WHAT CONSTITUTES GENOCIDE OF A PEOPLE?
RECENTLY, I translated an important book from English into Turkish, called Anatomy of a South African Genocide, written by distinguished emeritus professor of history Mohamed Adhikari at UCT. Adhikari clearly explains what genocide is and how the extermination of the Cape San people happened in South Africa.
Genocide is a term that evokes images of unspeakable human suffering, violence and systemic destruction. Defined by the UN in the 1948 Genocide Convention, it involves acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
The acts include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, imposing conditions leading to the group’s physical destruction or preventing births within the group. However, at times, massacres can become politicised and exploited for political purposes.
For instance, last month, France erected a statue of Armenian terrorist Soghomon Tehlirian in Marseille. In 1921, Tehlirian killed the former prime minister of the Ottoman State, Talat Pasha, in Berlin for blaming him for the Armenian deportation from Anatolia in 1915. During World War I, some Armenians rebelled against the Ottoman State to establish their own state.
Therefore, Ottoman authorities decided to deport them from the areas where they rebelled to southern cities in Syria.
Ottoman Armenians in Istanbul and Izmir were not included in the exile because they didn’t join the rebellion.
Unfortunately, the Western world supported the Armenian rebellion and recorded the incident as the Armenian massacre to politically fight against Ottomans during World War I, but today, Armenia doesn’t accept the Turkish offer to work on the subject with a mutual community.
Additionally, international scholars like Bernard Levis and even Armenian historian Levon Patnos Dabagyan noted that the deportation could not be called genocide.
It is ironic to see the French government turn a blind eye when it committed genocide in Algeria in the 1960s but build a statue to honour a so-called “Armenian Hero” from the 1920s.
In 1894, a South African citizen was writing to Istanbul regarding the Armenian question in the Ottoman land as follows: “I have been living in London for a while to establish a mosque similar to the one I helped build in Cape Town.
“In the British press, Armenian affairs occupy a special place and are filled with columns against the Ottoman Empire.
“The British government does everything to defeat Ottomans in the political arena,” said prominent Capetonian figure Muhammed Dollie.
Unfortunately, while the Armenian rebellion is politicised and labelled as “genocide”, the Malagasy massacre in Madagascar or the Mau Mau genocide in Kenya are called uprisings and almost forgotten in history.
Today, examining the term “genocide” does not require corrupt politicians like Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron or Joe Biden. It needs honest politicians like Naledi Pandor who stand for justice, even in another hemisphere, for Palestinians.
France quickly forgets its barbaric history when judging others for political agendas, but South Africans haven’t forgotten the embarrassing return of the remains of Sarah Baartman, almost 200 years later, to her motherland from the Paris human museum, in 2008.