Historicizing Genocide

First there were the events: mass, forced movements of targeted peoples, often followed by deliberate, state-ordered massacres of civilians. Later came the word — genocide — that attempted to capture, however incompletely, this new and terrible phenomenon. In the course of the twentieth century genocide became part of the political landscape, a policy of choice by ambitious and ruthless governments. By the end of the century it had become a field of study and also a site of fierce political controversy — targeted both by governments wanting to deny their involvement in genocide, and by populations who held that only their tragic experience qualified fully as genocide. The Turkish government continues to this day to reject the view of most historians who have studied the mass deportations and killings of Armenians in 1915 that they constitute a genocide avant la lettre. Ukrainians insist that the death of some five million or more of their countrymen during the Stalinist collectivization was not simply the consequence of ill-conceived policy but a deliberate attempt to eliminate Ukrainians as a nation. While the United Nations definition — 'acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group' — serves to restrict the category to groups defined culturally, it does not limit genocide to killings but extends it to a vague notion of harm. Politicians and some scholars have expanded the number of episodes that should be included as the ultimate crime against humanity. As with terms like 'fascism' and 'racism', the very revulsion produced by the phenomenon seems to encourage elastic deployment.

Because the word is so contested and used by different authors in so many different ways, it is necessary in any discussion of genocide to indicate precisely how one means to use the term.¹ I begin with the United Nations definition and accept the notion that this particular form of violence is directed against culturally defined groups, but I do not accept that any kind of harm should be included. In my own definition mass killing is central to what I would label 'genocide'. However, mass murder in and of itself is not genocide. Although legal definitions do not capture the full range of historical examples, there is utility in restricting the term 'genocide' to what might more accurately be referred to as 'ethnocide', that is the deliberate attempt to eliminate a designated group defined by the cultural characteristics — language, imagined biological origins, religion — that have historically bound them together as a community. While other forms of mass killing — war, massacres, the Great Purges — involve death on a horrendous scale, the motivations and intentions of the perpetrators are different enough from ethnocides that they require distinct explanations. Genocide is not the murder of people but the murder of a people. In his first publication using the term he had coined, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin explained in 1944, 'The practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders [the Nazis] is called by the author 'genocide', a term deriving from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (by way of analogy, see homicide, fratricide)'.² As difficult as it is to discern, intentionality is key as the starting point, and death is the result of the intention to eliminate. Genocide, thus, is 'ethnically inspired violence', but should be distinguished from ethnic cleansing, which may entail killing but more immediately involves displacement and deportation, the physical moving of a distinct population.³ Ethnic cleansing, whether of the American Indians or Australian aborigines, Palestinians or Kurds, is accompanied by loss of life, and killing is often an instrument to force people to move. The physical removal of people because you want the land but not the people on the land is closely related to genocide but does not require mass murder.

The genocidal elimination need not be total, but it should devastate a 'people', politically and perhaps culturally. The intention is to destroy the group's capacity to maintain...