Genocide

Defining Genocide

Although the term is relatively new, genocide is by no means a new type of behavior and, in fact, has been a constant throughout history. Since ancient times, conquering warlords and generals have wiped out entire populations in their attempts to build empires and quash rebellions. The word genocide, however, was first used in 1944 by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin, in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. He wanted to criminalize Nazi atrocities and war crimes by bringing attention to their actions in occupied Europe, and he felt that existing terms such as war crimes or mass murder did not convey the sheer magnitude and intent of this type of criminality. Accordingly, Lemkin created the word from the Greek genos, which means race or tribe, and the Latin cide, which means to kill.

With motivation provided by the postwar Nuremberg trials and the advocacy of Raphael Lemkin, the United Nations established a legal framework on December 9th, 1948, to define genocide as a crime under international law. Known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, it stipulates that any attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious population, in whole or in part, constitutes genocide and is a crime whether committed in peace or war. This definition also specifically articulates a variety of actions that can be considered genocidal and includes not only the overt killing of members of a group but also causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a population; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group; and forcibly transferring children of a group to another population. Genocide, therefore, includes a wide assortment of behaviors, not all of which involve the direct physical murder of a people. Although most individuals picture mass shootings and gas chambers when they think of genocide, this crime also includes forcing groups into ghettos and reservations where disease, malnutrition, and starvation may kill the population. Forced sterilization as a policy may also rise to the level of genocide if the intent is to destroy all or part of a population. The mass rape of Rwandan Tutsi women, to cite another example, was considered to be genocide by a tribunal court in Rwanda because it violated the “serious bodily and mental harm” clause of the genocide convention.

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