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Abstract
This article builds on David Rapoport's Four Waves Theory by identifying several anomalous movements which did not appear to precisely fit with the internationalist model posited in Rapoport's Four Waves. Specifically, groups which I have called Fifth Wave movements have turned inward, becoming localistic rather than international, and manifest intense ethnic, racial, or tribal mysticism. They are millenarian and chiliastic in nature, and seek to create a new society—based on the creation of new men and women—in a single generation. Fifth Wave movements thus focus strongly on women and see children as the vanguard of their movements. Following this logic, rape is their signature tactic and child abduction their normal recruiting practice. This study posits the pre-state Khmer Rouge in Cambodia as the avatar of the current Fifth Wave, but finds that after a nearly generation-long hiatus, the fifth wave in its fully modern form emerged in Africa with the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda as its paradigmatic exemplar.
Notes
I am deeply indebted to Profs. David Rapoport and Mark Sedgwick for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
David C. Rapoport, “Modern Terror: The Four Waves,” in Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, eds., Audrey Cronin and J. Ludes (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown Univ. Press, 2004), 46–73.
The international community has reacted to the changing nature of rape in wartime by classifying rape as a war crime for the first time. See for example Christine Chinkin, “Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women in International Law,” European Journal of International Law 5, no. 3 (1994): 326–341. Cf. John Hagan, Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague Tribunal, Chicago Series in Law and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
David P. Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 66–67; and Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 147; Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975 (London: Verso, 1985), 198–208.
The rise in incidents is so dismal that the State Department's Patterns of Global Terrorism has not appeared after the 2003 edition. The 2003 publication had to be withdrawn and revised after the numbers were called into question. Jonathan S. Landay, “U.S. eliminates annual terrorism report,” Seattle Times (April 16, 2005), http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002243262_terror16.html. Accessed July 25, 2006.
Jeffrey Kaplan, Terrorist Groups and the New Tribalism: Terrorism's Fifth Wave (London: Routledge, forthcoming).
Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Cf. Revolutionary United Front, “Footpaths to Democracy: Towards a New Sierra Leone,” http://www.fas.org/irp/world/para/docs/footpaths.htm. Accessed 10 July 2007.
“Darfur war crime suspect profiles,” BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4946986.stm. Accessed 10 July 2007.
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 13.
On the precariousness of Prince Sihanouk's position, Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, Westview Special Studies on South and Southeast Asia (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984), 62–66. On the 1963 crackdown, see Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (see note 9 above), 13. For the best overall history of the period, see Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975 (see note 4 above). For a perceptive capsule analysis of the time, see Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, 62–66.
Ben Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979,” in William S. Parsons, Israel W. Charney and Samuel S. Totten, eds., A Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 335.
Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (see note 9 above), 94. Keirnan's source is Pol Pot, “Long Live the Great Revolutionary Army of the Communist Party of Kampuchea,” Revolutionary Flags 8, August 1975, 24–66.
Ibid.
William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia, Rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Cf. on the academic controversy over the volume, Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979,” (see note 11 above), 346–348.
Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (see note 10 above), 101.
Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979,” (see note 11 above), 344.
Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (see note 9 above), 16–25.
Heike Behrend, Alice Lakwena & the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97 (Oxford: Fountain Publishers, 1999), ix.
Ruddy Dorn and Koen Vlassenroot, “Kony's Message: A New Koine? The Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda,” African Affairs 98, no. 390 (1999): 5–36; Behrend, Alice Lakwena & the Holy Spirits: War in Northern Uganda, 1985–97 (see note 18 above).
Even this was done idiosyncratically. Those found guilty of raising pigs for example would be killed, and those caught working on Fridays were to have an arm amputated. Dorn and Vlassenroot (see note 19 above), 25.
Ibid., 22–23.
For the full list of Holy Spirit Safety Precautions, along with their biblical proof texts, see Behrend (see note 18 above), 46–47.
Dorn and Vlassenroot (see note 19 above), 23.
Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (see note 9 above), 75.
Henri Locard, “State Violence in Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979) and Retribution (1979-2004),” European Review of History 12, no. 1 (2005): 122. Locard draws the quote from: Henri Locard, Pol Pot's Little Red Book, the Sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2004).
Anthony Vinci, “The Strategic Use of Fear by the Lord's Resistance Army,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 16, no. 3 (2005): 366.
Human Rights Watch/Africa, “Abducted and Abused: Renewed Conflict in Northern Uganda,” 15, no. 12 (2003). Available at http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/uganda0703/.
For a complete biography, see Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (see note 4 above). On the China trip, see Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power: A History of Communism in Kampuchea, 1930–1975 (see note 4 above), 118.
Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (see note 9 above), 41.
Anthony Vinci, “Existential Motivations in the Lord's Resistance Army's Continuing Conflict,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 30, no. 4 (2007): 337.
Behrend (see note 18 above), 182. Many such testimonies are recorded in Human Rights Watch/Africa and Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project, The Scars of Death: Children Abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1997). The report can be downloaded at: http://www.hrw.org/reports97/uganda/. For a good journalistic report, see DeNeen L. Brown, “A Child's Hell in the Lord's Resistance Army,” Washington Post, May 10, 2006, C1.
As with LRA fighter Vincent Otti's massacre of between 170–220 people in Atiak, his own village and thus of his own kinsmen. Such LRA commanders “…are haunted by their own curses.” Zachary Lomo and Lucy Hovil, “Behind the Violence: The War in Northern Uganda” (Institute for Security Studies South Africa, 2004), 27. The quote is attributed to Lomo and Hovil's interview with a senior government official in Kampala on December 4, 2003.
Behrend (see note 18 above), 22–36. Cf. for an update, Sverker Finnström, “Wars of the Past and War in the Present: The Lord's Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda,” Africa 76, no. 2 (2006): 200–220.
For moving testimony to this effect, see Melanie Thernstrom, “Charlotte, Grace, Janet and Caroline Come Home,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2005, 34–39. For a more academic take on such killings as a way to force a “clean break” between abductees and their societies, see Lomo and Hovil (see note 32 above), 22. For numerous such testimonies, see Human Rights Watch/Africa and Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project, The Scars of Death: Children Abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda; and Human Rights Watch/Africa, “Abducted and Abused: Renewed Conflict in Northern Uganda.”
François Ponchaud, Cambodia Year Zero (London: Allen Lane, 1978), ix.
The term “Year Zero” is attributed to Pol Pot. See “Cambodia Genocide (Pol Pot),” http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/Genocide/pol_pot.htm. For various views, see “Year Zero,” http://www.asia.msu.edu/seasia/Cambodia/history.html; and “From Sideshow to Genocide: The Khmer Rouge Years,” http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/khmeryears/. Both accessed August 4, 2006.
Lomo and Hovil (see note 32 above), 22–25; Thernstrom (see note 32 above), 34–39; Behrend (see note 18 above), 182–183.
News does filter through though on occasion. See Thernstrom (see note 32 above), 34–39.
Finnström (see note 33 above), 200–220.
Gregory H. Stanton, “Blue Scarves and Yellow Stars: Classification and Symbolization in the Cambodian Genocide,” http://www.genocidewatch.org/bluescarves.htm; “Cambodia: Life Under the Angkar,” http://www.country-data.com/cgi-bin/query/r-2100.html. Both accessed August 5, 2006.
David P. Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 43.
Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (see note 4 above), 136. Elsewhere, Chandler translates merok as “germs.” See Chandler, Voices from S-21 (see note 41 above), 44.
Zachary Lomo and Lucy Hovil, Behind the Violence: The War in Northern Uganda, Iss Monograph Series; No. 99 (Pretoria, South Africa: Institute for Security Studies, 2004), 24.
Even among thieves there is honor, apparently. The LRA has expressed contempt for the UDPA on the grounds that when the LRA raids a village, they rape only females. The UPDA makes no such gender distinctions. Behrend (see note 18 above), 183.
See for a complete discussion of all these issues, “The Hidden War: The Forgotten People,” (Kampala: Human Rights & Peace Center, 2003), www.up.ligi.ubc.ca/_assets/031106uganda_fullreport.pdf. Accessed August 4, 2006. Cf. Angela Veale and Aki Stavrou, “Violence, Reconciliation and Identity: The Reintegration of Lord's Resistance Army Child Abductees in Northern Uganda,” (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies South Africa, 2003), http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/OCHA-64C9TC?.OpenDocument; and Lomo and Hovil (see note 32 above).
Governments, however, have come to fear the worst from millennial movements. Jeffrey Kaplan, Millennial Violence: Past, Present, and Future (London and Portland, OR: F. Cass, 2002). Included are government reports from the U.S., Canada, and Israel.
Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot (see note 4 above), 112–113.
Ibid., 121.
Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (see note 41 above). A video production, “S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” tells much the same story, but in the voices of guards and survivors, both shown to be victims in their own way of the brutal dream of the Khmer Rouge.
Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979,” (see note 11 above), 343.
Lomo and Hovil (see note 32 above), 25. These authors recorded the quote in a focus group discussion with former LRA child soldiers in Gulu, October 6, 2003.
Behrend (see note 18 above), 182.
Ibid., 182–183, 195.
Payam Akhavan, “The Lord's Resistance Army Case: Uganda's Submission of the First State Referral to The International Criminal Court,” The American Journal of International Law 99, no. 2 (2005): 407.
Veale and Stavrou (see note 45 above), 11.
Ibid., 12.
These encampments offer scant protection at night and children abandon them to sleep in the cities on verandas or in churches. To see the process through the eyes of an amateurish Youtube-style film that nonetheless is powerful in its depiction of these children, see “Invisible Children,” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3166797753930210643.
Akhavan (see note 54 above), 409.
David P. Chandler, Ben Kiernan, and Chantou Boua, Pol Pot Plans the Future: Confidential Leadership Documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, 227.
Chandler, Voices from S-21 (see note 41 above).
Panh Rithy, “Bophana: A Cambodian Tragedy,” Manoa 16, no. 1 (2004): 108.
Dorn and Vlassenroot (see note 19 above), 20.
Ibid., 26–27.
Thernstrom (see note 32 above), 39.
Laura McGrew, “Cambodian Women at Year Zero,” OTR SEAsia 5, no. 4 (1999). http://www.advocacynet.org/news_view/news_113.html. Accessed August 7, 2006.
Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979” (see note 11 above), 363.
Ibid., 366.
Chandler, Voices from S-21 (see note 41 above), 35–36.
Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979” (see note 11 above), 345. After the defeat of the Khmer Rouge, there was a “preponderance of women” in Cambodia, to quote Kiernan. His estimate is that between 60% and 80% of the majority Khmer population was female.
Rithy Panh, “S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine,” (Cambodia: 2005). [Author: Is it Rithy Panh or Panh Rithy as in endnote 61 above?]
According to Human Rights Watch: “‘They [female escapees] arrive with gonorrhea, syphilis or sores, skin rash and complaints of abdominal pain and backache.’ At World Vision in Gulu, 70 to 80 percent of the children newly arriving at the center test positive for at least one sexually transmitted disease.” Human Rights Watch/Africa and Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project, The Scars of Death: Children Abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, 46.
“Fostering Terror-Child Soldier Crisis in Uganda,” UN Chronicle 2, June 2004: 10.
Lomo and Hovil (see note 32 above), 48.
Greg Taylor, “Innocence Stolen,” Christianity Today, July 10, 2000, www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2000/008/16.26.html. Accessed August 5, 2006.
“A Kidnapped Daughter; A Devasted [sic] Mother Turned Activist: The Story of Charlotte Awino and Angelina Atyam,” http://www.womenscommission.org/projects/children/atyam/Ang_Char_story.shtml. “Former Child Soldier Urges Action by Congress on Uganda War,” World Vision web page, http://www.worldvision.org/about_us.nsf/child/eNews_uganda_062006?Open & lpos=mainnav & lid=uganda0606. Both accessed August 6, 2006. Cf. Thernstrom (see note 32 above), 34–39.
Lomo and Hovil (see note 32 above), 48.
“Violence Against Women In Situations Of Armed Conflict In Africa; Isis-WICCE Experiences,” Presented at the First African Regional Consultation with the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights on violence against Women, Khartoum –Sudan, 25th – 26th September 2004. www.isis.or.ug/docs/peace%20and%20Security%20Sudan.pdf Accessed July 6, 2006. The Isis-WICCE website is http://www.isis.or.ug/.
Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime (see note 9 above), 3.
Kiernan, “The Cambodian Genocide—1975–1979” (see note 11 above), 340–341.
Ibid., 341.
Ibid., 340–350.
Ibid., 339.
Human Rights Watch/Africa, “Abducted and Abused: Renewed Conflict in Northern Uganda,” 25.
Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea (see note 10 above). On the later history, including the reconciliation process, Craig Etcheson, After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide, Modern Southeast Asia Series (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2006).
Chandler et al., Pol Pot Plans the Future (see note 59 above), 227–317.
Suddh Pulin, “The Diabolic Sweetness of Pol Pot,” Manoa 16, no. 1 (2004): 21–24.
Sverker Finnström, “'For God & My Life': War & Cosmology in Paul Richards, ed., Northern Uganda,” in No Peace No War: An Anthropology of Contemporary Conflicts (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), 101–103.
“The Hidden War: The Forgotten People” (see note 45 above), 43. Cf. Finnström, “Wars of the Past and War in the Present: The Lord's Resistance Movement/Army in Uganda” (see note 33 above), 201.
Behrend (see note 18 above), 183.
Pulin (see note 86 above), 24.
Ibid., 23.
Lomo and Hovil (see note 32 above), 23.
Ibid.
“U.S. Creating New Africa Command To Coordinate Military Efforts,” U.S. Info State Gov., http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english & y=2007 & m=February & x=20070206170933MVyelwarC0.2182581. Accessed 11 July 2007.
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer; Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Harper, 1951). xiii.