The Crime of Genocide
Can the efforts of one person make a difference? What role does the word, meaning and language of genocide play in our lives today?
When we look at the enormous obstacles faced in societies that have endured genocide or mass violence, it may seem futile to think that the efforts of one individual could actually effect any worthwhile change. And yet, time and again history shows us individuals who have done just that. As anthropologist Margaret Mead said, "never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." This reading about the man who coined the word "genocide" is testimony to the power of individuals to change the world.
When we look at the enormous obstacles faced in societies that have endured genocide or mass violence, it may seem futile to think that the efforts of one individual could actually effect any worthwhile change. And yet, time and again history shows us individuals who have done just that. As anthropologist Margaret Mead said, "never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." This reading about the man who coined the word "genocide" is testimony to the power of individuals to change the world.
...in every case of genocide in the twentieth century, there were upstanders. People who defied logic, risked their careers and lives, and spoke up on behalf of distant victims. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew born in 1901, had tried in 1933 to get lawyers at the League of Nations to outlaw the crime of "race murder." He had been laughed out of the conference. "Lemkin," they said, "this crime that you describe takes place too seldom to legislate." Six years later, Hitler would invade Poland, and Lemkin would lose 49 members of his family in the Holocaust.
In 1941, Lemkin, who had managed to escape Poland and eventually end up in the United States, heard a broadcast delivered by Winston Churchill in which the British Prime Minister said "We are in the presence of a crime without a name." Churchill was of course not talking about the extermination of the Jews. But Lemkin heard what he wanted to hear. He told himself that if, at that 1933 law conference, he had only had the right word to describe the systematic destruction of peoples, those lawyers would have listened to him. Maybe the Holocaust could have been averted. He thought he needed a word - a name - that would connote the ultimate moral imperative and thus trigger action. In 1944, having joined the War Department in Washington, Raphael Lemkin invented the word "genocide."1
As the Nuremberg trials unfolded in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, Lemkin was there to push for his legislation making genocide a crime against humanity. It was at Nuremberg that he learned that at least 49 members of his family were killed by the Nazis. More determined than ever, Lemkin listened as one of the British prosecutors explained to a Nazi defendant that in the indictment he was being charged "among other things, with genocide." Samantha Power notes: "This was the first official mention of genocide in an international legal setting."2
After Nuremberg, Lemkin went to the newly formed United Nations. In a climate of optimism, Lemkin lobbied UN delegates nonstop. On December 11, 1946, the General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution defining genocide as "the denial of the right of existence of entire human groups" which is "contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations." The resolution went further; it asked a committee to draft a treaty banning the practice. Two years later, with Lemkin acting as a one-man lobby, the United Nations passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which declares "genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which [the United Nations] undertake to prevent and to punish."
Since that ratification of the genocide convention, war criminals have been prosecuted both by domestic and international courts. In 2002, the United Nations established a permanent international criminal court to try the crime of genocide and other cases of massive abuse of human rights.
Connections for the Classroom...
- What did Lemkin hope to accomplish by making mass murder an international crime? Why was it a challenge for him to persuade people to adopt the word genocide?
- How does finding language focus attention on a problem? Samantha Power, a scholar of genocide and human rights, states that during the blood bath in Rwanda, U.S. officials were careful not to use the word genocide.
Even after the reality of genocide in Rwanda had become irrefutable, when bodies were shown choking the Kagera River on the nightly news, the brute fact of the slaughter failed to influence U.S. policy except in a negative way. American officials, for a variety of reasons, shunned the use of what became known as "the g-word." They felt that using it would have obliged the United States to act, under the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention. They also believed, understandably, that it would harm U.S. credibility to name the crime and then do nothing to stop it. A discussion paper on Rwanda, prepared by an official in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and dated May 1, testifies to the nature of official thinking. Regarding issues that might be brought up at the next interagency working group, it stated,
Would it have made a difference if the president had declared the events in Rwanda as genocide? Why do you think the U.S. officials were reluctant "do something"?
- Genocide Investigation: Language that calls for an international investigation of human rights abuses and possible violations of the genocide convention. Be Careful. Legal at State was worried about this yesterday-Genocide finding could commit [the U.S. government] to actually "do something." [Emphasis added.]3
- Article 2 of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as:
"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Some people claim that each of the following is an example of genocide:
"(a) Killing members of the group;
"(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
"(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
"(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
"(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."4
Research one of these cases or another case of which you are aware. Using the definition offered by the Genocide Convention, decide whether it was genocide. Present your findings to the class. Do your classmates agree with your assessment? What difficulties did you encounter in trying to reach a consensus on what constitutes genocide?- The destruction of the Native American population by various colonial powers and later the United States.
- The enslavement of Africans in the United States.
- Iraq's treatment of the Kurds before and after the first Gulf War.
- The suffering of the people of East Timor during the 1980s and 1990s.
- The mass murder of Bosnian Muslims during the 1990s.
A portion of this reading was excerpted from Crimes Against Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians (Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation, Inc., Brookline, Massachusetts), 2004, pp. 186-189.
1 Baccalaureate Address at Swarthmore College, by Samantha Power. June 1, 2002. Source.
2 A Problem from Hell, by Samantha Power (Harper Perrenial), 2003, pp. 48-49.
3 "Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen," by Samantha Power The Atlantic Monthly. September 2001. Source.
4 Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Source.
