Chapter 36: Genocide

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A basic definition of genocide could be: mass-murder on a huge scale; the planned and systematic elimination of an entire racial, ethnic, religious, cultural or national group.

A rather longer legal definition is that adopted by the United Nations: “Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The above is pretty broad, so pinning down exactly what we mean by genocide is half the battle in this area. At heart, the act – and intent – of genocide has existed for millennia, ever since tribal groups of humans first started hacking each other apart to assert dominance over each other and making sure the defeated party didn’t come back for vengeance later. However, the concept wasn’t defined, and didn’t have a name, until the mid-20th Century.

In 1941, as reports of the targeted mass murder of Jewish people by Nazi troops during World War II began to emerge, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to what was happening in Europe as “a crime without a name”. The term ‘genocide’ was defined in 1944 – as the full extent of the Holocaust started to become clear – a combination of the Greek word ‘genos’ (family, tribe or race) and the Latin word ‘cide’ (killing). The term was recognised by the United Nations as an international crime as early its first session in 1946 and the Genocide Convention was adopted by the U.N in 1948 following the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals for crimes against humanity.

However, it was 50 years after the adoption of the Genocide Convention that the first genocide prosecutions began to take place, concerning the Srebrenica Genocide during the Yugoslav Wars, and the Rwanda Genocide – both in the mid-1990s. I’ll go into these atrocities in greater detail in a later post. This long gap was in part caused by the long delay in the Genocide Convention’s adoption by U.N Security Council permanent members the USSR, the UK and the USA, the latter not becoming a signatory until 1988. This wait essentially caused the status of genocide as an international crime to languish inactive for decades. Widespread dissatisfaction with the Convention exists to this day, one major criticism being that while it enables retrospective prosecution for acts of genocide, there are insufficient mechanisms to intervene in genocides as they happen – as was the case in Rwanda.

More recently, there has been much debate over categorising as genocide events in the ongoing War in Darfur. The Darfur conflict began in 2003, the situation being described by observers as genocide as early as 2004 following a government campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Darfur’s non-Arabs. However, the U.N at that time only expressed a ‘risk’ of genocide. In 2005, the U.N referred the situation to the International Criminal Court and, in 2008, charges were filed against militia leaders, politicians, and the President of Sudan Omar al-Bashir, with an arrest warrant issued in 2009 on counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity – but with insufficient evidence of genocide. Sudan is not a signatory to the statute establishing the International Criminal Court and does not, therefore, recognise the legitimacy of his arrest warrant. Al Bashir remains the President of Sudan, has yet to be arrested, and is yet to come to trail. There’s much more to be said on this, which again I’ll cover in a future blog.

On genocide, the academic Gregory Stanton has identified eight specific stages in an attempt to recognise the first steps towards genocide and to limit its potential development:

1) Classification (dividing specific groups into ‘us’ and ‘them’)
2) Symbolisation (assigning derogatory names or symbols to represent specific groups)
3) Dehumanisation (equating specific groups with animals, vermin, insects or diseases)
4) Organisation (assigning units or militias to police specific groups)
5) Polarisation (disseminating propaganda against specific groups)
6) Preparation (forcibly separating specific groups from the wider collective)
7) Extermination
8) Denial

The first and third of these are concerning – and timely – reminders to keep our guard up given the recent rise of Islamophobia in the west, and even more recent media coverage concerning migrants and refugees trying to escape the war in Syria to get to Europe. Any labels or actions that divide us as humans are the start of a slippery slope – a slope we have fallen on only occasionally in recent years, but a slope on which each and every one of us still stands.

To learn more about International Law, jump to Chapter 109: International Law – content to follow

To learn more about the Rwanda Genocide, jump to Chapter 110: Rwanda Genocide – content to follow

To learn more about the War in Darfur, jump to Chapter 111: War in Darfur – content to follow

To learn more about the Yogoslav Wars, jump to Chapter 112: Yugoslav Wars – content to follow

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