Political Assassinations

Political Assassinations and Genocide: Implications and Classifications

• Political assassinations, including heads of state, opposition leaders, and legislators, can lead to a decline in democratic nature, increase in domestic violence, instability, and economic prosperity.
• Policy implications of political assassinations include the need for stable and regulated succession mechanisms, addressing political grievances, and ensuring the safety of political and opposition leaders.
• The UN Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, including killing, causing bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life for physical destruction, imposing measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children.
• Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy by one ethnic or religious group to remove civilian populations of another group through violent and terror-inspiring means, often driven by misguided nationalism, historic grievances, and revenge.
• Genocide and ethnic cleansing are viewed by international humanitarian law as punishable acts, with complicity in genocide equally punishable.
• The international community is the only body able to intervene if a state commits or contributes to genocide, as the convention is impotent to convict governments if they did not actively perpetrate the crime.
• Politicide is the killing of human groups due to political opposition to the regime and dominant groups, often involving multiple deaths and serious harm, displacement, and forced birth control.
• Democide is the act of eliminating a group of people in general, including politicide, and involves indiscriminate murdering of a group by the government for reasons other than nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, or political opinions.
• Pramono's classification of the degrees of genocide includes ideological and pragmatic genocide, with first, second, and third-degree classifications based on mental and material elements and the destruction of a human group.
• Ideological genocide/politicides aim at achieving utopia and are divided into progressive and reactionary, with examples like Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime and the killing of Jews by the Nazi empire in Germany.
• Pragmatic genocide includes developmental, retributive, and hegemonic types, aiming to eliminate "backward" people and cultures, seek revenge for past injustice, and seize and maintain political power by getting rid of a particular group/party.
• Factors leading to genocide include ethnicity, nationality, religion, economic dependency, underdevelopment, and destitution, which may constitute a source of genocide.