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?"
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS