Genocide: 'a crime that has no name'
February 13th, 2009 • ICL
When the atrocities of World War II were first made public, Winston Churchill’s called it ‘a crime that has no name’. At that time there was nothing to compare it to. Nothing that paralleled the nature of the modern, industrialised extermination of entire people group.
It was Raphaël Lemkin, an advisor to the US war ministry, that first used the word genocide – combining the Greek ‘genos’ (race/tribe) and the Latin ‘cide’ (to kill). He said it described the destruction of an ethnic group via a co-ordinated plan that aimed at the extermination of peoples based solely on their membership of that group.
This was not a crime of war, which had been defined already in the 1907 Hague Convention. This went beyond the ‘amorality of war’, it was a crime against humanity itself.
I hadn’t totally understood what set genocide apart from the other crimes of international criminal law until I read Alain Destexhe’s Rwanda and genocide in the twentieth century
Destexhe argues that at the heart of the offensiveness of genocide is the intent to kill somebody simply because he or she exists. He calls this “a crime against the very essence of what it is to be human”, against the very humanity of the individual victim.
It is an affront to all members of the international community that some would presume to be able to deny the rights of a group to exist. To see a section of humanity not as people but as vermin, to be eradicated. It denies the natural right all humanity has to exist. It also represents a danger to all people of extermination for no other reason then their existence. It is because of this that genocide is known as the gravest and greatest of all the crimes against humanity.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Related posts:
Recent comments