Whether it's "Save Darfur" posters in the New York City subway, front-page revelations of Saddam Hussein's massacre of the Kurds or the never-ending controversy over the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians 90 years ago, escaping genocide-talk is an impossible task these days.
While it may seem that we are living in an age of unparalleled cruelty and slaughter, frequent accusations of genocide and the outlawing of genocide-denial in the international arena show that the term has been politicized, cheapened into the most cynical of weapons for attacking political opponents and mobilizing grassroots support.
For the most part, humanitarian intervention is only justified by the international community when the conflict is defined as genocide. Otherwise, it would just be imperialism. So perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when Western activists label virtually every conflict in Africa as genocide.
Everyone agrees that the massacres in Rwanda in 1994 qualified as genocide. Interestingly, the United Nations, European Union, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International tend to avoid the G-word in reference to the conflict in Darfur, although that hasn't stopped anyone else. Many talk about the ongoing genocide in Uganda. Similarly, the war in Liberia and the spreading of conflict from Darfur to Chad have produced talk of "potential" genocides, introducing a nifty hierarchical classification system for the G-word.
Genocide-mongering has had disastrous effects on civil conflicts around the world. Johnathan Steele explains in the Guardian how the Save Darfur campaign has replaced a complex regional issue with a good versus evil scenario: "The complex grievances that set farmers against nomads was covered with a simplistic template of Arab vs. African, even though the region was crisscrossed with tribal and local rivalries that put some villages on the government's side and others against it."
While it is true that the Sudanese government severely overreacted to rebel attacks by arming the Janjaweed militias, most Western activists have forgotten that rebel soldiers also committed grievous atrocities. And so the conflict in Darfur has been simplified into a black-and-white moral paradigm in order to drum up support for the Save Darfur campaign, with the victims becoming celebrated martyrs and the perpetrators ruthless villains.
Consequently, those victims are much less willing to resolve the conflict or make compromises, thinking Western support will result in a sweeter deal, while the "evil-doers" become embittered against a torrent of Western criticism.
And that's exactly what we see in Sudan, where "the rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal reaction, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region," wrote Alan Kuperman in the New York Times.
Indeed, rebel factions in Darfur initially rejected a peace treaty last May in order to extract further concessions from the Sudanese government and increase their dominion over tribal lands, needlessly prolonging a brutal civil war. This gravely embarrassed both the international community and the Save Darfur movement, who had romanticized the rebels as noble freedom fighters.
It's all part of the strategic logic of victimhood, which is repeated over and over again when the West sticks its nose in civil conflicts where it doesn't belong. As Brendan O'Neill convincingly explains in spiked, "By treating certain groups as worthy victims who deserve our protection, Western campaigners encourage them to advertise and even prostitute their victimhood in order to win that protection."
Charges have been leveled that Bosnian Muslim rebel groups massacred their own people and blamed it on the Serbs in order to win more Western support and sympathy. Violence in Bosnia was extended for several months when the Clinton administration urged the rebels to hold out for a better deal. The Israelis and Palestinians are constantly one-upping each other over who is the "real" victim of genocide, hoping to win over the hearts and minds of na've Westerner activists.
Throwing around the G-word as a political tool has become increasingly popular in the international community, by states, activists and the supposed victims of genocide, all of whom seek to lend their cause some legitimacy in terms of hollow moral absolutes. Not only does this denigrate the very concept of genocide, but it also inflames civil conflicts around the world.
If the G-word is to serve any meaningful purpose in the modern world, then steps must be taken to ensure that it serves as a failsafe mechanism for alerting the world to the most egregious crimes against humanity - and more than just a weapon to manipulate the international arena by the most cynical of political actors.
Benjamin Bright '07 holds office hours at Haven Bros.
