The Concept of Genocide.
During World War II, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin created the term “genocide” to refer to the intentional elimination of national groups based on their collective identity. Lemkin’s objective was to use this phrase to bring about a framework of international law with which to prevent and punish what the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had termed as “a crime without a name”. Lemkin was extremely successful in this regard: by 1948, the nascent United Nations had been convinced to draft the UN Convention on Genocide.
Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide contains the international legal definition of genocide.
Section II: Genocide is defined in the current Convention as any of the following actions done with the goal to eliminate, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
While it should be emphasized that this is still the only legal definition of genocide, it should also be mentioned that many experts disagree with it, citing the list of probable victim groups as too small or the necessity to prove intent as too demanding. Below is a list of experts disagreeing with it.
Peter Drost (1959)
Genocide is the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by reason of their membership of any human collectivity as such.
Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (1987)
Genocide is the deliberate, organized destruction, in whole or in large part, of racial or ethnic groups by a government or its agents. It can involve not only mass murder, but also forced deportation (ethnic cleansing), systematic rape, and economic and biological subjugation.
Henry Huttenbach (1988)
Genocide is any act that puts the very existence of a group in jeopardy.
Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (1990)
Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.
Helen Fein (1993)
Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.
Barbara Harff (2003)
Genocides and politicides are the promotion, execution, and/or implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents — or, in the case of civil war, either of the contending authorities — that are intended to destroy, in whole or part, a communal, political, or politicized ethnic group.
As the concept of genocide became more alive and evolved, so did some of its negative consequences: It is a difficult crime to prove; it does not encompass all groups (such as those based on sexual orientation or political affiliation); and, by being viewed as the “crime of crimes,” it has unintentionally reduced the gravity of other crimes, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. The concept of genocide is not going to vanish. But we must ask what the social utility of such a hierarchy of crimes is: why would one memorialize the massacre of 8,000 Muslim males in Srebrenica as a genocide, but ignore the deaths of possibly at least three million people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) around the same time?
We must reconsider the concept of genocide and find a method to reconcile genocide with crimes against humanity. To make crimes against humanity and war crimes as horrific as they truly are, we must make genocide less exceptional, lower the standards, include more groups, and possibly make it simpler to prove.
