Genocidal massacre

The term genocidal massacre was created by South African sociologist Leo Kuper (1908–1994) to describe an event where mass murder happens, but fewer people die than. in a genocide. Some historians say the 1994 Rwandan genocide was a genocidal massacre, while others call it a genocide.

Definitions

This is a list of academic definitions of genocidal massacre.

Date	Author	Definition
1982	Leo Kuper	The annihilation of a section of a group—men, women and children, as for example in the wiping out of whole villages.
1994	Israel Charny	Mass killing as defined [...] in the generic definition of genocide, but in which the mass murder is on a smaller scale, that is, smaller numbers of human beings are killed.
2007	Ben Kiernan	Shorter, limited episodes of killing directed at specific local or regional community, targeted because of its membership in a larger group.

Views

Ben Kiernan

In his book Blood and Soil, Australian historian Ben Kiernan stated that imperial powers have often committed genocidal massacres to tame difficult minorities within their empires. For instance, he described the actions of two Roman legions sent to Egypt in 68 AD to stop rioting Jews in Alexandria. The Roman governor Tiberius Julius Alexander ordered the legions to massacre everyone who lived in the Jewish part of the city. 50,000 had been killed when Alexander, listening to the pleas of some yet to be killed, felt pity for them and ordered an end to the killings.

Kiernan pointed out that governments are not the only ones to commit genocidal massacres (or genocides). For example, in 1577, members of the Clan MacLeod from the Isle of Skye formed a raiding party and attacked the Isle of Eigg. In the Cave of Frances, they killed everyone who lived on the island. Members of the Clan MacDonald retaliated in 1578 by burning a congregation full of MacLeods to death in Trumpan Church. Both were examples of genocidal massacres, according to Kiernan. Almost immediately afterward, the Battle of the Spoiling Dyke followed.

Kiernan also gave a more recent example. On February 27, 2002, there was an argument between a group of Hindu pilgrims on a train and Muslim vendors at the platform where it had stopped. This was followed by a suspected arson that killed 59 people. Over the next three days, riots in Gujarat killed 790 Muslims and 254 Hindu.

William Schabas

Canadian human rights expert William Schabas made the point that genocidal massacres are criminal offences under international law as a crime against humanity, and in an armed conflict under the laws of war.

However, he pointed out that international prosecutions for individual acts were not covered by the Rome Statute, which had created the International Court of Justice (ICC), because crimes against humanity must be "widespread or systematic" and war crimes usually have to have a threshold above the individual crime "in particular when committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes".

Irving Louis Horowitz

American sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz was critical of Kuper's approach. He cited Kuper's use of the term genocidal massacre to describe the inter-communal violence during the partition of India and during The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

Hirsh stated, "to speak of [these] as genocidal in a context of religious competition and conflict risks diluting the notion of genocide and equating it with any conflict between national, religious, or racial groups."

Related pages

• Iași pogrom
• Katyn massacre
• Odessa massacre (1941)
• Jedwabne pogrom (1941)
• 7 October 2023 attack on Israel

References

• Andreopoulos, George J. (1997), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 978-0-8122-1616-5
• Charny, Israel W. (1999), Encyclopedia of Genocide, ABC-CLIO, ISBN 978-0-87436-928-1
• Horowitz, Irving Louis (1989), Persuasions and Prejudices: An Informal Compendium of Modern Social Science, 1953–1988, Transaction Publishers, ISBN 978-0-88738-261-1
• Kiernan, Ben (2007), Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-10098-3
• Kuper, Leo (1982), Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-03120-1
• Melson, Robert (1992), Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-51990-6
• Moses, A. Dirk (2004), Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Berghahn Books, ISBN 978-1-57181-410-4
• Schabas, William (2000), Genocide in International Law: The Crimes of Crimes, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-78790-1