Why April really is the cruelest month

Tulips, daisies, lilacs, hosts of daffodils…and genocide: all proliferate in April. Suicide and depression rates are highest in April and perhaps it is no surprise that Genocide Awareness Month also falls now, the beginning of the fourth month of the year: a time of renewal, the end of decay, the possibility of hope, brighter skies — and the killing season. “April is the cruellest month,” as T.S. Eliot says in The Waste Land. And George Orwell began Nineteen Eighty Four with the chilling words, “It was a bright cold day in April.” A is for genocide.

It may be a coincidence, but April is a notoriously brutal time of year. The Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide and the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda all began in April. Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler were both born in April.

On 1st April 1933, the Nazis organised a one-day boycott against Jewish businesses in Germany. On 7th April 1933, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Service excluded Jews and political opponents from university and government positions. The Germans invaded Norway on 9th April 1940. The Warsaw ghetto uprising began on 19th April 1943 and lasted 27 days. The Allies overran Germany in April 1945, and Hitler killed himself that month. The Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was liberated in April 1945, with footage that showed the world the horror of the Holocaust.

It was learning about the murder and displacement of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915 that galvanised a young Polish man, Raphael Lemkin, to spend a lifetime trying to prevent the repetition of what he rightly saw as a crime against humanity. Lemkin was horrified to learn that governments were not accountable for the deaths of their citizens. He became a lawyer with a mission to convince international bodies, like the League of Nations, to establish laws to protect groups of people. Lemkin lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust, and he believed the law could prevent and punish perpetrators. By 1944, he first used the term “genocide” in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. 

The distinguished Turkish historian Umit Kurt only learned about what had once been the thriving Armenian community when sitting at a café in his home town of Gaziantep, Turkey. He learned that the original Armenian owners had been deported during the genocide. It was a shock and his awakening. Coincidentally, hours after I interviewed Dr Kurt on 24th April 2021 for my book Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions, US President Joe Biden formally recognised the Armenian genocide. Recognition had only taken 106 years — to the day.

The plunge into the depths of depravity was slow and determined: it started on a local level, metastasising until it engulfed neighbours and colleagues hoping to liquidate “the other”: Orthodox Christians — mainly, but not exclusively, Armenian.

Never underestimate greed as a factor when it comes to annihilating others. I wanted to title my book Fear, Greed, and Propaganda as key motivators in attracting people to the cause. Kill your neighbour and get rewarded with the spoils: jewellery, an orchard, a promotion, a better house.

The growth of Armenian economic power in the previous decades was one of the factors that led to increased resentment and envy and to the discriminatory actions of the Ottoman Turks and their justification of genocide. The real fault line was that the Muslims were unwilling to accept the Christians as their equals.

Mehmet Talaat Pasha, grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, had ordered the arrest and detention of Orthodox Christian intellectuals in Constantinople on 24th April 1915. As such, he was ultimately responsible for the Armenian genocide.

Widespread mass arrests and deportations of the civilian population followed this. In response to the international news reports of mass atrocities by the Ottoman dictatorship, the Entente powers of England, France and tsarist Russia formally noted that the Young Turk government was currently committing “crimes against humanity” on the Armenians. They warned that the Ottoman government would be held accountable. Over five months, from April to September, most of the 3,000-year-old Armenian provinces were emptied of Armenians. They were either killed or sent on forced marches into the Syrian desert without sufficient food, water, shelter, or protection.

Yet, at the end of the First World War, with German assistance, Talaat escaped. Condemned to death in absentia, he lived freely in Berlin until he was assassinated by an Armenian in 1921. That there were no legal consequences for Talaat’s actions fuelled Lemkin’s lifelong dedication to ensuring that, in the future, there would be consequences.

Until the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide was the high watermark of modern human barbarity. Then came the Nazis. They conveniently blamed everything on the Jews,  including Germany’s defeat in the First World War.

In Nazi Germany, the only solution to “the Jewish problem” was the “final” one: kill all Jews. Aryan superiority was at the core of Nazi philosophy, which also condemned other Untermenschen to death. The victims — Jews, Roma, the physically or mentally disabled, homosexuals, political opponents — were considered “unworthy of life”. Getting rid of these “vermin”, dehumanising the victim, justified eliminating them to create a new, pure and better society, confirming Nazi racial superiority.

On 17th April 1975, genocide began to unfold in Cambodia, when the radical communists of the Khmer Rouge took over the government. The French-educated ideologue Pol Pot, their genocidal Maoist leader, wanted to create an economically “self-reliant”, autarkic society. His mission was to take Kampuchea, as it was known, to “Year Zero” to start over as an agrarian state. Barbara Harff, professor of political science emerita at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, points to estimates from various sources ranging from “1.9 million to 3 million people killed in four years of Khmer Rouge rule, out of a population of about 7 million”.

Cambodians who opposed the regime were executed and tortured; millions more starved and died from disease as the Khmer Rouge sought to obliterate the modern world and anyone who did not fit into its ideology. Cities were depleted of their populations as the sick, elderly, and young – hundreds of thousands of them – were forcibly marched into slave labour camps and torture centres. One particularly horrific image is of a murdered pregnant woman with her foetus hanging from a tree and left to wither. What happened on the killing fields was one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century. 17th April is the Anniversary of the Fall of Phnom Penh and the Memorial for the Cambodian Genocide.

In 1988, “Chemical Ali” Hassan al-Majid orchestrated the chemical attack known as the Anfal. (Al-Anfal, ‘The Spoils’, is the title of the eighth chapter of the Qur’an.) Under Saddam Hussein, as governor of the predominantly Kurdish region of northern Iraq,  al-Majid perpetrated the campaign in which between  50,000 and 100,000 Kurds in northern Iraq, primarily civilians, were gassed. After the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, he was arrested, tried and convicted of genocide and other crimes. Hassan al-Majid was hanged for his crimes in 2010. 14th April is the day that the Kurdish Regional Government has marked for remembrance of this genocide.

Every year, Rwanda observes Kwibuka (“to remember”). It is said that each time the day dawns on 7th April, you can hear the screams of ghosts that haunt the streets despite the decades that have passed. The 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda began in earnest on the evening of 6th April 1994. That was when the plane of President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile and burst into flames as it made its final approach to the capital’s Kigali International Airport. The crash killed the president and his travelling companion, the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, along with three French crew and nine passengers.

Within an hour, the presidential guard, along with Hutu militia groups, the Interahamwe (‘those who attack together’), Impuzamugambi (‘those who have the same goal’) and the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) had set up roadblocks and began slaughtering moderate Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. Among the first victims were moderate Hutu prime minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and ten Belgian peacekeepers, killed on 7th April, leaving a political vacuum that extremist “Hutu Power” leaders filled, provoking the withdrawal of Belgian troops. The term “Hutu Power” was used by anti-Tutsi genocidaires (people guilty of genocide) to denote a supremacist ideology that follows the Hutu Ten Commandments, calling for exclusive Hutu leadership and ethnic segregation. In the following 100 days, it is estimated that 200,000 Hutu massacred between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu.

April really is the cruelest month.