60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

80 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
States and France but also South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, Brazil
and others were afraid that cultural protection in the Genocide Convention
could motivate some minorities to use it as a political weapon
and as an excuse for resisting ‘normal’ assimilation (Levene 2005: 45).
It was thus feared by Western powers that the Convention could be
exploited by anti-colonial resistance movements. Predictably, the opposition
to Lemkin’s idea of cultural genocide was successful: With the
exception of the forced transfer of children of a targeted group into a
diff erent group, the UN Convention does not consider forms of forced
assimilation as being genocidal.
On 9 December 1948, the UN General Assembly meeting at the Paris
Palais Chaillot eventually passed the fi nal version of the Convention.
The legal experts and the General Assembly had agreed on the following
defi nition of genocide:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following
acts committed with 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 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
(Chalk and Jonassohn 1990: 10).
As I have shown in the introductory part of this article, the Genocide
Convention had not been applied in the era of the Cold War and was
thus a more or less insignifi cant tool in international law.
Social scientists and historians working on mass violence, however,
have more and more resorted to the genocide concept since the 1980s
since it represented a useful frame of reference to document the severity
of state-sponsored crimes against minorities. However, historians
have often referred to the inadequacies of the UN defi nition
of the concept of genocide per se (Gerlach 2006): According to the
defi nition above, the clear intention of perpetrators to destroy a targeted
group is a constitutive feature of genocide. However, such an
intentionalist argument is diffi cult to reconcile with the insights of
empirically oriented historical research. It ignores the fact that governmental
extermination policies generally constitute complex processes
that undergo various phases of cumulative radicalisation and
depend on a range of situational factors (Gerlach 2002: 351; Schaller