Genocide in the Non-Western World
In 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a convention defining and prohibiting the crime of genocide. The word 'genocide' was relatively new, coined by a Polish Jew, Rafael Lemkin, refugee from the Nazi occupation, in a study of Axis policies in Europe published in 1944. The term referred, of course, to the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe during the Second World War, but Lemkin and the General Assembly recognized genocide as a wider phenomenon, not a unique consequence of Nazism but a recurring feature of human history which demanded preventative action.
* By ROBERT CRIBB
The UN Convention on Genocide varied in one important respect from Lemkin's understanding of the term, and indeed from its own 1946 resolution on the topic. In 1946, the General Assembly had followed Lemkin in choosing a broad definition: 'Genocide is the denial of the right to exist of entire human groups... Such denial of the right of existence ... is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and aims of the United Nations. The General Assembly therefore affirms that genocide is a crime under international law ... whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds...'.
Two years later, however, the Genocide Convention limited genocide to 'national, ethnical, racial or religious' victims. We know now that this restriction took place mainly because Stalin's Soviet Union did not want its purges to come under the new heading (even though we can now say that there is a strong case against Stalin for his treatment of minority nationalities, even under the restricted definition). The exclusion of political killings, however, was then upheld in the scholarly world because of a widespread feeling that expanding the definition might compromise the integrity of the concept of genocide. There was a risk that the sense of abhorrence which genocide should arouse might be weakened if any persecuted political group could claim that it was a victim of genocide.
Although the United Nations definition still provides the only basis for legal action against genocide, in the last two decades there has been a growing tendency amongst scholars of genocide to broaden and relax the criterion of intent. The main reason for this change appears to have been a feeling that it is invidious to place victims in different categories simply because of the motives of their killers. The problem is especially acute in cases where the motives of the killers are ambiguous, as in the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or the Chinese pogroms against the Manchus after the Revolution of 1911.
Broader definition
The beneficiaries, if that is the right word, of this expansion are mainly found outside Europe. If we ignore intent and look at effect, then we find a vast range of historical examples of genocide, mostly outside the boundaries of Europe. In particular, we have to include the extermination of indigenous peoples by European settlers in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the depredations of the Mongols. A few scholars have even suggested that killings carried out in the conduct of war notably the Rape of Nanjing in 1937-38 and the bombing campaigns of the Second World War and the Second Indochina War should also be considered genocidal because of the scale of death that they caused.
This broader approach to genocide, however, is far from universally accepted. There is a common feeling that broadening the definition weakens its power and involves a kind of 'me-too-ism' on the part of groups whose grievances, although legitimate, are not in the same category as those of the Jews in Europe. There are, however, strong intellectual reasons to treat mass political killings as genocide. These reasons stem from the way in which our understanding of ethnicity has changed during the last century.
The United Nations made its distinction between racial and political killings at a time when ideas of the importance of race were much more firmly entrenched than they are today. There was a general belief that humankind had differentiated into races and cultures over thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of years, that cultural diversity was rather like biodiversity, the product of immensely long and essentially unrepeatable processes, so that the loss of any ethnic group was a tragedy. The wilful destruction of an irreplaceable part of human culture was therefore an especially terrible crime. Political beliefs, by contrast, were considered to be constantly developing and constantly renewable. There is hardly a political doctrine which has not proudly claimed that its basic ideas are so fundamentally human that they will spring to life again after the worst repression. Attempting to suppress a political belief did not seem to imply the same kind of extinction of a human creation as the destruction of a race.
The academic understanding of ethnicity, however, has changed considerably during the last fifty years. We now appreciate that ethnic identity is vastly more flexible than we once imagined it to be, that languages, cultural forms, dominant social ideas, and the borders between ethnic groups all change. We have come to appreciate not only the enormous power of the modern state to create identities but its power to create the appearance of antecedents, to see ancestral Dutchmen in Tacitus' Batavians and ancestral Chinese in the carvers of the Shang oracle bones. This is not to say that there is no primordial element in national identity, but rather that national identity is highly flexible.
'Political' genocide
We also appreciate now that one of the elements, which contributes to shaping ethnic identities, is often a political programme. At least in times of flux and change, people often choose their ethnic or national identity because of what they expect it to deliver, not because or not just because it represents some primordial or imposed identity. This programmatic element is essential for understanding genocide in both the Third World and Europe. The three largest genocides of modern Asian history took place in China between 1949 and 1980, in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966, and in Cambodia from 1975 to 1978. Even though the persecution of minorities played some role in each mass killing, all three were a primarily political genocide and the killings were done mainly by people who shared the ethnicity of their victims.
And yet, in important respects their ethnicities were different. In all three countries there was an intense political conflict over the essence and identity of the nation. The Communists in China wanted to break once and for all with the country's Confucian heritage; the Khmer Rouge came to power announcing that two thousand years of Cambodian history had come to an end; and in Indonesia there was a three-way struggle between Communists, Islamists, and a group which, for want of a better term, we can call Westernizers or modernizers. The vision which drove the rival forces in each of these three countries was not simply one of constitutional forms, not even one of raw power, but an all encompassing vision of what it should mean to be Chinese, or Cambodian, or Indonesian. In this context it is useful to remember, too, that the term 'un-American', despite its apparent reference to ethnic markers, is actually a thoroughly political term.
Provoking fate?
Of course political identity and ethnic identity are not the same thing, but in some contexts they closely resemble each other. When Chinese and Cambodian Communists exterminated landlords and conservative intellectuals, when the Indonesian army exterminated Communists, they were not merely killing political enemies, they were seeking to destroy forever a particular kind of Chinese, or Cambodian, or Indonesian identity. The quasi-ethnic nature of this extermination is particularly clear if we remember how important class background was in choosing Chinese and Cambodian victims, and how the continuing persecution of Communists in Indonesia targeted not only former Communists but their families as well.
Unfortunately, however, two rather unpleasant consequences arise if we accept that mass political killings can be genocide. First, we cannot avoid examining the complicity of the victims in their own fate. If genocide is only a matter of racism, then we can feel confident in regarding it as wrong not only morally but also intellectually. If the perpetrators of genocide are driven by an idea of human nature, which is alien from reality this is how we feel, for instance, about Nazi propaganda against the Jews then we do not need to consider what the victims might have done to provoke their fate. If, on the other hand, genocide is an outcome of intense identity politics, then the behaviour of both sides warrants attention. We can only understand the violence done to Indonesian Communists if we examine the political atmosphere, which they contributed to shaping in the early 1960s. We can only understand the violence of the Chinese Communists if we examine the violence of the KMT government in the 1930s. But to go further and to accept that there might be ways in which the Armenians provoked reasonable Turkish anger, or even to hint that the Jews and Gypsies might bear some complicity for what was done to them by the Nazis is to go beyond what is politically or academically acceptable. In admitting political killing as genocide, the world of genocide studies sets up for itself an enormous conflict.
The second unpleasant consequence of including political killings as genocide is that scale becomes increasingly important as a criterion for identifying genocide. The unpleasantness here is twofold. There is something repugnant about treating mass death as an object of statistical calculation, and the reliance on statistics generates a distasteful competition for status on the backs of murdered human beings. Uncertainty hovers over the whole discipline of statistics, but that uncertainty especially significant when the issue is mass death. However carefully and impartially we may weigh the evidence, we sail between the Scylla of denying victims the due recognition of their victimhood and the Charybdis of blood libel, of blaming people for murders they did not commit.
Nonetheless, even if treating political killing as genocide presents us with these unpleasant problems, we have little intellectual or moral choice but to follow this path. The development of international law to prohibit genocide and to try perpetrators is a significant step, but nothing in the history of criminology suggests that setting down law and punishing criminals is on its own enough to prevent crime. If we are to have any chance of ensuring that the twenty-first century does not join the twentieth in being labelled a century of genocide, then understanding the phenomenon in all its aspects is essential. *
This article is based on a lecture presented at the International Institute
of Asian Studies, Leiden,
7 September 2000.
Professor
Robert Cribb teaches history at the University of Queensland. His
research interests include the historical roots of violence in Indonesia.
E-mail: robert.cribb@mailbox.uq.edu.au