When Is It Too Soon to Call a Catastrophe a “Genocide”?

The following post is by my FIU colleague Hannibal Travis.

At an interesting event held by the United Nations General Assembly, with the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and delegates from many nations in attendance, the question of the “g-word” came up.  On the topic of “Multilateralism and Diplomacy for Peace,” the General Assembly president, Volkan Bozkir, responded to a question from an Armenian diplomat regarding denial and justification of past genocides being a “test of multilateralism” and the principles of the United Nations regarding the peaceful resolution of disputes.  Mr. Bozkir stated that in “order to describe an incident as genocide, a competent international tribunal must make a decision to that effect,” and that in April of this year, a spokesperson for Mr. Guterres had “reiterated that genocide needs to be determined by an appropriate judicial body, as far as the UN is concerned.”  By that standard, it may be too soon for the United Nations to label as “genocide” the Armenian catastrophe, or the great anti-Armenian crime (Meds Yeghern).   

For Michael Berenbaum, a project director for the emerging United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the first director of its Research Institute, the U.S. House and Senate resolutions of 2019 and presidential statement of 2021 recognizing the Armenian genocide did not come too soon.  The very word “genocide,” he argues, was used and invented by Raphael Lemkin “to speak of the Armenian genocide.”  

Advocates of Armenian genocide recognition point out that the UN does not often wait for an international tribunal to make a final decision on a genocide before the UN opines on whether one has occurred.  In 1985, a study prepared at the request of the UN Commission on Human Rights, for example, named the “massacre of the Armenians in 1915-1916” as a “genocide.”  At least 40 U.S. states and many national parliaments followed suit, as did the European Parliament in 2006 in a resolution that also referred to Assyrian and Greek victims.  (Incidentally, Lemkin wrote in 1948 not so much of an “Armenian genocide” as of a broader phenomenon – “the destruction of the Christians under the Ottoman Empire” – in promoting a genocide treaty; similarly, the House of Representatives in 2019 referred to a genocide against Armenians and “Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians,” whereas the presidential commemorative statement of 2021 referred only to Armenians even though it mentioned other Christian orphans and refugees as being affected by the same events.) 

In 1992, the General Assembly called the tragedy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina a “form of genocide,” after noting that human rights violations and mass refugee flight had happened.  The resolution also acknowledged that the Security Council had not even begun considering creating an international war crimes tribunal with jurisdiction over acts committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina.  The UN’s own records also designated the extermination of the Jews in Germany and occupied Europe and North Africa as a “genocide” before a genocide treaty had been signed, let alone enforced in court.

Waiting for a tribunal to declare a genocide could involve substantial delays in the effort to salvage the victims’ lives by such means as providing a safe haven, an independent country, an arms embargo, a UN or regional force to restore order, housing and land restitution, psychosocial counseling, or medical treatment.  It can take about three years for the memorials to be filed and preliminary objections to be heard in an interstate case involving state responsibility for genocide, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro.  It can take even longer than that, or more than a decade, for significant movement to occur in a genocide prosecution at the International Court, such as the “Darfur situation.”  The first chance to begin to assess the guilt of a suspect in the Darfur genocide at the ICC came in March of 2021, involving events that took place starting in 2004.  The Genocide Convention states that genocide has occurred throughout history and that all parties to the convention have a duty to punish the crime; while it states that all trials should be before a competent domestic or international tribunal, it does not state that all punishments must be meted out to natural persons after a trial.

There remain very few survivors of the events of 1914-1918 in the Ottoman Empire, or even of the events of 1919-1925 which followed and involved further massacres and denials of a homeland.  In that respect, many of the considerations which might persuade a diplomat to seek genocide recognition in order to advance an ongoing agenda of civilian protection carry less weight in the Ottoman case.  Scholars who write on the Armenian genocide therefore emphasize the ongoing character of the events, including reduced populations, lower birth rates as a result of physical violence and impoverishment, impacts of trauma on lifespans, and compromised cultural and religious traditions due to “dispersion.”

Other reasons not to recognize a genocide with resolutions or statements such as those that the United States issues include the following: politicians should not be the arbiters of what happened in history, recognition of important human milestones both for good and evil should be balanced rather than selective, contemporary political and strategic relationships are more important than proclamations about the past, and congressional or White House procedures may be twisted towards biased ends.  While each of these reasons has some validity, politicians make a variety of factual and historical findings and commemorations in the course of shaping legislative or executive policy and proclamations.  There are more urgent matters to investigate from the standpoint of the present moment than how to conceptualize the Armenian catastrophe as a matter of U.S. policy, but there are also other far less significant statements that are made in the annals of Congress, in the halls of the White House, or on a U.S. website.  The selectivity of U.S. proclamations is also obvious, especially given the executive branch’s policy of opposing judicial inquiry into allegations of internationally wrongful acts by the United States or its allies (whether in the International Court of Justice, the federal courts - update, or in foreign courts).  Perhaps rather than giving up on commemorating events with legal concepts that capture some of their gravity, politicians could strive to be even-handed across nations and situations, including their own nation and situation.  Finally, while the strategic situation of the United States is beyond the scope of this post, it is not as if the period during which the presidency and the Congress denied the Armenian genocide (beginning in the late 1980s or thereabouts) was uniformly characterized by greater security and reduced Middle East tensions.  Nor was Turkey’s role always a benign one during this period.