Genocide denial

Correspondent | Friday April 29, 2016 13:18

 

But the concept of annihilation of a people that pose as an obstacle is not just documented in the Bible; Greek Mythology supports this to; Homer quotes King Agamemnon’s quintessential pronouncement of root-and-branch genocide, stating;“We are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers’ wombs – not even they must live.

The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear.” Leo Kuper put it succinctly in his seminal 1981 text of genocide studies when he stated on Genocide; “The word is new, the concept is ancient”.

Until the Second World War, genocide was a “crime without a name,” in the words of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.  The term “genocide” was coined by Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900–59) as a term to make sense of the mass killing of Jews by the Nazis in World War II and the mass killing of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I. It was warfare not of state versus state, but warfare of state versus nation. In other words, genocide could be thought of as a type of warfare that a state or regime carries out against a people. “Genocide” was the intentional destruction of national groups on the basis of their collective identity. Physical killing was an important part of the picture, but it was only a part: By “genocide” we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group, on a neologism with both Greek and Latin roots: the Greek “genos,” meaning race or tribe, and the Latin “cide,” or killing. “. . . . 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 coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.

The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. . . .

Genocide has two phases: one: destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; Two: the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.

 This imposition, in turn, may be that which is made upon the oppressed population allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals. The critical question, for Lemkin, was whether the multifaceted campaign proceeded under the rubric of policy. To the extent that it did, it could be considered genocidal, even if it did not result in the physical destruction of all (or any) members of the group. Lemkin himself seems to have believed that killing a hundred thousand people of a single ethnicity was very different from killing a hundred thousand people of mixed ethnicities. Like Oswald Spengler, he thought that each cultural group had its own “genius” that should be preserved. To destroy, or attempt to destroy, a culture is a special kind of crime because culture is the unit of collective memory, whereby the legacies of the dead can be kept alive.  To kill a culture is to cast its individual members into individual oblivion, their memories buried with their mortal remains.  Levene in his article; “ The Crisis of Genocide. Volume I: Devastation.  The European Rimlands 1912–1938. Volume II: Annihilation.

The European Rimlands 1939–1953.”, published in the Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 545 and pp. 535, characterised the requirements for a genocide, and the commonalities that underlie the breeding ground for a genocide and he stated thus, genocide requires a critical psycho-social ingredient—what he calls collective unreason. He further elaborated on this point illustrating that in a genocide, the enemy is not a competitor that must be conquered.

In the mind of the perpetrator, the enemy is a wholly alien “other”—the sinister force behind society’s ills—that must be utterly destroyed.  In genocide the enemy is diabolical. That this demonisation by the perpetrator has little or no grounding in reality is quite beside the point. What is critical is that, in the collective mind of the perpetrator state, the victim is all powerful and poses an immediate and future threat. In addition to religious and cultural beliefs, a hunger for wealth, power, and “death-defying” combined to fuel the genocides of the early modern era.  In the African context, colonial Governments used religious theory, prevailing expansionist policy, and even ‘scientific research’ to advance their economic interests even if this meant the deliberate extermination, displacement, starvation, and segregation, of millions of indigenous people.

There are only five documented, read recognised genocides of African people. These are; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (1500- 1890), Africa’s Partition after the Congress of Berlin (1884-85), Belgian King Leopold II´s dominion of the Congo (1885-1908), The Herero in Southwest Africa (1904-1907), Rwanda (1994).

Trans-Atlantic Slavery, is referred to as the African Holocaust, 500 million Africans lost their lives, for European gain, over a period of 450 years.   Africa is the most exploited continent in the history of humanity; more human victims have been procured from Africa than all the continents of the world combined.

Carla V Nkusi

 

*Nkusi is  a Rwandan Botswana