Every April I find myself grieving over the levels of violence of which humanity is capable. April 6, 1994, was the first day of the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis by their Hutu neighbors. April 24 is the day on which Armenians commemorate the genocide that claimed the lives of a million or more of their ancestors in Turkey.

Both of these genocides -- the first and last of the twentieth century -- have deep personal resonance. My father-in-law and his sister were the only ones out of a family of nine to survive the deportation marches of 1915. And recently, I was in Rwanda interviewing women and orphans who survived the most efficient genocide the world has known. Eighty percent of the 800,000 Tutsis who died were killed in the first six weeks, while the United States and the United Nations were debating intervention.

Our eyes oftentimes glaze over when faced with statistics, so let me put a human face on one victim of the violence in Rwanda. Jennifer, not her real name, is a tall, beautiful woman in her 30s who is missing an arm and is dying of AIDS. Like many Tutsis, she was stopped at a roadblock set up by Hutus shortly after President Habyarimana's plane was shot down as it was landing in Kigali. Even though it is likely that the President was killed by right-wingers within his own Hutu party, plans had obviously been laid to blame and then exterminate the minority Tutsi population.

Jennifer was raped multiple times at the roadblock, but rather than being killed immediately she was held as a sex slave. One of her two children and her husband died in the violence. Her infant child was spared until her captor and his friends grew tired of Jennifer and decided to kill her. They decided to throw her into a ditch along with a grenade. The child Jennifer was clutching shielded her chest, but the explosion severed her arm. Later, someone helped her out of the ditch, but by the time she could seek medical care her wound was crawling with maggots. When Jennifer finally returned to her village, she surmised that she might be HIV-positive. One of her captors and a neighbor who had raped her had died of AIDS.

Quite legitimately, we can ask how it is possible for neighbors to treat each other with such inhumanity. The ultimate answer to this question is best left to philosophers and theologians. But historians and political scientists have suggested some ideas regarding the mechanisms of genocide. First, genocides do not happen in a vacuum. They typically occur during periods of war, substantial social change, and/or economic disruption. Secondly, a minority target population is singled out as a scapegoat for what is occurring. Typically, they are of a different race, nationality, or religious background. And, thirdly, there is a legitimating ideology that justifies the elimination of the threat (e.g., racist philosophies, extremist expressions of nationalism, etc.)

In the case of the first genocide of the twentieth century, Armenians were, with little justification, labeled as infidels and traitors who might side with advancing Russian troops during the First World War. In Rwanda the majority Hutus regularly referred to Tutsis as cockroaches -- one of nature's lowest, most tenacious life forms. A well-educated Rwandan told me that his Hutu pastor refused to serve Communion to Tutsis prior to the genocide, because he did not think insects were worthy to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ.

There are parallels among these dehumanizing rhetorical strategies and those currently deployed on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war on terrorism. As a professor of religion, I am quite aware of the use of religion to polarize and divide. That is its dark side. Religions also contain equally strong traditions celebrating the sanctity of God's creation, especially human lives. The rhetorical dehumanization of individuals as infidels, cockroaches, or part of an "axis of evil" flies in the face of these traditions and establishes the framework for guiltless killing.

We must guard against this rhetoric in times of strife and war. In extreme instances it has been, and can still be an important plank in the platforms of massacre and genocide.

-- Donald E. Miller is professor of religion at the University of Southern California and executive director of USC's Center for Religion and Civic Culture. He is also the author, with his wife Lorna Miller, of Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (University of California Press, 1993).