Genocide: Words have power.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am reading over 20 books on violence this semester. Here’s the latest installment on my thoughts.

Last week, I gave a presentation on genocide. C—my project partner—and I led a class discussion on the book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch. We wish is about the 1994 Rwandan genocide. And, if that wasn’t gloomy enough, we connected the Rwandan situation to Darfur.

Other than the time frame, the situations in Rwanda and Darfur appear similar: people are dying in Africa. Under the surface, however, the situations are very different. When C asked a refugee from Darfur about the similarities, the man looked at us quizzically. He said, “They are not the same. The conflict in Rwanda was tribal. The conflict in Darfur is religious.” But then he followed it up with, “Well, there are some similarities. In both cases, people die. Both are major genocides of the 21st century.”

A friend of mine currently in Darfur wrote, “Rwanda was clearly a genocide (even those who denied it while it was happening knew they were lying) but Darfur […is] a bit more questionable. They […] share a racial dynamic to them that is fascinating (and terrible) to look at, but I would warn against any type of broad brush strokes between the[m].” Darfur is NOT genocide? Wait… then what exactly is genocide?

If the difference between Rwanda in 1994 and the current situation in Darfur lies in the word “genocide,” then the similarity is there, too. (That’s weird logic, but hang with me.)

The word “genocide” was coined by a man named Raphael Lemkin, who was a Polish Jew in Europe before World War II. In the aftermath of a genocide in Armenia during WWI, he became fascinated with mass slaughter (as it was called before “genocide”), and began studying law to find a way to stop it. He identified Hitler’s rise to power as problematic, but no one listened to him. As a Jew, in 1939, he was forced to flee Europe.

Lemkin fled to the United States, where he continued his campaign to end mass slaughter, urging the international community to come together in order to stop such events from ever happening again. At some point, he realized that the crime needed a name. In addition to law education, Lemkin also had had linguistic training, and understood the importance of words. He named the crime “genocide,” which is Greek, “geno,” for race, Latin, “cide,” for kill. He published a book with the word, and continued to lobby to for laws to recognize genocide as a crime against humanity. (For more, check out Samantha Power’s book, “A Problem from Hell.”)

In 1946, a year after WWII ended, the United Nations recognized the concept of genocide. And in 1948, the Genocide Convention wrote the following definition:
“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 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.” (genocidewatch.org)

After the document written by the 1948 Genocide Convention was ratified, genocide was recognized as an international crime. Once a crisis has been recognized as genocide, the international community then has an obligation to stop it.

According to www.genocidewatch.org, there are eight stages in genocide:
1. Classification
2. Symbolization
3. Dehumanization
4. Organization
5. Polarization
6. Preparation
7. Extermination
8. Denial
(I like genocidewatch.org’s definitions for these eight stages because it also outlines possible ways of preventing genocide at each stage.)

Back to Rwanda and Darfur:

Rwanda’s genocide followed each of these stages in a linear fashion. The Hutus and the Tutsis used language to divide and “Other.” The genocide occurred. And now, in some areas, it is being denied. In his book, Gourevitch points out a unique aspect of the Rwandan genocide: in no other genocide were the two sides ever expected to live side-by-side in the same country after the genocide.

Darfur’s genocide has not followed each of these stages in a linear fashion, and perhaps this is one of the reasons why international policies have been slow to respond. In the beginning, maybe it was fundamentally a religious problem. Sudan’s civil war was predominantly between the North and the South, Islamic and Christian regions, respectively. In the western province of Darfur, far removed from the civil war, the different tribes felt the effects of the civil war, which increased pre-existing tensions between groups there. The violence began when people in Darfur tried making their voice heard via violence, and the Janjaweed retaliated with more violence.

Darfur was not initially genocide when it began. It has since become genocide. Whole villages are being destroyed past the point of being inhabitable again. People are dying. Children are disappearing. It fits the definition. For more information, check out what Eric Reeves writes.

It all feels very far away from where I sit at my desk in Pittsburgh. And yet, I know it’s happening. There are people who have seen it who confirm it. There are articles appearing in the news with short sentences about it. Short sentences. Words.

I have known about what’s going on in Darfur for several years now. I've had friends working in Darfur as aid workers for those years. But somehow, the impact didn’t hit me until recently, when I tried studying to understand what’s going on there. I still don’t understand. I don’t think I ever fully will. But comprehension is dawning.

No longer are the short sentences I see hidden in the daily headlines simply words. There are meanings attached to these words. Genocide. The press throws it around so easily, not realizing it’s a bowling ball in a ping-pong game.

A final thought.

During the Rwandan genocide, the Red Cross was present in the country, which is traditionally a neutral organization. One aid member said that to be aware of the genocide and to do nothing about it was to contribute to the genocide, and he couldn’t do that anymore. So he spoke.

“In such circumstances, if you don’t speak out clearly, you are participating in the genocide. If you just shut up when you see what you see, and morally, ethically, you cannot shut up. It’s a responsibility to talk, to speak up.” (video)

So I blog. I’m not sure what can be said. What can be done. I have no on the ground answers. I know the pat answers here: pray, write to your congressman, go to awareness events, etc. But I feel very helpless.

In the circles of government, it’s a linguistic battle.

Words have power.