Vancouver Sun, Canada
Oct 19 2007

‘Genocide’ doesn’t mean the world will leap into action

Jonathan Manthorpe, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, October 19, 2007

Since it was created by Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944,
genocide has been a word used sparingly because of its power to
describe the most barbarous of crimes against humanity.

It is a word that carries enormous and ominous weight because Lemkin
sought to invoke in one phrase all the horror of the industrialized
slaughter in the Nazi death camps and the psychopathic, twisted
mentality that created them.

So it is no wonder that since Lemkin fashioned it out of the Greek
word "genos" meaning race and the Latin word "cide" for killing,
genocide has been used to describe only the most extreme acts of
barbarity.

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Font:****That is why, for example, the international community has
been hesitant to apply the term genocide to what is happening in the
Darfur region of Sudan.

There is a belief — wrong as it turns out — that presenting
evidence of a genocide automatically launches international
intervention under a United Nations convention. This troubles the
many countries that remain opposed to interference in the internal
affairs of member states and they shrink from using the word
genocide.

Since the outbreak of violence in this northwestern region of Sudan
early in 2003, about 200,000 people have died and two million have
become refugees as ethnic Arab militias armed and directed by the
Khartoum government have attacked black African villages, burning the
huts and slaughtering the inhabitants.

It was only late in 2004 and after much lobbying that U.S. secretary
of state Colin Powell used the word genocide to describe what was
happening in Darfur.

There was a collective gasp among the multitude of agencies,
organizations and protagonists involved in Darfur.

The feeling was that once the magic word had been uttered, the door
to international intervention would inevitably swing open. UN
peacemakers and peacekeepers would have to be dispatched as soon as
practical to end the suffering of the six million people of Darfur.

Well, it hasn’t happened like that at all. Genocide remains
subservient to political expediency.

After much political haggling, a woefully ill-equipped force of 7,000
troops from African Union member states has been deployed, but it is
useless and has become a target for both government and rebel forces.

A more potent UN force is to be deployed in a few months and Libya is
hosting peace negotiations next week.

But it has become evident the rebel groups, of which there are a
dozen, are just as venal and uncaring of the plight of the six
million Darfurians as is the government.

The Darfur experience, especially so soon after the abject failure of
the international community to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994,
raises again questions about genocide, what it means, and what the
international response should be when it occurs.

As a young law professor in Warsaw in the 1930s, Raphael Lemkin was
deeply troubled by historic incidents of the mass murder of peoples.
He was influenced by the slaughter of Armenians during the collapse
of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, the mass
killing of Christian Assyrians by Iraqis in 1933 and many similar
atrocities that occurred in history.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin, a Jew, became a
partisan and after being wounded escaped to neutral Sweden. From
there he went to the U.S. where in 1944 he wrote the book Axis Rule
in Occupied Europe in which the word genocide was first used.

The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide was one of the first treaties of the newly formed United
Nations, though it took two years of quarrelling before a committee
could define the word. Genocide means, according to the UN, any act
"committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a nation,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."

That allows for a confusingly broad band of interpretations and the
convention is just as vague and uninstructive on other aspects,
especially the duty of nations to intervene to halt a genocide in
progress.

Lawyers and academics have for years complained the convention is
deficient. With yet another failure to protect innocent people in
front of us, it is perhaps time to rework this convention.

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