(Bloomberg) -- There are few more powerful words in international relations than genocide. But what exactly it means, when it should be invoked and what should happen when it is, is often unclear. It's an issue brought to the fore by recent remarks by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy calling Russia's invasion of his country a genocide, a statement later echoed by U.S. President Joe Biden. Former President Donald Trump, who in February praised Putin's escalation in Ukraine as “genius,” joined Biden in calling Russia's war in Ukraine a genocide.
1. What's the official definition of genocide?
In the United Nations Genocide Convention, written in 1948, it's defined both in terms of specific acts and on whether they are intended “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The listed acts are killing or inflicting serious mental or bodily harm on members of the group, subjecting them to conditions meant to bring about the group's physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures to prevent births or forcibly removing children. Victims of genocide are targeted not for individual reasons but for their membership in one of the four specified groups. The definition excludes persecution for political beliefs. Acts committed against a portion of the group can count if it represents a “substantial” share.
2. Where does the idea come from?
The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who fled his country after Hitler's 1939 invasion. It comes from the Greek word “genos,” or race, plus “-cide,” for killing. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, while working for the U.S. War Department, Lemkin introduced the word in an account of Nazi atrocities in Europe. While taking part in the U.S. preparations for the Nuremberg war crimes trials, he was able to get the word genocide included in the indictment against Nazi leadership.
3. How is it different from war crimes and crimes against humanity?
Unlike genocide, charges of war crimes are always linked to armed conflict. War crimes are violations of the rules of warfare as set out in various treaties. They include willful killing, torture, rape, using starvation as a weapon, shooting combatants who've surrendered, using banned weapons such as chemical and biological arms, and deliberately attacking civilians and non-military targets. Crimes against humanity needn't occur in wartime. They are defined as acts such as murder, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, rape, and apartheid when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. A report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe examining the war's first five weeks concluded that Russia's military committed war crimes by targeting civilians.
4. What are examples?
There's fairly widespread agreement among scholars that there were at least three instances of genocide in the last century:
- Armenia: During World War I, the Ottoman Turks committed a campaign of mass killing against their Armenian subjects, an accusation many modern-day Turks continue to deny.
- The Holocaust: During World War II, Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered six million Jews as well as five million others, including homosexuals and members of the Romani community.
- Rwanda: In 1994, extremists among the majority Hutu population killed more than 800,000 people, most of them members of the Tutsi community, though some were moderate Hutus.
Other atrocities that are considered genocide by some scholars and not others include:
- Holodomor: In the 1930s, a famine in Ukraine that was rooted in Soviet leader Josef Stalin's decision to collectivize agriculture killed millions of people.
- Cambodia: From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 1.7 million people died from starvation, torture, execution, forced labor and other forms of violence during the rule of the extremist Khmer Rouge.
- East Timor: During Indonesia's occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999, it's estimated that as much as a fifth of the country's population died.
- Myanmar: The Rohingya, Muslims in Myanmar who have lived uneasily among the country's Buddhist majority for decades, have been the subject of waves of violence led by security forces. Some 890,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh. So-called “clearance operations” by the military began in earnest in 2017, resulting in the deaths and rapes of thousands of Rohingya living in western Rakhine state.
5. What can be done about genocide?
A number of people have been convicted of the crime in special tribunals. The first conviction -- in 1998, of Jean-Paul Akayesu, who'd been mayor of Taba in Rwanda in 1994 -- was at a tribunal set up by the UN Security Council to prosecute those responsible for atrocities in that country. The tribunal eventually convicted another 46 people of genocide-related charges. A tribunal established to prosecute atrocities during the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s convicted two men of the crime: Radislav Krstic, a former Bosnian Serb general, in 2001 and former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, in 2007. A tribunal in Cambodia convicted Khmer Rouge leaders Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan of genocide in 2018. In 2002, the International Criminal Court was established in The Hague as a permanent, independent arena for holding accountable those who commit genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It relies on member countries to make arrests. The ICC has filed one genocide charge, against Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir, the former president of Sudan, for atrocities against the civilian population of the country's Darfur region. After al-Bashir was deposed in 2019 and jailed, transitional authorities said they favored surrendering him to the ICC, but that government was toppled in a military coup last October.
6. What's being said about Ukraine?
Zelenskiy labeled the Russian invasion an attempt at genocide shortly after it began, saying that Russian President Vladimir Putin intended to end Ukraine's existence as a nation. Ukraine filed a petition with the International Court of Justice in The Hague in mid-March, seeking action to prevent what it called Russia's plans for genocide. Zelenskiy renewed his calls for international action to prevent genocide after the bombing of a theater being used as a shelter in Mariupol and the discovery of the bodies of civilians who appeared to have been executed in areas abandoned by Russian troops near Kyiv. On April 12, Biden reversed his earlier position and described Russia's actions in the conflict as a “genocide,” though he later said lawyers would make the official determination. “I called it genocide because it has become clearer and clearer that Putin is just trying to wipe out the idea of being able to be Ukrainian,” Biden said. Russia has denied the charge, and Putin has justified the invasion in part on allegations -- unsupported by evidence -- that Ukraine is committing genocide against ethnic Russians in separatist parts of the country.
7. What's the significance of Biden's use of the term?
The president's words matter because diplomats, policymakers and investors are parsing the rhetoric of the leader of the world's biggest economy. By repeatedly making statements out of step with official U.S. policy, Biden endangers his credibility when speaking on behalf of the country. That's especially true among America's European allies, who are still very mindful of the way President Barack Obama drew a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria but failed to act after they were widely thought to have been used by Russian forces there. Evoking genocide -- a word that carries with it the idea that the international community has a “responsibility to protect” victims -- has also prompted questions about whether the U.S. should reevaluate Biden's determination not to get involved militarily. Administration officials on Wednesday insisted that Biden's words would not result in a policy change, and said military aid offered to Ukraine already exceeded assistance offered in some other officially-declared genocides.
The Reference Shelf
- The UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect has a page with definitions and background.
- A report by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on instances in which the U.S. government has and has not invoked the idea of genocide.
- A UN page on the genocide trials related to Rwanda.
- The International Court of Justice's page on how the tribunal works.
- An opinion column in the Washington Post arguing that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a war crime but not genocide.
©2022 Bloomberg L.P.
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