Portland Press Herald, ME
Jan 19 2005
The ‘g’ word loses its meaning when no real action follows it
by Nikki Kallio
It was almost shocking when top government leaders dared to utter the
“g” word – “genocide” – when referring to the violence in Sudan’s
Darfur region, because by all accounts that meant the United States
would have to do something to stop it.
As a signatory to the United Nations’ 1948 Genocide Convention, we’re
now bound to “undertake to prevent and to punish” the crime.
At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
The law started with Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who studied the
Turkish destruction of Christian Armenians during World War I and
escaped Poland a week after the Nazis invaded.
In her Pulitzer prize-winning book, “A Problem from Hell,” Samantha
Power describes Lemkin’s efforts to set up an international law that
was meant to forever eliminate such atrocities.
He’d seen in Hitler’s writings what the madman had in mind and tried
to warn his family and friends, who didn’t believe such a heinous
plan could be executed. His parents were among those to perish.
First, these crimes against humanity needed a name. Lemkin, an
attorney and a trained linguist, knew what had happened was worse
than mass murder, it was worse than an atrocity and it was worse than
a crime against humanity. It needed a name that would transcend all
others and compel the world to prevent it from ever happening again,
Power wrote.
Lemkin’s new word, “genocide,” finally gained the acceptance of
Webster’s Dictionary in 1944. The next step then was to establish an
international law that would force the world to act to prevent it.
If there were no such law, Lemkin knew genocide would continue to be
regarded as an “internal” problem and that the world would continue
to hesitate to intervene, Power wrote.
Lemkin’s vision of future genocide compelled him to take on the
personal responsibility of preventing the slaughter of millions of
people, and it consumed his life.
The new international law was all he talked about, and he would talk
about it with anyone who would listen and many who didn’t, Power
wrote. Day and night, he hammered at leaders and journalists, and,
after an exhaustive campaign, the United Nations finally adopted the
Genocide Convention in 1948. The United States, however, didn’t
ratify it until 1988.
The Convention defines genocide as actions “committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious
group.”
It compels signatories to act when genocide is occurring.
For that reason, past leaders have been excruciatingly reluctant to
speak the word, avoiding it like poison, believing that its utterance
would behold them to action.
The painful footage of State Department officials discussing in 1994
why what had occurred in Rwanda wasn’t “genocide” – despite the
slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans in 100 days – demonstrated how much
weight leaders thought the word carried.
That’s why pundits and editorialists – including me – called on
leaders to use the word in discussing the crisis in Sudan. At least
70,000 black Africans have been killed since last year and close to 2
million more have been displaced from their homes by the
government-backed Arab Janjaweed militiamen in an apparent attempt to
gain control of the resource-rich Darfur region.
Surprisingly, Congress, Secretary of State Colin Powell and President
Bush responded. They’ve all taken the extraordinary step of using the
powerful word. Much to Darfur’s dismay, little has happened.
Only weak resolutions that allude to economic sanctions have been
passed (barely), and they’ve been given little teeth, even after
Darfur’s situation had been officially called “genocide.”
Scott Straus, an assistant professor of political science at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote in the January/February issue
of Foreign Affairs that “Darfur has shown that the energy spent
fighting over whether to call the events there ‘genocide’ was
misplaced, overshadowing difficult but more important questions about
how to craft an effective response to mass violence against civilians
in Sudan.”
Apparently, he’s right.
So, has the word lost its power?
Should we start over? Rewrite the law? Talk about it some more? Wait
and see?
It took the United States 40 years to ratify the Genocide Convention
in the first place, and now we find out that it has about as much
strength as a paper towel.
“Never again,” indeed.
Nikki Kallio is an editorial writer at the Portland Press
Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram. She can be contacted at 791-6481 or at: