The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

60 modernity’s edges
However, the Soviet Union, Poland, and other nations argued against the inclusion
of political groups, claiming that such a step would not conform “with the scientific
definition of genocide and would, in practice, distort the perspective in which the crime
should be viewed and impair the efficacy of the Convention” (Kuper 1981:25). The
upshot was that political and social groups were excluded from the convention. The
sagacity of excluding such groups has been questioned, if not outright criticized, by
numerous scholars (Kuper 1981, 1985; Whitaker 1985; Charny 1984, 1991; Chalk and
Jonassohn 1990; Totten 1991). Others believe that the exclusion of political groups from
the convention was a sound move. LeBlanc (1988:292–94), for example, supports the
exclusion of political groups because of what he sees as the difficulty inherent in selecting
criteria for determining what constitutes a political group and their instability
over time; other reasons he cites are the right of the state to protect itself and the potential
misuse of the label “genocide” by antagonists in conflict situations.
On December 9, 1948, the Convention on Genocide was approved by the General
Assembly of the United Nations. The convention defines genocide as follows:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with
the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,
as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
It is important to note, as Kuper (1985:150) does, that the Genocide Convention
draws no distinction between types of genocide, since it seeks to define the elements
that they share in common. The convention differentiates only the means (ibid.:15).
As Chalk and Jonassohn (1990:11) stress, the U.N. definition of genocide commingles
physical destruction with causing mental harm to members of a group. Once
again, this raises the issue of whether ethnocide should be subsumed under the
larger definition of genocide.
Cultural genocide and ethnocide are basically synonymous and refer to the destruction
of a group’s culture. As Whitaker (1985:17) notes, cultural genocide constitutes
“[a]ny deliberate act committed with intent to destroy the language, religion
or culture of a national, racial or religious group on grounds of national or
racial origin or religious belief such as: 1. Prohibiting the use of the language of
the group in daily intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of publications
in the language of the group; 2. Destroying or preventing the use of libraries,
museums, schools, historical monuments, places of worship.” According
to Whitaker (ibid.:17), at least one member of the Ad Hoc Committee preparing
the United Nations Genocide Convention indicated that exclusion of the term
cultural genocide from the final text left minorities unprotected.