WHY ARE THE RESCUERS ALWAYS TOO LATE?

THE FAILURE TO HALT GENOCIDE AND OTHER CRIMES

AGAINST HUMANITY ANALYZED

GENOCIDE IN CRIMINAL LAW:THE UN DEFINTION, 1948

ARTICLE II of the U. N. Genocide 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 . . .

U.N. DEFINTION OF GENOCIDE (continued)

(c) Deliberately inflicting 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.”

ELEMENTS OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE

ARTICLE III of the U. N. Genocide Convention “The following acts shall be punishable:

a) Genocide

b) Conspiracy to commit genocide

c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide

d) Attempt to commit genocide

e) Complicity in genocide.”

FOUR MOTIVES FOR GENOCIDEFROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE

PRESENT

• TO ELIMINATE A REAL OR POTENTIAL THREAT

• TO SPREAD TERROR AMONG ENEMIES

• TO ACQUIRE ECONOMIC WEALTH

• TO IMPLEMENT A BELIEF, A THEORY, OR AN IDEOLOGY

SOME EXAMPLES OF GENOCIDES IN HISTORY

• THE ISLAND STATE OF MELOS, 416 B.C.• THE CATHARS, EARLY 13TH CENTURY• THE CHRISTIANS OF JAPAN, 1637• THE YUKI INDIANS OF CALIFORNIA, 1859• THE HEREROS OF GERMAN SW AFRICA, 1904• THE ARMENIANS, 1915• UKRAINIANS, EARLY 1930S• THE HOLOCAUST (SHOAH), 1939-1945• EAST PAKISTAN, CAMBODIA, EAST TIMOR,

BURUNDI, RWANDA, BOSNIA, 1971-1995

The Chalk-Jonassohn Research Definition of Genocide

“Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.”

What are crimes against humanity? In 1945, the United States and other Allies developed

the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis and Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), sitting at Nuremberg, which contained the following definition of crimes against humanity in Article 6(c):

“Crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, before or during the war; or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”

CANADA’S CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AND WAR CRIMES ACT,

2000, and the new Intl. Criminal Court, 2003 “Crime Against Humanity" means murder, extermination,

enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, persecution or any other inhumane act or omission that is committed against any civilian population or any identifiable group and that, at the time and in the place of its commission, constitutes a crime against humanity according to customary international law or conventional international law or by virtue of its being criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations, whether or not it constitutes a contravention of the law in force at the time and in the place of its commission.”

The Armenian Genocide, 1915

• Perpetrators: Extreme nationalist leaders of the Committee for Union and Progress

• Victims: Some 800,000 to 1,200,000 Armenian citizens of the Turkish Republic

• Methods: Shooting of Armenian men of military age, massacres and death caravans of deported women, children and the elderly on forced marches through the desert with no provision of food and water

25 April 1915 : Anzac soldiers landing at Gallipoli during World War One

Turkish machine gunners

Turkish soldiers in a trench, Gallipoli, 1915

Australian troops charging near a Turkish trench, Gallipoli, 1915

Photos of Armenian Deportees to the Syrian Desert, Armin Wegner, German Army medical orderly, 1915

U.S. State Department Telegram, Sec. State Wm. J. Bryan, 29 May 1915

The Guardian (London)

“Exterminating the Armenians”

11/09/1915

A Literary Response to the Armenian Genocide

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is a historical novel depicting the battle of Musa Dagh which took place in 1915. The novel was written in 1933 by the Austrian Jewish writer Franz Werfel (1890-1945).

The Aftermath of the Armenian Genocide

• The Allied forces reached the Armenians too late to save most of them

• Armenian survivors, including many orphans, found refuge in the Middle East, Western Europe, the United States and Canada

• The promised trials of the genocide’s perpetrators were indefinitely suspended by the British as the price of Kemal Ataturk’s cooperation in their anti-Bolshevik intervention

• Denial that the deaths of the Armenian victims were part of an intentional, planned annihilation of the Armenians in Turkey continues as a staple of Turkey’s curriculum and diplomatic activities, although progress is being made with the help of some Turkish and other specialist scholars

The Holocaust, 1939 to 1945, and the Failure of Rescue

• The Great Depression, 1929-1939, and rising antisemitism in Europe and America barred the gates of immigration in many countries

• Many Jewish refugees were murdered after Germany occupied most of Western Europe and a large part of Eastern and Southern Europe during the war

• The Allies top priority was to win the war and they regarded the rescue of Jews as endangering that aim

The Conflict between Military Victory and Rescue in WW II

• The Allies ignored evidence that the Germans would murder Europe’s Jews and Gypsies before they won the war and refused to undertake special efforts on their behalf

• The Allies viewed the rescue of Jews as undermining suppport for the Allied cause among their own peoples and citizens of the lands they intended to liberate in eastern Europe

• The Allies feared a Middle East and North African revolt if they rescued large numbers of Jews and moved them to Palestine or North Africa

BANGLADESH, 1971

• West Pakistan invaded East Pakistan to implement a reign of terror aimed at demands for a better share of Pakistan’s wealth

• The army of West Pakistan and its militias in East Pakistan murdered about one million Bengalis and others, while some ten million refugees fled to nearby India

U. S. Policy in 1971• Despite the largest protest ever mounted by

members of the U.S. Foreign Service, Secretary of State Kissinger and President Nixon refused to halt U.S. military aid to Pakistan during the genocide

• Kissinger argued that since Pakistan was China’s close ally and he was rebuilding Sino-American diplomatic and strategic cooperation, he could not offend China by intervening in East Pakistan

Aftermath of the Bangladesh Genocide

• India invaded Pakistan in 1971/72 to end the genocide

• The United Nations condemned the Indian invasion as a violation of Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty

• The United States cut off economic assistance to India

Rwanda, 1994• Some 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsis, as well

as Hutu human rights advocates were murdered

• Fearing a political backlash against his presidency after the 1993 disaster in Somalia which saw the killing of American soldiers, Clinton refused to acknowledge that a genocide was underway in Rwanda

• Dallaire was prohibited from seizing arms intended for use in the genocide

The U.N. and the Rwanda Genocide

• At the U.N., the Great Powers called for the withdrawal of the U.N. peacekeeping force led by Canadian General Romeo Dallaire

• The U.S., France, etc. refused to heed calls from Belgium for the rapid deployment of troops to stop the genocide

• The Great Powers denied that they had any vital interests in the Great Lakes struggle

LESSONS FOR THE FUTURE• Until very recently, the Great Powers defined

their self-interest narrowly in terms of their own military, economic, and political security

• Isolationism and unilateralism were the order of the day

• It will take a revolution in the mentality of their citizens for the Great Powers to acknowledge the link between security and human rights