Genocide

Social Conflict and Mass Murder

In 477 BCE, the democratic polis of Athens put to death the entire male population of the island of Melos and sold all the women and children into slavery following a siege that took place because the citizens of Melos voted for neutrality in the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens. From 149 to 146 BCE, the Romans laid siege to Carthage, killing 150,000 out of a population of 200,000. When the crusaders seized the Holy Land, the victors, it is said, waded to their ankles in the blood of Muslims. Massacres, the annihilation of towns and cities in war, the mass slaughter of combatants, and the liquidation of conquered populations are etched in the history of civilization (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990). It is noteworthy that these atrocities were collective acts sanctioned by religious and/or secular authorities, were typically acts of state policy, and were often carried out with a sense of righteousness. It is also noteworthy that these atrocities are not particular to antiquity. The worst atrocities in human history are living memories, primary among them the killing of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks during World War I and 6 million European Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

The Legal Construction of Genocide

The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 “to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” (Gutman and Rieff 1999: 155). In Lemkin's view, groups can be annihilated physically or assimilated forcibly by expunging their distinctive attributes. Lemkin proposed in 1933 that an international treaty be drafted to identify attacks on national, religious, and ethnic groups as international crimes. The backdrop to his writing was the rise of the Nazis and their conceptualization and implementation of plans to murder the European Jews.

At the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the Allies prosecuted the surviving figures of the Nazi era for war crimes and for crimes against humanity (Bass 2000). These crimes included “deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups” (Gutman and Rieff 1999: 155). In 1946, the United Nations affirmed for the first time in a General Assembly motion that genocide is a war crime under international law. This was further consolidated in 1948 with the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Geneva Convention).

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