Prevention of Genocide

Prevention of Genocide

Humankind has done disastrous acts to its kin from its early ages and it seems that people are bound to hurt other people at the slightest opportunity that arrives. Murders take place constantly and the killers do not need solid reasons for taking the lives of others as any difference of opinions between the killer and the victim can provide a motive in most cases.

The concept of genocide is very controversial, as most people do not exactly know what it involves and they usually picture a mass killing as the best image for it. The reason for the concept's controversy is that some nations would not consider a mass murder to be genocide if the motives for the murder have had a political nature or any other nature that would not involve a racial criterion.

One often thinks about the Holocaust when hearing the word Genocide, as it is one of the main reasons for the words' existence. The word has its roots in 1944 when Raphael Lemkin, a Polish scholar of international law and a secular Jew, first presented it in his book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress." (Heidenrich)

Genocide comes from the combination of the Greek prefix "genos" and the Latin suffix "cide." The combination of the two refers to the killing of a nation or of a particular group (Heidenrich). Moreover, Lemkin emphasizes the fact that the act of genocide does not exactly have to have the murder of a nation as its core, but it can also mean the destruction of the means necessary for a nation to survive. Lemkin died in 1958, but the word invented by him lived on and people were left to debate which actions can be called genocide. Unfortunately, they only preferred to study the act instead of finding means of stopping mass murders. Lemkin had been truly in favor of creating a law that would prohibit genocide world wide in order to help the minorities and to denounce any person that would be responsible of genocide. (Hirsch)

His intentions appeared to be idealistic for the members of the U.N. because of the great deal of resources that a law against the act of genocide would imply. Although the law quickly traveled around the world, most countries were reluctant in ratifying it because of the fact that it seemed to them as a motive for the U.N. To intervene in the internal affairs of several countries when it had not been necessary. The bottom line is that despite the fact that the UN's Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has been passed in 1948, there have still been cases of genocide across the world that were never followed by anyone's intervention.

In most cases those that perform mass murders aren't directly connected to their victims, nor are they perfectly aware of the alleged crime that has been done by the victims. People have always been in need for something to live and fight for and they have had to have some place that they would relate to as home and some people that they would call their kin. Today, it might seem natural for a normal society to have violence and to have crimes committed by its members. Yet, there are certain communities in the world that do not know crime and that have members within their ranks that are not familiar with the concept of anger, in spite of the fact that the respective communities have been assaulted and even tortured by outsiders. The Senoi are people that inhabit the jungles of Malaysia and are known to be very peaceful and not vengeful. (Heidenrich) the Senoi tribes have turned the eyes of the world upon them, as most people are amazed at the sight of their kin that know no anger.

One of the most terrible cases of genocide is when it happens between members of the same nation or even from the same family. The twentieth century has been witness to approximately 36 million deaths provoked by genocide, none of the victims having died because of wars.

Genocide has had its presence felt in the world long before World War II and there are accounts of mass murdering occurring thousands of years ago. The first concentration camps are believed to be build by the Spanish in Cuba in the late nineteenth century and later by the British and by the Nazis. (Heidenrich)

Among the first genocides to be racially related is the episode of the "Young Turks" when the First World War had been used as a motive to remove racial minorities from Turkey and millions of Armenian Christians had been left to starve in the desert.

The Holocaust is one of the worst disasters in the history of humankind. The Nazi war machine has murdered millions of innocent people in its process of the so-called cleansing of Europe. Taking into attention the horrific acts done during the Holocaust almost all factors indicate the fact that the Nazis have committed acts of genocide mostly because of racial reasons.

After Hitler took office of Germany in 1933 the faith of the Jewish population was sealed. Immediately, the Jewish population in Germany started to suffer, yet things remained relatively calm until the night of November 9, 1938 when Hitler unleashed the evil forces during the Kristallnacht. During that night approximately one hundred Jews have been murdered and thousands more have been taken into the first Nazi concentration camps. The Jews had been categorized as a problem to Germany mainly because they occupied high positions and they were considered wealthier than the rest of the population.

Another reason for the condemning of the Jews was that Hitler blamed the Jewish race for all that was evil in the world and in Germany especially. Jews had been generally oppressed because of the fact that they prove to have an amazing power to keep their national identity wherever they were. In Hitler's view, the Jews were the very opposite of the perfect Aryan race and there was no other alternative than to annihilate them in order for Germany to prosper. Hitler's subordinates had been fanatically impressed of their leader and they were certain that all Jews were Bolsheviks and enemies of Germany. These were reasons caused both by insanity and the need to find a scapegoat.

To be successful Hitler came up with the "Enloesung" which meant the Final Solution and involved the mass murdering of all people that were non-Aryan. There are even assumptions that the war with Russia had been a mere motive for Hitler to kill as many Jews as he could. However, most believe that the final solution had been a result of an unsuccessful campaign of deporting the Jews.

In spite of the fact that the genocide committed by the Nazis involved several ethnic groups, the Germans paid more attention to the Jewish population. Along with the Jews, Gypsies and mentally or physically challenged people received the same treatment because none of the three groups could have got a chance to change their conditions as the communists, Poles, Jehovah's witnesses and homosexuals could.

The first reports of Germans committing acts of genocide were in 1941 once Hitler gave Himmler, the leader of the SS, the order to shoot masses of Jews. The Nazis later abandoned the method of killing Jews by shooting them in favor of that of killing through gassing done in special gas chambers from concentration camps.

The Holocaust genocide did not only have Germans as the aggressors and Jewish as the victims. Unwillingly, Hitler provided several countries with the motives for eliminating ethnic minorities within their borders. Genocide during the Holocaust has also made its presence felt in Croatia with the Catholic and the Muslims taking advantage of their alliance with the Nazis to exterminate the Serbian minority next to other minorities that the Nazis wantedexterminated. Approximately 750,000 Serbian people have been killed by the Croats during the Holocaust because of their religion. (Mathuna)

Hitler's regime directly mass murdered an estimated 17 million human beings before and during World War II -- and caused millions more to perish through wanton neglect. The noncombat victims of the Nazis included some 5 million Poles, primarily intellectuals; at least 6 million Soviet civilians and captured prisoners of war, most of them starved to death; nearly 800,000 Serbs, most butchered in atrocities inflicted by the Nazis' Croatian allies; hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies); and, most notoriously, some 6 million Jews -- including 1 million Jewish children." (Heidenrich, 2001)

The Holocaust has provided the world with a reason to look back in regret and shame and it is still almost impossible to believe that human beings in a civilized society are able to perform genocide of such magnitudes.

While the Nazis were convinced that the individual had been influenced by biology alone and that one could only survive and thrive if he or she had been Aryan, the Marxist-Leninist Communists had been certain that one is defined by the training that he or she receives. Both Nazism and Communism have been proved of being highly ineffective and dangerous for humanity.

Some of the reasons which made it easier for the genocide that took place during the Holocaust to occur were Hitler's clever schemes and the favorable conditions in which Germans were searching for a scapegoat that they could blame for their deficiencies.

The Khmer Rouge regime has ruled over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and it is yet another example of genocide when considering the number of innocents that it claimed and the reasons it had for doing so. Despite the fact that both the Khmer Rouge Regime and the Nazi Regime were guilty of taking the lives of millions, the methods through which the two acted are opposite with one being communist and the other fascist.

With the Marxist leader Pol Pot in charge, the Khmer Rouge army attempted to take Cambodia back to its roots by constraining people from urban areas to work as slaves in the country side. After several insignificant attempts the Communists managed to attract attention from the people in 1970. (bbc) a civil war lasted for five years and it ended with the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

While living in a remote area before achieving victory, Pol Pot had learn from the tribes that civilization was not necessary for people to safely coexist. He later decided to transform Cambodia by getting the people out of the cities and installing a system that would lack civilization altogether. The measures taken by the Khmer Rouge regime were harsh and they involved the killing of anyone that was considered intellectual or educated. There were often cases in which illiterate members of the Khmer Rouge would force people to work until their last breath. Some estimates claim that nearly 2.5 millions perished under the unfair ruling of Pol Pot in the four-year period of the regime. The Cambodian leader is believed to have committed genocide on four accounts which include the annihilation of the Buddhist monks and of the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Muslim Chams. (Andreopoulos)

The Khmer Rouge ruling has been overturned in 1979 with the coming of the Vietnamese troops into the country and left way for the world to observe the massacre that has happened in Cambodia.

One of the most terrible cases of genocide in recent years is the Rwandan massacre where around 800,000 from the Tutsi tribe have been murdered by Hutu tribesmen.(bbc) the motive, or the pretext for the bloodshed had been the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana whose plane had been shot down on the 6th of April 1994. (bbc) According to a French official report from that time, the plane had been shot down at the orders of, Paul Kagamethe, the Rwandan President at that time. In spite of the replies coming from Rwanda claiming that Kagamethe had nothing to do with the terrorist act, a wave of violence was already sweeping the country.

Apparently, Habyarimana's death had been the single motive that the Hutus lacked in order to raise their arms against the Tutsis. Rwanda had been no stranger to violence, as the situation has been tensed ever since the Belgian colonists have discriminated the Hutus as being of lower intellectual capacity than the Tutsis. (bbc)

The Hutus started to rise against the Tutsis since 1959 when a large part of the Tutsis had been slaughtered as a result of a Hutu riot. The Tutsis began to feel the disastrous effects of the persecutions after the Belgian government has granted Rwanda its independence. Tension was beginning to rise and the Hutus were taking every opportunity to condemn the Tutsis as being at the center of the causes leading to the deterioration of the general situation in the country.

After Habyarimana began to lose popularity among the Hutus, he decided to bring back his followers by using the Tutsis attempt to take charge of the country in his favor. Habyarimana's death had provided the Hutus with a reason to start a wave of mass murders around the country killing everyone that were from the opposition. A militia group was soon formed and Hutus were moving around the country encouraging every other Hutu to join them in murdering innocent people.

The U.N. had decided not to intervene in the civil war after the killing of 10 of its soldiers and the Rwandan Patriotic Front was left to deal with the insurgency of Hutus. (bbc) the fighting lasted from April till June 1994 and ended with the RPF capturing the Rwandan capital and overthrowing the government. The U.N. troops later joined the RPF in providing aid for Rwanda's loses, but still nothing could be done to bring back the innocent that died for an absurd cause.

The Rwanda genocide is thought to be among the ones that could have safely been prevented by the outside world. Rwanda's problem had been that the country "was simply too little, too far away, too poor, and too black for the 'developed' world to care about." (Taylor, 1999)

It would appear that even after the passing of 46 years from the 1948 Geneva Convention and the actions that have been proposed in order to prevent genocide world wide the U.N. had not been ready, or did not want to be ready, to cope with the threat of genocide. Whereas the Hutus were mercilessly killing their very neighbors, the U.N. committee and the rest of the countries refrained from calling the action genocide. If the action were to be cataloged as being genocide, special measures had to be taken to sort the situation and to begin immediate evacuation.

Alison Des Forges explain that genocides like that in Rwanda and others could have been prevented if people were to examine all the features that indicated a possible uprising within the country. (Des Forges)

After approximately forty years from the Holocaust the great powers of the world were assumed to be ready for preventing genocide from happening. The case of previous Yugoslavia is proof that anti-genocide plans had not been made nor were the world leaders willing to give support in case of risk. In the broken states of former Yugoslavia terror had been at home as women and children were raped and killed in what once had been a civilized region. This particular genocide took place with the help of communist President Slobodan Milosevic that managed to get the Serb public against all non-Serbs serving him with the opportunity to start a strategy of ethnic cleansing.

The world has had much to learn from its past full of crime, but regardless of the amendments that have been done concerning genocidal research, the act of genocide is still present in the 21st century. This is possible because of the fact that there are no expert institutions that could either forecast the danger of genocide or prevent it.

There are a lot of centers world wide where genocide is studied, but the sheer analysis of the topic is of little importance as long as no tangible actions are done in order to actually prevent it from happening.

The reason for which most nations abstained from joining a united front that would fight genocide during the first years after the 1948 Convention was that during that period most people did not wish to use their resources to help people of different ethnicity. According to Herbert Hirsch, the U.S. had been one of the nations that have had issues concerning racism and social inequality during the 1950s itself. With the coming of Lyndon Baines Johnson in office, the situation was bound to change because the new President had set a program that would revolutionize the U.S. through programs known as "the Great Society." (Hirsch)

The change included both political and cultural changes which began to be seen with the birth of the eccentric rock and roll music and other activities that were perceived to be strange and suspicious. The difference was made with the coming of President Kennedy and the anti-Vietnam war movements, actions which triggered the signal that the U.S. had begun its road towards democracy.

Evolution does indeed make the difference between the people with prejudices from the early twentieth century and the open-minded people of today. What is more troubling is that despite the fact that concepts have changed, today's people also tend to hesitate when they are required to act for the help of others.

The U.N. Security Council commenced to economically sanction nations as early as 1966 in Rhodesia, 1977 in South Africa, and later in several areas around the world during the 1990s (Riemer). The Security Council did not apply the sanctions to directly denounce genocidal acts, but the sanctions were given as penalties for the reason that the particular countries that have received them have committed abuse of human rights. In the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa the sanctions accomplished their roles exactly, with the perpetrators running low on the resources necessary to conduct the killing after having been sanctioned.

Northern Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia are among the only states in which a major international military force chose to intervene and put an end to the disorder. These three particular cases are also related because of the disappointment that the outside help has turned out to be in each of the countries. The explanation for most of the failures in the three operations is that the international committees have not given sufficient consideration to their action. The effect of the lack of interest was that the military that was supposed to provide assistance to those in need was either too late or it had not been properly instructed. Regardless of the fact that the help provided to the three countries was not adequate, the operations were considered to be successful. The argument for their assumed triumph is that each of the three actions has saved more than a few lives.

Generally, the prevention of genocide depends on the elites and whether or not they chose to act with the purpose of ending the incident even before it starts. The U.S. is among the world's elite when considering the military power that it holds. While individual nations expect to receive help concerning a potential genocide alarm it is most certain that the U.S. will not provide the help with the excuse that the Americans are not directly concerned about sustaining involvement in saving the lives of others. The lack of interest that comes from the general public concerning genocide is partly due to the little mass media coverage in the respective country regarding the subject. Besides the fact that there was little media coverage on genocide topics, the public seemed to give less attention to news about mass murders than to the more commercial stories. In the case of the Americans, the concern for act of genocide has risen since the terrorist attack in 2001, given that the particular case involved them as a nation directly. (Hirsch)

In the case of the Somalia genocide wherein several factions took control of the country after the collapse of its government the U.S. did not intervene until the spring of 1992 when the mass media started to let the world know what was happening in that remote part of the world. (Riemer)

After fifty years from the creation of the Genocide Convention U.S. President Bill Clinton announced his government's objective of creating a Genocide Early Warning System (GEWS) that would anticipate cases of potential genocide. The Kosovo War took place in 1999 and genocide had been predicted to take place approximately four months before it did. Considering the facts, it is obvious that more time would be required to prevent genocide from happening.

Genocide can sometimes be predicted by a trained analyst years before it would actually take place. Taking into account the literature, we can observe that Hitler, for example, expressed an unnatural hate towards the Jewish population in his book "Mein Kampf" and one might foresee that in a country ruled by such a man the Jews could not possibly lead a comfortable life. However, it would require a great deal of additional information to catalogue a potential genocide as such. Genocides that are predicted to happen in the present can be more easily detected with the help of the news media. Regularly, mass media emitting from a country under the control of perpetrators is only releasing propaganda news and such. There are also independent newspapers and journalist within a country which send out messages of truth.

Although the Genocide Convention was adopted over 50 years ago, the first international criminal tribunals since Nuremberg were not established until the 1990s, and their first verdict in a genocide case was rendered only in 1998." (Riemer, 2000)

In spite of the somewhat little action that the tribunals did with reference to penalizing people that have done crimes against humanity, they are likely to prevent criminals from operating. One of the biggest impediments that international criminal tribunals have is that the act of genocide is difficult to label. This is because of the fact that not all cases of mass murders are considered to be acts of genocide by the Genocide Convention. There has been controversy as to what should be called genocide, with some states stating that the production of nuclear weapons by other states or other similar acts were criminal offences. Another aspect that can influence the conviction of those that commit genocidal acts is that, in some cases, governments responsible for crimes against humanity have managed to remain in charge even after the criminal acts have been committed.