A continuing series on How to Think About Darfur, by James North
I first looked into the definition of genocide in the early 1980s, when
I was writing Freedom Rising, my book about southern Africa. One chapter described the apartheid regime’s Bantustan policy, which
entailed the forced removal of several million black South Africans into already overcrowded, segregated, and terribly poor rural reservations. Infant mortality and disease levels shot up.
I pointed out that genocide, according to the 1951 United Nations Convention,
was "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group." In
addition to mass killing, the Convention states, genocide is also "deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part."
I concluded: "The regime’s policy already constitutes murder of some
degree. As government leaders push the scheme relentlessly forward,
they will certainly raise the amount of suffering, disease and death,
if they have not already, to a level that can only be defined as
genocide."
Today, I’m not sure I agree with those passages. One of my reviewers, Joseph Lelyveld,
politely questioned my use of "genocide." He did not disagree with my
harsh description of the Bantustan policy; he later eloquently indicted
it himself in his own book, Move Your Shadow. But he wondered if I had
not applied the word improperly.
One big problem with "genocide" is that you have to show intent. The
General kills 250,000 small farmers as part of his campaign to crush
a rebel movement and he is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
But let the General identify the same small farmers as part of a
religious or ethnic group; let him say, even privately, that he wants
to exterminate them as a group, and he can be tried for genocide.
In that sense, genocide is like "hate crime," another category that
I have trouble with. If a man attacks another man, common law
definitions of assault or attempted murder should be enough; I don’t
see why there should be additional changes, or a greater penalty, if he
shouts "kill the xxxxxx" during his crime.
Genocide is more than just semantics. International lawyers used to contend that a determination of genocide required the international community to intervene. Samantha Power’s important article about the Clinton administration’s failure to act over Rwanda in 1994
showed how high U.S. officials went through contortions to avoid saying
the g-word; at one stage, a State Department spokesperson would
acknowledge "acts of genocide," but she had been ordered to stop there.
(The mass killings in Rwanda
certainly do qualify as "genocide." But, as we will see in upcoming
posts, some of the wrong lessons were drawn from the Rwanda experience.)
As for Darfur, in 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell did describe the reality
in Darfur as "genocide"– but he did not trigger an armed intervention.
International law turns out to be more flexible than people thought.
My biggest objection to "genocide" is that the word is used to lift an actual
historical episode out of the here and now and put it on a cosmic plane of good and evil,
right and wrong, madmen and innocents, killers and victims. Sometimes,
as in the Nazi effort to destroy the Jews of Europe, that cosmic plane
is accurate.
But in many other instances, it confuses. "Genocide" should
require armed intervention, however international law is interpreted,
because you cannot negotiate with crazed killers; historians agree that
the Nazis actually weakened their war effort on the eastern front by diverting railway cars and other resources to murdering Jews.
But what about a regime, like Sudan today, that does use criminal
violence against civilians – not because it irrationally hates them,
but as a calculated tool to hang onto power? Let us leave aside the
practical question of sending Western troops into yet another nation in
the Middle East, (advocates of intervention seem not to have been following the news from Iraq over the past 5 years). Is there another way to change the Sudanese government’s behavior?
None of this is meant to imply that the Sudanese regime is not as bad as if it would be if we used the word "genocidal." I actually find people like Omar al-Bashir
quite as terrifying in their own way as full-fledged genocidal leaders;
he is capable of turning horrible violence on and off, not mainly out
of passion, but out of pure, cold, inhuman self-interest.
