Genocide by Attrition 49 There is a strong consensus among scholars that “strategies of mass violence are developed in response to real and perceived threats to the maintenance of political power.”165 The framing of small, marginalized, and persecuted minority groups as a threat to “the nation” is apparent in all three cases analyzed in this report.166 The threats attributed to Jews, Tutsi, and Rohingya were not grounded in any empirical reality, which is why it was so easy for perpetrators to scapegoat and kill their targets in vast numbers. Jews, ostracized for centuries, never possessed political, economic, or military power in Europe.167 By contrast, Tutsi did enjoy such power before independence, but they effectively lost all of it following the rise of extremist Hutu ethno-nationalism.168 Rohingya have been almost entirely dispossessed since the military seized power following the 1962 coup. Less clear is the extent that armed conflict plays in the onset of genocidal violence.169 For example, although historians may disagree as to whether the Holocaust helped or hindered the Nazi’s war effort, there is little doubt that the armed conflict served as a critical catalyst for killing Jews on a mass scale in the name of protecting Germany from “enemies of the state,” as Jews were often officially labelled.170 The 1994 genocide of the Tutsi also unfolded in the context of a regionalized war. During the early 1990s, armed conflict between the Hutu-led government and the RPF headed by Tutsi elites in exile, caused significant loss of life and conflict-induced displacement.171 Both outcomes reinforced Hutu extremist propaganda, which asserted that Tutsi everywhere were traitors to “the nation.” Perpetrators used this accusation to justify the 1994 genocide when identification cards played an essential role in identifying Tutsi in more urban areas.172 Moreover, in Rakhine State, Myanmar, the military’s attacks in 2016 and 2017 were ostensibly in response to Rohingya militant attacks against police. Historically, the military explained its largescale operations against Rohingya civilians as being necessary to protect “the nation” from internal and external threats to its continued unity, stability, and sovereignty.173 The very few armed Rohingya groups that have risen since the 1940s–most recently ARSA, previously known as Harakh al Yaqin– were short-lived, small in size, and lacking significant popular support, adequate material resources to support a sustained insurgency, or demonstrated capacity for tactical effectiveness.174 Nevertheless, while ARSA posed no genuine security threat to the state, the conflict between ARSA and the Myanmar military may have amounted to a non-international armed conflict. The Myanmar military has used the pretext of national security, which is intertwined with widespread islamophobia, to justify armed conflict and violence against Muslims in general and Rohingya in particular.175 165 Scott Straus, “‘Destroy Them to Save Us’: Theories of Genocide and the Logics of Political Violence,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2012, p. 546. 166 See, Alexander Hinton, ed., Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Fear, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 167 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Jews in Pre War Germany,” website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/ en/article/jews-in-prewar-germany?series=32; U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jewish Life in Europe Before the Holocaust, website, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/jewish-life-in-europe-before-the-holocaust. 168 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp. 43, 44. 169 Straus, “Destroy Them to Save Us,” p. 547. 170 See, Yaron Pasher, Holocaust versus Wehrmacht: How Hitler’s “Final Solution” Undermined the German War Efforts, (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2015). Christopher Fettweis, “War as Catalyst: Moving World War II to the Center of Holocaust Scholarship,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2003, pp. 225-236. 171 Global IDP Database, Profile of Internal Displacement: Rwanda, October 29, 2004, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb. int/files/resources/450251CAD179D23185256F3C006574A0-nrc-rwa-29oct.pdf, pp. 20, 21. 172 René Lemarchand, “The Rwanda Genocide,” Century of Genocide; Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, Samuel Totten and William Parsons, eds., (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 402, 403. 173 Ware and Laoutides, Myanmar’s Rohingya Conflict, p. 17. 174 Ken MacLean, “The Rohingya Crisis and the Practices of Erasure,” Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2018, pp. 4, 5. 175 Ronan Lee, “Extreme Speech in Myanmar: The Role of State Media in the Rohingya Forced Migration Crisis,” International Journal of Communication 13, 2019, pp. 3203-3224.