UN HONORS GENOCIDE CONVENTION RATIFICATION
By Michael Brasky, [email protected]
Evening Bulletin
Dec 9 2008
PA
U.N. Headquarters was closed to the public yesterday, honoring the
ratification of the Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) 60 years ago.
The CPPCG was ratified in the wake of horrifying excesses in violence
that the 20th century bared witness to. The Convention is underscored
by the belief that nations must never again stand idle while human
beings are murdered in such massive numbers.
The CPPCG defines genocide as any act perpetrated with the intention
of destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Article 2
of the Convention articulates the actions that fall under the purview
of genocide: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on
the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group.
Genocide, thanks of the ratification of the Convention, is now
considered a crime under international law. The CPPCG was the
culmination of a campaign that sought to build an international
mechanism that would forever deter the deliberate mass murder of a
people, such as that which occurred during the Holocaust.
A particular distinction for this achievement must be reserved for
Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin was a prominent Polish lawyer whose publication
Axis Rule in Occupied Europe coined the term genocide. Though he
escaped the Nazi onslaught, arriving in America in 1941, 49 of his
relatives were slain during the occupation of Eastern Europe.
For Lemkin however, his experience with the Nazis did not comprise the
sole prism through which he developed the concept of genocide. In one
his earlier works, an essay titled the "Crime of Barbarity," Lemkin
dissected the 1933 Simele Massacre in Iraq and the Armenian Genocide,
in the process laying out the components of genocide without referring
to it as such. Presenting his work to the League of Nations in 1933,
he argued that such acts were a crime and should be punished under
international law.
While Lemkin’s ideas are commonplace today, they were an innovation
for his time and provided the ideological and legal justifications
for the Nuremberg trials. It was Lemkin’s draft that was ultimately
approved in 1948, leading to the CPPCG.
Despite its ratification, the Convention did not go into effect
until 1951, requiring at least 20 signatories to take on the force of
international law. Some nations refused to sign and ratify without
certain provisos protecting them from prosecution. The original
content of the draft was altered to appease the U.S.S.R. in 1954,
precluding political murder from being considered as genocide.
The United States failed to ratify the Convention until
1986. Sen. William Proxmire, of Wisconsin, is known for giving 3,211
speeches about genocide beginning in 1967. He vowed to harangue the
Senate with his oratory until the convention was ratified, often
shaming his colleagues for their inaction.
Mr. Proxmire drew attention to many humanitarian catastrophes in this
period: the suffering of Nigerians in the Biafran War; the murder of
Bengalis in Pakistan; the excesses of Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the
slaughter of Hutus in Burundi. When the determined senator finally
got his government to capitulate, the United States became the 98th
nation to ratify the CPPCG. It should come as little surprise that
Mr. Proxmire considered Raphael Lemkin one of his heroes.
Parties that are signatories to the Convention have a legal and
moral obligation to prevent and punish acts of genocide. Yet as the
U.N. struggles to prevent violence in the eastern Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC), the world is forced to confront the unfortunately
legacy of the failure to fulfill the Convention’s promises.
The conflict in eastern DRC is very much a spillover from the genocide
in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. There, U.N. forces had knowledge of
Hutu weapons caches and intentions to exterminate Tutsis. Despite
receiving advance warning, U.N. forces in the area failed to act,
enabling the murder of 800,000 civilians.
The following year in Bosnia, U.N. peacekeeping forces failed to
intervene as Serbian separatists murdered civilians en masse in
Srebrenica, an area designated as a safe-haven by the Security Council
a little over two years earlier.
Today, skeptics are still concerned by the U.N.’s seeming impotence
in the face of such acts, and frequently criticize the failure of
peacekeeping forces in Darfur and DRC to prevent the slaughter of
innocent civilians.
Among those critics are the endangered civilians themselves. In
October, angry mobs rioted in front of the U.N. compound in Goma, a
city in the eastern DRC. The mob, consisting of civilians fearful of a
rebel attack, was outraged by the lack of protection from peacekeepers.
While yesterday served as due commemoration for a great achievement,
the day also offered an opportunity to reflect on the major gap that
must be closed in fulfilling the promise of that achievement.