The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

most nearly final solution. It had done so by apparently succeeding in getting rid of all its natives. (Actually, some children of Tasmanian women by white sealers survived, and their descendants today constitute an embarrassment to the Tasmanian government, which has not figured out what to do about them.) Many whites on the Australian mainland envied the thoroughness of the Tasmanian solution and wanted to imitate it, but they also learned a lesson from it. The extermination of the Tasmanians had been carried out in settled areas in full view of the urban press, and had attracted some negative comment. The extermination of the much more numerous mainland Aborigines was instead effected at or beyond the frontier, far from urban centres.

The mainland governments' instrument of this policy, modelled on the Tasmanian government's roving parties, was a branch of mounted police termed Native Police, who used search-and-destroy tactics to kill or drive out Aborigines. A typical strategy was to surround a camp at night, and to shoot the inhabitants in an attack at dawn. White settlers also made widespread use of poisoned food to kill Aborigines. Another common practice was round-ups in which captured Aborigines were kept chained together at the neck while being marched to jail and held there. The British novelist Anthony Trollope expressed the prevailing nineteenth-century British attitude towards Aborigines when he wrote, 'Of the Australian black man we may certainly say that he has to go. That he should perish without unnecessary suffering should be the aim of all who are concerned in the matter.

These tactics continued in Australia long into the Twentieth Century. In an incident at Alice Springs in 1928, police massacred thirty-one Aborigines. The Australian Parliament refused to accept a report on the massacre, and two Aboriginal survivors (rather than the police) were put on trial for murder. Neck chains were still in use and defended as humane in 1958, when the Commissioner of Police for the state of Western Australia explained to the Melbourne Herald that Aboriginal prisoners preferred being chained.

The mainland Aborigines were too numerous to exterminate completely in the manner of the Tasmanians. However, from the arrival of British colonists in 1788 until the 1921 census, the Aboriginal population declined from about 300,000 to 60,000.

Today, the attitudes of white Australians towards their murderous history vary widely. While government policy and many whites' private views have become increasingly sympathetic to the Aborigines, other whites deny responsibility for genocide. For instance, in 1982 one of Australia's leading news magazines, The Bulletin, published a letter by a lady named Patricia Cobern, who denied indignantly that white settlers had exterminated the Tasmanians. In fact, wrote Ms Cobern, the settlers were peace-loving and of high moral character, while Tasmanians were treacherous, murderous, war-like, filthy, gluttonous, vermin-infested, and disfigured by syphilis. Moreover, they took poor care of their infants, never bathed, and had repulsive marriage customs. They died out because of all those poor health practices, plus a death wish and lack of religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence that, after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, not vice versa. Besides, the settlers only armed themselves in self-defence, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time. To place these cases of the Tasmanians and the Australian Aborigines in perspective, consider the three maps on pages 256-8, depicting for three different time periods some mass killings that have been labelled as genocide. These maps beg a question for which there is no simple answer: how to define genocide. Etymologically, it means 'group killing': the Greek rootgenos, meaning race, and the Latin root -cide, meaning killing (as in suicide, infanticide). The victims must be selected because they belong to a group, whether or not each victim as an individual has done something to provoke killing. As for the defining group characteristic, it may be racial (white Australians killing black Tasmanians), national (Russians killing fellow white Slavs, the Polish officers at Katyn in 1940), ethnic (the Hutu and Tutsi, two black African groups, killing each other in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1960s and 1970s), religious (Moslems and Christians killing each other in Lebanon in recent decades), or political (the Khmer Rouge killing their fellow Cambodians from 1975 to 1979).

While collective killing is the essence of genocide, one can argue over how narrow a definition to adopt. The word 'genocide' is often used so broadly that it loses meaning and we become tired of hearing it. Even if it is to be restricted to large-scale cases of collective killing, ambiguities remain. A sample of the ambiguities could run as follows.

How many deaths are needed for a killing to count as genocide rather than were murder? This is a totally arbitrary question. Australians killed all 5,000 iasmanians, and American settlers killed the last twenty Susquehanna Indians in 1763. Does the small number of available victims disqualify these killings as genocidal, despite the completeness of extermination?

SOME GENOCIDES, 1492–1900

Deaths / Victims / Killers / Place / Date

1. XX / Aleuts / Russians / Aleutian Islands / 1745-70

2. x / Beothuk Indians / French, Micmaws / Newfoundland / 1497-1829

3. xxxx / Indians / Americans / US / 1620–1890

4. xxxx / Caribbean Indians / Spaniards / West Indies / 1492-1600

5. xxxx / Indians / Spaniards / Central & South America / 1498-1824

6. xx / Araucanian Indians / Argentinians / Argentina / 1870s

7. xx / Protestants / Catholics / France / 1572

8. xx / Bushmen, Hottentots / Boers / South Africa / 1652–1795

9. xxx / Aborigines / Australians / Australia / 1788-1928

10. x / Tasmanians / Australians / Tasmania / 1800-1876

11. x / Morioris / Maoris / Chatham Islands / 1835

x = less than 10,000; xx = 10,000 or more; xxx = 100,000 or more; xxxx = 1,000,000 or more

Must genocide be earned out by governments, or do private acts also count? The sociologist Irving Horowitz distinguished private acts 'assassination', and defined genocide as 'a structural and systeman, destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatu-However, there is a complete continuum from purely government killings (Stalin's purges of his opponents) to purely private Uhngs (Brazilian land development companies hiring professional Indian killers). American Indians were killed by private citizens; and th eJJS army alike, while the Ibos in Northern Nigeria were killed both bys«* mobs and by soldiers. In 1835 the Te Ati Awa tribe of ^w Zealand Maoris succeeded in a bold plan to capture a ship, load it with supplies invade the Chatham Islands, kill 300 of the occupants (another Polynesian, 1900–1950 group called the Morioris), enslave the remainder, and thereby take over the islands. By Horowitz's definition, this and many other equally well-planned exterminations of one tribal group by another do not constitute genocide, because the tribes lacked a state bureaucratic apparatus. If people die en masse as a result of callous actions not specifically designed to kill them, does that count as genocide? Well-planned genocide includes that of Tasmanians by Australians, that of Armenians by Turks during the First World War, and (most notably) those committed by the Nazis during the Second World War. At the other extreme, when the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek Indians of southeastern US states were forced to resettle west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s, it was not President Andrew Jackson's specific intent that many Indians should die en route, but he also did not take the measures that would have been necessary to keep them alive. Their numerous more deaths were instead merely an inevitable result of forced marches in winter with little or no food or clothing.

SOME GENOCIDES, 1900–1950

Deaths / Victims / Killers / Place / Date

1. xxxxx / Jews, gypsies, Poles, Russians / Nazis / occupied Europe / 1939-45

2. xxx / Serbs / Croats / Yugoslavia / 1941-45

3. xx / Polish officers / Russians / Katyn / 1940

4. xx /Jews / Ukrainians / Ukraine / 1917-20

5. xxxxx / political opponents / Russians / Russia / 1929-39