Explainer: What is genocide?

The Gambia has filed a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Myanmar of committing genocide against its Rohingya minority.

Myanmar’s security forces unleashed a savage campaign against the long-persecuted Muslim-majority ethnic group in August 2017 in response to attacks by an armed group. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled to neighbouring Bangladesh to escape the crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

The case filed by The Gambia at The Hague-based court alleges that Myanmar’s actions in its campaign against the Rohingya “which include killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, inflicting conditions that are calculated to bring about physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcible transfers, are genocidal in character because they are intended to destroy the Rohingya group in whole or in part”.

Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country, denies allegations of genocide.

As in the case of crimes against humanity and war crimes, the international community has a duty to prosecute genocide – but what exactly is genocide and who does the term apply to?

Convention on the Prevention of Genocide

Polish scholar and activist Raphael Lemkin in the early 1940s coined the neologism genocide, combining “geno” from the Greek word for race or tribe with “-cide”, derived from the Latin word for killing.

Genocide was first defined and criminalised in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

According to the convention, genocide is defined as the killing or harming of the members of a national, ethnic, religious or racial group with the intent to destroy the group in whole or in part. Harm can include mental harm, imposing difficult conditions on the group, preventing births, or forcibly removing children to another group.

As such, the definition of genocide can only be applied to actions against one of these four groups.

Lemkin had envisioned a broader definition but according to Mark Drumbl, professor at Washington and Lee University: “Political pressures during the negotiations of the genocide convention, notably between the United States, United Kingdom and Soviet Union narrowed the protected groups only to those four groups.”

As a result, some groups remain unprotected by the convention, including, for example, those who are killed and harmed with intent to destroy because of their gender, sexual identity or occupation.

According to Reed Brody, commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists who was instrumental in the prosecution of former Chadian President Hissene Habre among others, this does not mean that killing members of a group for their sexual orientation, for example, cannot be prosecuted as a crime against humanity. Yet, it cannot be prosecuted as genocide, which is also defined as an international crime in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/11/explainer-genocide-191112063045855.html

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