Genocide

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Genocide

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that “genocide is a crime under international law,” and “that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity.” This contradiction between a specific legal concept defined by an international convention and an eternal political and social phenomena characterizes both the global approach to genocide and the dilemmas it encounters.

DEFINING GENOCIDE

The concept of genocide was first voiced by a Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who worked tirelessly during World War II and in its immediate aftermath to achieve public recognition of this hideous crime. The impetus came from the wide recognition of the heinous crimes of the Nazi regime. Indeed, Lemkin quoted the British prime minister Winston Churchill, who described the killing of millions as “a crime without a name.” Lemkin responded by formulating the term genocide. His activism facilitated not only the recognition of the new concept but also the adoption of the Genocide Convention. Since then, writing about genocide has been divided between those who view it as a new phenomenon, largely an innovation of the Nazis in their extermination of the Jews, and those who view it as permanent phenomena that describes wars of extermination and ethnic cleansing throughout history.

The Genocide Convention (approved on December 9, 1948; came into force on January 12, 1951) states that:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

This is the only legal definition available, but it is inadequate. It diverges significantly from the daily use of the term, which views it as the ultimate crime and alludes to the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case and as a yardstick. The Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals marked the first time the crime of genocide was introduced into an international proceeding. There was a belief that a new type of crime had been committed by the Germans, and a new term was therefore needed. This obviously contradicts Lemkin’s own view that only the term was new, not the crime. This tension remains: Does genocide refer to an exceptional crime, or to a crime that occurs all too frequently, most often during war time? The cry of “Never Again,” made in reference to the Holocaust, points in the direction of exceptionalism, but the public discourse points in the other direction.

On the other end of the spectrum, according to the Genocide Convention, genocide can take place without any killing. Indeed, it states that genocide can occur through the removal of children from a particular group, if this is done as a way of destroying the future existence of the group. In Australia, the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families issued a report in 1995 titled Bringing Them Home (also known as the “Stolen Children” report). This report accused the Australian government of genocide not for killing Aborigines, but for the removal of their children. While this has been a controversial political issue in

Australia, such a definition of genocide diverges from the idea of mass killing that is generally conveyed by the term.

On the other hand, the definition in the Genocide Convention can be viewed as too narrow, for it excludes political motivations as grounds for genocide. In other words, the killing of members of a political group or economic class is not defined as genocide. Both the Soviet and the Chinese regimes killed tens of millions of people as part of political campaigns. Under the Convention, however, mass murder for political reasons is not considered genocide.

This dissonance between the popular and political use of the term and the legal definition of it is important because it obfuscates the demarcation of the concept itself. As a category, genocide describes the ultimate victimization of the group “as such.” The expansion of the concepts of “holocaust” and “genocide,” together with “ethnic cleansing,” to characterize all mass violence has led certain groups of victims to feel that their suffering—both historical and contemporary—has not receive adequate attention if they are not viewed as victims of genocide. Extensive atrocities have also been characterized as “gross violations of human rights” or “war crimes,” but these descriptions have not been embraced by the affected groups to describe their own suffering.

The list of those who argue that they are victims of genocide, and prosecutors’ efforts to indict offenders with the charge of genocide, make it all the more complicated. When a prosecutor in Mexico indicted a former president for ordering an attack on student demonstrators with charges of genocide, the inclusion in the UN definition of the phrase “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” argued against such a charge (the ex-President was cleared of the charges in 2006). There have been attempts within the United Nations (UN) (in conjunction with the claimed genocide in Darfur, Sudan) to rein in the definition by requiring that it include “the intention to destroy ‘a considerable number of individuals’ or ‘a substantial part,’” but the exact demarcation is further obscured by the introduction of the term ethnic cleansing, which was popularized during the 1990s, to describe the war in the former Yugoslavia,

The difficulty with such expansive usage is that it hinders the significance of the concept—intellectually, politically, morally, and in every other way. The force of naming particular crimes and violence as genocide, and its attractiveness to victims as a designation of their own case, is that genocide is perceived as the “crime of crimes.” But if the concept comes to designate every case of group violence, is it then cheapened or minimized? And should it therefore carry less severe consequences? In 2004 the UN Secretary General created the office of Special Advisor on Genocide Prevention. There is little doubt that the international community shares a consensus that genocide is a horrific crime that deserves special attention. The world is not as unified, however, on what should be included under the designation of “genocide.” In the spirit of Lemkin’s definition, which he illustrated by referring to occurrences throughout history, modern writers have listed numerous cases as genocide. Mindful of these extensive claims, and without attempting to arbitrate an agreed definition, several controversial aspects of the use of the term will be discussed here.

THE HOLOCAUST

The Holocaust was the momentous event during World War II when the Nazis almost succeeded in exterminating European Jewry and gypsies. The shock of the extermination and the concentration camps, and the view that the Nazis constituted the ultimate evil, enabled the postwar international community to agree on the Genocide Convention. As such, the Holocaust became the ultimate unique example of this crime. Uniqueness does not work as a comparative tool, and it is difficult to designate an event as both unique and a yardstick. And while there was an agreement that, in principle, there were other genocides, the debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust and of evilness of the Nazis coincided with the cold war, which meant that no mass murders, whether in a war or otherwise, were designated as genocides over the next four decades. Under the banner of “Never Again,” the international community was steadfast in refusing to label the killings in Bangladesh, Biafra, Cambodia, and other places as genocide, and they did little to stop the mass murder itself. Only in the aftermath of the cold war, when the bipolar international community became both plural and unipolar, and in the face of the killings in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, did the debate over the designation of genocide become integral to the international discourse.

The uniqueness of the Holocaust stemmed from the German goal of annihilating all Jewish persons because of their race. Because Jewishness was deemed to be a racial category, a Jew could not convert to be saved, and even those with only Jewish grandparents (and whose parents converted) were subject to annihilation. Furthermore, Germany directed significant resources to the destruction, which involved a vast system of government agencies and personnel, all conducted by a modern state. This was done in spite of the fact that the Jews did not present any concrete danger to Germany, even from a German perspective. The struggle was cosmic and mythological, aimed at ruling the world. It was fought between the Nazis and their imagined enemies constructed from antiSemitic propaganda. But real Jews were killed. The Holocaust shocked the world in part because of these bureaucratic and modern characteristics, but more so because it was directed at those who were, essentially, “people like us.” Europeans and Americans were used to stories of mass killings of “inferior” races and to mass murder during war, but the gassing of millions in cold blood was a novelty. The combination of ferocious racism and atrocities perpetrated by the common German created an incomprehensible aura.

In the early twenty-first century, the Holocaust is both unique and more integrated in world history. It is unique as the epitome of evil, and all other catastrophes and mass murders are measured against it. The Holocaust is comparable to other cases, because perpetrators of other genocides also tried to kill all the members of a specific group. That such a mass killing is irrational (e.g., in taking away resources from other goals) is the nature of genocide, not the exception. But more importantly, the growing number of studies comparing genocides teaches that each is different in its own way, and the question of uniqueness creates the appearance of ranking, which is bound to ruffle other groups. So the dilemma remains: While ranking is impossible, the politics of classifying genocide is crucial for the identity of victims.

OTHER INSTANCES OF GENOCIDE

The vast destruction of lives of indigenous peoples around the world as a result of the encounter with modernity is one of the most vexing in the dilemmas of designating a mass killing as genocide. On one side is the incontrovertible fact of the extensive destruction and death that befell the indigenous peoples. Furthermore, there is no doubt that racism motivated many of the policies that led to the devastation, and that the colonists in many places expected and hoped for the disappearance of the indigenous peoples. The “vanishing” indigenous group was a constant trope in descriptions of the frontier on every continent. However, the question remains whether the colonists acted “with intent to destroy,” or whether the violence and racism were separate from the expectations that the indigenous peoples would die, as a people, in the future, but not as a result of particular acts. The question becomes more complicated because of the tendency to discuss the destruction of indigenous peoples as a single event, rather than as widely spread phenomena that might have involved numerous genocides. In addition, perhaps the worst demographic destruction of indigenous peoples resulted from epidemics that nobody controlled. Here the tension between activist-historians and the legal definition of genocide is wide. This is an active field of scholarship, and much is changing in evaluating its history.

Armenia. Hitler famously said “Who remembers the Armenians?” when he contemplated the extermination of the Jews. The statement is repeatedly quoted to signal the crucial role of deterrence in avoiding future genocides, but it is also quoted as proof that the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey in 1915 was widely seen as the precedent for (and the first instance of) genocide in the twentieth century. In order to forget, one has to have knowledge that can be forgotten. But if the Armenian massacres were largely forgotten by the 1930s, an even earlier twentieth-century genocide also went unnoticed by the world, and it remained so until recently. This was the genocide perpetrated by German colonialists against the Herero, of South-West Africa (later known as Namibia). In an effort to capture the Herero’s land, the German army tried to annihilate the Herero, killing tens of thousands and expelling many others to the desert between 1904 and 1907.

The massacres of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire go back to the second half of the nineteenth century. But it was during World War I, against the background of a disintegrating empire with many Muslim refugees fleeing to Anatolia (the Asian portion of Turkey), primarily from the Balkans, that the massacre of a million Armenians throughout Asia Minor occurred (as well as that of other Christian minorities, such as the Assyrians and Chaldeans, who are rarely mentioned at all). In the days before the word genocide was invented, the world press wrote about the massacres, the expulsion, the long marches through the desert, and even the carnage of the war, all of which were singled out as constituting horrific crimes. The survivors attempted to rebuild their lives, many in the United States and France, but after the war, with the new Turkish republic flexing its political muscles, attempted trials of the leaders responsible for the crime were aborted. Mass ethnic cleansing (or “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey) overshadowed any active involvement with the Armenian suffering; the Armenian suffering was set aside and ceased to be a burning issue. Only in the last generation has the memory of the Armenian genocide resurfaced and become a defining political issue for Turkey. Amid the nation’s efforts to legitimize itself in Europe as an European Union (EU) member, the killing of the Armenians has become a symbol of the difficulties of domestic democratization. In the early twenty-first century, many around the world accept the designation of the events as genocide, while official Turkey sees this as a manifestation of anti-Turkish policies. The civil society in Turkey, meanwhile, views reconciliation with Armenia and the recognition of historical responsibility for the destruction of the Armenian community as an essential step in the democratization of Turkey.

Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia. During the 1990s, the genocide in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia gripped public attention. The failure of the international community to intervene in a timely fashion enabled the Serbs to perpetrate the first genocide in postwar Europe when seven thousand Muslim males were murdered in July 1995 in Srebrenica. In this case, the International Tribunal designated the murder as genocide, though the war in its totality was not so designated. In Rwanda, the mass killing of the Tutsis by the Hutus was stopped only when the Tutsis defeated the Hutus. The response of the UN was to authorize a tribunal post facto. Both of these cases were fresh on politicians’ minds when the Serb expulsion of Kosovars in 1999 was met with a NATO military response that may well have stopped genocidal acts. These precedents had little effect in Africa, and particularly in Sudan’s Darfur region, where in 2004 the United States determined that genocide was taking place. The United States did not intervene, however, and a UN investigation avoided the use of the term genocide because no “intent” on the part of the perpetrators could be established. The report was very specific in clarifying international law with regard to genocide, and it expanded the groups subject to the Genocide Convention beyond named groups to those with “the self-perception of the members of each group.” The report attempted to skirt the primacy of genocide as the “crime of crimes” because, as the Rwanda

tribunal determined, “there is no such hierarchical gradation of crimes.” The report argued that “some categories of crimes against humanity may be similarly heinous [to genocide] and carry a similarly grave stigma.” This form of normalization of genocide, making it comparable to other grave crimes, may be the wave of the future. This would be a shift from the special status accorded to genocide by the UN in the Genocide Convention.

The tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia and the new International Criminal Court are all addressing the crime of genocide, and their determinations will define the nature of genocide in international law in the future. The political nature of responding to genocides, and the failure of the international community to address the crisis in Darfur, or even to agree upon whether it is genocide or not, has placed the Genocide Convention under great stress. While the punishment of genocide through the tribunals has been extremely expensive and inefficient—few were brought to justice and a sense of impunity is widespread—the capacity to prevent genocide is even weaker. Not only is the Convention vague about prevention (Article VIII enables any party to bring a case before the UN), the lack of prevention is viewed as indirectly encouraging more atrocities.

Genocide has become a fixture of modernity, both as the ultimate crime against a group and as the identity marker of a group’s victimization. One would like to imagine that “Never Again” will someday be transformed from a slogan to a policy. But skepticism is justified. Can memory of genocide lead to reconciliation? The recounting of history has been exploited to provoke conflict, incite war, and inflame genocides, particularly since the end of the Cold War. Can it also be drawn upon to facilitate reconciliation? The narration of genocide may be as important as the policies that governments pursue in determining whether this will be the case.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akçam, Taner. 2004. From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Genocide. London and New York: Zed Books.

Andreopoulos, George J., ed. 1994. Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bartov, Omer, ed. 2000. The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation and Aftermath. London and New York: Routledge.

Courtois, Stéphane, and Mark Kramer. 1999. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.

Fein, Helen. 1990. Genocide: A Sociological Perspective. London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.

Gellately, Robert, and Ben Kiernan, eds. 2003. The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Marrus, Michael Robert. 1987. The Holocaust in History. Hanover, NH: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1987.

Power, Samantha. 2002. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books.

Schabas, William A. 2000. Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes. Cambridge, U.K. and New York: Cambridge University Press.

United Nations. 2005. Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-Genera, Geneva, 25 January 2005. Geneva: United Nations.

Weitz, Eric D. 2003. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Elazar Barkan

Encyclopedia of Race and Racism