Vail Daily News, CO
Feb 8 2005

The legal definition of genocide

Rohn K. Robbins
February 7, 2005

The recent slaughter in Darfur, coupled with the popularity of the
movie, Hotel Rwanda, and the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
Auschwitz bring into sharp focus the question of genocide. Darfur, of
course, is in the western part of Sudan where, over the last two
years, at least 70,000 people have been killed and more than 2
million have been dispossessed of their homes.

Since February 2003, in the context of a military counter-insurgency
campaign against two rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)
and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) Sudanese government
forces and government-backed Arab ethnic militias known as
“Janjaweed” have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and
“ethnic cleansing” in the Darfur region of Sudan. Government forces
and militias have systematically targeted civilian communities that
share the same ethnicity as the rebel groups (the black, non-Arab
Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit people), killing, looting, raping, forcibly
displacing and destroying hundreds of villages. Over a million
people, driven from their homes, now face death from starvation and
disease as the government and Janjaweed militias attempt to prevent
humanitarian aid from reaching them. The same forces have destroyed
the people of Darfur’s villages and crops, and poisoned their water.

The Hotel Rwanda recounts the genocidal terror of the 100 bloody days
commencing in April, 1994 in Rwanda when the ethnic Hutu tribesmen
engaged in the wholesale slaughter of the ethic Tutsi, ultimately
killing an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu
before the Tutsi rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front regained
control. Most of the dead were hacked to death with machetes by the
frantic Hutu hordes. Radio Mille Collines, featured prominently in
the movie, read the names, addresses and license plate numbers of
many Tutsi and moderate Hutus whom the Hutu slated for annihilation
and whom were summarily executed.

Of course, these two episodes of ethnic slaughter, roughly a decade
apart, were not the first of their kind in the 20th and early 21st
century. In 1915, the Turks massacred approximately 1 million
Armenians. In the 1940s, Nazi Germany exterminated more than 6
million Jews and another 5 million or so Poles, Roma, Communists and
other “undesirables”. In Cambodia, in the mid-1970s Pol Pot and the
communists Khmer Rouge exterminated roughly 2 million (out of a
population of 7 million) ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Muslim
Chams, Buddhist monks and “intellectuals” (which translated,
literally, to anyone who could read or who wore glasses). In the late
1980s Saddam Hussein gassed and otherwise murdered tens of thousands
of Kurds. In early 1990s in Srebrenica, Kosovo and Bosnia, Muslims
and Croats were slaughtered wholesale by the Serbs. It is a sad and
sordid history of our species.

Despite the outrage which is oftentimes expressed, most times, it is
little more than politic lip service. Far more times than not, the
international community has done little more than offer its
collective condemnation and limp-wristed condolences but has, to say
the least, dragged its collective heels in offering any meaningful
intervention.

It historically may not seem so, but there is, in fact, an
international law against such things. Known as the Genocide
Convention, it took the United States more than 40 years to adopt it.

The term “genocide” was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a survivor of
the Holocaust, and derives from the Greek “geno”, meaning “tribe” and
the derivative “cide” from the Latin word “caedre” meaning “killing”,
thus the “killing of a tribe” of peoples.

Genocide is defined as 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 the members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group the 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.

For a party to be found guilty of genocide, it has to: 1) carry out
one or more of the aforementioned acts, 2) with the intent to destroy
all or part of 3) one of the groups protected. The law does not
require the Holocaust-like extermination of an entire group, only
acts intended to destroy a substantial part.

And that has been the bugaboo; first, intent must be shown and second
a “substantial part” must be quantified. Simply, how much is
“substantial?”

The “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide” was adopted by the United Nations in 1951. The United
States did not ratify the act until 1988.

In Nuremberg the Nazi War Crimes tribunal was convened following the
Second World War to mete out justice to the perpetrators of genocide.
A similar tribunal was not convened again until the Balkans in the
1990s . A standing UN war crimes tribunal was not established at The
Hague in Belgium until 1993.

While it seems the declamations of genocide are flying earlier in
Darfur than in previous genocides, the world seems, yet again, to be
largely sitting on the sidelines. Waiting for precisely what, I
remain uncertain.

Rohn K. Robbins is an attorney licensed before the Bars of Colorado
and California who practices in the Vail Valley. He is a member of
the Colorado State Bar Association Legal Ethics Committee and is a
former adjunct professor of law. Mr. Robbins lectures for Continuing
Legal Education for attorneys in the areas of real estate, business
law and legal ethics. He may be heard on Wednesday nights at 7:00
p.m. on KZYR radio (97.7 FM) as host of “Community Focus”. Mr.
Robbins may be reached at 970/926.4461 or at his e-mail address:
robbins@colorado.net