DEFUSE THE LEXICON OF SLAUGHTER

[Yervant1]

Mr. David Scheffer, forgets to mention conveniently that over 150 historians already declared it as Genocide! Moron!

 

 

 

DEFUSE THE LEXICON OF SLAUGHTER

By DAVID SCHEFFER

 

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/opinion/defuse-the-lexicon-of-slaughter.html

Feb 23 2012

USA

 

Legislators play a dangerous game using the word "genocide." In

trying to appease millions of victims, they needlessly pit nations

against one another. They should leave it to others to sift through

the evidence and determine what killings occurred when and which

ones amount to what crimes. Political judgments distort the search

for truth and for justice.

 

Millions of people live with the memories that their ancestors were

slaughtered out of prejudice. They demand that the story of their

people's past be confirmed for posterity and that the perpetrators be

condemned. But judging such facts, especially many years, perhaps even

centuries, after they occurred, requires the discipline of historians

and, if surviving suspects can be prosecuted, of jurists.

 

Some nations have outlawed Holocaust denial to avoid stoking the

violence bred by anti-Semitism. Such intentions may be sound, but too

often the results are problematic. Legislators and governments have

variously decreed or denied that given mass atrocities were genocides

in order to satisfy certain interest groups or national agendas.

 

France and Turkey are now at loggerheads, for example, over how to

characterize the deaths of some 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians nearly

a century ago and whether to criminalize any refusal to call those

atrocities a genocide. The French Parliament says "genocide" and wants

to criminalize its denial; Turkey rejects the term and prosecutes

those who use it. The Turkish prime minister has threatened sanctions

against France and countered that France committed a genocide of its

own in Algeria between 1830 and 1962.

 

Mass atrocities were indeed committed against the Armenians, but

deciding to call them a "genocide" - or refusing to - is a dangerously

divisive political game. It heightens tensions between countries and

sows confusion about what really happened.

 

Politicians should use the term "genocide" only when historians

and jurists have determined, based on evidence and analysis, that a

genocide - a specific crime defined according to narrow factual and

legal criteria - has indeed occurred. It is the responsibility of

historians to establish the facts of distant events and of jurists

to determine whether these were a genocide, crimes against humanity,

war crimes, human rights abuses, political repression or other crimes

against civil or political rights.

 

Using the word "genocide" loosely can be tragically ineffective or

self-defeating. It can intimidate powerful nations from reacting

quickly enough to prevent further atrocities.

 

The United Nations and key Western governments failed to act in

Rwanda and the Balkans in the early 1990s partly because their policy

makers were searching for terminological certainty about the nature

of the killings. The false notion arose that invoking "genocide"

would require immediate military intervention. (The 1948 Genocide

Convention does not demand this; the requirement that parties to the

treaty "prevent" genocide can take military, political, diplomatic

or economic forms.) And while the politicians pondered, thousands of

civilians continued to die.

 

When in 2004 Secretary of State Colin Powell declared the killings

in Darfur a genocide, he wasn't committing to United States to send

the 82nd Airborne into western Sudan. He was simply trying to prod

the U.S. government to take some action, ideally with others, to stop

the atrocities. But others in Washington and several Western capitals

froze at the use of the g-word.

 

Politicians would be better off using the phrase "atrocity crimes" - a

term with no pre-existing connotations or legal criteria - to describe

any combination of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes,

leaving it to historians and jurists to determine, free of political

influence, which atrocity crimes belong to which category. In the face

of ongoing mass killings, this would allow policy makers to concentrate

on what needs to be done to end a slaughter rather than debate how to

define it. The Obama administration is rightly creating the Atrocities

Prevention Board to free up decision-making from any confining lexicon.

 

France, as well as the United States and Israel - both of which are

considering similar genocide legislation - could call what occurred

to the Armenian people a century ago atrocity crimes. (Turkey might

even tolerate that.) And Turkey could condemn what the Algerians

suffered at the hands of the French as atrocity crimes.

 

If the United States, the European Union and the Arab League declared

that the Syrian government was currently committing atrocity crimes

against its own people, they would have an easier time getting the

U.N. Security Council to refer Syria's leaders to the International

Criminal Court for investigation, leaving it to the prosecutor to

determine what crimes to list in an indictment. Rather than veto

such a move, Russia and China might abstain from voting on it and

give justice a chance.

 

By forgoing "genocide," politicians would no doubt disappoint interest

groups determined to use the label to describe the suffering inflicted

on their ancestors. The Armenians, in particular, would find this

compromise hard to accept. But their strongest case rests with the

historians and the jurists now - not with the politicians whose loose

indictments trigger the very tensions that can ignite prejudice among

peoples and nations. Shifting to "atrocity crimes" in government

speech, meanwhile, would focus the efforts of officials on getting

more unified international responses to ongoing massacres.

 

David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues

from 1997 to 2001, is a law professor at Northwestern University. His

new book is "All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War

Crimes Tribunals."