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.

Stalin's Soviet Terror and the Ukrainian Holodomor

Between August 1937 and November 1938, approximately 700,000 people died — an average of 1,500 per day — in what Conquest called the "Great Terror" (Kiernan, 2008). Between 1932 and 1933, roughly seven to eight million people died of famine and its related consequences, with four million of those deaths occurring in Ukraine, which had once been one of Europe's richest grain-producing regions. Another million died outside Ukraine, particularly in northern Kuban. This eradication resulted from a combination of economic, political, and ethnic factors, including the Bolsheviks' resolve to rapidly modernize the nation and destroy the power of the kulaks — the affluent peasant leadership.

In November 1927, Stalin ordered an attack on collective farmers and collective farms that continued to resist changes. Beginning in 1928, Stalin and his supporters launched a planned operation to force industrialization upon the Soviet Union and eliminate all economic backwardness. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Ukrainians continued to practice their traditional, independent, individualistic farming method of private land ownership. The arrival of the new Russian communal and collectivist spirit was entirely foreign to them, and they fiercely defied the Moscow leadership and its drive to industrialize the Soviet Union. One way Ukrainian farmers demonstrated their opposition to collectivization was by slaughtering their livestock. In time, such acts of defiance were made punishable by death.

The Soviet state seized control of the grain harvest and attacked the kulaks in order to deliberately remove this upper class of the peasantry from the countryside. This assault obstructed grain deliveries and forcefully withheld food from the peasants. All seed grain was to be turned over to the authorities. Widespread grain shortages resulted in severe hunger and desperation. This largest wheat-growing area, now bereft of food supplies, began slaughtering animals — no longer for political reasons as before, but simply to stay alive.

On February 19, 1933, Stalin went even further by stipulating that those who did not work deserved to starve. The borders between Russia and Ukraine were sealed just as thousands of Ukrainians were desperately searching for food. Stalin claimed they "fled across the entire European regions of the U.S.S.R. and are demoralizing our collective farms with their complaints and whimpering" (Hollander, 2008: 44). Ukrainian peasants were forbidden from entering cities where some food was still available. The Soviet Union also rejected offers from other countries to provide food to Ukraine, and there was a complete disregard for human suffering. Stalin denied that a widespread famine existed at all. In fact, the Soviet government began to blame the Ukrainians themselves for the famine.

This sequence of events can clearly be seen as genocide — Stalin's government wishing to eliminate an entire class of people. The Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and other "punished peoples" of this era were designated for elimination, whether physical or as identifiable ethnic groups (ibid: 46). The kulaks were denounced as "bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires" (Weitz, 2003: 62). The socialist offensive Stalin instituted in late 1928 represented the application of violence against all manner of opponents. The Great Terror's enormous, state-enforced transformation of agriculture into industrialization reinforced what the Bolsheviks had been implementing since the civil war. By creating havoc and confusion, the nation state grew ever more powerful, at the cost of millions of lives.

Overall, Stalin's actions exemplified some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, if not of all human history — achieved through the Soviet Union's systematic repression, oppression, and eradication. To reach the goal of annihilation, the state categorized all citizens by class, nationality, and political affiliation, with the aim of destroying those who did not conform to its overall plan. Hryshko (1983) encapsulates the human cost through a statistical comparison: when comparing the 32,680,700 persons living in Ukraine in 1932 with the 30,960,200 recorded in 1939 — and accounting for the normal 2.36% annual population increase — Ukraine had lost 7,465,000 persons over seven years. According to Hryshko (1983), approximately 4,821,600 people, or close to 19% of the Ukrainian population, died in the years 1932 to 1933 alone.

The Darfur Crisis: Origins and Escalation

Some people may not consider this a true "genocide," but what is happening in Darfur cannot be characterized as anything other than the annihilation of a people. What is worse, it did not happen decades ago — it is happening now. Approximately the same size as the state of Texas, the Darfur region of Sudan comprises racially mixed tribes of settled peasants who identify as Muslim African communities, alongside nomadic Arab herders. In February 2003, driven by extreme poverty and political neglect, two Darfurian rebel groups launched an uprising against the Khartoum government. The government enlisted a militia of Arab nomadic tribes from the region against the civilian population of Darfur and responded with a scorched-earth campaign. Since then, the Sudanese government in Khartoum, along with the government-supported Janjaweed militia, has employed rape, forced displacement, organized starvation, threats against aid workers, and mass murder. Violence, disease, and displacement continue to kill thousands of innocent Darfurians every month.

As the genocide continues, African farmers and other civilians in Darfur are being methodically displaced and slaughtered by the Janjaweed, a government-backed militia recruited from local Arab tribes. According to the Darfur Scores Organization, the genocide in Darfur is believed to have claimed 400,000 lives and displaced over 2,500,000 people. More than one hundred individuals continue to die every day — approximately 5,000 every month. The inaction and disregard of the government has left people throughout Sudan poor and powerless, while conflict has spread nationwide.

According to Straus (2005), the crisis in western Sudan has developed from several separate but intersecting conflicts. The first is a civil war between the Islamist, Khartoum-based national government and two rebel groups: the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement in Darfur. The rebels are aggrieved over Darfur's political and economic marginalization by Khartoum, which intensified from February 2003 onward. The government did not launch a major counteroffensive until three months later, following a devastating rebel attack on a military airfield that destroyed several aircraft and resulted in the capture of an air force general. Khartoum armed its irregular militia forces and directed them to eradicate the rebellion. The militias carried out these orders through mass violence against civilians.

The second dimension of the Darfur crisis, explains Straus (2005), is its connection to the decades-old civil war in southern Sudan between the northern, Arab-dominated government and Christian and animist black southerners. This conflict has afflicted Sudan in one form or another since the country gained its independence from the United Kingdom in 1956, with two million lives lost since 1983 alone. More recently, the government and the main southern rebel movement attempted peace negotiations mediated by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development. In June 2004, following numerous rounds of talks, the two sides appeared close to a final agreement, raising global hopes that Sudan's long-running war might finally end. Darfur, however, was never represented in these discussions, and the Darfur rebels chose to strike partly to avoid being excluded from any new political settlement.

The third dimension consists of deeply local origins. Darfur's six million people comprise several dozen different tribes, broadly divided between those who claim black "African" descent and primarily practice sedentary agriculture, and those who claim "Arab" descent and are mostly seminomadic livestock herders. As in many ethnic confrontations, the division between these two groups is not always clear-cut. Many farmers also raise animals, and the distinction between "African" and "Arab" designations is often blurred. All Sudanese are technically African; Darfurians are mostly Muslim; and generations of intermarriage have obscured the physical distinctions that supposedly separate "Arabs" from black "Africans." Historically, land disputes during dry seasons between farmers and herders were resolved peacefully. However, a severe drought and the encroaching desert over the past two decades have made water and arable land increasingly scarce. From the 1980s onward, Khartoum governments inflamed the situation by supporting and arming Arab tribes, partly to prevent southern rebels from gaining a foothold in the region. This led to a series of clashes in the late 1980s and 1990s in which Arab militias burned African villages and killed thousands. Africans responded by forming self-defense groups whose members eventually became the first Darfur insurgents to emerge in 2003.

The full-scale genocide began in mid-2003 as the Arabs were once again armed and organized into a militia calling itself the Janjaweed — meaning "evil men on horseback" — to inspire fear. The militia, which included convicted felons, quickly carried out Sudan's President Omar's directive to "eliminate the rebellion" (Lippman, 2007: 201). A major campaign of violence erupted, which especially targeted black African civilians — most notably those from the same tribes as the core rebel recruits. Khartoum continually denied direct involvement in attacks against civilians, and both the Arab League and the African Union downplayed the gross violations of human rights. In October 2004, a World Health Organization estimate concluded that 70,000 displaced persons had died in the previous six months from malnutrition and disease directly attributable to displacement — a figure that did not include those dying from violent causes.

Conclusion: The World's Continuing Failure to Stop Genocide

Since the eruption of the Darfur conflict, there have been numerous peacekeeping interventions and peace treaties that have been made and broken. The Darfur genocide has lasted more than seven years, with over 400,000 people killed, three million displaced, and approximately 4.5 million people in urgent need of aid due to the conflict. Generations of children are growing up in refugee camps without access to education or social stability, and are continually subjected to violence and homelessness. Attacks on those attempting to provide humanitarian aid have continued as well. When thirteen humanitarian organizations were expelled from Darfur at the beginning of 2010, it became extremely difficult to obtain accurate information about conditions on the ground.

Darfur advocates across the United States have focused on two initiatives in hopes that peace and reconciliation will come to the people of Darfur and Sudan: a review of the Obama Administration's Darfur policy and the April 2010 elections in Sudan. Although the vote was already tainted by allegations of fraud and widespread irregularities, the hope was that Sudan's first competitive election in 24 years would maintain a semblance of stability as the country moved toward a 2011 referendum that could split the Christian and traditionalist south from the Muslim north. Yet the election was unlikely to end the Darfur conflict, where the United Nations reported that 300,000 people had been killed since 2003 in a conflict that Washington had labeled genocide. The Khartoum government claimed only 10,000 had died. As the evidence makes clear, the world does not appear to be any closer to ending genocide in the early twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth.