HOLOCAUST WAS GENOCIDE, TOO

KEEPING FACTS IN PERSPECTIVE

Our friends at the United States Holocaust Museum's Conscience Committee have recently revised the description on their page commemorating "an exhibition of photos documenting the murders of 7,800 Bosnian men and boys on the tenth anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica." (page link)

They even contacted our blog to let us know of these changes (see here) and asked us to update these changes at our 'What We're Reading' page. We welcome the changes they made and we believe they were necessary.

Here is an excerpt of the original description published at the United States Holocaust Museum's web site, quote:

Murdering individuals solely on the basis of their ethnic identities [in Srebrenica], it has been called the largest single massacre in Europe since the end of World War II. Significantly, it is the first time in history that genocide has been found to have occurred in Europe.

Here is an excerpt of the revised description published at the United States Holocaust Museum's web site, quote:

It has been called the largest single massacre in Europe since the end of World War II, and is the only incident in Europe that has been judged by an international criminal court to have been genocide (the crime did not exist before 1948).

There are two important facts to understand. First, the Srebrenica genocide was the first legally established case of genocide in Europe. Second, the Holocaust was also a genocide, but unfortunately at the time of Nuremberg trials, the crime of genocide did not legally exist. Nevertheless, the Holocaust was a genocide; it was a combination of genocides that resulted in the destruction of Jewish people in Europe and it is important that people remember this fact.

You can read the transcript of the revised description statement at this page - Abandoned at Srebrenica: 10 years later (the article was originally published on July 11 2005 commemorating 10th anniversary of Srebrenica genocide).

And let us not forget that the term Genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar in 1943. In the wake of The Holocaust, Lemkin successfully campaigned for the universal acceptance of international laws defining and forbidding genocide.

This was achieved in 1948, with the promulgation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)).

It contains an internationally-recognized definition of genocide which was incorporated into the national criminal legislation of many countries, and was also adopted by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) [which also ruled Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide in a case of Bosnia vs. Serbia].