Last week in this space, my colleague Eve Fairbanks argued that we shouldn’t call the slaughter of Darfuris “genocide.” This line of thought, I’m horrified to report, is gaining in popularity, in large part because it serves as a pretense for excusing ourselves from direct intervention. Eve didn’t go that far — she admitted that the massacres “must be stopped, probably by outside force” — but she wanted to get real about a word that, she said, has been misapplied.
Wrong.
This familiar complaint is twofold. One half says, as Eve put it, that “being so hung up on a definition causes a lot of dangerous argumentative dithering.” But, in the case of Darfur, there’s something worse than wasting time on semantics — complete inaction. And failing to call murderous persecution by its right name is a sure formula for ignoring it. There’s a very important distinction between sectarian strife (when Sunni terrorists blow up Iraqi Shiites to instigate a civil war) and genocide (when one religious, racial, ethnic or national group aims to wipe out another). Ethnic strife is a political — and sometimes moral — calamity; but genocide is something else altogether. The 20th century has taught us that, no matter where it is or who it involves, we are compelled to stop it. Immediately.
The other half of the complaint says that the definition of genocide is actually quite narrow — and conditions in Darfur don’t satisfy it. (Never mind that this entails being “hung up on a definition.”) This is partially correct: One definition holds that genocide hinges on an intent to destroy an “entire” group. As Eve argued, “It can be hard to tell from the outside when a faction intends to terminate a group, but there’s often … a lot more evidence than there is in Darfur.”
But her contention is wrong on two counts.
First, although I can’t catalogue every Sudanese abomination here, there’s ample evidence — even enough to convince the U.S. government, which has never been cavalier with the term — that genocide is taking place.
Second, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide — adopted by the United Nations and ratified by the United States — uses the words “in whole or part” and includes not just massacres but also mutilation, psychological torture, measures to prevent births and the theft of children. (Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, emphasized that genocide can also mean “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups,” including “the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion and the economic existence of national groups, andthe destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”) That much, obviously, is happening in Darfur.
In some measure, the precise legal definition doesn’t even matter. Whether the Janjaweed are trying to cleanse the Darfuris mostly or entirely, the point is the same (in this sense, Eve is right) — there is a human rights crisis equaling genocide. Here, moralism should trump legalism.
But that is why the word “genocide” matters. It connotes a state of moral emergency that demands action. If governments have failed to respond, it’s not because, as “[o]veruse weakens the word,” as Eve writes. It’s because governments prefer — for cynical, political reasons — to abdicate their moral responsibilities rather than explain a foreign intervention. That’s why the Clinton administration never called Rwanda genocide — it would have compelled action.
It’s not we who are playing rhetorical games by affixing the word “genocide” inaptly to Darfur; today, it’s the Bush administration that has robbed it of meaning by ignoring this axiom: Once you acknowledge that genocide exists, you must end it.
Adam B. Kushner is assistant managing editor of the New Republic.
