Tech Central Station
Aug 2 2004
Genocide: Not to Be Alleged Lightly
By Stephen Schwartz Published 08/02/2004
Genocide is a big word; much bigger than it might at first appear to be.
The term did not exist until the aftermath of the Second World War,
when it was coined in reaction to the Nazi attempt to physically
eliminate millions of European Jews as well as to enslave and
culturally degrade whole populations of Slavs, and wipe out Gypsy and
other minorities. It was legally defined by the United Nations in the
1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
The definition is specific:
“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.”
It had other precedents, even before the rise of Nazism. The mass
deportations of Armenians from eastern Turkey to Syria, during the
first world war, constituted a genocide. While few in the West
understand it, Koreans see the campaign by Japan to wipe out their
culture, in the decades when it ruled over their peninsula,
similarly; Koreans were forced to take Japanese names at birth, and
were routinely massacred by their overlords. Japan is also accused of
genocidal crimes by the Chinese. Joseph Stalin committed genocide
when he induced a famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, resulting in millions
of dead. Nikita S. Khrushchev, who eventually succeeded him, said
Stalin would have sent all the Ukrainians to the gulag, but there
were too many of them.
Nazi Germany and imperialist Japan were not the only Axis powers to
engage in genocidal practices. Fascist Italy, although reluctant to
adopt Nazi anti-Jewish policies, sought the expulsion of hundreds of
thousands of Slovenes and Croats and their replacement by Italian
colonists in territories it occupied on the eastern Adriatic coast.
The threatened Slavs then joined the Tito Partisans en masse.
But the Ustasha regime in Croatia, a puppet state whose domain was
divided between Germans and Italians, was busy carrying out its own
murderous assault on the large Serb minority in Croatia and
Bosnia-Hercegovina The result was an uprising in July 1941, about
which the Bosnian historian Enver Redzic, of Muslim origin, has
written, “The establishment of the Independent State of Croatia under
the protection of German and Italian occupying forces was accompanied
by systematic pogroms against the Serbian population throughout the
entire Croatian territory. Bosnia-Hercegovina was transformed into a
slaughterhouse in which unbridled hatred raged against Serbs. The
outbreak of rebellion could not have been prevented by any military
force or by the threat of wholesale extermination.”
Stalin imitated the Nazis during the second world war by liquidating
thousands of Polish officers and deporting entire nations from the
Caucasus, mainly Muslims – thus wiping out half of the Ingushes and
some 40 percent of the Chechens. This partially explains bad
Chechen-Russian relations today.
Political Charges
Large-scale slayings of Armenians, Koreans, Jews, Chinese, Slavs,
Caucasian Muslims, and others were immense, bloody undertakings that
deeply stained the 20th century. But the term “genocide” was, almost
from the time it was introduced, also abused for political purposes.
In 1951, American Communists, pushed by the Soviets to paint the
United States as a fascist regime, declared “We Charge Genocide!” in
a petition to the UN, alleging that denial of African-American civil
rights was equal in evil to Nazism. One would never have imagined,
reading such absurd rhetoric, that President Harry Truman, then in
office, had ordered the desegregation of the U.S. military. Truman’s
civil rights platform enraged the southern white leadership in the
Democratic party, leading to their separate “Dixiecrat” presidential
campaign in 1948. But the Soviets and their agents were hardly
sticklers for consistency in propaganda.
Still, the lesson was learned by “progressives” – “genocide” was a
word that could be thrown around at will. I distinctly remember a day
in 1983 in San Francisco when I heard a leftist mob, protesting U.S.
policy toward Nicaragua, happily chanting, in the merriest of voices,
“Ronald Reagan, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” The
upbeat, buoyant tone of the chorused allegation unintentionally
undermined its seriousness, and made the term “genocide” seem
ridiculously trivial.
Genocide in Mexico?
But genocide is not frivolous, and Mexican judge Julio Cesar Flores
reaffirmed its seriousness on July 24, when he refused to charge
former president Luis Echeverría Alvarez, who ruled Mexico from 1970
to 1976, with that crime.
Echeverría, or LEA as he was universally known, was a stalwart of the
Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, which ran Mexico as a de
facto one-party state from 1928 to 2000. In truth, it would be absurd
to minimize the crimes of the PRI-ocracy, especially after it began
abandoning its populist and reforming legacy, with the election of
president Manuel Avila Camacho in 1940. By 1946, and the presidency
of Miguel Alemán Valdés – since 1934 Mexican presidential terms are
limited to six years, without the right of reelection – the party and
its leaders swam in corruption. Mexico’s élite benefited fabulously
from the country’s trade with the U.S. during the second world war.
Mexico’s poor remained poor, or came north across the border, legally
or illegally.
PRI rule was a kind of Sovietism without class ideology, although the
PRI’s claim to represent the “brown” indigenous masses of the country
also made it resemble fascism. The PRI bought off the entire leftist
intellectual class by providing them with government positions
requiring no work. The corruption of the intelligentsia was so
extensive that when, after of the horrific massacre of leftist
students in Tlaltelolco Plaza, in Mexico City in 1968, the poet
Octavio Paz resigned from his ambassadorship in India, few of his
peers believed he was serious. Paz was sincere in his protest, but
for other Mexican writers it was simply impossible to imagine life
without PRI patronage.
The PRI kept its grip on the working class through its system of
state labor unions, and on the peasants, consumers, and indigenous
groups through parallel “people’s” organizations, while also
maintaining rigid control of education and repression of the Catholic
church. The price of dissent in PRI-ocratic Mexico was steep.
Striking workers, discontented peasants, and rebellious indigenous
communities were all susceptible to the punishment meted out to the
student left in Tlaltelolco on the evening of October 2, 1968: the
murder of hundreds of demonstrators, whose bodies were removed and
buried secretly.
The next day the Mexican government daily Excelsior reported that
just after 6 p.m., the Plaza of the Three Cultures was lit up by two
flares, and gunfire “poured from all sides, from the top of a
building of the Unidad Tlaltelolco as well as from the street, where
military forces in light tanks and armoured vehicles fired machine
gun volleys almost without interruption… Three hundred tanks, assault
units, jeeps, and military trucks had surrounded the entire zone…
they permitted nobody to enter or leave unless they could satisfy a
rigorous identity check.”
The atrocity was ordered by then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, and
coordinated by Echeverría, who served him as secretary of the
interior, with responsibility for the maintenance of internal order.
Indeed, Echeverría was the “tapado” or “hidden one,” the PRI-ocratic
successor personally chosen by Díaz Ordaz, whom he replaced two years
later. In 1971, Echeverría summoned gangs of thugs to attack student
leftists in the streets of Mexico City, leaving some dozens dead.
The charge of genocide, which current Mexican special prosecutor
Ignacio Carrillo sought to bring against Echeverría, was based on the
1971 events and drawn under a 1967 Mexican statute.
Nobody doubts the responsibility of Echeverría in either atrocity.
But the PRI itself asks if a genocide accusation would not represent
a form of political revenge by the post-2000 administration of
Vicente Fox. Fox is the leader of the National Action Party or PAN, a
Catholic movement that labored under political restrictions for many
years, and to which even many disfranchised leftists, who sprang from
the people and not the élite, turned for succor against the
PRI-ocracy. Fox is the first non-PRI chief executive in Mexico in
more than 70 years. (Most of his immediate predecessors are better
designated “thief executive,” like President Carlos Salinas, who
ruled from 1988 and 1994, and whose brother organized at least one
political assassination while he was in office. President Salinas
fled to Ireland, but eventually returned to Mexico.)
The greatest irony of Echeverría’s history is that even while he
spilled the blood of his fellow-citizens on the hot pavements of the
Mexican capital, he presented himself to the world as a
“progressive,” a friend of the Palestine Liberation Organization no
less than of Fidel Castro, whose government Mexico long supported as
evidence of its independence from its powerful northern neighbor.
When Salvador Allende’s socialist regime fell in Chile in 1973,
Echeverría took in hundreds of radical refugees from the South
American republic. Yet perhaps that was no irony at all, since most
leftist rulers – the kind-hearted Allende having been an exception –
have shown brutal yearnings, if not habits, in office.
But… genocide?
The Milosevic Comparison
Here is how the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for genocide in
Bosnia-Hercegovina read, at his trial before the International
Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague:
“COUNTS 1 and 2
“GENOCIDE OR COMPLICITY IN GENOCIDE
“From on or about 1 March 1992 until 31 December 1995, Slobodan
MILOSEVIC, acting alone or in concert with other members of the joint
criminal enterprise, planned, instigated, ordered, committed or
otherwise aided and abetted the planning, preparation and execution
of the destruction, in whole or in part, of the Bosnian Muslim
national, ethnical, racial or religious groups, as such, in
territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina…. The destruction of
these groups was effected by:
“a. The widespread killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims during and
after the take-over of territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina…
In many of the territories, educated and leading members of these
groups were specifically targeted for execution, often in accordance
with pre-prepared lists. After the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995,
almost all captured Bosnian Muslim men and boys, altogether several
thousands, were executed at the places where they had been captured
or at sites to which they had been transported for execution.
“b. The killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in detention
facilities within Bosnia and Herzegovina…
“c. The causing of serious bodily and mental harm to thousands of
Bosnian Muslims during their confinement in detention facilities
within Bosnia and Herzegovina… Members of these groups, during
their confinement in detention facilities and during their
interrogation at these locations, police stations and military
barracks, were continuously subjected to, or forced to witness,
inhumane acts, including murder, sexual violence, torture and
beatings.
“d. The detention of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in detention
facilities within Bosnia and Herzegovina… under conditions of life
calculated to bring about the partial physical destruction of those
groups, namely through starvation, contaminated water, forced labour,
inadequate medical care and constant physical and psychological
assault.”
Milosevic has yet to be judged, and the opponents of U.S.
intervention to save the Bosnian Muslims, as well as Serb
nationalists and others who have made themselves his defenders for
reasons of their own, typically challenge the Hague indictment. But
the whole world knows what Milosevic did, and what genocide is. To
apply that word to the ordinary habits of corrupt Mexico under the
PRI is to devalue the term and dishonor both groups of victims – the
many millions of dead at the hands of Nazis, Stalinists, Serb
extremists and others, and the too-numerous corpses piled up by the
PRI-ocracy. Mexican judge Flores acted correctly in rejecting the
indictment of ex-president Echeverría.