Film and Genocide

Introduction

Introduction Defining Genocide: “Reckoning with Evil” The term genocide was coined by Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1933 after years of exhaustive study of mass killings in the ancient and medieval contexts in Europe and the Americas. At a law conference in Madrid, Lemkin attempted to frame his concept of genocide in relation to Hitler’s ascent in Germany and the Armenian case of atrocities. Lemkin argued that if it happened once in Armenia, it could happen again in modern Europe.1 While he was unsuccessful at convincing other jurists that an international law was needed to ensure that heads of state could not be protected by their own laws when they authorized mass killings, the struggle for a definition of genocide began and is still waged today. In his groundbreaking 1981 book, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Leo Kuper keeps alive Lemkin’s struggle to define genocide broadly. He suggests that we should understand the presence of genocide in all periods of history and take into account the variety and complexity of factors that have prompted such atrocities, in spite of its relatively modern, somewhat narrow, and politically contentious definition at the Genocide Convention of 1948: The strength of political factors and the inextricable interweaving of political considerations in so many genocides against racial, ethnic and religious groups, demonstrate the impossibility of separating the racial, ethnic and religious from the political, as seemingly required by the Genocide Convention with its exclusion of political groups from its scope. Can one really interpret the exterminating massacres of Hutu in Burundi in purely ethnic, non-political terms, thereby placing it within the terms of the Genocide Convention; or for that matter, can one interpret it in purely political non-ethnic terms, falling outside the purview of the Convention? The absurdity of this artificial separation between the political and other factors was, of course, foreseen by some of the representatives in the debates on the framing of the Convention.2 3 In keeping with Kuper’s concerns about the efficacy of the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide, as recently as January 2009, in an Argentine editorial, Daniel Feierstein called for a reconceptualization of the Genocide Convention. In “Genocide, a Wrongly Typified Crime” (“Genocidio, delito mal tipificado”), Feierstein suggests that the legal path taken by the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide as a way of understanding and prosecuting international instances of annihilation has been confused and inefficient. For example, for many judges and lawyers, almost no crime qualifies as genocide but many situations qualify as crimes against humanity. Alternately, he suggests that by the time the international community determines whether a situation constitutes a genocide, many deaths have occurred. He argues that we should return to Lemkin’s original idea about genocide as “the systematic annihilation whose objective is to destroy the national identity of the oppressed through the use of terror.”3 Lemkin’s early efforts to have genocide taken seriously were full of loneliness and constant struggle. Before arriving to the United States to teach international law at Duke University in 1941, Lemkin lived the life of a refugee. After the German invasion of Poland, he tried to convince his family to depart with him. Lemkin’s arsenal of knowledge about history and what Hitler was capable of was not enough to accomplish the difficult task: “I read in the eyes of all of them one plea: do not talk of our leaving this warm home, our beds, our stores of food, the security of our customs. We will have to suffer, but we will survive somehow. . . . What did I have to offer them? A nomadic life, a refugee’s lot, poverty. So the question resolved itself: I would continue as soon as possible to Lithuania—alone. . . . I felt I would never see them again. It was like going to their funerals while they were still alive. The best of me was dying with the full cruelty of consciousness.”4 Today, the question of how to recognize and convince others of the dangers of genocide before they occur has become a central tenant among scholars, filmmakers, and activist groups. Unfortunately, as Samantha Power suggests in “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, despite explicit coverage in the media, even today American politicians and the public are “extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil.”5 Powers suggests that...