GENOCIDE.

Mass slaughter of human beings by other human beings has been a recurrent phenomenon over the centuries, but until recently neither governments nor international legal specialists had sought to devise formal rules and institutions that could help prevent, or if necessary punish, the perpetrators of large-scale atrocities. Massacres that took place during and immediately after World War I, when Turks killed hundreds of thousands of Armenians, and the systematic annihilation of millions of Jews and hundreds of thousands of Gypsies (Roma) by Nazi Germany during World War II, gave rise to the concept of genocide, which is defined by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group." Scholars have differed in their analyses of the concept, but the most widely accepted understanding of genocide pertains to the deliberate slaughter of vast numbers of human beings.

Origins and Evolution of the Concept

The term genocide was coined in the mid-1940s by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a lawyer of Polish Jewish origin who escaped from Poland after the Nazis occupied it in September 1939. Lemkin fled to Lithuania and then to Sweden before eventually reaching the United States in April 1941. In November 1944 he published a lengthy book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which exhaustively documented the legal basis of the Nazis' policies of mass extermination, deportations, and slave labor. The book is best remembered nowadays for Lemkin's use of the new word genocide. He settled on that term after much deliberation and defined it as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves." Because the word became indelibly associated with the Nazi Holocaust, it promptly gained wide currency as the standard by which to judge human destructiveness. Lemkin himself, however, never believed that the term should refer only to carnage and atrocities of the magnitude perpetrated by the Nazis against Jews. He wanted it to encompass all attempts to destroy cultural or ethnic identities, regardless of whether the perpetrators were seeking to exterminate every member of the targeted group.

From the time Lemkin's book appeared, the term genocide has stirred controversy both in the public arena and among scholars. Lawyers, scholars, and political leaders have differed over the scope and nature of the crimes involved. Some, like Lemkin, have sought as broad a definition as possible, not limiting it to large-scale killing. Others, including many prominent historians and political scientists, have advocated a more restrictive definition, focusing on clear-cut cases of mass slaughter and attempts at systematic extermination. Still others have questioned whether genocide necessarily requires the targeting of a specific cultural, ethnic, racial, or linguistic group. Scholars who express reservations about this last point have argued that if genocide depends on the targeting of a particular cultural or ethnic group, slaughters such as those perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1977–1978—with a death toll as high as 1.5 million—would not be covered. By the same token, many of the atrocities committed in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin or in China under Mao Zedong would not be classed as genocide if the target had to be a specific ethnic or cultural group. Although Stalin did carry out mass deportations of nationalities in the 1930s and 1940s, most of his other violent abuses, affecting tens of millions of people, were not directed against ethnic groups per se. The same is true of most of the slaughters and systematic atrocities perpetrated in China under Mao. By excluding many of the worst abuses and crimes of the twentieth century, the requirement of a targeted cultural or ethnic group has arguably been the most controversial aspect of the concept of genocide.

To help fill these crucial gaps, Barbara Harff and Ted R. Gurr have argued that the concept of politicide should supplement genocide. Politicide, as Harff and Gurr define it, refers to the killing of groups of people who are targeted not because of shared ethnic or communal traits, but because of "their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups" (p. 360). Similarly, Rudolph Rummel has suggested that the term democide could cover all intentional killing of unarmed civilians by governments. According to Rummel, democide includes the slaughter of cultural and ethnic groups, the massacring of politically marginal groups, and all other government-sponsored killing of unarmed civilians. The concept has come under criticism for being too amorphous, but Rummel has sought to refine it in a number of books. Although neither "politicide" nor "democide" has been widely adopted by other scholars, the coinage of these terms highlights the continuing dissatisfaction with the term genocide.

One other issue that has sparked occasional disagreement is whether genocide must be deliberate from the start. This question has been most often raised in analyses of devastating famines such as the one that occurred in southern regions of the Soviet Union in 1932–1933 or in Ireland in the 1840s. The Soviet famine, which killed as many as four million Ukrainians, a million Russians, and a million Kazakhs, resulted from policies adopted by Stalin to crush the Soviet peasantry and to force the collectivization of agriculture. Some scholars, such as Nicolas Werth and Andrea Gnaziosi, have argued that even if Stalin did not set out to kill so many people, the famines were the inevitable result of his policies. They also have pointed out that when Stalin learned that vast numbers of people were dying of starvation, he took steps to keep peasants from escaping the affected regions, thereby consigning them to certain death.

The Soviet famine has come up particularly often in discussions of genocide because of what some writers, such as Robert Conquest, perceive as the deliberate targeting of Ukrainians (though it should be noted that, proportionally, more Kazakhs than Ukrainians died in the famine). Other specialists such as Jean-Louis Margolin have argued that even when famines do not affect concentrated ethnic or cultural groups, the deaths may still amount to genocide. Among the examples cited by those who subscribe to this view are the terrible famines in China in the late 1950s that resulted from Mao's Great Leap Forward policies. Although Mao undoubtedly did not foresee that the Great Leap Forward would cause tens of millions of people to die of starvation, he failed to take any remedial action even when he became aware of the scale of the suffering. Hence, scholars such as Margolin have argued that the death toll during the Great Leap Forward should be added to the millions of other victims whom Mao deliberately set out to kill.

The Genocide Convention

Revelations at the end of World War II about the scale of the Nazi Holocaust spurred an effort within the newly created United Nations (UN) to set up an international legal convention that would prohibit genocide and require signatory governments to take all necessary steps to prevent or halt it. Although political leaders were initially slow in moving on the issue, Lemkin did his best to keep the issue on the UN's agenda. He repeatedly called on the world's governments to establish a legal framework that would apply to all acts of genocide, not just to those committed during interstate wars. In December 1946 the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution denouncing genocide as "the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups" and describing it as "contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations." The resolution also set up a committee to draft an international treaty that would formally outlaw genocide. The result, after protracted and often arduous negotiations, was the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was approved by the UN General Assembly on a 55-to-0 vote in December 1948. The Genocide Convention was slated to enter into force after twenty of the fifty-five UN member-states that voted in favor of it submitted their formal instruments of ratification. Although some signatories of the convention, notably the United States, took many years before they ratified it, ratification by the twentieth country was completed in October 1950, allowing the convention to take effect in January 1951.

The Genocide Convention defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." In giving examples of the type of "acts" encompassed by this phrasing, the convention makes clear that genocide can occur even if no one has carried out (or intends to carry out) "mass killings." The definition in the convention is largely in keeping with Lemkin's own preference for the broadest possible scope. It also is in keeping with Lemkin's belief that genocide is targeted against an ethnic, religious, or racial group, and that the motives of the perpetrators are irrelevant. Although the convention stipulates that genocide is deliberate and purposeful (reflected in the phrase "intent to destroy") and includes "conspiracy to commit genocide" and "incitement to commit genocide" as well as the destruction itself, it does not require the signatories to determine why the perpetrators are seeking to wipe out the targeted group. Under the convention, genocide can occur irrespective of motive, in peacetime or in war.

The long delay in U.S. ratification of the Genocide Convention stemmed in part from domestic political maneuvering, but it also reflected continued disagreements among lawyers and politicians about the concept of genocide. Some U.S. senators were concerned, especially during the Korean War and the Vietnam War, that U.S. officials might come under frivolous accusations of genocide. Others worried that if the United States formally adhered to the convention, the government would be obligated to send military forces to distant countries to enforce it. Not until February 1986—nearly four decades after the convention was signed—did the U.S. Senate vote 83 to 11 in favor of ratification, albeit with a list of "reservations" in the resolution of ratification. It took another two years before Congress passed legislation that actually implemented the convention by making genocide a crime under U.S. law. Moreover, even after the ratification was approved (with reservations), U.S. officials and legislators continued to debate such matters as the scope of the convention and the means of enforcement. One of the ironies of the convention, as demonstrated during the mass killing in Rwanda in 1994, is that U.S. and other Western leaders have been reluctant to enforce it. As a result, they have refrained from using the term genocide to describe even flagrant instances of systematic killing and large-scale atrocities.

Some observers, notably Samantha Power in her prizewinning book on U.S. policy toward genocide in the twentieth century, have argued that U.S. leaders would be more inclined to enforce the convention if they knew they would be held accountable for failing to uphold it. Short of some action by Congress, however, there are few if any ways to ensure that presidents will faithfully implement the convention. Thus far, Congress has not tried to hold the president or other senior foreign policy officials accountable for preventing or punishing genocide. On the contrary, many in Congress have shared the executive branch's reluctance to send troops to enforce the Genocide Convention. (Although the convention was not invoked by the administration of U.S. president Bill Clinton when it decided to bomb Serbia in 1999 to curb human rights abuses in Kosovo, some specialists argued that the convention was in fact relevant. Yet, congressional support for even that limited use of force was meager.) Power maintains that the calculus of U.S. officials on this matter will not be altered unless they are held "publicly or professionally accountable for inaction" (p. 510).

Persistent Controversies and Ambiguities

The concept of genocide has remained a source of disagreement not only in the political arena, but also among legal scholars, historians, and political scientists. Although most scholars accept the view that genocide is targeted against a particular group, many have sought to expand the criteria for identifying particular groups. Rather than limiting the potential victims to ethnic and cultural groups, scholars such as Helen Fein and Leo Kuper have argued that genocide can also be directed against political or socioeconomic groups. This broadening of the concept is in line with Harff's and Gurr's concept of politicide, but it departs from the criteria laid out in the Genocide Convention. Some specialists, however, find even the broader conception of targeted groups to be still insufficient. In particular, Rummel has argued that the requirement for victims to be members of a group is a fatal drawback for those who want to take account of the full range of government-sponsored killing of unarmed civilians. Most scholars readily agree that genocide, if conceived of as directed against groups, leaves out many instances of slaughter and atrocities, but they still find the concept a useful one for describing a particular form of extreme abuse.

Even as scholars have generally expanded the range of potential victims of genocide, they have tended to move in the opposite direction when discussing the nature and scale of acts that fit under the rubric of genocide. In recent years, relatively few historians and political scientists have used the expansive definition of acts of genocide laid out in the Genocide Convention (in accord with Lemkin's preferences). The trend in the 1990s and early twenty-first century has generally been toward a more restrictive definition—a definition that limits acts of genocide to intentional killing of particular groups. Steven T. Katz, for example, has argued that "the concept of genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent, however successfully carried out, to physically destroy an entire group (as such a group is defined by the perpetrators)" (p. viii), and Mark Kramer has defined genocide as "deliberate mass slaughter aimed at complete extermination." (p. 2). Although some scholars continue to espouse a much broader definition of acts of genocide (a definition that would include such things as mass slavery, restrictions on cultural practices, discriminatory education policies, and limits on travel), the narrower conceptions have tended to win favor in the scholarly community.

Outside the scholarly community, however, genocide has remained an expansive concept. Many advocacy groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Genocide Watch, have sought to broaden, not restrict, the definition of acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention. They also have tried to strengthen the means of enforcing the convention. These groups vigorously supported efforts in the 1990s to establish international criminal tribunals to investigate and prosecute mass atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. They also strongly backed the ultimately successful campaign to set up an International Criminal Court (ICC), which was created under a statute signed in Rome in July 1998. Although the United States and China declined to take part in the ICC, enough other governments ratified the Rome Statute to enable the ICC to begin functioning in mid-2002.

The human rights NGOs have been less successful, however, in their attempts to persuade Western governments to enforce the Genocide Convention more rigorously. No governments adhering to the convention were willing to brand as genocide the mass atrocities committed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, against Kurds, marsh Arabs, and Iraqi Shiites. Nor were any Western governments willing to regard the mass killing in Bosnia-Hercegovina in the first half of the 1990s as genocide. Even during the slaughter of some 800,000 people (predominantly Tutsis) by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, Western governments carefully refrained from using the term genocide to describe what was going on. Officials worried that the mere use of the term would obligate them to send troops to put an end to the killing.

The unwillingness of governments to invoke the Genocide Convention in response to the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 or to the systematic atrocities perpetrated by government-backed Arab militias in the Darfur region of western Sudan in 2004 underscored the limits of both the convention and the ICC. In the absence of a concerted effort by parties to the convention to enforce it, debates about the precise scope and nature of acts of genocide are largely irrelevant. The special international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the ICC have no means of enforcing their own rulings; instead, like all international organizations, they depend entirely on individual states for enforcement. The Genocide Convention, as Lemkin recognized from the outset, is little more than a paper document unless the signatories are willing to take concrete steps to prevent mass killing and to punish the perpetrators. In a few instances, states have sent military forces to put an end to egregious human rights abuses, as Vietnam did in Cambodia in 1978 and Tanzania did in Uganda in 1979. In both of these cases, the interventions were only partly motivated by humanitarian concerns, but there is no doubt that the actions, whatever their motive, did put an end to systematic atrocities. Nonetheless, these incidents were rare exceptions. The most powerful countries, including the United States and other permanent members of the UN Security Council, have been averse to intervening abroad solely to uphold the Genocide Convention.

Despite the problems in enforcing the Genocide Convention, the document has had a notable influence on international politics. In large part through Lemkin's efforts and the widespread revulsion at the atrocities perpetrated by Nazi Germany, the convention not only attached a permanent stigma to the crime of genocide, but also helped ensure that governments could not simply brush it aside as an "internal affair" of a sovereign state. The convention made clear that unless a government lived up to certain minimum standards of conduct vis-à-vis its own citizens, that government could potentially be removed and punished by other states. No longer would sovereignty be an insuperable barrier against international action. Moving from this principle to concrete enforcement has not yet been practical, but the establishment of the principle itself has been a crucial step on the road toward more effective international responses to genocide.

See also Human Rights ; International Order ; Race and Racism ; State, The ; War .

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Mark Kramer