Eurasia Review
March 7 2012
Genocide – OpEdWritten by: TransConflict
March 7, 2012
By David B. Kanin
The struggle to control the term `genocide’ has become a contested
conceptual space, turning cautionary lessons in how bad we can be into
disputes over just how bad things really were.
One of Thomas Jefferson’s most often cited maxims was that `the earth
belongs always to the living generation.’ Jefferson urged a new world
to avoid the inherited aristocratic structures and incessant warfare
that he believed kept the old one’s tyrannical systems in place and
held back human progress. Living at the cusp of the nationalist era,
he did not have to consider the soon-to-be constructed rivalries of
national memories and atrocities – the latter witnessed, recorded, and
catalogued – which have ensured that in our current world the dead
often have as much purchase as the living.
The Third Reich, with its afterlife in law, entertainment, and the
mass media that never seems to end, has reinforced this condition. As
points of comparison, `Hitler’ and `Nazi’ have become clichés called
into use when someone is of a mind to put someone else in the worst
light possible. Similarly, genocide’ has become a blanket epithet
used to vilify (often enemy) perpetrators; it also serves as a slogan
helping to pay homage to murdered (often co-national) victims. After
World War II genocide gained legal status, and certainly stands as a
criminal category used by human rights activists and a burgeoning
international prosecutorial system dedicated to preventing horrors, if
possible, and to enforcing justice, if not. However, the mixture of
this concept with rival communal memories, nationalism, and
traditional categories of diplomacy and power politics does some harm
even while the legal process attempts to do some good.
The problem is that – reasonably enough – many who have suffered
through the murder of loved ones in the context of mass slaughter are
not satisfied to have these horrors classified as anything but
genocide. It is not enough to speak of mass murder, `crimes against
humanity’ (another legal neologism), or anything else connoting
something less than the superlative category in the class of the worst
possible human activities. Any effort to demote horrific events to
something less than genocide becomes a new crime against the survivors
and the loved ones of those who did not survive.
The necessary identification of the Holocaust as genocide puts a
unique semantic fence around the effort to wipe out European Jewry.
This is appropriate because of the stated intention, unique industrial
evolution, and bestial organization involved in those intentional
horrors. Regarding other cases of mass murder, however, the struggle
to control the term `genocide’ has become a contested conceptual
space. Arguments among politicians, officials, lawyers, and
commentators turn what should be cautionary lessons in how bad we can
be into disputes over just how bad things really were.
Turks and Armenians currently are getting the genocide headlines, with
a Constitutional Council decision apparently invalidating legislation
in France (which has had its own moral tussle over the extent to which
its wartime government contributed to the Holocaust) that would have
made it a crime to deny that the mass slaughter perpetrated by Ottoman
forces against Armenians during World War I constitutes `genocide.’ A
Turkish Minister provocatively denied this genocide while on a trip to
Switzerland, which has a similar law, and declared `let them come
arrest me.’ Swiss authorities prepared to do just that. Recent news
stories have repeated competing Armenian and Turkish versions of what
happened during 1915-16. Rival Armenian and Turkish lobbying groups in
various countries have gotten down to work. Azeri commentators have
supported the Turks for parochial reasons, blurring the issue.
The good news is that this means the victims are not forgotten.
Nevertheless, while this may lead to some sense of justice concerning
the fate of the dead, it is hard to see what it does to promote any
sort of reconciliation among the living. To be sure, various human
rights experts conduct workshops and declare lessons learned, but the
competition goes on to capture the word, apply it to an adversary, and
reject its application to one’s self.
In the post-Yugoslav Balkans, the contest over the ownership of
`genocide’ often is linked with the mass murder of thousands of
Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica by Ratko Mladic’s Bosnian Serb
troops in 1995. Mladic’s trial will legally define his actions, but
in the meantime Serbia, the Bosnian Serb Republic, legal authorities
in the notional Bosnian central state and in the Bosniak-Croat
Federation, and relatives of the murdered determined not to permit any
downgrading of the definition of Bosnian Serb culpability use genocide
as a semantic and moral football. The magnitude of what happened at
Srebrenica sometimes overshadows the other murders, rapes and
management of prisoners’ camps that accompanied the worst violence in
Europe since World War II. The prospect that Serbs will gain control
of local government in Srebrenica in elections later this year has
reopened old wounds.
Each trial in The Hague pits the defendants’ national supporters
against the victims’ community of loss – trials closer to home of
lesser known figures often do not attract as much attention. Some
Serbs complain the international legal process unfairly vilifies them;
other groups insist Serbian perpetrators have not been punished firmly
enough. At times, the formerly warring factions fight battles over
whether ambiguous events qualify as war crimes. The Bosnian Serb
Republic, which labors under the accusation of some of its Bosnian
`partners’ that it is a product of genocide, will not let go of the
killings of Yugoslav soldiers on Dobrovoljacka Street in Sarajevo in
early May 1992. That event was an awful part of a chaotic day in
which Alija Izetbegovic was kidnapped and the Yugoslav military
commander found himself trapped. A Bosnian Serb spokesman labelled an
international prosecutor’s decision last month to suspend the case for
lack of evidence as `illegal, tendentious, and biased.’ Two decades
after the event, there apparently still is no room for a protagonist
to acknowledge that someone across the line might just be making a
professional, if difficult, decision.
What is the optimal relationship between remembering the victims and
developing some sort of process by which living generations in the
Balkans can forge constructive relationships? History really does not
help much when it comes to this problem. The Nuremberg example
sometimes pointed to as the exemplary model actually was an
exceptional case in which a portion of the perpetrators – in the
emerging West Germany – accepted Germany’s criminal culpability.
Communist East Germany never acknowledged any responsibility for the
crimes of Fascism (which it insisted only implicated the Fascists).
The Asian counterpart to Nuremberg was an example of the more common
post-Tribunal process. Japan buried its war criminals with honor, and
some politicians continue to visit the spirits of those commemorated
at the Yasukuni shrine. Only decades after the War did Japan
grudgingly acknowledge a general responsibility for the acts of its
Japanese war criminals, but its apology satisfied few of its victims;
relations between Japan and both China and Korea remain tainted by
contested versions of what happened.
The West’s Tribunal model incorporates definitions of genocide, crimes
against humanity, and other categories in a context containing a fair
amount of self-righteousness. In the Balkans, European and American
overseers – whose countries benefited centrally by committing all the
acts they later defined as crimes and now prohibit others from
practicing – permit only rhetoric and actions accommodating their
one-size-fits-all teleology of civic, multicultural Democracy. Trials
run by international legal bureaucrats may provide an element of
justice, but whether they stoke or diminish communal anger is, at
best, debatable. Recent books by Jelena Subotic and Lara Nettelfield
offer contrasting and interesting views on how the work of the
International Criminal Tribunal on former Yugoslavia has affected the
region.
NGOs and local activists usefully pay attention to alternatives to
Tribunal justice. Truth and Reconciliation commissions seem to have
had some constructive impact in Rwanda, but disagreement over who shot
down that country’s (Hutu) President in 1994 and allegations of poor
behavior by its current (Tutsi) Administration remain on the table.
This model has been tried in various Balkan localities with mixed
results. It is hard to tell whether direct communication between
perpetrators and victims can work constructively while at the same
time highly politicized public disputes continue between victims and
defenders of the iconic monsters on display in The Hague. It is a
good thing that theorists and practitioners continue to consider what
combination of Tribunal, Truth and Reconciliation, and other processes
might protect the interests of both the living and the dead.
Every now and then something happens that gives cause for a little
hope. Recently, Bosniak military veterans announced they would share
some of their pension money with Bosnian Serb counterparts. These
groups share material interests and a common belief they are being
treated badly by the societies they defended (and, no matter the
fiction of `Bosnia,’ which remain plural). Bosnian Serb veterans
expressed surprise, but were grateful for the support and said they
would behave the same if the situation was reversed. This
communication across the lines was particularly constructive because
people who played a central role in the battles of the nineties
humanized each other and avoided the poisonous argument over whether
the Serb Republic is a congenital product of genocide.
It would be helpful if this positive moment leads to regularized
contacts between groups in the two entities who share interests and a
willingness to improve inter-communal relations. Such practical
arrangements would not provide a magic solution for the many problems
inherent in as artificial a construction as the current Bosnia.
However, they might at least create constructive experiences in the
present that eventually might enable the trust necessary to reconsider
usefully whatever people decide to call the atrocities of the past.
David B. Kanin is an adjunct professor of international relations at
Johns Hopkins University and a former senior intelligence analyst for
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
From: Baghdasarian