Genocide since 1945

Philip Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136293672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1948 the United Nations passed the Genocide Convention. The international community was now obligated to prevent or halt what had hitherto, in Winston Churchill's words, been a "crime without a name", and to punish the perpetrators. Since then, however, genocide has recurred repeatedly. Millions of people have been murdered by sovereign nation states, confident in their ability to act with impunity within their own borders.

Tracing the history of genocide since 1945, and looking at a number of cases across continents and decades, this book discusses a range of critical and inter-connected issues such as:

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• why this crime is different, why exactly it is said to be "the crime of crimes"

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• how each genocide involves a deadly triangle of perpetrators (with their collaborators), victims and bystanders as well as rescuers

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• the different stages that genocides go through, from conception to denial

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• the different explanations that have been put forward for why genocide takes place

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• and the question of humanitarian intervention.

Genocide since 1945 aims to help the reader understand how, when, where and why this crime has been committed since 1945, why it has proven so difficult to halt or prevent its recurrence, and what now might be done about it. It is essential reading for all those interested in the contemporary world.

1
Never again? From the Holocaust to the Genocide Convention

After the Holocaust

In January 1945, Soviet soldiers entered the extermination camp in Auschwitz in Poland, where over a million people, the overwhelming majority Jews, had been systematically murdered in the space of a few short years. Terrible as they were, Auschwitz and the extermination camps were ‘only’ one element in the Holocaust. A million had been shot before they were set up; many others had died already in ghettos and transportations; others died in death marches back to Germany as the Red Army advanced. Even as the Nazis faced certain defeat, priority had been given to murdering Jews over the war effort itself.

But Jews were not the Nazis’ only victims. A large percentage of Sinti and Roma (around 200,000) were killed in what has become known as the Porrajmos; many millions of Poles, Russians, prisoners of war (3.3 million), thousands of disabled people, so-called ‘social undesirables’, and political opponents had also been murdered or starved to death.

This scale of destruction was more than the outcome of war, terrible though that had now become. After the horrors of the First World War, there had been considerable and anguished debate about what would happen if there was another war. But hardly anyone had predicted anything like the Holocaust.

Raphael Lemkin

One of the few who had sensed something catastrophic was coming was a young Jewish lawyer from Poland. Raphael Lemkin had escaped himself to the United States but lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust. Lemkin died in poverty and almost total obscurity but has now come to be recognised as one of the great moral figures of the twentieth century. As a young man, Lemkin had been shocked to discover that the organisers of the mass killing of Armenians during the First World War had not been prosecuted because there was no law under which they could be tried. What, Lemkin asked himself, was this crime that could not be punished? Was it new or old? Why was there no law against it and what could be done about it?

Lemkin’s effort to answer these questions led him to develop a new concept: genocide. In the process, Lemkin drew on both his legal training and historical scholarship, and law and history have been intertwined in this question from the beginning, even if lawyers and historians have different objectives and concerns.

Lemkin’s first effort was to think about the problem in terms of what he called ‘barbarity’ and ‘vandalism’, terms he proposed to a conference in Madrid in 1933. ‘Barbarity’referred to ‘acts of extermination’; ‘vandalism’ to attempts to destroy culture. Evocative though they were, these terms did not seem to quite capture the urgency of the problem in the contemporary world. The former in particular could be said to look back in some way, to take mankind back to a supposedly less civilised state. What Lemkin thought was taking place now, however, was not simply a regression.

In 1944 Lemkin produced an extensive study of what the Germans and their allies were doing in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, paying detailed attention as a legal expert to laws and decrees, but also highlighting the Nazi state’s more general imperialist and colonising plans for the East.¹ This was where he first deployed the concept of genocide to capture what he had come to see as a modern crime. What was modern was not mass murder, although the scale of it was now becoming immense. As Lemkin knew perfectly well, human beings have slaughtered each other for centuries. What was new was the way modern states were now trying to destroy groups entirely, or to cripple them to such an extent that they could not continue as recognisable groups. Mass killing was one (horrific) part of a wider problem, the destruction of groups, each of which made its own distinctive cultural contribution to the life of humanity. Lemkin believed that ‘if the diversity of cultures were destroyed, it would be as disastrous for civilisation as the physical destruction of nations’.² Looking at what the Nazis were doing, Lemkin found evidence of what he called

a co-ordinated plan of different actions aiming at … the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.³

Lemkin was not always completely consistent in the way he used his new concept, perhaps not surprisingly, given the very difficult circumstances in which he was working, and the different audiences he was trying to address.⁴ At times, he seemed to focus on extermination and mass killing, and physical violence was always central to his conception of genocide. But the main thrust was to emphasise the variety of methods used to attack ‘different aspects of the life of the captive peoples’ – the political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral. At times too, he seemed to distinguish clearly between what happened to the Jews, with whom he closely identified and who the Nazis sought to annihilate immediately and physically entirely, and others who the Nazis also sought to destroy but not necessarily immediately, not necessarily totally and not necessarily through mass killing.⁵ But again, the main thrust was to stress the connection, showing how all of the groups targeted by the Nazis were slated for destruction, sooner or later.

The target in any event in every case was less the individual per se than he or she as a member of a group. It was the group that was to be crippled, its ‘essential foundations’ destroyed so that it could be replaced by something else. For genocide, as Lemkin understood it, was a two-sided phenomenon, or one with two connected phases: ‘one, the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’.⁶

This result, moreover, could be achieved even if states were to lose a war. Even though Germany had in the end been defeated, the Nazis had succeeded in making much of Europe largely Judenrein – clear of Jews. Across Europe, over 70 per cent of the Jewish population was murdered and in some places the figures were even higher – 85 per cent in Poland, 89 per cent in Latvia and 90 per cent in Lithuania. Jews were brought from all over Europe to be killed – from Greece, for example (65,000 out of a total Jewish population of 75,000), or from Holland (90,000 from a pre-war community of some 150,000).⁷

The word that Lemkin invented, genocide, was a compound of words from the Greek (genos referring to a group) and Latin (from caedere, to kill). In drawing on the dead languages of the classical world, one could say that this term too still looked back. But the creation of this new word nevertheless struck a chord with others.

Already in 1941, in denouncing the atrocities of the Nazis, Churchill had claimed that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name’.⁸ This did not mean that Churchill or other Allied leaders were entirely clear with their publics about what was happening. In fact they largely downplayed what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, not because of a lack of information but because it was not a strategic or moral priority.⁹ Their states had not gone to war with Nazi Germany to save the Jews and they saw no value in giving the erroneous impression that they were now fighting for this reason. Even after the war, what happened to Jews was still not highlighted in films, reports and broadcasts.¹⁰

Nuremburg, crimes of war and genocide

This was true even in the historic trial of leading Nazis which took place at Nuremburg in 1946, where the focus was not primarily on the murder of Jews, but on crimes of war and aggression.¹¹ This seriously limited the extent to which genocide could feature as an issue.

The Allies had been divided initially on what they should do with the Nazi leaders. In the end, the Allies decided to hold a trial but there was considerable uncertainty about who exactly should be arraigned and on what charges. A central problem had to do with the question of national sovereignty. As Justice Robert Jackson put it at the London Conference that paved the way for Nuremburg,

the way Germany treats its inhabitants, or any other country treats its inhabitants is not our affair any more than it is the affair of some other government to interpose itself into our problems. The reason that this program of exterminating the Jews … becomes an international concern is this: it was a part of a plan for making an illegal war. Unless we have a war connection as a basis for reaching them … we have no basis for dealing with atrocities.¹²

This overriding emphasis on war was a significant impediment to thinking more clearly about genocide in another important sense. The notion of war crimes had after all already been established in the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and in the Geneva Protocol of 1925. If the Nazis could be prosecuted for the crime of waging an aggressive war within which they had committed mass murder and other atrocities, why was a new concept or law necessary? The problem was that the Nazis had clearly committed them before the war, as well as during it. The prosecutors at Nuremburg tried to get round this problem by charging the Nazis with conspiracy to wage aggressive war but this was clearly not very satisfactory.

The term genocide was in fact invoked on several occasions, sometimes with specific reference to Lemkin himself. It featured for example both in the indictment and in the prosecutor’s closing arguments. It did not appear, however, in either the final judgement or in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal itself.

Lemkin was dismayed by this conclusion, as he had intended his new concept to cover crimes committed not only in times of war but also in peace. But he did not give up, and others in any case were already beginning to use the term more freely. Alongside Nuremburg, other trials of Nazi criminals were also taking place, in Poland and in occupied Germany, where the term genocide began to appear more and more.

Drafting the Convention¹³

Immediately after the Nuremburg Trial verdicts had been handed down in late 1946, discussion continued at the first United Nations General Assembly. On 11 December 1946, the General Assembly passed unanimously Resolution 96(I), which asserted the gravity of genocide and the threat it posed to humanity itself. Genocide was defined as

a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, resulting in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups, and is contrary to the moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations.

The Resolution identified genocide as ‘a crime under international law’ and called on Member States both to ‘enact the necessary legislation for the prevention and punishment of the crime’ and to ‘co-operate speedily to prevent and punish it’. The Assembly then mandated its Economic and Social Council to draft a Convention on genocide for its next session.

This was a momentous move. Although the General Assembly is not a law-making body, it had now called for commitments which went significantly beyond what had previously been agreed between states in any international forum or organisation.

The radical character of this declaration and the call for a Convention troubled some participants. The Economic and Social Council was not able to make a great deal of progress as a result and the matter then came back to the Assembly for its second session from September to December 1947 which handed the drafting over to its 6th (Legal) Committee. Here too there was considerable debate and the 6th Committee appeared rather to water down the spirit of the original Declaration, even to the point of suggesting a Convention might not be desirable or necessary at all. Many in the General Assembly were irritated by this. Resolution 180(II) reaffirmed the urgent need for a Convention, along the lines originally expressed. An ad hoc committee of the Economic and Social Council was formed to speed up the drafting. Finally, after considerably more debate (at no less than 28 meetings), the Assembly adopted Resolution 260(III) A on 9 December 1948 (some 24 hours before the Universal Declaration on Human Rights), as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (see Appendix 1).

Ratifying the Convention

Lemkin’s work, however, was not finished. The Convention still needed to be ratified by at least 20 states. Ethiopia was the first to do so and, by 11 December, 42 other states had also done so. The Convention itself came into force on 12 January 1951.

One state however refused to ratify it – the United States. This came as a great shock to Lemkin, who was to spend several more years fruitlessly attempting to have this decision changed. Although the United States had taken a leading role at Nuremburg and been engaged throughout the drafting process, strong opposition to the Convention emerged in Congress. This was largely on grounds of sovereignty, with critics fearing that the Convention would be used against the United States for what it might do or had done in the past, even though the Convention was not retroactive.

This was a serious blow to Lemkin but also foreshadowed critical problems with the Convention in the future, which hinge in many ways on the problem of the sovereignty of the nation state, as we shall see. Lemkin died long before the United States changed its position. It was to do so only in the 1980s. When the decision was made, it was not exactly the result of a major rethink but to appease those outraged by President Reagan when he visited an SS war memorial at Bitburg in Germany.

The United States of course was not the only state not to ratify the Convention. To date not all member states of the United Nations (UN) have signed up, although the large majority (140) have done so. Even if later than Lemkin would have wished, the Convention does command adherence from a large majority of states, includ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Never again? From the Holocaust to the Genocide Convention
• 2 The Genocide Convention
• 3 Explaining genocide
• 4 Perpetrators, bystanders, victims and rescuers
• 5 Genocide during the Cold War
• 6 Genocide after the Cold War
• 7 genocide and humanitarian intervention
• 8 Justice and prevention
• Conclusion: the politics of genocide today
• Notes
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Glossary
• Index