Genocide

Introduction

At first glance, an essay on genocide would seem to bear only a marginal relationship to racial and ethnic studies. After all, the gap between everyday acts of housing discrimination; race-based differentials in searches, prosecutions, sentencing, and access to health care; the appearance of denigrating media images, and the like are far removed from the Holocaust or the massive killings that have taken place recently in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and East Timor. This essay suggests that the relationship is well worth a second look.

Genocide fundamentally informs racial constructions, their political effects, and the political contours and costs of efforts to resist them. Just as racialization and the production of other schemes of social difference play a key role in making such acts of mass and systematic killing possible, genocides constitute key sites in which the nature and limits of racialization and efforts to resist and punish it are constructed.

Discussion

Recognition of the specific crime of genocide is part of the growing body of legal theory collectively called international humanitarian law (IHL). IHL emerged in the context of nineteenth-century European military conflict; it attempted to clarify the responsibilities of states during the conduct of war. Jean-Henri Dunant, a Swiss businessman, established the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863 after seeing the carnage of the clash between Austrian and Franco-Italian forces in 1859, in which tens of thousands of combatants died from untreated wounds. The Red Cross convened the Geneva Convention of 1864 “for the amelioration of the conditions of the wounded of armies in the field.” Subsequent Geneva conventions prohibited the wartime use of poison gas and biological weapons (1925), established the rights of wounded and sick combatants on land and at sea, prohibited medical experiments on and mistreatment of prisoners of war, and protected the status of civilian noncombatants (1949). The most recent initiative under IHL has been an attempt to outlaw the worldwide use of land mines in armed conflict because of the devastating legacy left buried in the ground afterward.

Despite a concise definition of genocide within the UN convention on genocide, there remains significant difficulty in actually recognizing genocide when it occurs. Heavy violence and death occur in many ethnic, religious, and national conflicts, but genocide, as it is defined by the United Nations, has the distinction of being motivated by and planned to exterminate an entire ethnic, religious, or national group. Demonstrating that this is the actual intent of aggressors is often challenging, as perpetrators of genocide are often secretive about their intent to commit genocide.

Certainly this was an issue in the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims. Serb leaders consistently described the violence in the Balkans as a civil war during their interactions with the international community. Outside Serbia, Serb leaders rarely mentioned their plan to cleanse the region of all Bosnian Muslims. Thus, the difficulties of identifying genocide have inspired some in the international community to suggest that the criteria for recognizing genocide be relaxed from the difficult-to-prove “specific intent” to a more realistic measure ...