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When Humans Turn into Beasts in the Name of Identity

Ahmad Okbelbab

Crimes

•20 February 2025

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Black History of Humanity Holocaust Human Atrocities international justice Khmer Rouge Massacres Nanjing Massacre Racial Violence Regional Cleansing

When Humans Turn into Beasts in the Name of Identity

All religions and laws have criminalized the act of taking a life and imposed severe penalties for it. Even beyond religious and legal frameworks, it is a crime that repulses any sane human being. It often occurs in intense anger that clouds one's judgment or in a moment of fear of being exposed for a [...]

All religions and laws have criminalized the act of taking a life and imposed severe penalties for it. Even beyond religious and legal frameworks, it is a crime that repulses any sane human being.

It often occurs in intense anger that clouds one’s judgment or in a moment of fear of being exposed for a lesser crime. Yet, for most perpetrators, it leaves a deep sense of remorse and regret.

However, systematic killing based on racial, religious, or ideological differences is pure madness—committed only by poisoned souls, unparalleled among all other creatures.

The Khmer Rouge Massacres at S-21 in Cambodia

When Vietnamese army soldiers seized Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, in 1979, which had been under the control of the extremist Marxist-communist Khmer Rouge, they found themselves in a ghost town. Among the many atrocities they encountered was a former high school that had been converted into a prison known as “Security Prison 21” or simply “S-21.”

The grim school buildings were surrounded by electrified barbed wire, and the windows were covered with iron bars.

The prisoners were academics, doctors, Buddhist monks, students, teachers, engineers, and laborers—all accused of being enemies of the regime. Their torture only ended with their execution, after being forced to name their friends and relatives as conspirators in a coup against the ruling regime.

Within days, those whose names had been mentioned were arrested, interrogated under torture, and then executed. In turn, they too would reveal the names of their own friends and relatives, creating an ever-expanding vicious cycle of arrests and killings.

Ultimately, paranoia led the regime to start targeting its own members. Prison cells became filled with party activists, their families, and even high-ranking politicians.

At least 18,000 people were imprisoned in S-21 alone, with only about seven surviving.

S-21 was just one of approximately 150 torture and execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge. Today, the prison has been transformed into a museum, serving as a testament to the brutality of the regime that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge sought to implement ethnic, social, and political “purification,” leading to one of the most horrific genocides in history.

Before this, a civil war had raged between 1970 and 1975 in Cambodia’s rural areas. The conflict was fought between the Khmer Republic, a Western-backed military regime that took power in 1970, and the Marxist-communist Khmer Rouge. By April 1975, the fighting had reached the outskirts of Phnom Penh, and it became evident that the ruling military regime was on the verge of collapse.

The city fell into the hands of the Khmer Rouge, marking the end of the Cambodian Civil War. Their de facto leader, who named himself Pol Pot and was known as “Brother Number One,” became the new Prime Minister of Cambodia. The country was renamed Democratic Kampuchea, currency was abolished, religions were outlawed, monks were executed, and the calendar was reset to what was called “Year Zero.”

Pol Pot and his followers dreamed of a society completely devoid of social classes and capitalism, where all Cambodians would live in a rural utopia, working together in collective farms to achieve self-sufficiency and total equality.

Education and culture were seen as threats to the new regime. Simply having soft hands, speaking a foreign language, or even wearing glasses was enough to be classified as an intellectual and, therefore, a danger to the state.

Pol Pot was heavily influenced by the rapid economic and agricultural transformation achieved by Mao Zedong in China and sought to implement a similar revolution in Cambodia. After seizing power, the Cambodian Communist Party aimed to rebuild the country at an unprecedented speed according to their vision. They declared that no revolution would be faster than theirs. The party became obsessed with rapid change and deep paranoia, suspecting everyone of disloyalty.

The plan was to achieve a massive transformation without any external support, relying solely on internal forces and absolute self-sufficiency. The Khmer Rouge ideologues believed that a period of enforced economic isolation would revive traditional crafts and local industries.

As part of this policy, the party announced a four-year plan to triple rice production. However, Cambodia had suffered greatly during the civil war, losing nearly three-quarters of its draft animals used for plowing fields. As a result, rice production dropped by an estimated 85%.

Despite the impossibility of achieving this target, Pol Pot viewed it as simply a matter of revolutionary willpower. He launched a campaign known as the “Agricultural Offensive,” which involved forced labor on a national scale. Villages were reorganized into collectives, and thousands of city dwellers were forcibly displaced to the countryside to work in the fields. Regardless of age, all citizens were required to work 10 to 14 hours a day under unbearable conditions, effectively turning the entire country into a massive forced labor camp.

In pursuit of maximum rice production, crops were confiscated for export without any compensation for farmers, leaving them without enough food to survive, resulting in widespread famine.

During the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, famine and mass executions led to the deaths of between 1.5 and 2 million people, nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time. Victims’ bodies were buried in fields to be used as fertilizer.

Executions were carried out brutally, often by bludgeoning victims with iron rods on the back of the head while they knelt blindfolded and bound in front of mass graves—a method used to save ammunition. In many cases, victims were forced to dig their own graves before being executed.

After the Khmer Rouge carried out a massacre in a Vietnamese border village, the Vietnamese army invaded Phnom Penh in 1979. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge fled east into the jungles and later to Thailand to continue guerrilla warfare, but their influence gradually declined until their movement collapsed entirely.

Pol Pot was never brought to trial, as he died in 1998 while hiding in the jungle. However, some former Khmer Rouge leaders who defected in the 1990s managed to return to government positions.

It was not until 2007 that the United Nations officially recognized the events in Cambodia as genocide. “Brother Duch,” a former schoolteacher who became the chief overseer of the S-21 prison, was not tried until years later. He was known for his obsession with meticulously documenting executions as proof of his loyalty to Pol Pot’s regime.

In 1993, American researchers Chris Riley and Doug Niven discovered an archive of S-21 victims’ photographs inside a rusty cabinet within the prison. Their efforts led to the restoration and preservation of approximately 6,000 images, which are now displayed in the S-21 Museum to honor the victims.

Pol Pot died of a heart attack in 1998, and in his last interview, he claimed that his conscience was clear, insisting that everything he did was for his country.

The Cambodian citizen Van Nath was among those imprisoned in S-21. He had previously been sent to a forced labor camp for logging, but was later arrested on charges of engaging in counter-revolutionary activities and transferred to S-21 in 1978. He was sentenced to execution, but his artistic talent in painting delayed his execution, as he was forced to paint murals glorifying the regime and Pol Pot.

Van Nath later showcased numerous sketches drawn from memory, depicting the prison and its victims. He published his book, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: A Year in S-21 Under the Khmer Rouge (1998), and appeared in the documentary film S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), which won numerous international awards. In the film, Nath directly confronted former prison guards, whose responses ranged from excuses and chilling indifference to deep remorse, as they recalled the atrocities they had committed when they were as young as 12 years old.

Van Nath worked at the S-21 Museum, which was once his place of imprisonment, until he passed away in 2011 at the age of 65 due to kidney disease. Sadly, he was unable to afford proper medical treatment.

The Japanese Massacres in Nanjing, China

The Nanjing Massacre, which lasted for six weeks in late 1937, is undoubtedly one of the worst atrocities in human history. When the Imperial Japanese Army captured Nanjing, the capital of China at the time, they committed countless acts of murder and rape against the city’s population.

The Japanese army invaded China with an insatiable hunger for resources and territorial expansion, entering through Manchuria by land, while simultaneously launching naval attacks along the eastern coast.

The ultimate goal was the complete conquest of China, but one of Japan’s immediate priorities was to seize Nanjing, which was only about 150 kilometers from the eastern coast.

It did not take long before the Japanese forces reached the city gates. They sent an envoy to deliver an ultimatum: “Surrender within 24 hours, or we will show no mercy.”

The Chinese defenders refused to surrender, fearing what had happened in Shanghai. As soon as the deadline passed, the Japanese assault on the city began. The battle quickly turned into a massacre, as the Chinese forces, led by General Tang Shengzhi, failed to halt the Japanese advance. The Chinese military rapidly lost control of the city.

Amid the escalating chaos, civilians began fleeing to escape the impending disaster. It is estimated that around 75% of Nanjing’s residents had evacuated before the Japanese forces entered the city.

The wealthy were the first to flee, followed by the middle and lower classes. Only those unable to escape remained behind. Meanwhile, the Tanka boat people, a group of traditional fishermen, chose to stay, despite their inevitable fate.

Violence erupted as soon as the Japanese soldiers entered the city, but the real massacre began on December 13, the day the Chinese garrison surrendered. As soon as the Japanese took control, the once vibrant streets of Nanjing became rivers of blood.

No one was spared—men, women, children, and the elderly were all targets. Anyone who was not Japanese had their fate determined solely by the mood of the soldier they encountered. The brutality was not limited to isolated areas—it spread everywhere.

To understand the sheer scale of the systematic slaughter, we turn to the testimony of John Rabe, a German businessman and Nazi Party member who lived in Nanjing during the massacre. He used his influence to protect approximately 300,000 Chinese civilians from Japanese brutality.

In his diary, Rabe wrote:
“We came across bodies nearly every 200 meters, most bearing gunshot wounds in their backs, indicating that they were shot while fleeing. I found numerous bodies in the ponds—thirty in one alone—many with their hands tied, some weighted down with stones to keep them submerged. The water had turned completely red from the sheer amount of blood.”

Another horrifying account comes from Xia Shuyun, an eight-year-old girl at the time. She recalls:
“The Japanese soldiers entered our house and immediately shot the person who opened the door. My father fell to his knees, begging them not to kill anyone else, but they shot him too. My mother hid under the table with my one-year-old sister, but they dragged her out and raped her in front of us before stabbing her with their bayonets.”

One of the most horrifying incidents during the massacre was the so-called “Killing Contest,” in which two Japanese officers competed to see who could kill 100 people with a sword first. When both exceeded this number, the target was raised to 150 kills. The Japanese newspapers proudly documented the event, glorifying the competition.

Rape was just as rampant as the killings. Many Chinese women tried to protect themselves by altering their appearance, as recounted by Chen Fangying, who was 12 years old at the time. She said, “We shaved our heads and hid in caves. My older sister, who had recently married, was pursued by Japanese soldiers. She had no choice but to jump into a pond and take her own life to avoid being raped.”

Another survivor, Jiang Shukong, who was also 12 years old, recalled how she was raped by a Japanese soldier in front of her grandfather, leaving her with a permanent injury.

The massacre finally ended in late January 1938, after six weeks of horror, during which approximately 300,000 people were killed**, averaging 300 deaths per hour.

This tragedy remains deeply etched in China’s collective memory and has been commemorated through memorial sites, the most notable being the “Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall,” built over a mass grave known as “The Pit of Ten Thousand Corpses,” serving as an enduring testament to this bloody chapter in human history.

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that at least 200,000 people were killed and that there were no fewer than 20,000 cases of rape during the massacre.

The Serbian Massacres in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The specter of genocide still haunts Europe even in modern times, as seen in the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina that devastated the country in the 1990s.

In the past, Josip Broz Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1980, managed to contain these conflicts. However, after his death, subsequent leaders failed to foster a collective Yugoslav identity. With the absence of a unifying ideology, Yugoslavians gradually began to define themselves primarily by their ethnic and religious identities, making the Yugoslav federation increasingly fragile.

As a result, when Yugoslavia collapsed in 1991 following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which had dominated Eastern Europe, separation was not peaceful, and armed conflicts erupted immediately, lasting from 1991 to 2001.

The genocide in Bosnia occurred amid the dissolution of Yugoslavia, as wars broke out among its former members, including Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia.

Macedonia was allowed to secede peacefully, but Slovenia and Croatia fought wars for independence from Yugoslavia. Serbia, which had a majority Christian Serbian population, was not willing to let Yugoslavia break apart entirely.

Serbia, alongside Montenegro, attempted to become the successor state of Yugoslavia. Serbs controlled most of the power in Yugoslavia and dominated the Yugoslav People’s Army. They did not want independent states to emerge but sought to maintain their dominance and influence.

This led to the rise of ethnic nationalist leaders who exploited these divisions to consolidate their power. Among them were Slobodan Milošević of Serbia, Franjo Tuđman of Croatia, and Radovan Karadžić of the Bosnian Serb minority. These leaders manipulated ethnic and religious identities, rewrote historical narratives, and instilled fear of the “other” to solidify their rule.

The Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) made up more than half of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s population. The Christian Orthodox Serbs accounted for about one-third, while the remaining 17% were Croats.

For a long time, these groups coexisted in relative peace, united under the shared ideology of communism within Yugoslavia. However, with growing aspirations for independence, no group wanted to end up in a new state dominated by the other.

During my time studying in Germany in the 1990s, I met an Algerian student who shared a strange story. He recalled that during a visit to Yugoslavia before its breakup, he was shocked to see mosques with minarets but found no other visible signs of Islam in the country. Later, he learned from Arab students who had studied there before the war that many Bosnian Muslim parents preferred to marry their daughters to their Christian Serbian or Croatian neighbors rather than to Arab students.

Following a 1992 independence referendum, in which 99% voted in favor of secession, Bosnia and Herzegovina officially declared independence. Croatia immediately recognized the new state.

This decision angered the Bosnian Serb minority, who then declared their own independence from the new state and established the Republika Srpska under Radovan Karadžić’s leadership. They sought assistance from the Yugoslav central government, which was still controlled by Serbs. The government did not hesitate to provide military support, and war officially erupted in the same year, marking the beginning of the Bosnian War.

The Bosniaks and Croats allied against the Yugoslav People’s Army and the Bosnian Serb forces. However, tensions arose between Bosniaks and Croats, leading to localized conflicts in what was later described as a “war within a war.”

The Serbian-led genocide against Bosniaks began with a series of coordinated massacres carried out both officially and by nationalist groups. One of the most infamous atrocities was the Sarajevo Market Massacre, where the crowded marketplace was shelled twice, once in 1994 and again in 1995, resulting in dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Other massacres followed, including the Tuzla Massacre in 1995, where Serbian artillery targeted Kapija Square, a bustling area filled with young people, killing 71 civilians.

Between 1992 and 1996, Serbian forces imposed a siege on Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, making it the longest siege in modern warfare history. The blockade resulted in the deaths of 12,000 people, with more than 40% of the city’s population forcibly displaced.

However, despite the sheer brutality of these crimes, they represented only a fraction of the atrocities committed. The most horrifying acts were the systematic ethnic cleansing massacres, such as the Vlasenica Massacre in 1992, where all Bosniaks in the town were either killed or forcibly expelled. By mid-1992, the town’s population shifted from over 60% Bosniak to being 100% Serbian.

Serbian forces also established rape camps, where at least 25,000 Bosnian women of all ages were repeatedly assaulted. Many were only released upon becoming pregnant. Numerous UN reports meticulously documented these atrocities.

One such report stated:
“These acts were premeditated, carefully organized, and intended to humiliate and degrade the entire ethnic group. They were not merely a byproduct of war but were deliberately carried out in front of victims’ families and even within their communities.”

An article titled Sexual Violence in Bosnia recounted the case of a Bosnian girl, 18 years old, who was recovering in a Tuzla hospital after undergoing an abortion. She had become pregnant after being raped multiple times by Serbian soldiers at a rape camp in Pale, a Serbian stronghold outside Sarajevo.

The article further described her ordeal:
“During ten weeks of captivity, she was burned with cigarette butts, cut with razor blades, and subjected to constant humiliation for being Muslim. She was raped 16 times, often under the threat of knives or firearms. She was told that there were too many Muslim women and that many of them would give birth to Serbian children.”

The most horrific atrocities took place in Srebrenica, where tens of thousands of Bosniaks sought refuge from massacres, relying on the protection of United Nations forces. However, in July 1995, Serbian forces led by Ratko Mladić stormed the town, forcing women and children onto buses for deportation, while separating men and boys from their families.

Over the next several days, more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were systematically executed in mass killings. Their bodies were buried in mass graves, which were later exhumed and relocated in an attempt to conceal evidence of the genocide.

To this day, the Dutch UN peacekeeping forces, known as the “Blue Helmets,” remain haunted by accusations of complicity in allowing the massacre of Bosniaks under their protection in Srebrenica.

How can a human being kill his fellow human simply for being different, without even flinching?

How can someone be so blinded by hatred that they take pride in false heroics, carrying their shame to the grave—an unforgivable stain in the pages of history?

What kind of diabolical ideology drives some people to commit such atrocities?

Surely, the only hope lies in spreading a counter-ideology, one that draws its legitimacy from the power of justice, rather than the justice of power.