The Routledge History of Genocide

Cathie Carmichael, Richard C. Maguire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317514831
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Routledge History of Genocide takes an interdisciplinary yet historically focused look at history from the Iron Age to the recent past to examine episodes of extreme violence that could be interpreted as genocidal. Approaching the subject in a sensitive, inclusive and respectful way, each chapter is a newly commissioned piece covering a range of opinions and perspectives. The topics discussed are broad in variety and include:

• genocide and the end of the Ottoman Empire
• Stalin and the Soviet Union
• Iron Age warfare
• genocide and religion
• Japanese military brutality during the Second World War
• heritage and how we remember the past.

The volume is global in scope, something of increasing importance in the study of genocide. Presenting genocide as an extremely diverse phenomenon, this book is a wide-ranging and in-depth view of the field that will be valuable for all those interested in the historical context of genocide.

1 Introduction Raphael Lemkin, historians and genocide

Cathie Carmichael

DOI: 10.4324/9781315719054-1

On 9 December 1948, the United Nations ratified the Genocide Convention criminalizing ‘acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. The term ‘genocide’ had not been used at the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal at which the crimes committed by some of the most important leaders of the German Third Reich had been punished. However, the UN Convention codified what had been developing international norms for some decades and responded to a desire by many of the combatants in the Second World War to inaugurate a new era of justice. At The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, rules were set out which prohibited attacks on undefended civilians and pillaging their properties. They also planned to protect the rights of prisoners of war, who could expect humane treatment under the terms agreed. In the 1920s the Geneva Protocol to the Conventions sought to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons. The League of Nations, which has often been seen as a forerunner to the United Nations, decided to create an international court in 1937 and in Lima in 1938 the 8th Conference of American States considered criminalizing persecution for racial and religious reasons. The adoption of the 1948 Convention essentially came down to the work of one man. In his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Raphael (Rafał) Lemkin used his new term ‘genocide’ which he had coined by bringing together the Greek word for a single people (genos) with the Latin word for killing (-cide). Although genocide was recognized as a distinct crime in international law after the Second World War and after revelations about the annihilation of the Jewish and Roma communities of Europe during the Holocaust, the term clearly has its intellectual origins in the treatment of minorities in Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire several decades earlier.

The lawyer who coined the term ‘genocide’, Raphael Lemkin, was born in Imperial Russia in 1900 and brought up in a close Jewish family at a time when the state was becoming an increasingly difficult place for Jews to live. There had been outbreaks of violence against Jews since the 1880s generally known as pogroms. Often these started out as drunken riots fuelled by antisemitic propaganda and incitement at church services. A devastating pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 took place at Easter. Many Jews had chosen to leave rather than face further violence and had emigrated to Germany, France, Britain or the United States. Lemkin went to school in Białystok in what is today Poland, where there was a terrible pogrom in 1906. He grew up in an atmosphere in which Jews felt increasingly menaced and it is clear that the situation of minority religious groups preoccupied him from an early age. His intelligent mother Bella discussed the Nobel prize winning novel Quo vadis? by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, which had first been published in 1895 and concerned the Roman persecution of Christians.¹

Figure 1.1 International lawyer Raphael Lemkin helped draft the Genocide Convention, which maps out prevention and punishment for the crime of genocide.

Source: © Bettmann/CORBIS.

In Kiev, the manager of a brick factory, Mendel Beilis, was arrested on 21 July 1911, after a man testified that a murdered boy, Andrei Iushchinskii, had been kidnapped by a ‘man with a black beard’. Although Lemkin was a just a child at the time he remembered that ‘the entire world trembled with interest and indignation. Our family discussed it every day. It was a test case for justice.’² Many also remembered the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s when a Jew had been wrongly accused of treason. This trial became a cause célèbre and was pivotal in a wider international discussion of the shape of the nation and who could and who could not be seen to ‘belong’.³ In Imperial Russia, nationalist groups spread rumours about Beilis and threatened to lynch him if he were ever released from jail in Kiev. The atmosphere became increasingly polarized with students and left-wing intellectuals protesting and Christian monarchists supporting the absurd accusations against him. Beilis, who was eventually acquitted, remained quiet for much of the trial, but protested his innocence. During the Beilis trial, Lemkin recalled that ‘(a)ll Jewish pupils were called by the collective name Beilis . . . The Jewish population faced the possibility of a pogrom . . . I saw clearly that the lives of millions of people depended on the vote of the jury . . . As the years went by I kept thinking of these problems.’⁴

Lemkin also turned his mind to the situation faced by the Christian Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, who had suffered from attacks similar to pogroms in the 1890s and in 1909. During the First World War, the Ittihad regime in Istanbul used the political crisis to murder and deport hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Lemkin commented that ‘in Turkey, 1.2 million people were put to death for no other reason than that they were Christians . . . Only a handful survived, hidden by the bodies of their comrades. The Turks later accused the unarmed Armenians of having started the shooting.’⁵ For Lemkin, the imperative was to understand the universal. But he did not merely wish to interpret the world but also to change it and to bring in a new legal framework for prevention. In so doing Lemkin definitively rejected the notion that, as Adolf Hitler put it, ‘natural instincts bid all living beings not merely conquer their enemies, but also destroy them. In former days it was the victor’s prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples.’⁶

By the early 1920s Lemkin had started to study law and maintained an active interest in the treatment of Armenians. On 15 March 1921, former Ottoman grand vizier Talaat Pasha (Mehmed Talaat) was assassinated on a Berlin street by an Armenian who had deliberately tracked him down. The young man, Soghomon Tehlirian, admitted in court that he wanted to avenge the slaughter of his family. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide and Tehlirian’s landlady spoke in court and evoked great sympathy from the German people. When the acquittal was announced to a packed courtroom, there were wild shouts of ‘Bravo!’ An hour after the trial, Tehlirian left the courtroom in a car covered with flowers.⁷ Lemkin was extremely perplexed by the Tehlirian case, noting that the law as it stood did not make a distinction between individual and mass murder (i.e. the destruction of an entire community). He had been shocked when Tehlirian had been released: ‘Had he acted as the self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind? Can a man appoint himself to mete out justice? . . . I didn’t know all the answers, but I felt that a law against this sort of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world.’⁸

Some years later, in 1926, Symon Petlura, who had been Hetman of the Ukrainian Directorate during the Civil War, was shot by Sholom Schwartzbard in Paris. Schwartzbard freely admitted that he had pulled the trigger. As in the Tehlirian case, survivors of the Ukrainian Civil War spoke in court. Schwartzbard was defended by Henry Torrès (who also helped to defend the Jewish assassin Herschel Grynszpan, whose actions were the excuse given for the Kristallnacht pogroms in Austria and Germany in November 1938). After the jury had deliberated for 24 minutes, Schwartzbard was acquitted to the wild approval of a packed out courtroom. At the time of the trial, Lemkin described the murder of Symon Petlura as a ‘beautiful crime’, stressing the fact that there was no international law for penalizing the destruction of national, ethnic or religious groups.⁹

Although genocide is essentially a legal concept, it clearly presents great challenges to historians. Acts ‘committed with intent to destroy a nation in whole or in part’ were committed well before the twentieth century and in many different parts of the world. But can we apply a twentieth-century legal term to the sixteenth or even nineteenth centuries? Does it make sense to apply a legal term which essentially demands a verdict to events that occured centuries ago? This book attempts to grapple with that problematic and each individual essay looks at the problem from a different perspective. Not all the authors come to a final conclusion about the historical applicability of the term ‘genocide’ in the case that they are examining, but instead use the term as a framework for thinking about particular historical events in a wider context. The book is divided into four main sections, each presenting fresh ideas about the interpretation of genocide. The first section on genocide in a historical context looks at several important case studies on Iron Age Europe by Fernando Quesada-Sanz, early modern Ireland by David Edwards, the response to the Holocaust in the British Empire by Jennifer Reeve, the German populations expelled from Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century by Benjamin Lieberman and the displacement of children in Europe and Australia by Simone Gigliotti. As a thinker, Lemkin was historically minded and did not believe the epoch in which he lived was unique in terms of the extent of cruelty. Nor did he believe in progress per se: ‘It required a long period of evolution in civilized society to mark the way from wars of extermination, which occurred in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, to the conception of wars as being essentially limited to activities against armies and states. In the present war, however, genocide is widely practiced by the German occupant.’¹⁰

The second section looks at the role of ideology in genocide, particularly ideologies of race, class and nation. Lemkin recognized that ideology was crucial and that genocide signified ‘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’.¹¹ Mark Felton examines Japanese ideologies in relation to war crimes committed during the Second World War, Tim Smith and Nicholas Werth both look at the genocidal intent of communist regimes of Cambodia and the Soviet Union respectively. René Lemarchand examines the competing extreme nationalisms of the Great Lakes region of Africa and their impact on interethnic relations. Tomislav Dulić looks at the fascist Ustaša regime in Croatia between 1941 and 1945. The third section largely concentrates on the interpretation of genocide which draws on recent research and highlights the increasing range of specialisms within genocide studies. In this section there is a chapter on heritage and remembering the past by Rebecca Jinks. Paul Jackson looks at contemporary fascism and Mark Hobbs at holocaust denial. In her chapter, Kate Temoney examines the role of religious ideas in extreme violence. Uğur Ümit Üngör analyses the destruction of property, culture and art that goes hand in hand with attacks on people.

Chapters in the last section look at the relationship between war and genocide. Genocide is often committed during war and the chaos of war brings opportunities that are rarely given to leaders during peace time. Wartime digressions from behavioural norms were sometimes accepted with fatalism as if human beings always behaved differently in extremis. In the final months of the war in Berlin when the inhabitants of the city died from bombing or suicide, and many women were raped by the Red Army, some made a conscious decision to not to speak about what they had been through: ‘C’est la guerre. N’en parlons plus.’¹² The intention to commit genocide may also be the reason to go to war in the first place and ideologies of annihilation are often crucial to the outcome. In this section there are chapters on the Chechen war by Mike Bowker and the war in Bosnia by Kate Ferguson. Robby Van Eetvelde examines the behaviour of police forces during the Holocaust. Uğur Ümit Üngör looks at the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the destruction of ancient communities. The final chapter by Richard Maguire looks at importance of nuclear weapons to debates about genocide.

Notes

1. Samantha Power, A ‘Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 20.
2. Donna-Lee Frieze, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 19.
3. Cathie Carmichael, Genocide before the Holocaust (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009).
4. Frieze, Totally Unofficial, pp. 18–19.
5. Website: Ibid, p. 19.
6. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: The Lawbook Exchange, 2008), p. 81.
7. Jacques Derogy, Opération Némésis (Paris: Fayard, 1986).
8. Frieze, Totally Unofficial, p. 20.
9. Power, A Problem from Hell, p. 1.
10. Raphäel Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: The Lawbook Exchange, 2008), p. 80.
11. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 79.
12. Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945 (Munich: btb Verlag, 2008), p. 202.

Part 1 Genocide in Historical Contexts

2 Genocide and mass murder in Second Iron Age Europe Methodological issues and case studies in the Iberian Peninsula

Fernando Quesada-Sanz

DOI: 10.4324/9781315719054-2

The concept of ‘genocide’ presents several definitional dilemmas in the contemporary world. There are literally dozens of cogent definitions of the concept, which are quite distant and d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction Raphael Lemkin, historians and genocide—Cathie Carmichael
• PART 1 Genocide in Historical Contexts
• PART 2 Genocide and ideologiesof race, class and nation
• PART 3 Interpreting Genocide
• PART 4 Mass Violence, War and Genocide
• Index