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Comment: On the Meaning of Genocide and Genocide Denial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Eric D. Weitz
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Abstract

Robert M. Hayden raises two very significant issues: He argues against laws that criminalize genocide denial, and he challenges the notion that a genocide occurred in Srebenica during the ex-Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. Yet Hayden misreads the basis of the Hague Tribunal's genocide conviction in the Krstićcase and raises faulty comparisons in regard to limitations on free speech. The fundamental basis of the Tribunal's decision was that by killing seven to eight thousand Muslim men, Serb nationalists intended to prevent the Srebenica Muslim community from reproducing. Genocide denial laws have little in common with attacks on heresy in the medieval and early modern past. Moreover, a full consideraton of the problem of genocide and free speech would have to include cases in which the affirmation of genocide is criminalized, as in contemporary Turkey.

Type
Discussion
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 67 , Issue 2 , Summer 2008 , pp. 415 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2008

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References

1. See Lemkin's, Raphael classic work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, D.C., 1944).Google Scholar

2. See Fein, Helen, “Genocide: A Sociological Perspective,” Current Sociology 38, no. 1 (March 1990): 1–126 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chalk, Frank and Jonassohn, Kurt, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, 1990)Google Scholar; Mennecke, Martin and Markusen, Eric, “The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the Crime of Genocide,“ in Jensen, Steven L. B., ed., Genocide: Cases, Comparisons, and Contemporary Debates, (Copenhagen, 2003), 293–350 Google Scholar; and Semelin, Jacques, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, trans. Schoch, Cynthia (New York, 2007).Google Scholar

3. “Radislav Krstić Becomes the First Person to Be Convicted of Genocide at the ICTY and Is Sentenced to 46 Years Imprisonment,” ICTY Trial Chamber, The Hague, 2 August 2001, OF/P.I.S:/609e atwwvv.un.org/icty/pressreal/p609-e.htm (last consulted 25 February 2008).

4. See his major study, written before the Krstić decision; Schabas, William A., Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes (Cambridge, Eng., 2000)Google Scholar. For some of his initial reservations about Krstić, see Schabas, William A., “Was Genocide Committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina? First Judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” Fordham International Law Journal 25, no. 1 (November 2001): 23–53, esp. 45-47,50-51.Google Scholar