60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

Colonialism and genocide –
Raphael Lemkin’s concept of
genocide and its application to
European rule in Africa
Dominik J. Schaller
Every nation’s paramount contribution is through its culture.
The world at large can be compared to a concerto in which
every nation brings in the tone of its own instrument. It is
the harmony and the interplay of individual musical tonations
which make the beauty of the concert. Try to destroy an instrument
in the midst of a concert and you will sense the result of your actions
with shudder.
Raphael Lemkin 1
On 9 December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted
the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide’. The celebration of this milestone in international law 60
years later coincided with the decision by the Chief Prosecutor at the
International Criminal Court (ICC) to charge the Sudanese president
Omar Hassan al-Bashir with war crimes, crimes against humanities
and most notably genocide. In his application for a warrant of arrest
for al-Bashir, Luis Moreno-Ocampo made clear that the Sudanese
leader has to be identifi ed as the ‘mastermind’ behind the killings in
Darfur: ‘The evidence establishes reasonable grounds to believe that
al-Bashir intends to destroy in substantial part the Fur, Masalit and
Zaghawa ethnic groups as such. Forces and agents controlled by al-
Bashir attacked civilians in towns and villages inhabited by the target
groups, committing killings, rapes and torture, and destroying means
of livelihood. Al-Bashir has thus forced the displacement of a substantial
part of the target groups and attacked them in the camps for internally
displaced persons, causing serious and bodily harm – through
rapes, tortures and forced displacement in traumatizing conditions –
1 The quote is from an unpublished and undated manuscript entitled ‘International
collective responsibility for the survival of national, racial, religious, and ethnical
groups’. Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union
College, Cincinnati, Raphael Lemkin Papers, Box 7, Folder, p. 4.