Political wrongdoings 101

1. Political wrongdoings 101 Dictionary of terms

2. Scope of Transitional justice • TJ is focused on mass/gross human rights violations perpetrated by state agents for political reasons • Includes: • genocide, civil war, political killings, ethnic cleansing, massacres, repression waves, isolated killings (assassinations) • torture, political imprisonment, maiming, disappearances, deportations, forced exile, confiscation/nationalization, secret surveillance, persecution • Excludes: • Killings/crimes perpetrated by non-state agents • Crimes perpetrated by state agents for non-political reasons

3. Genocide • Term coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, adviser to Nuremberg Trial chief American council Robert Jackson • “Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 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; • imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; • forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” (Article 2, Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by UN General Assembly on 9 Dec. 1948) .

4. Examples • Holocaust (Nazi Final Solution imposed in European territories, • Holodomor (Ukrainian state-inflicted family under Stalin, 1928-33, some 6-7 million victims) • Armenian (100,000 to 1.5 million Armenians killed by Turkish authorities, 1915) • Rwandan (Tutsi-Hutu conflict, 1 million victims, 1994, faster rate of killing than in the Holocaust) • Cambodian (1.7 million victims amounting to 21% of the country’s population, 1975-1979)

5. Civil war • High intensity conflict, often involving regular armed and paramilitary forces, that is sustained, organized, large scale, and leading to numerous casualties (bellum civile). • Civil wars are fought by state forces against organized rebels, guerillas, militias, or other organized groups that aim to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies. They often affect civilian population. • Average length increased from 1.5 years before WWII to 4 years after WWII. Civil wars that included pro- or anti-communist forces lasted 141% longer than the average non-Cold War conflict, while a Cold War civil war that attracted superpower intervention resulted in wars typically lasting over three times as long as other civil wars

6. Examples • Guatemala (1960-1996) • El Salvador (1979-1991) • Nicaragua (1970-1990) • Yugoslav wars (1990s) Europe’s deadliest since WWII

7. deportations • Expulsion of a group of people from the place or country it inhabits. Internal deportation of groups with a right to the land from which they are deported vs. external deportation of non-nationals. • “Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive. ... The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” (Article 49, Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, August 1949)

8. examples • Deportations operated by the Soviet authorities – Cossacks, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, others amounting to 6 million – no. deaths from deportations 1 in 3 (recognized as genocide by European Parliament in 2004) • Operation Priboi – Soviet mass deportation of 90,000 Baltic nationals labeled enemies of the people (March 25-29, 1949) • Deportation of Sudetenland Germans out of Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of WWII • Deportation of Turkish groups out of Bulgaria during the 1980s

9. Ethnic cleansing • Policy of eliminating unwanted ethnic or religious groups by deportation, forcible displacement, mass murder, or by threats of such acts, with the intent of creating a territory inhabited by people of a homogeneous or pure ethnicity, religion, culture, and history. • Term gained acceptance with the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. • Ethnic cleansing (ethnic purification) is similar to forced deportation or population transfer whereas genocide is the intentional murder of part or all of a particular ethnic, religious, or national group.

10. massacre • Derives from mass sacrifice. • An incident where some group is killed by another, and the perpetrating party are perceived to be in total control of force while the victimized party is perceived to be helpless and/or innocent with regard to any legitimate offense. • Usually smaller number of victims than genocides and civil wars. • Massacres of Jews in Europe called pogroms.

11. examples • St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre by Catholics of Huguenots in France (23 August 1572, 70,000) • Hamidian massacres of Armenians by Ottoman troops (1894-6, 100,000 to 300,000) • Rape of Nanking, massacre of up up 300,000 Chinese civilians by Japanese troops (13 Dec. 1937) • Katyn massacre (Soviet troops executed 25,000 Polish officers, 1940) • Jeju massacre of 25,000-60,000 communist sympathizers by South Korean troops (3 April 1948) • Srebenica massacre of 8,000 Bosniak males by Serb snipers (July 1995)