A historian of the 1914-1918 war, Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau was also closely interested in the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, to which he devoted the highly commendable an introduction (Threshold, 2017). What makes this prolific author – he recently published It’s the war. Small subjects on the violence of war, 19th-21st century (Editions du Félin, 2020) – a sort of “massacre specialist”.
Director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, he greatly contributed to renewing the historiography of the First World War, on which he notably wrote Find the war (Gallimard, 2000, in collaboration with Annette Becker). Regarding the conflict in Ukraine, he suggests that there is indeed violence specific to Russia.
L’Express: What do you think of the crime in Boutcha, a town in the northern suburbs of kyiv?
Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau: We are here in the presence of practices of atrocities and undoubtedly of cruelty, that is to say violence that goes beyond the military objective of neutralizing the enemy. Here, it was a question, for the Russians, of inflicting on the Ukrainian community the maximum possible suffering with, for example, summary executions of people in front of the members of their family. There is clearly a will to terrorize to break the morale of the population.
Conflicts that take place among the civilian population are always extremely deadly, either accidentally or intentionally. The harder a war, the more extreme the fate reserved for them. We are in this configuration. In Boutcha, it was a question of making the civilian population pay the price of the resistance offered by the Ukrainians to the Russian army.
Should we expect other forms of atrocities?
Unfortunately yes. The rape of women is a practice of cruelty that almost always accompanies other war crimes. Remember that rape in wartime is not the result of a supposed sexual frustration among soldiers, but of a weapon knowingly used to psychologically damage a community and, what is more, to destroy its bond of filiation. For the Russians, the border which must separate those who carry who carry weapons and the defenseless civilians (women, children, old people…) seems to have collapsed.
It doesn’t seem to surprise you…
Alas no. What is surprising is rather our amazement in the face of the violence of war. But what did we believe? That the Russians were going to fight a “clean war” by joining hands with old ladies to help them cross the street? Our surprise and our indignation, although very legitimate, are indicative of the extent of our denials. Denial before the war: Chancelleries and experts were convinced that Russia would not attack Ukraine. Denial today: Now that the war is here, we are surprised by the way it is unfolding, not to mention our obliviousness to possible chemical and nuclear developments.
A specialist in the First World War, historian Stéphane Audouin-Rouzeau is also the author of “Une initiation” (Seuil, 2016), on the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Virginie Bonnefon
How to explain it?
We have “lost” ourselves from the war. Our Western societies are built on a kind of eschatology – that is to say a doctrine on the fate of man – of the disappearance of war. This dream of European elites dates back to the 19th century. We were therefore not in the best position to anticipate Russian intentions and we are not in the best position to understand the reality of warfare. Our myopia says a lot about our society, where the end of military service, decided by Jacques Chirac in France, is not a trivial event. Today, the notion of citizenship no longer goes through military experience, which consisted first of all of learning to hold a weapon in one’s hands.
“What the Russians did in Grozny, Aleppo and Mariupol is unheard of brutality”
The “military fact” was outsourced to professionals and found itself confined within society, deprived of real contact with the army. Knowing that France bears an enormous responsibility within NATO, it’s strange.
And there is another paradox: in Europe, certain countries which have a tradition of neutrality (Switzerland, Sweden, Finland) are finally less distant from the “military fact”, because they have continued to prepare for war by perpetuating the “civil defence” that had been put in place during the Cold War.
Is there something specifically Russian about the practice of war crimes?
Historically, Russian society has been “brutalised” – that is, made brutal – by a host of events: World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism, World War II, breakup of the USSR, Putin’s hardening, the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya… Through these episodes, there is one constant: a tolerance for brutality and a low regard for human life.
An example: the Russian army health service seems very sketchy. Evidenced by the death-injured ratio of the Russians, comparable to that of the 1939-1945 war. There are three wounded soldiers for every one killed, according to their own figures. This same ratio is seven wounded for one dead in the American army during recent conflicts. In other words: an American soldier has a much better chance of being treated and of surviving his wounds than a Russian. And this thanks to a chain of care which makes it possible to transport an injured person to the operating theater in twenty minutes. Conversely, on the Russian side, the concern for the preservation of the life of an injured person seems much weaker.
City workers carry six partially burned bodies found in Boutcha, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine on April 5, 2022.
Genya SAVILOV/AFP
Is the Russian army today the most violent on the planet?
I don’t know how the Chinese army would behave, because we haven’t seen it in action since the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. But what the Russians did in Grozny, Aleppo or Mariupol, with the massive use of artillery, bombs and missiles against the cities is unheard of brutality. There is indeed a continuum between Grozny and Mariupol. However, war crimes are not exclusive to Russia. The Americans committed them in Vietnam: we remember, for example, the My Lai massacre in March 1968 (347 villagers killed [NDLR : selon l’armée américaine]).
However, the American high command never encouraged this type of behavior. On the contrary, he had issued precise rules on the opening of fire and on the treatment of prisoners. There were many transgressions of these rules on the ground but the power, in Washington, never covered them. On the contrary, the massacre of My Lai gave rise to a huge scandal in public opinion and led to legal challenges. As for the French in Algeria, we know: they tortured, raped and carried out summary executions.
Does the Boutcha massacre meet the definition of a “war crime”?
Let us recall the legal definition: it is “assassination, ill-treatment or deportation for forced labor, or for any other purpose, of civilian populations in occupied territories; assassination or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons at sea, execution of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of towns and villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity”. It is clear that in Ukraine, the Russian military is multiplying war crimes.
It must be understood that it is intentionality and the modus operandi that make it possible to distinguish between “war crime”, “crime against humanity” and “crime of genocide”. However, in Boutcha, the crime scene does not give the impression of a preliminary intentionality, nor of a coherent order of liquidation of the civilian populations, but rather of unpremeditated acts perpetrated by small groups of soldiers – or men of the FSB? -, who take revenge on the civilian population present at that time.
A crime against humanity is “the deliberate and ignominious violation of the fundamental rights of an individual or a group of individuals inspired by political, philosophical, racial or religious motives”. As for the crime of genocide, it is an “act committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national ethnic, racial or religious group such as: the murder of members of the group, serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”.
The Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina (more than 8,000 Bosnian men and teenagers killed between July 11 and July 24, 1995) could be legally qualified as “genocide”, because there had been an order given by a hierarchy and because the killing was organized. The intentionality was there. The victims had been sorted, evacuated, transported to the scene of the massacre; they had been executed en masse, then arrangements had been made to conceal the crime, which required organization and order from a hierarchy.
Is Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” as Joe Biden says?
I don’t mind using that term. But legally, you have to know how far the orders he gives descend and arrive on the ground and how far the information goes back to him. But we agree: the primary responsibility for what is happening in Ukraine lies entirely with him.