WARS, GENOCIDE, BLOCKADES

Abstract

The examples described here show that wars not only provide occasions and camouflage for carrying out genocidal intentions, but degenerate into wars of extermination when intentions of conquest and subjugation merge with intentions of extermination. Military defeats do not diminish the intentions of annihilation, but even increase them. On the other hand, military interventions can serve to prevent genocide or to liberate threatened groups, if carried out in time. However, it is often the fear of states of becoming involved in armed conflicts that prevents such timely interventions.

In the case of starvation blockades during and after wars, it can be seen that there are factors that reinforce this crime: In the German case, the famine of the German and Ottoman populations was exacerbated by organizational incompetence in the German case and genocidal intent in the Ottoman; in the Ottoman example, Ahmet Cemal, as governor of Syria, prevented crops from being brought into ‘his’ province affected by the blockade. In the case of the Leningrad blockade, it was the continued Stalinist policy of repression and the enrichment of the functionary caste that added to Nazi Germany’s genocide.