Genocide: - DIIS

Robert Cribb
time, it was argued that political groups were too diffi cult to defi ne in any
coherent way and that the nature of political groups changed so rapidly
that any attempt to exterminate a political group was a different kind of
action from the extermination of an ethnic group. To many scholars, too,
it has seemed that there is a difference between targeting people purely
because of the ethnicity into which they were born and targeting people
for political beliefs which they had acquired while growing up and over
which they – presumably – had at least some choice. Of course no-one
defended political killings, but the act of killing people for the role they
had chosen to play in politics seemed less horrible than killing them on
racial grounds. We have tended to feel, as well, that political (and religious)
belief is inherently renewable in a way that cultural diversity is not. The
followers of a religion or a political belief may die confi dent that their belief
will live after them and may even be strengthened by their deaths. “The
blood of martyrs,” as Tertullian commented, “is the seed of the church.”
By contrast, the disappearance of a culture, like the destruction of a work
of art, is something that cannot be compensated for by a new generation
of culture or art. Some things can be created only once, and when they are
lost they are lost forever. Nonetheless, changes in our understanding of
ethnicity during the last century have made the distinction between ethnic
and political killings increasingly diffi cult to sustain.
The United Nations made its distinction between racial and political
killings at a time when ideas of the importance of race were much more
fi rmly entrenched than they are today. There was a widespread belief that
humankind had differentiated into races and cultures over thousands,
perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of years, that cultural diversity
was rather like biodiversity, the product of immensely long and essentially
unrepeatable processes, so that the loss of any ethnic group was a tragedy
and the wilful destruction of an irreplaceable part of human culture was
a specially terrible crime. Political beliefs, by contrast, were considered
to be constantly developing and constantly renewable. There is hardly a
political doctrine which has not proudly claimed that its basic ideas are
so fundamentally human that they will spring to life again after the worst
repression. Attempting to suppress a political belief did not seem to imply
the same kind of extinction of a human creation as the destruction of a
race.
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