Genocide

Term that generally refers to the killing of members of a specific ethnic, racial, religious, or national group with the intent of annihilating that group. In 1946, as the international community grappled with the horrors of the Holocaust, the United Nations drafted the first international convention on genocide.

On December 9, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The convention defined genocide as “[a]ny act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This might include killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; deliberately creating conditions calculated to bring about the group's physical [Page 286]destruction; imposing measures to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

As of 2002, 135 nations had signed the convention, indicating broad international support for the punishment and prevention of genocide. However, the practical issue of confronting and ending genocide has proved much more controversial than official support for the UN convention. The international community has been slow to intervene to stop some of the most horrific acts of genocide in the latter half of the 20th century, leaving many to question just what the international community can and should do to prevent and punish genocide.

The 20th century has witnessed several genocides. Some of the most notable include the 1915–1917 genocide of nearly one million Armenians; the genocide of more than six million Jews during the Holocaust; the deaths of more than two million Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime; the killing and/or rape of several hundred thousand Bosnian Muslims during the Bosnian conflict; and the deaths of 800,000 Rwandans, most of these Tutsis, during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Although the death toll in each of these genocides varies, what defines these atrocities is the objective of the aggressors—the total annihilation of a particular group of people.

National Interests and Genocide

Some in the international community have voiced concerns that intervening to stop genocide will occur only so long as the international community has a material interest in doing so. Supporters of this position often reference the lack of intervention in the 1994 Rwandan genocide (nearly one million dead in 100 days). Despite evidence that genocide was occurring in Rwanda during the spring of 1994, UN troops withdrew from the area, and the United States and Europe failed to intervene. The lack of intervention during the Rwandan genocide is often juxtaposed with the intervention in the genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the early 1990s. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the United States, and several European nations intervened to stop the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims through arms embargoes, economic sanctions, and, ultimately, NATO air strikes against the Serbian aggressors. This genocide, with is geographic proximity to Western Europe, arguably held more material interest for the international community than did the Rwandan genocide.

Defining and Recognizing Genocide

Despite a concise definition of genocide within the UN convention on genocide, there remains significant difficulty in actually recognizing genocide when it occurs. Heavy violence and death occur in many ethnic, religious, and national conflicts, but genocide, as it is defined by the United Nations, has the distinction of being motivated by and planned to exterminate an entire ethnic, religious, or national group. Demonstrating that this is the actual intent of aggressors is often challenging, as perpetrators of genocide are often secretive about their intent to commit genocide.

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