Genocide

Throughout history there have been attempts to destroy groups of human beings because of their race, religion, or nationality. However, until the twentieth century, no international body or document had adopted a formal legal definition of such concerted action. Attempts to develop humanitarian laws, including various treaties and the Geneva Conventions, focused on war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during times of war. Genocide as a legal concept has its origins in the Nazi barbarism of World War II (1939–1945). The Nazis' extermination of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, recognized by Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), prime Minister of Great Britain, as the "crime that has no name," caused the international community to recognize genocide as an international crime.

the holocaust

The ascension of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) to power in 1933 as the head of the National Socialist Party in Germany laid the foundation for the Holocaust and the death of over 11 million people. Nazi ideology , based on a belief in racial purity, declared the Aryan race to be the supreme race in the world. Skillfully using propaganda to demonize Jews as the cause of Germany's post-World War I (1914–1918) social and economic ills, the Nazis imposed laws and policies discriminating against Jews and, with adoption of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Jews were denied all rights of citizenship.

Initially the Nazis attempted to drive the Jewish population from Germany through pogroms , the destruction of Jewish communities, forced relocation to ghettos and labor camps, and forced emigration . Subsequently, Nazi leadership devised a "Final Solution" for the Jewish question, the use of liquidation squads and concentration camps as centers for mass murder. By World War II's end the Nazi regime had murdered over 6 million Jews.

In addition, the Nazis targeted other ethnic groups, nationalities, and persons considered social deviants: homosexuals, the mentally ill, and the physically disabled. Some sources have estimated that overall 3 million non-Jewish Poles, 500,000 Romani (gypsies), and thousands of those regarded as socially undesirable were killed in concentration camps. Poles not killed in the camps became forced laborers; many were sent to work in factories in Germany under conditions of extreme starvation and deprivation.

defining genocide

The term "genocide" was first used by Raphael Lemkin, an international law scholar, who had fled the Nazi occupation of Poland in 1939. Searching for a word to describe the organized destruction of racial, religious, or social groups, Lemkin coined the word genocide by combining the Greek genos (race or tribe) with the Latin-cide (killer or act of killing). Writing in 1944 during the height of the Holocaust, Lemkin in his seminal work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe identified genocide as any synchronized plan intended to eliminate a group of people by destroying the "essential foundations" of the life of that group.

Genocide was first officially recognized as a legal concept in the indictment of Nazi war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg in 1945. Count III of the war crimes indictment specifically addressed "deliberate and systematic genocide; viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian population of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people, and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies" (Article 6).

The legal concept of genocide was affirmed by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 1946 when it adopted Resolution 96(I) that described genocide as follows: "a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence … is contrary to moral law and to the spirits and aims of the United Nations." In 1948 the General Assembly unanimously adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which came into force in 1951 and has been ratified by 133 countries.

Article I of the Genocide Convention recognizes genocide, whether committed during times of war or peace, as a crime under international law. In Article II the Convention defines genocide as:

[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group…..

As such, the Convention created a category of international crime requiring three elements: (1) the commission of one of the four enumerated acts, (2) its direction against one of the specified groups; and (3) its specific intent to destroy that group in whole or in part.

Scholars, particularly social scientists, finding the legal definition too narrow, have also attempted to define genocide to assist in understanding how governments become involved in mass murder. Some well-known and frequently utilized examples of these definitions include the following:

Genocide is the successful attempt by a dominant group, vested with formal authority and/or with preponderant access to the overall resources of power, to reduce by coercion or lethal violence the number of a minority group whose ultimate extermination is held desirable … and whose respective vulnerability is a major factor. (Dadrian 1975, p. 201–202)

Genocide is a sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim. (Fein 1993, p.24)

Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator. (Jonassohn 1992, p. 19)

Unfortunately, even with an internationally recognized prohibition against genocide and increased attention by scholars to understanding the causes and dynamics of genocide as a prelude to preventing, or at a minimum reducing, its incidence, genocidal events still arose in the later part of the twentieth century and continue in the twenty-first.

other twentieth-century examples of genocide

In 1990 simmering political tensions in Rwanda erupted into civil war. A former Belgian colony, Rwandan society was divided into two primary social groups: the Hutu making up approximately 85 percent of the population and the Tutsi representing the other 15 percent. Historically the Tutsi had been politically privileged through a Tutsi monarchy and system of highly personal patron-client relationships known as ubuhake. The resulting social divisions were based more on the Tutsis' societal roles and occupational characteristics rather than their ethnic classification. However, Belgian colonial rule, in asserting a belief in the racial superiority of the Tutsi and instituting administrative policies that legitimized Tutsi rule, created an environment whereby social divisions began to be viewed along ethnic lines.

Hutu uprisings between 1959 and 1961 resulted in large-scale ethnic violence leading to the murder of 10,000 Tutsi and the flight of another 336,000 into exile. By 1990 it was estimated that between 600,000 and 700,000 Tutsi were in exile. Within Rwanda, a new Hutu elite institutionalized discrimination against the remaining Tutsi. In neighboring countries, Tutsi exile groups increased in militancy, became more organized, and in 1990 launched an invasion of Rwanda under the banner of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). During the next three years of civil war, the Rwandan government sponsored a series of massacres of Tutsi within the country. In 1993 the government and RPF signed a peace accord; almost immediately, however, the government began to train and arm radical Hutu militia . Simultaneously ethnic tensions between Tutsi and Hutu in neighboring Burundi erupted into fighting that led to ethnic massacres responsible for some 50,000 deaths. When a plane carrying the presidents of both Rwanda and Burundi was shot down in 1994, Rwandan military forces and radical Hutu militias began a murderous campaign, executing Tutsi and moderate Hutu throughout the country. Between 500,000 and a million people were killed during a four-month period (April through July of 1994).

cambodian genocide

Cambodia was the site of a tragic genocide between 1975 and 1979. Led by the despot Pol Pot (1925–1998), the Khmer Rouge (or Red Cambodians) came to power by overthrowing the weak and upopular government of Gen. Lon Nol (1913–1985), which had with the help of the United States overthrown the neutralist government of Prince Sihanouk (b. 1922). The Khmer Rouge tried to turn Cambodia into a self-contained Communist agrarian society. The country, which was renamed the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, is thought to have lost between one and two million people—perhaps as much as a quarter of its total population—during the purges, mass executions, and starvation that marked the four years of Pol Pot's rule.

Imitating Mao Tse-tung's policies of population relocation, Pol Pot forcibly emptied the major cities of Cambodia. The inhabitants were moved into rural areas at gunpoint and put to work in slave labor camps that came to be known as "killing fields." Many died there of disease, overwork, and malnutrition.

The country was also "purified" of Western influences. All foreigners were expelled; the use of foreign languages was forbidden; and newspapers, radio, and television stations were closed. Banks were closed, and money was abolished. Social groups that represented the "old" Cambodia, including anyone with higher education as well as Buddhist clergy and former government officials, were relentlessly purged. In addition, ethnic minorities, such as the Vietnamese and Chinese, were scheduled for elimination. It is estimated that half the ethnic Chinese living in Cambodia in 1975 died under the Khmer Rouge regime.

The genocide ended after the Vietnamese, in response to several years of Khmer Rouge provocation, as well as thousands of refugees coming over the border, invaded Cambodia in late 1978 and overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime. Pol Pot fled Cambodia in January 1979. He died in exile in Thailand in April 1998.

During this same time period, the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, formerly part of Yugoslavia, became the site of another genocide. Yugoslavia, created in World War I's aftermath, had within its borders numerous religious and ethnic groups driven by historical rivalries: In particular, enmity had long existed between Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Croats (Catholics), and ethnic Albanians (Muslims). Following the death of its communist leader, Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980), the country quickly became mired in political and economic chaos. By 1991 Yugoslavia had fragmented, with a number of republics announcing their independence. In response, the Yugoslav military dominated by Serbs under the control of Slodoban Milosevic (b. 1941), a nationalist who had gained power by inflaming religious hatred, invaded Croatia. During this invasion Serbs massacred hundreds of Croat men and buried them in mass graves. Although a cease-fire had been brokered by the end of 1991, a new crisis emerged when the United States and the European community formally recognized the independence of Bosnia. The capital of Bosnia, Sarajevo, soon came under attack by Serb forces. Moving through the country, in what came to be known as a campaign of "ethnic cleansing ," Serb forces rounded up local Muslims and perpetrated mass executions, rape, the forced depopulation of towns and villages, and imprisonment of men and boys in concentration camps. It is estimated that by the time a peace accord was reached in 1995, 200,000 Muslim Bosnians had been killed, more than 20,000 were missing, and over 2,000,000 persons had become refugees.

See also: Armenia; Bosnia and Herzegovina; Crimes Against Humanity; Ethnic Cleansing; Hitler, Adolf; International Criminal Court; Rwanda; War Crimes.

bibliography

Charny, Israel W. The Widening Circle of Genocide. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994.

Dadrian, Vahakn N. "A Typology of Genocide." International Review of Modern Sociology 5 (Fall 1975):201–212.

Fein, Helen. Genocide: A Sociological Perspective. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993.

Horowitz, Irving L. Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 4th ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997.

Indictment: Count Three. The Avalon Project. <http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/count3.htm>.

Jonassohn, Kurt. "What is Genocide?" In Genocide Watch, ed. Helen Fein. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2005.

Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, Volume 1, Article 6,

Prunier, Gerard. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Rummel, R. J. Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994.

Richard Janikowski