JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE VOlume 92 November 1999
ETHICS
Genocidal doctors
Jeremy Hugh Baron FROP FRCS
JR Soc Med 1999.92.590-593 Doctors are trained to be humanitarian but have not the
expertise to explain why cruelty, suffering, hatred and General of Health Services, organized the disposal of
Armenian corpses with thousands of kilos of lime over six other evils exist in the world. Doctors do, however, have months; he became foreign secretary from 1925 to 1938.
the responsibility of trying to understand why in this
The mass murders were witnessed and reported by relief century in several continents some of their profession have organizations, the Red Cross, war correspondents and conceived, encouraged, organized, promoted, conspired,
colluded or collaborated with genocide. This article gives diplomats from Austria, Britain, Denmark, France,
Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the USA, and were examples from five countries in which doctors played such a recorded in the postwar newspapers and trial supplements role: the activities of doctors in Germany’ and Japan? are not covered. I discuss the conflict between nationalism and of the official gazette of the Ottoman governments 8, Many
doctors were arrested after the war but most of the courts
medical ethics and ask whether we can educate our doctors
martial were soon dismantled?. Only fifteen Turks were ever given death sentences for their part in the massacres,
and just three were executed®. And when Mehmat Kemal, a
ARMENIANS
A million or more Armenians perished in Turkey in 1915. sub-district governor, was hanged in April 1919 a crowd which demonstrated in protest consisted largely of students Two doctors were among the ultimate decision-makers in
wartime Turkey’* who in 1915 drew up the Ten
of the moded by ol of its pul tengesty: Kemal is Commandments for the massacre of the Armenians. The
senior member, Talat Pasha, was the chief of the Ittihad Armenian doctors, pharmacists, dentists, nurses and
medical students were killed, often with the knowledge and ruling party which came to power in 1908; he became interior minister, and then in 1917 grand vizier. Both complicity of their Turkish fellow professionals, some of whom, however,
doctors had qualified in Istanbul, where Dr Behaeddin Sakir
did try to shelter their Armenian
became professor of medicine and head of the Red Crescent colleagues. Provincial governors and military commanders
who refused to kill Armenians were removed or murdered. society while Dr Mehmett Nazim, who had trained in Paris
also, became chief physician of the Soloniki municipal
However, General Vehib commanding the Ilird Army did
hospital and later minister of education’.
refuse to kill Armenians, court-martialled and hanged a
However, Sakir was also political chief of the Special
local gendarmerie commander and a brigand chief for their
Organization (East) and later field commander of the killer participation in the massacres, and tried to arrest Sakir, who
escaped*. units which in 1918, after the capture of Baku, massacred its
Armenians between 15 and 17 September. Nazim, director
Dr Riza Nur was deputy head of the Turkish delegation
of ‘the wartime Ittihad’s terror arm… prided himself on
at the 1923 Lausanne Conference. He had previously
having committed a million murders’. Soon after the armistice threatened to kill any remaining Armenians, and in 1921
had instructed the commander of the Eastern Front
in November 1918 both doctors fled from Turkey in a
occupying the medieval centre of the Armenian Church warship of their German ally and, like other top Ittihad leaders that ‘the relics and traces of the monuments of Ati be wiped and government ministers, were in absentia sentenced to death
in 1919 and 1920 by Turkish military tribunals for their off the face of the earth’. At the Conference he denied that
there had been any Armenians killed, and declared that any
genocide. Sakir was assassinated in Berlin by an Armenian deaths had merely been from ‘epidemics, famine and ‘avenger’ on 17 April 1922. Nazim returned to Turkey and
was hanged in 1926 together with other Ittihad leaders for emigration ‘lO. The Allies, who were condemned by Lloyd
George as abject, cowardly and infamous, accepted this
conspiracy against Mustapha Kemal Ataturk6.
denial. This denial was still being maintained in 198510, Individual doctors were directly involved in the
massacres, having poisoned infants, killed children and
although such denials were repeatedly discredited by the
issued false certificates of death from natural causes.
evidence of contemporary accounts 3-9,11,
Nazim’s brother-in-law
Dr Tevfik Rusdu, Inspector-
Mount Sinal School of Medicine, New York, USA
Corrospondence to: 21c Randolph Crescent, London W9 1DP, UK
ARGENTINA Paragraphs (d) and (e) of Article Il of the 1948 United
Nations Genocide Convention cover measures intended to prevent births within a group and to forcibly transfer children of one group to another group. Between 1976 and 1983 the Argentine military dictatorship fought a ‘dirty war’ against political dissidents. Thousands were arrested and then disappeared, often by being thrown from aircraft into the Atlantic ocean. A police doctor Jorge Berger tortured and performed medical experiments on female detainees. In 1990 he was amnestied and promoted to the post of medical commissioner of Buenos Aires police (since suspended). Dr Norberto Bianco was in charge of the maternity ward at Campo de Mayo military hospital where detained pregnant women gave birth bound and blind- folded. The mothers then ‘disappeared’ and the hundreds of babies were given to childless mothers of military or police officers for a ‘Christian upbringing’. Two children were given to Bianco; he is now in prison 2,13, A police doctor, Roberto Bettalo, was accused of issuing five death certificates for members of a dissident family but exhumation showed that only four of the coffins had bodies; the fifth contained just baby clothes, the baby having
been given for adoption by a military family!4.
BOSNIA In July 1998 Dr Milan Kovacevic, a former Bosnian Serb anaesthetist and hospital director, was accused at the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague of 14 crimes
of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Kovacevic, who was born in a Croatian concentration camp where tens of thousands of Serbs were exterminated in the Second World War, was a senior official of the crisis staff of the Serbian Democratic Party. He was accused of helping to set up concentration camps in Serb areas of Bosnia, and of organizing the transport of Moslems and Croats to these camps where they were massacred’5. Dr Radovan Karadäic was born in 1945 in Montenegro, where his ancestors had arrived in 1642 and where in 1941 the Croats had killed thousands of Serbs. He studied medicine in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, where he was popular with his fellow. students and led them in a riot. After qualifying he was described by his clinic chief as lazy, always looking for an
easy way. In 1983 he moved to Belgrade and became an ardent Serb nationalist. He served one year out of a four-year sentence for embezzlement. His energies and charisma made him the leader of the Serbian Democratic Party in the Bosnian Parliament, and then President of the ‘Serbian Republic of Bosnia’. His policies as annunciated in his speeches from 1991
to 1994 have been fully documented 16,17,
Karadzic cited an eighteenth
century bishop who
declared Moslems evil and urged their violent eradication. On the one hand, he accused the President of Bosnia of working to found the first Islamic State in modern Europe to allow Islam to enter the West: the high Moslem birthrate was proof of the Moslem threat. Karadzic maintained that he was, as were his ancestors six hundred years ago, defending Europe from Moslem fundamentalism. He claimed that the Serbs were enslaved and the Croats were threatened by Islamic domination, that all Moslems should convert to Christianity, that the Moslem community would disappear from the face of the earth, and that his policies were blessed by the Serbian Orthodox Church. On the other hand. Karadzic maintained that he was a friend of all ethnic groups, that his wife’s best friend was an Albanian, that ethnic cleansing was never part of his policy and that any ethnic transfer was because Moslems demanded the right to leave. The Serbs had never threatened anyone, the destruction of Sarajevo and the slaughter of its inhabitants were not due to Serbian shells but was from Moslems mining their own city, and only Serb and not Moslem women had been raped. Karadzié advised the Serbian military to pay no attention to what he did at conferences, because all the maps were transient and only what land they held was eternal, so that the soldiers should hold every village and not worry. Karadzie has not yet surrendered or
been arrested to stand trial at The Hague for genocide.
CROATIA Serbian forces occupied Vukovar in November 1991 and the Croatian medical staff were forced to leave. One night a Serbian surgeon toured the hospital and identified to a Serb soldier 260 wounded Croat soldiers. They were taken away
the next day and shot!s.
RWANDA In April and May 1994 about 800 thousand Tutsis, out of a total of about 930 thousand, were massacred by Hutus,
including Hutu doctors, In the university hospital at Butari ‘People were being expelled. Some of our (Hutul doctors were colluding with the extremists: they expelled them (the Tutsi patients) and chased them out of the hospital to be killed… Some of the doctors were
also conniving… And they were the doctors in charge. In the morning they would go round during the medical
check….. and they would say “This patient is healthy.
Out, Out!”
…So they had to go… After the road- blocks they were killed… The doctors were also asking for their ID cards before treating them. They refused to treat sick Tutsis [Some Hutu doctors courageously defended the Tutsi patients…). The medical staff went around spreading the news [of peace) “Come out of hiding and go back to your homes, you have nothing to fear”. So people came out. Later on these people were all killed’20
Referenced from; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1297441/
Love and Light WWYHS
The power of a mindful mind 
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