Genocide: The Holodomor and Darfur Crisis Explained

Defining Genocide: Origins and Legal Framework

Despite the fact that humans have been violently killing other humans since the beginning of civilization, the word "genocide" — which encompasses the concept of "holocaust" — did not exist before 1944. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish attorney who wanted to describe the Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the destruction of European Jews, combined geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. Lemkin defined it as "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."

On December 9, 1948, following the end of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, the United Nations established the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, declaring "genocide" an international crime that signatory nations "undertake to prevent and punish." The Convention defined the word as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) 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."

Despite the fact that numerous cases of group-targeted violence have occurred throughout history — and even since the Convention was established — the legal and international creation of the term is grounded in historical events following 1944. When the word should be applied continues to be debated. There are those who feel that the Holocaust sets the standard for genocide and that no other event can compare, regardless of how heinous. On the other hand, many argue that the Soviet Union's murder of millions of Ukrainians, and what has been taking place in Darfur since 2003, clearly fall within this definition. Regardless of what is or is not classified as genocide, the world does not appear to be any closer to stopping such atrocities than it has been in the past.

The Holocaust and the Debate Over Genocide Standards

After Stalin had accomplished his atrocities against Ukraine, "a quarter of the rural population, men, women, and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbors" (Conquest cited in Williamson, 2005: 125), as nearby, well-nourished squads of police or party officials stood by and watched them die. Such circumstances surely bring to mind the mass killing instigated by the Nazi regime. As Courtois (1977: 9) wrote in The Black Book of Communism, "the genocide of a class may well be tantamount to the genocide of a race." Surely, he argued, the death of Ukrainian kulak women and children — whom the Stalin regime purposely sacrificed — "is equal to" the death of a Jewish child in the Warsaw Ghetto, dying from Nazi-instigated starvation.

Yet there are those who disagree. Conquest (Hollander, 2008: 39) argued that the Holocaust was the worst case of genocide in modern times because of the apocalyptic nature of the Nazi "racial utopia," the total helplessness of the Jews in the face of an attack on their very existence as a people, the sheer scale of the murders, and the "industrial nightmare" of the extermination camps' gas chambers and ovens. Similarly, Evans attests, "There was no Soviet Treblinka, built to murder people on their arrival" (Kiernan, 2008: 486).

Other scholars describe Stalin's crimes using different terminology — such as "classicide," "democide," or "politicide" — because, unlike the Holocaust, they were not primarily ethnic, national, or religious in character, even though they constituted mass murder. Others argue that Stalin's murderous deportation of the "punished peoples" during the war, which was part of his instrument of mass killing, can definitively be classified as genocide. They question why the term genocide should be limited to the attempted or eventual decimation of national, ethnic, and religious groups while excluding those of a social, political, or economic nature. Does it make any difference to the end result, and to the millions of lives lost? Considered in this broader context, the Soviet Union's "Great Terror" can be deemed an apt term for such horrors against humanity.