THE TROUBLE WITH THE ‘GENOCIDE’ LABEL
Salil Tripathi
Washington Post
/needtoknow/2009/04/the_trouble_with_the_genocide. html
April 28 2009
The Current Discussion: Today is "Genocide Remembrance Day "in the
Armenian community, a particularly strained time of year for Turkey and
Armenia. What’s a realistic first step forward toward reconciliation
for each of these countries?
Turkey and Armenia have begun the slow, tentative waltz of rebuilding
relations, after President Obama spoke in Istanbul, but did not use
the G-word.
That was perhaps a wise decision, notwithstanding the strong emotive
reason that propelled many to call a spade a spade, a machete a
machete, and a genocide a genocide, leading to the Congressional
Resolution. The truth is that ultimately only communities themselves
can make the decision to leave the past behind. International
leaders – even one as gifted as Barack Obama – can only play a
limited role. (Sudan’s conflict didn’t stop when Colin Powell called
the killings in Darfur a genocide, and few countries joined him in
condemning the Sudanese leadership.)
This is a peculiar period in the world annals of our coming to terms
with genocide. Cambodia is trying to account for genocide and killing
fields by indicting Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch. India’s ruling
party withdrew a candidate for Parliament, partially in response to
a shoe-throwing incident. (Credible human rights groups allege that
the candidate was involved in the 1984 Sikh massacre, after two Sikh
bodyguards assassinated former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.) Tamils
in Britain accuse the Sri Lankan army of committing genocide in
Sri Lanka. Bangladesh’s newly-elected government sets its sights
on bringing to justice those accountable for the Pakistani Army’s
widespread killings of Bangladeshis in 1971.
And then there is Rwanda. This month is the 15th anniversary of
the Rwandan genocide. In a recent issue of Paris Review, the French
writer Jean Hatzfeld recalls the uneasy aftermath of dealing with
released prisoners who had at one time massacred a community’s loved
ones. Hatzfeld’s books – The Machete Season (2005), Life Laid Bare
(2007), and The Antelope’s Strategy (2009) — are required reading
for anyone who wants to understand the psyche of the perpetrator and
the victim, of what makes a killer, and, as Hannah Arendt observed
in the context of Eichmann, the banality of evil.
The fixation with the word ‘genocide’ comes from its emotive
power. Among human rights abuses, genocide is arguably the worst,
which is why governments fight tooth and nail to prevent others from
calling their heinous acts as genocidal. The definition, developed
after we discovered the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, is written
bearing in mind the Nazi atrocities against the Jewish community. Those
abuses made every preceding abuse seem less significant. With the
definition was so precisely drafted, what were we to call Stalin’s
purges – or even Pol Pot’s bloody rule – where a single ethnic group
wasn’t targeted, and where the masterminds of those genocides did not
always get around to implementing policies that would prevent future
generations from being born? These were mass killings, massacres,
crimes against humanity. But they weren’t quite like the Holocaust –
just as the Holocaust wasn’t quite like what happened in Cambodia
between 1975 and 1979.
Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity are extremely powerful terms,
which is why governments resent such characterization. The sad
consequence is that diplomats then perform the delicate dance of
defining the term more precisely, and argue whether a particularly
horrendous abuse was genocide. Lost, amidst all this, are human
impulses – of ethics, morality, revenge, justice, redemption,
and compassion.
What happened in Turkey nearly a century ago – as indeed in Rwanda,
Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Sudan – must never happen
again. And yet Obama and other world leaders can only nudge governments
to do the right thing. Ultimately communities and nations must
develop the confidence and face the past, apologize where necessary,
and forgive as appropriate. That requires a moral core, not legalism
alone. The law helps and is of course necessary. But genocide is wrong
not because the law says so, but because it is against our conscience.