Genocide is not an event; you don’t simply wake up one morning and begin exterminating an entire people out of the blue. Genocide is a process; you have to work your way up to it.

And like all processes, genocide has its stages — 10 stages in all if we are to refer to the list prepared by Dr Gregory Stanton, founding president and chairman of Genocide Watch, an organisation that does exactly what its name implies.

One of those stages is dehumanisation. This is an important one because committing genocide is not easy; murdering men, women and children in thousands tends to take a toll on the psyche, causing one to perhaps face all kinds of uncomfortable questions, to counter all manners of unwelcome thoughts that intrude into even the most closed of minds like single spies sneaking into a well-guarded fortress.

Those who pull the trigger on children, those who drop bombs on schools and hospitals, are after all presumably as humans as the ones they murder. How then, one wonders, do they sleep at night? How do they not see the blood on their hands every waking moment, like Lady Macbeth wandering the halls of the Dunsinane castle?

The answer is simple; you live with it by convincing yourself that those being killed are not in fact human, or at the very least not as human as you are.

Read the full story by Zarrar Khuhro here.