The Hardest Word
PARIS — While the U.S. House of Representatives might soon be considering a resolution that would recognize the crimes committed by Turks against Armenians in 1915 as genocide, the Serbian Parliament has just adopted a resolution that provides an apology of sorts for the killing of Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica in July 1995 but eschews any reference to “genocide.”
Intense political pressure has been at play in both cases to prevent the adoption of the resolutions — or at least to get any reference to genocide out of them.
Supporters of these resolutions seem to think that legal accuracy is essential to establishing the truth of what happened, and that genocide is the crime that best describes what was done to the Armenian and Bosnian victims.
Those opposing these efforts argue that while crimes might have been committed, they were not genocidal in character. They fear that labelling them as genocide might leave an irremovable stain on the history of their nation.
It’s time for both sides to look beyond the law as a means of resolving what divides them.
The U.S. and Serbian resolutions reflect legitimate demands for historical truth (dongle- not individual culpability which labelling is supposed to pursue) — what the author Milan Kundera has described as “the struggle of memory against forgetting.” But the memory of past atrocities does not depend on the legal label that is pinned on them. What must be recorded and remembered are the hard facts that define them — in these two cases the murder or attempted murder of a nation.
By seeking to enlist international law in its support, the political process behind these resolutions is condemning itself to a fruitless or divisive result. Parliamentary debates are not the judicial or forensic examinations that allow the sort of legal and evidential evaluation necessary to give a legal characterization to historical events. Serbia’s resolution is intended as an act of political and national contrition, while the proposed U.S. resolution is a belated acknowledgement of a grave historical wrong.
There is no denying the power and symbolism of the word “genocide” to victims for whom the expression might have come to reflect the horror of their suffering. However, the suggestion that crimes of that sort can only be properly recorded if they bear that label does not stand up to scrutiny. After all, the crimes of the Nazi regime against European Jewry and others were punished at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity and as war crimes, not as genocide.
The very proposition that legal concepts such as genocide could ever adequately measure and reflect the intricacies of such historical events could itself be questioned. International criminal law, which includes genocide, provides for ways to criminalize the conduct of individuals who have taken part in mass atrocities — not for passing judgment on history.
Even if it were capable of this, the law is likely to provide some support for both sides and might therefore contribute to grinding the process of healing historical wounds to a slow and divisive ethnic or religious standstill rather than to help resolve anything.
The debate surrounding the use of the word “genocide” has made the nations involved hostages of a legal issue that they seem unable to resolve. Better, it seems, for them to focus on recording and recognizing facts that are undeniable historical truths and leave the debate over the legal characterization of these events for another day. Future generations of Turks and Serbs would be grateful to have been freed from the burden of explaining, defending or arguing over crimes that they have no responsibility for.
To achieve that goal, however, the two resolutions need to leave no doubt that the killing of Armenians in Turkey and of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica were atrocities committed in the name of flawed ideologies and by individuals who enjoyed the support of local or national authorities.
While providing cause for hope, Serbia’s resolution falls short of that ideal because while it records the crimes, it shies away from discussing what caused them. In addition, avoiding the word “genocide” should not serve as a way to promote a sort of distorted moral equivalence between the crimes committed by both sides.
If they meet these standards, the resolutions would draw a line under painful common historical events and could contribute to making the memory of these events something that binds rather than divides.
Guénaël Mettraux, the author of “The Law of Command Responsibility,” represents defendants before international criminal tribunals.
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Can We Stop Arguing About Whether a “Genocide” Occurred? Posted: 03 Apr 2010 04:55 AM PDT by Julian Ku Genocide is one of those phrases with both highly potent political ramifications as well as highly complicated legal requirements. These two characteristics, GUÉNAËL METTRAUX argues in the IHT, make the obsessive focus on whether something is or is not a genocide (Armenia? Srebenica?) a largely hopeless and unhelpful exercise for historical events. The very proposition that legal concepts such as genocide could ever adequately measure and reflect the intricacies of such historical events could itself be questioned. International criminal law, which includes genocide, provides for ways to criminalize the conduct of individuals who have taken part in mass atrocities — not for passing judgment on history. Even if it were capable of this, the law is likely to provide some support for both sides and might therefore contribute to grinding the process of healing historical wounds to a slow and divisive ethnic or religious standstill rather than to help resolve anything. The debate surrounding the use of the word “genocide” has made the nations involved hostages of a legal issue that they seem unable to resolve. Better, it seems, for them to focus on recording and recognizing facts that are undeniable historical truths and leave the debate over the legal characterization of these events for another day. Future generations of Turks and Serbs would be grateful to have been freed from the burden of explaining, defending or arguing over crimes that they have no responsibility for.
