CONFLICTS, GENOCIDE AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

'The fact of genocide is as old as humanity', wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. The law, however, is considerably younger. The modern law of genocide follows from the observation that, historically, genocide has gone unpunished. Hitler's famous comment, `Who remembers the Armenians?', is often cited in this regard. Yet the Nazis werenot the only ones to rely on the reasonable presumption that an international culture of impunity would effectively shelter the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. The global community has attempted to establish a judicial order to curtail its occurrence and minimise its devastating effects. Yet, serious violations of International Humanitarian and Human Rights Law are still common in many armed conflicts. 

S KRISHNAN AND KAMINI KUMAR 

INTRODUCTION

    Since the dawn of civilisation, war has posed one of the most significant threats to human life, liberty, property and indeed the very notion of humanity as a moral and ethical concept. In the words of Isaac Asimov, “Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict, its own variety of problems that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished by itself.” 

        The naked violence and utter savagery that often accompanies war or armed conflict has caused unspeakable and unquantifiable suffering to millions upon millions of people throughout the course of human history. On a purely logical plane, it seems astoundingly absurd that the murder of one or a handful of individuals is accorded negative social sanction and is treated as a crime; but the murder of several thousands or even millions is lauded as a noble act of patriotism or a holy duty. Jean Rostand captures this tendency most eloquently when he says, “Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror.” 

Throughout man’s longstanding presence on earth as a social animal featuring distinct social characteristics in the nature of cohesion, organisation, division of property, labour and resources, there has always been some form of conflict. Each conflict has ended either conclusively or inconclusively, in both cases only to either manifest itself in some other form at a later juncture or wither away with time and give birth to or lead to another conflict as a new social group occupies a certain territory and adapts to a new social and economic environment. The history of human warfare is therefore replete with examples of the permanence of conflict among social groups, which come to acquire the distinct character of national groups or nation states. The prevalence of war throughout human history makes it so evident that it would be a folly to consider warfare as an exceptional form of human behaviour. (Mary Dudziak, War Time: an Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, Oxford University Press, 2014, p56) Every epoch in history has seen significant armed conflict between kingdoms, republics, empires and nation states. New conflict has often been a consequence of subsisting differences of opinion or a pre-existing conflict of competing interests. War has been persistent in the recorded experience of humankind. (Braden R Allenby, The applied ethics of emerging military and security technologies, Routledge, 2015, p34)