According to Raphael Lemkin, the expression 'mass murder' that was being used
at the time to describe what had happened was an inadequate description of the
totally new phenomenon witnessed in Nazi-occupied territories. It was
inadequate because it failed to account for the motive for the crime, which
arose solely from 'racial, national or religious' considerations and had
nothing to do with the conduct of the war. War crimes had been defined for the
first time in 1907 in The Hague Convention, but the crime of genocide required
a separate definition as this was 'not only a crime against the rules of war,
but a crime against humanity itself' affecting not just the individual or
nation in question, but humanity as a whole. Raphael Lemkin was the first
person to put forward the theory that genocide is not a war crime and that the
immorality of a crime such as genocide should not be confused with the
amorality of war.
The definition of what constitutes a crime against humanity was established at
the Nuremberg Trials. However, despite the significance of this, the jurists at
Nuremberg had invented nothing new. They were simply advancing Montesquieu's
ideas on international law, which he described as 'universal civil law, in the
sense that all peoples are citizens of the universe.' Killing someone simply
because he or she exists is a crime against humanity; it is a crime against the
very essence of what it is to be human. This is not an elimination of
individuals because they are political adversaries, or because they hold to
what are regarded as false beliefs or dangerous theories, but a crime directed
against the person as a person, against the very humanity of the individual
victim. Thus it cannot be categorised as a war crime. As Alain Finkielkraut,
the French philosopher, has pointed out, it is quite a different thing to be
regarded as an enemy than as a particular species of vermin to be
systematically wiped out.
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 the greatest of the crimes against
humanity:
In the same way as in a case of homicide the natural right of the individual to
exist is implied, so in the case of genocide as a crime, the principle that any
national, racial or religious group has a natural right to exist is clearly
evident. Attempts to eliminate such groups violate this right to exist and to
develop within the international community.
A genocide is a conspiracy aimed at the total destruction of a group and thus
requires a concerted plan of action. The instigators and initiators of a
genocide are cool-minded theorists first and barbarians only second. The
specificity of genocide does not arise from the extent of the killings, nor
their savagery or resulting infamy, but solely from the intention: the
destruction of a group.
Lemkin's efforts and his single-minded perseverance brought about the
Convention for the Prevention and the Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which
was voted into existence by the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) in
1948. After stating in Article 1 that genocide is a crime under international
law, the Convention laid down the following definition:
any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
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.*
This definition, although lessening the uniqueness of Lemkin's concepts to some
extent, is nonetheless of remarkable significance. Some UN member states wanted
to go further to include the notion of cultural or economic genocide, others
would have added political motivations. The French representative remarked at
the time, 'even if crimes of genocide were committed for racial or religious
reasons in the past, it is clear that the motivation for such crimes in future
will be mainly political. Ironically, and probably not without ulterior
motives, the Soviet delegate gave the real reason for the exclusion of
politically-defined groups arguing that their inclusion would be contrary to
the 'scientific' definition of genocide and would reduce the effectiveness of
the Convention if it could then be applied to any political crime whatsoever.
The final definition as it stands today is based on four constituent factors:
- a criminal act...
- with the intention of destroying...
- an ethnic, national or religious group...
- targeted as such.
If it was the reality of the Genocide that led to the establishment of the
concept of genocide, in most people's minds there was an almost automatic
connection between the two.
Consequently the word 'genocide' has often been used when making comparisons
with later massacres throughout the world in order to attract attention by
evoking images of the concentration camps and their victims. The Second World
War and the genocide became absolute references in the political context. As
Alain Finkielkraut puts it, 'Satan became incarnate in the person of Hitler who
represented nothing less than an allegory for the devil.' Facism became the
supreme enemy and all political adversaries were indiscriminately accused of
supporting it. But it was genocide that became the ultimate verbal stigma, a
term used both to describe any thoroughly horrendous, thoroughly fascist act
perpetrated by an enemy and as a rallying call for minority groups looking to
assert their identity and legitimise their existence. Thus the word genocide
fell victim to a sort of verbal inflation, in much the same as happened with
the word fascist. It has been applied freely and indiscriminately to groups as
diverse as the blacks of South Africa, palestinians and women, as well as in
reference to animals, abortion, famines and widespread malnutrition, and to
many other situations.
The term genocide has progressively lost its initial meaning and is becoming
dangerously commonplace. In order to shock people and gain their attention to
contemporary situations of violence or injustice by making comparisons with
murder on the greatest scale known in this centyr, 'genocide' has been used as
synonymous with massacre, oppression and repression, overlooking that what lies
behind the image it evokes is the attempted annihilation of the entire Jewish
race. Further trivialization has resulted from the over-use of the term
'Holocaust,' first popularised on a wide scale in the 1970s by the American
television series with that title. The original context is of course religious
and means, literally, 'a ritual sacrifice wholly consumed by fire.' The use of
this term has a twofold effect, both mystifying and spectacular, which distorts
and denies reality.
The inevitable consequences of such misuse of language are a loss of meaning
and a distortion of values. For example, there is a great danger in the way the
media applied the term 'Holocaust' to the devastation wrought by the cholera
epidemic in Goma, which has the largest concentration of Rwandan refugees in
Zaire. This puts the medical disaster that resulted from the massive influx of
refugees as a consequence of the genocide on the same level as the genocide
itself, a premeditated mass-crime, systematically planned and executed. This
has resulted in a double error with the exaggerated emphasis focused on the
cholera victims-catastrophe though that was-distracting attention from the real
crime already committed. The fact that cholera does not handpick its victims
according to their ethnic origin was completely overlooked. (Even the
controversial carpet-bombings that took place over Germany and Vietnam claimed
their victims in a totally haphazard manner.) Intrinsic meaning is lost when a
word is used so loosely to describe any human disaster with a large number of
victims, regardless of the cause. As a further consequence, we arrive at a
situation where no individuals are to be singled out as guilty or responsible
because blame is laid at the door of historical fate and 'unfortunate
circumstances', 'the climate of the time' and sheer bad luck. It would be hard
to deny that some form of evil has always existed in the world. But if such
evil is seen in general, impersonal terms such as barbarism, 'man's inhumanity
to man,' chance circumstance or plain hatred, then there are no individual
culprits at who, an accusing finger can be pointed. On the other hand, if
everyone is considered to be somehow involved and therefore somehow
responsible, then the picture becomes hazy and guilt and innocence are somehow
confused. This so-called collective blame is just another way of denying the
facts.
....Thus, using the definitions of both Lemkin and the Convention, and placing
them within the context of the larger category of crime against humanity in
general, there have really only been three genuine examples of genocide during
the course of the twentieth century: that of the Armenians by the Young Turks
in 1915, that of the Jews and Gypsies by the Nazis and, in 1994, that of the
Tutsis by the Hutu racists.
