Genocide

Origins of Genocide

Polish jurist Raphaël Lemkin is credited as the originator of the term genocide. As early as 1933, he showed a prescient understanding of Nazi intentions when he drafted a proposal for penalizing destructive actions taken against minority populations that was presented to the International Conference for the Unification of Penal law in Madrid. Later, as a witness to Nazi aggression against the nations of Europe and specific peoples (e.g., Jews, Roma, Poles, Slavs), Lemkin argued that it was necessary to find a word that could inspire moral condemnation and political action for the world to take seriously this crime that was, at that time, “without a name.” After he escaped Nazi-occupied Europe, Lemkin wrote his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he coined the term genocide, a combination of genos (race, tribe) and cide (to kill), for this purpose. With this new word in hand, he directed his efforts toward legal codification so that a clear standard would be in place rather than a hodgepodge of international treaties and agreements that did not speak to the scope or scale of geno-cidal crimes.

The first formal recognition of Lemkin's new term can be found in the indictment of the major German war criminals by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg in 1945. However, the IMT did not make significant use of this term in its judgment, and the further codification of genocide as a matter of international law was left to the United Nations. On December 11, 1946, the UN General Assembly passed its first resolution on genocide that compared the crime of genocide, as a denial of group existence, to that of murder, or the denial of individual life. Based on this resolution, the UN's Economic and Social Council was charged with the task of developing a convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide.

Debates among UN member nations ensued. Contentious issues included the groups to be included under the convention, the status of cultural genocide, the meaning of intent, and the challenge of prevention. For example, the Russian representative argued that political groups were too impermanent and unstable to be included under the convention. Likewise, many Western nations opposed the inclusion of [Page 531]cultural genocide, or “ethnocide,” under the convention, suggesting that these crimes were of a different order from mass killing.

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