Debórah Dwork, who gave Tuesday’s ‘Never Again Auschwitz’ lecture on chance and luck in surviving crimes against humanity, says it without hesitation: A genocide is underway in Ukraine.
Yet again. It’s like walking in circles through time. Or fall, as Hans Goedkoop put it in his sublime May 4 speech: ‘For generations we hoped to drift away to a new future, never again, but we fall through time, it seems like 1939.’
“I study despots and tyrants, how could I not have seen it coming?” Dwork, a Holocaust expert and director of the New York Study Center on Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, said in Tuesday Fidelity† She explained why she dares to speak of genocide in Ukraine. It is clear to me that Putin’s rhetoric points to a conscious destruction of the independent country of Ukraine and its culture. Day after day we saw sieges, massacres and attacks on civilian targets. That fits within the definition of genocide.’
The American president preceded her. Canada’s parliament voted unanimously last week: this is genocide. The pope made the comparison with Rwanda, where murders took place continuously for 100 days. Western European heads of government are more reserved, refrain from qualifications, talk about complexities, because one crime is not the same.
Talking about genocide is a minefield. Because it has to be proven very precisely that there was intent, that there was a preconceived plan for the destruction of a narrowly defined group of people. That is a matter of courts and evidence and long trials.
However, we do not have to wait for that, Phon van der Biesen, the lawyer who represented Bosnia and Herzegovina’s interests in the genocide case against Serbia at the International Court of Justice, recently wrote in de Volkskrant. He relies on the Genocide Convention, which states in the first article ‘that all states that are parties to the treaty, almost all states of the world, are obliged to prevent genocide’. Between the genocide in the Balkans and its legal determination, Van der Biesen recalls, there were twelve years. We can never wait that long again.
Time is ticking. The terror continues. Hear the stories of the people who returned to their villages and towns. What they saw: residential blocks systematically bombed away, targeted attacks on non-military personnel, executions of unarmed civilians. Tineke Ceelen of the Refugee Foundation told de Volkskrant about the booby traps Russian soldiers have left behind the front doors of civilian homes in devastated suburbs of Kyiv. A horrific form of terror against civilians who want to return home.
There are new European sanctions, the sixth package. It is our desperate effort to fulfill our obligation to prevent atrocities. With even tougher measures, an oil boycott that will hit us too, “perhaps harder than Russia,” as one diplomat said. Now it comes down to it. Now we’ll see how much we’re willing to give up. Now we’re going to see how much comfort Western European voters are willing to give up, and how long it will take before an influential politician on the right side of the new iron curtain declares that he no longer wants to suffer under someone else’s war.
Hans Goedkoop put it this way at the commemoration: ‘Now it comes down to us – our compass for good and evil.’