During revolution, as state and social structures are re-shaped, groups deemed to impede the revolutionary agenda are susceptible to destruction, as happened after the 1917 Russian Revolution<\/a> or after the Khmer Rouge triumphed in Cambodia in 1975. Threats to the territorial integrity of a state by regional independence movements may trigger genocide, as seen by the Pakistani military\u2019s actions in what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.<\/p>\n War is a particularly potent context for genocide, as military conflict enhances feelings of group solidarity and xenophobia, and violence in the military sphere can extend to other spheres. The sense of a country\u2019s existence being under threat may also stimulate attacks on groups perceived to be involved in the threat. Even the Nazi regime, despite its persecution of Jewish people from 1933 onwards, did not become genocidal until it was at war.<\/p>\n The acquisition of new territory can also raise the threat of genocide. For example, the indigenous Native American and Australasian peoples were dispossessed and killed, or had their way of life destroyed, by European settlers. In lands of expanding white settlement, the frontier societies, acting with the tacit consent of their own governments, perpetrated mass murder, as in Tasmania or California in the 19th century. The settler example shows that it is not only \u201ctotalitarian\u201d states that have perpetrated genocide. Few political systems have shown themselves immune to fostering the destruction of other groups.<\/p>\n According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide comprises \u201cany 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\u201d. This is not the only definition of genocide in existence, but it is especially important in law and politics.<\/p>\n Contrary to a common belief, the Convention does not create a legal obligation for external intervention in ongoing cases of genocide. The fear that acknowledging the existence of an ongoing genocide might create such an obligation was palpable during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. A US Defense Department discussion paper of 1 May 1994 noted the concern of the Legal Division of the State Department that a \u201cGenocide finding could commit USG [the US government] to actually \u2018do something\u2019\u201d. Ten years later, however, the-then US Secretary of State Colin Powell was surer of his ground. After stating that genocide had indeed been committed in Darfur and that the Sudanese government and the janjawiid militia were responsible, he asserted that \u201cno new action is dictated by this determination\u201d.<\/p>\n At the same time, \u2018genocide\u2019 has become an important political mobilisation slogan irrespective of the strict legal issues involved. Claims of genocide by both Russia and Ukraine<\/a> in the present conflict are evidence enough of this. The evocative, moral force of the \u2018G-word\u2019 explains the vigour with which states including Myanmar, Sudan, China, and Turkey contest its applicability to events with which they are concerned.<\/p>\n In Rwanda\u2019s genocide in 1994, up to 800,000 people were murdered, mostly Tutsis but also some politically moderate Hutus. Genocide began shortly after the assassination of longstanding Rwandan President Juv\u00e9nal Habyarimana on 6 April. That event was the latest in a radicalising sequence which included the crisis of legitimacy of Habyarimana\u2019s single-party Hutu regime amid economic downturn in the later 1980s; the introduction of political pluralisation; and a war in 1990\u201393 between the Rwandan army and the Uganda-based majority-Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).<\/p>\n Pluralisation, the war, and the resulting Arusha Peace Agreement \u2013 according to which political power was to be shared between Rwandan political parties and the RPF \u2013 all threatened the place and privileges of Hutu elites who used the war and the assassination to propagandise about a \u201cTutsi\u201d threat to all Hutus.<\/p>\n These elites used their influence in Rwanda\u2019s security services and violent militias established during the war to orchestrate the murder of political opponents and genocide against the Tutsi minority<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> The 1990s saw horrific mass crimes committed in Rwanda and Yugoslavia<\/a>, and yet, despite some Nato<\/a> intervention in the latter, it was clear that some countries were not interested in \u201cthe lessons of history\u201d or even the evidence before their eyes. In 2000, the Canadian government established an International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty to examine when the international community should intervene in the affairs of states where civilian populations were under attack. The Commission found that it was not a want of information about violations of international humanitarian law that impeded action, but problems in translating data into policy and the determination to act.<\/p>\n General Rom\u00e9o Dallaire, the Canadian who commanded the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda, emphasised the overriding significance of determination when cabling his superiors in the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in January 1994 about the likelihood of a slaughter of Tutsis. Requesting guidance, he signed off with peux ce que veux<\/em> \u2013 \u201cwhere there\u2019s a will, there\u2019s a way\u201d. As he watched the genocide of the Tutsi unfold from April, his soldiers neutered by the terms of their peacekeeping mandate, Dallaire\u2019s verdict would come to mirror that of James Gow (professor of international peace and security at King\u2019s College London) on the international community\u2019s failures during much of the murderous dissolution of the former Yugoslavia: a \u201cTriumph of the lack of will\u201d.<\/p>\n Since Dallaire had first-hand information about the build-up of arms under extremist Hutu elements in the Rwandan governing structure and the likely deployment of the weapons in mass murder, it might be thought that whether or not anything could be learned from history was an irrelevance. By mid-April what need was there for, say, historical education about the Holocaust as ethical stimulus for international action against genocide when a predicted campaign of mass violence was underway?<\/p>\n What the historical record does highlight is the failure of the international community to halt mass atrocity in all but a few cases. Despite increasing concern with genocide and related matters from the late 20th century, less has changed than the authors of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention and UN Declaration of Human Rights, and the organisers of any number of Holocaust and genocide memorial<\/a> initiatives, would have wished.<\/p>\nWhat is the definition of genocide, what does it mean?<\/h2>\n
Rwanda<\/h2>\n
States turn a blind eye<\/h3>\n
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