The accurate definition of genocide has come under scrutiny ever since the International Court of Justice accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza in its response to the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas terrorists, which claimed the lives of 1,200 Israeli civilians and foreign nationals in communities in southern Israel, and participants in the Supernova music festival.
The term, coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in the wake of the Holocaust, was defined as any attempt to destroy a group, in whole or in part, based on its national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity.
The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention not only criminalizes genocide, it also obligates state parties to pursue its enforcement. The convention was adopted in response to the Holocaust as the archetypal genocide. In recent decades there has been an expansion of the term to include a number of atrocities, well beyond the original genocide convention.
This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in some post-communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Lithuania, in particular has taken the lead in “widening” use of the term “genocide” to include Stalinist deportations and repressions.
Often, these claims came with inflated numbers of victims. These cases are too many to mention. One such “victim inflation” was the plaques initially placed in Auschwitz, when Poland was under a Communist regime, which claimed that 4 million persons had been murdered in the camp. After Poland transitioned to a democracy, however, a team of expert historians revealed that the accurate number of victims was 1.3 million, among them 1.1 million Jews.
Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko cited a tally of 10 million victims of the government-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 – known as the “Holodomor” – calling it, in the superlative, “the greatest genocide.”
This is not just a matter of nomenclature, and not just about Lithuania. Over the past three decades, legislative assemblies across Europe have designated several atrocities as genocide. In 1994, Germany criminalized the “belittling, denying, relativizing… acts committed under National Socialist rule.”
In subsequent years, other EU member states followed suit. In 2008, the EU adopted a “Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia by means of Criminal Law, which meant that member states must make condoning, denying, and grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes a criminal offense.” This scope soon expanded to criminalize denial of “other internationally recognized crimes” as well.
Definition of genocide becomes legislated
As a result, numerous laws now define how we should interpret historical atrocities. France, for example, recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide. The above-mentioned Lithuanian definition of genocide has been “widened” to include Stalinist deportations to Siberia and population transfers following World War II.
In 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament recognized the 1932-1933 Soviet-engineered famine as a Ukrainian genocide, though the brutal Stalinist policies were aimed against economic and social groups (small farmers) and had devastating effects on many ethnic groups in several areas of the USSR.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, and the European Parliament officially recognized that the Holodomor famine constituted a genocide.
Such memory regulations do not take into consideration that the historiography remains sharply divided as to the genocidal narration of the famine, and that many authoritative historians on the famine do not endorse the genocide thesis.In some cases, inflated numbers have entered the official declarations of recognition, causing confusion rather than understanding. The current efforts also open up potential legal liabilities to those disputing the now-official narrative of the famine as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians. These regulations risk hampering, rather than stimulating, critical inquiry into genocide.
Nor do they provide a consistent approach to what constitutes genocide. For instance, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre is classified as a genocide by all EU-member states. The 20,000-25,000 Muslims there should have been protected by Dutch UN forces, but were abandoned to Serb forces. More than 8,000 males of combat age were murdered; women, children, and the elderly were released.
This crime against humanity is interchangeably referred to a genocide and an act of ethnic cleansing. The EU regulations, and national memory laws in member countries, affirm the genocidal narration.
However, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has not been universally recognized as such. Approximately 700,000 Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were slaughtered by radical Hutus intent on murdering the entire Tutsi population in Rwanda.
For some reason, which is difficult to identify, the United States refuses to recognize the mass murder of the Rwandan Tutsis as a case of genocide. One possible explanation is that the American refusal to send troops, or to encourage the United Nations to do so, remains highly problematic in light of the results of their failure to try and stop the mass murders.
Ukraine does not recognize the 1915 massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide; its foreign ministry actively opposes campaigns to recognize the event as such.
The three I's
We suggest that every tragedy that might be classified as genocide be tested by the three I’s: intent, implementation, and implications.
The intent, in such cases, is to deliberately murder a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group.
Implementation reflects the goal of the perpetrators, the scope of the murders, the cruelty of the perpetrators, and the inability of those targeted to survive.
Implication refers to the degree of damage inflicted on the victims, and what possibility they have to survive/recover.Justice and historical understanding can only succeed if the historical inquiry into past tragedies is open, free from ideologically imposed censorship.
Per Anders Rudling is an associate professor of history and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History, Lund University, Sweden. Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff has an MA and PhD in Holocaust Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For the last four decades, he has played an important role in bringing Nazi criminals to justice as the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.