Published by The Jakarta Post on October 16, 2023
The post-Holocaust clarion call of "never again" rings hollow across the world today as we all bear witness to the hypocritical destruction of the Genocide Convention.
We are witnessing horrific violence being perpetrated against civilians, including war refugees, women, children and elderly people, in Myanmar, Ukraine, Israel and Israel-occupied Gaza, primarily by state actors. The founding members of the United Nations either look on or worse, serve as enablers behind the perpetrator states.
What we don’t see on social media platforms and TV broadcasts is the silent demolition of international law: not least the Genocide Convention, the UN Security Council and the UN Charter.
As if to spit on the post-Holocaust moral clarion call of “never again”, Israel, a signatory to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, has in effect declared its intention to commit an act of genocide by cutting off all “water, electricity, and food supplies” to the 2.2 million people in Gaza.
The Genocide Convention, as the binding interstate treaty is generally referred to in activist and scholarly quarters, was adopted on Dec. 9, 1948, less than two years after the Soviet Red Army closed the Auschwitz concentration camp on Jan. 27, 1945.
From pro-Israeli American protestors on the streets of New York to state officials and politicians in high places, demands are being made that the Jewish state take “revenge” and “retaliate”, wittingly or not, in language that is easily recognizable as genocidal.
Niki Haley, the United States’ Republican presidential hopeful and former permanent representative to the UN, has tweeted chillingly: “Netanyahu … finish them!”
Were Raphael Lemkin alive today, he would be so pained to witness what is being done to a marked population of Palestinians in the name of “defending” Israel. As a genocide scholar and a campaigner against the full-blown genocide targeting the Rohingya minority in my own native country of Myanmar, I once visited Lemkin’s home: an apartment complex where he lived as a student reading law at a university in Lviv, then a Polish city.
Lemkin gifted the post-Holocaust world with the word “genocide”, which has since captured the popular imagination. In his original conception, which more or less became the intellectual foundation of the Genocide Convention, genocide refers to any intentional destruction of populations or identity-based groups marked for elimination, in whole or in part.
Israel’s declaration of a total siege on the entire Gaza population, with the clearly stated intent to deprive the latter of access to life’s essentials – food, water and electricity (for hospitals, clinics, water pumps, cooking and heating) – its use of white phosphorus and the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas are definitely tantamount to an act of genocide.
What is even more shocking is that the entire cluster of the Washington-led Western world, along with India, has officially backed Israel, despite its declared genocidal intent in Gaza. Gaza’s population includes 1 million children, which is roughly the same as the number of Nazi victims at Auschwitz, mostly Jews.
As deplorable as Hamas’s horrific attacks on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 were, Israel’s intention to mete out genocidal “collective punishment” against the Palestinians in Gaza is not simply in breach of this international law, but also unconscionable at the most elemental human level.
On Wednesday, a British doctor working in Gaza told BBC Radio Four that Israel bombed a hospital the night before and that the majority of those killed were children. He also said the hospitals and clinics there would run out of medical supplies in the next 24 hours, owing to the genocidal siege Israel had imposed this week.
Communities of conscience worldwide must call out the unbearable hypocrisy of the governments of Europe, the US, Canada and Australia for their collective disregard for international law.
Despite the recognition of genocide among American citizens at home or abroad as a crime worthy of the death penalty, the US has unequivocally thrown its political and military weight behind Israel. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden sent Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to Israel in a show of US support for Israel.
That the Hindutva government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has also thrown its weight behind Netanyahu’s genocidal declaration against Palestinians in Gaza comes as no surprise. India is hell-bent on relegating the status of non-Hindu Indians, for instance 300 million Muslims, to second- and third-class citizen in its attempt to remake India as a country of Hindus. This includes a proposal to rename the country Bharat, like the far-right Israeli government that officially made the state in Israel exclusively Jewish.
Lemkin would tell us that genocide is a process, not an event or a single incident of violence or mass killing. It starts with stripping populations marked for exclusion and persecution, followed by the eventual destruction of legal protections and basic rights, including due process, to create a hierarchy of citizenships.
But India is not the only non-Western country that is increasingly in breach of international law and secular constitutional norms at home.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is said to have elements of genocide. In his address to the UN General Assembly last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky used the word “genocide” to refer to the abduction by Russian occupation authorities of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, who he said were being brainwashed into hating their homeland.
In Myanmar, the military junta continues with its genocidal wars against national minorities amid legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice, such as The Gambia vs. Myanmar, better known as the Rohingya genocide case. Faced with countrywide resistance to its universally unpopular coup of 2021, the junta regime is violating all elements of international law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Only a few days ago, close to midnight, a fighter jet of the Myanmar junta’s Air Force dropped a massive bomb on ethnic Kachin war refugees who were taking shelter immediately adjacent to the China-Myanmar border in northern Myanmar. Among the casualties were 21 children who were asleep in the makeshift shelters.
In all the aforementioned cases, state actors – Russia with its veto power, Israel with total impunity and protection from the US, India and Myanmar – are wittingly disregarding international law and breaching the Genocide Convention.
It is no coincidence that that these violators of international criminal law and interstate treaties flock together. Israel, India and Russia are known to be among Myanmar’s key arms suppliers, while Myanmar has shipped artillery and munitions to Russia for use in Moscow’s war on Kyiv.
Enabled by their protectors and supporters, Russia, Israel, India and Myanmar are driving the final nail in the coffin of international law. Ironically, “never again” has been rendered hollow by the Jewish state itself, while Russia, the liberator of Auschwitz, is playing its part in destroying the Genocide Convention.
*** The writer is a research fellow with the Documentation Center of Cambodia specializing in genocide and a cofounder of Forces of Renewal in Southeast Asia (FORSEA).
