The theme is
genocide. The author is Norman Naimark. Trancribed the Jakarta Globe newspaper
dated July 17. A review and, if you will, an opinion piece. On genocide Indonesia is
properly identified. Not only for what happened within its borders as well as the
genocidal practice that its military and police practiced in East
Timor during the invasion and 24 year occupation of that
neighboring country. About 300,000 East Timorese were brutally murdered. At
present Indonesia, which
hypocritically claims to a democratic regime, have in practice genocide in West Papua. But it seems nothing bother journalists and
Indonesian communication organs. Stop the Genocide in West
Papua! Judge and condemn those responsible for the genocide in
East Timor and West Papua!
Opinion and appeal
of Timor Agora.
Commentary: Why
Genocide Isn’t History
The
purpose of this article is to explore several fundamental propositions that
underlie my recent book manuscript, A World History of Genocide, which I hope
will appear before the end of the year with Oxford University Press.
The
general idea behind the book is to historicize genocide in the longue
durée of world history, making it clear that mass killing of the sort
experienced, for example, by the Armenians in 1915-16 (the centennial of which we mark
this year), the Jews during the Holocaust, or the North American Indians (at
the hands of European and American settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries), is
part and parcel of human history, rather than standing outside the historical
experience.
Moreover,
the sources, the dynamics, and the consequences of genocide become clearer in
light of comparison with other genocides.
The
propositions about the character of genocide that are at the foundations of the
book are not uncontroversial. Each of them requires a long and systematic
explanation. But for the sake of keeping the article to size, let me simply
enumerate them with the briefest of descriptions of their importance.
Genocide
through the ages
Genocide
has occurred throughout history, from the very beginnings of the social
organisation of human communities until the present.
the
memory and recitation of classical cases of genocide into later periods of
history
the
relationship between agricultural pursuits, land, and the mass murder
the
emergence of race thinking, racism, and the creation of the other, and
expansionism,
the seizure of territory and the killing of its inhabitants.
Kiernan,
and after him Mark
Levene, who has authored four impressive volumes on the history of
genocide, make the case that the history of genocide can and should be broken
down into general periods that reflect the stages of the development of state
and society over the centuries.
Kiernan
is ready to begin his history with the ancient world, the Old Testament, the
Greeks, and the Romans, an approach I now share. Levene argues that genocide
cannot be thought to have taken place before the foundations of the modern
state, which he dates from the 17th and 18th centuries.
Many
historians – I was once one of them – claim that one should not speak of
genocide before the 20th century.
Wherever
one begins his or her narrative, genocide both has a constant set of
characteristics, yet also changes its aspects over time.
Genocide
in the ancient world should be distinguished from genocide of the great
conquerors from Alexander the Great to the Mongols.
Crusader
genocide against the “Saracens” in the Middle East and the Cathars or
Albigensians in southern France in the 13th century should be differentiated
from the genocidal actions of the Spanish in the New World in the first half of
the 16th century.
The
category of settler genocide, which spans the murderous campaigns by European
settlers against Aboriginal people in the Antipodes, against native Indian
peoples in North America, and against the so-called “Bushmen” in southern
Africa, among many others, has its own particular set of dynamics that only in
part reproduce genocides of earlier and later periods.
The
transition to modern genocide, which one might date from the German attacks on
the Herero and Nama in southwest Africa, 1904-07 and the Armenian genocide of
1915, reflect aspects of both settler genocide and of modern genocide.
Finally,
genocide in our own era – Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, eastern Congo – has its
particular history, closely tied to changes in the norms of the international
system regarding human rights and genocide prevention.
Genocide
is global
Genocide
has occurred in various parts of the world and in different types of
civilisations and cultures. We will never know all of the genocides that have
taken place in the past.
While
working on this article, I happened to read a March 2015 article in The New Yorker on dying languages, which
discusses the genocide of the Sel’knam, a “nomadic tribe of unknown origin,”
which lived in Tierra del Fuego in Chile.
In
an all too familiar scenario (think about the fate of the Yuki Indians in
Mendocino County in the 1860s or of the Aborigines in Tasmania in the 1820s and
1830s), at the end of the 19th century gold prospectors and sheep ranchers
coveted the Sel’knam’s lands, massacred them in large numbers, and reduced them
from a population of approximately 400,000 to some three hundred.
Sometimes
there are no records remaining of the elimination of peoples and even
historical memory of past atrocities disappears. Sometimes genocidal events in
history, like that of the Sel’knam, simply escape our gaze.
Lemkin’s
definition
The
definition of genocide developed by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in
the 1930s and 1940s, which was codified in the December 1948 UN
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, is a useful one,
especially as adumbrated since the 1990s in the international tribunals.
In
his first stab at the concept of genocide – what he then called “barbarism” –
in the early 1930s, Lemkin presented to a League of Nations sponsored
conference of international lawyers the concept of the crime of mass murder
that included social and political groups as potential targets, as well as
ethnic and religious ones.
Lemkin
coined the term “genocide” in his 1944 book Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe. No doubt under the influence of the Holocaust, which had
engulfed many members of his own family, he limited genocide to ethnic,
religious and national groups. As I argued in my 2010 book, Stalin’s
Genocides, it was primarily the influence of the Soviet Union on the
deliberations connected with the December 1948 genocide convention that
confined genocide to ethnic, national, religious and racial groups.
Genocide,
in my view, should include such cases as the Cambodian genocide, where social
and political groups were the main categories of victims, the mass murder of
some 500,000-600,000 Indonesian communists in 1965-66, which was focused on a
political group, and Stalin’s elimination of “kulaks,” Ukrainians peasants,
“asocials,” and a series of imagined groups of alleged political “enemies of
the people” in the 1930s.
Overly
politicized?
Some
scholars believe that the term genocide has ceased to have serious meaning
because of its overly-politicised use by victim groups of the most variable and
diverse character. It is certainly the case that the word has the kind of
resonance that makes many victim groups anxious to use the appellation as a way
to underline their own suffering. But both the international courts and
reputable genocide scholars continue to argue for the need for a “high bar” for
genocide.
The
intentionality of the perpetrators to eliminate a group in whole or in part, as
defined by the genocide convention and the international tribunals, must be
clearly demonstrated. The victim group must be the object of campaigns of mass
killing, as well as other attacks on their very existence that are detailed in
the 1948 convention.
As
long as scholars and jurists continue to think about genocide as “the crime of
crimes,” there is every reason to think that it will continue to be relevant to
scholarly research and judicial prosecutions.
Other
scholars lament that the term genocide is too all-encompassing and too
imprecise to be of much use. They prefer terms like ethnicide, democide,
politicide, sociocide, or even genderocide as a way to focus more concertedly
on the specificities of the victim groups. Recently the Italian scholar Andreas
Graziozi has suggested the term “demotomy” to indicate the surgical nature of
the removal of peoples, especially as experienced in Stalin’s Soviet Union in
the 1930s.
My
own view is that Lemkin’s term works — and works well — when rigorously
applied, based on the 1948 definition, to events past and present. Using newly
devised social science terms artificially separates the legal discourse about
genocide — which has been influential and important to the evolution of our
understanding of genocide — from scholarly discussions.
Moreover,
it creates a gulf between the popular understanding of genocide and the
academic. This can only confuse questions of “naming” genocide, like the
contemporary problems associated with the Turkish denial of the Armenian
genocide or in past debates (inside and outside of government) about
intervention in Rwanda and Darfur.
After
Lemkin, our problem is not naming the crime of crimes; it is to understand it
and prevent it from happening.
*Norman
Naimark is participating in the Australasian Association for European History
(AAEH) XXIV Biennial Conference, War, Violence, Aftermaths: Europe and the
Wider World, in Newcastle, July 14-17.
