Tag Archives: Genocide

Government, Israel, Legal, Myanmar, Politics, Society, United Nations

Genocide once had meaning. It has become a political tool

GENOCIDE

Of the many examples of moral collapse in society today, the debasement of genocide has been among the ugliest. Using the megaphone of social media, activists, hostile states, the media, and non-governmental organisations have corrupted a precise legal term to smear troops who were issuing evacuation orders, facilitating aid handouts, and fighting an enemy that used human shields. If the proper meaning of genocide is lost, no Western army will be safe.

As Keir Starmer’s failed attempts to marshal international law against our own troops who fought in Iraq demonstrated, such instincts are strong amongst progressives. As in London and Strasbourg, so in The Hague. Just days ago, judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, finished hearing a genocide case against Myanmar. Given the appalling atrocities against the Rohingya, few would dispute the verdict if the crime is confirmed. Scratch the surface, however, and trouble is brewing.

Genocide as a modern legal concept first emerged in print in Axis Rule In Occupied Europe, a 1944 book by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin. Crucially, it described mass violence with the intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. Lemkin was influenced by the 1915 Armenian massacres, but it was the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews – in which 49 members of his own family were murdered – that provided the catalyst for its inclusion on the statute books.

Since 1945, only five legally confirmed genocides have been recognised by the British government: the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and the liquidation of the Yazidis by Islamic State. Between the Srebrenica massacre – the last time the ICJ delivered a guilty verdict – and Myanmar, times have changed.

As part of the Myanmar hearing a few days ago, hostile Facebook posts were presented as evidence. Social media has become part of life since 2007, but there are fears that relying on such contextual and emotive ephemera may eclipse the hard facts. This will especially apply to the ICJ’s next case against Israel.

Aggressive posts and videos of soldiers chanting bloodthirsty slogans already form the backbone of the prosecution’s case against the Jewish state. Whatever our view may be over Palestinian Gaza, are these really evidence of genocidal intent in an army that is said to warn civilians to flee before it attacks? The Myanmar precedent may lead judges to give such things undue weight.

Similarly, NGOs giving evidence against Myanmar included Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, both of which have a well-established bias against Israel. None of this necessarily invalidates the case. But it reveals the weakness of the court.

One of the presiding judges, an 84-year-old South African jurist, has already been accused of turning genocide into a political tool. For many years the jurist headed a UN Human Rights Council “commission of inquiry” that was dismissed as laughably biased. As long ago as 2014, 100 members of Congress said the commission that this jurist led could “not be taken seriously as a human rights organisation”. Another commission member later claimed that social media was “controlled by the Jewish lobby”. Sanctions were then called for against “apartheid Israel”.

Last September, the commission produced a highly contemptible and skewed report which pre-emptively found Israel guilty of “genocide” and airbrushed out of its report all other parties to the conflict. Remove the combatants from any war and you have a crime against humanity. Is the jurist leading the commission, then, a proper person to preside over genocide cases at the UN’s highest court?

Like the rest of the world, the UN seems to be deploying “genocide” as a campaigning tool, fuelled by ideology and the often-empty rage of social media.

The California state senator Scott Wiener, who is in line for Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco congressional seat, said the quiet part out loud.

“In terms of the word ‘genocide’, it’s traditionally been a very technical legal term under the Geneva Convention. It is a descriptor for an extreme level of devastation of a people. It’s a heartfelt descriptor.”

Heartfelt or not, replacing facts with emotive feelings is a dangerous game. Just 10 days after October 7, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention accused Israel of “genocide”. Others may conclude that it was an unprecedented military operation. Members of Lemkin’s family are fighting to have his name removed from the institute’s title.

Last Tuesday, Holocaust Memorial Day was held. As any schoolboy knows, or used to know, victims of that genocide totalled about 11 million, of which six million were Jews. Regardless, the BBC and other broadcasters repeatedly paid tribute to the six million “people” who were murdered, erasing the Jews once again as a reprehensible coda to the genocide.

Was that “heartfelt”? It probably was. Unsurprisingly, of the 2,000 secondary schools that marked the Holocaust in 2023, 1,146 have since given it up. Lurking in the background is the cunning little piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, shamefully endorsed by the UN, that when it comes to genocide, the Jews are as bad as the Nazis. Yet nobody has used the G-word for massacres by the Iranian regime, an enemy of our democracies.

How easy it has become to dismiss truth as a quaint and old-fashioned habit. But unmoor legal definitions at your peril. When genocide becomes a political weapon, it is wielded against the West. Be careful what you are aiming for.

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European Parliament, Government, History, Society, Turkey, United Nations

Genocide. An emotive word that must be used correctly…

GENOCIDE

Intro: Genocide is a highly emotive word and shouldn’t be confused with other mass killings

A century ago, in 1915, Ottoman officials seized upon and rounded up Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, most of whom were later murdered. Events which followed are still bitterly contested. The official Turkish version says that some 500,000 Armenians died, which included those fighting alongside the invading Russians against Ottoman forces. Others were also slayed as a regrettable side-effect of deportations that were perhaps understandable in the context of the times. However, many scholars say that up to 1.5m Armenians died, and imply that their deaths were a result of a deliberate and orchestrated campaign to eliminate the Ottoman empire’s only sizeable Christian population. Pressingly, given this account of events, members of the Armenian diaspora want events recognised as genocide.

Genocide is a highly emotive word and shouldn’t be confused with other mass killings; use of terminology and language matters as to which word should be used.

In 1948 the United Nations adopted a convention aimed at preventing and punishing acts of genocide, which it defined as the ‘deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnical, racial, religious or national group’. Agreement on the text involved a number of compromises. For example, targeting victims because of their class was not classed as genocide: Stalin would hardly have signed it if it meant being held to account for his mass slaughter of ‘middle peasants’. In the past century, the world has witnessed many mass slaughters, including some which have been acknowledged as genocide and some that do not fit within the UN’s definition. The genocidal nature of the slaughter of Rwanda’s minority Tutsis by majority Hutus militias, for instance, is not in question. Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia, however, does not strictly qualify, since the Khmers Rouges targeted no particular group.

Genocide as a word has considerable power. If mass slaughter is recognised as genocide when it is happening, it will be much harder for outside forces to sit idly by. When capitulation is over, an official declaration that it was genocide can give any survivors some grim satisfaction. But when that recognition is withheld, because of a technicality or due to political expediency, it will feel like the final insult. And the ‘crime of crimes’ tag that genocide has been given has led to some human rights activists and legal scholars expressing concern that this status sometimes overshadows the horror of other crimes against humanity.

Pope Francis and the European Parliament have very publicly described the Armenian massacres as genocide: the pontiff at a mass on April 12th attended by Armenia’s president, and the European Parliament in a plebiscite three days later commending the pope’s words and calling on Turkey, too, to recognise the killings as genocide. The Turkish government reacted with outrage and fury, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying: ‘It is not possible for Turkey to accept such a crime, such a sin.’ Mr Erdogan’s foreign minister claimed Pope Francis had fallen for propaganda disseminated by the Armenians who ostensibly control the press in his homeland of Argentina. The irony, though, is that Mr Erdogan has done more than any previous Turkish leader to acknowledge the suffering and pain of Armenians under the Ottoman empire, such as when he offered his condolences last year on April 24th. But unquestionably, there are limits to the willingness of the Turkish government in facing up to, and naming, the crimes of his country’s past.

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Africa, Foreign Affairs, France, Government, United Nations

The prospect of genocide in the Central African Republic looms large…

CENTRAL AFRICA

Intro: Fears are mounting that the Christian militias are engaging in ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the 7,000-strong French led international security force is in urgent need of reinforcements

Escalating violence in the Central African Republic is being overshadowed as the world’s attention is focused on events in Syria and Crimea. Central Africa might not seem a pressing priority for Western policymakers, but the conflict between Christians and Muslims in the former French colony has raised the spectre of another Rwandan-style genocide taking place on the African continent.

Many thousands have already died in bitter fighting that continues to be fuelled by long-standing tensions. In recent weeks, Muslim communities have borne the brunt of the violence, inflicted by Christian militias determined to prevent the country falling under the control of Islamist hardliners and the adoption of Sharia law.

Map of Central African Republic and neighbouring countries.

Map of Central African Republic and neighbouring countries.

In one of the worst atrocities committed, Amnesty International documented and reported upon the massacre of a bus full of Muslims, killed by Christian rebels armed with machetes and knifes. The incident took place outside a mosque about 80 miles north of Bangui, the capital. The escalating violence has resulted in around 1.3 million people fleeing to neighbouring Chad and Cameroon – almost a quarter of the country’s entire population.

Fears are mounting that the Christian militias are engaging in ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the 7,000-strong French led international security force is in urgent need of reinforcements.

The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has authorised the deployment of 12,000 peacekeepers to halt the brutality, but this could take up to six months to fully enact; the many other demands being placed on the UN’s limited resources is largely attributable, but this is clearly unacceptable.

If the UN is serious in wanting to avoid another bloodbath, then donor nations must be persuaded as a matter of urgency to provide the required troops and other reinforcements. Failure to do so will only lead to the Central African Republic descending into an all-out war.

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