!á�� face="Verdana" size="2">In his article in Birikim, Taner Akçam refers to the way I link the “genocide motive” to racism and says this issue has nothing to do with law in any way. Furthermore, he claims that I am “lying deliberately,” committing an “ethical crime.” To prove his point he quotes from Prof. W. Schabas, who is one of the leading jurists of genocide law.

  Yet, when you read page 255 of Schabas' “Genocide in International Law” you see that his reasoning is as follows: “Genocide is, by nature, a collective crime, committed with the cooperation of many participants. It is, moreover, an offence generally directed by the state. The organizers and planners must necessarily have a racist or discriminatory motive, that is, a genocidal motive, taken as a whole. Where this is lacking, the crime cannot be genocide. Evidence of hateful motive will constitute an integral part of the proof of existence of a genocide plan, and therefore of a genocidal intent.”

  Like many other jurists, Schabas admits that in a genocidal climate individuals could commit crimes against the target group with other motives (such as revenge, robbery, rape, etc.) as well. He says that such acts would be considered genocidal if acts of genocide were being committed on a collective scale with a racist motive leading to the formation of the intent to destroy the group “as such.” In short, if, in a given country, acts of genocide are being perpetrated against a certain group with the intent to destroy, which is motivated by racial hatred, then the crimes individuals commit against members of that group with some other personal motives, too, may be classified as genocidal acts.

  Akçam refers to the sentences delivered by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on a number of Serbs, including the perpetrator of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre Krstic. However, the ICTY decision on Krstic has come under criticism for especially having eased the strict criteria required by law, mainly on two concepts, namely the “intent to destroy” and the destruction of a group “in part.” (Katherine G. Southwick, Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, Jan. 1, 2005).

  Meanwhile, Cecile Tournaye, a legal official of the ICTY, says that the problem created by the court decisions on individual acts of genocide stems from the absence of an International Court of Justice (IJC) decision on whether genocide had been perpetrated in Bosnia-Herzegovina on a collective plane. (ICLQ, April 2003, pp. 447-462). Both of these jurists agree, just as Schabas, that racial hatred or discrimination is the motive behind the intent to destroy and that, in this context, the phrase, “as such” is of key importance.

  Bosnia-Herzegovina initiated a genocide case against Serbia at the IJC in The Hague on March 20, 1993. The IJC started examining the case on Feb. 27, 2006, which had been left in limbo until then. The case will reportedly be brought to a conclusion by the end of the current year at the latest. We will see whether the IJC will, in its ruling, determine that the racial motive was proof of specific genocidal intent.

  Even in cases where the presence of the intent to destroy is proven and the culprits are punished, it is very important to know why they committed that crime. In other words, it is important to know what the motive was. Otherwise, it would not be possible to know what sort of measures has to be taken to stop as early as possible the process leading to the commission of genocide in the future.

  On the other hand, the U.N. Genocide Convention envisages prevention of genocide. But how can states take action to prevent genocide if it is not known which signs indicate genocide in being?

  Not only reasonable jurists but philosophers too consider racism as the sole reason for genocide. Raimond Gaita stresses anti-Semitic racism for the motive for the genocide, pointing out the Holocaust as “the paradigm of genocide.” He thinks the Soviets did the right thing by preventing the term “political group” from being added to the protected groups cited in the U.N. Genocide Convention (Genocide and Human Rights, edited by John Roth, pp. 153-166). “Political group” means a group that wages a struggle with political motive. Those who struggle against it wage their struggle with political motive as well. Since the political motive does not lead to the intent to destroy, the “political group” was left outside the scope of the Convention.

  In the Ottoman Empire no anti-Armenian racism existed. And the Armenians constituted a political group par excellence, as Bogos Nubar Pasha, head of the National Armenian Delegation, confessed to during the Versaille Peace Conference.

  To be able to understand what the Holocaust was, one has to read not Lemkin but “Le Mythe Aryen,” the masterpiece of one of his compatriots, Léon Poliakov. However, for those who have, due to “personal” reasons, already described the Armenian incidents of 1915 as genocide, it would be a belated and probably futile effort to study the judicial, philosophical and psychological aspects of the issue in an effort to learn about genocide now.