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Economist: The Uses And Abuses Of The G-Word

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  • Economist: The Uses And Abuses Of The G-Word

    THE USES AND ABUSES OF THE G-WORD

    The Economist
    http://www.economist.com/node/18772664?story_id=18772664
    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.

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