Patrick Moreau is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and contributed to the collective work edited by R. Antonius and N. Baillargeon Identity, “race”, freedom of expressionwhich has just been published by PUL
As the Greek historian Thucydides already mentioned, war affects “even the usual meaning of words”. Faced with the violence of the bombings, machine-guns and exoduses, the words move away from their definition, start to wander too, like haggard and terrorized populations, and end up no longer meaning what they meant before they were born. erupts such and such a conflict. Sometimes they even succumb, victims of the crude propaganda of a Vladimir Putin, who describes the Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis” and claims to justify his invasion of Ukraine by a supposed “genocide” of which the Russian-speaking populations of this country would have been victims. .
That said, if Putin’s propaganda is obvious, in Western countries this war also threatens the “usual meaning of words”. This linguistic drift is mainly reflected in the proliferation of hyperbolic terms used by journalists and other opinion leaders without too many precautions. On this point, a milestone was reached when President Biden called the manifest horrors that accompany this war “genocide”.
One can understand that the Ukrainian government launches such accusations and sees in them a lever to move Western public opinion and thus push NATO to intervene in the conflict. Propaganda seems like a desperate but legitimate weapon in this country invaded by a much more powerful neighbor. On the other hand, that Western leaders repeat these accusations seems unreasonable. And even dangerous.
The neologism “genocide” was invented in 1943 by the jurist Raphaël Lemkin and it imposed itself shortly after as a legal concept when the General Assembly of the United Nations voted in 1948 the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. . The introduction of this new term into the vocabulary of international law was then dictated by the enormity, the barbarity and the unprecedented nature of the mass murders carried out against the Jews by the Nazis, murders committed on such a scale and so systematically that the words “massacres” or “killings” seemed perfectly inadequate to account for them.
To date, apart from the Jewish genocide (six million victims between 1940 and 1945), two other tragedies have been qualified as such and have achieved consensus among jurists and historians, namely the Armenian genocide carried out in 1915-1916 by the government of the Young Turks, which caused the death of approximately 1.2 million Armenians, and the genocide of the Tutsis, in Rwanda, which gave rise, at the initiative of certain members of the Rwandan government of the time and organized militias by radical Hutus, to the 1994 massacre of approximately 800,000 Tutsis.
This obviously does not mean that ancient or recent history has not known other inhuman massacres. The list would even be long. But genocide is not an ordinary crime. To be recognized as such, these massacres, even on a large scale, must be accompanied by a proven desire to destroy a human group, whether national, ethnic, racial or religious. This is why, to give just this example, the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, which led to the death of a fifth of the Cambodian population, are not qualified as “genocide”, because it was not the intention of the Pol Pot regime to make its own people disappear.
Even if the war crimes committed in Ukraine by the Russian army prove after investigation indisputable, it is doubtful that it is a “genocide”. Neither committing war crimes nor knowingly striking populations constitutes such a crime. On this account, moreover, shouldn’t Hiroshima and Nagasaki be described in the same way, the tons of bombs dropped on Hanoi, etc.? ?
In short, this accusation of the crime of “genocide” is so serious that it should in no way be launched lightly, as if it were a simple rhetorical tool intended to stigmatize an enemy. To overuse the use of this word for political reasons can only contribute to weakening it, to trivializing it. Especially if these same countries which virulently denounce an alleged “genocide” are careful not to intervene militarily to prevent it, as the convention signed in 1948 obliges them to do.
Instrumentalizing this legal concept also makes it tendentious and partisan. Such an attitude tends to make international law, which is still in its infancy, a political weapon in the hands of the West.
This abuse in the use of this term finally raises a final problem: it makes any real peace impossible, prevents a political settlement of conflicts. Who would indeed negotiate with a genocidal head of state, come to an agreement with a country or a government thus banished from humanity? The convention mentioned above requires all states that have signed it to bring those responsible to justice. Wars waged under such auspices can then only become all-out wars, with leaders targeted by such accusations having nothing to lose.
Some words are heavy with meaning. This is why it is necessary at all costs to preserve their “usual meaning”. Even in time of war, the government of reason must prevail over that of emotions. Only then can we continue to think beyond the present.