EXACTLY a century ago, on April 24th 1915, Ottoman officials rounded up scores of Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul, most of whom were later murdered. What followed is still bitterly contested. According to the official Turkish version, perhaps 500,000 Armenians died, some while fighting alongside invading Russians against Ottoman forces and others as a regrettable side-effect of deportations that were understandable in the context of the times. But many scholars say that 1m-1.5m Armenians died, and that their deaths were a result of a deliberate campaign to eliminate the Ottoman empire’s only sizeable Christian population. Members of the Armenian diaspora want the events recognised as genocide. What marks genocide out from other mass killings, and why does it matter what word is used?
In 1948 the United Nations adopted a convention aimed at preventing and punishing genocide, which it defined as the “deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnical, racial, religious or national group”. Getting agreement on the text involved compromises. Targeting victims because of their class, for example, was not classed as genocide: Stalin would hardly have signed if it meant being held to account for his mass slaughters of “middle peasants” and the like. The timeline below shows just some of the mass slaughters in the past century, including some that have been acknowledged as genocide and some that do not fit within the UN’s definition. The genocidal nature of the slaughter of Rwanda’s minority Tutsis by militias of majority Hutus, for example, is not in question. But Pol Pot’s reign of terror in Cambodia does not strictly qualify, since the Khmers Rouges targeted no particular group. (Article continues below)
