THE USES AND ABUSES OF THE G-WORD
The Economist
June 2 2011
Genocide is the ultimate crime. All the more reason to use the word
carefully
NO LESS than the act itself, “the politics of genocide can be
heartbreaking.” That is what Sophal Ear, who fled Cambodia as a
ten-year-old and now works as a politics professor in the United
States, remembers feeling as a young man.
His father was among the 1.7m victims of mass killing by the Khmer
Rouge; by pretending to be a Vietnamese citizen, his mother spirited
him and four other children to freedom. Yet before last year, when four
suspects were indicted for genocide, most murders by his homeland’s
communist tyrants were not seen as genocidal in the legal sense,
because killers and victims belonged to the same ethnic and religious
group. Among the many crimes of Pol Pot’s regime, only the killings
of minorities like ethnic Vietnamese, or Muslims, fall neatly into
the category of genocide.
Many people, faced with any of the scenes created by systematic
slaughter during the 20th century would simply say: “I may not be a
lawyer, but I know genocide when I see it.” The reality of genocide
may be easy to grasp at a gut level, yet its definition is complex.
Prosecutors, judges, historians and politicians have made huge efforts
in recent years to describe the boundaries of genocide: when mere
mass murder stops and the ultimate human crime starts. Yet the term is
far more than a tool of historical or moral analysis. Its use brings
momentous political and legal consequences-and is therefore bound to
be highly contested.
Such thinking pervaded bureaucratic debates in Washington, DC, in
1994 as news of massacres in Rwanda emerged. As Samantha Power,
an author who works for President Barack Obama, has disclosed,
a paper by a Pentagon official urged caution in using the G-word:
“Be careful …Genocide finding could commit [the government] to
actually do something.”
Plain facts, muddy language
Even when the facts are clear, the vocabulary may not be. The killing
of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys near Srebrenica in Bosnia, in 1995,
has been widely described as a genocidal act; that is why its alleged
mastermind, the Bosnian-Serb general, Ratko Mladic, was extradited
to The Hague this week. Yet even in the Bosnian context, the word
genocide has been challenged; prominent figures, who do not doubt the
vileness of the war, raise questions about the proper legal category.
They include William Schabas, a Canadian law professor who heads
the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He has stirred
a furore by arguing that since many authorities reject the use of
“genocide” to describe the whole military campaign by the Bosnian Serbs
(or those of other war parties), it may not make sense to single out
one episode in the war as genocidal; either there was a general bid
to exterminate or there was not.
This thinking does not, he insists, diminish the horror of Srebrenica
or of genocide-like acts in general. But he thinks the world should
focus more on “crimes against humanity”-defined as killing and other
inhumane acts when committed as “part of a widespread or systematic
attack …against any civilian population.” Such felonious deeds should
not be seen as a “discounted form of genocide” but as an extreme form
of wickedness; they were, after all, the precise charges against the
Nazis convicted at Nuremberg.
The starting point for any definition of genocide is clear and fairly
familiar. The United Nations in 1948 adopted the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which describes
“the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of
an ethnical, racial, religious or national group.” That formula is
incorporated in the statutes of the Hague-based International Criminal
Court, which since 2002 has stood ready to try terrible atrocities
if national courts fail. In scores of countries the convention is
also part of domestic law.
The prime mover of the convention, Raphael Lemkin, had been pressing
since the 1930s for the adoption by world institutions of a broad ban
on the mass slaughter of groups; he said later that he had been mainly
motivated by the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians in 1915. The text
was readily adopted in a climate of horror over the Nazi Holocaust
of Jews as well as of Roma and other despised groups.
The convention’s provisions are remarkable for what they do and do
not cover. They exclude-at the insistence of the Soviet Union, for
obvious reasons-the mass killing of “class” or political enemies. But
they include as genocidal any measures to limit births within a group,
and the transfer of children of one group to another. China’s one-child
policy would not count-because it applies to ethnic Chinese-unless
it were brutally enforced on, say, Tibetans. Armenian nationalists
enraged Mikhail Gorbachev, the then Soviet leader, by protesting over
the adoption of orphans by Russians after the 1988 earthquake there.
But they had law on their side.
The special courts considering Rwanda and the Balkans have expanded the
jurisprudence of both genocide and crimes against humanity. The Rwanda
one has stressed that the genocide charge requires proof of a plan;
and that the victims were killed solely for membership of a group.
Mr Schabas sees two trends in the definition of genocide. First, judges
and legal scholars have been cautious: the ICC judges, he points out,
took a lot of persuading to issue an arrest warrant for genocide
against Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir. Even the fact that they
finally issued it does not mean they are persuaded that the G-word
can stick. Meanwhile, social scientists and historians have widened
the use of the word, to include, say, the destruction of cultures
and languages, or the decimation of tribes. Indigenous peoples, for
example, have died in big numbers because they were vulnerable to
the diseases borne by colonisers. The effect is genocidal, whether
or not there was a plan.
Judges and lawyers have to be precise because their opinions have
precise effects: for historians, a perpetual testing and redefining
of categories comes naturally. But that does not make the historian’s
work easy or free of heartbreaking consequences: witness the endless
row over the mass killings of Armenians.
Only an open debate can resolve those questions. It does not help
that asserting an Armenian genocide is a criminal offence in Turkey,
whereas denying it is against the law in Switzerland. (France’s
lower house adopted a similar measure but was overruled in May
by the Senate.) Arrest warrants may be the right way to deal with
genocidaires, but they have no place in the study of history.