Yehuda Bauer (photo by Wikipedia)

Israeli scholar Yehuda Bauer, Yad Vashem advisor on Holocaust studies, took part in the Third regional forum on genocide prevention held in Berne at the beginning of April. Ahead of this meeting he was interviewed by Swiss Info journalists. His most striking thesis is that man is programmed for mass murder, and genocide prevention must be undertaken also by defying the human natural tendencies.

Among other things Yehuda Bauer said: "humans have conflicting capacities. On the one hand, we are pre-programmed in a way for mass murder, which has been going on since time immemorial and before that; and on the other hand, because we live in herds – whether we call it clans, tribes, nations, ethnicities or whatever – we have developed the capacity for sympathy and love and cooperation. These two preconditions in the human make-up fight each other all the time.

So it’s possible to prevent genocide, but it’s extremely difficult because of conflicting economic and political interest. There has been progress, no doubt about it. International law has developed. Three or four hundred years ago no conference such as this could have possibly taken place because people just didn’t care when millions of people were killed.

That said, there has been too little progress and if we don’t try to prevent it in the foreseeable future, there will most certainly be more genocides. [Prevention] can’t happen from one day to the other – it’s a process which will inevitably have ups and downs, but it is a possibility".