Two years after Winston Churchill called it "the crime without a name," a Jewish lawyer who had fled the Nazis dared to give it one. He called it genocide.
Six decades later, it's not the crime that's debated, it's the name.
In Sudan, 30,000 African villagers have been slain by government-backed Arab militiamen. In the past month, the number of refugees has jumped 20 percent to 1.2 million, according to the United Nations. As the rainy season peaks, relief workers are warning that conditions could deteriorate.
But world powers, including the US government, remain divided over what to call the crisis in Darfur province. The US State Department is expected to decide soon whether it is genocide.
The debate runs deeper than semantics because the label comes with a weighty question attached: If it is genocide, what is the world going to do about it?
US President George W. Bush has called Darfur one of the "worst humanitarian tragedies of our time," US Secretary of State Colin Powell dubbed it a "humanitarian catastrophe," and both houses of Congress, on July 22, voted to declare it genocide.
Eight days later, the UN Security Council threatened "mea-sures" against the Sudanese government if it does not take steps by September to end the conflict. The resolution avoided the words "sanctions" and "genocide."
Raphael Lemkin coined the word in 1943 from the Greek word genos, for race or tribe, and the Latin word cide, meaning killing. Genocide gave definition to a whole category of "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."
Its legal definition was coded in the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, signed by virtually every nation and binding them to "prevent and punish" the crime. Acts of genocide include killing, causing bodily or mental harm, mass rapes, expulsion and other actions aimed at destroying the group.
The Security Council resolution, drafted by the US, condemned violations of human rights ``by all parties to the crisis, in particular by the janjaweed (Arab militias), including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, rapes, forced displacements and acts of violence[,] especially those with an ethnic dimension.''
A US State Department team is interviewing Sudanese refugees in neighboring Chad to determine whether the atrocities that led them there constitute genocide or ethnic cleansing, in which the intent to destroy a group cannot be established.
Meanwhile, the US Agency for International Development has warned that the death toll could reach 350,000 if aid doesn't reach 2 million people soon.
Kristin Wells, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, said the congressional resolutions declaring genocide in Sudan were ``a political strategy'' to prod the Bush administration to do more.
"The view on Capitol Hill was that the point of the 1948 convention on genocide was to prevent genocide," Wells said. "What's the point of having a special word if it's just for the history books?"
Four US Congressmen have gone further to draw attention to the issue. Democrats Charles Rangel, Bobby Rush, Joseph Hoeffel and Albert Wynn have been arrested for protesting outside Sudan's embassy in Washington.
Many human rights advocates point to the past cases of Rwanda and Bosnia. In the early 1990s, some 250,000 Bosnians were killed by Serbian forces. In 1994, in Rwanda, more than 900,000 people died during a conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes.
In both instances, the first Bush and Clinton administrations declined to call the killings genocide.
"How many people should die before they call it genocide?" asked Amal Allagabo, a Sudanese immigrant in Virginia who said she does not know if relatives in Darfur are alive or dead. "Are they waiting for Rwanda to happen again?"
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
DELA ROSA CASE: The whereabouts of the senator, who is wanted by the ICC, was unclear, while President Marcos faces a political test over the senate situation Philippine authorities yesterday were seeking confirmation of reports that a top politician wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) had fled, a day after gunfire rang out at the Philippine Senate where he had taken refuge fearing his arrest. Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, the former national police chief and top enforcer of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs,” has been under Senate protection and is wanted for crimes against humanity, the same charges Duterte is accused of. “Several sources confirmed that the senator, Senator Bato, is no longer in the Senate premises, but we are still getting confirmation,” Presidential
HELP DENIED? The US Department of State said that the Cuban leadership refuses to allow the US to provide aid to Cubans, ‘who are in desperate need of assistance’ US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday said that Cuba’s leadership must change, as Washington renewed an offer of US$100 million in aid if the communist nation agrees to cooperate. Cuba has been suffering severe economic tumult led by an energy shortage that plunged 65 percent of the country into darkness on Tuesday. Cuba’s leaders have blamed US sanctions, but Rubio, a Cuban American and critic of the government established by Fidel Castro, said the system was to blame, including corruption by the military. “It’s a broken, nonfunctional economy, and it’s impossible to change it. I wish it were different,” he told
RSS