Is there truly justice for Genocide?
Throughout the course of history, many brutal atrocities have been committed, on a genocidal scale. Some of these have resulted in court cases and punishments for the perpetrators, though many have not. Reparations, even enormous ones, do not repay the families of the murdered. This can be exemplified with the genocide of the Poles in the Katyn Woods, and the Armenian Genocide. One happened in the midst of World War II, and has been largely ignored by the international community, and one happened during World War I, and despite worldwide outrage, the perpetrators never paid for their crimes. Justice, which on Earth can only go as far as substantial reparations and …show more content…
Through nearly 70 years after the massacre, a BBC news report says that “no-one has ever been convicted in connection with the massacre, with Russian prosecutors arguing that those responsible are now dead” (Europe court criticises Russia over Katyn Massacre inquiry, 3). Even though figures such as Stalin and other NKVD leaders are in fact no longer alive, even when they were, nothing was done about Katyn. During the Nuremberg trials, when the issue of Katyn appeared, “as Churchill wrote in his memoirs: “It was decided by the victorious governments concerned that the issue should be avoided, and the crime of Katyn was never probed in detail”” (Naimark, 20). It was an absolute travesty that the Nuremberg trials were to punish those who committed horrendous crimes during the Second World War, yet resulted in one of the largest atrocities of the war going unpunished. Given the Communist Polish government’s silence on the topic, the issue did not even become a question for justice until the fall of the Eastern Bloc. With the end of communism, however, the issue would once again become a hefty one for the Polish
Throughout the course of history, many brutal atrocities have been committed, on a genocidal scale. Some of these have resulted in court cases and punishments for the perpetrators, though many have not. Reparations, even enormous ones, do not repay the families of the murdered. This can be exemplified with the genocide of the Poles in the Katyn Woods, and the Armenian Genocide. One happened in the midst of World War II, and has been largely ignored by the international community, and one happened during World War I, and despite worldwide outrage, the perpetrators never paid for their crimes. Justice, which on Earth can only go as far as substantial reparations and …show more content…
Through nearly 70 years after the massacre, a BBC news report says that “no-one has ever been convicted in connection with the massacre, with Russian prosecutors arguing that those responsible are now dead” (Europe court criticises Russia over Katyn Massacre inquiry, 3). Even though figures such as Stalin and other NKVD leaders are in fact no longer alive, even when they were, nothing was done about Katyn. During the Nuremberg trials, when the issue of Katyn appeared, “as Churchill wrote in his memoirs: “It was decided by the victorious governments concerned that the issue should be avoided, and the crime of Katyn was never probed in detail”” (Naimark, 20). It was an absolute travesty that the Nuremberg trials were to punish those who committed horrendous crimes during the Second World War, yet resulted in one of the largest atrocities of the war going unpunished. Given the Communist Polish government’s silence on the topic, the issue did not even become a question for justice until the fall of the Eastern Bloc. With the end of communism, however, the issue would once again become a hefty one for the Polish