Why are some conflicts termed as ‘genocide’ and some as ‘crimes against humanity’, ‘political violence’ or ‘insurgency’?
Why did Pope Francis christen the Armenian Genocide as the first genocide of the 20th century although British author David Olusoga pointed out that the actions of General Lothar Von Trotha in German Southwest Africa against the Herero and the Nama held that notorious title. Photos: iStock The ongoing conflagration in the Holy Land which started on October 7, 2023 has once again highlighted how intractable some disputes in the world’s gallery of unsolved problems are. The actions, first of Palestinian group Hamas and then the State of Israel, have shown that international law is toothless as far as some conflicts are concerned.
Or maybe all? Why is that so many of the “new conflicts” that have taken place in this century have not aroused as much disgust or moral dilemmas as Gaza and the Ukraine have this year?
One may cite the relatively lesser digital footprint a decade or two ago when George W Bush was bombing Iraq or the Syrian Civil War was on.
Fair enough. But then, just think: Why is Rwanda 1994 a genocide but Biafra, on the same continent a few decades removed, is not? Why are Bosnian Serb generals guilty of crimes against humanity in the 1990s but not those from West Pakistan in the country’s eastern wing in 1971?
And as Down To Earth (DTE) reported a few years ago, why did Pope Francis christen the Armenian Genocide as the first genocide of the 20th century although British author David Olusoga pointed out that the actions of General Lothar von Trotha in German Southwest Africa against the Herero and the Nama held that notorious title?
Ultimately, it leads one to question the way international law regarding human casualties of wars and conflicts has been framed last century. And it leads to one man at the heart of it all: Raphael Lemkin.
Lemkin, a Polish Jew born in Tsarist Russia (his birthplace is today in Belarus) in 1900 is famous today as the person who coined the term ‘genocide’, made up of the combination of ‘genos’ (Greek for ‘people’) and ‘-cide’ (Latin for ‘killing’).
Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his family as Nazi German forces pushed east into the heart of the Soviet Union, was also the force behind the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Convention was approved and proposed for signature and ratification on December 9, 1948. It came into force on January 12, 1951.
As per the Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
But is it time to rethink Lemkin and his definition of what constitutes genocide? As apparent from the instances above, there are a number of problems.
“It is a labelling game in which the powerful get to label some things as genocide and not others; just as the Russian invasion of the Ukraine is termed a war crime and Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories is not,” Nandini Sundar, professor of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, told DTE.
Perhaps the strongest critique of Lemkin’s definition of genocide is the 2021 book, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, by Australian academic A Dirk Moses.
In the introduction to the book, Moses writes:
Taking the normative perspective of civilian immunity from military attack that international law and norms ostensibly prioritize, this book argues that their implicit hierarchy, atop which sits genocide as “the crime of crimes,” blinds us to other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities and the “collateral damage” of missile and drone strikes, blockades, and sanctions.
Moses notes that the majority of post-World War II conflicts have been internal to states, and that civilians are now the majority of victims of armed conflict.
Yet, he adds, international law since World War II takes genocide as the threshold of mass violence to be proscribed and prosecuted.
“As a consequence, journalists feel compelled to make genocidal allusions to gain humanitarian attention for sufferings of civilians in the bombings of besieged cities in the Middle East. They do so because a narrow definition of genocide downgrades, if not screens out, more common and equally destructive human losses,” he says.
Whether it is civil war, insurgency, political violence, they are “lesser cousins” of genocide. Here is Moses again:
Genocide captures public attention in a way that war crimes or crimes against humanity do not. Clearly, the deliberate destruction of a people is a terrible crime; but why is worse than the foreseeable destruction of many people?
Perhaps, this focus on genocide as “the crime of crimes” is due in part to the early life of Lemkin.
He developed an early interest in atrocities from history, whether it was Roman emperor Nero throwing Christians to the lions, the Punic Wars ending in Carthage’s sacking, the invasions of Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes or the Saint Bartholomew Day’s Massacre of French Protestant Huguenots.
In his early years, the Armenian Genocide happened under the directions of high-ranking Ottoman officials. It left a deep impression on the young Lemkin.
Finally, the Holocaust which caused the deaths of his parents and entire clan, spurred Lemkin on his lifelong mission of giving a name to attempts of wiping out entire ethnic, racial or national groups.
But as Moses has noted and as is apparent, Lemkin’s definition does not do justice to victims who are not covered by his genocide definition.
“Given these problems, I suggest in this book that the genocide concept should be replaced with the more general crime of “permanent security”. To that end, we need to understand how our categories and imaginations of mass criminality produced this moral hierarchy, the lamentable hair-splitting in discussions about civilian destruction, and the occlusion or permanent security: these problems of genocide,” he writes.
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