21398: Higbie: Re 21370: Angry DuTuyau and the g-word (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Janet Higbie <jhigbie@nytimes.com>


In reference to the esteemed Du Tuyau's complaint about use of  the word
"genocide" ...

If you ask me, this usage, in the translation of a formal legal statement
from French to English, was not incorrect.  In a way, it understates the case.

In regular English usage, the term is indeed often understood to mean the
systematic and planned extermination of  "an entire national, racial,
political, or ethnic group," as in the dictonary.com definition cited by Du
Tuyau (it seems to be the Webster's one as well).   Sometimes, though, it
is used somewhat more broadly even in regular English, such as another
definition on dictionary.com:   "systematic killing of a racial or cultural
group." (not necessarily an entire race or other group).   Similarly,
according to
Larousse, the French definition is along the same lines: systematic
extermination of a social, national, ethnic or religious group.

The term has a somewhat different meaning in international human rights
law, however.  Surely, Du Tuyau, you've worked the bar at an international
law conference or two, yes?  ;-)   The foremost international treaty on
genocide, the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to
which Haiti was one of the first signatories in 1948, has the following
definition:

"In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group"

The term "group" and "in whole or in part,"  has sometimes been defined
to apply to a relatively small group.  For instance, when a Spanish judge
brought charges of
genocide against Pinochet some years ago, jurisdiction was claimed in part
on the basis of the killings or disappearances of several hundred Spanish
citizens resident in Chile at
the time of the 1972 coup.  "The term 'national group' not mean 'group
formed by people who belong to a same nation,' but simply a national human
group, a distinct human group, characterized by something, integrated to a
larger community,"  the Pinochet decision read.   (Note that I'm NOT
comparing Aristide to Pinochet, merely saying that the word genocide can
involve a relatively small group, not an entire race or nation.)

Now, the NCHR-Haiti article on "the genocide la Scierie" refers to the
following actions:

-- Men, women and children, tortured, killed, burned alive ;
-- Homes ransacked, pillaged and destroyed by fire ;
-- Women raped inside the town's police station ;
-- Arbitrary arrests, kidnappings of individuals followed by their
disappearances.

Some of these very severe abuses would fit under the definition of genocide
and others would not.   So if this were a news story it would have been
better to be more specific and less legalistic, phrasing it something like
a request for "an investigation of reports that residents of a Haitian town
were tortured, burned alive and subjected to other human rights
abuses."   Here, I think, NCHR-Haiti probably decided to do a straight
translation from the original, written in the somewhat more vague French
legal style.   So go ahead, sue them, but given what human rights advocates
are up against in Haiti at the moment, I think it's a minor point.  It's
hardly a justification to derail an investigation in what appear to have
been very serious human rights abuses, or discredit an organization calling
for such an investigation.

Also, none of the news accounts I've seen have said that Privert and the
others were formally charged with genocide, as suggested by Du
Tuyau.  Though one of the news reports said that reporters saw no more than
five bodies, certainly that doesn't mean that no more were killed or that
there were no other serious abuses, does it?  There are allegations of
disappearances, so bodies would not be found.   Shouldn't either the
government or an international agency conduct a formal investigation of
what happened, rather than relying solely on news reports?   And though
it's hardly my goal to defend NCHR, I think that a search of the NCHR
sites, Corbett postings and media archives would yield ample evidence
of  that organization's criticism of the transitional government's handling
of the legal and judicial system in recent weeks.

Janet Higbie