The U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The term did not exist until it was first coined in 1944 by Ralph Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, seeking to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder, including the extermination of European Jews.
While this definition has generally been accepted, countries have traditionally been reluctant to recognize genocidal activity outside of their own boundaries. This, unfortunately, has most often led to genocidal extermination being allowed to continue under cover of the excuse of "national sovereignty." (It took the U.S. 40 years, from 1948 to 1968, to finally ratify the U.N. Convention.) Consequently, we continue to see genocides happen right before our eyes, and we will do nothing about them.
Case in point - less than 9,000 miles from Washington D.C., Myanmar soldiers are burning Rohingya infants alive, gang-raping teenagers, shooting villagers fleeing their homes, and wiping out entire villages, while the world continues to contemplate if it should define what is taking place as genocide, ethnic cleansing, or just an internal military action. Since late August, during a timespan of just eight weeks, Myanmar's military killed thousands, and forced 600,000 surviving Rohingya Muslims, 58% of which are children who witnessed atrocities no child should ever see, to flee to Bangladesh.
The sentiment of most observers is that, if history is a guide, the international community will abet the situation. Even though U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has said that it is "an absolute priority" to stop all violence against Myanmar Rohingya Muslims, and a simultaneously approved statement issued by the Security Council condemning the violence, the organization has stopped well short of identifying the activity as genocide. If it had, the U.N. would have been legally bound to intervene, which is why most member states will be reluctant to initiate such a move. Myanmar's State Controller Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, while facing universal criticism for not vocally objecting to the violence, was never even confronted with the subject when she attended the ASEAN Summit in Manila this past week.
This callously predictable non-response has permeated similar unresponsive reactions to previous equally horrific events throughout history.
During and immediately following WWI, Turkey killed, deported and starved to death as many as 1.8 million Armenians. Modern Turks generally refuse to acknowledge that what happened to have been genocide. However, most scholars consider it to have been an orchestrated effort at exterminating an unwanted ethnic group that had lived within the borders of the crumbling Ottoman Empire for centuries. The world just watched.
From 1939 to 1945, during the Holocaust, when the Nazis systematically killed 11 million people, 6 million of which were Jews, the world looked the other way. There was ample evidence about what was taking place. However, the information remained classified, and reports were either denied or catalogued as "unconfirmed," while millions were literally exterminated.
In 1975, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, which wanted to establish a "Communist utopia," annihilated two million people (20 percent of the population) who were considered "enemies of the state." We all knew, but we declined to interfere.
In January 1994 the leader of the U.N. troops in Rwanda was warned that a plan for genocide was in place. His intent to act was nixed by his superiors in the U.N., and most of the 25,000 peace keeping troops were withdrawn from the country. The U.S. government avoided admitting that the subsequent massacre constituted genocide. We argued that we had no business involving ourselves in the internal conflict of another country. Within a 100-day period the Hutu majority killed an estimated one million Tutsis, 70 percent of its ethnic group and 20 percent of Rwanda's population.
Other examples are plentiful. The world shamefully watches, head in sand, claiming "not our problem."
Gregory Stanton. president of Genocide Watch, lists eight stages of genocide: Classification (us against them); Symbolization (attaching labels); Dehumanization (denying the humanity of the other group); Organization (training and planning for genocidal killings); Polarization (involving propaganda and passing new, discriminatory legislation); Preparation (identifying the victims); Extermination (the killing begins); and Denial (it's the victims' fault, hide the bodies). At each stage preventive measures could have stopped the process.
Genocide is the world's worst intentional human rights problem. But it is different from other problems, and it requires different solutions. Because genocide is almost always carried out by a country's own military and police forces, the usual national focus on law and order cannot stop it. International intervention is usually required. However, because the world lacks an international rapid response force, and because the U.N. has so far either been paralyzed or unwilling to act, genocide continues to go unchecked.
With genocide and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar continuing unabated, we should keep in mind that the numbers that are being reported from the area are not just statistics, they refer to real people.
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