⚠️Disclaimer! I am not a denier or even questioner of any genocides I’m aware of!⚠️ I swear to fuck I am genuinely asking this question because I don’t know the answer, and using a search engine for something like this is only going to yield crackpot denier misinformation.

I have used the argument in the past, “If given all available evidence you’re still not sure a genocide is happening, you can probably safely assume that it is, because humans just constantly do genocide.”

And I wanted to be prepared in case whoever I’m debating says something like “well in 19XX, group A accused group B of genocide and it turns out group A was just lying to make group B look bad!”

Basically, would they be full of shit, or have humans been proven to have sunk that low too? :/

  • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
    16·
    3 days ago

    If we want to go into technicalities:

    The internationally accepted definition of what constitutes a genocide is quite limited and certainly not identical to what is colloquially interpreted as genocide. The same way murder is distinct from manslaughter.

    Serbia was found not guilty of committing genocide by the ICJ in the Yugoslav wars for instance. Serbia did commit various crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing (primarily by way of deportation) but this was not found to be genocide.

    Most scholars believe genocide (as defined under the Genocide Convention) refers exclusively the “physical-biological destruction of a protected group”.

    Just look at a couple excerpts from this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_genocide

    In the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić (2 August 2001), the ICTY ruled “customary international law limits the definition of genocide to those acts seeking the physical or biological destruction of all or part of the group. Hence, an enterprise attacking only the cultural or sociological characteristics of a human group in order to annihilate these elements which give to that group its own identity distinct from the rest of the community would not fall under the definition of genocide”.

    On 14 January 2000, the ICTY ruled in the Prosecutor v. Kupreškić and Others case that the Lašva Valley ethnic cleansing campaign in order to expel the Bosnian Muslim population from the region was persecution, not genocide per se.

    Though under some nation’s law, such as Germany, the definition of genocide is more broad:

    However, the ECHR highlighted that the German court’s ruling, based upon German domestic law, had interpreted the crime of genocide more broadly than and in a manner since rejected by international courts.[52] Under the wider definition that the German judiciary upheld, the ethnic cleansing carried out by Jorgić was a genocide because it was an intent to destroy the group as a social unit, and although the majority of scholars took the view that German genocide law should interpret genocide as the physical-biological destruction of the protected group, “a considerable number of scholars were of the opinion that the notion of destruction of a group as such, in its literal meaning, was wider than a physical-biological extermination and also encompassed the destruction of a group as a social unit”

    Tl;dr: It’s only genocide when it comes from the genocide region, else it’s just sparkling ethnic cleansing.