Why we need to talk about genocide

 Menachem Rosensaft lives with ghosts. That’s perhaps not so surprising as one of them is his brother Benjamin. The latter was five and a half when the Nazis sent him to the gas chambers in Birkenau, along with his father and other family members. Ghosts have haunted the Renaissance-like writer, poet, human rights activist, and legal scholar, an adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School, instructor-in-law at Columbia Law School. In January 2017, President Obama reappointed Professor Rosenhaft to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, having previously been named to the Council by President Obama in 2010 and President Clinton in 1994 and 1999. He is also the author of a recently published volume of poetry,  Poems Born on Bergen-Belsen .

When I was researching my project on genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries, I was introduced to Professor Rosensaft. He was born in the Displaced Persons camp of Bergen-Belsen in 1948. The Holocaust may be more than seven decades in the past. However, in our discordant world, its horrors still resonate, especially as genocides continue, with ongoing politically-charged examples such as the Rohingyas in Myanmar, the Uighurs in China and the struggle to have the massacre at Srebrenica recognised as a genocide by the international community.

The last hundred years have distinguished themselves as some of the bloodiest in history. The genocide of the Namaqua and Herero people that began in 1904, perpetrated by the Germans in their former southwest African colony, Namibia, is now considered the first genocide of the previous century. American President Joe Biden finally acknowledged the Armenian Genocide in April 2021, precisely one hundred and six years after it began.

Professor Rosensaft has first-hand experience as the child of two remarkable Holocaust survivors. His mother, Ada Bimko, had studied dentistry at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Nancy in France before the war and practised as a dental surgeon in her home town of Sosnowiec, Poland. She and her family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in early August of 1943, along with five thousand others from the ghetto.

.”They are not working in Myanmar currently. “Diplomatic entreaties are not going to do it. Appealing to someone’s better nature isn’t going to do it, because no one who has an iota worth of decency is going to commit genocide.”

Committing genocide means committing a crime against humanity, but also against individual, flesh-and-blood human beings. It means that you are willing to go out there and start butchering men, women, children, infants, old people, sick people, neighbours — even friends. Menachem is soberly realistic: “There isn’t a person with an ounce of decency within them who does not believe that this is a criminal act. And if they do it anyway, then education is going to be useless. It’s a mistake to think that one can reason with people who are fanatics. If they’re out to kill you, you telling them, ‘No, this is wrong,’ isn’t going to work. On the other hand, the way to keep such killers in check is not to let them get to the point where they are allowed to run loose.”

But are we well-served by considering genocide as separate from crimes against humanity? Menachem believes the two legal concepts, which emerged and were developed during and after World War II, to be equally severe in nature. “What I am saying,” he says, “is that we are playing with legal definitions. To my mind, crimes against humanity are as heinous a category as genocide.” It’s an argument that has raged in the legal world since then. From a legal point of view, he says, it is simply not true that genocide is the greatest of all crimes. “Genocide is a crime that falls into a particular category. It doesn’t mean that if you have the mass killing of people who do not happen to fall into a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as defined by the Genocide Convention, that the crime is any less severe. That’s why we have to keep talking about genocide.