Genocide In The 21st Century Essay

Genocide plagues modern-day human history. Starting with the 1904 Namibia genocide and continuing into the late 1990s with the Kosovo genocide, suffering, forced expulsion, psychological violence, and even mass-murder characterized the twentieth century (Onishi, 2). Furthermore, the still-ongoing Darfur genocide, considered the first genocide of the twenty-first century, stands as a constant reminder of the prevailing problem. These events prove that despite the presence of the Genocide Convention, genocide is not easy to prevent, halt, and eradicate.

The term genocide first entered international discourse in 1943 thanks to Raphael Lemkin, whose relentless efforts to make the world recognize genocide as a crime culminated in the 1948 United

International discussions about genocide as it unfolded often revolved around quantifying the event, resulting in what is called the numbers problem. Because the Convention is unclear about how to approach potential genocides, signatory nations often resort to “the question of how many individuals have to be killed and/or expelled from their homes in order for mass murder or ethnic cleansing to amount to genocide” to compensate for the ambiguity (Power, 65). The numbers problem arose in Rwanda when a U.S. officer questioned Dallaire about “precisely how many Rwandans had died” and in Srebrenica when communication between Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Shattuck and Washington revolved around estimating how many Muslims had been killed (Power, 381 & 418). Even Samantha Power, a fervent advocate of avoiding falling into the quantitative trap, makes this mistake herself when discussing the Kosovo genocide (Power, 467). The numbers debate that results from the ambiguity of the Genocide Convention’s terminology not only slows down action in events in which time is a matter of life and death but also undermines the central goal of genocide prevention: humanitarian help for all of those in