"In a cemetery, as far as I know, people do not talk".
Milenko Karan, Serb intel­lectual, fore­seeing the Kosovo "massacre".

In East-​​Timor, just like in ex-​​Yougoslavia or Rwanda before, the brave sol­diers of the inter­na­tional com­munity go count the corpses, watch over the mass graves, and bury the dead. Today, the image is explicit: a gen­ocide is like an earth­quake. Unpre­dictable, sudden, unex­pected. The earth shakes during the night and all we can do is send spe­cialists the next day to count victims and avoid epidemics.

It makes one wonder what human­ities are for. What’s the use of spe­cialists in inter­na­tional rela­tions, secret ser­vices, United Nations observers and our nice worldwide inform­ation system every time people get cut to pieces (the unit involved being the tens of thou­sands of victims), since we seem to be sur­prised every time some­thing like that happens?

What if, in fact, the world order estab­lished a the end of WWII wasn’t that of peace, of demo­cracy, of human rights, but that of Order for the sake of Order? Did the world, more bar­baric than ever (were there ever more killings than during the 20^th century?), stop striving for human hope and pro­gress and start caring only for stability?

Ini­tially, the world order was forged not on the defeat of Germany and Japan, but on the exem­plary pun­ition for their people. The equi­librium of world powers comes from the mas­sacres per­pet­rated after victory was­as­sured: Dresden bombed by the English in Feb­ruary 1945 (35,000 dead - read Kurt Vonnegut’s "Slaughterhouse-​​Five"), the Russian response over Berlin and the American supremacy with Hiroshima (140,000 dead) and Nagasaki (70,000 dead) in August of 1945. We can try jus­ti­fying those through the respons­ib­ility of Germany and Japan for the war, the horror of the con­cen­tration camps, the mil­lions of dead… But is the mas­sacre of civilians the best show of justice? Death to the losers. A proof of absolute mil­itary superi­ority as an assurance of stability.

Nowadays, the equi­librium brought about by nuclear terror being but a memory, sta­bility rests on new prin­ciples, the first one being ethnic purity. The wars in the Balkans are largely due to the new geo­pol­itical the­ories of the great powers, the German Eth­no­politik, the Shock of civil­iz­a­tions for Amer­icans (as described by Samuel Hut­ington in "the Clash of Civil­iz­a­tions," Foreign Affairs, vol. 72, No. 73, 1993). Those the­ories would deserve long explan­a­tions, but, sim­plified to death, they rest on the spurious idea that races cannot live together (ethnic and reli­gious origins defining the notion of race and not, as in the ideals from the French revolution, Reason and the social con­tract). They can only co-​​exist one next to the other, in a sort of worldwide Apartheid, with the ratio of power working as the guar­antee of stability.

Therefore, gen­ocide and mas­sacre are the byways of the world order. Ethnic cleansing and dis­placement of pop­u­la­tions answer, in a quite quick, simple, and defin­itive manner, the need for sta­bility of the great powers. Human rights, peaceful co-​​existence of races and demo­cracy, on the other hand, take a lot of time, are complex and… costly (and it’s a never-​​ending process).

Moreover, World order is designed serve the goals of big busi­nesses (fruits and veget­ables com­panies in South America, oil com­panies in Africa, indus­tries in Asia), mul­tina­tionals that prefer sta­bility to change, repression to human pro­gress. To explain the fact that France backed the regime of Juvenal Habyar­imana in Rwanda, Roland Dumas said that, although it may not be a model of virtue, thanks to him Rwanda was a stable country. There again, the inter­na­tional com­munity turned a blind eye, and the mas­sacres came only later (as if to cleanse the inter­na­tional community’s con­science or to avoid the instability of the whole region?).

In Bosnia, what happened in Srebrenica showed the determ­in­ation of the West not to protect ethnic mixes, and the war was resolved by cutting the country into eth­nically pure ter­rit­ories, regardless of the human costs of mas­sacres and displacements.

In spite of the so-​​called human­it­arian dis­course, the world order still rests on the plight of the losers. Inter­vening too late, in spite of what some hypo­crites among the people in charge say, is not a fatality but a delib­erate will to resolve durably (or defin­it­ively, in the case of total Pogroms) and at a low cost the problems that may arise between pop­u­la­tions. A good big mas­sacre is simply good enough to some people to bring back ethnic equi­librium (or ethnic purity), which is the base of the geo­pol­itical the­ories of the greater powers. (Note that I vol­un­tarily did not use brackets, as I think that the racist slant of the Eth­no­politik and of the "Clash of civil­iz­a­tions" the­ories is explicit enough…)

Tomorrow (if we’re really going towards a humanist world), we shall have to write the Black Book of this bar­baric world order that sac­ri­fices people to its craving for sta­bility. Sta­bility at all cost, that is the defin­ition of a reac­tionary system.