In every conflict, there is at least one protagonist who is nicknamed a ‘butcher’. During World War II, there were numerous Nazi ‘butchers’, for example Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon’. During the Khmer Rouge regime, Ta Mok was called the ‘Butcher of Cambodia’. The General Ratko Mladić was the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ and convicted for, among others, genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. These ‘butchers’ have shown a brutality and efficiency that surpasses morally and socially acceptable behaviour in an armed conflict or even a genocide. I recently presented my ongoing research of all adjudicated cases before international(ised) criminal courts of the past 80 years, starting with Nuremberg and ending with the International Criminal Court, at the 24th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology (Eurocrim) in Bucharest. My research shows that the metaphor of a ‘butcher’ is either self-assigned or assigned by others. While the media focuses on high-ranking individuals, international criminal cases also mention, usually male, individuals of lower ranks, to whose denomination of ‘butcher’ both negative and positive connotations are attached. Yet, despite the widespread occurrence of the metaphorical butcher across different conflicts and times, international(ised) criminal tribunals rarely discuss and integrate it into their jurisprudence. As such, the metaphor has a minimal legal value. However, my research shows that witnesses and even some defendants relate to the metaphor in court. Since metaphors assume a common understanding and interpretation between a speaker and a listener and even can shape thoughts, they provide important information about a conflict. In addition to the lived experiences of an individual who witnessed the brutality of a ‘butcher’, the metaphorical use of the term may also be of help to establish the context, in which crimes were perpetrated. As such, the metaphorical ‘butcher’ deserves more attention from the international criminal justice system.
Some parallels of these preliminary findings on the butcher metaphor can be drawn to the smell of genocide. In every case of mass atrocities, when bodies decompose, there will inevitably be a horrible stench. My recently published chapter on ‘The Stench of Death: The Olfactory of Genocide in International Criminal Trials’ discusses how the ostensibly least important human sense plays a crucial role to the memory of victims. Despite that memory of smell is much more reliable than the memory of sight, international criminal courts still primarily rely on visual evidence, relegating smell to a lower evidentiary rank. Reviewing all the cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, I found that witnesses of atrocity crimes frequently mentioned stench, even if not specifically questioned about it. Their memory of the genocide was inextricably linked to the smell of death. One judgment relied on stench for the construction of incitement to genocide, thus providing stench legal relevance. Stench is thus significant for the adjudication of crimes, but the stench of death more importantly adds a sensory layer to the description of cruelty and the lived experience of genocide.
Moreover, research from biology and psychology has shown that human remains smell differently than animal carcasses. The research examined why and when the smell occurs, and how it triggers a warning sign to those still alive. The brain registers the stench as a threat, which can activate increased hostility toward an outgroup. The fact that the human brain registers stench as a threat, which can trigger hostility toward an outgroup, should be taken into consideration in the aftermath of atrocities. Reconciliation can likely only occur if the threatening stench has vanished.
About the author
Carola Lingaas is a professor of law at VID Specialized University in Oslo and is the author of the monograph The Concept of Race in International Criminal Law. She holds a PhD and LL.M. in law from the University of Oslo.
Contact: carola.lingaas@vid.no