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2441Chapter6 16/10/02 8:05 am Page 160 6 Comparing genocides: ‘numbers games’ and ‘holocausts’ at Jasenovac and Bleiburg What will our children say about us when they read about the Balkan Holocaust in their history books? (Stjepan Meštrović et al., The Road from Paradise) Chapter 5 outlined some of the principal myths of victimisation and persecution stemming from the wartime activities of the Serbs and Croats. By invoking images of historic genocide and persecution, both sides portrayed their actions in the 1990s as defensive only – a reaction to
169 Chapter 8 Genocide and the ICERD William Schabas Although there is no reference to genocide in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD/the Convention), the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD/the Committee) has shown a special interest in the subject. Ironically, CERD examined the periodic report of Rwanda in March 1994, only a few weeks before the outbreak of the worst episode of genocide since the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
6 CULTURAL GENOCIDE, 2017–2020 The term ‘cultural genocide’ is generally attributed to the Polish lawyer who coined the overall concept of ‘genocide’ in the 1940s, Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin viewed genocide as more than the mass killing of people from a given group; he defined the term as ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.’1 In discussing how this destruction takes place, he notes that it is rarely accomplished through the ‘immediate destruction’ of the group, which would connote the mass murder of its members. Instead, it is almost always
9 The Tutsi body in the 1994 genocide: ideology, physical destruction, and memory Rémi Korman Since 1994, bodies have been at the centre of the memorialization of the Tutsi genocide. For, in addition to constituting evidence in the context of forensic investigations, they are publicly exhibited in memorials to the genocide. The display of bodies aims principally to remind visitors of the historical facts of the genocide: not only the sites of massacres, but also the form these took. Far from being an incidental detail, the methods employed by the killers are an
journalists and opposition politicians and violent attacks against Tutsi. In January 1993, both Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) participated in a ten-member panel of international experts that investigated human rights abuses in Rwanda and published a devastating report that linked the government to all recent cases of anti-Tutsi ethnic violence and considered, given their nature, whether they might constitute genocide, though they suggested that the numbers killed might not reach the threshold to be labelled genocide
1 The biopolitics of corpses of mass violence and genocide Yehonatan Alsheh Introduction For the past four decades, students of biopolitics have been probing why the spectacular growth in the application of technologies and policies that aim at the optimization of human life has been articulated with a parallel proliferation of human death. Various studies have been suggesting many objects or sites that are arguably highly symptomatic of the issue at hand – a privileged epitome of the biopolitical quandary. The most famous of these is the camp that Giorgio
footage is white, barring an ice cream seller who can be seen cycling down the promenade in one shot, three car guards wearing high visibility jackets in the background of another and two women wearing domestic workers’ uniforms, filmed standing among the crowd and shaking their heads sympathetically. Protesters hold up signs that read ‘South Africa: Designed by geniuses, now run by idiots. Stop White GeNOcide’, ‘Stop killing our farmers’ and ‘Our children have the right to live without fear’. According to one of the
This article discusses how Armenians have collected, displayed and exchanged the bones of their murdered ancestors in formal and informal ceremonies of remembrance in Dayr al-Zur, Syria – the final destination for hundreds of thousands of Armenians during the deportations of 1915. These pilgrimages – replete with overlapping secular and nationalist motifs – are a modern variant of historical pilgrimage practices; yet these bones are more than relics. Bone rituals, displays and vernacular memorials are enacted in spaces of memory that lie outside of official state memorials, making unmarked sites of atrocity more legible. Vernacular memorial practices are of particular interest as we consider new archives for the history of the Armenian Genocide. The rehabilitation of this historical site into public consciousness is particularly urgent, since the Armenian Genocide Memorial Museum and Martyr’s Church at the centre of the pilgrimage site were both destroyed by ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) in 2014.
Representations of Rwanda have been shaped by the display of bodies and bones at Tutsi genocide memorial sites. This phenomenon is most often only studied from the perspective of moral dimensions. This article aims in contrast to cover the issues related to the treatment of human remains in Rwanda for commemorative purposes from a historical perspective. To this end, it is based on the archives of the commissions in charge of genocide memory in Rwanda, as well as interviews with key memorial actors. This study shows the evolution of memorial practices since 1994 and the hypermateriality of bodies in their use as symbols, as well as their demobilisation for the purposes of reconciliation policies.
, seeking to destroy Indigenous culture and replace it with a version of Britishness. In seeking to impose the rule of English law, sometimes immediately, at other times more gradually, they aimed to undermine Indigenous law and the wider Indigenous cultures of which it was a crucial part. If we think of Polish Jurist Raphaël Lemkin’s founding definition of genocide as having ‘two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern