60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

98 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
tory of genocide. Their application to very diverse cases of mass death,
where the intentions of the perpetrators vary considerably, and whose
contexts, course and extent are so diff erent, means that the terms lose
analytical precision and thus their usefulness for historical analysis. Not
every mass death constitutes a case of genocide, let alone a ‘Holocaust.’
The positions mentioned above – either stressing or denying the singularity
of the Holocaust – are refl ected in the scholarly debate within
Holocaust and genocide studies about the appropriate defi nition of
genocide. 7 Whereas Israel W. Charny defi nes genocide quite broadly
as ‘the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not
in the course of military forces against an avowed enemy, under conditions
of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims’
(cited in Fein 1997: 17), Steven T. Katz wants the concept limited to
the Nazi murder of the Jews, defi ning it as ‘the actualization of the
intent, however successfully carried out, to murder in its totality any
national, ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, gender or economic
group, as these groups are defi ned by the perpetrator’ (1994: 131).
Both defi nitions are largely useless for a universal-historical consideration
because they make sensible comparison diffi cult. A working
defi nition is needed that neither excludes an event from historical
consideration, nor diminishes the horror of the deliberate murder of
entire peoples within a general history of mass killings.
The United Nations Convention on Genocide still off ers the best and
most widely accepted working basis. In 1948, it defi ned genocide as
‘any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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 infl icting 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’ 8
Four years earlier, the originator of the term, Raphael Lemkin, defi
ned it inter alia as a ‘coordinated plan of diff erent actions aiming at
the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups,
7 For a brief overview of the phases of genocide scholarship, see Chalk and Jonassohn
(1998). See also Gessler (2000).
8 Article 2, United Nations ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide’, 9 December 1948, reproduced in Chalk and Jonassohn 1990: 44–49.