BBC News
Last Updated: Wednesday, 30 June, 2004, 12:03 GMT 13:03 UK
Analysis: Defining genocide
Black Africans say they are being driven from their homes in Darfur
Human rights campaigners accuse Sudan’s pro-government Arab militia of
carrying out genocide against black African residents of the Darfur region.
They are accused of forcing some one million people from their homes and
killing at least 10,000.
Many thousands more are at risk of starving due to a lack of food in the
camps where they have fled.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has refused to use the term genocide, which
would carry a legal obligation to act.
But US Secretary of State Colin Powell said: “We see indicators and elements
that would start to move you toward a genocidal conclusion but we’re not
there yet.”
But what is genocide and when can it be applied? Some argue that the
definition is too narrow and others that the term is devalued by misuse.
UN definition
The term was coined in 1943 by the Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin who
combined the Greek word “genos” (race or tribe) with the Latin word “cide”
(to kill).
After witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust – in which every member of his
family except his brother and himself was killed – Dr Lemkin campaigned to
have genocide recognised as a crime under international law.
Genocide is… both the gravest and greatest of the crimes against
humanity
Alain Destexhe
His efforts gave way to the adoption of the UN Convention on Genocide in
December 1948, which came into effect in January 1951.
Article Two of the convention defines genocide as “any of the following acts
committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The convention also imposes a general duty on states that are signatories to
“prevent and to punish” genocide.
Ever since its adoption, the UN treaty has come under fire from different
sides, mostly by people frustrated with the difficulty of applying it to
different cases.
‘Too narrow’
Some analysts argue that the definition is so narrow that none of the mass
killings perpetrated since the treaty’s adoption would fall under it.
The objections most frequently raised against the treaty include:
The convention excludes targeted political and social groups
The definition is limited to direct acts against people, and excludes acts
against the environment which sustains them or their cultural
distinctiveness
Proving intention beyond reasonable doubt is extremely difficult
UN member states are hesitant to single out other members or intervene, as
was the case in Rwanda
There is no body of international law to clarify the parameters of the
convention (though this is changing as UN war crimes tribunals issue
indictments)
The difficulty of defining or measuring “in part”, and establishing how many
deaths equal genocide
But in spite of these criticisms, there are many who say genocide is
recognisable.
In his book Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century, former
secretary-general of Doctors Without Borders, Alain Destexhe says: “Genocide
is distinguishable from all other crimes by the motivation behind it.
“Genocide is a crime on a different scale to all other crimes against
humanity and implies an intention to completely exterminate the chosen
group.
“Genocide is therefore both the gravest and greatest of the crimes against
humanity.”
Loss of meaning
Mr Destexhe believes the word genocide has fallen victim to “a sort of
verbal inflation, in much the same way as happened with the word fascist”.
The slaughter in Rwanda shocked the world
Because of that, he says, the term has progressively lost its initial
meaning and is becoming “dangerously commonplace”.
Michael Ignatieff, director of the Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy at
Harvard University, agrees.
“Those who should use the word genocide never let it slip their mouths.
Those who unfortunately do use it, banalise it into a validation of every
kind of victimhood,” he said in a lecture about Raphael Lemkin.
“Slavery for example, is called genocide when – whatever it was, and it was
an infamy – it was a system to exploit, rather than to exterminate the
living.”
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a renegade commander said he captured
the town of Bukavu earlier this month to prevent a genocide of Congolese
Tutsis – the Banyamulenge.
It later transpired that fewer than 100 people had died.
The differences over how genocide should be defined, lead also to
disagreement on how many genocides actually occurred during the 20th
Century.
History of genocide
Some say there was only one genocide in the last century – the Holocaust.
Other experts give a long list of what they consider cases of genocide,
including the Soviet man-made famine of Ukraine (1932-33), the Indonesian
invasion of East Timor (1975), and the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia in
the 1970s.
Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic is on trial in The Hague, charged
with genocide in Bosnia from 1992-5.
However, some say there have been at least three genocides under the 1948 UN
convention:
The mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915-1920 – an
accusation that the Turks deny
The Holocaust, during which more than six million Jews were killed
Rwanda, where an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in the
1994 genocide
In the case of Bosnia, many believe that massacres occurred as part of a
pattern of genocide, though some doubt that intent can be proved in the case
of Mr Milosevic
The first case to put into practice the convention on genocide was that of
Jean Paul Akayesu, the Hutu mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba at the time of
the killings.
In a landmark ruling, a special international tribunal convicted him of
genocide and crimes against humanity on 2 September 1998.
Twenty-one ringleaders of the Rwandan genocide have now been convicted by
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Milosevic denies committing genocide
Earlier this year, the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia widened
the definition of what constitutes genocide.
General Radislav Krstic had appealed against his conviction for his role in
the killing of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.
But the court rejected his argument that the numbers were “too
insignificant” to be genocide – a decision likely to set an international
legal precedent.
On Darfur, Mr Powell says: “We can find the right label for it later, we
have got to deal with it now.”
But US envoy for war crimes Pierre Prosper has already started to compile a
list of those associated with the Janjaweed Arab militia.
For the moment, these are threatened with sanctions but in the future, they
may be charged with genocide, like those in Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia.