Portland Press Herald, ME
April 26 2005
Will genocide make a 21st century comeback?
Abraham J. Peck
Winston Churchill called it “the crime without a name,” a crime
responsible for the murder of nearly 170 million innocent human
beings in the 20th century who were considered the “other” in their
own homelands. We have the promise of more of the same in the 21st
century.
We call the crime genocide, from the Latin words genos (a race or
tribe) and cide (murder). It is as old as humanity itself and is
committed only by humans.
In 1948, just three years after the end of the Holocaust, the most
extreme expression of the evil of genocide, the world reacted against
an act of human barbarism that finally had a name and a punishment.
The newly formed U.N. General Assembly passed a convention making the
crime of genocide a matter of universal criminal justification.
Genocide was described as “the killing of a people because of their
group membership by race, ethnicity, religion or language.” But
genocide can also be cultural, destroying a people’s identity and
history.
Shortly after the Genocide Convention was passed, Raphael Lemkin, the
man who had coined the term genocide and who had struggled for years
to make it a crime, was found by himself in a corridor deep in the
halls of the United Nations weeping at the sense of relief after his
many years of seeking to bring about this moment.
But was he weeping for joy or because of a certain sadness reflecting
his understanding that the world was not yet ready to make genocide
obsolete?
Perhaps it was a premonition about the latter, because Lemkin, a
Polish-born Jew who lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust,
died in 1959, a disillusioned and broken man. The Cold War had
created a stalemate that did not allow for any implementation of the
Genocide Convention.
His own adopted country, the United States, had refused to ratify the
convention and would not do so until 1988, stymied for decades by
segregationist Southern politicians who feared that their treatment
of African-Americans might be labeled as a form of genocide.
When the Genocide Convention was passed by the United Nations, the
world said “never again.” But the history of the 20th century, and
now the 21st century, instead proved that “never again” became “again
and again.” The promise made by the United Nations was broken, as
genocides and other forms of mass murder killed more people than all
the international wars of the 20th century combined.
It was not for want of U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda that 800,000
people died.
They died because of the complete lack of political will by the
world’s leaders to save them. Neither the United States nor any other
member of the U.N. Security Council had the political will to risk
one of their citizens to rescue 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus
from genocide.
History repeats itself in Darfur at this very moment: 300,000 Fur
people in the south of Sudan have died, with another 10,000 dying
every month. And again, the world looks away.
Victims of genocide and their descendants have had to live with a
trauma that has very few parallels. The trauma of genocide and the
knowledge that the world did not care is passed on from generation to
generation. A kind of trauma ghetto is created that does not allow
much more than the ability to focus on what was done to that
community.
On Wednesday, in a 7 p.m. program at the Abromson Education Building
on the University of Southern Maine’s Portland campus, titled “Living
in an Age of Genocide: Remembering the Victims, Preventing the
Perpetrators,” the generations of genocide will be explored.
People from Native American and African-American communities will
join representatives from the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust,
Cambodian genocide, Rwandan and Burundi genocide, Kurdish atrocities
and the genocide in Darfur, to leave those ghettos of trauma and
raise their voices as one in protest against the continuing evil of
genocide.
The program will also ask, “Will genocide ever end?”
The political scientist Roger Smith has written that “we often hear
genocide described as actions of the mad, the primitive or bestial,
yet it is ordinary human beings who have enacted most of the mass
killing of other groups throughout history. Genocide is made
possible, not by the animal in us, but the human. ”
We need to understand this the next time we reflect on the fact that
we are created in the image of God.