"But at the beginning, our definition of the genocide was what happened to Armenia in 1917 or 1919, it's happened to the Jew in Europe, and we were not realizing - In our point of view, they have not the tools to do a genocide"
About this Quote
Genocide, in Boutros Boutros-Ghali's telling, starts as a museum label: Armenia, the Holocaust, a catalog of catastrophes with a familiar silhouette. That opening move matters. By anchoring the concept in two “canonical” cases, he reveals how the term gained moral force by being attached to industrial-scale, state-engineered killing. The subtext is uncomfortable: our recognition is trained by precedent. If the violence doesn’t resemble the last atrocity we agreed was genocide, we hesitate to name it.
The most revealing phrase is bureaucratic and chillingly technical: “they have not the tools.” It’s the language of capacity, not intent; logistics, not bodies. He’s describing a mindset common to international institutions in the late Cold War and immediate post-Cold War era, where legal categories became gatekeepers for action. If perpetrators weren’t equipped with railways, camps, registries, or a modern state apparatus, then the crime seemed, in this warped calculus, less legible - and therefore less urgent.
Context sharpens the stakes. Boutros-Ghali moved through diplomacy at a time when the UN was repeatedly accused of paralysis: Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia. His remark captures how definitions can function as alibis. By treating genocide as something only highly organized actors can “do,” policymakers can misread improvisational, decentralized, or rapidly escalating mass violence until it’s too late.
The intent isn’t to deny suffering; it’s to explain an institutional blind spot. The effect is an inadvertent self-indictment: a warning that the world’s moral vocabulary can lag behind the violence it’s meant to stop.
The most revealing phrase is bureaucratic and chillingly technical: “they have not the tools.” It’s the language of capacity, not intent; logistics, not bodies. He’s describing a mindset common to international institutions in the late Cold War and immediate post-Cold War era, where legal categories became gatekeepers for action. If perpetrators weren’t equipped with railways, camps, registries, or a modern state apparatus, then the crime seemed, in this warped calculus, less legible - and therefore less urgent.
Context sharpens the stakes. Boutros-Ghali moved through diplomacy at a time when the UN was repeatedly accused of paralysis: Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia. His remark captures how definitions can function as alibis. By treating genocide as something only highly organized actors can “do,” policymakers can misread improvisational, decentralized, or rapidly escalating mass violence until it’s too late.
The intent isn’t to deny suffering; it’s to explain an institutional blind spot. The effect is an inadvertent self-indictment: a warning that the world’s moral vocabulary can lag behind the violence it’s meant to stop.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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