”.
What is a “Thick Description”?
Sofsky (2014) uses the term of a “thick description” to understand how the system of power worked within Nazi concentration camps. As he says, “Thick description presents a reading of the meaning of what has happened” (p.230). This definition is to some extent similar to the process of “critical thinking” suggested by Hooks (2010).
According to her, critical thinking entails the long and hard process of thinking to
“understand core, underlying truths, not simply that superficial truth that may be most obviously visible” (p.9). Therefore, to have a “thick description” of something is to perform a close analysis of that thing, which requires “a detailed examination of something in order to interpret or explain it” (Oxford English Dictionary online, 2016).
Butler (1990) explains that behind every human behavior there is meaning. She asserts that this semantic meaning “is real only to the extent that it is performed” (p. 278).
As a result, she says that every act is “performative.” In the comics of Wonder Woman:
Rise of the Olympian, Simone expresses her understanding of this theory by drawing a series of frames where the creature calls himself Genocide because that is what it has done (Simone, 2009). If an act has in it a meaning, the act itself thus can be treated as a
104
“sign” using the logic of Barthes’s mythology (Barthes, 1991). According to him, a myth is “a type of speech” (p. 107) which is identified as “a message.” A myth is not about a matter of oral speech per se, but also includes “modes of writing and/or representations”
such as “…shows, publicity” (p.108). As a type of speech, Barthes agrees with de Saussure’s semiological system; that is a myth consists of the signifier, the signified and the sign. A “sign,” he asserts, denotes the unity of the image and the meaning/concept.
The acoustic image of the word is called “signifier,” while all the subsequent denotative and connotative meanings represent what is “signified.” This is correlate with what de Saussure notes as follows: “the sign unites, not at thing and a name, but at concept and a sound-image”(de Saussure, 2006).
Power as Controlling Another’s Body and Mind
From the story of Kocho above, mass killing, raping and kidnaping children all demonstrate power in terms of total control over both a victim’s body and mind. As Panh (2013) writes, “Behind those crimes [mass killing], there were…an obsession of control…, total contempt for the individual, and the status of death as an absolute recourse” (p.110). One definition of killing, according to the OED, is ”to destroy, do away, put an end to, suppress (a feeling, desire or non material thing) (Oxford English Dictionary online, 2016). Killing can therefore be mental as well as physical.
Indeed, based on Spiegelman’s examination of the story of his father, Vladek, who had escaped from the Holocaust, the act of murdering means to have total physical control over the victims’ fate and to neglect them as humans with the capability to act independently (Spiegelman, 2011). Moreover, killing in Arabic is qital, which also similar to jihad with the meaning of fighting. Qital may have connotative meanings that relate to control, as the purpose of fighting in this context is to destroy the capability and intention of an opponent to fight back in the future (Shah, 2011). If the word “mind” here is understood as “the thought of something” (Oxford English Dictionary online, 2016), therefore, the act of killing can mean an act by the perpetrators to control victims in terms of stopping them from thinking about retaliation.
Moreover, mass killing is also the sign of controlling the mind of the victim, particularly if the act of killing is joined with the absence of a tomb or another type of grave marker. The “mind”, according to the OED, etymologically is from the Germanic
105 word gimunt or gamunds which means “remembrance, reminder or to think about”
(Oxford English Dictionary online, 2016). Here, controlling the mind has its mean to control on how the victim can be remembered. In the Holocaust, absolute control over the bodies and minds of the victims was completed by burning their corpses, which signified the total end of their story. With regard to ISIS, total control of the narrative over the corpses’ history and memory was done by leaving the corpses in mass graves or in open killing fields without tombs or grave markers, by the very basic notion of common sense, are used as symbols to remember their deaths. Chute (2006) for example, agrees with this conclusion in her analyses on the last frame of Maus, depicting a tomb with names of Holocaust survivors, Vladek and Anja. She argues that a tomb with the name of the corpse is a gesture, “the most basic, simplistic form of live narrative” (p. 219), that invites “the reader to join in a collective project of meaning-making” of the death’s story.
Without a proper headstone or any other way to mark the death, ISIS has stolen all of the corpses’ life narratives while at the same time determining a total ending of public access to the narrative or even a continuation of the narrative within the memory of the living. Card (2014) defines this situation as a “social death,” claiming that genocide is “social death” because of the inability of the victims to have “intergenerational connections” with the living. The perpetrators become the only one who bear witness of victims’ existence and story.
Moreover, raping is also another act of genocide. Sharlach (2000) argues that raping should be included into the definition of genocidal acts because systematic raping can destroy “the morale of the woman, her family, and perhaps her entire community”.
The act of raping within genocide is also a political gesture in terms of, as said by MacKinnon (2014), it involves “a deprivation of sexual freedom, a denial of individual self-acting” (p.334). In the crime of raping, the power of the victims, that is the capacity to control and determine their own body, has been ripped and transferred without their consent to the perpetrators. The consent over “who wanted what, who knew what when”
no longer belongs to the victim of rape because she is under total control of the perpetrator (MacKinnon, 2014).
It is debatable how to define rape according to MacKinnon, but the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, an adhoc international criminal tribunal for genocide in Rwanda, suggests that rape is a crime against humanity and defined as “a physical
106 invasion of a sexual nature, committed on a person under circumstances which are coercive” (Amann & Oxman, 1999). In this sense, rape embedded within genocidal behaviors is the manifestation of power because it destroys the victims’ identity as females who have consent over their bodies and at the same time, rape is also signifying the transfer of authority or control by force from the women to the perpetrators of rape both physically and mentally.
Kidnapping children qualifies within the character of genocide. What is important, however, is that genocide is always a depiction of loss for children; “loss of childhood, loss of identity, and loss of family and community (Shapiro, 2014). By kidnapping children by force from their family, ISIS obstructs their intergenerational learning process from their parents to them as well as their freedom to enjoy a creative childhood which together are important to shape their identity. Moreover, the separation of children from their families and communities also brings ISIS the capability to control not only physical behaviors of these children, but also fills the gap in their learning process by imposing their “maze” in terms of values, norms and mindsets. Kidnapping, as a result, will work as the projection of power in terms of having the capability to have full domination over the physical and physiological aspects of the transferred children.
Power as Controlling the Self
Every time ISIS perpetrates genocide to Muslim and non-Muslim groups, the fighters always announce that they do it because of Islam. They say “Allahu Akbar”
(Allah is The Great) while committing mass killing and explain later that this is justifiable because their victims are “infidels and apostates” due to not having supported ISIS actively in realizing what ISIS claimed as the true system of Islam (Goodenough, 2016).
They also justify raping by saying it is for the purpose of forcing victims to convert to Islam. ISIS claims that kidnapping is also permissible to educate this children about what Islam and how to fight for Islam.
This can be a sign with two meanings. On one hand, by committing genocide, the perpetrators feel powerful because they successfully control the maze as well as their ability to overcome their metaphysical guilt. Jaspers (2014) notes that human beings equip themselves with the sense of “metaphysical guilt” which makes them “co- responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world” (p. 366). With regard to
107 ISIS, saying “Allahu Akbar” and blaming others as infidels is the proof of how they use religion as a tool to help them control their maze in order to mitigate stress and, at the same time, service a metaphysical comfort to reduce the metaphysical guilt for themselves. On the other hand, it can be viewed as a celebration of the ability to channel their beliefs into the real world. In short, involving religion in the legitimation process is a sign of that ISIS fighters have power over both their minds as well as their actions.
By utilizing the concept of a revitalization movement introduced by Wallace (1956), whether or not people maintain or change their own maze is determined by their level of stress, defined as a condition in which they perceive themselves as “threatened with more or less serious damage” (p. 266). If people decide to change the maze, it is also necessary to make change in the real world in order to bring the mazeway and real world system “into congruence” (p. 267).
In their article entitled In God’s Name, Bartov and Mack (2014) explain how religion has acted significantly in providing justification for genocidal acts. As they say, religion by its nature has two contradictory attitudes to violence; either motivating or limiting/constraining it. In the case of genocide, the perpetrators exploit this nature of religion to provide them “a rationale for atrocity…or a means to…the destruction..” of whatever they believe to be the threat (Bartov & Mac, 2014).
However, holding a particular maze without being able to transfer this mode of thinking into the real world is also causing stress. ISIS’s brutal actions could possibly be seen as an effort to realize what each ISIS fighter has in mind as truth. Their action of genocide in this sense is a way for each of these fighters to say who they are both psychologically and physically. This reflects the concept of performativity; “to say something is to do something” as posed by Austin (2016). They claim themselves as true
“believers” of Islam and their actions are their proof of it. Therefore, performing genocide is the language of power in terms of having full control over their mind and actions simultaneously. As Foucault (1988) says, “self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.”
Conclusion
This essay aims to relate the act of genocide perpetrated by ISIS to the discourse of power. It assumes that genocide is a political act which, accordingly, is a language of
108 power. By examining ISIS’s behaviors related to genocide, it finds that that their genocidal act is all about power in terms of controlling the physical and mental over both other and self. Sofsky (2014) introduces the concept of “Absolute Power” to define the behavior that is “far from being satisfied with controlling human bodies, it also seized hold of biographical ties and motions of the mind.” Sofsky applies this concept limitedly within the relationships between perpetrators of genocide and the victim. Meanwhile, this essay expands the coverage of the concept by including the relationship between perpetrators and themselves.
The process of bringing a “thick description” of power within genocide of ISIS is an effort to study genocide critically. Rather than merely accepting genocide by nature as some brutal act aimed at destruction of a group physically and mentally, it goes deeper by looking at the meanings of such acts. This is in line with what Hinton (2012) says in his explanation on critical genocide studies, that is “to engage in critical reflection” about genocide. In this essay, the discussion on genocide perpetrated by ISIS is linked to the issue of power.
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