INTRODUCTION

Victims and perpetrators are often referred to as two completely separate and homogenous sets of people. However, the reality of many historical injustices is more complex. Neither all victims nor all perpetrators are necessarily comparable and the two groups are rarely separate and distinct. It is in particular the relationship between these actors at different time periods that matters. Some individuals are both victims and perpetrators or were victims and then became primarily perpetrators. The most well-known example nowadays is child soldiers who, after having been abducted, are forced to murder one or more of their friends of the same age and of the same tribal group. The transformation from victim to perpetrator can be sudden but it also may continue over a long period of time. In many training camps for creating professional torturers the recruits are first victimised to obtain total obedience, which is a requirement to be able to torture in detention or concentration centres. For example, this occurred in the military training center of the Greek Regime of the Colonels from 1967–1974. In the words of former prison warden and chief torturer M. Petrou: ‘You couldn't think like an ordinary human being anymore (…) They changed us into instruments. People without a will of their own who obey. You were trained not to think’.

Repairing historical injustices in post-conflict situations becomes even more complicated because of the presence of a third group of people, the so-called bystanders. This is the large group situated somewhere in between the victims and the perpetrators. Its comprised of those who did not do anything wrong themselves, but on the other hand did not do anything to prevent others from committing their crimes. How should we perceive their responsibilities? Do neutral bystanders exist? Or are they always either collaborators or rescuers depending on their level of assistance to the perpetrators or victims? In this chapter the bystander's role at the national (internal bystanders) and international level (external bystanders) is studied. What matters is the interaction between these bystanders and the other two groups in the atrocity triangle: the perpetrators and the victims.

INTRODUCTION

What is the role of bystanders on denialism in situations of gross human rights violations? Not the denials of the perpetrator as the usual approach but the role of denials by the bystanders will be addressed in this chapter. It is, in particular, the bystander who can play a crucial role in allowing to continue the perpetrator with these crimes but it is also the bystander that has the ability to prevent, stop or end the atrocities of the perpetrators towards the victims. When the gross human rights violations are very severe the repression makes opposition and resistance from the direct targeted victims in that society almost impossible.

Denying of the gross human rights violations by the bystanders precludes any action to prevent or stop the atrocities and makes for the rescue of the victims by any third party impossible. The bystander matters and the external international bystanders matter very much.

The theoretical elaboration by Irene Bruna Seu in this volume is my reference. What she has described for the individual and group level of analysis will here be applied to actors at the international level. Her study focuses on knowledge and action and she has put forward the question of how much people know about human rights violations and what they do in response to that knowledge. I replace ‘people’ with ‘international bystanders’. The questions in my research were who received what messages at what time, to whom the messages were forwarded, and which (non-)decisions were taken in response to the alarming reports on atrocities. The focus is on the knowledge and action of the international bystanders as the important decision makers in situations of genocide. The use of denial as a defence mechanism to turn away from the events by international bystanders with disastrous consequences in situations of genocide will be demonstrated from our studies on Rwanda (1994), Srebrenica (1995) and Darfur (since 2003).

We will elaborate the crucial role of bystanders at different levels of analysis in the second section. The role of the UN – as the worldwide international bystander making use of the mechanism of denialism for failing to act or taking limited action – is put forward in section 3.