The UN
Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide
when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.
The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm.
The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological
continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c),
forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. This refers to
indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the
environment that sustains them. Sufficient ‘conditions of life’ require
buildings, hospitals, social infrastructure, sewage and water systems,
power grids, agriculture. The intentional destruction or degradation of
such structures undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a
slower and more tortuous form of annihilation.
The
idea that the built environment determines a group’s conditions of life
recalls the modernist conception of architecture, prevalent when the
word ‘genocide’ was first conceived and defined by the Polish Jewish
jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.
Modern architecture offered to calculate and improve the conditions of
life. Cities were to be laid out in accordance with public health
principles, and homes, in Le Corbusier’s famous definition, were to be
‘machines for living in’, calibrated to maximise the supply of
biological necessities – heat, hygiene, air circulation, food and even
sexual reproduction.
Architects’ Data
(1936) by the German modernist architect Ernst Neufert is still used by
architects looking for the most efficient dimensions for kitchens,
bedrooms or even park benches. In the 1920s Neufert was an assistant to
Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. Later, on behalf of the Nazi
Party, he oversaw the standardisation of Germany’s building industry,
which was largely powered by enslaved labour. Several Bauhaus graduates
designed concentration camps. The deliberate degradation of living
conditions inverted the task of modern architecture from the enhancement
of life to the production of death.
Lemkin
defined genocide as being aimed at ‘the destruction of essential
foundations of the life of national groups’. He was thinking about the
way the Nazis saw the Jewish ghettos and enslaved labour camps as means
of slow, indirect extermination. But he was also aware of the colonial
origins of this mode of destruction. Though direct acts of massacre took
place in colonised territories everywhere, slow, indirect killings have
more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples.
Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on
which they depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations,
Indigenous populations were destroyed to free up the best land for
European settlement.
Two and a half
years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee
camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure,
agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made
toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic
destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US
company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades
into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening
homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. The tide
of destruction... READ MORE
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n07/eyal-weizman/all-they-will-find-is-sand
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