Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

than the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, which many scholars and jurists regard as inadequate owing to
its narrowness, there are no other universally accepted definitions of genocide prevailing
today. Grouping examples of mass killing and human rights violations together within a
matrix of genocide may be a means to break the impasse, but it has only a limited value
in law. Even though conceptually it provides assistance to scholars, classification can only
be applied narrowly by lawyers and courts.
Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1988. The Genocide Convention
Implementation Act of 1988, which was named the “Proxmire Act” in honor of Senator
William Proxmire (1915–2005), who had arduously lobbied for the ratification of the UN
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG), was
the title of the U.S. law that made genocide a crime that was punishable in the United States
by life imprisonment and fines of up to 1 million U.S. dollars. Although passage of the
Genocide Convention Implementation Act of 1988 was hailed as a milestone, many
saw it as “tainted,” for certain senators insisted that a reservation be attached to the ratification.
The reservation basically stated that before the United States could be called
before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the president of the United States would
have to consent to the court’s jurisdiction. That reservation resulted in the United States
being the only country in the world that would decide whether or not it would appear
before the World Court.
It is also noteworthy that the U.S. Senate did not ratify the “U.S. version of the genocide
treaty” until February 11, 1986, some thirty-eight years after the UN General Assembly
unanimously voted on passage of the law. Equally noteworthy is the fact that ninety-seven
nations had ratified the UNCG ahead of the United States. Ultimately, it took another
two years before the United States’ ratification became formal law, for incessant wrangling
continued over the implementation legislation that became the “Genocide Convention
Implementation Act of 1988.”
Genocide, Denial of. Denial of a genocide having taken place (even in the far past,
such as the Ottoman Turk genocide of the Armenians and the Nazi extermination of the
Jews, Roma and Sinti, and physically and mentally handicapped) is a frequent occurrence.
Genocide is first and foremost a crime, and those who commit it, or those supporting the
perpetrators’ actions, are often eager to seek exoneration by denying that charges of genocide
have any veracity. Denial activities have often taken place via the printed word,
though most recently this has extended to the Internet and lectures and speeches to
receptive (or potentially receptive) audiences.
The motives of genocide deniers are not based on serious or objective scholarship, but
rather on political, racist, or bigoted foundations. Often deception is employed in order to
“convince” those without deep knowledge that the “accepted version” of history is in fact
wrong. Genocide denial is thus not a part of the legitimate quest for understanding in which
scholars engage, as denialist activities do not rework or revise, based on new evidence, the
endeavors of earlier researchers. Their method, instead, is to deny the very reality of the
phenomena to which earlier scholars have directed their attention, or to skew the facts.
Concomitantly, genocide denial is frequently an attempt—sometimes made quite crudely—
to discredit the victims of genocides by saying their experiences did not take place.
Given the latter, deniers frequently proceed from the belief—often held with passionate
conviction—that they are struggling against a massive conspiracy being waged by
GENOCIDE, DENIAL OF
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