Genocide

Genocide is the attempt to eradicate a people due to their race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality, usually by means of mass slaughter. The Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered about 6 million Jews along with millions of others, is probably the most widely known genocide of the 20th century. Although the Holocaust may be unique in other respects, it is not unique in its being a genocide. Over the 20th century and into the 21st century, genocide has occurred in Cambodia, Germany, Iraq, Turkey, and Rwanda, and intervention has been rare. Some of these acts of genocide were probably preventable, and great harm might have been averted had the international community taken swift, decisive action.

Definition, Use, and Differentiation of Categories

The word genocide is relatively new, originating in the mid-20th century, when it was created by a Polish-born lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who needed a term describing acts aimed to destroy entire races or cultures. Lemkin created a word using the Greek term genos, denoting race or tribe, and cide, a derivative of the Latin caedere “to kill.” At the end of World War II, as the extent of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis during the Holocaust became clear, the international community was ready to declare genocide a crime. The General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution condemning genocide on December 11, 1946, and on December 9, 1948, it passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, widely known as the Genocide Convention.

The Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Included in such acts are killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to them, inflicting conditions of life calculated to physically destroy the group, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Perpetrators of genocide rarely describe their actions using the terms employed in the Genocide Convention. Instead, they devise a coded language loaded with euphemisms. The Nazis used expressions such the famous “final solution” and other phrases such as “special treatment” or “evacuation” to designate systematic programs of murder conducted on a massive scale. “Ethnic cleansing” was widely employed to describe what took place during the genocide in the Balkans. Manipulation of language can obscure what is actually taking place and help perpetrators to mentally distance themselves from the moral implications of the atrocities they commit.

Persons affected by, or engaged in, genocide can be differentiated by category. These categories include perpetrators, victims, bystanders (which may include individuals, communities, nongovernmental organizations, nations, or the international community itself), and rescuers who come to the aid of those targeted by a genocidal regime. This list is not exhaustive and other categories can often be distinguished. For example, there may be individuals or groups engaged in resistance—a category frequently overlooked but deserving of recognition. Individuals sometimes fall within more than one of these classifications. The same individual may be a rescuer or resister and also a victim. More rarely, a perpetrator may also be a rescuer. The Nazis are paradigmatic perpetrators, yet a few party members acted as rescuers. Oskar Schindler is probably the best known of these, due to the popular filmSchindler's List, but he was not the only party member to engage in rescue efforts.

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