We must reinsert our thinking about eliminationist and exterminationist politics into an understanding of international politics. Eliminationist politics is part of a world system of countries that, by acting or not acting, affect one another economically, politically, socially, and culturally, and over life and death. The formal position and claim that countries do not intervene in other countries’ affairs has governed the international state system for generations and is enshrined as binding international law in the UN Charter. Nevertheless, (1) countries’ political intervention, singly and in concert, into other countries’ affairs has actually been normal, and (2) countries, by varied means, regularly signal other countries about possible interventions.
States have always tried to influence the character of other states, societies, and peoples. Conquest and colonization have been staples of human civilization, including during our age. Countries successfully repulsing aggressors have continued beyond their own borders until the attacking countries sue for peace, often relinquishing territory, or are conquered, the offending regimes replaced, or critical features of state or society are altered. A central goal of international institutions and alliances and of individual countries’ foreign policies has been to support and create abroad favorable political regimes and economic systems, and to undermine or prevent unfavorable regimes. During the cold war, much of the world was divided into two camps led by the two superpowers, with each side seeking to sustain its members’ political and economic systems, undermine those of the opposing camp, and influence nonaligned countries’ domestic politics and economics to make them friendlier. Today many countries interfere in other countries’ domestic politics by promoting democracy and free markets, among many more specific features of state and society. Such attempts employ the full range of political means available, from implementing military intervention or its threat; to imposing economic sanctions or their threat; to setting down political, economic, and social conditions and human rights standards countries must meet in order to make treaties, join international federations, participate in international organizations and commercial relations; to diplomatic initiatives; to public praise or denunciation. Regardless of whether such acts accord with international law and treaties, states have always tried to shape other countries’ domestic politics and practices, and they have often succeeded.
The notion that states must not intervene in other countries’ domestic affairs and that sovereignty is inviolable is, in practice, ignored all the time. Intervention today is typically done in the name of freedom and other higher, universal values, and the rule of law, though this is often cynical cover for motives of political or economic power or advantage. Either way, intervention has been and is a common practice, and noble principles are put forward and often accepted as legitimizing justifications.
States have been able to influence other countries’ leaders who contemplate and then begin to carry out eliminationist assaults. Yet, in contrast to all the other ways that states have claimed to be legitimately influencing the domestic practices of other states, societies, and peoples, political leaders have rarely defended the innocent abroad by seriously trying to forestall or stop mass murder, let alone mass elimination.
The Genocide Convention
Until after the Holocaust, mass murder was not even broadly perceived as a problem, much less one that must be addressed politically, including in international law and treaties. The various Geneva conventions (the first one signed in 1864) and other conventions for rights of prisoners of war long predated international conventions on the rights of citizens. This was not an accident. Soldiers needed protection because they fought to uphold states and their governments. But states saw no reason to protect the rights of noncombatants during war, or of ordinary people in general, not to be wantonly murdered because the states’ own prerogatives to act as they wished would thereby be compromised. Political leaders wanted impunity to slaughter or to violently repress their own people as necessary, and to slaughter, expel, coerce, even enslave other peoples abroad. A world dominated by imperialist powers is almost guaranteed not to create laws, institutions, or norms for the prevention of eliminationist, including exterminationist, politics and practices, because imperialism depends upon the violent domination of conquered peoples and has a strong, almost ineluctable tendency to become eliminationist in intent and practice for many reasons, not least because of subjugated and colonized people’s inevitable and ongoing resistance. This blinkered view of the necessity to safeguard certain small classes of people (such as prisoners of war) but not humankind’s overwhelming majority is not at all surprising in a predemocratic era that denied the rights of all peoples to be self-governing. Until the second half of the twentieth century, few rulers saw their people as citizens with rights. Instead they treated them as subjects to be subordinated to the rulers’ economic and political interests. The great powers practiced imperialism. So there was no powerful constituency for prohibiting eliminationist politics or even its mass-murder variant. Only with the powerful impetus provided by the Germans’ mass murdering all over Europe, and especially the Holocaust’s existential and real horror, did statutes against mass murder enter international law. In December 1948, the UN General Assembly passed its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, consisting of nineteen articles, with the critical Article II stating:
In the present Convention, genocide means 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.
The government of any signatory country can bring a charge of genocide to the Security Council, which, if it first issues a finding that genocide is being committed, may then “take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III,” such as the “attempt to commit genocide,” and the like.1
In its bare bones, the genocide convention seems to (1) outlaw genocide and (2) call for intervention when it occurs. But its drafters crafted specific provisions to so eviscerate these two elements that the convention effectively does neither, and is meaningless as a working body of law and as a basis for action against genocide. This should not have been surprising, if for no other reason than that one of the all-time most egregiously mass-murdering regimes, the Soviet Union, had veto power over the convention’s content.
Most severe and ridiculous are the definitional problems. The convention does not cover groups slaughtered for political reasons or as economic targets. It prohibits the mass murder of only “national, ethnical, racial or religious” groups. The Soviet Union insisted upon this exclusion because, even as it was negotiating the convention’s terms, its gulag was still fully operational. The consequence of this definitional omission has been even more catastrophic than it first appears. It allows any mass-murdering regime to claim it is engaged in a political struggle. The UN members wanting cover for their inaction can similarly pretend that mass murder’s victims are not national, ethnic, religious, or racial groups but political ones.
Even more problematic is the genocide convention’s failure to define genocide, let alone include objective criteria (such as a threshold number of people killed) that allow the international community to readily identify genocide while it is happening. This permits the world’s countries to pretend that genocide is not being perpetrated when by any reasonable definition it is. In genocide after genocide, the countries that should have invoked the genocide convention circumvented compliance with its provis
ions by refusing to utter the word “genocide.” The United States did this in Rwanda, explicitly refusing, in full awareness of the actual events, to call the Hutu’s all-out slaughter of the Tutsi genocide. The United Nations has yet to declare the Sudanese regime’s ongoing genocide in Darfur “genocide.” Only long after any reasonable threshold of genocide had been crossed did the American government, in September 2004, finally use the word “genocide”—and yet the Americans nevertheless failed to urge forceful, effective intervention, and even worked to ensure that the United Nations would not adopt language suggesting that intervention is necessary and obligatory.2
As much as all this robs the genocide convention of meaning and force, there is an even more crippling aspect of the definition of the phenomenon it purports to outlaw. The convention is clearly meant and has been taken to mean only enormous mass slaughters of hundreds of thousands, or millions of people. So a regime may slaughter twenty thousand to forty thousand people—as Hafez al-Assad’s Baathist regime did in Syria—without the principal convention that purports to combat the enormous world problem of mass murder outlawing it. Indeed, the Syrian regime essentially had international immunity for leveling a good part of Hama and wantonly slaughtering its inhabitants. Or a regime that, over decades, murders a few hundred thousand people—as Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime did in Iraq—is not considered to violate this convention or trigger its provisions. Most mass murders do not, according to the convention’s definition of genocide, qualify for international intervention. The de facto consequence of the convention, the United Nations’ constitution and inaction, and international law has been to sanction a political leadership murdering five thousand or even fifty thousand of its country’s people (particularly if done not too ostentatiously). The international community or some of its members may say that such political leaders are very, very bad people and eventually seek to put some of them on trial. But military intervention to stop the mass murdering would be without a legal foundation and therefore criminal.
Another grave problem plaguing the genocide convention is its failure to treat genocide—more properly mass murder—as part of a continuum of eliminationist politics. Hence, “ethnic cleansing”—expelling huge populations while murdering “only” a small percentage totaling many thousands—does not fall under the genocide convention. Intervention is not triggered. NATO’s interventions in the former Yugoslavia, first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo, came much too late, after the perpetrators had victimized millions. When NATO finally did act, owing to mounting domestic pressure in Western countries and the desire to make sure the situation did not spin utterly out of control, NATO was without UN authorization and without the genocide convention’s having been invoked. Indeed, international legal experts deemed NATO’s belated intervention illegal because it lacked a basis in international law for outsiders to stop the Serbs from brutalizing, torturing, and expelling Bosnians and Kosovars from their homes and country, and murdering them. If you, as a political leader, want to attack people for whatever reason (they oppose you, you consider them evil, you want to transform the country), then the international community, represented by the United Nations and its powerful countries, tells you that as long as you drive most of them from their homes, even if you kill thousands, for legal and political reasons you will not lawfully face international intervention.
As if all this is not debilitating enough for establishing an intervention regime that might work against mass murder and eliminations, the convention’s Article II defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (my emphasis). The convention’s crafters included the word “intent” as an artful and catastrophic dodge of the problem. A regime slaughtering hundreds of thousands can allege that it is an anti-insurgency campaign’s collateral damage, or famine’s unfortunate consequence, even if the regime willfully causes or fails to alleviate the famine. It can maintain it has never intended to destroy one of the designated kinds of groups. According to the convention, such acts are not genocide. (As I was composing this section, the United Nations issued its disgraceful report that the Sudanese government’s colossal eliminationist and murderous assault in Darfur is not genocide and therefore does not qualify, under the genocide convention, for intervention.) A regime fighting an insurgency that withholds food from a famine-ridden region can claim that the insurgency itself is preventing the food delivery and thus avoid international intervention because no intent to kill through starvation can be proven. Without a mass-murdering regime’s secret records, it is almost always impossible to meet a legal threshold of proving intent. This makes it all but impossible for the United Nations to establish a legal finding of genocide while mass murder is under way, while acting against the murderers and saving lives is possible.
The genocide convention’s second colossal problem complements its foundational definitional problem, to produce a political and legal climate of neglect, inaction, and all but total cynicism: It contains no effective enforcement mechanism. The convention must be invoked by the very states that typically have no desire to intervene to stop mass murders, and by some that want the killing to proceed. It contains no trigger mechanism, such as a threshold number of slaughtered people. It relies on no authoritative body, aside from the self-interested noninterveners, such as the Soviets for their own mass murders and those of other communist regimes, the Americans for the Indonesians’ slaughter of communists (which the Americans green-lighted), the British in Kenya, the French in Rwanda, the Chinese in Tibet, the Russians in Chechnya. Even if the convention were deemed applicable to a given onslaught, it contains nothing but hortatory words to produce intervention: The member states may take action that they “consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.” Acting upon the genocide convention’s provision to actually do something effective is essentially at will.
The genocide convention has utterly failed to serve as a practical impediment to regimes slaughtering or expelling their peoples. In its sixty years, it has never been triggered or used for intervention, despite the many tens of millions of people that mass murderers (and the practitioners of eliminationism) have victimized around the world. It was not invoked for the Soviets’ gulag, the communists’ gargantuan slaughters in China, the Indonesians’ slaughter of communists, the Pakistanis’ annihilationist and eliminationist onslaught against the Bangladeshis, not for the Khmer Rouge’s annihilation of Cambodians, for the mass murders in Burundi and in Rwanda, the Ethiopians’ killing of the people of the north, the rightists’ mass murdering in Latin America, including the Guatemalans’ against the Maya, not for the mass slaughters and expulsions in the former Yugoslavia, Saddam’s various mass murders in Iraq, the eliminationist and genocidal onslaught by Political Islamists in Sudan first against the country’s southern non-Muslims, and then against the peoples of Darfur. For establishing law adequate to what it purportedly wants to outlaw, and for mobilizing the world against exterminationist and eliminationist politics, the genocide convention might as well be in invisible ink.
Its immense failure notwithstanding, the genocide convention was immensely important. It took the ad hoc law made at the Nuremberg Trials of the German leadership and turned it into general international law and formal norms. It is the only human rights convention that empowers UN members to intervene militarily in other countries to stop eliminationist assaults. It bolstered the foundation for the development of the international law of retributive justice, by authorizing an “international penal tribunal” to try those charged with genocide, and mandated (at least on paper) that perpetrators be tried.3 These provisions have led to the ad hoc criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone, and recently the permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague—an important development examined in Chapter 11. The genocide convention has also critically contributed, at least rhetorically and vaguely normatively, to creating a place for mass murder’s proscription in
the world’s politics, both internationally and sometimes domestically, a break with thousands of years of practice.
The International Political Environment’s Crucial Context
With this in mind, we see immediately that our age has had various international political environments regarding mass murder. Understanding them depends upon delineating and analyzing, albeit briefly, the international political environments’ four relevant dimensions. The first is legal: Is mass murder legally proscribed? The second is rhetorical: Is mass murder publicly discussed and brought to the attention of the world community? Is it loudly condemned, especially in the media and by governments? The third is action: Are outside actors, states and international organizations, permissive toward mass murdering? Or do they intervene to stop it? The fourth dimension, related to and independent of the third, is hortatory: Do outside actors, by their public or behind-the-scenes stances, actually encourage certain leaders to commit mass murder, or support them when they do?
There has been substantial variation on each dimension and in the overall international political environments these dimensions—legal, rhetorical, political action, and political exhortation—together compose. Regarding mass murder, four basic international political environments have characterized our time.
Until after World War II, with the Nuremberg Trials and Tokyo Trials, and then the passing of the genocide convention in 1948, the international environment was all but wholly permissive of mass murder. No law proscribed it. Mass murder barely registered on the radar screens of governments, media, and public. Hardly a word was uttered against it. Little if any rhetorical pressure was brought against those implementing eliminationist policies. This was partly due to primitive technological and news-gathering capabilities, and the virtual absence of truly independent media, which left events in many parts of the world unknown in other parts. But even when knowledge came to those who might have raised a cry, they said little, suggesting that better information-gathering capacities would not have changed things. A partial exception was the condemnation of the mass murders that the two major international aggressors, Germany and Japan, committed. The Japanese Rape of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1937 did cause an enormous international outcry, partly because of the West’s racism against the Japanese but also because of the butchery’s sheer brutality, licentiousness, and shamelessness done in plain view of Western diplomats and newsmen. The Germans’ mass murdering of Jews and others initially gained little notice around the world. The Germans’ crimes and the upcoming reckoning was little discussed in the Allies’ propaganda or in American, British, and other governmental organs’ public pronouncements. After the war, though, it became a central theme of international discussion. During this period, the international environment, though nearly totally permissive toward mass murderers, generally did not actively encourage it. Murderous regimes were left to do as they pleased, though others did not spur them onward. The principal exceptions were the Germans, urging their satellites and collaborators to join the slaughter of Jews and others, and the Catholic Church, which around Europe supported the Jews’ eliminationist persecution (though only certain portions of the Church in some countries actively supported the mass murder itself).4
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