I admit I feel ashamed to say this. Such statements are usually the preface to cynical calls for “realism,” and, historically, are the redoubt of the worst kind of deniers. Call it whatever you want: The slaughter in Darfur is terrible. And it must be stopped, probably by outside force.
But originally, genocide was meant to be understood differently than it is now. Its historical definition is very narrow: the planned and systematic destruction of an entire ethnic group or race. Not just running them out of the country (this is ethnic cleansing), and not just targeting some — or even most — of them.
In The New Republic, an author attempted to prove Darfur is a genocide by recounting his visits to Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, where victims of violence there told him their tormentors expressed a desire to kill blacks. This is hateful, shameless racism in killers who will not voluntarily stop. But it is only genocide if we consider the lynchings in the old South genocide.
By the word’s original definition, not many conflicts have qualified as genocides — Rwanda, the Holocaust, a few others. It can be hard to tell from the outside when a faction intends to terminate a group, but there’s often (as in the case of Rwanda) a lot more evidence than there is in Darfur.
But why does it matter? It matters because overuse weakens the word, strips it of its power to force specific actions, and enables us to fixate on the definition of what we’re facing, rather than confront plainly what we see.
In the aftermath of Rwanda in 1994, many have said that if we’d only had the courage to call it a genocide, we would have done something to stop it. This logic is now applied to Darfur: If we can get leaders to call Darfur a “genocide,” this verbal determination would automatically trigger certain feelings and actions. And it legally should, according to the 1948 Genocide Convention. But, unfortunately, terming something a genocide no longer — if it ever did — gives birth to any sort of imperative. The U.S. did eventually call Rwanda a genocide, and still didn’t do anything. We have repeatedly called Darfur a genocide, and haven’t done anything. Many are worked up about the terminology from a sense that people only react to things if they’re billboarded a certain way. But who cares, if this billboarding doesn’t affect our actions?
I wish our strategic reaction to killings — and our emotional reaction — wasn’t so hinged on whether or not we call it by a special word. Being so hung up on the definition causes a lot of dangerous argumentative dithering. It’s like the debates over Iraq: Once Iraq becomes a “formal civil war,” we imagine, we’ll withdraw our troops. But when does this happen? What is a civil war? Semantic probings about the difference between “civil war,” “insurgency,” and “sectarian warfare” constitute cowering behind words in order not to face the truth of the facts on the ground. And it makes our discussion strangely abstract — an effort to derive a false certitude from definitions that only confuses the situation more, like Orwell’s formulation that a man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
Since the Darfur rally on the Mall in April, CNN has reported that violence there has doubled. In Darfur, both politicians and polemicists use the ambiguity of whether or not it “counts” as genocide to dampen and delay action. Every slaughter, every political or humanitarian mess, is different, and I’d rather judge them each on their own merits, with watchfulness and courage.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
