Genocide denial

Genocide denial is an attempt to deny or minimize statements of the scale and severity of an incidence of genocide. Some of the better-known examples are Holocaust denial, the Armenian Genocide denial and the Bosnian Genocide denial.

Where there is near universal agreement that a genocide occurred, genocide denial is usually considered a form of illegitimate historical revisionism. However, in circumstances where the event in dispute is not seen to constitute genocide by the facts, the use of the term may be an ad hominem by those who argue that a genocide occurred.

The extremely serious nature of the crime of genocide, along with the terrible reputation it creates, and potential repercussions that may come against a nation as a result of committing it, ensures that whenever genocide is charged, there will be parties that attempt to avoid or divert blame.^[1] However Larissa van den Herik has pointed out there is a gap in international law that encourages the use of the charge of genocide when other charges might be more appropriate "The only way for Bosnia to go to the ICJ was to allege genocide. There is no Crimes against Humanity Convention providing for jurisdiction for the ICJ"^[1]

The European Commission proposed a European Union–wide anti-racism law in 2001, which included an offense of genocide denial, but European Union states failed to agree on the balance between prohibiting racism and freedom of expression. After six years of wrangling a watered down compromise was reached in 2007 giving states freedom to implement the legislation as they saw fit.^[2][3][4]

Techniques used by illegitimate historical revisionists

The distinction between respectable academic historians and those of illegitimate historical revisionists rests on the techniques used to write such histories. Accuracy and revision are central to historical scholarship. As in any academic discipline, historians' papers are submitted to peer review. Instead of submitting their work to the challenges of peer review, illegitimate revisionists rewrite history to support an agenda, often political, using any number of techniques and rhetorical fallacies to obtain their results.

Richard Evans describes the difference thus:

Reputable and professional historians do not suppress parts of quotations from documents that go against their own case, but take them into account and if necessary amend their own case accordingly. They do not present as genuine documents which they know to be forged just because these forgeries happen to back up what they are saying. They do not invent ingenious but implausible and utterly unsupported reasons for distrusting genuine documents because these documents run counter to their arguments; again, they amend their arguments if this is the case, or indeed abandon them altogether. They do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources which in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite. They do not eagerly seek out the highest possible figures in a series of statistics, independently of their reliability or otherwise, simply because they want for whatever reason to maximise the figure in question, but rather, they assess all the available figures as impartially as possible in order to arrive at a number that will withstand the critical scrutiny of others. They do not knowingly mistranslate sources in foreign languages in order to make them more serviceable to themselves. They do not wilfully invent words, phrases, quotations, incidents and events for which there is no historical evidence in order to make their arguments more plausible

—Richard J. Evans^[5]

Writing on genocide denial in general

Gregory H. Stanton, formerly of the US State Department and the founder of Genocide Watch, lists denial as the final stage of genocide development:

George Orwell writes in 'Notes on Nationalism' that

Israel Charny, Executive Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Israel, describes genocide denial by putting it into the following categories:

Notable genocide denials by individuals and non government organisations

• In February 2006 David Irving was imprisoned in Austria for Holocaust denial, he served 13 months in prison before being released on probation.^[9][10]
• Bernard Lewis was fined one franc by a French court for denying the Armenian genocide in a November 1993 Le Monde article.^[11]
• David Campbell has written of the now defunct British magazine Living Marxism that "LM’s intentions are clear from the way they have sought to publicize accounts of contemporary atrocities which suggest they were certainly not genocidal (as in the case of Rwanda), and perhaps did not even occur (as in the case of the murder of nearly 8,000 at Srebrenica)."^[12][13] Chris McGreal writing in The Guardian on 20 March 2000, stated that Fiona Fox writing under a pseudonym had contributed an article to Living Marxism which was part of a campaign by Living Marxism that denied that the event which occurred in Rwanda was a genocide.^[14]
• Scott Jaschik has stated that Justin McCarthy, is one of two scholars "most active on promoting the view that no [Armenian] genocide took place".^[15] He was one of four scholars who participated in a controversial debate hosted by PBS about the genocide.^[16]
• Shimon Peres, Foreign Minister (and later President) of Israel, was quoted in 2001 as having said: "We reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is a tragedy what the Armenians went through but not a genocide."^[17][18] In response to criticism of the comments, the Israeli Foreign Ministry later clarified, "The minister absolutely did not say, as the Turkish news agency alleged, 'What the Armenians underwent was a tragedy, not a genocide.'"^[19]
• Darko Trifunovic is an author of the Report about Case Srebrenica,^[20] which was commissioned by the government of the Republika Srpska.^[21] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) reviewed the report and concluded that it "represent[ed] one of the worst examples of revisionism in relation to the mass executions of Bosnian Muslims committed in Srebrenica in July 1995".^[22] After the report was published on 3 September 2002, it provoked outrage and condemnation by a wide variety of Balkan and international figures, individuals and organizations.^[21][23]
• Samuel Weems wrote Armenia, a big deception. A mystery of Christian-terrorist state.^[24] In it he asserts that the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire occurred during a civil war and not in a genocide.^[25]
• Patrick Karuretwa stated in the Harvard Law Record that in 2007 the Canadian politician Robin Philpot "attracted intense media attention for repeatedly denying the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis"^[26]
• In May 2010, American law professor Peter Erlinder was arrested and jailed in Rwanda on charges of denying the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in preparation for the defense of opposition presidential candidate Victoire Ingabire, who also was charged with promoting "genocide ideology."^[27]

Notable genocide denials by governments

• The government of the Republic of Turkey has long disputed that the mass killings of Armenians was a genocide.^[28] This was exemplified by their objections in April 2007 to the wording in a United Nations exhibition, entitled "Lessons from Rwanda", about the 1994 Rwanda genocide, that forced a delay to the opening of the exhibition. The sentence disputed by Turkey was "Following World War 1, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes".^[28] As a diplomatic compromise, the wording was changed to "In 1933, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, urged the League of Nations to recognize mass atrocities against a particular group as an international crime. He cited mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman empire in World War I and other mass killings in history. He was ignored."^[29] The exhibition opened on 1 May 2007 three weeks later than planned.^[30]
• The Soviet famine of 1932–33 that affected Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and some densely populated regions of Russia, has a special connotation in Ukraine where it is called the Holodomor. The famine was caused by the confiscation of the whole 1933 harvest in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, and other parts of Russia, leaving the peasants too little to feed themselves. As a result an estimated seven million died Soviet-wide, including five million in Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million elsewhere.^[31] Under Yushchenko's administration, Ukraine was attempting to have the Holodomor recognised as an act of genocide against Ukrainians.^[32] This move is opposed by former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian government, since a lot of non-Ukrainians also died.
• According to Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and Edina Becirevic, the faculty of criminology and security studies of the University of Sarajevo:

Denial of the Srebrenica genocide takes many forms [in Serbia]. The methods range from the brutal to the deceitful. Denial is present most strongly in political discourse, in the media, in the sphere of law, and in the educational system.^[33]

• The government of Pakistan continues to deny that the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities took place under Pakistan's rule of Bangladesh (East Pakistan) during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. They typically accuse Pakistani reporters (such as Anthony Mascarenhas) who reported on the genocide of being "enemy agents".^[34] According to Donald W. Beachler, professor of political science at Ithaca College:^[35]

The government of Pakistan explicitly denied that there was genocide. By their refusal to characterise the mass-killings as

genocide or to condemn and restrain the Pakistani government, the US and Chinese governments implied that they did not consider it so.

Similarly, in the wake of the 2013 Shahbag protests against war criminals who were complicit in the genocide, English journalist Philip Hensher wrote^[36]

The genocide is still too little known about in the West. It is, moreover, the subject of shocking degrees of denial among partisan polemicists and manipulative historians.

See also

• Genocides in history
• Nanking Massacre denial
• Cambodian genocide denial

References

Literature

• Pech, Laurent. "The Law of Holocaust Denial in Europe: Towards a (qualified) EU-wide Criminal Prohibition". The Jean Monnet Working Papers (10/09).