Comment: On the Meaning of Genocide and Genocide Denial

Abstract

Robert M. Hayden raises two very significant issues: He argues against laws that criminalize genocide denial, and he challenges the notion that a genocide occurred in Srebenica during the ex-Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s. Yet Hayden misreads the basis of the Hague Tribunal's genocide conviction in the Krstićcase and raises faulty comparisons in regard to limitations on free speech. The fundamental basis of the Tribunal's decision was that by killing seven to eight thousand Muslim men, Serb nationalists intended to prevent the Srebenica Muslim community from reproducing. Genocide denial laws have little in common with attacks on heresy in the medieval and early modern past. Moreover, a full consideraton of the problem of genocide and free speech would have to include cases in which the affirmation of genocide is criminalized, as in contemporary Turkey.