News from Ukraine, photos and testimonies from the liberated areas after the Russian occupation, daily updating of the horrors and violations of international law have forced observers and legal experts to question the definition of what is happening; and one of the most debated topics, albeit with some skepticism, is whether or not genocide is taking place in Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the bombing of the children’s hospital in Mariupol a month ago “the latest evidence that the genocide of Ukrainians is taking place”. The accusation was then repeated by Zelensky himself several times, most recently after numerous evidence of violence, killings and torture against civilians in the town of Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv. While it is now clear that the Russian army is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine, not all experts agree that genocide is already underway, as it is difficult to define and prove. Most say we cannot talk about genocide, although they warn of the risk that Russia could commit it.
The existence of the debate does not imply different judgments on the seriousness of the crimes being committed in Ukraine: genocide is just one of the charges, many of them equally serious, that international judicial authorities codified after World War II. At the end of February, Karim Ahmad Khan, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, launched an investigation “because there are reasonable grounds to believe that both war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed.”
The existence or nonexistence of genocide will not have legal consequences for Russia in the short term, nor will it change in any way the suffering that the population has suffered and is suffering. However, it can have an important weight not only in the historical assessment of the facts, but also in international political decisions, such as tightening sanctions against the Russian government.
Genocide is defined under international law as the systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of a population, ancestry, race or religious community. It precisely requires “intending to destroy” by one or more of these acts: killing; serious violation of physical or mental integrity; imposition of living conditions aimed at physically destroying the group in whole or in part; birth prevention measures; Forced transfer of children.
The term “genocide” was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a PolishJewish lawyer who had experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand and killed all members of his family except one brother. In the book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe he combined the Greek word ghenos (“race”, “descent”) with the Latin word caedo (“to kill”). His awarenessraising campaign to recognize the genocide led to the UN passing the “Convention for the Prevention and Suppression of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948, which came into force in 1951.
However, the seemingly clear definition hides a number of legal complications regarding the conditions under which the term can be used. Since its adoption, the Convention has been criticized from two opposite directions: according to many, the definition is too difficult to apply to specific cases and seems too strict; According to others, it lends itself to excessive use. This has created the conditions for debate and distinction affecting many of the alleged cases of genocide.
The generally recognized ones are the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1920 (now denied only by Turkey), the Holocaust which resulted in the death of six million Jews, and the extermination of 800,000 Tutsi by the Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. From a broader historical perspective, colonial wars in South America and the extermination of indigenous peoples in North America can also be considered genocide.
More recently, genocide trials against the Khmer Rouge regime have been brought by special international courts (the International Criminal Court in The Hague, a permanent court, only operational since 2002), resulting in the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians. and for the massacre of the Muslim population of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War in 1995. The recent cases of persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minorities in Myanmar or the Uyghurs in China, for whom there are currently no official charges, attest to the difficulty of solving the crime of the Proving genocide in a law firm.
The debate about Ukraine is open and conditioned by the constant development of news about the facts that have come to light only partially and recently.
According to various observers, there are numerous elements that make what happened compatible with the definition of genocide. The indiscriminate killings of civilians, kidnapping, torture, rape, bombing of residential areas and deportation of large sections of the population, including children, to Russia are the most blatant charges. But the destruction of electricity and water systems, the blocking of humanitarian aid, and the deprivation of food supplies to besieged cities also constitute the voluntary imposition of conditions designed to bring about the physical and psychological annihilation of a population.
Professor Alexander Hinton, human rights scholar at Rutgers University, added two more elements in a speech in The Conversation: Russia’s long history of violence and propaganda.
Hinton points to the numerous episodes of Russian mass violence against Ukrainians and other groups, and recalls the agricultural policies that led to famines in 19321933 that killed millions of Ukrainians (known as the Holodomor, “extermination through starvation” in a Ukrainian expression ). ), the deportations of national or ethnic groups, political purges: “Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was guilty of mass violence against civilians in Chechnya, Georgia and Syria”. In short, it would not be the first time in history that Russia has attacked entire populations living in what the Russian ruling class sees as their legitimate sphere of influence.
Indications of a possible genocide then come from the propaganda that devalues and demonizes the population, which is considered objective: the declarations on denazification and Putin’s definition of the Ukrainian ruling class as “a group of drug addicts and neoNazis” should be interpreted in this way. . The mere denial of the legitimacy of Ukraine’s existence as a nation can be a clear indicator of “annihilation intent.”
According to other scholars, however, it is appropriate to be more cautious about the notion of genocide.
Alain Destexhe, former secretarygeneral of Médecins Sans Frontières, in his book Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, describes genocide as “a crime occurring on a scale unlike any other and implying intent to completely exterminate a particular group”. Outgoing From this consideration, Destexhe underscores the danger that the notion of “a kind of verbal inflation similar to that experienced by the word ‘fascism’ becomes a dangerous commonplace”.
Regarding the current special case, there are those who, like Dominique Fraser in The Interpreter (journal of the independent Australian research organization Lowy Institute), emphasize that “the cruelty of the crimes is shocking, but at the moment there is no evidence of the conscious intent to commit a to destroy a specific group: bombs fall on civilians and infrastructure, regardless of their identity, while Ukrainian citizens have not been the target of attacks in Russia or elsewhere. Even those who, like Fraser, consider discussions of the existence of genocide to be premature do not deny the possibility that current events, when the information is more complete, can take on this dimension.
However, experts emphasize that this debate can distract from decisions that are more necessary to respond to ongoing crimes and may be of little importance from a legal point of view. On the one hand, there are obvious and sufficient charges to make Russian leaders (Putin at their head) stand accused of war crimes, on the other hand, the chances of a trial and conviction are almost nil.
Investigations are slow and complex, and the International Criminal Court has not been recognized by either Russia or the United States. On the other hand, the Ukrainian government’s more than understandable denunciations have a nonnegligible political intent, while defining the coherence of genocide allegations against Russia will become the duty of historians in the near future.