Worksheet for Describing and Categorizing a Genocidal Event: A New Tool for Assembling More Objective Data and Classifying Events of Mass Killing
Abstract
:1. A New Tool and Sequence for Research
- (1)
- This model presents researchers with a tool and methodology for developing more systematic, extensive and objective information about many different aspects of an event of mass killing. As far as we know, it provides the first ever systematic worksheet for assembling a wide variety of empirical data about how any given event of genocidal mass killing developed and unfolded and its outcomes. There have been some attempts at complex scoring systems, but these would seem to require a team of researchers and computer-generated reports while the present proposal is intended as an everyday working tool for narrative recording and assembling of information even and primarily by a single researcher. Of course, the researcher’s assembly of information subsequently can also be submitted to more complex coding and computerizations.
- (2)
- Second, emphasis is placed on identifying the researcher (analyst) who is recording and assembling the data, and on identifying each researcher’s guiding concept of genocide. It is to be understood that even assembling data that are as objective as possible takes place in a specific context of each researcher’s professional identity and guiding conceptualizations.
- (3)
- Third, the proposed methodology purposely postpones any effort at classification or categorization of an event—whether as constituting “genocide” or not, and whether the mass killings qualify as “intentional genocide,” “crimes against humanity,” or any of the several other names that have been proposed for describing mass murders. Categorizing is postponed until after factual data about the event have been assembled. What happens too often today is that major energies are poured into the categorizations and even the collection of data about the event falls by the wayside, especially if the event is assigned to whichever kind of “unimportant” or “less important” or a type of mass killing that does not qualify as “genocide.”
- (4)
- Now following the collection of actual information about the event—one proceeds to a process of categorization of an event of mass killing—categorization is to be understood as an act of judgment by each researcher, and not as scientifically established truths. Even in the case of legal ruling (e.g., the International Criminal Court ruling that genocide was committed in the slaughter at Srebrenica but that Serbia is not to be accused of genocide)2 is to be understood that judgments are based on the attitudes and philosophy of the persons doing the categorization.
- (5)
- It is also to be understood that classification by a researcher in the language of social sciences is different than efforts at a legal classification. The legal classifications in turn are also to be understood as based on existing codes of law that are formulated differently in the legal codes of different countries and in the international legal system, and also that like all laws, may well see future changes.
2. Defining Genocide and the Obstacles of Definitionalism
“The one-sidedness of genocide is a central issue for another pioneer, Israel Charny, who fought hard to raise the question of genocide at a time when it was not seen by many as a major problem. His acute awareness of the vulnerability of victims lies at the heart of his own redefinition of genocide…Charny’s emphasis in this definition on the weakness and vulnerability of victim groups is very important, particularly when it comes to thinking about what is to be done to help victims.”([9], pp. 21, 27)
3. The Knowledge That Even Data Collection Is Influenced by a Researcher’s Subjectivity
3.1. How Many Victims Were Killed?
3.2. Which Victim Group Was Targeted?
3.3. What Were the Means of Committing the Genocide?
4. Replacing Definitionalism with Solid, Factual Data Collection
5. Part 1 of the Worksheet
5.1. Genocidal Intention (Objective)
5.2. Targeted Victim Group
5.3. Means of Genocide
- Direct face-to-face execution by hand or other contact weapons, e.g., like hacking and execution by machete in the Rwandan Genocide, or in our time decapitations by ISIS (ISIL).
- Death camps, concentration camps, gulags, labor camps, and prisons.
- Forced marches, forced deportations or “transfer” of populations; induced famine, e.g., the Ukranian Genocide, and according to emerging reports quite possibly today in North Korea.
- Medical killing, such as the murderous series of experiments carried out both by Dr. Mengele in the Holocaust, and by Dr. Ishii in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.
- Plain old’ mass killings, but here too the means of killing vary considerably and need to be specified, e.g., the airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11; or in the Holocaust mass graves, and increased efficiency crematoria—which in turn facilitate mass killing; the infamous gas chambers in the Holocaust (there are also reports these years of a gas chamber operating in North Korea); the directly cruel mutilation and killing face to face with machetes in the Rwandan Genocide.
- Bombing of civilians as a means of genocide, whether intended as genocide or resulting from “facts on the ground” of saturation bombing in which huge numbers of civilians are killed—thus see the controversy about whether the Allied bombing of Dresden constituted genocide [16]; or the more recent controversies about Israeli conduct of the Gaza War in 2014 in the face of Hamas’ use of civilians and their homes for launching missiles [17,18].9
- The relatively new curse of our time of transnational genocidal terrorism—terrorist attacks with bombs exploding in civilian areas, markets, churches, hospitals, cemeteries, weddings—in effect everywhere; and much of it in a crazy proliferation (all over the world) of suicide bombings where the killers do not try to protect their own lives.
- Looking to dread future possibilities of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)—what may lie ahead in respect of weapons of mass destruction of nuclear, chemical, biologic or other futuristic weapons.
5.4. Context—Organizing Theme and Inspiration Imagoes
- Religious Supremacy;
- Ethnocentric Superiority;
- Battles for Ideological Purity, Supremacy or Domination;
- Economic System Superiority;
- Wartime Crimes against Humanity (1)—Genocide in the course of a war that in plain old-fashioned ways is intended to expand or dominate—and thereby is generally defined in the concepts of the Catholic philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, as an Unjust War;
- Wartime Crimes against Humanity (2)—Genocidal killing in the course of what is defined as a Just War of legitimate self-defense, where the people fighting for their lives go on to massacre enemy civilians in whatever number of genocidal events—thus, Israel’s War of Independence was clearly fought in self-defense against intended destruction of its people, but there were also several callous genocidal massacres of civilians and several bursts of formulations of genocidal policy in a number of areas and events [21,22,23];10
- Genocidal Terrorism;
- Genocidal Killings that Accompany Colonization;
- Globalization—Genocidal acts resulting from relentless exploitation of resources and major industrial development at the expense of the lives of a local population;
- Consolidation of Power “Ecological Genocide”—large-scale manslaughter by ignoring and overriding safety concerns;
- Revolution, Revenge and Attribution—the delight of revenge against people who in the past committed genocide against one’s people and therefore “deserve retribution”; similarly executions of “counterrevolutionaries” and “enemies of the state”: harsh murderous campaigns sponsored by a governing regime against people in its own society who are identified, rightly or wrongly, as enemies of the state, and a passion of genocidal persecution expands against them; or genocide that is committed “mutually” back and forth between two perpetrators; as well as genocide of a current perpetrator by a victim group [24];11
- Youth Bulge—It has been pointed out by any number of scholars that there is an increasing bulge of a population of unemployed youth and that this is a prime population for recruiting killers [26];
- Genocidal Killing for the Sake of Killing—there are still other existing or emergent themes and inspirations for genocide. Is it possible the killing impulse is instinctive or a natural substrate in the human mind? Much genocidal killing clearly manifests as “killing for killing’s sake.” The desire and readiness to destroy other living beings is resonant within human beings and may be one of our instinctive systems of thinking and behavior in the basic machinery with which we humans are endowed [29].13
5.5. Identity of Perpetrator
5.6. Outcome
5.7. Responses to the Genocide
5.8. Other Important Characteristics of the Genocidal Event
6. Part 2 of the Worksheet
6.1. Value Judgments of Whether an Event Is Genocide or Another Related Crime
6.2. Identifying the Biases of Researchers
7. Conclusions
Supplementary Materials
Conflicts of Interest
Appendix A
- Crimes against Humanity (1D—see also 9D and 10D): The first prosecution for crimes against humanity took place at the Nuremberg Trials. Sadat, Leila Nadya [91]
- Humanicide (1E): The term humanicide appears for the first time to our knowledge in [92] Drost, Pieter N. in 1959. Drost’s book is the earliest work we know of in the English language after the seminal work of Raphael Lemkin [93] and before the first three pioneering works in English in the United States by Horowitz [94], Kuper [49], and Charny [95] that are known to have set the stage for the development of genocide studies. The word humanicide is then used occasionally by a few researchers, e.g., see [96] Sheleff, Leon Shaskolsky. See also a clear article advancing the basic concept of humanicide but does not employ the word: McFarland, Sam; Brown, Derek; and Webb, Matthew [32]
- Highly Violent Societies (1E): Gerlach, Christian [97]
- Mass Killing (1E): Valentino, Benjamin [98]
- Ethnic Cleansing (1E): Naimark, Norman N. [14]
- Genocide by Attrition (1G): Fein, Helen [101]
- Ecological Destruction = Ecocide (1G): Charny, Israel W., (Section “Genocide as a Result of Ecological Destruction and Abuse” in Chapter “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide” [1], p. 65).
- Religious Genocide (1H): The concept of genocide on the basis of religious identity is a “given” in the formulation of the concept of genocide as created by Raphael Lemkin [93]. In a sense almost all of the literature of genocide studies refers to religious genocide. Two excellent specific references are the seminal work of Leo Kuper [49] and the comprehensive overview of genocide by Philip Spencer [9]
- Political Genocide or Politicide (1H): Harff, Barbara, and Gurr, Ted Robert [102]
- Genocide for Power and Domination (1H): Horowitz, Irving Louis [94]
- Cultural Genocide (1J): This concept appears in the classic work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe by [93] Raphael Lemkin, and he is generally credited with its prominent inclusion in the [97] United Nations Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide [106]. However, Lemkin also left a rich legacy of unpublished work (in his archives one finds one after another rejection by publishers who say his work is very interesting but will not have a market!). The first scholar that I know of who devoted himself to retrieving Lemkin’s writings was Steven L. Jacobs [107,108]. See also Frieze, Donna-Lee [109]
- Gender (2E): Jones, Adam [110]
- Enemy Civilians in War (2G): Markusen, Eric, and Kopf, David [16]
- Weapons of Mass Destruction: Nuclear, Biological, Chemical, Other Futuristic Weapons (3I): Santoni, Ronald E. [112]; Lifton, Robert J., and Markusen, Eric [113]; Leslie, John [114]; Rees, Martin [115]; United Nations. Weapons of mass destruction. First Committee 2013 civil society presentations [116]
- Preventing Births (3J): Fournet, Caroline [119]
- Planetocide (3J): To the best of my knowledge this concept—which is obviously bread and butter in the burgeoning science fiction of star wars—has been introduced in the formal academic literature by this author in a satire [120]. For a related satire on varying types of genocide, see editorial column by Harut Sassounian in California Courier, 21 April 1988 [121].
- Dehumanization and Demonization (4A): Charny, Israel W.; Stanton, Gregory [95,103]. The basic reference to a very useful summary of the stages of genocide has been Stanton, Gregory which refers to eight stages of genocide [78]. See also Stanton, Gregory [124]. More recently Stanton [125] (no date given) has elaborated the model into ten stages of genocide
- Revolutionaries (5D): Melson, Robert [126]
- Crimes against Humanity (1D,9D,10D): This category is seen very differently by different scholars. Some place crimes against humanity as a separate category that is to bear a somewhat lesser degree of responsibility than the categories of “genocide.” Others consider crimes against humanity a subset or type of genocide and use the category for massive terror and injury to broad populations. The latter can include actual killing but the killing is done differently than intentional genocidal targeting a specific victim people (so that in some case there can be charges against a perpetrator both of genocide and crimes against humanity). Still other scholars want to get rid of the term genocide altogether and work entirely within the concept of crimes against humanity or with some other concept they propose. One sensitive scholar has pointed out that victim peoples inevitably will insist that the event that befell them be known as “genocide” and only as genocide.
- For this writer, the critical issue in any and all mass killing of unarmed civilians is that the lives of human beings were terminated, and therefore I advance the concept that all mass killing of unarmed civilians be defined first of all as genocide, and then sub-classified further into meaningful categories or types. In this way the everyday usage of “genocide” is respected and our need to identify and differentiate different types of genocidal mass killing is also fulfilled. Charny, Israel W. [6]
- Attempted Genocide (10E): Michael Bazyler, a professor of law, points out that although attempted genocide is indeed “on the books,” there has never been any legal action based on it. Personal Communication [127].
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- 1The actual Worksheet for Describing and Categorizing a Genocidal Event will be available for use as a supplementary document of this paper. It can be found at www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/5/3/31/s1.
- 2See the later discussion of this ruling by the International Criminal Court of Justice on the genocidal massacre at Srebrenica.
- 3It may be of interest to genocide scholars that this was originally the talk that I gave at the “First Raphael Lemkin Seminar on Genocide” at Yale University in February 1991, that was referred to in Reference [1]. The symbolism of honoring the heroic founder of genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin, as well as the meaning of holding a seminar at the prestigious law school and university at which Lemkin taught when he first came to the U.S. touched me so deeply that, with my wife’s agreement, I flew from Israel to the U.S. despite the fact that at the time we were in the throes of the Gulf War and missiles were being fired daily on Israel. Only Israel’s national airline, El Al, was flying at the time, and the flights to and from the U.S. also were emotionally charged with an extra sense of danger. But I felt the Symposium marked a breakthrough event in the development of genocide scholarship. Includes a section, “A Proposed Definitional Matrix for Crimes of Genocide” ([1], pp. 7–9).
- 5“It is time to match Feinian rigour with a more Charnyian range. In short, if we are to tackle genocide’s root causes—as scholars and human beings—we are going to have to struggle and campaign for prevention in terms of a much more holistic antidote than we have so far dared to contemplate…While I do not accept Israel Charny’s definitional ultra-inclusivism in matters of genocide, I recognize that there is an underlying humanitarian principle in his work which is in need of scholarly recognition and development.”—Mark Levene [8].
- 6In my opinion this statement by Philip Spencer in Genocide Since 1945 [9] is the simplest and most comprehensive definition of genocide and identifies all of the components that go into evaluations and does not get stuck in any individual component.
- 7By now there are thousands of news reports. See a New York Times report from as early as 2012 by an unnamed employee of the New York Times in Syria and Damian Cave, 27 August 2012 [11]. See [12]. Genocide Alert also issued an emergency alert for Syria. GPN Genocide Prevention Now called Syria an “Incremental Genocide” and tracked the mounting figures from issue to issue. Nonetheless, amazingly here too, in the first years of the Syrian genocidal horror, otherwise fine scholars were embroiled in disputes as to whether a definition of “genocide” was called for, or was it a plain old “revolution” or “civil war” as if in these conditions mass killings a priori define a lesser crime than genocide. One prominent leader in the field denied emphatically on the listserv of the International Association for Genocide Scholars that genocide was unfolding while adding the only real danger of genocide in the Middle East was from Israel (!).
- 8Personally, I very much view ethnic cleansing as one of the many or multiple forms of genocide, and thereby do not at all minimize its deadly significance as genocide. The purpose of identifying the specific subcategory of a genocide is to convey more meaningfully how the specific genocidal mass murder was carried out since there are many different scenarios for committing genocide. Helpless civilians are dead and we have no right to leave them without a name that clearly protests the genocide that killed them. The Worksheet calls first of all for accurate facts. It is only in the second part of the Worksheet that each researcher is to choose conceptual labels, and these are not to affect the assembly of data which are to continue as an event of mass killing continues and as further information becomes available.
- 9The NGO Monitor (29 June 2015) advances a strong counter thesis by military/legal and Middle East experts. In the words of Major-General Mike Jones, Former Chief of Staff, U.S. Central Command: “While it is positive that the UN’s Gaza report acknowledged that all combatants are required to abide by the law, and that Hamas’ and other groups’ indiscriminate rocket fire at Israel was unlawful, it is disappointing that the report fails to condemn these groups for unlawfully failing to distinguish themselves as combatants, as well as purposefully co-locating amongst civilians, knowingly placing them at risk, with absolutely no military necessity to do so.” [18].
- 10There have been people, including prominent genocide scholars, who have charged the newly founded State of Israel with genocide for killing Arabs during the War of Independence. There is no doubt about a number of such events—thus see the works of Benny Morris [21,22,23]. The question is how to interpret these events—inexcusable but common crimes in the course of war, or a basic indictment of Zionism and Israel. Thus see the debate that erupted with Martin Shaw of Roehampton University in London in the report by Beckerman, Gal [25].
- 11Nicholas Robins was perhaps the first scholar to conceptualize forthrightly the idea that a people who have been victims of a genocide can themselves become the perpetrating genociders.
- 12The shocking almost unbelievable example of utopian thinking—and an explicit call to kill those who stand in the way of the better society—was discovered posthumously in the writings of no less than Abraham Maslow, the beloved founder of humanistic psychology!
- 13Thomas Friedman [23] explains evil in a “comic book type conversation” between Batman and his helper. In a brilliant op-ed in the New York Times, Friedman created a fictional parable where the archetypal fictional hero Batman is discussing the source and motivation of evil. “He thought it was good sport. Because some men aren’t looking for anything logical like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
- 14Athanase Seromba is a Rwandan priest who was found guilty of aiding and abetting genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the Rwandan genocide. Seromba, a priest of a Catholic parish at Nyange. He was charged with the deaths of around 2000 Tutsis who took refuge in his parish church. Seromba surrendered himself to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on 6 February 2002.
- 15A promising program for reaching the mid-level diplomats of many countries was created by the late Fred Schwarz under a rubric of an Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation [40]. Diplomats are invited to gather at the Institute’s site immediately adjacent to Auschwitz-Birkenau (!) where they participate in a several day seminar aiming at heightening their awareness that they may be able to save human lives if they recognize persecutory genocidal processes in time and make good moral choices about their roles.
- 16R. J. Rummel passed away in 2014. He is considered by many genocide scholars to have developed the outstanding empirical research of genocide to date.
- 17In 2006, the UN Security Council passed a landmark resolution obligating governments to protect human life (UN Security Council Resolution 1674). This major development known as the “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P was a legislative initiative spearheaded by former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans working alongside Mohamed Sahnoun, a Muslim who was a Special Advisor to the Director-General of the United Nations. Kofi Anan, the former Secretary-General of the UN, and the current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon also joined the initiative as staunch supporters. See [63,64].The resolution is revolutionary because the long prevailing principle dominating international law negates the rights of states to interfere with any decisions of other sovereign states. The meaning of R2P is that the principle of state sovereignty is no longer absolute, but regrettably notwithstanding considerable intellectual excitement about the new concept, there is still little evidence of its application in the realpolitik of life, and some observers offer the opinion that the concept will fade away.
- 18NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999 is considered by many a transformational event which showed that genocide could be prevented. At this writing an international coalition led by the U.S. was created as a military deterrent to the fundamentalist Muslim ISIS, a group whose avowed intention is to create an extended “Caliphate” state that has been rampant with genocidal actions in areas it conquered.
- 19Yair Auron of the Open University of Israel has been researching the subject of righteous Muslims. In his forthcoming book he deals with a Circassian-Muslim village in the Caucasus Mountains in 1942 where the villagers saved 32 young children in the Nazi siege of Leningrad [65]. Auron also reports that he has been to Rwanda to interview Hutu-Muslims who saved Tutsis, both Muslim and not Muslim alike. He adds that he is now gathering material about Turks who saved Armenians during the Armenian Genocide. He is also studying the cases of Palestinians who saved Jews during the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as well as cases where Jews saved Palestinians. Auron also reports that in the village in which he lives in Israel, which is named “Oasis of Peace” and is the only joint Palestinian-Jewish community in Israel, they have recently opened a “Garden of the Righteous Worldwide.”
- 20On 26 February 2007, the International Court of Justice issued its judgment in Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro. The case was the first time a country sued another country for a breach of the U.N. Genocide Convention. The judgment was complex and lengthy and in the opinion of many of us absurd. The court concluded that Serbia had violated its obligations under the Convention by failing to prevent the genocide of over 7000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995. At the same time the Court ruled that Serbia was not the perpetrator directly responsible for the genocide.
- 21The proposal for a Genocide Early Warning System (GEWS) was originally formulated by Israel Charny and was developed in collaboration with Chanan Rapaport. The first publication, jointly authored, appeared in 1977. Although several pilot studies were run, the GEWS never secured sufficient funding to be activated. However, the theoretical model of GEWS has also been applied to the reconstruction of other genocides including Astourian [75] on the Armenian Genocide, De Champs and De Champs [76] on the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, and Paulino [77] on a threat of genocide in the Dominican Republic.The Genocide Early Warning System was hailed by Willie Brandt of Germany, Pierre Mendes-France of France, and by Roberta Cohen, Human Rights Officer of the US Department of State. It was described in Choice, a library review magazine, as “brilliant,” and in the New York Times Book Review as a “noteworthy contribution to thinking about the condition of humanity on the earth”; and it was recognized by a United Nations study on genocide which stated: “Many welcome the establishment of early warning systems for potential genocide situations in order to prevent recurrence of the crime. Intelligent identification of potential cases could be based on the databank of continuously updated information, which might enable remedial, deterrent overt measures to be planned ahead. Reliable information is the essential oxygen for human rights: this could be facilitated by the development of the United Nations satellite communications network.” (A United Nations pamphlet that is currently unavailable to us).
- 22There are important and complex data systems for predicting genocide and political violence. However, these require systematic coding and more than likely a team of researchers. Thus, Ulfelder, Jay, and Valentino, Benjamin [81]; Ulfelder, Jay [82]; Uppsala Conflict Data Program, at Uppsala University in Sweden records ongoing violent conflicts since the 1970s [89].The present Worksheet is for everyday use, including by individual researchers, to record the known facts of a past or ongoing genocidal event. As far as I can see none of the data sets about political violence are tailored to create a “case history” of a genocidal event. See Ulfelder’s essay above in which he bemoans wryly that his almost no one is using his data set on political violence [82].
© 2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Charny, I.W. Worksheet for Describing and Categorizing a Genocidal Event: A New Tool for Assembling More Objective Data and Classifying Events of Mass Killing. Soc. Sci. 2016, 5, 31. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci5030031
Charny IW. Worksheet for Describing and Categorizing a Genocidal Event: A New Tool for Assembling More Objective Data and Classifying Events of Mass Killing. Social Sciences. 2016; 5(3):31. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci5030031
Chicago/Turabian StyleCharny, Israel W. 2016. "Worksheet for Describing and Categorizing a Genocidal Event: A New Tool for Assembling More Objective Data and Classifying Events of Mass Killing" Social Sciences 5, no. 3: 31. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci5030031