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ISTANBUL: Never Again To Genocide Trials

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  • ISTANBUL: Never Again To Genocide Trials

    NEVER AGAIN TO GENOCIDE TRIALS

    Today's Zaman
    July 31 2012
    Turkey

    HEIDELBERG -- Rarely does one read such hopeful news: In late June,
    the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
    acquitted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžic of genocide.

    That might sound like a bad thing: Karadžic, who once warned Bosnia's
    Muslims that war would lead them down the road to hell, surely deserves
    to be sentenced for the acts of which he was just acquitted -- murder,
    siege and slaughter almost beyond naming. But for genocide?

    Better not.

    In fact, we would be better off getting rid of genocide as a crime
    altogether. The legal concept of genocide is so incoherent, so harmful
    to the purposes that international law serves, that it would be better
    if we had never invented it. Karadžic's acquittal -- precisely because
    he is still on trial on other counts related to the same atrocities --
    is an opportunity to move toward the sensible goal of retiring it.

    This was not just any acquittal. The ICTY decided that, after a
    two-year trial, the prosecution had not presented enough evidence for
    any judge to find Karadžic guilty of genocide early in the Bosnian War
    (he faces a separate count for the July 1995 massacre at Srebrenica,
    and the prosecution is appealing the acquittal). The court has been
    consistent: With just a few trials left, it has issued no convictions
    for genocide apart from Srebrenica.

    The broader charge was always risky, but, for many advocates, it is
    an article of faith that genocide was Bosnia-wide. Still, the problem
    with genocide is not narrow judging, but that the crime itself is
    doubly irredeemable: It is defective in its definition and troubling
    in its moral and political effects.

    Genocide requires "special intent." A genocidaire must intend both to
    commit a defined crime and to destroy the victim's group. In domestic
    law, the motive behind a crime is usually irrelevant -- and for good
    reason. People have complex reasons for acting illegally. War -- a
    collective enterprise in which killing your enemies can be legal --
    increases that complexity.

    Trying to prove genocidal intent has drawn prosecutors into thickets
    of interpretation -- such as giving lessons on the history of Greater
    Serbia -- that distract from trials' forensic core and encourage their
    politicization, as defendants "hijack" proceedings with their own
    justificatory glosses. But the alternative -- relaxing evidentiary
    standards -- would undermine values such as legality and reasonable
    doubt, which are essential to a fair trial. Genocide's stringent
    requirements mean that it is -- and should be -- difficult to convict
    a defendant.

    That is consistent with our intuition that genocide is unique. But,
    while granting supreme status to the "crime of crimes" may seem
    morally attractive, the gravitational effect of genocide distorts
    international law and politics.

    Genocide makes other crimes seem less important. When Goran Jelisic
    -- a camp guard in Bosnia who called himself "the Serb Adolf" --
    was acquitted of genocide in 1999, one might have concluded from the
    prosecution's stunned reaction that Jelisic had walked free. In fact,
    he confessed to 31 other counts covering the same underlying acts,
    and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

    Likewise, reactions to the Karadžic decision show how inflated the
    perceived stakes are. Some say that acquitting him denies his victims'
    suffering -- as if only genocide mattered. But it is only because
    acknowledgement of suffering has become identified so dogmatically
    with one crime that anything else seems inadequate.

    The problem extends beyond Bosnia. Asking "Was it genocide?" does
    little to illuminate what was done to which Armenians by which
    Ottomans during World War I. Today, Turks willing to discuss or even
    apologize for the massacres refuse to confess to the "supreme crime,"
    but Armenians can accept no other label. Any group whose suffering
    is not called "genocide" feels like a second-class victim.

    This is morally perverse. It is not more wrong to kill people because
    of their ethnicity than it is to kill them because of their political
    beliefs, gender, or for the sheer pleasure of watching them die. Yet
    this is precisely what elevating genocide presupposes.

    The political cost is high. Genocide's status eases the pressure to
    intervene in crises that are "only murderous." Yet crying genocide too
    liberally quickly cheapens its value, entangling efforts to respond
    to ongoing exterminations in debates about their precise legal nature.

    Despite these problems, prosecuting genocide might be worthwhile if
    it were the only way to hold mass murderers accountable. But it is not.

    Buried beneath the headlines about Karadžic's acquittal are those
    other charges: He will be tried for the same acts, but classified as
    crimes against humanity and war crimes. If the prosecution produces
    enough evidence, Karadžic will be sentenced for the same shelling
    and sniping, the same killings and rape. All that will be lost is
    the opportunity to label those acts "genocide."

    This is the real reason to drop "the crime of crimes": its redundancy.

    There is no act of genocide that is not also another crime. Genocide
    is a crime of characterization, an interpretation. Rather than parse
    killers' motives, we better affirm our own values by denying that
    any reasons could ever justify such acts.

    Genocide is a socially meaningful way to describe a species of
    annihilation; it is the legal category that we must question. We need
    international crimes that are minimally characterized -- commonsensical
    analogues of domestic crimes -- with as little room for interpretation
    as possible. In court, we need not know why men slaughter to condemn
    them for it.

    So let us end genocide as we know it -- by stopping genocides, but
    also by abandoning the crime of genocide. Let us call its constituent
    evils by their ancient names. That will do for Karadžic, when judgment
    comes: He is still on trial, and we can still name his crimes.

    *Timothy William Waters , a professor at Indiana University Maurer
    School of Law and a Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for
    Comparative Public Law and International Law, worked at the ICTY on
    the trial of Slobodan Miloševic, on which he is editing a forthcoming
    book. © Project Syndicate 2012

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