>> On David Chandler, btw, one of the blurbers below see,
>> http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/cambear2.htm
>> http://www-mcnair.berkeley.edu/uga/osl/mcnair/Sophal_Ear_canon.html
>>
>>
> Come to think of it, this book looks pretty dumb. Pol Pot killed a hell of a
> lot of people, but to accuse him of "genocide" implies he wanted to wipe out
> every single Cambodian, including himself. Bruital ethnic war and ethnic
> cleansing like in the former Yugoslavia is not genocide either. Nor are the
> various bloody ethnic deportations of Stalin examples of genocide.
(Sorry for the long post.)
I disagree. I think we should reserve 'genocide' for the extermination or attempted extermination of a 'gens' - a geographical-cultural unit - and use 'holocaust' for a relatively successful or large scale genocide, or a very large scale mass killing (if you don't accept there is a crime of genocide in the technical sense). I think that is the clearest use of the words, and is the one closer to international law and also the least corrupted by political emotions.
(I would note, in passing, that 'a people' is partly a self-nominated category, so it's not entirely up to us to decide what is and is not genocide.)
In my view, ethnic cleansing is genocidal, as is ethnic deportation and self-inflicted genocide. Who does it and with what ideology is of marginal importance, so long as the acts are intended to destroy 'a people.' Uprooting them and destroying their houses with the intention to wipe out an ethnicity from a geographical area is genocide, as is the sort of policy that Canada and Australia pursued until very recently, that of deliberately removing children from their mothers so as to cause the end of a culture. That's genocide, even though very few people died.
The comment that removing Chechens to somewhere far, far away was not genocide as they were not to be killed is, I think, a little callous. The assumption is that Chechens could continue to live as Chechens after being transported to a completely different environment, after they lost all kinds of connections to place and each other, and had 25% of their number wiped out. If that's not genocide, then what is it? Administrative error? That it was carried out to stop them from allying with Hitler is not really a mitigating factor. Indeed, that is a justification that seems to strengthen the case that Stalin was in fact attempting genocide, the rationale for this being that the Chechen society had become 'enemy.'
A holocaust, on the other hand, is something that depends on scale or success. Pol Pot comes pretty close, Stalin less so, but the Yugoslav example isn't nearly there, and the Australian and Canadian record depends on relativising to scale. We didn't kill eleven million, but we did succeed where Hitler didn't: we actually exterminated some cultures (though there are still people descendent from them, eg. in Tasmania, they no longer have their language.)
You say that banning a language is clearly not genocide. Well, I think that is a very disturbing view. It is not too different from saying that the crusaders were not genocidal because they offered people the option of converting to Christianity. In my opinion, if the crime of genocide recognises that forcing people to abandon something as crusty as religion is genocide, and it does, so is forcing them to abandon their language. The experience of the peoples I have studied in Australia and Papua is that forcing the abandonment of language is extremely traumatic and is in fact intimately connected with the destruction of the rest of their way of life. There is a good reason why the Turks, Indonesians, Australians, Americans, Canadians, the English, the Spanish, Portuguese, the Brazilians, Nazis and every one else who ever tried to wipe out a people set out to suppress language.
You could, of course, argue that cultural-geographical units (and languages) do not have rights to continued existence, or more accurately, that people do not have a right to a cultural-geographical unit or language; or if there is such a right it is abrogated if the unit becomes reactionary or whatever. Far more plausibly, you could argue that the legal sense of genocide is based on assumptions that are very conservative and seem to give rights to tradition and 'way of life' - that is ok in my book, so long as the criticism is of the jurisprudence - ie. so long as it is not an attempt to exonerate. But it would be better to make such cases explicitly than to simply muddy the waters by inventing yet more new technical senses of 'genocide'...
Thiago Oppermann