Broadening the Definition of Genocide

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines the reformulation of the international definition of genocide by national courts in Lithuania, Argentina, and Guatemala. Such revisions of the concept included crimes committed against political opponents and national resistance movements, and cultural genocide against Indigenous populations—two categories explicitly eliminated from the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. These expanded definitions were forged to overcome impunity and prosecute the crimes committed by the military and the communist regimes during the Cold War. They were also designed to enforce specific historical narratives that understood the repressive history of these dictatorships in terms of ‘the crime of crimes’. The Lithuanian judiciary coined the concept of ethno-national-political genocide to frame the killings of anti-Soviet partisans in the 1940s and 1950s and thereby to equate the mass atrocities committed by the Soviet regime occupation of the Baltic states with the crimes of the Nazis. Similarly, Argentinian judges employed the notion of ideological auto-genocide to inscribe the extermination of left-wing opponents in the 1970s in the global history of twentieth-century bureaucratically organized atrocities such as the Holocaust. Finally, Guatemalan courts ruled that the category of genocide included not only massacres of Indigenous groups but also acts of cultural genocide. The latter encompassed the destruction of Mayan culture and social cohesion and emphasized the racist and neocolonial character of the Guatemalan military, political, and economic elites.