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Genocide and Structural Violence: Charting the Terrain
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Genocide and
Structural Violence
Charting the terrain
Adam Jones
s INTRODUCTION
Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has a distinctive
perspective on mass murder.
By Ziegler’s estimate, one hundred thousand people die worldwide daily from
starvation – more than thirty times as many people as died in Al-Qaeda’s attacks on US
cities on September 11, 2001. Ziegler describes this as a “massacre of human beings
through malnutrition,” and has stated: “Every child who dies of hunger in today’s world
is the victim of assassination.”1
Nor does he balk at identifying the actual or potential
“assassins.” He has denounced the initiative by the World Trade Organization (WTO)
to render “food aid, especially that distributed by the United Nations . . . subject to
certain rules in order to avoid any distortion of commercial markets.”
Ziegler’s comments, like the millions of victims of starvation every year, have passed
almost unnoticed. His claims that the victims of such processes do not passively “die”
but are actively murdered, and that victims of WTO trade policy are “wittingly
condemned to starve to death,” sit poorly with most commentary on human rights and
mass crimes. Do they, in fact, have substance? Is human agency central to such largescale
mortality? Can such cases of structural suffering and mortality qualify as mass
atrocities? If so, to what extent, and under what circumstances, might they be considered
genocidal? And which strategies of intervention and prevention may be available?
132
CHAPTER 8
s STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND THE GENOCIDAL CONTINUUM
In the 1970s, Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung initiated the study of structural
violence. He defined violence in general
as the avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs or, to put it in more general
terms, the impairment of human life, which lowers the actual degree to which someone
is able to meet their needs below that which would otherwise be possible.2
Galtung described structural violence as indirect, distinct from “personal or direct”
violence “at the hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence.” “Can we
talk about violence,” he asked, “when nobody is committing direct violence, is acting?”3
His answer was yes: certain inherently violent structures had become so reified that “no
personal violence or threat of personal violence is needed.” Galtung cited, for example,
“the typical feudal structure,” which “is clearly structurally violent regardless of who staffs
it and regardless of the level of awareness of the participants.” But he also acknowledged
that structures influenced individuals to commit direct, personal violence:
These important perspectives are regained if a person is seen as making his decision
to act violently not only on the basis of individual deliberations but (also) on the
basis of expectations impinging on him as norms contained in roles contained in
statuses through which he enacts his social self; and, if one sees a violent structure
as something that is a mere abstraction unless upheld by the actions, expected
from the social environment or not, of individuals. . . . The distinction that nevertheless
remains is between violence that hits human beings as a direct result of . . .
actions of others, and violence that hits them indirectly because repressive structures
. . . are upheld by the summated and concerted action of human beings . . . The
question is . . . whether violence is structured in such a way that it constitutes
a direct, personal link between a subject and an object, or an indirect structural
one, not how this link is perceived by the persons at either end of the violence
channel.4
In accordance with the broad thrust of Galtung’s argument, I contend that:
(a) structures and institutions, by definition, are created and perpetuated by
the collective actions and agency of human beings;5
(b) as “background” features of social relations, structures and institutions
influence individual actions, whether conscious or unconscious;
(c) all violence is the product of human agency; and
(d) such agency therefore underpins “structural violence,” by maintaining the
structures and institutions that channel and facilitate violence.
These formulations are consistent with other scholars’ explorations of structural and
institutional violence; for instance, Steven Lee’s exploration of the question, “Is Poverty
Violence?” Lee writes:
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133
Poverty results in a whole range of serious physical and psychological harms: higher
risks of disease, shortened life spans, stunted mental and emotional development, and
inadequate opportunity to lead a meaningful life. These are primarily institutionally
imposed harms, because they are the result of the enforcement of systems of social,
political, legal, and economical [sic] rules. But, though the harms are institutional,
they are caused by individuals, in the sense that the acts of other individuals could
avoid them. It is individuals who enforce the unjust legal norms of the social order
and refrain from seeking to change these norms to achieve a fairer redistribution of
wealth and power.6
An important feature of the violence that human agency produces when supported by
ideological structures and institutions is that violent outcomes arrive by a more indirect
route than the direct, highly personal actions we standardly label as “violent.”This is true
in both a temporal and an empirical sense. Structural and institutional forms of violence
tend to be inflicted more slowly, often through gradual impoverishment and debilitation.
They also tend to result from human actions and decisions, the proximate purpose of which
is other than to cause death or debilitation; these consequences may be incidental or even
accidental, rather than integral to the purposive project. To cite an example, industrial
pollution may be seen as a form of structural and institutional violence, in that it is: (1)
an outgrowth of a human institution (industrialism), embedded in pervasive, enduring
economic and social structures; and (2) objectively harmful to human life and health.
However, pollution is not released in order to damage human beings and the ecosystem
that sustains them. It is released as part of the pursuit of profit, or of personal utility, or
even accidentally (as with a toxic chemical spill). Likewise, the looting of state assets
and resources through corruption does not have the purpose of creating social conditions
that result in mass immiseration and rising mortality: its perpetrators simply aim at selfenrichment.
None of this, however, means that the death and debility linked to
institutionalized corruption are unintentional – motive and intent are conceptually
distinct, as I explore next.
s STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE AND GENOCIDAL INTENT
With Nancy Scheper-Hughes, we can point to a continuum of structural and
institutional violence:7
from less to more destructive; from less to more empirically
manifest; from less to more traceable to the actions of individual human agents. To the
extent that structural and institutional violence is more amorphous and diffuse, it is less
amenable to a genocide framing, in which intentional human agency is central. To the
extent that it is more manifest and direct, it may be more amenable to such a framing
– and to interventions and attempts at amelioration based upon that framing.
The language of “intent to destroy” in Articles 2(b), (d), and (e) of the UN Genocide
Convention suggests that group destruction can be accomplished by means other than
physical killing. For the purposes of this chapter, I limit the application of 2(b) to serious
physical debility (i.e. setting aside the question of “mental harm”), and exclude 2(d)
and (e) entirely. This is not because these strategies are necessarily less central to the
Convention definition – although genocide in the absence of killing has failed to arouse
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much in the way of outrage and intervention – but because it is harder to tie structural
and institutional violence to outright “killing,” “physical destruction,” and “serious
bodily” harm. If such a link can be made credibly, then most would probably accept
that it can also be made with regard to “mental harm,” or “imposing measures intended
to prevent births within the group.” (I am not sure about 2(e), “forcibly transferring
children.”)
Summarizing the recent finding of the Akayesu trial chamber of the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in his study The Genocide Convention: An
International Law Analysis, John Quigley wrote: “If an actor does violence to immediate
victims, understanding that thereby harm is brought to the group, or even having reason
to know that harm is thereby brought to the group, the elements of genocide would seem
to be satisfied.”8
Even “wilful blindness” may suffice to demonstrate genocidal intent,
referring to “a situation in which an actor lacks actual knowledge but is aware of a high
probability of the existence of a fact and fails to inquire into circumstances that would
have made him aware of the existence of the fact.” The tribunals find it a fair reading
of Article 2 to include persons who do not have actual knowledge of the consequences,
but who should, on the basis of facts they knew, have understood the consequences.9
Quigley even touches upon the theme of structural and institutional violence in the
context of massive mortality inflicted by environmental degradation:
One can imagine situations of potential environmental harm that could constitute
genocide if the culpability standard requires less than a purpose to bring about a result.
Allowing a nuclear generator to operate in the face of knowledge that it is emitting
radioactive material to the surrounding area might be taken as evidence of an intent
to destroy a group.10
What seems important in determining the degree of genocidal intent is whether a
reasonably short causal chain exists; the destruction wreaked is readily apparent; and
the evidence shows that actors were aware of the impact of their policies and decisions,
or should have been. I return to these elements in the closing section of the chapter.
s CASES (1): A BRIEF SUMMARY
What unites the exceedingly diverse phenomena examined in this section? First, all have
resulted, or (in the case of global warming) may well result, in large-scale human
suffering and mortality. Second, all have been denounced, often repeatedly, by public
commentators employing the language and framework of genocide and/or mass humanrights
atrocity. Third, all have been linked to underlying social, political, and economic
structures, and to institutions in both the broader (ideological) and narrower (formal/
bureaucratic) sense. Fourth, none constitutes a discrete “event” of the kind normally
examined in genocide studies; they are instead processes, aspects, features – that is,
phenomena both more amorphous and usually more enduring than “events.”
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135
Global poverty and inequality
Despite considerable advances on a number of fronts, the death toll inflicted by the
core structural inequalities in the international system continues to be incomprehensibly
large – and almost invisible. In his article “Structural Violence as a Form of Genocide,”
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed writes that “the international economic order’s systematic
generation of human insecurity . . . has led to the deaths of countless hundreds of
millions of people, and the deprivation of thousands of millions of others.”11
The UN’s
Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) contends that “nearly six million children
die each year as a result of hunger or malnutrition.”12
A global economic crisis, such as
the one that descended worldwide in 2008, “will condemn 53 million more people to
extreme poverty and contribute to 1.2 million child deaths” in the half-decade that
follows, according to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The same authorities estimate that “more than a billion people, or one in six people on
the planet, are still struggling to meet basic food needs, leading to increased instances
of disease – and ultimately death – in young children and pregnant women,” with “1.2
million children . . . likely to die between 2009 and 2015 as a result . . .”13
S.P. Udayakumar’s 1995 essay for Futures, “The Futures of the Poor,” coined the terms
“structural genocide” and “poorcide” to describe a global assault by the privileged upon
the poor. His essay included a section, “Poverty is Genocide,” that merits extended
quotation:
Although race, ethnicity, gender, generation and political powerlessness all contribute
considerably to poverty, the “economic worth” factor forms the basis in “poorcide,”
the genocide of the poor. It is an economic group (or class) who [is] discriminated
against in poorcide. A particular group of people is massacred in genocide, but poverty
kills indiscriminately, irrespective of the group identity.
Genocide just kills you, but poverty tortures you and condemns you to a slow and
painful death. . . . Genocide prompts physical elimination, but poverty causes
physical pain, mental agony, moral degradation and spiritual dissipation. Extending
the analysis of physical violence and structural violence to genocide, we can distinguish
between direct and indirect, or physical and structural, genocide. Genocide
means not just massive killing (which we can call direct or physical genocide) but
also includes calculated attacks on and constant efforts at undermining the basic
human dignity and life-support systems of a particular group of people (which may
be described as the indirect or structural genocide). Poorcide may not be actual
physical elimination of the poor [on] a massive scale, but it is a slow-pace[d] silent
holocaust.14
Udayakumar’s focus on Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, i.e., “calculated attacks
on and constant efforts at undermining the basic human dignity and life-support systems
of a particular group of people,” seems especially relevant to our analysis of structural
and institutional genocide. Article 2(c) focuses on the kind of indirect, but intentional
and “calculated,” infliction of debility and death which scholars of structural violence
from Johan Galtung to Udayakumar and Paul Farmer have emphasized.15
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136
Debt crisis in the South
In The Collapse of Globalism, John Ralston Saul describes “the Third World debt crisis
[now] stretching on toward the end of its third decade” as an example of “crucifixion
economics” inflicted on poor countries. “The debt is unpayable, unserviceable, of no use
to a stable free market or to the debtors.” Respect for it, Saul writes, “must unfortunately
trump disease, suffering and social order.”16
According to some observers, the surplus mortality that can be linked to ruinous debt
payments, often exceeding 20 percent of a country’s gross domestic product, is of holocaust
proportions.17
Jeffrey D. Sachs, an economist who previously urged “stabilization”
programs on economically vulnerable governments, more recently has emphasized the
destructive impact of prioritizing macroeconomic stability over subsistence needs.Writing
in August 2005, he argued that “these policies have left [made?] hundreds of millions of
people even more desperately poor and hungry. Millions die each year, either of outright
starvation or from infectious diseases that their weakened bodies cannot withstand . . .”18
“Austerity programs” and privatization measures
“Just as war can be a form of politics carried on by other means, so can genocide represent
economic policy carried out by means of mass murder.”19
So writes Hannibal Travis,
one of the brightest of the new generation of genocide scholars.
The requirement that poor countries service their debt is an essential element of the
austerity programs and “structural adjustment” policies imposed upon Southern
economies, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, as a condition for loans and other aid.
Such programs, also referred to as “shock therapy,” “call for nations to deregulate their
economies, by opening up to international investment, privatize services, lowering labor
and environmental standards, and use a significant portion of government funds to
service their debt.”20
Such “sado-monetarism”21
(in Gerard Baker’s memorable phrase)
likely reached its zenith – or, rather, its nadir – in post-communist Russia under the
government of Boris Yeltsin. Nothing less than “the wholesale, complete replacement”
of Soviet institutions by “an alternative, market-based system,” would suffice.22
By 2006,
The Los Angeles Times was reporting that “the end of the Soviet healthcare system and
the debut of free-market medicine have added to the slide”:
In the new Russia, millions are born sick. Many succumb to poisons in the air and
water around them, or are slowly killed by alcohol, cigarettes or stress. Most are too
poor to buy back their health. The overwhelmed healthcare system can’t help much.
Although medical care still is nominally free, in practice all but the most basic services
are available only to those able to pay hefty fees . . .The Scientific Center of Children’s
Health, a branch of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences, estimates that 45% of
Russian children are born with “health deviations,” including problems of the central
nervous system, faulty hearts, malformed urinary tracts and low birth weight.23
A Lancet study published in 2009 found that “rapid mass privatization as an economic
transition strategy was a crucial determinant of differences in adult mortality trends in
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137
post-Communist societies,” with its effects “reduced if social capital was high” (and
sharpened where it was low). According to the report, “only a little over half of the exCommunist
countries have regained their pretransition life-expectancy levels.”24
Russia
specialist Stephen F. Cohen of Princeton, one of the leading critics of the “structural
adjustment” measures inflicted on post-Soviet Russia, has estimated the death toll
exacted by the “nihilistic zealotry” of proponents of “savage capitalism” as in the tens of
millions (“the lost lives of perhaps 100 million Russians seem not to matter . . .”).25
“I
don’t think . . . it is unfair,” stated Russian commentator Aleksander Prokhanov, “to call
it genocide.”26
Maternal mortality
The global plague of maternal mortality inflicts approximately half a million deaths a
year, frequently in agony paralleling that of the worst tortures. The non-governmental
organization that I co-founded, Gendercide Watch, declares itself “skeptical of including
individual-level killings, let alone ‘agentless’ ones, under the rubric of ‘gendercide,’”
and hence of genocide. Nonetheless, the broader framing of genocidal intention that
has come to predominate in international case-law, in which “reckless disregard” and
“wilful blindness” can qualify as genocidal, can be “‘gendered’ to encompass the institutional
discrimination, leading to physical victimization, that occurs on a massive scale
with maternal mortality in the underdeveloped world.” I alleged that “those primarily
responsible” for the mass mortality
are the governments and ruling elites who can always find money for weapons, but
only rarely for hospitals and clinics and midwives; who systematically deny other
resources (educational, legal, contraceptive) to women; and who thereby deny them
rights that every human being should have to control their bodies and their destinies.
The failure of the developed world to contribute meaningfully to the development
of the poorer countries is [also] obviously an important factor.27
AIDS in the Global South
“By some estimates,” according to Edward O’Neil Jr., “AIDS will claim more lives by the
year 2025 than the total of lives lost in all of humanity’s wars since the first century.”28
Both state and nonstate actors have been accused of complicity in the massive excess
mortality afflicting the African continent, and elsewhere, in the age of HIV/AIDS. The
accusation that this is tantamount to genocide and/or crimes against humanity has
regularly featured. Especially outspoken on this count has been Stephen Lewis, the UN
Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, who denounced “those who watch [the
epidemic] unfold with a kind of pathological equanimity,” and demanded they be held
to account: “There may yet come a day when we have peacetime tribunals to deal with
this particular version of crimes against humanity.”29
While the world’s wealthiest countries, and particularly pharmaceutical companies,30
have come in for their share of condemnation, the most vitriolic denunciations have been
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reserved for a government in the developing world: the South African regime under
President Thabo Mbeki. The Mbeki government’s “disastrous and pseudo-scientific”
health policy had resulted in “many people . . . dying unnecessarily,” according to an
open letter issued by sixty experts in September 2006.31
Richard Branson, the British
mogul, went a step further in ceremonies commemorating the opening of a health center
he had funded in a South African township. He declared (in a media outlet’s paraphrase)
that government inaction “is killing thousands of its own people”; “this government is
not doing enough . . . [and] the little that they are doing could be seen as genocide.”32
Climate change and global warming
A strong scientific consensus now exists that human activity – notably the burning of
fossil fuels – is decisively altering the global climate, resulting in average temperature
increases not seen for thousands of years. The implications are profound for animal
species,33
including human beings. As early as 2001, the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation cited estimates that “global warming may have killed between 50,000 and
100,000 people in the past three years and made up to 300 million people homeless.”34
In 2006, the non-governmental organization Christian Aid concluded that:
climate change will devastate poor countries. [The group] estimates that up to 182
million people in sub-Saharan Africa could die of diseases directly attributable to
climate change by the end of the century. Many millions more people throughout
the world face death, disease and penury if nothing is done . . .35
According to Andrew Pendleton of Christian Aid, “Knowing what we know, if we
don’t respond, we’re committing a very serious crime . . . It would be the climate change
version of Rwanda,”36
“a death sentence for many millions of people.”37
The renowned
genocide scholar Mark Levene in the UK supplied his endorsement, and that of the
Crisis Forum he co-founded, for a conference in which a looming “environmental
genocide” was denounced.38
Corruption and stripping of state resources
What is one to make of countries where a regime, or a series of regimes, have effectively
stripped the country of resources that could have brought enormous benefits to a
society, leaving the population in penury and facing malnutrition and early death?
On its face, this would seem to meet the UN Convention definition of genocide
as including the infliction of conditions “calculated” to destroy a national group. Nuhu
Ribadu, a Nigerian anti-corruption activist, estimates that successive Nigerian
kleptocracies have stolen or squandered in excess of US$380 billion since the country
achieved independence in 1960.39
A more severe, or at least more intensive, example
of out-of-control looting and stripping of state assets is Zimbabwe under the regime of
President Robert Mugabe. In a critique published in The SundayTimes in January 2007,
R.W. Johnson described a system not only of pervasive political persecution, but of
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139
“general economic meltdown”; a “health system [that] has collapsed”; and “a populace
now weakened by five consecutive years of near-starvation.” “A vast human cull is under
way in Zimbabwe,” Johnson alleged:
it is a genocide perhaps 10 times greater than Darfur’s and more than twice as large
as Rwanda’s . . . Genocide is not a word one should use hastily, but the situation is
exactly as described in the UN Convention on Genocide, which defines it as “deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part” . . . Mugabe . . . [has] already been responsible for
far more deaths than Rwanda suffered and the number is fast heading into realms
previously explored only by Stalin, Mao and Adolf Eichmann.40
David Coltart, a member of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change,
claimed that “Zimbabwe has the lowest life expectancy in the world: 34 for women and
37 for men,” and that Mugabe’s tyranny had rendered him culpable for the country’s
structural collapse. “To use a legal term, I would say this amounts to genocide with
constructive intent. In terms of a complete disregard for the plight of people, not caring
whether there is wholesale loss of life, it amounts to genocide.”41
Economic sanctions and embargo
The structural dislocation associated with punitive economic actions, and the mass
mortality allegedly caused by them, have hovered at the margins of comparative genocide
studies since the beginning of the 1990s. It was at that point that the United Nations
Security Council, led by the United States and Great Britain, imposed sanctions on Iraq
as punishment for its May 1990 invasion of neighboring Kuwait. The destruction of
civilian infrastructure caused by the ensuing Gulf War “wrought near apocalyptic results
on the economic infrastructure” of Iraq, in the estimation of a March 1991 UN report.
The mixture of sanctions and war had returned Iraq to a “pre-industrial age but with
all the disabilities of post-industrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and
technology.”42
The 1996 International Court on Crimes Against Humanity Committed
by the UN Security Council on [sic] Iraq, headed by former US Attorney General
Ramsey Clark, charged and found that:
The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom
and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide as
defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population of Iraq including
genocide by starvation and sickness through use of sanctions as a weapon of mass
destruction . . .43
In December 1996, after more than five years of unparalleled privation, the “Oil for
Food” program was established, ostensibly to alleviate the worst of the damage caused
by sanctions, to allow the Iraqi regime to purchase essentials for the population through
carefully-managed oil sales and disbursements of revenue. However, two successive
overseers of the program resigned, and both subsequently adopted the framing and
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vocabulary of genocide to denounce what was occurring under the sanctions regime.44
In her 2010 treatment, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, Joy
Gordon stated her belief “that the sanctions on Iraq [do not] constitute genocide or
crimes against humanity, as these are defined in international law”; but contended that
if understandings of genocidal intent could be expanded to place greater emphasis on
general rather than specific intent, the term would be apt:
Under this standard, it is clear that dozens of U.S. officials had the necessary intent
and knowledge to be found criminally responsible under the Rome Statute, were there
a prosecution . . . There is a terrible and obvious cost to using the higher level of
[specific] intent that the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute require for
genocide and crimes against humanity, rather than the general intent standard . . .
It may be that the specific intent requirement does not provide the means to punish
genocidal murderers in general, but only tactically inept ones.45
Dumping of hazardous waste
When toxic wastes and poisonous products or by-products are dumped into an
ecosystem, in the knowledge that they will cause widespread death and debilitation –
or when such consequences are likely and should be seen to be likely – can a genocide
framework be useful? Among the high-profile cases in recent decades are:
• The death and deformity caused by “a historically unprecedented level of chemical
warfare,” namely “the indiscriminate spraying of nearly 20 million gallons [of
herbicides] on one-seventh the area of South Vietnam” during the Vietnam War.The
devastating human impact of the chemical “Agent Orange,” produced by Dow
Chemical and other US-based corporations, was the subject of a legal claim for
genocide filed in US courts. In the words of the judgment:
It is contended that the acts against plaintiffs constitute genocide, in violation of
customary international law which prohibits the following acts committed with
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,
as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to
members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; or imposing
measures intended to prevent births within the group.46
• The explosive growth of cancer rates in China in recent years – the disease is now
the leading cause of death – has been persuasively tied to the country’s extraordinary
economic transformations and pell-mell industrialization over the past two decades.
According to a detailed 2010 report by Lee Liu, published in Environment, “China
appears to have produced more cancer clusters in a few decades than the rest of
the world ever has,” the result of the country’s “‘grow first and clean up later’”
approach to development, which led to an acceleration of environmental pollution
and serious environmental health problems.The result is the so-called “cancer-village
phenomenon,” which
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141
is likely to worsen in the future, partly because the health impact of environmental
pollution tends to be long-lasting . . . The poor, such as the cancer villagers, will
remain poor or may get even poorer . . . What does development mean to these
villages? . . . Pollution causes diseases that lead to absolute poverty and death.47
s CASES (2): PARAMETERS OF EVALUATION
What are the conditions under which it is reasonable to contend that a structural and
institutional form of violence is genocidal? I point to three main factors:
• Convincing evidence of severe, large-scale debility and/or premature death. In the absence
of serious harm of the type mentioned in Article 2(b) of the Genocide Convention
– especially physical harm, and especially life-threatening physical harm – an
allegation of genocide is less likely to prompt recognition and intervention.
• A reasonably short and direct causal chain, traceable to identifiable actors. In order for
a genocide framework to be preferred in instances of structural violence, it is
important to establish a reasonably clear connection between human agency/
actions and possibly genocidal outcomes. Although diffuse/collective agency does
not rule out an allegation of genocide, it is certainly the case – given the Genocide
Convention’s emphasis on individual responsibility – that allegations made against
more easily identifiable agents, acting in a more direct and calculated fashion, are
more likely to persuade a tribunal of their soundness.
• Related to both of the above factors is actors’ evidence of awareness of the impact of
policies and decisions; or a failure to seek or acknowledge such an awareness that is
so egregious as to amount to negligence. Where strong evidence exists and the causal
chain is reasonably direct, a perpetrator’s responsibility and liability are more firmly
established. Consider a standard aspect of structural-adjustment measures: so-called
“shock therapy.” This euphemism, employed by those imposing it as well as by critics,
recognizes that at least in the short-to-medium term, the socioeconomic impact will
inflict a shock, defined by the Concise Oxford Dictionary as a “violent collision,
concussion, or impact” and a “great disturbance of organization or system”; it adapts
a psychological treatment strategy based on “inducing coma or convulsions.” It is not
merely the case that the policies are imposed in the reasonable expectation that they
will inflict a severe shock, which is all that would be required to demonstrate mens
rea and, thus, intent; in fact, they are explicitly designed to inflict a “great disturbance
of organization or system” (thus motive and purpose). Where actors are aware or
should have been, but fail to heed or respond adequately to available evidence, they
may also be genocidally culpable. “If you have evidence your inaction is responsible
for millions of deaths, you promise to correct that situation, then you fail to deliver,
what do you call that?” asked Julio Montaner in the context of the AIDS crisis. “It’s
not ignorance. It’s not mere negligence. It’s more than a crime against humanity. It
can only be characterized as genocide.”48
Beyond these empirical issues, we need to distinguish between forms of structural
violence in which a greater or lesser degree of voluntary agency is evident among those
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apparently victimized by the phenomenon in question. For example – to cite a case that
I have not explored in this chapter – how are we to evaluate the role of tobacco
companies? On one hand, the product they sell kills tens of millions of people every
year – possibly more than any of the phenomena considered in this chapter, with the
exception of global poverty. Extensive evidence also suggests that the companies are
fully aware of the dangers of the product they sell, and have often employed deception
to downplay those dangers. Nonetheless, the destruction wreaked by tobacco-related
illness is also closely tied to the independent agency of the consumers, and, since tobacco
dependence and addiction can be voluntarily broken (I personally did so on January 1,
2010), to their voluntary decisions to keep purchasing and consuming the product.49
On the basis of these criteria, which of the cases examined here appear to be more
amenable to a comparative-genocide framing, and intervention strategies derived from
it? Which are less amenable? See Table 8.1.
The “ideal case” of a clear responsibility for genocide in cases of structural/
institutional violence would thus be found where the evidence in Table 8.1 in column
(1) is high, the causal chain and agency in column (2) are short, direct, and centralized/
individualized, the actors’ awareness (mens rea, column (3)) is high, and victims’ agency
in column (4) is low. Only one case on our list is “ideal” in this respect: that of the Iraq
sanctions and economic embargo. There would appear to be very strong support for a
charge of genocide in this instance.
GENOCIDE AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
143
Table 8.1 Evaluation of cases of structural/institutional violence
Event/Process (1) Evidence of debility (2) Causal chain (3) Actors’ aware- (4) Degree of agency/
and death as result of (direct/indirect); ness (high, voluntarism among
event/phenomenon agency (centralized– moderate, low) victims
(high, moderate, low) individualized/ of policies’
decentralized–diffuse) destructive impact
Global poverty and High Indirect/ Moderate Low
inequality decentralized–diffuse
Global debt crisis Moderate Direct/centralized– High Low
individualized
Austerity programs and Moderate Direct/centralized– High Low
privatization measures individualized
Maternal mortality High Indirect/ Low Low
decentralized–diffuse
AIDS in the developing High Direct/centralized– Moderate Through
world individualized transfusion: low
Through sexual
transmission:
moderate
Corruption and stripping Moderate Indirect/centralized– Low–moderate Low–moderate
of state resources individualized
Iraq sanctions and embargo High Direct/centralized– High Low
individualized
Dumping of hazardous Moderate Direct/centralized– High Low
waste individualized
In other cases, where requisites (2), (3), and (4) are satisfied, there would appear to
be a strong case for a charge of genocide. Thus, with regard to the global debt crisis,
transmission of AIDS by blood transfusion, austerity programs and privatization
measures, and dumping of hazardous waste, support for an allegation of genocide
appears moderate to strong. At least, this would be true at times; all of these phenomena
are of an “umbrella” character, and responsibility for genocide could be more readily
demonstrated in some instances than in others.
In several cases (global poverty and inequality, maternal mortality, corruption, AIDS
through sexual transmission), powerful obstacles appear to impede a persuasive charge
of genocide – at least to the extent that such a charge is to be directed against a limited
set of identifiable actors. Evidence may be lacking of debility and death resulting
reasonably directly from the event or phenomenon at hand. Responsibility and agency
may be highly decentralized or diffuse. Evidence of actors’ awareness of the damage
their policies are apparently causing may be lacking. Some victim agency may be present,
even decisive in the equation. However, in my view, this does not entirely rule out a
deployment of a genocide framework. For example, it may be quite legitimate to refer
to the huge mortality inflicted by global poverty and inequality as “genocidal,” even
though, in a real sense, most of us in the Global North – and a good number of those
in the Global South – share responsibility for perpetuating unequal and povertyproducing
structures and institutions.
s STRATEGIES OF INTERVENTION AND PREVENTION
In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)
released its report, The Responsibility to Protect, which immediately became a cause célèbre
among proponents of a more vigorous interventionist stance in the face of mass atrocity.
The commission’s members declared that, in their view,
military intervention for human protection purposes is justified in two broad sets of
circumstances, namely in order to halt or avert:
• large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is
the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or a
failed state situation; or
• large scale “ethnic cleansing,” actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing,
forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.50
Upon reading the statement of the first “broad set of circumstances,” my mind leapt in
a perhaps unexpected direction: to the phenomenon of maternal mortality. Here we
clearly have a case of “large scale loss of life,” “actual” in the sense that it produces
hundreds of thousands of female deaths annually, and enormous attendant suffering.
Maternal death on this scale is at the very least a product of “state neglect or inability
to act.” The majority of such deaths occur in the poorer states of the “Third World.”
Most of these states could readily devote resources that they currently squander, for
example, on high-tech weaponry, to establishing the institutions and mechanisms that
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would reduce maternal mortality to First World levels or below. Cuba, for example, has
done so.51
For those unable to generate the necessary resources and expertise, transfers
of resources from the First World could readily fill the gap.
As the ICISS emphasized, “genocidal intent” need not be present in order to trigger
military intervention. But as it happens, a case for such intent could easily be made.
Drawing upon the arguments advanced in John Quigley’s reading of the case-law
spawned by the UN Genocide Convention, the “reckless disregard” and “wilful blindness”
that underpin maternal mortality worldwide could qualify as genocidal.
My purpose in making this argument is not to call for military intervention and the
trampling of state sovereignty in order to address the crisis of maternal mortality. Rather,
I question the readiness with which we, like the ICISS commissioners, leap to a definition
of “broad . . . circumstances” that centers on the notion of event-based humanitarian
emergencies, rather than process-based or institutional ones. The commission was driven
by the discrete and time-bound developments in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and
elsewhere during the 1990s. There is no mention anywhere in its text of structural
emergencies.
The ICISS constructs “intervention” broadly. It includes not only (or principally)
military intervention, but emphasizes as well “political, economic and judicial measures.”
One can imagine a range of such measures being instituted to address maternal mortality
and other forms of structural violence. On the judicial front, for example, a simple
assertion and activation of the basic subsistence rights guaranteed under the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights could radically transform the prevailing language of
human rights. This has concentrated, for most practical purposes, on direct violence by
state agents and others. What other “political” and “economic” measures might be
required to intervene effectively in structural violence? These are very much open to
discussion and debate; but the debate cannot occur unless the question is first raised, and
a persuasive case made that it should be taken seriously.
With regard to intervention through legal mechanisms and systems, one should first ask
what is the likelihood and viability of bringing charges against the alleged perpetrators.
As the case-law of genocide has evolved, the formidable challenges to making a charge
of genocide stick in the courts have become more evident. Even in more clear-cut cases
of individual responsibility for mass murder of members of a sharply-defined group,
the difficulty of securing a verdict of genocide has resulted in other prosecutorial
strategies being preferred – such as bringing charges of complicity in genocide and, most
commonly, of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. The difficulty of widening
the legal framing of genocide to address adequately, for example, malfeasance by multinational
corporations or international organizations does not seem insurmountable. But
it is unlikely to generate positive outcomes proportionate to the enormous investment
of energy required.
It is likely, in my view, that the best use of a genocide framework is as a political and
rhetorical instrument, to denounce and shame alleged perpetrators. It could, in fact, be a
powerful tool in mobilizing popular movements to confront structural and institutional
atrocities. Where interventions through publicity campaigns and demonstrations fail
to generate results, direct action, notably peaceful civil disobedience, can be tried.
What of strategies of violent resistance? In extreme cases, these may be justified.
Consider the case of Freeport’s Grasberg gold mine in Papua New Guinea, which has
GENOCIDE AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
145
apparently bought the complicity of Indonesian government officials in order to undertake
operations that are projected to result in the dumping of “six billion tons of waste,”
much of it “into what was once a pristine river system.”52
Do downstream populations
have the right not only to protest, petition, and launch legal proceedings, but if this
fails, to conduct acts of sabotage against mining operations – destroying material plant,
say, or seizing and sequestering mine officials and administrators? Such tactics have been
adopted by rebel groups among the Ogoni people of Nigeria, to confront Shell Oil’s
rampant destruction of their Niger Delta territories.53
Since both the state and the oil
company have refused to stage an effective intervention in the pattern of ecocidal – and
arguably genocidal – destruction, it seems hard to gainsay such measures. However, it
seems reasonable to argue that a strategy of violent resistance should only be adopted
in the most extreme cases: where definable actors are demonstrably responsible for the
structural and institutional violence in question; and where permanent injury to human
beings can be avoided.
A substantial redistribution of wealth, both within and between societies, seems central
to interventions in structural violence. In addition to “internal redistributions,” writes
Henry Shue:
The only feasible source of the amounts now needed . . . are transfers from the
countries that are now wealthy . . . One can responsibly acknowledge subsistence
rights, including duties to aid, only if one is willing to support, where necessary,
substantial transfers of wealth or resources to those who cannot provide for their own
subsistence and willing to support any structural changes necessary nationally and
internationally to make those transfers possible.54
At the very least, the prevailing pattern, under which transfers of wealth are massively
greater from poor countries to rich ones than vice versa, must be abandoned. According to
Linda McQuaig, from 1982 to 1999, “a net transfer of $1.5 trillion from South to North”
occurred.55
Forgiveness of the debts of highly-indebted countries, tied perhaps to
increases in the provision of services and development of social-oriented infrastructure,
is indispensable.
Attention to structural and institutional forms of violence also encourages a shift away
from the state-centric orientation that has long reigned in comparative genocide studies.
States do, probably, remain the primary actors, given the power they exert not only
directly vis-à-vis their domestic populations, but collectively through the international
(inter-state) organizations they comprise. But other institutional actors – notably international
organizations as distinct bureaucratic bodies; corporate entities, both national
and multinational; and “third-party states” indirectly complicit in atrocities – also figure
prominently in the equation.
Another important aspect of a focus on structural and institutional violence is that
it forces us to confront the collective agency often required to inflict it. Each of us is dutybound
to examine the institutions and structural arrangements in which we participate,
many of which we are born into; to determine the extent to which they are violent, even
genocidal; to understand how we act, in concert with others, to buttress and perpetuate
them; and to consider how we can and should act, again alongside others, to impede and
erode them. This is particularly relevant to those of us in western countries, who both
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dominate the world and its resources and enjoy democratic freedoms that enable us to
influence socio-political outcomes.
We might also heed Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s advice, cited earlier, to focus on daily
practices and discourses of exclusion, anathematization, and marginalization:
It is essential that we recognize in our species (and in ourselves) a genocidal capacity
and that we exercise a defensive hypervigilance, a hypersensitivity to the less dramatic,
permitted, everyday acts of violence that make participation (under other conditions)
in genocidal acts possible, perhaps more easy than we would like to know.56
And we should not overlook the role that victims may play in intensifying and perpetuating
their own victimization. In cases where the destruction would be on a lesser
scale without the voluntary or semi-voluntary contribution of a victim class – the
cigarette smoker, the irresponsible sexual partner – a corresponding responsibility may
exist to monitor one’s own complicity with an oppressive social formation, and to
transcend it.
s CONCLUSION
This chapter has argued that patterns and processes of structural and institutional
violence have tended to be downplayed in the genocide studies literature. In part, this
reflects the state-centric orientation of the field, which grew out of the ultimate stateplanned
and -administered genocide, the Nazi Holocaust. However, a consistent thread
runs through discourse on mass atrocity, broadly defined – one in which “holocaust,”
and other genocide-inflected terminology, is used to convey the massive mortality of
structural and institutional forms of violence, and the human agency underpinning it.
I have argued that this marginal discourse deserves to be taken seriously, and moved
closer to the mainstream of genocide studies. There is nothing in the UN Genocide
Convention that rules out such forms of violence as genocidal mechanisms. A standard
sticking point has usually been the issue of agency and intent. But there is much in the
evolving case-law to suggest that the understanding of intent can legitimately be
extended to cases where motives are quite different from the destruction of a population
for destruction’s sake – for example, personal or corporate profit. The evolving interpretation
also acknowledges “wilful blindness” and “reckless disregard” as falling under
the rubric of genocidal intent.
Genocide studies, and international case-law, are presently at the stage of an extended
“plausibility probe,” pushing the boundaries of the destructive actions, targeting of
definable groups, and degrees of mens rea that can legitimately be termed genocidal. It
is far from clear that questions of structural and institutional violence will be readily
incorporated into the emerging legal framing. It is probable, in fact, that the genocide
framework will be more effective at the level of political mobilization and popular
discourse than in a more formal courtroom setting. Where a short causal chain, direct
responsibility, and individual perpetrators are present, legal remedies may be viable.
However, they are unlikely to prove a decisive strategy of genocide prevention and
intervention, even in the context of the political–military events usually prosecuted as
“genocide.” Not until a transformation in public opinion and popular mobilization is
GENOCIDE AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE
147
brought about, on an international and indeed global scale, is genocide likely to be
effectively confronted. In this broader transformation and mobilization, framings of
genocide and structural/institutional violence may play a notable part.
s NOTES
1 Jean Ziegler quoted in “UN Expert Decries ‘Assassination’ by Hunger of Millions of
Children,” UN News Center dispatch, October 28, 2005. This article began life many years
ago as a conference presentation to the International Association of Genocide Scholars
(biennial meeting in Boca Raton, FL, 2005). It has undergone extensive revisions and new
permutations since. I am grateful to Edwin Hodge for capable and proactive research
assistance, and to Jo and David Jones for proofreading and editorial suggestions.
2 Johan Galtung cited in “D@dalos – Peace Education: Basic Course 2 – Violence Typology,”
http://www.dadalos.org/frieden_int/grundkurs_2/typologie.htm.
3 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” in Galtung, Peace: Research –
Education – Action (Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers, 1975), p. 111.
4 Ibid., p. 123.
5 This is close to Peter Prontzos’s definition of structural violence as “deleterious conditions
that derive from economic and political structures of power, created and maintained by
human actions and institutions.” Prontzos, “Collateral Damage: The Human Cost of
Structural Violence,” in Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and
Complicity (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 299.
6 Steven Lee, “Is Poverty Violence?,” in Deane Curtin and Robert Litke, eds, Institutional
Violence (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), p. 9.
7 Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Genocidal Continuum: Peace-time Crimes,” in Jeannette
Marie Mageo, ed., Power and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
pp. 29–47. See also my application of Scheper-Hughes’s continuum to cases of subaltern
genocide in Adam Jones, “‘When the Rabbit’s Got the Gun: Subaltern Genocide and the
Genocidal Continuum,” in Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones, eds, Genocides by the
Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2009), pp. 185–207.
8 John Quigley, The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis (London: Ashgate,
2006), p. 119.
9 Ibid., p. 119.
10 Ibid., pp. 111–112.
11 Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, “Structural Violence as a Form of Genocide: The Impact of the
International Economic Order,” Entelequia: Revista Interdisciplinar, 5 (2007), p. 4.
12 “Hunger Kills ‘6m Children a Year,’” BBC Online, November 22, 2005.
13 Ed Cropley, “Economic Crisis Adds Millions to Ranks of Poorest,” Reuters dispatch, April
23, 2010.
14 S.P. Udayakumar, “The Futures of the Poor,” Futures, 27: 3 (1995), p. 342.
15 Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” in Galtung, Peace: Research –
Education – Action; Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New
War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). See also Thomas
Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
16 John Ralston Saul, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World (Toronto:
Viking Canada, 2005), pp. 12, 103–104, and 107.
17 Ross P. Buckley, “The Rich Borrow and the Poor Repay: The Fatal Flaw in International
Finance,” World Policy Journal, 19: 4 (Winter 2002/03), http://www.worldpolicy.org/
journal/articles/wpj02-4/buckley.html. Buckley states:
According to UNICEF, over 500,000 children under the age of five died each year in
Africa and Latin America in the late 1980s as a direct result of the debt crisis and its
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management under the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs.
These programs required the abolition of price supports on essential food-stuffs,
steep reductions in spending on health, education, and other social services, and
increases in taxes. The debt crisis has never been resolved for much of sub-Saharan
Africa. Extrapolating from the UNICEF data, as many as 5,000,000 children and
vulnerable adults may have lost their lives in this blighted continent as a result of the
debt crunch.
18 Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Alive Today, Desperate Tomorrow,” Tompaine.com, August 19, 2005,
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/081905G.shtml.
19 Hannibal Travis, Genocide in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire, Iraq, and Sudan
(Durham, NC: Carolina University Press, 2010), p. 4.
20 Robin Fenske, John G. Bell, and Erich Albrecht, “Affinity Group: ‘International Relations
and Systems Thinking,’” http://www.arlecchino.org/ildottore/palod/paper_-_international_
relations.html.
21 Quoted in William Keegan, “This is No Time to Flirt with Fiscal S&M,” The Observer,
April 4, 2004, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/economics/comment/0,11268,1185543,00.
html.
22 Richard E. Ericson, “The Classical Soviet-Type Economy: Nature of the System and
Implications for Reform,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5: 4 (Autumn 1991), pp. 25–26.
23 Kim Murphy, “For the Sick, No Place to Turn,” The Los Angeles Times, October 9, 2006.
24 Cited in Judy Dempsey, “Study Looks at Mortality in Post-Soviet Era,” The New York
Times, January 16, 2009; see David Stuckler, Lawrence King, and Martin McKee, “Mass
Privatisation and the Post-Communist Mortality Crisis: A Cross-National Analysis,” The
Lancet, 373: 9661 (January 31, 2009), pp. 399–407.
25 Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), pp. 38, 50. The collapse of health care in postSoviet
Russia has been especially catastrophic. See Murphy, “For the Sick, No Place to
Turn.”
26 Prokhanov, quoted in Mark G. Field, “The Health and Demographic Crisis in Post-Soviet
Russia: A Two-Phase Development,” in Mark G. Field and Judyth L. Twigg, eds, Russia’s
Torn Safety Nets: Health and Social Welfare during the Transition (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 2000), p. 17.
27 Gendercide Watch, “Case Study: Maternal Mortality,” http://www.gendercide.org/case_
maternal.html.
28 Edward O’Neil Jr., “Poverty, Structural Violence, and Racism in a World Out of Balance,”
Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Perspectives, 3: 1 (Autumn 2009), pp. 115–138.
29 Stephen Lewis, quoted in Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2005), p. 61.
30 Criticizing “superpatents” which prolong US pharmaceutical companies’ patents on drugs
for AIDS and other conditions, Pedro Chequer, chief of Brazil’s national AIDS program,
stated: “If you prevent countries from using generic drugs, you are creating a concrete
obstacle to providing access to drugs. You are promoting genocide, because you’re killing
people.” Quoted in Dr. Peter Rost, “The Genocide Election,” Counterpunch.org, November
6, 2006, http://www.counterpunch.org/rost11062006.html.
31 Open letter quoted in “Aids Experts Condemn SA Minister,” BBC Online, September 6,
2006.
32 Zinkie Sithole, “Govt’s HIV Policy ‘Is Genocide,’” News24.com, October 30, 2006.
33 See Alister Doyle, “Humans Spur Worst Extinctions Since Dinosaurs,” Reuters dispatch in
The Scotsman, March 20, 2006.
34 Cited in Peter Prontzos, “Collateral Damage: The Human Cost of Structural Violence,” in
Adam Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity (London: Zed
Books, 2004), p. 303.
35 John Vidal, “Africa Climate Change ‘Could Kill Millions,’” The Guardian, May 15, 2006.
36 Andrew Pendleton, quoted in Gerry Smith, “Climate Change ‘Genocide’ Threatens Kenyan
Herders: Aid Groups,” Agence France-Presse dispatch, November 12, 2006.
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149
37 Andrew Pendleton, quoted in Michael McCarthy, “The Century of Drought,” The
Independent, October 4, 2006. Emphasis added.
38 I am thinking, for instance, of an event held in the mid-2000s, “How Can Jews Help
Prevent Environmental Genocide and Save the Planet?,” with Levene as panelist.
39 “Nigerian Leaders ‘Stole’ $380bn,” BBC Online, October 20, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.
uk/2/hi/africa/6069230.htm.
40 R.W. Johnson, “Zimbabwe, the Land of Dying Children,” The Sunday Times, January 7,
2007.
41 Sebastien Berger, “Starving in Zimbabwe ‘Amounts to Genocide,’” The Daily Telegraph,
August 21, 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1560933/Starving-in-
Zimbabwe-amounts-to-genocide.html.
42 Quoted in BBC Online, “A Country Suffering under Sanctions,” February 3, 1998,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/crisis_in_the_gulf/road_to_the_brink/53003.stm.
43 Ramsey Clark, “Criminal Complaint against the United States and Others for Crimes
against the People of Iraq,” in Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West, p. 271.
44 The first, Denis J. Halliday, stated in a speech in Spain in 1999 that was based on a careful
reading of the UN Genocide Convention:
Some including myself consider that by the deliberate continuation of the UN sanctions
regime on Iraq, in full knowledge of their deadly impact as frequently reported by the
Secretary-General and others, the member states of the Security Council are indeed guilty
of intentionally sustaining a regime of genocide.
He added sardonically: “. . . I have observed that the term ‘genocide’ offends many in our
Western media and establishment circles when it is used to describe the killing of others for
which we are responsible, such as in Iraq.” Denis J. Halliday, “US Policy and Iraq: A Case
of Genocide?,” in Jones, ed., Genocide, War Crimes and the West, pp. 264, 265–266.
Halliday’s successor, Hans-Christian von Sponeck, likewise resigned, writing subsequently
in A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq (Oxford: Berghahn Books,
1996), p. 171:
The conclusion that . . . the Genocide Convention . . . was violated by the UN Security
Council from the beginning of the Oil-for-Food Programme in 1996 by, for example,
severe limitations of rights of children to health, development of their personalities and
education is therefore sound.
See also the statement of genocide scholar Alan Kuperman on the H-Genocide academic list,
March 5, 2003.
I realize it is hard for Americans, some of whom are Holocaust survivors, to accept that
their own government would knowingly pursue a policy that killed hundreds of
thousands of innocent civilians, mainly children. But it happened. Admittedly, killing
the civilians was not the U.S. government’s ultimate goal, but merely a means to an end
and a type of “collateral damage” deemed acceptable. But it is important to understand
that this is the case in most genocides. The Holocaust, while not unique, is an exceptional
case of genocide, where killing the population was the ultimate end. In most cases of
genocide, it is a means to an end or a type of “collateral damage” deemed acceptable, such
as when putting down an armed rebellion by clearing rebel-infested areas (draining the
sea), or punishing a fifth column that has sided with an external aggressor, etc. To term
it “scandalous” when someone raises the undeniable facts of the U.S. genocide in Iraq is,
ironically, itself a type of genocidal denial.
45 Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010), p. 227. See also Thomas Nagy, “A Reluctant Genocide Activist,”
describing aerial bombing of Iraq as prima facie prohibited by Article 2(c) of the Genocide
Convention and by “extermination” provisions of crimes against humanity legislation; in
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Adam Jones, ed., Evoking Genocide: Scholars and Activists Describe the Works that Shaped Their
Lives (Toronto, ON: The Key Publishing House Inc., 2009), pp. 215–218.
46 United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Memorandum in re: Order and
Judgment “Agent Orange,” MDL No. 381, p. 51, http://www.nyed.uscourts.gov/pub/
rulings/cv/2005/moj-04-cv-400-mdl381.pdf. The decision of the court, however (p. 181),
was that “The use of herbicides in Vietnam did not constitute genocide as defined by either
the Genocide Convention Implementation Act or the Genocide Convention . . .”
47 Lee Liu, “Made in China: Cancer Villages,” Environment, (March/April 2010), http://www.
environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/March-April%202010/made-inchinafull.html.
The institutional analysis in this report makes plain how much human agency
and carefully structured injustice shape these outcomes:
Due to economic, social, and political disparities, the poor rural people . . . have no
healthcare and rarely do physical exams, so cancer is usually found at a late stage, and they
are too poor to pay for treatments, leading to the high death rate. Compared to their
urban counterparts, the villagers are more likely to be excluded in the decision-making
process when a potentially polluting factory is put in their areas; they are powerless against
the alliance of corporation and government. As a result, polluters get rich quickly and are
not concerned with destroying the local environment . . . Since governmental officials are
not democratically elected, they do not work for the villagers, who in turn have little
influence on government policies . . . China has established many environmental laws,
but they are seldom enforced . . . Cancer victims have filed many lawsuits against the
polluters, but few have been successful. There are no government reports that establish a
direct link between a factory’s pollution and villagers’ cancers. As a result, it is impossible
for the victims to obtain compensation.
See also Jonathan Watts, “China’s ‘Cancer Villages’ Reveal Dark Side of Economic Boom,”
The Guardian, June 7, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/07/china-
cancer-villages-industrial-pollution.
48 André Picard, “Political Leaders Accused of AIDS Genocide,” The Globe and Mail, August
18, 2006.
49 As my father David pointed out (written comments, March 2011), the question of death
and debility inflicted through second-hand smoke would be a separate question. It might
best be classed together with other instances of pollution and contamination; but unlike
most such cases, the principal perpetrators would be individuals at the grassroots (i.e.
smokers), rather than corporate actors.
50 The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to
Protect (Ottawa, ON: International Development Research Centre, 2001), p. 32. Emphasis
in original.
51 See Gendercide Watch, “Case Study: Maternal Mortality,” http://www.gendercide.org/
case_maternal.html.
52 See Jane Perlez and Raymond Bonner, “Below a Mountain of Wealth, a River of
Waste,” The New York Times, December 27, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/
international/asia/27gold.html.
53 On the ecocidal dimension of the assault on the Niger Delta, see Daniel Howden, “Visible
from Space, Deadly on Earth: The Gas Flares of Nigeria,” The Independent, April 27, 2010,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/visible-from-space-deadly-on-earth-the-
gas-flares-of-nigeria-1955108.html.
54 Henry Shue, Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd edn (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 103–104.
55 McQuaig, cited in Prontzos, “Collateral Damage,” p. 307.
56 It may also be fairly contended that individual responsibility is greatest where individual
capacity is greatest; and so the recent resurgence of mega-philanthropy in the developing
world, by billionaires like Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and investor Warren Buffett, is to
be welcomed.
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