02-27-2023, 08:50 PM
Ukrainian policy in the Donbass: Is it fair to call it genocide?
This essay will consider the above question first by considering the concept of genocide and then the actions of the Ukrainian Government in relation to the Donbass and Crimea: “anti-terror” operations, shelling of civilians, use of torture, propaganda, linguistic, educational and religious rights, water supplies, etc. It will conclude that it is indeed fair, or proper, to call Ukrainian policy, from 2014 to today, ‘genocide’ in terms of the United Nations Genocide Convention’s definition of the concept.
Genocide
Homicide, suicide, regicide, patricide—all these words include the root -cide, which comes via French from the Latin cidium—the act of killing, and caedere, to kill, slay. In each of the above four cases, an individual is killed; there is the complete death of an individual. One might well think that genocide therefore ought to mean the complete killing or death of an ethnic group (the stem geno- comes from the Greek genos—race, kind, nation, a people) through massacre, mass murder, so that a particular ethnic group of people is exterminated and no longer exists.
However, the man who invented the term genocide in 1944—the Polish-born, Jewish-American jurist, Raphael Lemkin—added his own qualification to the use of the root -cide:
So, for Lemkin, the point about ‘genocide’ is not so much that it denotes the actual total destruction or ‘death’ of an ethnic group but that it denotes a plan that is aimed at the destruction of the target group; this can therefore include various acts of non-homicidal oppression.
Before Lemkin, the English language already had terms to describe the mass murder of large numbers of an ethnic group, terms that did not go so far as total annihilation, namely: mass murder, race murder, mass killing, mass slaughter. Yet Winston Churchill called the mass killings of Soviet troops and civilians by the Nazis in Operation Barbarossa during World War II “a crime without a name”. There was no single term in English to denote the total eradication, or the planned and attempted total eradication, of a single people—not a juridical term, at any rate; a term that would correspond at ethnic scale to the murder or attempted murder of an individual person.
But Lemkin was a jurist. He had been appalled that after the First World War, no specific international law existed to prosecute the Ottoman Turkish leaders responsible for the planning, organisation and killing of between 600,000 and 1½ million Armenians during that war. However, the Armenian massacres and deportations, terrible though they were, did not result in the total disappearance, the death of the Armenians as a people: they did not disappear but managed to establish their own republic after the war (1918–1920), until the USSR subsumed them in 1922; and then, almost 70 years later, in 1991, the Armenian people re-established the independent Republic of Armenia, which still exists.
While the fate of the Armenians had moved Raphael Lemkin to think about a new crime of ethnic mass murder, in inventing the term ‘genocide’ and in initiating the UN Genocide Convention in 1948, he clearly had in mind the persecution by the Nazis of his own people, the Jews. Like the Armenians in World War I, the Jews were not all eradicated by the crimes perpetrated against them by the Nazis before and during World War II; on the contrary, their power and influence steadily grew in the West after 1945, not least as a result of what they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
Like the Armenians, the Jews too came to establish their own state, Israel, in 1948; the same year as the adoption by the UN of the Genocide Convention. Lemkin was therefore largely successful in getting the UN to adopt the crime of ‘genocide’, but it did so with a five-part definition, which was more specific than the definition Lemkin had proposed to the UN in 1945. The Convention’s Article II omitted the word ‘conspiracy’ that featured three times in Lemkin’s definition, and it defined genocide as:
Article III declares that:
The important point to note here is those five words “in whole or in part” in Article II. With them, the scope of the concept ‘genocide’ was greatly widened from simply killing “in whole”—killing an entire ethnic group (i.e. total annihilation, eradication)—to destroying only a part of the whole, and furthermore, it was widened to include acts that did not in themselves constitute killing but were acts of oppression that were deemed to aim at the eradication of a people.
Indeed, Gregory H. Stanton, President of the NGO Genocide Watch, has written: “Genocidal acts need not kill or cause the death of members of a group”. In the five-part UN definition of genocide above, criteria (a) and (b) did not specify how many people were to be regarded as a ‘part’ of a people, tribe, nation or religious group, and this has been a contentious issue ever since. How many were the qualifying “members of the group”: 2, 20, 200, 200,000, or 2 million?
Furthermore, criteria (b), (d) and (e) did not relate directly to killing (-cide) as, for example, do such words as homicide, suicide, regicide, patricide, parricide and infanticide. The actual meaning of one of the two constituent parts of the whole concept of ‘genocide’ was therefore changed. This meant that all those conditions could be included in ‘genocide’ and that prosecutions could be brought for all the crimes (including those which did not involve killing and murder) of the Nazis against the Jews.
‘Bodily or mental harm to members of the group’, for example, could be used to prosecute those who had confiscated Jewish homes and property, because having one’s home taken from one might obviously result in mental or even physical harm. But this was not killing. Neither was criterion (e) above. “Complicity in genocide” could mean simply observing, watching, and not preventing acts of genocide, as well as taking part oneself in killing, for example, by acting under orders.
Read more....
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/ukraini...t-genocide
This essay will consider the above question first by considering the concept of genocide and then the actions of the Ukrainian Government in relation to the Donbass and Crimea: “anti-terror” operations, shelling of civilians, use of torture, propaganda, linguistic, educational and religious rights, water supplies, etc. It will conclude that it is indeed fair, or proper, to call Ukrainian policy, from 2014 to today, ‘genocide’ in terms of the United Nations Genocide Convention’s definition of the concept.
Genocide
Homicide, suicide, regicide, patricide—all these words include the root -cide, which comes via French from the Latin cidium—the act of killing, and caedere, to kill, slay. In each of the above four cases, an individual is killed; there is the complete death of an individual. One might well think that genocide therefore ought to mean the complete killing or death of an ethnic group (the stem geno- comes from the Greek genos—race, kind, nation, a people) through massacre, mass murder, so that a particular ethnic group of people is exterminated and no longer exists.
However, the man who invented the term genocide in 1944—the Polish-born, Jewish-American jurist, Raphael Lemkin—added his own qualification to the use of the root -cide:
Quote:Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a [b]coordinated plan of different actions[/b] aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. [Emphasis added]
So, for Lemkin, the point about ‘genocide’ is not so much that it denotes the actual total destruction or ‘death’ of an ethnic group but that it denotes a plan that is aimed at the destruction of the target group; this can therefore include various acts of non-homicidal oppression.
Before Lemkin, the English language already had terms to describe the mass murder of large numbers of an ethnic group, terms that did not go so far as total annihilation, namely: mass murder, race murder, mass killing, mass slaughter. Yet Winston Churchill called the mass killings of Soviet troops and civilians by the Nazis in Operation Barbarossa during World War II “a crime without a name”. There was no single term in English to denote the total eradication, or the planned and attempted total eradication, of a single people—not a juridical term, at any rate; a term that would correspond at ethnic scale to the murder or attempted murder of an individual person.
But Lemkin was a jurist. He had been appalled that after the First World War, no specific international law existed to prosecute the Ottoman Turkish leaders responsible for the planning, organisation and killing of between 600,000 and 1½ million Armenians during that war. However, the Armenian massacres and deportations, terrible though they were, did not result in the total disappearance, the death of the Armenians as a people: they did not disappear but managed to establish their own republic after the war (1918–1920), until the USSR subsumed them in 1922; and then, almost 70 years later, in 1991, the Armenian people re-established the independent Republic of Armenia, which still exists.
While the fate of the Armenians had moved Raphael Lemkin to think about a new crime of ethnic mass murder, in inventing the term ‘genocide’ and in initiating the UN Genocide Convention in 1948, he clearly had in mind the persecution by the Nazis of his own people, the Jews. Like the Armenians in World War I, the Jews were not all eradicated by the crimes perpetrated against them by the Nazis before and during World War II; on the contrary, their power and influence steadily grew in the West after 1945, not least as a result of what they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
Like the Armenians, the Jews too came to establish their own state, Israel, in 1948; the same year as the adoption by the UN of the Genocide Convention. Lemkin was therefore largely successful in getting the UN to adopt the crime of ‘genocide’, but it did so with a five-part definition, which was more specific than the definition Lemkin had proposed to the UN in 1945. The Convention’s Article II omitted the word ‘conspiracy’ that featured three times in Lemkin’s definition, and it defined genocide as:
Quote:... [b]any[/b] of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
[Emphasis added]
Article III declares that:
Quote:The following acts shall be punishable:
(a) Genocide;
(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
© Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
(d) Attempt to commit genocide;
(e) Complicity in genocide.
The important point to note here is those five words “in whole or in part” in Article II. With them, the scope of the concept ‘genocide’ was greatly widened from simply killing “in whole”—killing an entire ethnic group (i.e. total annihilation, eradication)—to destroying only a part of the whole, and furthermore, it was widened to include acts that did not in themselves constitute killing but were acts of oppression that were deemed to aim at the eradication of a people.
Indeed, Gregory H. Stanton, President of the NGO Genocide Watch, has written: “Genocidal acts need not kill or cause the death of members of a group”. In the five-part UN definition of genocide above, criteria (a) and (b) did not specify how many people were to be regarded as a ‘part’ of a people, tribe, nation or religious group, and this has been a contentious issue ever since. How many were the qualifying “members of the group”: 2, 20, 200, 200,000, or 2 million?
Furthermore, criteria (b), (d) and (e) did not relate directly to killing (-cide) as, for example, do such words as homicide, suicide, regicide, patricide, parricide and infanticide. The actual meaning of one of the two constituent parts of the whole concept of ‘genocide’ was therefore changed. This meant that all those conditions could be included in ‘genocide’ and that prosecutions could be brought for all the crimes (including those which did not involve killing and murder) of the Nazis against the Jews.
‘Bodily or mental harm to members of the group’, for example, could be used to prosecute those who had confiscated Jewish homes and property, because having one’s home taken from one might obviously result in mental or even physical harm. But this was not killing. Neither was criterion (e) above. “Complicity in genocide” could mean simply observing, watching, and not preventing acts of genocide, as well as taking part oneself in killing, for example, by acting under orders.
Read more....
https://www.ukcolumn.org/article/ukraini...t-genocide