GENOCIDE

One of the few things undisputed about the term genocide is its origin. It was introduced and discussed at some length in a 1944 book, Axis Occupation of Europe, by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish jurist writing in the United States. Lemkin defined genocide broadly in terms of

the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group…. Genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings…. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of a national group, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves…. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.

The attacks on nationhood could be political, social, cultural, economic, biological, religious, moral, or physical. Physical attacks were further subdivided into racial discrimination in feeding, endangering of health, and mass killings. Although he never used the term "cultural genocide," Lemkin seems to have included the cultural destruction of a people within the scope of genocide.

The term was referred to several times during the 1945–1946 Trial of the Major War Criminals at Nuremberg. The indictment, for example, alleged that the defendants "conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others." Since genocide was not at that point recognized as separate crime under international law, at Nuremberg these allegations were included among the "war crimes." Shortly thereafter, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring genocide to be a crime under international law. This resolution both broadened Lemkin's concept of genocide, by adding "political and other groups" to the list of potential victims, and narrowed it, by giving only passing attention to the cultural aspect of Lemkin's concept.

By 1948, when the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted, both the cultural and the political components of the term were ignored, and genocide was defined as:

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.

An important distinguishing feature of the new crime of genocide was that it was not necessarily linked to an overt war, unlike the related concepts of "crimes against humanity" and "war crimes" used at Nuremberg. The same definition of genocide was used, unchanged, in the statutes for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established in 1993 and 1994, respectively, and in those for the International Criminal Court created in 1998.

Subsequent scholars have varied the definition, particularly to overcome perceived short-comings in the concept of genocide under international criminal law. For example, Irving Lewis Horowitz defined genocide as "a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus" (1997). Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn defined the term as "a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator" (1990). And Helen Fein defined it as the "sustained purposeful action by the perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, [the latter] through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim" (1990).

Related terms sometimes associated with or distinguished from genocide include politicide, where the victims are defined primarily in political terms; democide, encompassing genocide, politicide, massacres, extrajudicial executions, and other forms of mass murder; and ethnocide, the destruction of the culture of a population, particularly an indigenous population.

Data and Estimation Issues

Even with agreement on definition, quantifying a genocide is difficult. Limits on geographical scope and time period must be set. But how can the destruction of a people's culture, language, or socioeconomic accomplishments be measured? By default, the focus is usually on the number of deaths, occasionally supplemented with the number of forced migrants or with the monetary value of confiscated property and personal injuries.

Even considering deaths alone, estimates can rarely be made with any degree of precision. For example, there is the question of which deaths to count: (1) only those deaths directly attributable to genocidal killing operations (i.e., mass executions and the like), (2) such direct deaths plus those attributable to malnutrition and ill-health associated with populations confined or dislocated due to other genocidal operations, or (3) any elevated mortality in a target population during a defined period. Genocide mortality, as with mortality generally, may be measured directly as an estimated number of deaths over a period of time or indirectly as the difference in population size before and after, adjusted for fertility, non-genocidal mortality, and net migration. The two approaches are often used together. In countries with reasonably well-developed statistical systems, data from population censuses or population registration systems are often available for the initial population. Indeed, in some of these countries, the perpetrators have used such information to identify and target genocidal victims or as a baseline against which to assess the outcome of a genocide.

Other approaches to estimating genocide mortality do not depend on a preexisting statistical infrastructure. The bureaucratic organization of many large genocides may offer various direct or proxy indicators of scale. Mortality counts can also be derived from mass graves or from retrospective surveys. This last approach, like any survey-based retrospective reporting of deaths, is often subject to substantial response errors. In the 1990s dual and multiple system estimation techniques began to be used to control for these response errors so as to obtain improved estimates of genocide mortality from such retrospective reporting.

The interpretation and analysis of mortality estimates also pose challenges. Estimates presented simply as the number of persons killed, while an excellent indicator of the scale of genocidal operations, often obscure the impact of genocide on the victim population. A better measure of this impact is the proportion of the population killed. For example, in Cambodia from the 1975 to 1979, the Pol Pot regime is estimated to have killed over 1.3 million Khmers (the majority group) and less than 350,000 persons belonging to various ethnic minorities. However, while the Khmer victims made up an estimated 11 percent of the 1975 Khmer population, the minorities taken as a group lost 44 percent of their 1975 population.

An Inventory of Selected Modern Genocides and Genocide-like Events

Table 1, adapted primarily from information in the sources cited in the bibliography, is a tentative and incomplete listing of major genocides in modern times. It indicates the widespread incidence of genocide and its complex and varied character. Many of the assessments and estimates given are disputable: It is the nature of the field that no such inventory would be universally accepted. The table's omissions may be its greatest shortcoming. For example, no mention is made of the African slave trade or the suppression of minorities in the USSR and China. Information about these and many other genocides and similar human rights tragedies can be found in the works cited in the bibliography.

Population Issues

From the perspective of population studies, three aspects of modern genocides are particularly relevant. First, the crime of genocide under international law is defined largely in demographic terms. Three of the five elements of the crime–killings, coercive birth prevention, and the forcible transfer of children–are demographic in nature. On the other hand, forced migration, a frequent precursor to the mass killings of genocide and a major source of "conditions of life calculated to bring about … physical destruction" of a group, is not included in the legal definition. Second, the measurement of genocide mortality and survivorship will continue to present major challenges. As with any human rights tragedy, the emotional and political after-effects make objective assessment difficult for both scholars and advocates. In these circumstances, estimates of losses gain credibility by the qualifications that accompany them rather than by the number of significant digits in which they are expressed. Third, from a strictly long-term demographic viewpoint, genocide and related

TABLE 1

state efforts directed toward the destruction of specific populations often fail. For example, those who identify themselves as Armenian, Jewish, or Native American are more numerous or nearly as numerous now than most creditable estimates of their size when genocidal or related activities began. This is not to minimize the terrible short-run impact of genocides in the lives lost, pain to individuals, families, and societies, and the damage to culture. Rather it is a simple testament to the transitory impact of a period of even greatly elevated mortality in the face of the recuperative powers of human populations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alvarez, Alex. 2001. Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Andreopoulos, George J., ed. 1994. Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ball, Patrick, Wendy Betts, Fritz Scheuren, Jan Dudukovich, and Jana Asher. 2002. Killings and Refugee Flow in Kosovo, March–June 1999: A Report to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Washington, D.C.: American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Bar Association Central and Eastern European Law Initiative.

Chalk, Frank, and Kurt Jonassohn. 1990. The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Fein, Helen. 1990. "Genocide: A Sociological Perspective." Current Sociology 38 (1): 1–126.

——, ed. 1992. Genocide Watch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Horowitz, Irving Lewis. 1997. Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power, 4th edition. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Jonassohn, Kurt, and Karin Solveig Björnson. 1998. Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Kuper, Leo. 1982. Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lemkin, Raphael. 1944. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment.

United Nations General Assembly. 1946. Resoultion 96 (I), 11 December 1946. Reprinted in Kuper, 1982.

United Nations. 1948. "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." Paris, 9 December 1948. Reprinted in Andreopoulous, 1994 and in Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990.

United States Office of Chief Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. 1946. "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume I." Chapter III, International Military Tribunal Indictment No.1, Count 3–War Crimes. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.