Genocide

While the term genocide is new, the phenomenon is old. Genocide has a long history, going back to at least the 12th century BCE and continuing into the present. The 20th century can be considered an “age of genocide,” with numerous examples of genocide throughout the period claiming as many as 70 million lives (some scholars would say many more than that). After the Holocaust, the watchword was “Never again,” yet since 1945 the lives claimed by genocide exceed those killed in international and civil wars combined. But with so many genocides, different situations, motives, and victim groups, it has been difficult to define genocide in ways that everyone would accept. Moreover, the term is widely used in a rhetorical fashion to attract attention and to further political and social demands.

Nevertheless, the definition of genocide that is contained in the United Nations (UN) Convention [Page 967]on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, though widely criticized, is the one that prevails among scholars. To complicate matters further, the concept of genocide could be described, following Ludwig Wittgenstein, as a concept with “blurred edges.” Here, the family resemblances and differences between genocide and other concepts, such as ethnic cleansing, must be taken into account. There is still a core meaning: Genocide consists of acts that intentionally threaten the existence of human groups. Yet this statement itself is incomplete: What acts? What level of threat? What is a group? Who defines it? And how is intentionality determined?

Before the term genocide existed, mass killings were referred to as massacres, race extermination, and so on. Perpetrators had very different terms: victory, self-defense, purification of society. It was not until 1944 that the term genocide was created by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The term was based on the Greek genos (race, group) with the Latin cide (killing). Lemkin used the term to describe not so much the destruction of individuals but “the destruction of a nation or ethnic group.” Political and social groups, such as classes, were not included in his definition and nor was the partial destruction of a group. He stated, “Genocide is a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups completely” (p. 79). For him, the core of the crime was the destruction of groups, not individuals; he believed that groups were the bearers of civilization and culture, of identity, of diversity, and thus in special need of protection. Pieter Drost (1959) countered with a definition that focused not on the destruction of groups but of individuals: “Genocide is the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by reason of their membership of any human collectivity as such” (p. 125).

Lemkin pressed the UN to declare genocide a crime against international law. From 1946 to 1948, the UN debated the wording of what would become, by unanimous vote in December 1948, the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. With sufficient ratifications by member states, the Convention entered into force in early 1951. But despite the occurrence of numerous examples of genocide in the years following, not a single case of genocide was tried under international law until the opening years of the 21st century. The International Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have now both charged and convicted several individuals for genocide. One problem with this, however, is that a vast, state-organized process, with deep societal involvement, is treated as if it were simply a trial for murder.

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