[Salon] IS “GENOCIDE” THE RIGHT TERM FOR RUSSIA’S ACTIONS IN UKRAINE?

IS “GENOCIDE” THE RIGHT TERM FOR RUSSIA’S ACTIONS IN UKRAINE?
                                                          BY
                                      ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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When President Biden used the term “genocide” to describe Russia’s actions in Ukraine, it was received with both support and opposition. French President Emmanuel Macron warned against an “escalation of rhetoric.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hailed “the true words of a true leader.” A Kremlin spokesman called the comment “unacceptable.”

It is interesting to review the origins of the term “genocide.” The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born Jewish lawyer who fled the persecution of the Holocaust and moved to the U.S. in 1941. A few months after his arrival, he heard a radio address in which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told his listeners about the horrors of World War 11.

Churchill declared: “Whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands —-literally scores of thousands—-of executions are being perpetrated by the German police troops . We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

Lemkin, who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, understood that the problem of mass murder was not new but he believed that his contemporaries lacked both law and language to help them prevent future atrocities. He decided to create a name for the crime without a name. He came up with “genocide,” which he defined as the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. He said he created the word by combining the Ancient Greek word “genes” (race, tribe) and the Latin “cide” (killing).

In 1948, the newly created United Nations used this new word in the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” The treaty was intended to prevent future genocides.

What is happening in Ukraine is clearly a case of mass murder and serious war crimes, and what many observers are now calling genocide. The 57-member Organization for Security and Cooperation In Europe has accused Russia of illegally targeting schools, hospitals, residential buildings and water facilities, leading to civilian deaths and injuries. The U.N. Reports that damaged water infrastructure and electricity networks have left 1.4 million people without running water in eastern Ukraine, with 4.6 million people across the country—-more than 10 percent of the prewar population—-at risk of losing their water supply.

Russia’s rhetoric is becoming increasingly ominous. On state television, a military analyst called for concentration camps for Ukrainians opposed to the invasion. The head of the defense committee in the lower House of Parliament said it would take 30 to 40 years to “re-educate” Ukrainians. On a talk show, the editor in chief of the English language television news network RT described Ukrainians’ determination to defend their country as “collective insanity.”

“It’s no accident we call them Nazis,” said Margarita Simonyan, who heads the Kremlin-backed media group that operates the Sputnik RIA Novosti news agencies. “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children based on their nationality.”

Eugene Finkel, an expert on genocide at John’s Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, said the Russian rhetoric isn’t just “a few crazy hard-liners” spouting off. It’s coming from prominent government officials, showing up in the press, being heard on state television——“and is clearly genocidal.”

“They’re talking about destroying Ukrainians as a group,” said Finkel. “Ukraine as a state and as an identity community. The argument is we are going to destroy this national community as it exists and create something new that we like instead, no matter how many people we kill in the process.”

In late March, the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee launched an investigation into whether Ukrainian textbooks “target children with hatred of Russia and the Russian language and distort history.” There already is evidence, Finkel told The Washington Post, of Russian soldiers in Ukraine going through libraries and schools and destroying books in Ukrainian or those about the country’s history and struggle for independence.

In Finkel’s view, “I think there is a clear indication that the Russians are targeting quite deliberately everything and everyone that is associated with Ukrainians as a national identity.”

In an interview with the New Statesman, Kremlin adviser Sergei Karaganov said that Ukraine would be left as a rump state—-or perhaps as nothing at all—-after Moscow is done. Russia, he made clear, “cannot afford to lose.”

The alleged threat of “Nazism” is one of Moscow’s continuing themes. RIA Novosti ran a piece by Timofei Sergeitsev, a strong Putin supporter, that urged the liquidation of the entire Ukrainian elite, the division of the country, destruction of its sovereignty and even the abolition of its name. He wrote that, “Denazification will inevitably be de-Ukrainization,” requiring years of ideological repression and severe censorship in political, cultural and educational fields. He noted that, “Ordinary Ukrainians were complicit and must suffer the inevitable hardships of a just war before total submission to Russian power as a historical lesson and atonement for their guilt.”

Ruth Deyermond, A Russia expert at King’s College London, said such arguments “are hard to read in any other way than a justification for mass killing. It’s extremely disturbing language and has genocidal overtones.”

Professor Finkel fears that a Russian victory would not only destroy Ukraine but bring the post-World War 11 global order to an end. He said, “That’s something I have been thinking about a lot. I think it will be a pretty scary world. For Russia, it’s a test of the idea that might makes right—-and we have the power, so we can do whatever we want.”

Poland’s president Andrzej Duda says that Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian town of Bucha fulfil the definition of genocide. He said the goal of the Russian invasion is simply to extinguish the Ukrainian nation and noted that Russia’s narrative of the “denazification” of Ukraine was a pretext to commit massacres. United Kingdon Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that attacks on civilians “do not look far short of genocide.”

Gregory Stanton, chair of Genocide Watch, says there is proof that the Russian Army is in fact intending to destroy, in large part, the Ukrainian national group. “That’s why they are targeting civilians,” he says. “they’re not just targeting combatants and military. Often the perpetrator of genocide will accuse the other side of intending to commit genocide before, in fact, the perpetrator does it. That’s what has happened in this case.”

Would Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the term “genocide” believe that Russia’s slaughter of civilians in Ukraine and its stated goal of eliminating Ukraine as an independent sovereign state constitute genocide? We can only speculate about how Mr. Lemkin would assess the current situation, but I have an idea that he would find Russia’s actions all too familiar and would not find it difficult to categorize it as genocide.
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