How are we to describe the abominations being carried out in Xinjiang by the Chinese Communist Party? What word is apt for the concentration camps, the mass sterilizations, the deportations, and the slave gangs? Repression? Ethnic cleansing? Extermination?
The Uighurs on the receiving end of these atrocities asked for one designation above all: “genocide.” On his final day, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave them what they wanted, pronouncing the freighted word and leaving it to the Biden administration to decide what to do about it.
Under international law, genocide has a specific definition. The word was first used in 1944 by Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, whose original inspiration was not the Nazi bloodletting but the massacres of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915. More than a century on, the quarrel about whether the violent removal of Anatolia’s Armenian population was a genocide rages on.
Use of the label “genocide” does not add or subtract from the suffering of the Armenians who died on those forced marches — or of the incarcerated Uighurs, the Jews murdered in Nazi camps, or the Rwandan Tutsi. In this sense, at least, the dispute about the word is more semantic than moral.
In the case of the Armenians, not even the flintiest Turkish nationalist denies that civilians were murdered as a result of government policy. Indeed, when the Turkish republic emerged after World War I, one of the charges it placed on the former Ottoman regime was precisely that it had mistreated its Armenian citizens. On the eve of the centenary, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan became the first holder of his office to express sorrow for the victims and sympathy for the descendants of the survivors. Yet the Turkish state remains neuralgic about the g-word, jailing people who use it in ways it considers improper.
All of this prompts a disquieting thought. Ought we to place different forms of persecution in special categories? Shouldn’t we treat deliberate murder as the ultimate crime, whether or not it is targeted at a group?
The brilliant evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich has shown that Western societies are distinguished by their unique conception of the responsible person. In most ages, the primary unit of organization was the tribe, and it was natural to punish people for the misdeeds of their kin. That instinct has never entirely gone away, and genocide is its worst manifestation. But doesn’t the very thing that makes genocide repulsive — the fact that people are condemned by their membership to a group, that nothing they can do will establish their innocence — impel us to honor every life equally?
To put it another way, if the Chinese authorities embarked on a program of slavery and forced sterilization against, say, small-business owners, would that be morally different from the monstrosities they have unleashed in Xinjiang? What if they seized a million randomly chosen people rather than a million Uighurs? Wouldn’t those people be every bit as much the center of their universes? Wouldn’t they leave as many grieving relatives?
“We ordained for the Children of Israel that if someone slays a single soul, unless it be in punishment for murder, it shall be as if he had slain all mankind,” the Quran states. The notion that we are responsible for our actions, the very basis of Abrahamic morality, became the defining characteristic of modern society. Distrusting collectivism in life, we should be wary of assigning it in death.
Genocide, as defined in international law, does not necessarily mean attempting to annihilate a population. It means a state policy targeted at a particular ethnic or religious group that is likely to cause severe harm. Even if we exclude the tribal and religious wars of earlier ages, that still leaves a long list: the relocation of Native American tribes, the transatlantic slave trade, the barbarities carried out in the Belgian Congo, the intercommunal violence that accompanied India’s partition, Stalin’s deportations, the expulsion of the East African Indians, and, not least, the ethnic cleansing of the long-settled German communities of Eastern Europe in and after 1945. This last one, which no one is seriously proposing to include, reminds us, uncomfortably, that the designation is not determined by an impartial computation of suffering. We should be careful of competitive victimhood.
I hesitated before writing that line. In a time of performative outrage, someone will pretend to understand it as somehow downplaying genocide. But my point is the opposite. We should honor and remember victims as people. Posthumous reclassification drags them instead into the arguments of the living. They deserve better than that. They have suffered enough.
