Genocide
The Economist | 11th September 1971
SIR—So, according to your correspondednt Mr. Mujahid Rasul (letters, August 28th), the Punjabi survivors of last March were spirited away back to West Pakistan so that they should not know of their fellow’s fate. This fanciful episode was presumably observed by Mr Rasul from his viewpoint in Rochdale, Lance, from which he writes. It was certainly remarked by nobody in Pakistan.
–Yours Faithfully,
James Cameron
London, W4
SIR—I should like to offer some comments on your note (August 14th) on the above subject. While I am not a lawyer, and do not wish to go into legal argument, I should like to cite what Mr John Salzberg, responding the international Commission of Jurist, observed while speaking on behalf of his own and 21 other non-governmental organizations at the United Nations on August 16th. He stated that from all information available to the public and the sub-commission . . . “it was clear there have been a clear and consistent pattern of violations of human rights I east Bengal: killing and torture, mistreatment of civilians in armed conflict, religious discrimination, arbitrary arrests and detention, arbitrary deprivation of property, suppression of freedom of speech, the press and assembly, suppression of political rights and suppression of the right of immigration.”
I should also like to quote the following extract from an account by Mr Alvin Toffler published in the New York Times of August 5th: “since March 25th, West Pakistani troops have bombed, burned, looted and murdered the citizens of East Pakistan in what can only be a calculated campaign to decimate them or to drive them out of their villages and over the border to India.” I suggest that through words do matter, facts speak for themselves.
Yours faithfully,
- L. Mehta
Bombay
SIR—I cannot agree with the inference in your article on genocide (August 14th) that the use of words must be restricted to “what they actually do mean.” A word can have no absolute immutable meaning of its own; it is only given a meaning by its use in a particular context, and that meaning can be found only if the reader tries to understand the intension of the writer.
If words are to be treated a having absolute meanings, then to whom should we turn for a decision as to what that meaning is? You cite the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, yet I am sure that the editor of the dictionary would be the first to agree that the words can change their meaning.
To consider for a moment the word “genocide”, it seems to me that a word which was born in 1944 could still be open to discussion and debate in 1948. If, in that year. The United Nations found it useful to give the word a wider definition than “annihilation of a race”, surely it is open to others to accept and use the meaning the United Nations has chosen. I would suggest that the importance of any word, aside from its beauty when spoken, ties in the utility it has for conveying meaning. You say that the recent events in East Pakistan may be described as “murder, massacre or atrocity”. That is true but none of those words conveys the racial element in the killing. Genocide does. In my opinion, it is considerably more useful have a word which conveys the meaning of racial killing on large scale, than to restrict its meaning to total extermination. People have adopted the word “genocide” to convey a meaning which they needed to express.
Yours faithfully,
Jouy-en-Josas,
France
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