| "...Against partisans backed by the entire population, colonial armies are helpless. They have only one way of escaping from the harassment which demoralizes them .... This is to eliminate the civilian population. As it is the unity of a whole people that is containing the conventional army, the only anti-guerrilla strategy which will be effective is the destruction of that people, in other words, the civilians, women and children..." Jean Paul Sartre's Statement 'On Genocide' at the Second Session of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam, held in Denmark in November 1967 ".... the sovereign territorial state claims, as an integral part of its sovereignty, the right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal massacres, against peoples under its rule, and that the United Nations, for all practical purposes, defends this right. To be sure, no state explicitly claims the right to commit genocide - this would not be morally acceptable even in international circles - but the right is exercised under other more acceptable rubrics, notably the duty to maintain law and order, or the seemingly sacred mission to preserve the territorial integrity of the state. And though the norm for the United Nations is to sit by, and watch, like a grandstand spectator, the unfolding of the genocidal conflict in the domestic arena right through to the final massacres, there would generally be concern, and action, to provide humanitarian relief for the refugees, and direct intercession by the Secretary-General. Moreover, some of the steps presently taken by the United Nations in the field of human rights may have the effect of inhibiting the resort to massacre; and there are indications of changing attitudes in the United Nations, though this may be too optimistic an assessment. In the past, however, there was small comfort to be derived from the Genocide Convention, or from the commitments of the United Nations, by peoples whose own rulers threatened them with extermination or massacre. The almost perennial complaint is that the world remains indifferent to the genocide or the genocidal massacres, and that the United Nations turns a deaf ear..." Leo Kuper in Genocide: Its Political Use in the 20th Century, 1983 |
