LAMB: What does “genocide” mean?
POWER: Very controversial, obviously, to this day, Raphael Lemkin notwithstanding. The definition settled upon in the UN treaty is “a systematic attempt to destroy in whole or in substantial part a national, ethnic or religious group as such.” So the idea here is that you don’t have to exterminate every last member of a group to commit genocide. If you just intend to wipe out the group as a meaningful entity on a territory, that’s enough. So it’s more expansive than our associations, which are with the Holocaust.
LAMB: When did genocide start in the world?
POWER: The practice? Again, Genesis, I think. It’s been with us forever. There’s a tendency of groups who feel themselves under siege, who feel like they’re risking losing something, either because a minority group is claiming their rights and — and usually, there’s some kind of economic dislocation and some kind of catalyst, in terms of, you know, a plane crash or the outbreak of war. Genocide often happens under the cover of war.
But where one group sets out to systematically destroy another group, either by murdering everybody, as Hitler did and as the Rwandan Hutus set out to do, or as in Bosnia, by ethnically deporting an entire populace, namely, the Bosnian Muslims, killing a huge number of them because the only way to get rid of a populace is to convince them that returning would mean a death sentence, and degrading the women by setting up rape camps and other things. There are lots of sort of forms that genocide has taken over time.
And I think one of the problems that Lemkin has encountered, or that his legacy has encountered, is that people do associate the word “genocide” with the Holocaust. And there’s a tendency to sort of say, you know, we can’t use the word until it’s 6 million, or until we have full proof that the perpetrator group is setting out to exterminate every last member. And it just would make Lemkin turn over in his grave because he was so adamant that the Holocaust not be the standard because, obviously, then preventive action, if it were to come, would necessarily come too late.
SAMANTHA POWER, “A PROBLEM FROM HELL: AMERICA AND THE AGE OF GENOCIDE“.
Updated @ 5:19pm 4/12/04
Excerpt: “Dasht-E Leili” by Edward Herman:
—The Cruise Missile Left: The cruise missile left displayed the same pattern of service to state policy. Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff, David Rieff, Aryeh Neier, Christopher Hitchens, and Timothy Garton Ash, who had focused with great indignation on massacres by official targets in Yugoslavia (Racak, Srebrenica) and Iraq (Halabja), but not on those by the United States and its clients in those same countries (Serb Krajina, NATO-occupied Kosovo, the “sanctions of mass destruction in Iraq, 1991-2002), or by Indonesia in East Timor (Liquica), predictably have overlooked the “death convoy” in Afghanistan.