However, the piece has a fatal flaw: O'Neill fails to ever clearly define what genocide is. He admits that the Holocaust fits the bill, but he seems skeptical about what happened in Rwanda. Yet he never explains his skepticism beyond saying that
Consider how easily the genocide tag is attached to conflicts in Africa. Virtually every recent major African war has been labelled a genocide by outside observers. The Rwandan war of 1994 is now widely recognised as a genocide; many refer to the ongoing violence in Uganda as a genocide. In 2004 then US secretary of state Colin Powell declared, on the basis of a report by an American/British fact-finding expedition to Darfur: ‘We conclude that genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility.’ (4) (The UN, however, has not described Darfur as genocide.) Even smaller-scale African wars are discussed as potential genocides. So the spread of instability from Darfur into eastern Chad has led to UN handwringing about ‘genocide in Chad’. During the conflict in Liberia in 2003, commentators warned that ‘Liberia could be plunged into a Rwanda-style genocide’ (5).
The discussion of every war in Africa as a genocide or potential genocide shows that today’s genocide-mongering bears little relation to what is happening in conflict zones on the ground. There are great differences, not least in scale, between the wars in Rwanda, Darfur and Liberia; each of these conflicts has been driven by complex local grievances, very often exacerbated by Western intervention. That Western declarations of ‘genocide!’ are most often made in relation to Africa suggests that behind today’s genocide-mongering there lurks some nasty chauvinistic sentiments. At a time when it is unfashionable to talk about ‘the dark continent’ or ‘savage Africans’, the more acceptable ‘genocide’ tag gives the impression that Africa is peculiarly and sickly violent, and that it needs to be saved from itself by more enlightened forces from elsewhere. Importantly, if the UN judges that a genocide is occurring, then that can be used to justify military intervention into said genocide zone.
Hardly anyone talks openly about a global divide between the savage Third World and the enlightened West anymore. Yet today’s genocide-mongering has nurtured a new, apparently acceptable divide between the genocide-executers over there, and the genocide-saviours at home. This new global faultline over genocide is formalised in the international court system. In the Nineties, setting up tribunals to try war criminals or genocidaires became an important part of the West’s attempts to rehabilitate its moral authority around the globe. In 1993, the UN Security Council set up an international tribunal to try those accused of war crimes in the Former Yugoslavia. In 1997 the international war crimes tribunal for Rwanda got under way; there is also one for Sierra Leone. As Kirsten Sellars argues in The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, for all the claims of ‘international justice’, these tribunals are in reality ‘political weapons’ wielded by the West – attempts to imbue the post-Cold War West with a sense of moral purpose by contrasting it favourably with the barbarians in Eastern Europe and Africa (6).
In other words, because everything looks to us like it is or could be genocide, despite different causes and the fact that Western intervention may have exacerbated it, none of it can be called genocide. The other, more chilling possibility, is that large-scale tribal wars in Africa are inherently genocidal. In other words, if the conflict becomes severe enough, one side will try and exterminate the other. That is what happened in Rwanda, when the Hutu attempted to exterminate the Tutsis, but O'Neill at least implies that that is simply the way African tribes fight their wars and who are we to judge them, especially if Western involvement has made things worse? If they want to slaughter each other, let them. This is an interesting combination of multiculturalism and a sort of international libertarianism. Their ways are as legitimate as ours, and as long as we're not harmed by them killing each other, we have no right to intervene.
O'Neill's argument is actually rather clever in this regard. From the standpoint of a multiculturalist, it is unassailable. However, I am not a multiculturalist. Therefore, I can say that, at least on this count, the principles of the just war theory and the rules of war outlined in treaties like the Geneva Conventions provide a way of fighting war that is morally superior to the mass slaughter of civilians.* I have no problem making this assertion, and I am willing to defend it if need be.Still, O'Neill is right to point out that the term genocide is thrown about far too readily, mostly by the left (e.g. charges of the United States committing genocide in Iraq, or Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, though Pat Buchanan would also be comfortable leveling this charge). The problem with this is that, much like with the charge of racism, calling things genocide that don't even remotely look like genocide renders the term meaningless.
Webster's defines genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group. What happened in Rwanda was genocide. From what I can tell, the events in Darfur are genocide. Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad is threatening to wipe Israel off the map. That sure seems like a threat of genocide to me. Modern technology makes it relatively easy to travel great distances and kill many people in a short period of time. Thus, it becomes easier to commit genocide. The fact that the term is bandied about with little or no concern for anything beyond scoring a cheap political point should not blind us to the fact that there is a murderous side to human nature, and sometimes that murderousness manifests itself in social groups as an urge to eliminate a rival group. The Hutu wanted to eliminate the Tutsis. Ahmadinezhad wants to destroy the Jews, as did the Nazis. Shiites in Iraq were trying to destroy the Sunnis there until recently (they seem to have gone to ground for the moment). This is nothing new. What is new is man's ability to act on his hatred in such a far-reaching manner. This means that once the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away, any society is liable to commit genocide. In failed states such as those of Africa, the veneer of civilization is very thin indeed, and the threat of barbarism is that much higher.
The fact that the word genocide is thrown about too readily should not blind us to the fact that it is still more than a rhetorical and political weapon, a way for Western nations and designated victim groups to gain the moral high ground. After all, if Muslim unrest continues to grow in Europe at the rate it has, various European nations might seek to implement a genocide of their own.
*Granted, Western nations do not always fulfill their obligations as laid out by the just war theory and the laws of war, but the West has striven over the past several centuries, especially as wars grew larger and technology more deadly, to construct a framework to constrain the effects of war, to make it more civilized.
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