Speaking to journalist Sophie Raworth on the BBC’s Sunday Morning show recently, former war crimes prosecutor Sir Howard Morrison, now an advisor to the Ukraine government, highlighted the dangers posed by the negative – often insulting and dehumanising – statements made by some Russian politicians and media personalities about Ukraine and its people.
“Genocide is often rooted in the way that one nation or one ethnic group views another and how it describes them,” Morrison said, citing the way Nazis referred to the Poles as “subhuman” before and during the second world war, or the way Hutu elites in Rwanda referred to Tutsis as “cockroaches” before the 1994 genocide. “It’s this dehumanisation – and the pretence that they are not a real people or have a real culture.”
