Terry Prone: Words matter, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy knows their value

Genocide. By repeatedly stating it, Ukraine's president is setting out the terms of the indictments that will one day be heard in international courts of law

The term genocide was coined by lawyer Raphael Lemkin who battled to have the term included in the indictments at Nuremberg of Hermann Goering (left), Rudolf Hess, and other leading Nazis. Picture: Chris Ware/Keystone/Hulton/Getty

Someone is setting fire to things in the National Children’s Hospital. Or, rather, someone is setting fire to things in the part-built hospital. Arson has been committed several times on the site. The gardaí have been informed, the builders are on it, more surveillance cameras have been deployed, which is all grand. 

What isn’t grand is the word used in the minutes of a recent board meeting: “The Board expressed grave concern in relation to the incidents, deeming them as unacceptable”.

Unacceptable? 

Now, come on, you must admit that’s a daft word to use in this context. Arson doesn’t fit within general-standards-of-good-behaviour. It’s a criminal act. It’s a particularly scandalous criminal act because of its possible consequences. Once it takes hold, the progress of fire is not linear. It can go anywhere. It can kill. It can kill workers or trespassers or the fire-setter or firefighters. 

“Unacceptable” in that context is prissy and patronising; the ridiculously distant judgment of the detached superior.

Words matter, which is why more attention might usefully be given to Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s repeated use of the word “genocide” in his condemnations of Russia’s attacks on his country.

When the Russians left the Bucha area, the destruction they left behind them included more than 400 bodies, some with their hands tied, but none of them wearing military uniforms. Civilians, in other words. Civilians who weren’t randomly killed by a bomb. Civilians mistreated and then murdered.

“These are war crimes, and they will be recognised by the world as genocide,” reporters were told by the Ukrainian president. 

You are here today and can see what happened. We know of thousands of people killed and tortured, with severed limbs, raped women, murdered children. This is a genocide. 

Clearly understanding the international definition of genocide as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group”, Zelenskyy followed his initial reaction in a CBS interview where he said that the Russian military were seeking to effect “the elimination of the whole nation of people”.

The word originated in the ruins of Europe

The word “genocide” was first coined 1944 by a lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who, even though he wasn’t central to the Nuremberg Trials of former Nazis, fought to have the term included in the indictments of the international court trying men like Goering, Hess, and Speer. 

When lawyer Hartley Shawcross used the term genocide in his final summation at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1945, the initial reaction in the room was one of shock. Picture: AP/Pool

He wrote background notes, paragraphs for speeches, personal letters — anything that would persuade the prosecutors to use the term, believing that “crimes against humanity” did not encompass the manifest determination of the Third Reich to exterminate Jews as a race. Partly because Lemkin, a Polish Jew, had undergone great familial suffering in the Holocaust, he perceived that only “genocide” would capture crimes committed before and after the war, only that term would encompass the racism underlying and uniting the German state and its individual agents in their killing of his people.

This was something much more than mass murder, he believed. (Ironically, his impassioned lobbying left out of consideration other groups the Nazis sought to exterminate, including Gypsies and homosexuals.) Lemkin was at worst ignored and at best humoured in a sporadic way.

The Russian, American, and British lawyers working on the prosecution side excoriated Hitler’s men for mass murder, for methods of mass murder, for racism, for hypocrisy. For everything short of genocide. That was a word too far. 

When Hartley Shawcross, the senior British member of the prosecutorial team, used it in his final summary, the reaction in the courtroom was one of shock. But Shawcross, according to a recent examination* of the origin of the concept, was able to confidently lay out the techniques of genocide. 

“He described the pattern of action that ended with the deliberate murder of groups, in gas chambers, by mass shootings, by working the victims to death. He spoke of ‘biological devices’ to decrease the birth rate, of sterilization, of castration, of abortion…each defendant knew about the ‘policy of genocide,’ each was guilty of the crime.” 

Even though none of the other prosecutors picked up on this new term, Lemkin had succeeded in creating a new understanding and driving a new definition into international law.

Shortly after the Nuremberg trials finished with the acquittal of a small number of the accused, the long-term imprisonment of others, the pre-emptive suicide by cyanide of Goring and the execution of several of those convicted, the United Nations General Assembly decided that genocide must be registered as a crime under international law.

Despite the subsequent conviction and execution of more than 30 men in Rwanda alone, despite convictions and executions in Darfur and Bosnia, genocide, increasingly, is an accusation that rarely creates buy-in within the most powerful nations of the world. It’s difficult to accuse one world power of contemporary genocide when almost all world powers can so easily be accused of historic genocide. 

Many in the US regard the decimation of the Native American population as a genocide, despite the more traditional view of the Native Americans as having engaged in conflict with pioneering settlers, and as having suffered unintended destruction wrought by disease. Similarly, some would view the colonial past of the British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese as including elements of genocide.

Bodies being exhumed from a mass grave in Bucha, in north-eastern Ukraine, which were revealed after the Russian occupiers had withdrawn. Picture: Pavlo Bahmut/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing/Getty

Consequently, few world leaders have followed Zelenskyy in so describing what is happening in Ukraine. Many global bystanders, in addition, do not see a race-destruction imperative being played out by Putin’s forces. Atrocities and crimes against humanity they would see as obvious, but motivated by the old “Lebensraum” imperial land-grab rather than visceral hatred of the Ukrainians as a people. 

The Russians and Ukrainians have been close enough for long enough for even refugees interviewed in this country to stress that they have no argument with the Russian people and don’t believe the Russian people harbour enmity toward them. Why, then, is the Ukrainian president so resolute and repetitive in his use of the term?

He may see the existential threat as a way to fortify the identity of the Ukrainians. He may see repetition of the term as a way to herd world leaders into more support. 

Early last week, Joe Biden stated that “It’s become clearer and clearer that Putin is trying to wipe out the idea of being Ukrainian.” Genocide, in other words. 

The final thread of Zelenskyy’s thinking may be to challenge the view that close to 4m Ukrainians who died in the Holodomor were random victims of an artificial famine that destroyed millions of Russians, too.

The one thing that’s certain is that Zelenskyy’s resolute repetition of the term has purpose. Because this is a man who knows the value of words.

It is said that history is written by the victors. Zelenskyy, whether his nation wins or loses, is bypassing that maxim. He is writing the future and dictating the terms of the accusations which will be made in international law courts in times to come.