Here's a sort of rhetorical reductio ad absurdam argument. If expulsion is genocide, then genocide was committed against 10,000,000 Germans expelled from Eastern Europe in 1945-46 -- an expulsion sanctioned and thereby encouraged by the powers that would soon become the core of NATO. Would anyone who applies that term to what's now happening in Kosovo feel comfortable saying that the Germans were just as much the victims as the perpetrators of genocide? I certainly am not. But I think it's an unavoidable equivalence under this usage. As soon as you say those two crimes are not the same, you are either saying they are not both genocide, or that there are different kinds of genocide -- which sounds to me a terrible idea. I think it's easy just to agree that expulsion is not genocide.
It is true that the Convention on Genocide defines genocide so broadly as to include expulsion and cultural eradication -- i.e., the forbidding of language use and the practice of religion -- as genocide. But this is wrong, and it illustrates what is wrong with a lot of international law. Since it was never imagined that it would ever be used for anything but moral suasion, it was written broadly, so it could be invoked often. If international law were real law in the way that federal law is real law -- involved in everyday adjudications over a long period of time by legimate institutions, and enforced by a legitimate government whose predominance over local government in key areas is acknowledged by the governed -- it would almost immediately have been drastically whittled down. Because defined as it is, almost all extant countries have been guilty of genocide at at least one time in their history, and there's no statute of limitations on it. So in action, this law would be an authorization of international lawlessness, an invitation for any country to invade any other, and for any country to kidnap the leaders of any other. Only its out of touchness with reality allowed it to ever been written this way.
One could argue that this broadness served a good purpose so long as it was used purely as moral suasion, as the invocation of a "higher" law, much as one might invoke God's law. But the convention was never subjected to the thought and examination a real law that people expected to be enforced would have gotten. And, unsurprisingly, it is extremely ill-suited to that purpose.
Therefore, central as it has been to the discourse, the Convention on Genocide should not be our touchstone as to what the word means if we want to preserve the idea that genocide is an ultimate crime that justifies intervention. I can understand why it seemed a good idea at the time to define the term broadly. But history is showing before our eyes why those good intentions were a mistake in germ form. It might well have been a mistake from the beginning that was unnoticed as long as it was unenforced. But now that the self-proclaimed enforcers have arrived, it seems clear that interpreting and enforcing the genocide convention by the means and institutions we are using at present is not the path towards legitimate world government, but rather the path away from it.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com