Reply #59: We Killed A Number Of Civilians, Sir

[The Magistrate]

That is not in question. What is in question, and defines any act of violence as criminal, is the intent with which those acts that killed non-combatants were carried out. In warfare, to conduct an operation for the purpose of killing none combatants is criminal; to kill non-combatants in the course of engaging military targets, or targets useful to military as well as civilian functions, is criminal only if no reasonable attempts are made to minimize non-combatant casualties, and if the direct military benefit is not sufficient to outweigh likely non-combatant casualties. No operations of the first sort were carried out, and operations of the second and third sort that were carried out mostly seem to have fallen within the rules. Human Rights Watch necessarily takes an extreme view of the applicable standards, and it is not one that the admittedly scanty body of court rulings on the subject aligns with.

Your presentation of the genocide definition fails to bold the most important element, which is 'with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part': the individual items that you bold are not things the law takes as signifying genocide, but examples of the things that it can be expected will be engaged in in furtherance of the intent to exterminate. The law does not mean that, for example, killing members of a group, establishes that genocide, the determination to destroy the group entirely, is occuring. The International Criminal Court has, in fact, ruled explicitly recently, in a major case involving Serbia and Bosnia, that even an extensive pattern of atrocious and murderous conduct is not sufficient in and of itself to establish the requisite intent for the crime of genocide.