Was there a genocide in South Ossetia?

Fri, 08/15/2008 - 4:30pm

No, the Wall Street Journal reports:

Russian and South Ossetian officials have pegged the death toll as high as 2,000. They have maintained that Georgian troops razed the regional capital, Tskhinvali, and left it resembling Stalingrad after the long siege by Nazi troops during World War II. State-controlled television has shown footage of burning buildings and badly damaged infrastructure.

But on the ground in Tskhinvali, where most of the fighting during the five-day conflict occurred, there is little evidence of a high death toll. [...] The civil-liberties group Human Rights Watch, which accused both Russian and Georgian troops of causing civilian casualties, issued a report Wednesday suggesting that the number of dead in Tskhinvali was in the dozens, not more.

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The Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy are wrong

What the Wall Street Journal Article (& by proxy, Foreign Policy) misses, however, is that genocide is not measured quantitatively, but qualitatively and with intent. Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. If Russia or South Ossetian security forces targeted civilians with the intent of killing Georgians for being Georgian, such acts would meet the minimum standard set forth in the convention. The fact that these forces will not be prosecuted for the crimes (probably) doesn't change the fact that genocide occurred-consider the parallel case of identity-based violence in Kenya last spring where no one will be prosecuted.