The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

toward an anthropology of genocide 5
U.N. conference in Rome approved a statute calling for the creation of a permanent
International Criminal Court, despite the protests of the United States and a
handful of other countries, including Iran, Iraq, China, Lybia, Algeria, and Sudan.
President Clinton finally signed the treaty in January 2001, days before leaving
office. Senate confirmation remains in doubt.
After tracing these developments, Magnarella describes the process by which
the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) conducted the first trial
for the crime of genocide ever held before an international court. In September
1998, fifty years after the adoption of the U.N. Convention, former Rwandan mayor
and educator Jean-Paul Akayesu was convicted of various acts of genocide, as well
as crimes against humanity. Magnarella recounts the testimony of one woman who,
despite seeking Akayesu’s protection, was repeatedly raped in public; Akayesu reportedly
encouraged one of the rapists, saying: “Don’t tell me that you won’t have
tasted a Tutsi woman. Take advantage of it, because they’ll be killed tomorrow.”
Akayesu, in turn, claimed that he was a minor official who was unable to control
the atrocities that took place in his municipality.
Because of its unprecedented work, the ICTR faced many difficulties in achieving
the conviction of Akayesu. One of the foremost problems was the U.N. Convention’s
lack of a definition of a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Background research revealed that the drafters of the convention restricted the
definition of the term genocide to “stable, permanent groups, whose membership is
determined by birth.” Based on that conceptual distinction, the ICTR came up
with provisional definitions of the aforementioned groups. However, the more fluid
Hutu/Tutsi/Twa distinction did not clearly fit any of the proposed definitions. Noting
that Rwandans readily identified themselves in these terms and that the labels
were used in official Rwandan documents, the ICTR nevertheless concluded that
such emic distinctions could serve as a basis for prosecution.
Magnarella points out that the ICTR effectively expanded the coverage of the
convention by adding any “stable and permanent group, whose membership is
largely determined by birth” to the pre-existing national, ethnic, racial, and religious
categories. Thus, atrocities committed against those of different castes, sexual
orientations, or disabilities might qualify as genocidal. In addition, the ICTR
set a precedent for examining local understandings of social difference, since etic
ones are too often indeterminate and vague. In fact, as I will later point out, this
very uncertainty about identity often leads perpetrators to inscribe difference upon
the bodies of their victims (Appadurai 1998; Feldman 1991; Taylor 1999). Although
the ICTR ultimately maintained a criterion of enduring difference, its difficulty in
using “national, ethnical, racial or religious” designations illustrates that even these
seemingly stable categories refer to sets of social relations that have fuzzy boundaries
and vary across time and place (see also Bowen, this volume).
Accordingly, I would advocate the use of a more moderate definition of genocide,
such as the one Fein proposes, because it can, without losing analytic specificity,
more easily account for the fact that group boundaries are socially constructed