When President Biden declares Russia's Ukraine war “genocide,” it isn't just another strong word. A treaty approved by the U.N. after World War II could carry obligations to act.
A look at what’s involved in that decision, and what it means when a world leader declares a genocide:It’s a surprisingly modern word for an ancient crime. A Jewish lawyer from Poland, Raphael Lemkin, coined it at the height of World War II and the Holocaust. Lemkin wanted a word to describe what Nazi Germany was then doing to Europe’s Jews, and what Turkey had done to Armenians in the 1910s: killing members of a targeted group of people, and ruthlessly working to eradicate their cultures.
That includes mass killings, but also actions including forced sterilization, abuse that inflicts serious harm or mental suffering, or wrenching children of a targeted group away to be raised by others.Russian forces are widely accused of carrying out wholesale abuses of Ukraine’s civilians, including mass killings.It’s all about intent, argues Bohdan Vitvitsky, a former U.S. federal prosecutor and former special adviser to Ukraine’s prosecutor general.
In a long essay last year, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin made clear the depth of his determination on the matter. He called the modern border dividing Russia and Ukraine “our great common misfortune and tragedy.” U.S. leaders for decades dodged using the word “genocide” to avoid increasing the pressure on them to act as mass killings targeted classes of people or ethnic groups in Cambodia, Bosnia, Iraq, Rwanda and elsewhere.
Starting in 2005, world also leaders embraced – in principle – responsibility for collective action to stop genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Atrocities and targeted campaigns against groups continue around the world, however, and the so-called responsibility to protect is seldom invoked.U.S. leaders long have feared that acknowledging genocide would require them to intervene, even to send in troops, with all the risks, costs and political backlash that would entail.
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