Genocide is without doubt one the most heinous crimes humanity has ever known. The term was coined by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, a survivor of the Holocaust. He explains the etymology of the word in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe;
“By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)”
The crime is distinguished from other international crimes of violence against humans, such as War Crimes, or Crimes Against Humanity by the intention of the perpetrators to destroy a particular group (in part or all of them).
In 1948, during the aftermath of the Holocaust, nations signed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
The definition of genocide in Article 2 of the convention has many shortcomings (not least the exclusion of protected groups defined by their politics, culture or sexual orientation); however, it has become the most widely used definition. The debate over the scope and meaning of the term continues…
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
This definition has been adopted as the working definition by the International Criminal Court. (insert link) This concept has been built upon and developed by subsequent academics and ( find other words) The quotes below are included to shed some light on different, important elements of the crime of genocide;
“Genocide is not extreme war or conflict; it is extreme exclusion. Exclusion may start with name-calling, but may end with a group of people being excluded from a society to the point where they are destroyed.”James M. Smith speaking to the London Assembly, January 2006
“a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.” Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, 1990
“the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings … under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims.” Israel Charny in George Andreopoulos (ed), Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, 1994
“sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim.” Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, 1993/1990
“the promotion and execution of policies by a state or its agents which result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a group …[when] the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity, religion or nationality.” Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr, ‘Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides,’ International Studies Quarterly, 37:3, 1988
