A Blistering Attack on Restriction of the Definition of Genocide to the Serbians (WWII) and by the Serbians (in the 1990's) -- Leading also to a Humiliating Denunciation of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)

Issue 10, Spring 2012

A G P N Report and Editorial Discussion
G P N S T O R Y

William Schabas is very distinguished professor of law with a considerable specialization in the subject of genocide. He is a past president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). In 2003, when he was chair of the Irish Center for Human Rights at the National of Galway, Schabas hosted and convened an international meeting of the association in Galway, Ireland.

Schabas is today professor of international law at Middlesex University in London, and also holds appointments at Leiden University, where he is professor of international criminal law and human rights, the National University of Ireland Galway, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences where he has the title of honorary professor.

Schabas has also distinguished himself for his forthrightness and integrity in standing up for his beliefs such as when some years ago he gave a paper to the Bar Association in Ankara, Turkey and asserted, unequivocally that the Ottoman Empire had committed a genocide against the Armenians.

At the same time, like a number of other legal genocide scholars, Schabas has been adamant in his restriction of the concept of "genocide."

GPN has recently learned that some time ago the Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada (IRGC) issued a blistering attack against the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) over what they claim to be Schabas' denial of the genocide in Srebrenica.

The attack was framed in a letter to the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS), an organization that is a rival to the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). It was written at a time that there were active efforts to lead to a merger of the two organizations and includes a shabby characterization of IAGS as an "obscure organization." IRGC urges INOGS not to do business with such a shabby group as IAGS.

In fact, in 2007, prior to Schabas' presidency of IAGS (2009-2011), IAGS held its international conference directly in Srebrenica itself, including a day of active participation in the annual commemoration and memorial of victims of the genocidal massacre in Srebrenica. The president of IAGS at the time, who is today editor of GPN, Israel W. Charny, laid a wreath and spoke on national media on behalf of the association.

The following is the text of the critique of the Institute - all the writing is as released by this group:

Srebrenica Genocide Blog

DID YOU KNOW ? Three years before the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, Serbs destroyed 296 Bosniak villages and killed at least 3,166 Bosniaks around Srebrenica. In 1993, the UN described the situation in Srebrenica as a "slow-motion process of genocide." In July 1995, Serbs forcibly expelled 25,000 Bosniaks, brutally raped many women and girls, and systematically killed 8,000+ men and boys (DNA confirmed).

The So-Called "International Association of Genocide Scholars" (IAGS)

Letter to the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS)
Re: Genocide Denying Prof. William Schabas
By: Institute for the Research of Genocide, Canada

Dear International Network of Genocide Scholars (INOGS),

The Institute for the Research of Genocide Canada {IRGC} would like to voice concern over the proposed merger of your organization with the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS).

IAGS’s membership numbers remain highly questionable and they are certainly not representative of the majority of international scholars. IAGS is an obscure organization led by Prof. William Schabas, an academic who regrettably reduced himself to the position of being a genocide denier.

Please be advised that the IAGS president, Prof. Schabas, offered his expertise to Serbian defendants at the Hague Tribunal, who had been charged with crimes of genocide. His proposed testimony – in which he aimed to deny genocide in Srebrenica – was rejected on the grounds that there were conflicts of interest with specific respect to the close friendship that he enjoyed with the Judges Carmel Agius and Kimberly Prost.

In his book entitled Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes (Cambridge University Press, 2d ed., 2009), Prof. Schabas denies that the killing of Slav citizens under Nazi occupation constituted genocide. The same book denies genocide during the Bosnian war of the 1990’s.

We wish to draw attention to the following facts:

[i] That the killings of Serbs by the Ustasha forces and the killings of Bosniaks by the Chetnik forces during World War II were and are, indeed, widely recognized as acts of genocide.
[ii] With respect to the Bosnian war of 1992-1995, three cases were legally validated as genocide; they included:

[a] the Srebrenica massacres (Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic),
[b] the Doboj massacres (Prosecutor v. Nikola Jorgic), and
[c] the Foca massacres (Prosecutor v. Novislav Djajic)

In 2005, both Houses of the United States Congress passed resolutions asserting that the policies of aggression and the internationally referred to ‘ethnic cleansing’ as implemented by Serb and Croatian Ustasha forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995 – including the Srebrenica massacre – constituted genocide.

A leading holocaust researcher, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton – author of several books, including “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” and “The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and the Nuclear Threat,” agrees that what happened to the Bosnian Muslims “merits the use of the word genocide.” He is recipient of a "Nobel Lectureship," the "Holocaust Memorial Award" and the "Gandhi Peace Award." Since the 1960s, Dr. Lifton has been internationally recognized for his research into the diverse aspects of genocide.

According to Dr. Lifton, “What’s happening there [in Bosnia] merits the use of the word ‘genocide’. There is an effort to systematically destroy an entire group. It’s even been conceptualized by Serbian nationalists as so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’. That term signifies mass killing, mass relocation, and that constitutes genocide.”

Furthermore, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs is currently defending himself against charges of genocide in connection with terrible crimes committed in and across 11 Bosnian municipalities.

After due consideration and with reference to the above text, IRGC ascertains that nothing short of irreparable damage will permeate the credibility of any organization seriously concerned with genocide, who might decide to merge with this association.

Respectfully,
Professor Emir Ramic
Director IRGC

Source: Srebrenica Genocide Blog (The copy brought to our attention was originally dated January 2011 and was retrieved January 26, 2012; but when GPN went to retrieve this file from the Web, the original date given was December 2009). http://srebrenica-genocide.blogspot.co.il/search?q=INOGS

_____

GPN Editorial Discussion: GPN sent the above story to Professor Schabas in advance with an invitation for him to write a rejoinder that we would publish.

Schabas was understandably upset about the proposed publication and felt that it was unfair. First of all, he claimed, in our judgment rightly, that the Institute for the Research of Genocide, Canada (IRGC) statement was a "diatribe." GPN agrees, especially when the IRGC moves from its powerful criticism of Schabas' views to the condemnation of the entire organization of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). The fact that Schabas was indeed president of the IAGS at the time does not mean his scholarly-professional views were adopted by the association, and as noted the IRGC completely failed to take note of previous highly official participations of IAGS in memorializing and condemning the genocide in Srebrenica and the larger picture of genocide in Bosnia.

With regard to Schabas' own views of Srebrenica as not constituting genocide, there was a lengthy exchange of letters between GPN and him in which he was repeatedly invited to state in what ways the critique of him was inaccurate or unfounded, and in each case he declined to do so while insisting that GPN be the responsible party to research what he actually said.

So GPN did the research. And indeed there are several clear cut reports that Schabas severely limits the concept of "genocide" to only a very few known genocides, including the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust of the Jews and Gypsies, and the Rwandan Genocide. According to a summary in Wikipedia -- GPN is not an academic journal and therefore it is not inappropriate for us to use that as a source -- in Schabas' book, 'Genocide and International Law: The Crimes of Crimes' (2009), he takes the position that "Stalin's atrocities in the Ukraine, the killings of Slav and Soviet citizens under the Nazi occupation and the Holodomor [the genocidal famine imposed on the Ukraine by Stalin] were not, legally genocide. The same book treats the Bosnian atrocities as ethnic cleansing and not as genocide, in contrast to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ITCY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which ruled the crimes committed in Srebrenica to constitute genocide."

GPN takes the following positions:

Any scholar, of course, has the right to take whatever position on definitions of genocide

Over the last 20 years, it has clearly emerged that legal definitions of genocide, by the nature of the legal beast, may be much more restrictive, we think to a point of hair-splitting, than historical and social science definitions on the one hand, and common sense language usage both by journalists and everyday people responding to events of cruel mass murder of unarmed civilians.

GPN believes that the word "genocide" has become the word for everyday usage by human beings all over our globe to describe collective exterminations of unarmed people. Further, GPN believes that the insistence by too many scholars that such collective exterminations be limited to make-sense-definitions of the object group (e.g., Jews, Communists, regime opponents, etc.) gets in the way of the human reality that cruel mass killers have always proved capable of creating absolutely ridiculous, previously non-existent definitions for who the hell they want to kill. For us, any case of mass killings of unarmed civilians is ipso facto, in common sense and down to earth deadly reality, genocide. But what is then to follow entirely legitimately and very much necessarily, is the work of scholars in both social sciences and law to differentiate the different types of genocide accurately and factually and for the legal system to assign different weights of responsibility and punishment just as is the case with different types of murder in everyday law.

The ultimate point for GPN is that human experience cannot and should not be ignored or insulted. Thus, one feedback to an article about Schabas' definitions in the "Economist" has a writer saying, "Professor Schabas supports the view that the killing of Slav citizens under the Nazi occupation, (e.g. in the Jasenovac concentration camp) was not genocide. I lost more than 20 relatives in Jasenovac." Another wrote in, "I think human language needs a word to describe the malicious obliteration of a group. No? We are not machines. Words matter."

Conclusion:
In conclusion, GPN recognizes the right of scholars to disucss and argue over definitions, but criticizes strongly any definitions that leave masses of dead bodies of unarmed civilians out of a common sense concept of genocide. GPN then supports, unreservedly, also sub-defining, e.g., intentional genocide, intentional partial genocide, genocidal massacre, crime against humanity, war crime, ethnic cleansing, inadvertent genocide, and as many more categories as scholars will propose; but here to we caution against "definitionalism" or obsessive intellectualizing that cuts off experiencing the actual tragedy and evil of the mass murder under discussion.

Readers are also urged to see in this issue the GPN Editorial Discussion accompanying the report of the current genocide taking place in Syria, where we also comment on the need for a down to earth concept of "genocide."

Sources:
Economist (June 6, 2011). Genocide - It seems like a handy word. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/06/genocide

Wikipedia (Retrieved June 20, 2012). William Schabas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Schabas

Tags: Genocide scholars | Genocide, definitions | IAGS | INOGS

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