60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

colonialism and genocide 81
2004b: 14; Hankel 2005: 70-81; Mann 2005: 140). More recent studies
on National Socialist population and extermination policy, for
example, have revealed that these cases were not killings exclusively
organised by central authorities and carefully planned long before the
actual crime (see the contributions in Herbert 2000). For instance, the
mass deaths of Soviet prisoners of war during World War II, caused
by hunger and disease, or of the Herero and Nama in concentration
camps during the colonial war from 1904 to 1908 were not brought
about premeditatedly. If, therefore, one were to keep strictly to the
defi nition of genocide by the United Nations, one had to conclude
that neither of these two cases could be classifi ed as genocide. Yet
causing the deaths of members of an ethnic or religious group by imposing
unreasonable living and prison conditions nevertheless has to
be characterised as being genocidal, because the prisoners’ death was
willingly accepted (Zimmerer 2008: 56).
Although some acts of colonial mass violence – like for example the
extermination of natives by distributing blankets contaminated with
smallpox by the British Army under the command of Lord Jeff rey
Amherst in North America in 1763 (Finzsch 2008: 221-223), the massacre
in the Meander River region in Tasmania in June 1827 (Ryan
2008), the Third Colorado Cavalry’s atrocities against the Cheyenne
on Sand Creek in 1864 (Churchill 1997: 228-232) and (as an example
of genocide without physical extinction) the aboriginal child removal
in Australia in 1900-1940 (Manne 2004) – qualify as genocide according
to the UN Convention, its respective defi nition is far from being
an adequate methodological tool for the study of colonial mass violence
because of its emphasis on intentionality.
Land seizure, forced labour, the destruction of traditional social and
political structures – that is, the essential elements of indigenous culture,
the elimination of the economic basis for life of indigenous
hunter-gatherer societies, for instance by forced settlement of nomadic
groups – run through the history of European colonialism like
a thread. These measures often led to mass death. The Belgian ‘rubber
terror’ and slave labour in the so-called Congo Free State led to
a decline of the indigenous population by about 10 million (Hochschild
1999). Apologists for European colonialism often argue that
mass mortality in the Congo and in the Americas has to be ascribed
to diseases formerly unknown to the indigenous societies like the
smallpox (Gründer 1998: 137-139). However, this argument is fallacious
because it ignores the fact that the loss of original living space
and identity, expulsion, terror and forced labour contribute to the
spread of diseases.