On August 24, 1941, two months after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill addressed the British people in a live radio broadcast. Describing intelligence reports he had received from occupied Russia, Churchill reported: “Scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops…We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” Although the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1943 to give these crimes a name, heated debates about the use of the word have continued ever since in response to almost every episode of mass atrocity since World War II.
In recent years the most prominent chapter in this debate occurred in response to the violence in Darfur, Sudan in 2003. In July 2004, prompted by pressure from human rights groups and the press, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring that the “the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide,” and in September, the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, officially concurred. In January 2005, however, the UN released its own report on Darfur concluding that, although crimes against humanity had been committed, there was insufficient evidence to support a charge of genocide.
The conflicting findings sparked an intense debate. Those in favor of using the term genocide argued that applying this label to Darfur would establish a moral imperative for taking action. Critics, on the other hand, argued that the term obscured the complex reality of the conflict in Sudan—exaggerating the scope of the violence, and distorting its causes and the motives of the government and the rebels. Both sides seemed to agree, however, that the outcome of the debate held the key to American public opinion and, ultimately, to the fate of the people of Darfur.
