III - Eroding the Myth of Pure Evil: When Victims become Perpetrators and Perpetrators Victims

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The myth of pure evil defines the way we look at extreme atrocities (Baumeister 1999). It portrays the perpetrators thereof as bad and evil and the victims as good and innocent and thus classifies the victims and the perpetrators in two extremes, namely two mutually exclusive groups: the good and the bad. One may wonder, however, whether this is always fair. The distinction between perpetrators and victims might be clear cut when looking at a single event, for example a woman who kills her husband with a knife. Yet, if we look at the context, the distinction between perpetrator and victim might not be so clear cut when – to use the same example – it turns out that the wife has been abused, mistreated and sexually exploited by her husband for years and that he was about to attack her again. This could be no different for perpetrators of international crimes. The international legal framework has qualified perpetrators of international crimes as hostes humani generis; enemies of all humankind and thus seems to endorse the myth of pure evil. Yet, one may wonder if this classification is always adequate. In order to answer this we need to take the person who committed the crimes into account as well as the context in which the crime has been committed. The aim of this chapter is to do this and test whether the myth of pure evil in which the two groups are mutually exclusive is an adequate representation of reality or whether we need to take a more nuanced view.

In the following sections I will focus on perpetrators of international crimes and discuss to what extent perpetrators can also be victims and victims can become perpetrators. In the sections 2 to 4 three types of situations are distinguished. In section 2, perpetrators who are driven by an ideology in which they themselves are depicted as the victims are considered. In section 3, the focus is on victims who, as a means of self-defence, commit atrocities and thus become perpetrators themselves. In section 4, the focus will be on various situations of enforced compliance and cooperation in which individuals or even whole groups are pressured and forced by others to go along. Section 5 discusses three case studies in which victims come to cooperate with the oppressor and commit atrocities.