Jump to content

Genocide

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 172 (talk | contribs) at 20:56, 3 January 2003 (good job fixing formatting! more on herero). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Genocide is a type of atrocity, the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, cultural or political group. The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 from the roots genos (Greek for tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). Lemkin campaigned for the international outlawing of genocide, which was achieved in 1951.

Definition of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and came into effect in January 1951. It contains an internationally-recognized definition of genocide which was incorporated into the national criminal legislation of many countries, and was also adopted by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Convention (in article 2) 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:"

(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.

The first draft of the Convention included political killings but that language was removed at the insistence of the Soviet Union. The exclusion of social and political groups as targets of genocide in this legal definition has been criticized. In common usage of the word, these target groups are often included.

Common usage also sometimes equates genocide with state-sponsored mass murder, but genocide as defined above does not imply mass murder (or any murder) nor is every instance of mass-murder necessarily genocide. Neither is the involvement of a government required.

The word genocide is also sometimes used in a much broader sense, as in "slavery was genocide", but this usage is clearly incorrect from a legal standpoint.

International law

All signatories to the above mentioned convention are required to prevent and punish acts of genocide, both in peace and wartime. Genocide is an international matter and can never be treated as an internal affair of any country.

Some legal opinion holds that as well as being illegal under conventional international law, genocide is a crime under customary international law as well, and has been since some time during World War II or possibly earlier.

Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish, since intent of destruction has to be proved.

Genocide is nowadays considered a crime against humanity, but the initial definition of that concept established during the Nuremberg trials was restricted to acts committed during wartime or directed against the peace and would therefore not have included all acts of genocide.

As mentioned above, state-sponsored mass murder is sometimes equated with genocide. The more precise term for this is democide.

Cultural genocide refers to the deliberate destruction of a culture, without necessarily fulfilling the criteria of genocide. This term has been criticized as trying to benefit from the emotionally charged nature of "genocide".

Current campaigns of genocide

On February 23, 1998 Osama bin Ladin of al Qaida issued a fatwah calling for the killing of "Americans and their allies-civilian and military" [1].

Major charges of genocide

(Presented in approximate chronological order)

  • North America
Lord Jeffrey Amherst approved spreading smallpox among Native Americans intentionally during Pontiacs Rebellion by distributing infected blankets.
See http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html.
Indian Removal resulted in the death of many thousands of Native Americans.
See Indian Massacres, Trail of Tears, Extermination of the Pequots in 1637.
Under the rule of King Leopold II, the Congo Free State suffered a great loss of life due to crinimal indifference to its native inhabitants in the pursuit of increased rubber production.
Exploitation of the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, German Southwest Africa, Rhodesia, and South Africa paled in comparison to that of the Belgian Congo. The most infamous example of this is the Congo Free State. The fortunes of King Leopold II, for instance, the famed philanthropist, abolitionist, and self-anointed sovereign of Congo Free State (1885)—76 times larger geographically than Belgium itself—and those of the multinational concessionary companies under his auspices, were mainly made on the proceeds of Congolese rubber, which had historically never been mass-produced in surplus quantities. Between 1880 and 1920 the population of Congo thus halved; over 10 million ‘indolent natives’ unaccustomed to the bourgeois ethos of labor productivity, were the victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion induced by over-work, and disease.
Mass-murder or genocide in the Congo Free State became a cause celèbre in the last years of the 19th century, and a great embarassment to not only the king but also to Belgium, which had portrayed itself as progressive and attentive to human rights.
Many argue that the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by the Australian government constituted genocide; see Stolen Generation
The German extermination of the Herero in Southwest Africa might have been the first attempt by to systematically annihilate a single ethnic group. Up to one million might have been murdered.
In 1985, the United Nation's Whitaker Report recognized the German attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Southwest Africa as one of the earliest attempts at genocide in the twentieth century. In total, some 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Nama (50 percent of the total Nama population) were killed. Characteristic of this genocide was death by starvation and the poisoning of wells for the Herero and Nama population that was trapped in the Namib desert.
Many historians have stressed the the historic importance of these autrocities, tracing the evolution from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Hitler, from Southwest Africa to Auschwitz.
Approximately 0.6-1.5 millions Armenians in Ottoman Empire were killed [2]. The Turkish government officially denies that there was any genocide, claiming that most of the Armenian deaths resulted from armed conflict, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War.
See also: Armenian Genocide
Nanjing Massacre: reportedly 300,000 (the number is quite controversial) people killed during the three months following the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese. Genocide targeted at Chinese at other places of China: Manchuria, the Wan Bao Hill Incident, Xiangyang.
Smaller scale Genocide also targeted at Koreans, Filipinos, Dutch, Vietnamese, Indonesians and Burmese.
Holocaust: approximately 6 million people killed. [1] Genocide targeted at Jews.
Genocide also targeted at Slavs, Gypsies and Jehovahs Witnesses. Approximately 21 million Soviets, among them 7 million civilians, were killed in "Operation Barbarossa", the invasion of the Soviet Union. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities conquered by the Nazis. Since the Slavs were considered "sub-human", this was ethnically targeted mass murder.
Nazis also killed other groups, such as those suffering from birth defects, mental retardation or insanity; homosexuals, prostitutes and communists, as part of a wider mass murder.
[Ukraine|Ukrainians]] - Claims of 5 million civilians starved to death for refusing to cooperate with "collective farming" rules.
Some argue that genocide took the form of man-made famines in 1932-33, particularly in Ukraine. Collectivization led to a drop in the already low productivity of Russian farming, which did not regain the NEP level until 1940, or allowing for the further disasters of World War II, 1950. These statistics, and the actual existence of these famines is debated though. Some argue that the famines were generally a hoax. That collectivization was not responsible for millions of deaths and the actual amount of people who died of starvation was much lower and due to other causes. The 1932 dust bowl crisis which occurred not only in the USA, but also in India and the USSR, is commonly cited as one explanation.
Some have claimed that Stalin was planning a purge of elite Jews following the so-called "Doctor's Plot". These claims, though well publicized, have never been proven.
Note: Many historians dismiss reports of Soviet genocide, as in Ukraine, as anti-soviet propaganda. Some historians have argued that the millions of civilian killings done by the Soviet government should not be called "genocide" since the motivation for the murders is outside of the legal definition of genocide. No ethnic groups or classes, they argue, were targeted in particular.
Some political groups, such as extreme factions of the Free Tibet movement, have claimed that the government of the People's Republic of China has committed genocide by killing members of many minority ethnic groups, including Uighurs, Tibetans and others during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Most scholars argue that this is not a case of genocide but simple famine, because while minority ethnic groups died, so did members of the majority Han Chinese, and at no time has the PRC government undertaken policies specifically to kill minority groups. Famine has been a cyclical, reoccurring phenonmenon in Chinese history for thousands of years.
China states that these charges help to indoctrinate impressionable youths in the Free Tibet movement and other groups with virulent anti-China agendas.
Argentina's government was involved in a "dirty war" in which political opponents were kidnapped and murdered.
In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor with quiet approval of the USA and its subjugation of that nation involved the deaths of thousands of civilians which has been estimated to be, in proportionate numbers, worse than the killings committed by the contemporary Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia.
Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, murdered many other groups as part of a wider campaign of mass murder, such as intellectuals and professionals. An enenmy of Vietnam and the USSR, aided by the United Stated and Maoist China.
Groups that were target of genocide during Pol Pot's rule:
Death squads were active in terrorizing, kidnapping, and murdering political opponents in El Salvador.
Sabra and Shatila massacre (1982), committed by Lebanese Christians, in an area surrounded by Israeli forces. The United Nations declared it to be an act of genocide. Some claim that this declaration was political, the proper classification of the event being a massacre, since no party in the conflict implemented a systematic policy of exterminating Palestinians.
In 1988, Iraq used Sarin to kill the population of a Kurd village.
Organized ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Muslims) throughout the period.
More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica in July 1995. See also History of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutus. See History of Rwanda.

[1] Figures from R. J. Rummel, "Death by Government".
[2] Figure from Britannica

Further Reading

  • Problem from Hell America's Failure to Prevent Genocide, Samantha Power, Basic Books, 2002, hardcover, 640 pages, ISBN 0465061508
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Genocide&oldid=556996"