60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

142 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
serves the creation of group identity as a means to overcome the fallout
of destruction’ (Gerlach 2006: 464). Surely it is obvious that perceptions
of both survivor groups and individuals are shaped by their
experiences and that they are not guided by the impersonal rigours
of scholarly debate? Moreover, by downplaying the Nazi ideology of
biological racism Gerlach’s account occludes its function of identifying
a hierarchy of ‘blood enemies’ as explaining the prioritisation of
the ‘Final Solution’ by the Nazis. Denying the pure logic and salience
of Nazi ideology is both unhelpful and ultimately misleading.
Conversely, it is problematic to claim that ‘to think along the lines of
the concept of genocide…implies the creation of hierarchies between
diff erent forms of mass destruction, because some are not dignifi ed
by that term’ (Gerlach 2006: 464). Is Gerlach suggesting that certain
distinctions, say between ‘mass violence’ and ‘mass killings’ (Gerlach
2006: 455), are meaningful but that others, such as between ‘genocide’,
‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ are less so? Each individual
human life is equally valuable. But not all crimes fall into the
same category. According to Gerlach’s logic the distinction in criminal
law between ‘manslaughter’ and ‘murder’, and between various
‘degrees’ of murder, is misleading and unacceptable presumably because
these crimes have the same outcome. This is certainly true from
the point of view of the victim. The similarity nonetheless ends there.
Premeditated murder is distinguished by the element of ‘intent’, and
it is intent that imparts the crime of murder with its particular legal
and moral opprobrium. Similarly, the Genocide Convention was
never intended as a catch-all legal framework for the prosecution of
all forms of ‘mass violence’. Responding to Dobkowski’s objection
that Article II glosses over ‘structural violence’, Stein comments that
this is ‘perhaps’ true,
but if the concept genocide is expected to cover both ‘intentional’,
and structured violence, it would vary substantially from the Article
II defi nition and apply, therefore, to a diff erent phenomenon
(Stein 2005: 184).
It is an altogether diff erent question whether the legal defi nition of
genocide can serve as a basis for meaningful scholarly debate. Since it
is not clear if by the ‘de-facto concept of “genocide”’ Gerlach has the
Article II defi nition of genocide in mind, it is not possible to engage
this aspect of his argument.
Nevertheless, Gerlach is right to object to scholarly research that
stresses the fate of European Jewry to the exclusion of other victim
groups, although it would be mistaken to include in this category