The First Law of Genocide
The first law of genocide is that it will be denied until it is too late, because its worst crimes will remain hidden from view, as even its strongest opponents lack the courage to face it.
It is almost a law of genocide that the worse it gets the more strongly it is denied. Hence, it should be no surprise that as Putin talks about wiping Ukraine off the map, while carrying out an endless series of war crimes aimed at achieving it, most foreign observers remain skeptical that he is committing genocide.
People deny that genocide is happening because the crimes involved in carrying it out are so unimaginable. Readers of the international press simply cannot imagine that Russian troops have been raping young children or that they have been deporting residents of Mariupol deep into the Russian interior, where they are forced to sign “contracts” obligating them to fixed terms of slavery.
So, they treat these sorts of stories as sensationalism, and journalists mute their descriptions so as not to appear hyperbolic.
The mind tends to sanitize such atrocities by downplaying their brutality and to seek explanations that would make them appear justified. Otherwise, the world appears too arbitrary and dangerous. For many this means turning away in denial, for others adopting the positions of the perpetrator. And for just about everyone it means isolating the worst offenses in an unconscious refusal to recognize the complete picture of genocide.
Most definitions of genocide focus on the effort to destroy a group of people through violent acts. For instance, the UN definition mentions imposing measures to prevent births, forcibly transfer children, and inflict conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group. Yet, what makes it genocide is not the specific acts, or even the wider pattern of abuses, but rather the effort to violently destroy the group, and this isn’t easy to assess.
Few criminals announce their crimes to the world, and most try to cover them up. Hence, most genocides are not recognized until they are nearly over.
It was not until the Srebrenica Massacre, when 8,000 men and boys were slaughtered over the course of a few days, that Serbian Chetnik attacks on Bosnia began to be recognized as a genocide in 1995. Yet, the international press corps had a front row seat at the action in Bosnia, watching from their hotel rooms as Serbian snipers picked off old people in the streets of Sarajevo.
Where the international press corps is absent, generations can go by with little recognition that a genocide has taken place.
Perhaps the quintessential case is that of the Holodomor in which 3.5 million Ukrainians were forcibly starved to death under Stalin in the early thirties. Ukrainians were starved in order to teach peasants a lesson after rebelling from Soviet collectivization, but only two western journalists were present to write about it, so it is barely known outside of Ukraine—even after the passage of generations.
The Armenian Genocide took place under similar circumstances and also took generations to receive the recognition it deserved. Yet, genocides taking place right under our noses sometimes go unrecognized as well. Between the perpetration of war crimes and their recognition as part of a genocide, there is often a lengthy lag time. Victims must to gather the courage to tell their stories, the stories have to be recorded, reports need to be compiled, their contents must to be absorbed, and decision makers have to be convinced of their salience. Then they must come together in official meetings where it is declared a genocide.
It takes time to face up to what’s taking place in a genocide, as each person arrives at the awful truth on their own.
Hence, it is essential that people like Amal Clooney, who recently arrived in Ukraine to document Russia’s pattern of abuses, do so quickly. But it is also important that they paint a compelling narrative of what’s happening. Otherwise, the experts are likely to take a minimalist approach, speaking only of those crimes that have been documented while failing to register the wider pattern of abuses.
Unfortunately, the worst war crimes are often the hardest to document, because they are often the most carefully cloaked. Journalists are also reluctant to smuggle themselves into dangerous crime scenes like Mariupol, where residents have been starved, frozen, bombed, and deported. In this way, the crimes committed in a genocide help shield the wider pattern of abuses from view by scaring reporters away from the crime scenes.
But where genocide is recognized, the world often mobilizes to stop it. We saw this in Bosnia, where Nato stopped a genocide in 1995, and we saw it again when Isis had trapped 30,000-40,000 Yezidis on a small mountain range in northern Iraq and were threatening to kill them if they did not convert to their religion in 2014. Within a matter of days, America’s President Obama coordinated strikes with the Kurdish PKK that stopped the genocide in its tracks.
The world mobilizes to stop genocide because it is “the ultimate crime against humanity,” which inspires all other crimes against humanity, including torture, mass rape, ethnic cleansing, familial separations, and, of course, mass murder. Genocide represents the inversion of the moral order where evil reins and all social relations are broken, and as a result its moral rot tends to spread, from perpetrators to victims, from one state to the next.
Perhaps people fear genocide so much because there is always a danger it will engulf the world.
Ukraine’s strategic location in Europe, and its role in halting Russian aggression, have made the atrocities it is suffering unusually visible to the world. Other peoples, like the Palestinians, whose identity is threatened though a generations-long effort to displace them from their homeland, while dividing them up into ever smaller ghettoes; or the Syrians, who Assad and Putin sought to portray as terrorists, as they obliterated their cities and tortured tens of thousands to death, have not had the same opportunity.
Putin’s effort to commit genocide in Ukraine has been obscured by the fierce resistance put up by Ukraine and the remarkable level of international support it has received. Yet, both his intent and tactics are genocidal. Now, Ukrainians need only make their case to a world in denial.
~ Theo Horesh, author of The Holocausts We All Deny