60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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140 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness the latter term as meaningfully distinguished from the concept of intent associated with the legal defi nition of genocide. The very distinction, secondly, between the parties ordering and executing orders is at least suggestive of a state-centric, centralised, topdown logic as described by Gerlach, and to which he opposes his notion of ‘diverse’ or ‘autonomous social groups’ participating in mass violence. However, as Quigley argues the relevant Article IV of the Convention is routinely criticised for omitting reference to the state: Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public offi cials or private individuals. Quigley argues that in recent trial proceedings the ICJ 12 ruled that there is no reason to read Article IV as limiting the Convention’s applicability for perpetration of genocide to individuals… The purpose of Article IV was to ensure that individuals not escape responsibility by virtue of their position in a government [i.e. public offi cials and constitutionally responsible rulers] (Quigley 2006: 235; emphasis added). Article IV thus establishes the liability of ‘natural persons’ and the ICJ has ruled that nothing in Article IV limits the Convention’s applicability to natural persons. On the other hand Article IX, ‘by referring to the state’s responsibility “for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in article III”, makes it plain that a state may perpetrate genocide, including conspiracy, incitement, attempt, and complicity’ subject to the qualifi cation that a state’s liability is civil rather than penal since unlike natural persons the state is not ‘punishable’ (Quigley 2006: 236). Gerlach’s criticism of the alleged state-centrism of the concept of genocide is therefore more properly directed at those scholars who stress the role of the state rather than other possible agents of, or participants in, genocide. From the point of view of the Convention, Gerlach’s notion of a ‘process’ of ‘autonomous social groups’ participating in mass violence would be subject to the same burden of proof as individuals and the state. In other words it would have to be shown that over and above the actor’s culpability towards its immediate victims there was also an intent to ‘destroy, in whole or in part’, a group as defi ned by the Convention (Quigley 2006: 10). 12 The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed on the territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991.
do we need an alternative to the concept of genocide? 141 Gerlach may have grounds, thirdly, for his contention that ‘most of genocide studies will continue to focus on one given victim group in isolation’. However, also in this instance the real target should be genocide scholars rather than the (legal) concept of genocide. For the limiting criterion of ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ pertains to the composition and not the number of victim groups involved. Indeed the Nuremberg indictment describes the acts of the accused in the following terms: They conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others (Quigley 2006: 6). Although this seminal ruling was made prior to the adoption of the Genocide Convention, it does not substantially diff er from the terms of the Convention. Conversely, Gerlach posits an alleged tendency by both perpetrator societies and victim groups to focus on a single victim group, without demonstrating the relevance of this observation to his subject matter. Thus, in the former case Gerlach suggests it is ‘much easier’ for societies that bear responsibility to admit having morally failed in dealing with one group than with many and thus create a more convenient, simpler stories… [that] it is easier to identify with persons from one group rather than from many diverse persecuted communities (Gerlach 2006; 464). This is a questionable proposition. The observer of post-war West Germany during the 1950s would have been forgiven for not realising that there had, in fact, been an appreciable number of Jewish victims. On the other hand, the German Democratic Republic famously dismissed the notion of racial victims with its pious invocation of communist ideology, to explain away Nazi ideology, and ‘the whole Nazi period – including the Holocaust – as simply the ugly face of “fascist capitalism” and “western imperialism”’. In both German states the ‘murderers in our midst’ had been removed from view, while select victims (the communist resisters in East Germany, the July 20 conspirators and White Rose martyrs in West Germany) were elevated into each respective post-Nazi pantheon (Betts 2005: 61). Denial is not a conceptual problem. Even more problematic is Gerlach’s treatment of the victims insofar as he argues that a singular focus on one given victim group ‘chiefl y…
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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8 development dialogue december 200
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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