SUFFERING IS NOT A CONTEST
Otago Daily Times
March 2 2012
New Zealans
Rawiri Taonui notes that some scholars have taken issue with Jewish
claims to exclusive use of the term holocaust.
Jewish Council president Stephen Goodman’s criticism of Keri Opai’s
view that Maori colonial experiences compare to a holocaust is
simplistic.
Mr Goodman labelled the claim an “ignorant” attempt to “elevate
Maori grievances” that “trivialises” and “diminishes” the genocide
of European Jews.
However, several scholars have taken issue with Jewish claims to
exclusive use of the term holocaust. For instance, it excludes millions
of other victims of the Nazi extermination, including socialists,
homosexuals, the disabled, Romani (Gypsies), Slavs, Poles and Soviet
prisoners of war.
The term has been used for four centuries in Europe to describe
various massacres; others argue the Armenians have the first claim
to its formal use.
The Ottoman Empire caused one million Armenian deaths during World
War 1. Winston Churchill termed that a holocaust, a so-named, now
eminent, poem was composed in 1922 and a book, The Syrma Holocaust
followed in 1923.
After World War 2, “holocaust” was used to describe the bombings
of Dresden and Hiroshima, the 1930s Stalin-induced Ukrainian great
famine and Japan’s suppression of Korea and Manchuria.
>From the 1950s onwards, the term was increasingly used to refer to the
Nazi genocide, often as a translation of the Jewish descriptor Shoah
(catastrophe) or the Yiddish term Churben (destruction). Nora Levin’s
book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry appeared in 1968.
The unqualified formal use of “Holocaust with a capital H” as
the terror of the Jews did not come about until after the 1978 TV
mini-series of the same name starring Meryl Streep. A majority of
the world’s named Holocaust centres date from then.
Holocaust with a small ‘h’ continues to be used to describe events
such as African slavery, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, the Rwanda slaughter
and indigenous colonial histories.
While I believe “Holocaust” defines the Jewish experience – the
horrific pinnacle of industrial-scale human extermination, I also
understand why indigenous peoples use the term, not just to define
their experience but, more importantly, to highlight the denial of
their experience.
Writers such as David Stannard and Ward Churchill, who attest
the colonisation of the Americas was a holocaust, also argue that
condemnations like Mr Goodman’s actually reinforce the denial of
horrors perpetrated on indigenous populations.
That denial has a history. Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin coined the term
“genocide” in 1943, providing a broad-based definition including
physical, political, social, biological and cultural genocide. The
latter was applicable to indigenous contexts, Lemkin arguing genocide
could be immediate or cumulative over time.
Historian David Cesarani went further, saying that, over the longer
term, the oppression of colonised peoples can be more costly than
the Holocaust.
Lemkin subsequently drafted a UN Convention on Genocide in 1946. The
Soviet Union opposed his definitions because of their record of
political suppression. The United States, France and Britain did so
as well, because of their colonial records.
When the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide was adopted in 1948, the reference to cultural genocide
had been effectively expunged.
Administered under the Rome Statute (1998) and International Criminal
Court (2002), Article 2 defines genocide as any acts intended to
destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as
killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting particular
living conditions, preventing birth and forcibly removing children.
With an emphasis squarely on state “intent”, Western European
countries have been able to prosecute leaders from weaker developing
and Eastern Europe countries, while exonerating themselves for any
colonial transgressions on the basis that they were the inadvertent
consequences of “civilising” projects.
In 1993, the former British colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and the United States (Canzus) opposed the draft Declaration on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which included prohibitions against
“ethnocide” and “cultural genocide”. As a result, the terms “cultural
destruction” and “forced assimilation” were moved into a separate
section, and ethnocide and cultural genocide replaced by “genocide”,
which, by default referral to the 1948 Convention and Rome Statute,
again protected Western countries with colonial baggage.
The declaration was passed at the 2007 UN General Assembly, with 144
countries in support and only the Canzus four against.
In the search for due recognition, writers and academics continue
to use the terms “cultural genocide” and “holocaust” to describe
colonisation in the Pacific, Americas, Tibet, East Turkmenistan and
other places.
When Tariana Turia made her holocaust reference in 2000, Judy Sedley,
from the Wellington Jewish Community Centre, said that might be
appropriate if Maori used the term with a small “h”. Posterity might
determine the Jewish Holocaust belongs alongside an Armenian and other
holocausts and “colonial genocide” might describe many indigenous
experiences.
In a debate about honouring by acknowledgement the inestimable numbers
of humans over many generations who suffered in this way, those who
condemn indigenous peoples lack the humanity and grace of Lemkin.
Suffering is never a competition.
Dr Taonui is adjunct professor of indigenous studies at the Auckland
University of Technology.
http://www.odt.co.nz/opinion/opinion/199714/suffering-not-contest