Genocide as an experience of human behavior throughout history is old, but our concern and understanding about it are relatively new. Humans have probably been committing genocide since the beginning of our species. Killing ‘en masse’ and committing crimes against other human groups is not new to human history. Human groups have considered – and unfortunately still consider – genocide as a viable political course of action, contemplating the intentional destruction of other groups -- national, ethnical, racial or religious, in whole or in part – in such a way as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. However, it is only in recent years that we have come to acknowledge genocide more systematically, trying to articulate understandings that were simply unavailable to our ancestors. There was a long delay in recognizing genocide as a crime despite its recurrence throughout human history. As a human race, we did not even have a name to describe genocidal violence before the Second World War when Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide.”Until then, it was a “crime without a name” in the words of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The systematic mass murder of millions of people in the Holocaust, however, forced us to recognize that humans were killing other humans in systematic ways, with the intent to destroy groups in whole or in part, with terrifying results. The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 emerged as the legal response, stipulating “a detailed and quite technical definition as a crime against the law of nations” which then engendered debates among scholars for decades to follow.
Yet ‘willful neglect’ prevailed in spite of numerous genocides in the latter half of the 20th century; the world’s leaders were mindful of what was unfolding and yet stood by and negligently let the crimes transpire. This indifference was partly justified by political calculations that made sense to the perpetrators and was tolerated by a desire to avoid intervention in violent strife by leaders of other countries who were desensitized by ideology to the violence inflicted on the mass of victims and their
communities, the ideological numbing of the Cold War. The very Genocide Convention which was adopted on 9 December 1948, a day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, was also an expression of this ‘willful neglect.’ The text of the Convention deliberately left an ambiguous space for interpretation as it omitted “politicide” – destruction of groups based on imputed political affiliation – from the terms of the Convention. The debate and disagreement over ambiguities and
uncertainties embedded in the Genocide Convention, despite the original intent of the drafters, endure to this day. Among the unresolved issues are the definition of genocide and what institutions have responsibility for its prevention, as well as legal standards on the meaning of intent to destroy the enumerated groups in whole or in part. Does the intent need to be “specific” as advocated by European civil lawyers, making prosecution possible after genocide is over, but prevention almost impossible while a genocide is underway? Or is simply “knowing” of the intent sufficient, as the common law tradition and Lemkin meant?
Genocide is a highly political act and genocide prevention cannot be but a political response. While genocidal processes assume necessarily fluid and conditional circumstances before the occurrence of genocide, even the framing of group classification, especially into a politically dichotomous relationship, could precipitate a genocidal threat. Yet few would disagree that genocide cannot happen without mass murder of human groups and without the willful neglect of other states. Genocide prevention therefore requires that politically willed attention be paid to processes of human interaction at all the different levels – individual, group, and state – over time and space. What is emerging today is a confluence of burgeoning scholarship, systems of information management, doctrinal evolution, and institutional platforms that assist us in inviting shared understanding and looking at the phenomena differently and more comprehensively. The ensuing discussion will highlight the key developments in
those areas, illuminating a direction where the emerging trends are leading us