Recent BooksSeptember/October 2019 237victims, heroes, and butchers. As he
shows, this was not the ecient killing
o Nazi extermination camps but
individual, face-to-face barbarity. In
both Anatolia and Sudan, the heroes o
one era became the killers o the next.
In neither case have the leaders respon-
sible ever been held to account in a
court o law.Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neoliberalism,
and the Disintegration of a State
BY HELEN LACKNER. Saqi, 2017, 342 pp.This useful survey reÇects Lackner’s
40 years o experience studying
Yemen. She examines the country’s
descent into chaos, from the golden
period o the 1980s, when oil rents and
out-migration were high, through the
growing kleptocracy under President
Ali Abdullah Saleh in the 1990s and
early years o this century, to the civil
war that began in 2015 and the result-
ing humanitarian catastrophe. Along
the way, she analyzes Yemen’s tribes,
its varieties o Islam, its economy, and
the mismanagement o its water
resources. She dismisses the claim that
Iran is supporting the Houthis in the
civil war, but she fails to provide
sucient evidence to support her
skepticism. She also blames neoliberal
policies promoted by the International
Monetary Fund for Yemen’s growing
inequality. Her account ends before
the assassination o Saleh at the hands
o the Houthis in 2017. Since then, no
one o his Machiavellian caliber has
emerged to replace him. Four years o
a Saudi-led, U.S.-backed assault by
pro-government forces have devastated
Yemen’s infrastructure and people, but
Lackner is clear that the Houthis do notbetween 1.5 million and 2.5 million
Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks were
murdered. Morris and Ze’evi convey
well the horror o the killings. In a cave
where the bodies o at least 100 Greeks
were found, they write that “all appar-
ently had ¿rst had their hands and feet
cut o, after that they were either burnt
alive in the cave or had their throats cut.”
I anything, the killing in southern
Sudan over the last 60 years has been
even more extensive than that in
Anatolia. For centuries, the Muslim
north o Sudan systematically raided the
animistic south for slaves. When Sudan
gained independence, in 1956, the
southern third o the country was already
in revolt. Apart from a brie interlude in
the 1970s, the region has known only
suering and death ever since. In recent
decades, slave raiding has been replaced
by the competition for oil rents, southern
Sudan’s only source o revenue other
than international aid. Today, the
butchers are no longer northerners; they
are southern leaders and their militias.
According to some reports, since 2013,
two years after South Sudan gained
independence, South Sudanese Presi-
dent Salva Kiir, a member o the Dinka
tribe, may have orchestrated the slaugh-
ter o about 300,000 members o the
Nuer tribe, to which his principal rival,
former Vice President Riek Machar,
belongs. Like Anatolia at the time o the
Armenian genocide, southern Sudan has
large inaccessible areas that have become
killing ¿elds, rarely observed by outsid-
ers, except a few courageous missionar-
ies. As a result, estimates o the number
o victims are uncertain, but they run
into the millions. Martell, an intrepid
journalist who covered the region for
the , has interviewed many o the