Questions on Genocide

A college student writing a paper on genocide and governmental policies for prevention and response emailed us with a few questions.

We turned to Marie Berry, a PhD candidate in Sociology with a focus on genocide in UCLA's prestigious program. Marie, a graduate of the University of Washington, spent several years working at the Holocaust Center.


Do you think any changes should be made to the UN structure to try and help responses to genocides?
Most debates about the UN’s treatment genocide are concerned with altering the definition of genocide, rather than changing the mandated responses to genocide. In general, this is because the UN’s responses to genocide have yet to successfully materialize. Thus, scholars and policy makers debate the definition in an attempt to pressure the signatories of the convention to refine the definition and thus make it more feasible for action to stop genocides that are underway.

The process of drafting the 1948 Genocide Convention was extremely political; in particular, the involvement of the Soviet Union complicated the process, given that they (and affiliated countries like Belarus) wouldn’t sign a document that criminalized something Stalin had been doing for years. What resulted was a definition that includes “national, ethnic, racial, or religious” groups, but excludes political or economic ones. And, as a result, the historical episodes of violence that are commonly accepted as genocides exclude mass murders in Ethiopia, and often Guatemala. The problem with this is that in most analyses of genocide, the real causes are obscured—instead, it is easier to explain away genocide in terms of ethnic, racial, or religious groups that “hate” each other. Of course, in every case of genocide in history, the “ethnic” or “racial” groups that end up being targeted for extermination have been integrated in the societies that they live in for centuries (or more). Jews in Europe, Tutsis in Rwanda, and Bosniaks in Bosnia weren’t simply targeted one day because of their ethno-religious identify, but rather because of a series of political power struggles that escalated and were ultimately framed as ethno-religious.

The UN’s definition of genocide, therefore, is problematic in several ways. First, it serves to reify the ethno/racial/religious aspects of a brewing conflict while obscuring the political and economic ones. In the case of Rwanda, this allowed the international media and foreign governments to dismiss the violence as “tribal” and neglect acknowledging the power struggle at play in Kigali that was in part facilitated by the international community’s attempts to negotiate a peace process between the current Hutu regime and the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front invading from Uganda. Moreover, it obscured the significance of the colonial era, recent crop shortages and resulting famines, and intra-ethnic conflicts between a powerful family from the North and other powerful families from the South.

Second, the definition revolves around the idea of “intent”; a group must have the intent to destroy a group for mass violence to be considered genocide. This eliminates some of the most massive deaths in human history, such as Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” where it is difficult to argue that Mao intended to kill 20 million+ of his countrymen (but easy to argue that his policies had that effect). The very concept of “intent” is almost always subjectively determined; barring the leak of some sort of internal government memo explicitly stating the goal of eliminating a group within its population, intent is usually agreed upon after amassing mounds of evidence that point that direction. This is much easier in retrospect, after genocide is over, when the true intent of a perpetrating group is revealed. Intent is much more difficult to determine during the actual genocide itself—especially in cases like Rwanda, where the genocide happened rapidly over merely 100 days.

Last, the narrowness of this definition and the exclusion of political or economic (i.e. class) groups, is conducive to disagreement and debate over whether violence counts as a genocide or not. This leads, ultimately, to inaction, as we’ve seen in basically every case that ultimately resulted in genocide (with the possible exception of East Timor: See Geoffrey Robinson’s book If You Leave Us Here We Will Die, 2009). For the UN’s definition of genocide to be more effective at invoking action from the international community, I believe it needs to be centered on the degree of devastation being caused to civilians, rather than on the subject concept of intent and restrictive classifications like race and religion.


How much does politics complicate responses to genocide?
I think that politics complicates responses to genocide a lot, but self-interest complicates responses even more. Military interventions generally carry tremendous costs in terms of human lives and financial resources. If a given country has little strategic or economic relevance to an intervening state, the risks of intervening are high while the potential gains are low. Politics also factors in, particularly when strategic alliances are strained over an ally engaging in genocide. We’ve seen this most recently with US involvement in Darfur, where at the initial stages of the conflict the US was hesitant to shame Sudanese President Bashir publicly given his cooperation about eliminating al-Qaeda training cells in his country. The US-led 1995 Dayton Accords after the wars in the Balkans were also influenced by politics, and as a result we watched as the Serbian aggressors (and perpetrators of egregious crimes against humanity) were given control over 49% of Bosnian territory – a higher percentage than before the war. So we see that politics can not only influence decisions to intervene in genocides, but also the peace-process afterward.


What are some of the best tactics in stopping/preventing genocide? What is your feeling on military interference versus peaceful interventions?

The best tactics for stopping and preventing genocide are unique in each situation and at each stage in the conflict. In my opinion, however, the first and most important things to consider are the real roots of the conflict. Dismissing violence in Rwanda as merely tribal warfare between Hutus and Tutsis gives policy makers little leverage to negotiate a cessation of violence or to design a plan to physically intervene. Instead, understanding the historical processes that led to the evening of April 6, 1994, when the genocide began, are absolutely essential if we are going to be able to conceive of bringing the violence to a halt. Furthermore, understanding the “repertoires of violence” that people in a given region draw from based on historical experiences of violence can give us a better knowledge of where the violence might be heading and thus how we could potentially confront it. The brutal treatment of Serbs in Ustaša concentration campus in former Yugoslavia during WWII provided a historical memory that was adopted by Serbs several decades later against Bosniaks—had the “west” understood many of the historical roots of the types of violence being used in the war in the Balkans, intervention might have been more carefully designed and carried out. Once the history of a conflict is understood from all perspectives, the best tactics of intervention can be more successfully determined. And, in my opinion, sometimes peaceful interventions are the best option, while at other times the situation has gotten so out of control that the only possible options are military. In the case of Rwanda, for example, a military intervention really was the only option. However, I tend to believe in the cyclical nature of violence, and thus would only endorse an armed intervention as a very last resort.