Genocide

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Genocide has been defined as the deliberate killing of people based on their ethnicity, nationality, race, religion, or (sometimes) politics. There is disagreement over whether the term genocide ought to be used for politically-motivated in general (compare "").

The word genocide was coined by , a Polish Jew, in , from the roots genos ( for family, tribe or race) and -cide ( for killing). Lemkin campaigned for the international laws defining and forbidding genocide (in the non-political sense), and achieved his goal in .

Table of contents

Definitions of Genocide

Much debate about genocide revolves around the proper definition of the word genocide. Opponents of government massacres often insist that the word's usage should include such massacres, even if international law has a narrower scope. These advocates complain that a narrower definition may be seen as exculpating the totalitarian governments which, they claim, killed over 100 million of their own citizens during the 20th century.

Others insist that the word should be used only in the accepted sense in international law, which limits the scope to "national, ethnical, racial or religious" groups, even if this excludes some massacres. These advocates claim that their preferred usage is closer to the word's literal meaning and to the primary meanings found in dictionaries. However, the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary definition reads as follows: "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group".

Genocide as a crime under international law

The was adopted by the in December and came into effect in January . 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 , the treaty that established the (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 . 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 , 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 diverges from the legal definition set by the UN.

International law

All signatories to the above mentioned convention are required to prevent and punish acts of genocide, both in peace and wartime, though some barriers make this enforcement difficult. Genocide is dealt with as an international matter, by the UN, and can never be treated as an internal affair of a country. It is commonly accepted that, at least since , genocide has been illegal under as a , as well as under . Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish, for prosecution, since intent, demonstrating a chain of accountability, has to be established.

Related concepts

Genocide is also called a , though the initial "definition" of that concept; established during the , 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 is sometimes equated with genocide. has been suggested as a more precise term for this, but it is rarely used. Genocide is a common term referring to deliberate policies promoting mass killing. The term genocide also generally carries an connotation, though the delineation of ethnic groups is easier to frame as simply 'foreign' to the culprit party.

refers to the deliberate destruction of a culture, without necessarily attaining to the full criteria of genocide. This term has been criticized as inflammatory; trying to reap political benefit from the accusation of genocide, as issues dealing with genocide are serious and severe.

Some alleged genocides in history

(Presented in approximate chronological order)

Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clearcut matter. Furthermore, in nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide is certainly not taken lightly and will almost always be controversial. The following list of alleged genocides should be understood in this context and not regarded as the final word on these subjects.

Many campaigns of the Roman Empire can by modern standards be rated as genocide:

's campaign in : the war cost the lives of more than a million Gauls, and a million further were enslaved.

Caesar's campaign against the : approximately 60% of the tribe was killed, and another 20% was taken into slavery.

: the city was completely destroyed, the soil salted, and its people murdered or enslaved.

( –) can be considered as a case of genocide. It was carried out against the people, militarily and by use of the .

Genocide of by –

approved spreading among Native Americans intentionally during the by distributing infected blankets.

See .

resulted in the death of many thousands of .

See , , Extermination of the in .

The

Genocide in the , prior to its being taken over by to form the

Under the rule of , the Congo Free State suffered a great loss of life due to criminal 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 in what later became the Belgian Congo. The most infamous example of this is the Congo Free State.

King Leopold II (of Belgium) was a famed philanthropist, abolitionist, and self-appointed sovereign of the Congo Free State, 76 times larger geographically than Belgium itself.

His fortunes, 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 the Congo 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 , and a great embarrassment to not only the King but also to Belgium, which had portrayed itself as progressive and attentive to human rights.

Tasmania's population was almost entirely wiped out in the 19th century. At least some died at the hands of settlers, many died from disease inadvertently introduced by those settlers, and internal conflicts also occurred. The relative effects of those and other factors is a subject of strong historical and political debate, including whether they constituted genocide.

The removal of Aboriginal children from their families by the Australian government constituted genocide, falling clearly within the ambit of Art. 2(e) of the Genocide convention. Despite the obvious legal classification this has been strongly contested by interested parties. See

1982 - Mayan villages

The (also known as the 'Irish Potato Famine'): After an invasion by the English in 1169, the native population of Ireland had been oppressed under various laws and forced resettlement. The culmination of this oppression occurred between 1845–1850 when a disease struck the potato crop and many people starved to death. With very little relief effort made by Parliament, approximately one million Irish men women and children died of starvation and disease.

One and a half million more would be evicted by their landlords and forced to leave Ireland for (mainly , , and ), the , , and . Conditions aboard the ships transporting poor Irishmen and women to new homes were horrendous: one quarter of all emigrants would die within a year of leaving Ireland. The Great Hunger resulted in the near destruction of the and the old . Those who argue that the definition of genocide is inappropriate for the Great Hunger insist that this is because it did not amount to a deliberate policy of extermination on the part of the British government.

Genocide in the : The Highland Clearances can be traced to the consequences of the failure of the rebellion in the 18th Century. The revenge of the English dealt a huge blow to the culture of the Highland people and the traditional system in the Highlands of Scotland subsequently broke up. After the in the chiefs were impoverished, the language of the people () was proscribed and the wearing of was forbidden.

From about , estate landlords, some absentee, in partnership with impoverished ex-clan chiefs, 'encouraged', sometimes forcibly, the population to move off the land, which was then given over to sheep farming. The people were accommodated in poor crofts or small farms in coastal areas where the farming or fishing could not sustain the communities, or directly put on emigration ships. Together with a failure of the crop in the , this policy resulted in starvation, deaths, and a secondary clearance, when Scots either migrated voluntarily or were forcibly evicted, many to emigrate, to join the British army, or to join the growing cities, like , and , in Lowland Scotland. In many areas there were small and large scale massacres and violence towards the indigenous people.

As in the Australian example above, there are conflicting views about whether the process of change was genocide: there were social and historical factors at work, including the onset of , development of a rational approach to economics, and moves to larger scale agriculture. The Clearances could be argued to be an inevitable collision between the economics of "improved" land use and an almost feudal way of life led by who did not, for the most part, speak English.

Other people feel that what developed does meet the central definition of genocide (see Eric Richard The Highland Clearances Barlinn Books (2000), for an acknowledgement of both sides of this argument), involving the calculated destruction for economic as well as political reasons of groups leading a way of life which no longer "fitted in".

Highlanders were also seen as a threat to the established British Government, and there was already alarm about the . In the context of centuries of resistance and intermittent intrusion from Scotland, some feel this was a further impetus to destroy the traditional way of life and to suppress any resistance to the changes that were taking place.

in (– and –)

Some historians feel that the wars of the against the South African were a form of genocide: because the Boers protested English plans to annex their nations in the English , instead wishing to remain independant or form a coalition with , the English rounded up civilians, placing them in . Until the Boers surrendered in May 1902, at least 25,000 civilians had been killed.

in current-day (–)

In , the United Nation's recognized the German attempt to exterminate the and 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 or perished. Characteristic of this genocide was death by starvation and the poisoning of wells for the Herero and Nama populations that were trapped in the . The responsible German general was

Many historians have stressed the historic importance of these atrocities, tracing the evolution from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Hitler, from Southwest Africa to Auschwitz.

(–)

German genocide before and during

(1933–1945). (See also .)

The : approximately 11 million people were killed (figure is contested, see [1]) according to the Nazi racist ideology, as some ethnic groups were considered "sub-human". This includes:

ha-, ("the Catastrophe" in ), in which 6 million European , including 1.5 million children, were systematically "exterminated" (the Nazi term) for being Jewish. See also .

6 million (3 million of whom were counted as both Polish and Jew: see possibly ).

Genocide also targeted (see ) and .

7 million Soviet civilians and 2 million Soviet . This number includes 2 million mainly in the areas of former , , and proper, many of whom were killed by squads of formed among , , and . The Jews of Eastern Poland were doubly counted also among victims in Poland.

The Nazis also killed other (non-ethnic) groups, such as those suffering from , or ; , and , as part of .

Alleged Allies genocide during WW2

Allies during WW2: 3 to 5 million German civilians killed, 10 to 15 million expelled from their homes.

: allied bombers dropped 3.4 kilotons of incendiaries () on , specifically targetting a civilian population (the city was packed with refugees), and creating a firestorm which killed an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 civilians.

Bombing of : one third of the city destroyed, 60,000 to 100,000 civilian deaths.

Allied bombers attacked known refugee bunkers in many western and eastern German cities, attempting to "demoralize" the Germans.

Attacks on German refugees during the

Refugee ships in the were targetted by allied war ships and submarines and sunk, no survivors were rescued and rescue ships were also sunk. (Earlier in the War German ships had refused to rescue survivors of ships of ships sunk by their submarines: Germans were tried for this at )

The dropping of nuclear missiles on and , , despite Japanese attempts to surrender.

Alleged genocide during WW2

German POW: At least 1 million out of 5 million POWs died in prison camps

: Soviet rape and murder bands attacked East Prussia, raping and killing women and killing all men. Survivors trudged in great columns through the snow at -25°C, fleeing through the blizzards and shell fire. The German population of East Prussia was systematically eliminated.

Convoys of German refugees running for their lives from , , , eastern and other eastern German lands were targetted by bombers and attack airplanes.

Alleged Japanese genocide during WW2

genocide before and during World War II (–)

: Some authorities claimed 300,000 people killed during the three months following the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese. Genocide targeted at Chinese at other places of China: , the , , and the .

conducted biological and chemical warfare experiments on living humans

Smaller scale Genocide also targeted at , , , , and .

(–) genocides by the government

Approximately 0.6–1.5 million in the were killed [2] (some sources cite much higher figures). 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.

Approximately 300,000–600,000 in the were killed, and several hundred thousand others exiled. The Turkish government denies there was any genocide despite evidence to the contrary, instead blaming the wars with Greece which took place around the same time for the millions of deaths.

See also: ,

- 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 . 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. The dispute includes, if the collectivization was responsible for famine and the actual number of victims.

Soviets targeted also following groups: ,, , , , , , , , , , , regardless nationality.

Some have claimed that Stalin was planning a purge of elite Jews following the so-called "". These claims, though well publicized, have never been proven.

Note: Many historians dismiss reports of , 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. Sometimes the term is instead used to describe targeted Soviet killings of particular ideological and political groups.

Some political groups, such as the , have claimed that the government of the has committed genocide by killing members of several minority ethnic groups, including , and others during the and the . Most scholars argue that this is not a case of genocide but simple , because while minority ethnic groups died, so did members of the majority , and at no time has the PRC government undertaken policies specifically to kill minority groups. Famine has been a cyclical, recurring phenomenon in Chinese history for thousands of years. The PRC states that these charges help to indoctrinate impressionable youths in the Free Tibet movement and other groups with anti-China agendas.

In , Indonesia invaded with the quiet approval of the , 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 Regime in Cambodia.

(–)

Killed between 50,000 and 2,000,000 of its civilians after the .

The , led by , killed many other groups as part of a wider campaign of so-called , such as intellectuals and professionals. Some people view the Western democracies and Communist China as complicit in the encouragemnt and support of the CPK.

Groups that were killed during the rule of the CPK:

• (200 thousands or less)
• (150 thousands or less)
• (40-60 thousands or less)
• (12 thousands or less)

(1983)

The US government's of October 21, 2002 accused Sudan of genocide for killing more than 2 million civilians in the south during an ongoing civil war since .

There exist six major crime periods:

1. 1983 attacks on Kurds;
2. 1988 campaign against Kurds;
3. attacks on Kurds 1986-88 (: Saddam Hussein's forces allegedly used to kill the population of a village. Some analysts, however, insist this atrocity was committed by . See for a full discussion);
4. The 1991 crushing of a southern Shi'ite revolt;
5. 1991 crushing of Kurdish insurrection;
6. Crimes against all sectors of the population during the entire period of Baath rule.

(–)

Organized carried out by , , and throughout the period.

More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in in . See also .

(April 1994)

Roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutus. See .

(February–March 2002)

About 800 or more than 2000 people (views differ on the numbers of victims), mostly Muslims, were killed throughout , a state in , during the . This is considered by some people to satisfy the international legal definition of genocide, with the considered responsible for the systematic nature of the killings, while others consider the killings to have been spontaneous and uncontrolled.

Notes

[1] Figures from controversial book by , "Death by Government".
[2] Figure from

Further reading

• Samantha Power, Problem from Hell: America's Failure to Prevent Genocide, Basic Books, 2002, hardcover, 640 pages,
• Eric Richard, The Highland Clearances, Barlinn Books, 2000,
• Edited by Ben Kiernan Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the U.N., and the International Community, .335 pp. (1993).
• Barbara Harff, Early Warning of Communal Conflict and Genocide: Linking Empirical Research to International Responses, Westview Press, August 2003, paperback, 256 pages,

External links