Dr Martin Mansergh
There must always be some hesitation about applying contemporary norms and concepts retrospectively
On a visit to the United States in March 1997, Bertie Ahern, then leader of the opposition, paid a courtesy call on that formidable Church leader Cardinal John O’Connor, Archbishop of New York.
As we prepared to leave, Cardinal O’Connor mentioned that he was due to address an Irish-American gathering on St Patrick’s Day on the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine in 1847. He asked us whether it should be regarded as genocide, or whether the British were trying to do their best. Bertie Ahern looked across to me as the nearest thing to an historian in the delegation, and, according to a note I made at the time, “I explained my view, which blamed the British, but not endorsing the notion of deliberate genocide”.
I have often thought about this since, especially since reading Tim Pat Coogan’s fluently written book The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy published in the US in 2012.
Based mainly on familiar sources, its novelty consists in attempting to measure the British government’s handling of the Famine against the criteria set out in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. The concept of genocide emerged in 1943-44 during the Second World War, at a time when Nazi Germany, seeking to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, killed an estimated six million people.
Nazi invasion
A Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin (1900-59), not referenced in Coogan’s book, who was wounded as a soldier defending Warsaw against the Nazi invasion in 1939, and who had several dozen relatives murdered in the Holocaust, developed the concept of genocide, after working from 1942 in American universities and for the US government.
He subsequently advised the US Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, and was the chief influence behind the UN convention.
The weight of the convention rests on its definition of genocide, as meaning acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Deliberate intent is inherent to the concept of genocide. Five acts are listed:
* killing members of the group;
* causing them serious mental or bodily harm;
* inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction;
* measures to prevent births within the group;
* forcible transfer of children to another group.
Obviously, some of these acts can occur within contexts other than genocide, so evidence of intent is of paramount importance. Conspiracy, incitement, and attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in it, are also punishable.
There were 20th Century antecedents to the Holocaust.
In 2004, the German development minister, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, on a visit to Namibia, the former German colony of South-West Africa, acknowledged that German atrocities committed against the Ovaherero and other tribes between 1904 and 1907 “would today be termed genocide”.
The head of the German Army General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen, recommended to the government regarding the Ovaherero that “the entire nation should be annihilated or driven from the country”.
Far more hotly contested is the fate of the Armenian people during the First World War in the dying years of the Ottoman Empire, who were massacred, deported and left to starve. It is a crime in Turkey to refer to this as genocide, and a crime in some Western democracies to deny it. Other countries now prefer, for diplomatic rather than historical reasons, to refer to it as a ‘tragedy’. Hitler certainly cited it as a precedent for the ‘Final Solution’.
A more relevant example, but considered unlikely to meet the strict terms of the convention, of which the Soviet Union was a signatory, is the cost in millions of lives of farm collectivisation in Ukraine under Stalin, implemented with the help of deliberate famine in the early 1930s, resulting in the loss of up to a quarter of the population.
Were there precedents going back further into history, especially colonial history, and even going back to Old Testament times? A weak Anglo-Saxon king Ethelred the Unready (or Ill-Advised) ordered the massacre of all Danish settlers in England in 1002. Apart from difficulties in verifying loose narratives of distant times, it could be argued that effective means of causing mass death and destruction were only fully developed in the last century or so.
There must always be some hesitation about applying contemporary norms and concepts retrospectively. Historians have rightly been slow to accept the charge of ethnic cleansing during the Irish revolutionary period. Being a highly emotive accusation, evidence for genocide needs to be conclusive.
The International Court of Justice earlier this year did not uphold the charge of genocide against either Serbia or Croatia, despite high death tolls in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, though at an earlier stage the massacre at Srebenica was so categorised. Since then, in Rwanda, South Sudan and elsewhere, the international community have been alerted to the dire consequences of inaction, where genocide is threatened, though effective and timely direct intervention is not straightforward either. Not all mass slaughter falls within the definition of genocide, which may not make it any less reprehensible.
The Famine originated in a natural disaster, the repeated failure of the potato crop beginning in 1845, but the human devastation was hugely exacerbated by a remote, inappropriate and inflexible government approach driven by a parsimonious Treasury fearful of moral hazard and permanent dependency. It was justified by a virulent free market ideology called political economy underpinned by a religious-tinged providentialism. While there was much callous comment and indifference, and a conviction that Ireland’s alleged over-population needed to be reduced (by emigration), there is no evidence, such as is amply available elsewhere, of a deliberate intent to exterminate.
Historians should not flinch from harsh judgments warranted by the facts, but preferably without going way beyond them.
There were consequences. The Union was discredited. The separatist instinct hardened. It would also be an interesting exercise to compare and contrast the effects of globalisation and political economy.
