"Genocide" in Ukraine?

Othmer Karas is one of my favorite politicians. He's a Member of the European Parliament for the Austria ÖVP (Christian-democratic/People's Party).

He is a committed "European," i.e., an advocate for a robust European Union that defends democratic principles and practices among its member states. He has been a persistent critic of far-right radicalism, rightwing authoritarian movements, petty nationalism, and xenophobia.

So I pay attention to what he has to say. (He is also, by the way, the son-in-law of the late Kurt Waldheim.)

However, I do have reservations about this tweet of his:

Wir erleben gerade einen Völkermord in der #Ukraine – anders sind die grausamen Bilder aus #Butscha nicht zu benennen. Auch ich kann diese Bilder nur schwer ansehen, aber wir müssen hinschauen.

💭Persönliche Gedanken, für die ich Sie bitten würde, sich kurz Zeit zu nehmen. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/gvM5f2No7c

— Othmar Karas (@othmar_karas) April 5, 2022

He says there, "We are right now experiencing a genocide in #Ukraine - the gruesome picture from #Butscha cannot be called anything else. Even I find these images difficult to see, but we must look at them."

My reservation is not that he is condemning war crimes. While early reports always need careful scrutiny, there seems to be enough supporting evidence that civilians have been directly murdered. As Karas says in the video, the Russian wars in Chechnya and Syria provide unfortunate precedents.

But I worry that the concept of "genocide" in its popular and political usage is being degraded to a routine polemic. The concept was coined by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944. Lemkin was a key figure in developing the Genocide Convention adopted by the United Nations in 1948. The idea was to define as a specific kind of crime the systematic mass killing that occurred in the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide.

The legal concept of genocide was not meant as a blanket charge to cover all war crimes, atrocities, massacres, violent situations that generate refugees, or all acts of racial or ethnic discrimination. But in its popular and polemic usage, it seems to be functioning that way now.

Diane Orentlicher in her article on "Genocide" in Crimes of War 2.0 (2007) says this about the legal definition of genocide, which on its face does sound fairly broad:

The definition of genocide set forth in the Genocide Convention is authoritative and has been incorporated verbatim in the statutes of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals, the International Criminal Court and several other courts established by or with the support of the United Nations. After affirming that genocide is a crime under international law whether committed in time of peace or war, the 1948 convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

In the 1948 convention, then, the crime of genocide has both a material element-comprising certain enumerated acts, such as killing members of a racial group-and a mental element-those acts must have been committed with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group "as such." In its verdict in the Akayesu case, the Rwanda Tribunal found that the systematic rape of Tutsi women in Taha Province constituted the genocidal act of "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the [targeted] group."

In addition to the crime of genocide itself, the 1948 convention provides that the following acts shall be punishable: conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide.

Still, I'm inclined to be cautious about labeling instances of "genocide." Not least because it can contribute to threat inflation, one of the chronic problems of American foreign policy. It's already routine that many people will label whoever the main enemy is taken to be at the moment as the "new Hitler." Vladimir Putin is the current recipient of that designation in the West. And there is always someone who will complain in any actual or potential military confrontation that any sign of caution or restraint on the part of the United States is a replay of "1938" and "Munich" and will likely lead to world war.

And the word "genocide" for most people conjures up the image of the Holocaust which involved the deliberate, systematic mass murder of millions of noncombatants. If "genocide" is applied to all war crimes and even acts of discrimination like disadvantaging the language prominent among an ethnic minority, that seems to me to risk watering down the concept to near-meaningless.

Maybe I'm overstating that risk. But I'm still going to incline to caution in invoking the concept of "genocide." It's worth noting here that almost no one opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine had any difficulty dismissing Russian charges that Ukraine was committing genocide against "ethnic" Russians and ridiculous and risible.

Also, if you're the son-in-law of Kurt Waldheim, a caution in accusing countries of genocide is probably particularly advisable.