Recently, I spoke with a colleague about a proposal, made by students, that Duke University divest holdings in companies doing business in Sudan. The initiative is part of a international campaign to pressure the Sudanese government to, in the words of the Sudan Divestment Task Force, “end the genocide in Darfur.”
A large part of Sudan’s revenue comes from oil. Extraction would be impossible without the expertise of foreign companies like Petrochina, Petronas (based in Malaysia) and Khanom Electricity Generating Company Ltd., out of Thailand. There are among the multinationals the task force seeks to influence.
It’s important to note that only a few companies based in the United States can do direct business in Sudan; in 1997, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13067 designating Sudan a State Sponsor of Terrorism and heavily restricting trade.
The task force says that a “targeted” divestment strategy against the worst offenders is the way to go. By worst, they mean companies that fulfill three criteria: they contribute to government revenue or government sponsored projects, but impart minimal benefit to the country’s people and have demonstrated no substantial corporate commitment to including human rights considerations as a part of their policies is an important pro-human rights tool.
As it turns out, Duke is de facto disinvested, likely by chance rather than design. But as I spoke with my colleague, I realized that he – after admitting knowing little about Sudan or the issue, while professing a genuine admiration for and interest in the students’ request – saw divestment as a strategy appropriate for only the “worst” human rights violations. In his view, this meant genocide.
For the record, genocide is defined as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Once, the campaign to typify the crime of genocide was viewed as virtually a lost cause, championed mainly by a Polish Jew and lawyer named Rafael Lemkin. Dedicating his life to the recognition of the crime of genocide, Lemkin’s work was described by Michael Ignatieff “a counterintuitive leap of the imagination beyond the realm of what common sense deemed possible.”
After much cajoling, lobbying and convincing, Lemkin won his battle and saw the passage of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.
Without question, this was a good and necessary thing.
My colleague is not the only one who thought that genocide was special and, in the category of human rights violations, the worst one. In a recent class (I am teaching “Human Rights in the Americas”), a student referred to the Dirty War in Argentina as a genocide. It wasn’t — it was mass killings and forced disappearances matched with vicious politicial repression. But not genocide.
Yet today, the concept of “genocide” is invoked frequently, like a magic word meant to galvanize public opinion, motivate policy makers and convince the media to increase coverage. Other kinds of crimes against humanity — mass killings, the use of rape as a tool of war (the Congo), systematic political repression (Burma) — seem less compelling in the great wash of what we see and hear about genocide.
In part, this is fed by principled — but incautious — statements by anti-genocide activists. For instance, the Holocaust is called, by the US Holocaust Museum, the 20th century’s “greatest crime.” The numbers are certainly shocking. Over nine million people were killed – six million Jews and the rest Roma, political prisoners, gays and lesbians, the mentally ill and the physically handicapped. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.7 million people between 1975-1979, 21% of the country’s population. And in Rwanda, over one million people died in just 100 days in 1994. A quick and very unscientific calculus suggests that at least 930 people were killed each day during the Cambodian genocide. The Holocaust took at least 4,000 per day. Rwanda was both the shortest and most deadly recorded genocide, with a numbing 10,000 people slaughtered on average during the three months the killings lasted.
These numbers are spectacular – but was the Holocaust really the worst abuse of human life this century? Anne Applebaum’s excellent book, Gulag, makes the case that the Soviet terror has not received the same attention or study as the Holocaust, for diverse reasons. But that doesn’t mean that it was any less “terrible,” for the Soviet people, than the Nazis were for the Jews.
I would argue that creating such a privileged place for genocide is counterproductive. Were Stalin’s actions — crash programs of industrialization and collectivization in the 1930s, along with his decades-long campaigns of political repression – any less harmful, in the end, or any less spectacular in the cost to human life? Perhaps it is more difficult to make a spectacular case since the numbers are not available.
In a similar vein, a crime against humanity like apartheid, as practiced in South Africa, cost untold and largely uncounted lives. Victims include not only those who died, but the many more whose lives were permanently marred by an unfair system. These effects are still very visible today, as I learned during a summer trip to the country. Many South Africans told me and my colleagues that black citizens still receive a “Bantu” education, like they had under apartheid. This has tremendous, negative, and ongoing consequences.
So we should work to stop genocide – but not make it the only category of human rights violations that we really care about.