PIMP MY GENOCIDE
Spiked, UK
March 1 2007
The prostitution of the G-word for cynical political ends has given
rise to a grisly new international gameshow.
Genocide, it seems, is everywhere. You cannot open a newspaper or
switch on the box these days without coming across the G-word.
Accusations of genocide fly back and forth in international
relations. This week the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The
Hague cleared Serbia of direct responsibility for genocide in the
Bosnian civil war in the mid-Nineties, though it chastised Belgrade
for failing to prevent the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica
in 1995. The International Criminal Court, also in The Hague, indicted
two Sudanese officials for ‘crimes against humanity’ in relation to
the conflict in Darfur.
Last week, a United Nations official said the spread of the Darfurian
conflict into eastern Chad means that ‘Chad faces genocide’, too. ‘We
are seeing elements that closely resemble what we saw in Rwanda in
the genocide in 1994’, said the head of the UN refugee agency (1).
Meanwhile, to the concern and fury of Turkish officials, the US
Congress is set to debate a resolution that will recognise Turkey’s
killings of a million Armenians from 1915 to 1918 as an ‘organised
genocide’ (2). This follows the French decision at the end of last
year to make it a crime in France to deny the Armenian genocide.
On the domestic front, too, genocide-talk is widespread. Germany,
current holder of the European Union’s rotating presidency, is
proposing a Europe-wide ban on Holocaust denial and all other forms
of genocide denial. This would make a crime of ‘publicly condoning,
denying or grossly trivialising…crimes of genocide, crimes against
humanity and war crimes [as defined in the Statute of the International
Criminal Court].’ (3) In some European countries it is already against
the law to deny that the Nazis sought to exterminate the Jews. Under
the proposed new legislation it would also be against the law to
question whether Rwanda, Srebrenica and Darfur are genocides, too.
Why is genocide all the rage, whether it’s uncovering new ones in
Africa and Eastern Europe, or rapping the knuckles of those who would
dare to deny such genocides here at home?
Contrary to the shrill proclamations of international courts and
Western officials and journalists, new genocides are not occurring
across the world. Rather, today’s genocide-mongering in international
affairs – and its flipside: the hunt for genocide-deniers at home –
shows that accusations of genocide have become a cynical political
tool. Genocide-mongering is a new mode of politics, and it’s being
used by some to draw a dividing line between the West and the Third
World and to enforce a new and censorious moral consensus on the
homefront. Anyone who cares about democracy and free speech should
deny the claims of the genocide-mongers.
In international relations genocide has become a political weapon, an
all-purpose rallying cry used by various actors to gain moral authority
and boost their own standing. Anyone with a cursory understanding
of history should know that the bloody wars of the past 10 to 15
years – in Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur – are not unprecedented
or exceptional. Certainly none of them can be compared to the Nazi
genocide against the Jews, which involved the industrialised slaughter,
often in factories built for the purpose, of six million men, women
and children. Rather, the labelling of today’s brutal civil wars
as ‘genocides’ by Western observers, courts and commentators is a
desperate search for a new moral crusade, and it has given rise to a
new moral divide between the West and the rest, between the civilised
and enlightened governments of America and Europe and those dark
parts of the world where genocides occur.
In some circles, ‘genocide’ has become code for Third World savagery.
What do the headline genocides (or ‘celebrity genocides’, perhaps) of
the past two weeks have in common? All of them – the Serbs’ genocide
in Bosnia, the Sudanese genocide in Darfur, the Turks’ genocide of
Armenians – were committed by apparently strange and exotic nations
‘over there’. Strip away the legal-speak about which conflicts can be
defined as genocides and which cannot, and it seems clear that genocide
has become a PC codeword for wog violence – whether the genocidal wogs
are the blacks of Sudan, the brown-skinned, not-quite-European people
of Turkey, or the Serbs, white niggers of the post-Cold War world.
Consider how easily the genocide tag is attached to conflicts in
Africa. Virtually every recent major African war has been labelled a
genocide by outside observers. The Rwandan war of 1994 is now widely
recognised as a genocide; many refer to the ongoing violence in
Uganda as a genocide. In 2004 then US secretary of state Colin Powell
declared, on the basis of a report by an American/British fact-finding
expedition to Darfur: ‘We conclude that genocide has been committed
in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear
responsibility.’ (4) (The UN, however, has not described Darfur as
genocide.) Even smaller-scale African wars are discussed as potential
genocides. So the spread of instability from Darfur into eastern
Chad has led to UN handwringing about ‘genocide in Chad’. During the
conflict in Liberia in 2003, commentators warned that ‘Liberia could
be plunged into a Rwanda-style genocide’ (5).
The discussion of every war in Africa as a genocide or potential
genocide shows that today’s genocide-mongering bears little relation
to what is happening in conflict zones on the ground. There are
great differences, not least in scale, between the wars in Rwanda,
Darfur and Liberia; each of these conflicts has been driven by complex
local grievances, very often exacerbated by Western intervention. That
Western declarations of ‘genocide!’ are most often made in relation
to Africa suggests that behind today’s genocide-mongering there
lurks some nasty chauvinistic sentiments. At a time when it is
unfashionable to talk about ‘the dark continent’ or ‘savage Africans’,
the more acceptable ‘genocide’ tag gives the impression that Africa
is peculiarly and sickly violent, and that it needs to be saved from
itself by more enlightened forces from elsewhere.
Importantly, if the UN judges that a genocide is occurring, then that
can be used to justify military intervention into said genocide zone.
Hardly anyone talks openly about a global divide between the
savage Third World and the enlightened West anymore. Yet today’s
genocide-mongering has nurtured a new, apparently acceptable divide
between the genocide-executers over there, and the genocide-saviours
at home. This new global faultline over genocide is formalised in
the international court system. In the Nineties, setting up tribunals
to try war criminals or genocidaires became an important part of the
West’s attempts to rehabilitate its moral authority around the globe.
In 1993, the UN Security Council set up an international tribunal to
try those accused of war crimes in the Former Yugoslavia. In 1997 the
international war crimes tribunal for Rwanda got under way; there is
also one for Sierra Leone. As Kirsten Sellars argues in The Rise and
Rise of Human Rights, for all the claims of ‘international jutice’,
these tribunals are in reality ‘political weapons’ wielded by the
West – attempts to imbue the post-Cold War West with a sense of moral
purpose by contrasting it favourably with the barbarians in Eastern
Europe and Africa (6).
The opportunistic transformation of ‘genocide’ into a weapon on the
international stage can be seen most clearly in recent debates about
Turkey. The Turkish state’s genocide against the Armenians in the
First World War is surely debated more today than at any other time
in history. That is because the Armenian genocide has been latched
on to by certain governments that want to lecture and harangue the
current Turkish regime.
Last year France passed its bizarre law outlawing denial of the
Armenian genocide. This was a deeply cynical move motivated by EU
protectionism on the part of the French. France is keen to keep Turkey
at arm’s length from joining the EU, viewing the American ally in
the East as a threat to its authoritative position within Europe.
And what better way to cast doubts on Turkey’s fitness to join
the apparently modern EU than to turn its refusal to accept that
the massacre of Armenians 90 years ago was a genocide into a big
political issue? At the same time, Democrat members of US Congress are
attempting to dent the Bush administration’s prestige and standing
in the Middle East by lending their support to a resolution that
will label the Turkish killings of Armenians a genocide. This has
forced Bush to defend the ‘deniers’ of Turkey, and given rise to the
bizarre spectacle of a six-person Turkish parliamentary delegation
arriving in Washington to try to convince members of Congress that
the Armenian massacres were not a genocide (7). Again, movers and
shakers play politics with genocide, using the G-word to try to hit
their opponents where it hurts.
At a time when the West making claims to global moral authority
on the basis of enlightenment or democracy has become distinctly
unfashionable, the new fashion for genocide-mongering seems to
have turned ‘genocide’ into the one remaining moral absolute, which
has allowed today’s pretty visionless West to assert at least some
authority over the Third World.
This reorientation of global affairs around the G-word has had a real
and disastrous impact on peace and politics. When ‘genocide’ becomes
the language of international relations, effectively a bargaining
chip between states, then it can lead to a grisly competition over
who is the biggest victim of genocide and who thus most deserves the
pity and patronage of the international community. The state of Bosnia
brought the charges of genocide against the state of Serbia at the ICJ,
and is bitterly disappointed that Serbia was cleared. Here it appears
that Bosnia, every Western liberals’ favourite victim state, feels
the need to continue playing the genocide card, to prostrate itself
before international courts, in order to store up its legitimacy and
win the continued backing of America and the EU.
One American commentator has written about ‘strategic victimhood in
Sudan’, where Darfurian rebel groups exploit the ‘victims of genocide’
status awarded to them by Western observers in order to get a better
deal: ‘The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically
have sued for peace long ago. Because of the [Western] Save Darfur
movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke
genocidal reaction, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand
them control of the region.’ (8)
The logic of today’s politics of genocide is that it suits certain
states and groups to play up to being victims of genocide. That is one
sure way to guarantee the sympathy and possibly even the backing of
the West. This has nurtured a grotesque new international gameshow –
what we might call ‘Pimp My Genocide’ – where groups strategically
play the genocide card in order to attract the attentions of the
genocide-obsessed international community. The new genocide-mongering
means that certain states are demonised as ‘evil’ (Sudan, Serbia)
while others must constantly play the pathetic victim (Bosnia,
Darfurian groups). This is unlikely to nurture anything like peace,
or a progressive, grown-up international politics.
Rather than challenge the new politics of genocide, the critics
of Western military intervention play precisely the same game –
sometimes in even more shrill tones than their opponents. Anti-war
activists claim that ‘the real genocide’ – a ‘Nazi-style genocide’
– is being committed by American and British forces in Iraq. Others
counter the official presentation of the Bosnian civil war as a
Serb genocide against Muslims by arguing that the Bosnian Serbs,
especially those forcibly expelled from Krajina, were the real
‘victims of genocide’ (9). Critics of Israel accuse it of carrying out
a genocide against Palestinians (while supporters of Israel describe
Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s occasional dustbin-lid bombs as ‘genocidal
violence’) (10). This does nothing to challenge the hysteria of
today’s genocide-mongering, but rather indulges and further inflames
it. Genocide-talk seems to have become the only game in town.
The flipside of genocide-mongering is the hunting of
genocide-deniers. New European proposals to clamp down on the denial of
any genocide represent a serious assault on free speech and historical
debate. Will those who challenge Western military interventions
overseas to prevent a ‘genocide’ be arrested as deniers? What about
historians who question the idea that the Turks’ killings of Armenians
were a genocide? Will their books be banned? On the homefront, too,
genocide is being turned into a moral absolute, through which a new
moral consensus, covering good and evil, right and wrong, what you
can and cannot say and think, might be enforced across society (11).
If you don’t accept the new global genocide divide, or the right of
the EU authorities to outline what is an acceptable and unacceptable
opinion about war and history, then step forth – and let us deny.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.
(1) Chad violence could erupt into genocide, UN warns, ABC News,
16 February 2007
(2) Turkey Intensifies Counter-Attack Against Genocide Claims,
Turkish Weekly, 1 March 2007
(3) See ‘Genocide denial laws will shut down debate’, by Brendan
O’Neill
(4) Powell declares genocide in Sudan, BBC News, 9 September 2004
(5) Liberia: Fears of genocide, Mail and Guardian, July 2003
(6) The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, Kirsten Sellars, Sutton
Publishing, 2002
(7) Turkey Intensifies Counter-Attack Against Genocide Claims,
Turkish Weekly, 1 March 2007
(8) See Darfur: damned by pity, by Brendan O’Neill
(9) Exploiting genocide, Brendan O’Neill, Spectator, 21 January 2006
(10) Mr Bolton gets a UN flea in his ear, Melanie Phillips, 24
January 2006
(11) See ‘Genocide denial laws will shut down debate’, by Brendan
O’Neill
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