UN discusses prevention of genocide: Six times it failed to do just that
The United Nations General Assembly meets amid Israel's genocide on Gaza, Myanmar's genocide against the Rohingya, and other humanitarian crises. The United Nations General Assembly
The United Nations General Assembly meets amid Israel's genocide on Gaza, Myanmar's genocide against the Rohingya, and other humanitarian crises. The United Nations General Assembly is holding a plenary session on Monday to discuss nations’ responsibility to prevent genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. But the meeting on Monday at UN headquarters in New York comes amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the Rapid Support Forces’ and allied militias’ ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, and other humanitarian crises around the world, which many critics say the international community has done very little to address. While the UN meeting may result in protocols that countries need to follow to prevent future genocides, observers are sceptical that these will make much difference to victims on the ground. What is the UN’s definition of genocide, and which are some of the genocides the UN has ultimately failed to act on? Here, Al Jazeera takes a look. How does the UN define genocide? In 1944, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin used the term “genocide” for the first time in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The prefix of the word is “genos” and means “race” or “tribe” in Ancient Greek. The suffix “cide” is Latin and means “killing”. In 1946, the UN General Assembly recognised genocide as a crime for the first time. According to the world body, the term genocide was then “codified” as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or the Genocide Convention, which came into effect in 1951 and has been ratified by 196 countries. The UN’s Geneva Conventions define genocide as any act committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. This includes “killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”. Which are some of the genocides the world has failed to act on? Genocide in Rwanda In 1994, members of the majority Hutu ethnic group in Rwanda massacred an estimated 800,000 minority Tutsis, moderate Hutus and members of a third ethnic group, the Twa, in one of the darkest episodes in world history. A combination of colonial-era favouritism towards the Tutsis, which had angered other groups, a media landscape that was ripe for spreading hate, and the slowness of the international community to respond to the crisis all combined to fuel the genocide, which began in April 1994 and continued for 100 days. Before the genocide, the 1991 census counted the Tutsi population at 657,000, or 8.4 percent of the overall population, although some have alleged without proof that Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s government undercounted Tutsis to limit their access to education and other opportunities. Human Rights Watch estimated at least 500,000 Tutsis – 77 percent of their 1991 population – were killed. Global leaders were aware of the genocide, but did not intervene. For a long time, the UN actually avoided using the word “genocide” under pressure from the United States, which had been reluctant to send troops to Rwanda. UN chief Ban Ki-moon said on the 20th anniversary of the killings that the organisation was still “ashamed” of its failure to prevent the genocide. The UN did, however, establish the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in November 1994 in Arusha, Tanzania. The court has since tried several high-profile leaders of the massacres, including caretaker Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, who was handed a life sentence for inciting, aiding, abetting and failing to prevent genocide. He was also sentenced on two counts of crimes against humanity. The tribunal has convicted 61 people so far. Israel’s genocide in Gaza It has been more than 1,000 days since Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023, killing at least 73,066 Palestinian people in the enclave following the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel in which more than 1,100 people were killed.
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