AllAfrica. com
Feb 8 2005

Deadly Semantics

Sunday Times (Johannesburg)

OPINION
February 7, 2005
Posted to the web February 7, 2005

Andrew Donaldson
Johannesburg

If a United Nations report can decree, just days after Holocaust
Memorial Day, that the killing of tens of thousands of people in
Darfur did not amount to genocide, then what does it mean to say
‘Never again’? asks Andrew Donaldson

‘China wants the country’s oil and Russia wants to sell it weapons.
Africans will die, bluntly speaking, so their businessmen may profit’

THEY gathered at Auschwitz in the bitter cold as a light snow fell on
the crematoriums, the dark rows of huts, the barbed wire, the guard
towers and the railway sidings. Among the dignitaries were world
leaders and, of course, the frail and elderly survivors of that
horror in southern Poland – all commemorating the 60th anniversary of
the Nazi death camp’s liberation.

The media was there, too, and, amid the reflections and the
recollections of the Holocaust, one particular phrase, uttered by
politicians that day, once more, via newspaper headlines and
broadcast sound bites, made its way into our collective
consciousness: “Never again”.

Now, as ever, the blunt intention was abundantly clear: Evil like
this, and the ideology from which it stemmed, shall no longer be
allowed or tolerated in our world; that active, forceful measures
shall be taken to prevent its reappearance; and that those who
transgress in this regard shall be punished. So it was written in the
United Nations Convention on Genocide, adopted in 1948 and which came
into effect in 1951.

And yet, this week a definition over what is “genocide” has emerged
as a bitter and essentially pointless source of tension between the
US and the UN.

The context is Darfur, the victims Africans. In July last year, a US
state report found evidence of genocide in the oil-rich region where
the Sudanese government and its militia, the Janjaweed, have murdered
about 70 000 people, although there is no official confirmation of
this figure. Almost two million others have been driven from their
homes and villages in a merciless campaign of ethnic cleansing that
began in earnest in 2003. The then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell
endorsed the US’s position.

However, a UN report released just days after Holocaust Memorial Day
has ruled otherwise – thus freeing the international community, or
the 96 countries which had ratified the Genocide Convention at least,
from a legal and binding obligation to bring to a swift end the
killings there and to punish the perpetrators.

Drawn up by a five-member commission of inquiry, led by Italy’s Judge
Antonio Cassesse, who was the first president of the International
Criminal Court (ICC), the report found that the raiders of Darfur, in
their “indiscriminate attacks” and “killing of civilians, enforced
disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of
sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement throughout Darfur”
have not intentionally pursued “a policy of genocide”.

The semantics become all the more confusing when one turns to the
convention for its definition of genocide. The definition in 1948
stated that genocide could be “any of the following acts committed
with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic,
racial or religious group 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 destruction in whole or in part; steps intended to prevent births
within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to
another group”.

Nevertheless, the panel’s report has pleased Khartoum, which quickly
leaked it. Washington and its supporters are dismayed; as an
editorial in the Chicago Tribune claimed: “It’s as if the [UN] is
saying, ‘Never again? Never mind.’ ”

But Cassesse’s panel did recommend that the atrocities in Darfur be
investigated by the ICC. And, should that happen, it may well find
that genocidal acts had taken place and that some individuals may
have acted with “genocidal intent”.

Here, though, is more confusion. The Bush administration vehemently
opposes the ICC in principle and practice, and has negotiated
agreements with dozens of countries that they will not surrender US
citizens to the court.

Instead, Washington argues that a special Darfur war crimes tribunal,
independent of the I CC, be set up, possibly in Tanzania, and run
jointly by the UN and the African Union.

There is no denying there have been atrocities. Only last week a
Sudanese aircraft bombed a village, according to AU observers,
killing some 100 people, mostly women and children.

In his reaction to the report, UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said,
“Regardless of how the commission describes what is going on in
Darfur, there is no doubt that serious crimes have been committed.
Action will have to be taken [to end the conflict].”

And that will probably mean a lot more than the promised deployment
of 3 500 African Union troops.

To date, three UN resolutions have condemned the violence. The
Security Council, which was due to have discussed the report on
Friday, has threatened sanctions against Khartoum and a travel and
assets freeze against those suspected of war crimes.

Sanctions have, however, been opposed by China and Russia. As
Security Council members, both have the power of veto and both have
offered lengthy and quite often garbled diplomatic arguments against
punishing Sudan. But the truth of the matter is that both have
economic ties with the country – China wants the country’s oil and
Russia wants to sell it weapons. Africans will die, bluntly speaking,
so their businessmen may profit.

In the meantime, the debate sparked by the Cassesse panel’s report on
the definition of “genocide” has deepened. There is the suggestion,
on the one hand, that in terms of the Genocide Convention, the
definition is too narrow and that none of the mass killings
perpetrated since the convention’s adoption would fall under it.
There are, for example, those who say the Holocaust was the only
genocide in the last century.

The convention’s critics point out that it excludes targeted
political and social groups, and that the definition of “genocide” is
limited to direct acts against people – but excludes acts against
environments which sustain them or their cultural distinctiveness.

Then, as Darfur has shown, there is the difficulty of proving intent
beyond reasonable doubt. UN member states are reluctant to single out
other members or intervene.

Then there is the argument, incredibly, about establishing how many
deaths amount to genocide.

Such an argument was heard in April last year, when the Bosnian Serb
military leader, General Radislav Krstic, appealed against his
sentence for genocide for his role in the slaughter of Bosnian
Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, Europe’s worst massacre since World
War Two.

The Hague tribunal, thankfully, rejected his contention that the 7
000 Muslim men and boys murdered at Srebrenica was “too
insignificant” to be genocide. (Krstic’s conviction was reduced to
one of aiding and abetting genocide His jail sentence was cut from 46
years to 35.)

On the other hand, others have claimed that, like “fascist” or
“racism”, the term “genocide” has become devalued through misuse.

One such person is Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Centre for
Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, who argued in a recent
lecture: “Those who should use the word genocide never let it slip
their mouths. Those who unfortunately do use it, banalise it into a
validation of every kind of victimhood. Slavery for example, is
called genocide when – whatever it was, and it was an infamy – it was
a system to exploit, rather than to exterminate, the living.”

There is a danger, of course, that such a position trivialises the
deaths of the victims of what many have, whether incorrectly or not,
labelled genocide. They include, among others, those worked to death,
starved or who died from disease in the Congo under Belgium’s King
Leopold II a century ago, the Hereros butchered by German
imperialists in what is now Namibia, the Armenians murdered by
Ottoman Turks, those who died as a result of the Soviet man-made
famine in Ukraine in the 1930s, those who died in Mao’s Cultural
Revolution in the 1960s, those who were murdered by the Khmer Rouge
in Cambodia in the 1970s, those who were killed in the Palestinian
conflict, those who were slaughtered in the Indonesian invasion of
East Timor in 1975, and those who were hacked and bludgeoned to death
in Rwanda in 1994.

There are millions and millions of them. But it is not about the
numbers, it is about action. Or, rather, the lack of action.

As for Darfur, well, one may cynically wonder whether there too shall
be memorials to what has happened there. Perhaps we may even gather
there one day, amid the oil refineries, and promise ourselves once
more, “Never again.”