The Posthumous Genocide

"...history has a way of intruding upon the present..."

- Dee Brown, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

Ninety-year-old ghosts made a haunt of American foreign policy last week, when the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a resolution to label as genocide the Ottoman Empire's systematic murder and deportation of Armenians between the years of 1915 and 1923. Suddenly the slaughter of the Armenians -- already considered by many (like Samantha Power, author of "A Problem from Hell": American and the Age of Genocide) to be the first genocide of the 20th century -- became a hot button political issue, with the President warning that the bill's passage in the House "would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror." Tom Lantos, head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in the U.S. House, also noted the levity of the situation, stating, "We have to weigh the desire to express our solidarity with the Armenian people...against the risk that it could cause young men and women in the uniform of the United States armed services to pay an even heavier price than they are currently paying." Indeed, Turkey's president Abdullah Gul called the genocide vote invalid and unacceptable, and withdrew the Turkish ambassador from Washington. The row further complicates an already tense moment between the two countries, as the Turkish government threatens incursions into northern Iraq to hunt down members of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group.

(In what might come as no surprise, the president of Armenia welcomed the House committee's decision.)

Although the Ottoman Empire's campaign against the Armenians predates the term "genocide" by nearly thirty years, it meets the fundamental condition laid out in the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention; i.e., it was prosecuted with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group." The Convention in addition outlines the following acts, any of which can constitute genocide if committed with intent to wipe out the target group:

(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.

In "A Problem from Hell", Samantha Power notes what she calls the "numbers problem;" that there is not, nor can there ever be, a consensus on how many deaths or forced migrations amount to genocide. But Raphael Lemkin, the jurist who coined the term and lobbied ceaselessly for an international ban on genocide, and the other authors of the Genocide Convention sought to deter this criticism, establishing instead the imperative of intent. "By focusing on the perpetrators' intentions and whether they were attempting to destroy a collective," she writes, "the law's drafters thought they might ensure that diagnosis of and action against genocide would not come too late."

The fact that the U.N. Genocide convention was not ratified by the United States until 1988 (and even then with significant reservations) reveals the underlying fear that submitting to international law could weaken America's sovereignty. Some worried its broad language could be used to prosecute Americans for their treatment of blacks under Jim Crow, or perhaps its eradication of Native Americans during the 19th century.

It is the latter issue that Ward Churchill takes up in his 1997 book A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to Present. Churchill argues that the destruction of Native American peoples and their culture constitutes genocide, and the lack of admission on the part of the U.S. government and its people constitutes denial. According to a 1999 review, Churchill (himself a Native American activist) goes on to suggest amending the U.N. Convention to include non-lethal acts that weaken the target group's viability, a definition which goes back to Lemkin's initial elaboration of genocide.

While I haven't read Churchill's 531-page tome on the subject, I just finished Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which got me wondering why the systematic destruction and confinement of American Indians is never referred to as genocide. Brown focuses his narrative on the period between 1860 and 1890, culminating in a massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, where the U.S. Cavalry killed between 153 and 300 Sioux, that heralded the end of major resistance by prominent Sioux chiefs. Bury My Heart is a tragic (and, at times, boring) book because it tells practically the same story in every one of its nineteen chapters, though place and time vary: Indian chiefs who grudgingly make treaties with the U.S. government to preserve their tribal lands are eventually betrayed or forced to "re-negotiate" due to the proliferation of white settlement and mining. The options then left to the Indians are to fight an ultimately futile resistance, flee to Mexico or Canada, or capitulate to life on a reservation, where the government's promises of arable land, food, and supplies usually fall short.

Does this miserable refrain add up to genocide? Did the U.S. government ultimately wield the intent to destroy the Native American population -- "in whole or in part" -- that is a precondition for genocide under the 1948 Convention (which, by the way, is not retroactive)? Though Bury My Heart is filled with characters who, like General Philip Henry Sheridan, believed that the only good Indians were dead ones, it was not the policy of the U.S. government to systematically exterminate Native Americans. The unifying tenet of Indian policy during this period instead seems to fall under section (c) of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention: "Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part." The government moved Indians to the least desirable land and, in the process, destroyed their way of life. They were forced to become farmers on land too barren for farming, and thus condemned to partial extinction; the survivors, to perpetual marginalization.

The recent controversy about the Armenian genocide illustrates the impact changing historical perception can have on the present. Genocide carries with it huge moral baggage; neither Turkey nor the United States would like to bear that burden. And while referring to an event or events as genocide certainly empowers the victims of that atrocity with appropriate recognition and perhaps an opportunity to seek compensation, those who stand to benefit most are the members of the majority group. Americans shouldn't have to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to recognize the campaign against our country's native peoples as one of systematic destruction and repression; it should be taught explicitly in schools and openly compared to twentieth-century genocides. The current generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings is largely untainted by the Hollywood imagery of the savage Indian, which so permeated the culture of our parents' generation. Yet nothing we learned in school accurately represented the true nature of the Native American genocide or the pitiable state in which many Indians still live.

Calling it a genocide has the potential to change that. It might make us uncomfortable, but it's time to let history intrude.