Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
Table. 5.1 Top ten ethnic/national genocides in history
Victims Perpetrators Date Numbers killed
1 Chinese Mongols 1215–79 18.8 million a
2 Slavs Nazis, Germany 1940–45 10.5 million a
3 Jews Nazis, Germany 1933–45 6 million a, b
4 Persians Mongols 1220–22 6 million a
5 Nuer, NubaSudan 1983–present 1.9 million b
and Dinka
6 Tibetans China 1959–present 1.6 million b
7 Germans Poland 1945–48 1.6 million a
8 Bengalis Pakistan 1958–87 1.5 million a, b
9 Armenians Turkey 1915–17 1.5 million b
10 Ibos Nigeria1966–70 1 million b
Sources: a Rummel (2003), b Genocide Watch (2003).
peoples rather than their annihilation. The Mongols were unusually savage in their
ransacking of cities and so merit an inclusion, but the list excludes some notable long
term slaughters, such as the fate that befell African slaves and native Americans in
the imperial era. It was in the twentieth century when ideas of nationhood began to
be conflated with ‘ethnic purity’ in the extreme nationalism of Nazi Germany that
‘genocide’ entered the political lexicon and landscape (see Box 5.1).
Box 5.1 Rafael Lemkin
Rafael Lemkin, an International Law lecturer at Yale University, both coined the term
genocide and played a leading role in the formulation of the UN’s 1948 ‘Genocide
Convention’. Lemkin was a Polish Jew who fled Nazi persecution in 1939, moving
initially to Sweden before then embarking on an academic and activist career in the
United States. Lemkin’s 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was the first
publication to use the term genocide which he defined as ‘a coordinated plan of
different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national
groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups completely’ (Lemkin 1944: 79). The
word, which combines the Greek genos (meaning race/family) with the Latin ‘cide’
(to kill), had particular resonance to him since 49 members of his family and six million
of his fellow nationals had been murdered by what Churchill called the ‘crime without
a name’. Lemkin went on to play the leading role in the drafting of the UN convention
on genocide and participate as an adviser at the Nuremberg Trials against Nazi war
criminals. Something of a forgotten hero, Lemkin’s grave at the Mount Hebron
Cemetery, New York refers to him aptly as the ‘Father of the Genocide Convention’
(Korey 2001).
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