Daily Times

My article, ‘Mass murder: a matter of terminology and counting’ (Daily Times, July 8, 2014) evoked diverse responses and comments. Writing on a subject for a newspaper column is different from academic writing; I had simplified the discussion on genocide to make is easily accessible to most readers. However, some very pertinent remarks also arrived at my end and I would like to address some of them.

In the chapter, ‘A theory of ethnic cleansing’, in my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, a rigorous review of the discussion on genocide and ethnic cleansing is presented. The term ‘genocide’ was coined originally by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to designate the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group; it was given legal recognition at the Nuremberg Trials (1945 to 1947), the purpose of which was to punish responsible members of the Nazi Party for their complicity in mass murder and other atrocities against civilian populations and racial and ethnic minorities before and during the Second World War. The cruel exactions committed by Japanese forces in China and other parts of eastern and south-eastern Asia during roughly the same period also led to key Japanese figures in authority being tried and punished after the war. International law gave proper legal recognition to the concept of genocide on December 9, 1948 when the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was signed (ratified in 1951).

The genocide convention proffers a wide definition of genocide, taken to mean “any of the following acts committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such: killing members of a particular group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of that group, deliberately inflicting on the group such conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within that group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The Nazi ‘final solution’ was directed against Jews and, by that token, the Roma (gypsies) but, as I pointed out, a Muslim Tartar perished in the concentration camp near Strasbourg, and there is no reason not to believe that many more were also sent to their deaths in the same manner there and elsewhere.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler described Soviet Communism as a Jewish conspiracy! Also, the Nazi ideologue on racism, Alfred Rosenberg, developed an elaborate hierarchy of ‘races’ in which the Nordic Aryans were at the apex and then all other races were ranked below them. No doubt, in some parts of eastern Europe some Slavs cooperated with the Nazis as they were rabid anti-Communists. However, that did not mean that the Nazi wrath against the Soviet Union’s overwhelming Slavic citizens was mitigated by such quislings. Nevertheless, the pattern for the mass killing of 25 to 27 million Soviet citizens was, as a friend Dr Ahrar Ahmad pointed out, the combined result of “soldiers killed in battle, civilian casualties as a direct result of the war (as in bombing campaigns, the siege of Stalingrad, and so on), and deaths as collateral damage of the war effort (disease, food and resource scarcities, or even the brutal winter, etc.).” However, I have read extensively on the Nazi war campaign and it is clear that their appalling treatment of Soviet citizens was motivated strongly by racism as well.

Some other friends pointed out that the Armenian genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey and the genocide in former East Pakistan should also be mentioned. Turkey claims that a million Turks also died in that conflict, which resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians, largely through forced migration, but in most western countries the Armenian genocide is taken to be a fact, which cannot be explained away. The Bangladeshi genocide is counted between 300,000 and three million. The Bangladesh National Party of Begum Khaleda Zia adheres to the 300,000 figure. The Pakistan military figures mention a mere 26,000 deaths in the civil war of 1971.

Someone wrote to me that a vast majority of the pre-Columbian population of North and South America was reduced to a minuscule percentage of their original numbers after the European conquest of those two continents. Very strong objections were raised by some others that I had omitted the millions of deaths caused by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong when they were engaged in gigantic social engineering to realise their utopias. Others mentioned the mass murder of the Vietnamese by the US war machine.

Now, the UN convention on genocide takes a restrictive position on genocide: it is the identification of a specific group based on national, ethnic, racial or religious criteria with the intention of annihilating it which constitutes genocide. Social class has not been included nor deaths resulting from the flawed policies of states. Perhaps one can distinguish between intentional mass murder (genocide) from mass deaths caused by bad policies, wars and civil wars. The two are closely related but are outcomes of different motivations. However, there is a dissenting point of view as well: that the outcome and not the intention should be the basis for deciding whether genocide has taken place or not.

As a political scientist, I am always keen to make these distinctions because social science research requires stringent terminology and an unequivocal theoretical framework. In a philosophical sense, however, such distinctions should not be used as excuses for condoning the cruelty of man against man. Under all circumstances, crimes against humanity should be condemned and even one murder of an innocent person is unacceptable. Simultaneously we must continue to delve deep into the socio-psychological preconditions that explain such behaviour. Man is the most ruthless predator.

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honourary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com