Category: Genocide

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Book pulled from curriculum

Barbara Coloroso’s book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide was recently pulled from a Grade 11 curriculum proposal in Toronto, after protests from the Turkish-Canadian community arose over including the Armenian genocide.

But a committee struck to review the course decided in late April to remove the book because “a concern was raised regarding [its] appropriateness. … The Committee determined this was far from a scrupulous text and should not be on a History course although it might be included in a course on the social psychology of genocide because of her posited thesis that genocide is merely the extreme extension of bullying,” according to board documents.

Ironically, it would seem that Coloroso’s attempt to demonstrate how common, everyday behavior (such as bullying, intimidation, and discrimination) can so easily feed an act of genocide, is the message that the committee decides to criticize during their statement. Normally this is exactly the kind of example Holocaust educators attempt to use in order to draw parallels.

Strangely, the committee decided to use works by Bernard Lewis and Guenter Lewy in place of Extraordinary Evil. Both men are deniers of the Armenian genocide, which seems a curious way to present material for a course covering the genocide, as it would naturally suggest that the committee is hoping their students walk away disavowing the events of 1915.

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JEM launches attack against Khartoum

Over the weekend, Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), one of the rebel groups operating in the Darfur region, launched an attack against Khartoum in hopes of ousting current president Omar Bashir.

Early Saturday evening, the swelling sound of heavy fighting came from Omdurman, a suburb just across the river from Khartoum, and helicopters and army trucks headed toward the area, according to a Reuters reporter in the capital. Earlier in the day, the rebels said they had taken control of Omdurman and would not relent until they had pushed into the center of Khartoum.

“The international community has failed to protect our people, and now we are in a position to do it,” said Tahir Elfaki, chairman of the legislative council for JEM, speaking from a London airport as he headed to Libya, which, along with the government of Chad, is a main backer of the rebel group. “We are not going to stop until this regime is removed once and for all.”

The United States has officially condemned the attack and claims that such actions only frustrate the already tense negotiations. Nonetheless, the government of Khartoum is seen almost universally as a regime that has ignored practically every region of its country, murdering hundreds of thousands and displacing over a million.

While the rebel action was not entirely unanticipated by the international community, reports from the ground, citing examples of Sudanese soldiers joining the rebels, have been particularly troubling for international observers who fear that this could signal the breakdown of party loyalties across the country. To add fuel to the fire, JEM is reported to get funding from Chad, which heightens the risk of cross border conflicts, inter-country disputes, and puts the millions of displaced people in-harms-way.

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Denial in policy making

In 1994, I can clearly remember watching State Department spokesperson Christine Shelley standing behind a podium and addressing a room full of reporters. It was the usual State Department briefing, and with the Rwandan Genocide being in the news, one reporter asked, “How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?”

It may seem like a strange question, but two weeks before, during a similar briefing, Mike McCurry, another State Department spokesman, was asked: “has the administration yet come to any decision on whether it can be described as genocide?” McCurry responded:

I’ll have to confess, I don’t know the answer to that. I know that the issue was under very active consideration. I think there was a strong disposition within the department here to view what has happened there, certainly, constituting acts of genocide.

Two weeks later, when Shelley got the clarification question, about how many acts of genocide it takes to make a genocide, she responded, “That’s just not a question that I’m in a position to answer.” When the reporter then asked if she had “specific guidance not to use the word ‘genocide’ in isolation, but always to preface it with these words ‘acts of’?” she responded:

I have guidance which I try to use as best as I can. There are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of. I don’t have an absolute categorical prescription against something, but I have the definitions. I have phraseology which has been carefully examined and arrived at as best as we can apply to exactly the situation and the actions which have taken place.

The simple fact is, despite all of Lemkin’s hard work, the genocide convention has always been a faulty mechanism, which is backed by sovereign powers only as needed to excerpt policy forces where they’re advantageous. As Jonah Goldberg reported in the Los Angeles Times recently, this type of political maneuvering has recently reared its head in Russia, where the lower house of parliament passed a resolution stating that the Ukrainian famine wasn’t genocide.

Virtually no one, including the Russians, disputes that the Soviet government was involved in the deliberate forced starving of millions of people. But the Russian resolution indignantly insists: “There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines.” It notes that victims included “different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas” of the Soviet Union.

As Goldberg points out, the distinction the Russians are attempting to make (which many others have attempted to make in the past), is that the victims of this genocide were not an ethnic or religious group, but simply a bunch of people who happened to be living in an area that was decimated by a violent act. He goes on to explain that Lemkin made a number of concessions in order to get the convention passed, after years of fighting for its adoption.

The Russian’s argument, of course, like Turkey’s anti-Armenian lobby, is nothing but a semantic dodge. It’s the same kind of dodge Mike McCurry and Christine Shelley made in order to keep the Clinton Administration shielded from having to take action in Rwanda. And while I agree that this is a loophole that needs to be closed, I can’t help but notice that the United States and her sister nations have plenty of other excuses to ignore genocides, including, unfortunately, those that are currently unfolding.

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UN genocide prevention comes up toothless

The United Nation’s Secretary-General recently released a report on the implementation of the so called Five Point Action Plan and the activities of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. For those who aren’t familiar with the plan, it was originally proposed back in 2004 and can be boiled down to a single paragraph, as it was in this 2006 report for the Human Rights Council:

On 7 April 2004, in his address to the Commission on Human Rights on the occasion of a special meeting to observe the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, the Secretary-General outlined a Five Point Action Plan to prevent genocide, which included the following: (a) preventing armed conflict, which usually provides the context for genocide; (b) protection of civilians in armed conflict including a mandate for United Nations peacekeepers to protect civilians; (c) ending impunity through judicial action in both national and international courts; (d) early and clear warning of situations that could potentially degenerate into genocide and the development of a United Nation’s capacity to analyse and manage information; and (e) swift and decisive action along a continuum of steps, including military action.

While it seems like this is a fairly intelligent and obvious list of steps one would need to take in order to stave off genocide, the reality is that effective action in halting violence is one of those things that time-and-again have stymied international bodies. As United Press International recently wrote:

The report of the secretary-general on the implementation of the Five Point Action Plan on the Prevention of Genocide said more work needs to be done to strengthen the activities of the special adviser on the prevention of genocide.

The report concluded that the United Nations in general “has experienced difficulty” in recognizing the signs of outbreaks of violence that could lead to genocide and in intervening early enough to make a difference.

Ask anyone who works in this field if “recognition” is the problem and you’ll most likely get a clinched-toothed “no.” Simply put, genocide is often easy to spot, but the United Nations and her members, even when faced with hard-and-fast evidence of genocide (as it was in Rwanda), are extremely wary of intervention.

As this report once again affirms, the United Nations remains committed to an approach that recognizes and fully respects the sovereignty of States and sees sovereignty as a positive concept of State responsibility to protect those under its jurisdiction, respect their human rights, and seek international support when needed. While respecting the sovereignty of an individual nation is without a doubt important for insuring participation in the United Nations, it’s unlikely that a country in the midst of a genocidal furor is going to take the responsibility of protecting its own citizens as paramount, since that’s contrary to the very definition of genocide.

It does, however, ensure that other member nations, who may be inclined to aid those who are suffering at the hands of genocidaires, will keep conflicts at arm’s length in order to maintain the principle of “fully respect[ing] the sovereignty of States.” It’s this kind of backwards thinking realpolitik diplomacy that allows genocide to happen without threat of intervention.

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Denial is endemic

While Holocaust denial gets the lion’s share of press when it comes to the subject of “genocide revisionism,” it’s certainly not the only case. In fact, in recent years, as the United States has contemplated recognizing the Armenian genocide, the voices of angered Turks has been added to the cacophony of those who strive to paint history in a different light.

In fact, Gregory Stanton (the president of Genocide Watch) included Denial as the eighth, and final, stage of genocide in the briefing paper he presented to the U.S. State Department in 1996:

Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims. They block investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern until driven from power by force, when they flee into exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is established to try them.

The best response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts. There the evidence can be heard, and the perpetrators punished. Tribunals like the Yugoslav, Rwanda, or Sierra Leone Tribunals, an international tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and ultimately the International Criminal Court must be created. They may not deter the worst genocidal killers. But with the political will to arrest and prosecute them, some mass murderers may be brought to justice.

While Stanton was primarily speaking about “active” cover-ups immediately preceding a genocide, its fascinating (and depressing) that such acts quickly move from action into mainstream discourse. Even when trials have taken place, evidence has been presented, and testimony has been gathered, the crime is still an on-going source of controversy years after the fact.

David Irving is no doubt one of the better known Holocaust deniers, but he’s only one example of the plethora of those who seek to diminish the crime through the guise of scholarly debate. As academics and researchers alike begin to dig deeper into the origins and events of other modern genocides (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, et al.), a stream of fresh deniers are following along with their own versions of what happened in each of these cases.

For example, it was recently announced that one such group of deniers (called negationists by allAfrica) are heading to a conference later this month — The Media and Rwanda: The Difficult Search for the Truth. The event is being sponsored by Les Editions les Intouchables, who published a book by Canadian Politician Robin Philpot entitled Ça ne s’est pas passé comme ça à Kigali (“It did not happen like that in Kigali”). Based on the reported speakers, the sphere of discourse is going to be largely limited to those who are attempting to revise as they revisit what took place in Rwanda.

Even though Stanton did an excellent job of outlining the various stages of genocide, it seems like the eighth needs to be expanded beyond the immediate vicinity of the crime. As denial is constantly expanding with the pace of scholarship, and it often grows rather than diminishes over time, it seems apt to address the problem, particularly considering the rate at which the information age has accelerated the course of such specialized revisionism.