The Srebrenica massacre reminds us that genocide starts with words of hate

an article by Yasmin Qureshi published in the New Statesman



After the hateful “Punish a Muslim” letters, we must learn from recent history: no society is immune from the consequences of dehumanising rhetoric.

Genocide does not happen overnight. It often takes years, indeed decades, of animosity and hatred before it manifests.

Gregory H. Stanton of Genocide Watch describes in detail the process of how casual racism and discrimination can lead to mass murder in his Ten Stages to Genocide model. The message is that this process is not particular to any country or culture: under the right conditions, it can happen anywhere.

I was reminded of this recently when I paid my respects at the Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery in Potočari, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Potočari is home to the site of remembrance for the 8,000 men and boys who were systematically murdered because of their Muslim faith in July 1995. This was the event now known as the Srebrenica Genocide.

Fifty years after the Holocaust, after we all said “never again”, came Srebrenica – another genocide in the heart of Europe. I travelled there as part of a delegation organised by the charity Remembering Srebrenica, to learn just how a modern society, like Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, could tear itself apart.

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The Difference Law Makes: Domestic Atrocity Laws and Human Rights Prosecutions

an article by Mark S. Berlin (Marquette University, Milwaukee, USA) and Geoff Dancy (Tulane University, New Orleans, USA) published in  Law & Society Review Volume 51 Issue 3 (September 2017)

Abstract

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the effects of domestic atrocity laws on human rights prosecutions. Scholars have identified various political and sociological factors to explain the striking rise in human rights prosecutions over the past 30 years, yet the role of domestic criminal law in enabling such prosecutions has largely been unexamined.

That is surprising given that international legal prohibitions against human rights atrocities are designed to be enforced by domestic courts applying domestic criminal law.

We argue that domestic criminal laws against genocide and crimes against humanity facilitate human rights prosecutions in post-authoritarian states by helping to overcome formal legal roadblocks to prosecution, such as retroactivity, amnesties, immunities, and statutes of limitations. Using original data on domestic atrocity laws and human rights prosecutions in new democracies, we find that atrocity laws increase the speed with which new democracies pursue prosecutions, as well as the overall numbers of trials they initiate and complete.

Full text (PDF 54pp)
Do not be alarmed at the number of pages, it's a pre-publication version and is double-spaced.

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Fifty million missing women

I saved this to put into one of my ocassional "interesting but not really work" posts but I couldn't bear to hide it. We all need to know what is going on even if it makes us feel uncomfortable, both with the actuality and with our inability to do anything to help.


Fifty Million Missing Women via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza on 12 August

From the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly:

According to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, there should be millions more women and girls living in India than there are. The acclaimed economist compared the natural ratio of men to women globally with the ratio in India, and twenty years ago had calculated that India was "missing" about thirty-seven million women. That number has escalated to fifty million today. ... Numbers tell the story in chilling detail:

• Some one million female foetuses are aborted each year.
• Midwives in some regions regularly kill the infant girls they deliver for as little as $1.50.
• Dowry-related murders of women stand at about 25,000 cases a year.
• A UNICEF report found that the mortality rate for girls under five is more than 40 percent higher than for boys the same age.
• WHO and UNIFEM estimate that one pregnant woman dies every five minutes in India.

These conditions persist due to a deep-rooted mind-set Banerji describes as "unresisting acceptance of female genocide".

More here. [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]