Genocide

I

Introduction

Genocide, crime of destroying or conspiring to destroy a group of people because of their ethnic, national, racial, or religious identity. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish legal scholar, coined the term in 1944 to describe Nazi Germany’s annihilation of groups by direct murder and indirect means during World War II (1939-1945). The Nazis’ specific attempt to totally destroy the Jewish people and the Roma, or Gypsies, became known as the Holocaust. Genocide has been a crime under international law since 1951.

II

History

Genocide has occurred since ancient times. When a group or a nation conquered another group, it was common practice to kill all the men—civilians and soldiers alike—of the conquered group. Well-known examples of such genocides include the widespread killings by the army of the 5th-century Asian conqueror Attila in Europe and the massacres across the Middle East by forces of the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan in the 13th century. During the 18th and 19th centuries many nations agreed that civilians should not be killed or injured during war. Eventually, international law was changed to include rules on warfare, but no mechanism existed for enforcing these rules.

In the 20th century mass killing increasingly became a part of some nations’ policies to achieve political goals. During World War I (1914-1918), the government of the Ottoman Empire deported two-thirds or more of its estimated 1 million to 1.8 million Armenian citizens in eastern Anatolia (present-day Asian Turkey). The deportations, mainly to the deserts of present-day Syria, led to the deaths of most of these Armenians by massacre, rape, starvation, and dehydration. (The government of Turkey denies Ottoman government responsibility for the deaths of the Armenians and disputes the labeling of these events as genocide. However, these events have been affirmed as genocide by the European Parliament and more than ten countries—including Vatican City—and also acknowledged in legislative bodies in the United States and Canada as well as by independent genocide scholars.) The systematic genocide accomplished by Nazi Germany during World War II resulted in the deaths of an estimated 5 to 6 million Jews, about 500,000 Roma, and millions of other people considered undesirable in German territory. About two out of every three Jews in German-occupied and allied Europe, nine out of every ten German Roma, half of all captured Soviet prisoners of war, and 10 to 20 percent of other peoples in Eastern Europe were killed. The government of Croatia in the former Yugoslavia also was responsible for genocide during World War II, killing an estimated 200,000 to 340,000 of its Serbian citizens.

Social scientists estimate that since the end of World War II at least 16 nations have attempted or committed genocide. Genocide has occurred in countries in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and in Europe. From 1975 to 1979 in Cambodia, the Communist Khmer Rouge killed close to 1.7 million Cambodians. In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor, a former Portuguese colony located in the southeastern portion of the Indonesian archipelago. Indonesia’s attempt to subdue and “integrate” the region resulted in the deaths of about 200,000 people—more than one-third of the indigenous East Timorese population.

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During Guatemala’s civil war, from 1960 to 1996, an estimated 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, the overwhelming majority killed by Guatemala’s right-wing military governments. The military governments specifically targeted the indigenous Maya people, taking the lives of 85,000 to 110,000 indigenous people (according to Guatemalan generals’ estimates) in the rural highlands from 1981 to 1983. In 1999 the United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification recognized these massacres as genocide (see Guatemala). In 1994 in Rwanda, a country in east central Africa, between 500,000 and 1 million people, mostly of the Tutsi ethnic group, were slain after a coup by extremists of the Hutu ethnic group. In the 1990s thousands of people, predominantly Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), became victims of genocide in wars in the states of the former Yugoslavia (see Yugoslav Succession, Wars of). In 2003 the government of Sudan began a violent suppression of a rebellion in the region of Darfur. At least 200,000 and possibly more than 400,000 people have died as a result of the conflict, and more than 2 million have been displaced.

III

Types of Genocide

Although every mass killing involves unique circumstances, certain underlying conditions are common to most genocides. The offending nation, or perpetrator, is usually a nondemocratic country that views the targeted group as a barrier or threat to maintaining power, fulfilling an ideology, or achieving some other goal. The perpetrators exclude the victim from their universe of obligation—that is, they believe that they do not have to account for or protect the victims, who are seen as inferiors, subhumans, or strangers. Most genocides occur during a crisis, such as a war, state breakdown, or revolution, that is blamed on the victims. In addition, the governments of other countries that might have interfered or deterred the genocide may support the perpetrator directly or indirectly by their lack of action.

Canadian scholars Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn have identified four main types of genocide. These types can be called: (1) ideological, (2) retributive, (3) developmental, and (4) despotic. However, any genocide may have characteristics of more than one of these types.

The Nazi Holocaust, the Armenian massacres, and the Cambodian genocide are examples of ideological genocide. Most often, this type of genocide is committed in an effort to achieve an ideal social structure in which all members of society are alike or hold the same beliefs. Fascism and communism are the major 20th-century ideologies that seek to establish societies based on likeness. In these cases the governments in power instituted policies that led to mass deaths as part of a plan to achieve a country based on a single racial or ethnic group. The Holocaust, for example, was driven by the Nazi racial theory that Germans belonged to a superior race, which they called Aryans. The Khmer Rouge goal was to eliminate difference. They killed members of minorities—including all ethnic Vietnamese, many educated and urban people, some rural people, and anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Communist regime.

Retributive genocide is undertaken to eliminate a real or potential threat. It is most likely to occur when one group dominates another group and fears its rebellion or when the other group actually rebels. The attempted extermination of the Tutsi in Rwanda by the Hutu in 1994 is one example of this type of genocide. The Hutu tried to maintain control of the government in Rwanda by destroying the Tutsi.

Genocide undertaken for economic gain is known as developmental genocide. A government might use this type of genocide against people native to an area that the government wants to use for building, mining, and other development. An example of this type of genocide occurred in Paraguay in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To allow for the expansion of logging and cattle-raising enterprises in the nation’s interior, Paraguay’s government collaborated in the forced relocation and execution of an estimated half of the native Indian population.

Despotic genocide is intended to spread terror among real or potential enemies. The killings orchestrated by Ugandan presidents Idi Amin and Milton Obote during the 1970s and early 1980s are examples of this type of genocide. Both Amin and Obote ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans belonging to groups who had opposed or who they feared might oppose their tyrannical rule.

IV

Genocide and International Law

In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) passed an act called the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, also known as the Genocide Convention. This act, which took effect in 1951, provided a legal definition of genocide and established genocide as a crime under international law. According to the Genocide Convention, any of the following actions, when committed with the intent to eliminate a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, constitutes genocide: (1) killing members of the group, (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to kill, (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and (5) forcibly transferring children out of a group.

In the 1990s the UN began an effort to prosecute cases of genocide. In 1993 the UN established an international tribunal to investigate and prosecute people involved in war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in the former Yugoslavia. In late 1994 the UN established a similar tribunal to investigate war crimes in Rwanda. These trials, the first international war crimes trials since those that followed World War II, were the first attempts to prosecute individuals under the Genocide Convention. In 1998 the Rwanda tribunal convicted three men, including former Rwandan prime minister Jean Kambanda, of genocide. The convictions marked the first time an international court found individuals guilty of the crime of genocide.

In 1998 UN delegates adopted a statute approving a permanent International Criminal Court to try individuals accused of genocide and other serious violations of international criminal law. The court came into being on July 1, 2002, after 60 countries ratified the statute. Headquartered in The Hague, the court replaced ad hoc tribunals such as those created for the conflicts in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

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