1.) Your article powerfully weaves personal narratives, legal history, and current affairs. What initially drew you to write about genocide, especially at a time when the word seemed, as you put it, “dusty”?

When I was about 12, my parents, younger brother, and I travelled to Germany and went to the Dachau concentration camp. I don’t think I ever recovered from the shock of what I saw. All genocides have their own unique horror, but the Nazis intrigued and appalled me in equal measure. Then came Rwanda, which shocked me again as the world knew what was happening and did nothing.

Just before the outbreak of COVID-19, I was in Toronto. I met Paulette Volgyesi, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who was helping Yazidi survivors of the ISIS genocide to resettle in Ontario. I found the arc of the two genocides very powerful and wrote an article.

Then someone asked me to write a book.  When I talked about genocide, most people seemed to have little interest. One woman told me she wasn’t interested since she wasn’t Jewish.  Since October 7th, that’s not the case, but most people still do not seem to understand what genocide, technically, is and what it isn’t.

2.) In your research, what was the most emotionally challenging story or interview that shaped your understanding of modern genocide?

My discovery of the Armenian genocide, and again, I had two outstanding scholars, Prof Alan Whitehorn and Dr Umit Kurt, who helped me understand the absolute horrors of what had occurred beginning in 1915. I remember reading about Dr Mehmed Rashid, who hated all Christians without distinction. He was one of the organisers of the genocide in Diyarbakir. He would nail horseshoes onto the feet of Armenians and force them to walk through the streets. He nailed Armenians to crosses. Ottoman doctors experimented on children and murdered those with learning difficulties.

His rationale was that he was a Turk first.

“On the question of how I, as a doctor, could have murdered, I can answer as follows: the Armenians had become hazardous microbes in the body of this country. Well, isn’t it a doctor’s duty to kill microbes?”

The Armenian genocide foreshadowed the Nazis. There are many parallels. None of them is good. It made me ask, not for the first time, what is wrong with human nature? How can one group of human beings believe that another group is so different, so alien, that they are rendered sub-human and are therefore expendable?

3.) You mention Raphael Lemkin and Ben Ferencz — two legal titans of the 20th century. What did you learn from their legacy that we seem to be forgetting today?

Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944, wanted to put a law in place to stop future genocides. He was a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had lost 49 family members in the Holocaust. What had sparked his original interest was the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which approximately 1.5 million Orthodox Christians were murdered by the Ottoman Turks. At that point, governments could do what they wanted with their citizens without consequences. He tried to change that.

I was introduced to Ben Ferencz, to whom I spoke over the phone, by Menachem Rosensaft, a law of genocide scholar at the schools of Cornell and Columbia. Talking to Ferencz was like having a direct link to history, and amplified by my inquisitiveness over Nazism. Here was a man who, as he famously said, ‘peered into Hell’, doing his due diligence for the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg, and still managed to believe that we should ‘never give up’.

Lemkin died destitute and friendless at 59, trying to rebuild the European conscience. Ferencz lived to 103, still inspiring people with his famous mantra. The lesson? You need to stay true to your beliefs. You need to have moral clarity. You need to be strong and brave. And you need to care. Both men believed in law and humanity. It’s not easy. The Doomsday clock is ticking closer to midnight. The world is in a terrible place, and the time to act is now.

4.) How did working on your book, Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions, transform your views on global justice and human rights?

By nature, I am not a cynical person, but I have become increasingly pessimistic. I spent over a year in Afghanistan, which is such a fantastic country that seems to have been damned. They had plenty of great laws, but no will or perhaps no ability to implement them. Global justice and human rights are two key foundations of any decent democracy. We jeopardise them at our peril, and that is happening now.

5.) In the article, you quote Auden’s line: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” Do you believe the international community is equipped to break that cycle — or are we just resigned to it?

I asked the brilliant documentary filmmaker and anthropologist Andre Singer that same question. His response summed it up:

“The depressing conclusion often arrived at is that we do not and have not learned from the  lessons of the past.  Is this just an irredeemable part of human nature that we will always live with?  I always return to the words of Richard Crossman in 1945 when he saw the nightmare inside the liberated concentration camps:

’The dead have been buried. It remains for us to care for those, the living.

‘It remains for us to hope that Germans may help to mend what they have broken and cleanse what they have befouled.

‘Thousands of German people were able to see for themselves, to bury the dead, to file past the victims. This was the end of the journey they had so confidently begun in 1933.

‘Twelve years? No – in terms of barbarity and brutality, they had travelled backwards for twelve thousand years.

‘Unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall. But by God’s grace, we who live will learn.’”

6.) Your article discusses the difficulty of legally proving genocide and the overlap with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Do you believe the term “genocide” still holds legal or moral weight in 2025?

I do, but I also understand the argument, which I discuss in my book, that war crimes and crimes against humanity are equally terrible. Because genocide is so difficult to prove, we may need to find another category so that governments can be held to account. Here we are right back at the beginning.

I want to quote Prof Rosensaft, who has pointed out that, “once you say that genocide is the worst crime possible, anything less becomes less severe, and that simply is not the case. There is no moral difference between crimes against humanity and genocide.

“Let’s understand that the term is being used – and abused – today because it serves as a flashpoint, eliciting an often-subliminal reaction. It works well on TikTok, effectively getting people in a crowd to scream a slogan. However, people usually fail to understand or want to understand that genocide is a narrowly defined term under international law. They don’t understand – or don’t want to understand – the relevant nuance.”

Motivations may be different, and trying to find a common denominator is a mistake; you have to make the distinction.

7.) You highlight atrocities in Congo and Darfur that have received far less attention than Gaza. Why do you think some genocides gain global traction while others remain overlooked?

No doubt it has something to do with the way social media amplifies the worst aspects of human nature and dubious global funding. I also don’t think people care that much about Africa or Africans, something I find inconceivable, as the continent is my happy place.

Another reason is that news organisations don’t have the budgets to have journalists on the ground to cover most conflicts.

There’s no question that what is happening in Gaza is tragic, and what happened in Israel and to the hostages is also grotesque. Israel, for all its flaws, has the right to exist, which is still disputed. Some of that comes down to antisemitism, which has shockingly re-emerged. Israel is a historic ally of the West. Maybe we in the West are more inclined to hold our friends and allies to account? Perhaps we hold them to a higher standard than other nations?

We also don’t mention the Uyghurs much or the Rohingyas. Maybe it proves what George Orwell said, to paraphrase, some are more equal than others.

8.) The piece ends on a plea for a two-state solution and new leadership. In your opinion, what kind of political or civic leadership could realistically halt the pattern of “othering” you describe?

If only I had the answer!  In an ideal world, Israelis and Palestinians would live together. I grew up in Canada and now live in the UK, where plurality is valued, and having different sorts of people is certainly one factor that makes these countries great.

No one ever thought that the situation in Northern Ireland would be resolved, so there is hope that intractable problems can be sorted out. Whoever believed that Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and the firebrand Unionist Ian Paisley would end up being known as the Chuckle Brothers?

Remember that extraordinary handshake on the White House lawn with President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin and Palestinian Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat signing the Oslo Accord in 1993?  Peace, imperfect as it was, seemed so close. How many tens of thousands of lives would have been saved? How many lives would not have been blighted by these wars and walls?

I believe that people need to interact on a personal level; they need knowledge, understanding, and empathy. They need hope. And better politicians.

9.) Your writing often blends geopolitical insight with vivid personal stories. As a journalist, how do you balance emotional truth with analytical rigour?

The truth is what counts. Getting there is a journey, but it is the raison d’être. Many journalists want to tell the story to improve the world. Objective truth is important, but if facts are not relatable and memorable, they will be lost in time. People relate to human stories. A well-told story is a step towards genuine empathy. And empathy makes corrective action more likely. Objective truth is important, but if facts are not relatable and memorable, they will be lost in time. People relate to human stories. A well-told story is a step toward genuine empathy. And empathy makes corrective action more likely. That’s why we tell stories.

10.) Finally, as someone who’s covered conflict and human rights issues for decades — are you hopeful? Or do you see the “crisis of civilisation” Ayaan Hirsi Ali warns of becoming permanent?

I have great respect for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and she connects dots that are not obvious. The rise of fascism, authoritarianism, the fact that the United States has a leader who bestrides the globe, walking across the map like the cartoonish Hitler in the satirical movie, The Producers, is a nightmare I never thought I would witness because I did believe that we had learned at least some lessons.

I don’t know where this is going, but what we need for sure is to hold onto our principles and our hats.

Heidi Kingstone has spent her career covering events around the globe for prominent publications from the Financial Times to the Mail on Sunday. She has interviewed key international figures from Benjamin Netanyahu and HRH Princess Anne to Zaha Hadid and Daniel Libeskind. Her interest in human rights and dictatorships led her to Iraq on four occasions, travelling to Baghdad, Irbil, and Basra before and after the invasion in 2003. She has also reported from Bangladesh, Africa and the Middle East. Arriving in an old Soviet helicopter and a C-130 military aircraft, she reported extensively from Afghanistan. She later wrote her first book: Dispatches from the Kabul Café (2014), a memoir of a country at a tipping point. War and genocide have fuelled Kingstone’s pursuits and informed her work. Like so much in her life, from moving to London from her native Toronto to ending up in Iraq and Afghanistan, serendipity played its part in writing her latest book, Genocide: Personal Stories, Big Questions.

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