Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

SPECIES CONSCIOUSNESS
404
and sovereign immunity was guaranteed. Succinctly stated, that meant that within its
borders, a state ruled supreme and that what it did within its own borders basically constituted
“internal affairs.” Time, circumstances, and a changing worldview have, in certain
respects, slowly eroded the “sanctity” of sovereignty. Put another way, the traditional
understanding of the concept of sovereignty is being rethought by various scholars
(including, but not limited, various political scientists and specialists in international law
and/or on humanitarian intervention ), as is the actual practice of sovereignty. That is not
to say that sovereignty is not still firmly in place, for it is; but, it is to say, that it is both
in flux and experiencing change. Certainly, from a normative viewpoint—through the
human rights movement of the latter half of the twentieth century, along with the
Nuremberg Trials, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY),
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the establishment of the
International Criminal Court (ICC)—absolute sovereignty has been weakened, particularly
as it applies to a state’s perpetration of crimes against humanity and/or genocide.
Species Consciousness. In Chapter 9, “A Species Mentality,” of their 1990 study The
Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, scholars Robert Jay Lifton (b. 1926)
and Eric Markusen (1946–2007) understand this phrase to mean “full consciousness of ourselves
as members of the human species, a species now under threat of extinction” (p. 259),
and suggest that such an awareness, though not precise, holds the potential to serve as a
counter or “moral equivalent” (p. 255), psychologically, to the genocidal mentality. More
specifically, they argue that by drawing upon the insights of various religious and philosophical
traditions, it is indeed possible to develop such a conscious awareness of our humanity,
and that, having developed such, primarily through educational means and drawing upon our
own innate psychological resources, such an awareness could very well serve as an antidote
to the thinking and awareness of those intent on global genocidal destruction.
Srebrenica, Dutch Peacekeepers. As part of the UN commitment to the defense of
civilians during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995, the Bosnian city of Srebrenica was
declared a “safe area” on April 16, 1993. In late January 1994, the first units of a 1,170strong
Dutch paratroop battalion (codenamed Dutchbat) were deployed to Bosnia, and
on March 3, some 570 of their number entered Srebrenica to relieve a much smaller
Canadian detachment. In the sixteen months that followed, Dutchbat experienced a wide
range of challenging situations, including military deaths in combat conditions; the capture
of some of its soldiers and their subsequent abuse as the Bosnian Serb forces used the
Dutch as human shields; and being overrun in Srebrenica in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb
forces led by General Ratko Mladic (b. 1942) without a shot being fired. Ultimately,
Dutchbat failed to defend the population of Srebrenica during which some seven to eight
thousand civilian Muslim men and boys were murdered after the fall of the city. In the
national soul-searching that followed, Netherlands’ citizens were distressed when it became
known that the night before the final Serb assault on Srebrenica, the Dutchbat commander,
Lieutenant Colonel Tom Karremans (b. 1949), had drunk a toast with General
Mladic—a toast, it was said, in honor of Mladic’s victory. (Karremans later explained that
it was only a glass of water, but by then, courtesy of Serb photographers filming the
exchange, the damage had been done.) The fall of Srebrenica, and the mass murder of its
citizens by the thousands, was seen as a matter of national shame in Holland.
In 1996, the Dutch government of Prime Minister Wim Kok (b. 1938) commissioned
an official inquiry into the actions of the peacekeepers; the resulting report, produced by