>http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/genocide.html
>GENOCIDE, WORLD ORDER, AND STATE FORMATION
I passed the article along to a friend of mine, not on the list, who offered this reply (and said I could forward it to the list). It is in two parts, a reaction to the abstract, and another reaction after he read the whole thing:
1)It's hard to tell exactly what the article is about just from the abstract, so I'll take a look at it when I get a chance. But I'll just say initially that as a tool in international law, genocide is used to deny claims of national sovereignty. that is, the UN generally has no jurisdiction to intervene in the "internal" affairs of sovereign nations. But with certain "crimes against humanity" such as genocide, claims of national sovereignty are dissolved, and as an asside, the normal immunity for heads of state is also lost. In fact, once a group commits genocide, an entity such as the US no longer needws UN sanction under international law to intervene -- so for example, arguably, to the extent that Serbia has committed the violations now asserted, it can no longer claim protection under doctrines of national sovereignty, because any foreign intervention is supported under international law. Likewise, that is why Serbian leaders can be (and have been) indicted as war criminals, and any country, including the US may claim juridiction.
The point here is that one of the reasons for developing genocide doctrines was precisely to defeat "nationalist" defenses against attempts to hold actors accountable in international forums. The article seems to want to turn that basis on its head, and I can't tell from the abstract exactly how that might work, unless the focus is on the way genocide law depends on notions of group identity that function like national identities (although they need not be).
Lastly, the concept of "cultural genocide," with which the article seems concerned, is far more controversial than is "traditional" genocide, and there is no consensus that the destruction of a culture, or the "mere" expulsion of a population, as opposed to the physical extermination of people, justifies the same sort of military or other response.
Anyway, you get no dispute from me if the argument is just that our actions in Serbia are ill-conceived, to say the least. But partially because I don't think that claims of national sovereignty ought to be very highly valued, at least in many contexts, I remain pretty content that national boundaries can't be used to secure immunity from intervention where those in power wish to murder large groups of people who happen to live within.
2)Ok, now I've read the entire article, and I disagree even more strongly than before, for the reasons I put in the previous e-mail, and too many additional ones to mention here. But here's one: It seems obviously wrong to me to argue that the notion of genocide is necessarily nationalistic simply because in the post-WWII period, some of the dispossessed groups in Europe used "propaganda" of genocide (such a notion of "propaganda" seems to just about ignore the fact that there WERE victims of a REAL genocide, and that this genocide was supported by the most fervent nationalism known to the twentieth century). Is opposition to slavery necessarily support of laissez-faire government simply because Republican abolitionists turned to absolutist free labor and contract ideology during Reconstruction? Is advocacy of non-violence nationalistic because Gandhi sought Indian independence?
It's one thing to mistake historical ideological links (the particular genesis of a discourse of freedom of contract and abolition, or nationalism and genocide, say) for necessary connections. But to turn around and argue that the victims of that genocide somehow deviously linked genocide (some of their own) nationalist ambitions after WWII, and that therefore to object to physical extermination without qualification today is to be nationalistic, is a most insulting form of revisionism, as well as being downright stupid.
As I said in the previous e-mail, the construct and category has worked far more to the detriment of unbridled nationalist ambitions than the reverse, and although of late may indigenous and separatist groups have attempted to extend the notion to things such as "cultural genocide," (the remaining victims of WWII didn't need to "reach" for such legalistic extensions of the idea), the traditional concept developed in the wake of the holocaust was at great pains not to make a viable national identity of the exterminated group the measure of its applicability. The central idea seems to me to be pretty sound, whatever its complex origins or commonsensical and uncritiqued status today: Constructs of national borders simply shouldn't create immunity from repercussions for acts of mass murder.
------------------------------------------------------------- Tavia Nyongo Turkish Doctoral Student American Studies Yale University
"I don't mind: Being called a Marxist-Leninist makes me feel young again. It's like being asked for ID in a bar." -- Mark Kingwell -------------------------------------------------------------