{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02738475581926061, 'fraction_numerical': 0.025559105431309903, 'mean_word_length': 4.940379403794038, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Rwanda, Ethiopia and Cambodia: links, faultlines and complexities in a comparative study of genocide

About two million people of diverse ethnic backgrounds dead in Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991. Between two and three million mainly Khmer ethnic groups killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Approximately 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu killed in Rwanda between April 6 and July 15, 1994. These are the visible epitaphs in the public memory of mass murder in Ethiopia, Cambodia and Rwanda in the last three decades of the twentieth century. But the death toll alone, as important as it is, does not offer us a better perspective of the complex processes behind the numbers. It often creates in the public mind a hierarchy of mass murder based on mortality statistics. Writers and scholars who have looked beyond the scale of murder in their analysis of what happened in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Cambodia have often not resisted the temptation of drawing comparisons between them and other historical cases of genocide. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, a defected member of Ethiopia’s revolutionary regime, and journalist Robert Kaplan see a mirror image of Cambodia in Ethiopia of the early 1970s. As Dawit argues, “like Pol Pot, Mengistu ... massacred thousands ..., and brought death, suffering, and displacement to millions (Dawit, 1989, p 57). Robert Kaplan has described Ethiopia under Mengistu as the “African killing field.” Evoking this powerful imagery of Cambodia under Pol Pot, Kaplan contended that the “manner in which Ethiopians died” resembled “the slaughter of millions of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge” (Kaplan, 1988, p 32). Robert Melson, arguably the dean of the comparative study of genocide, has characterized the slaughter of Tutsis by extreme Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 as “the African version of the Holocaust” (Melson, 2003, p 337). But comparisons of mass murder in the developing world that seek common characteristics or links with genocide in other parts of the world should also discover instructive distinctions and faultlines produced by specific histories and circumstances. This article is inspired by calls from scholars who study genocide for the