Genocide

Genocide is a type of atrocity, the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, cultural or political group. The term was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 from the roots genos (Greek for tribe or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). Lemkin campaigned for the international outlawing of genocide, which was achieved in 1951.

Definition of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and came into effect in January 1951. It contains an internationally-recognized definition of genocide which was incorporated into the national criminal legislation of many countries, and was also adopted by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Convention (in article 2) defines genocide as "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.

The first draft of the Convention included political killings but that language was removed at the insistence of the Soviet Union. The exclusion of social and political groups as targets of genocide in this legal definition has been criticized. In common usage of the word, these target groups are often included.

Common usage also sometimes equates genocide with state-sponsored mass murder; however genocide as defined above does not imply mass murder (or any murder) nor is every instance of mass-murder necessarily genocide. The involvement of a government is also not required.

The word genocide is also sometimes used in a much broader sense, as in "slavery was genocide"; this usage is clearly incorrect from a legal standpoint.

International law

All signitories to the above mentioned convention are required to prevent and punish acts of genocide, both in peace and wartime. Genocide is an international matter and can never be treated as an internal affair of any country.

Some legal opinion holds that as well as being illegal under conventional international law, genocide is a crime under customary international law as well, and has been since some time during World War II or possibly earlier.

Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish, since intent of destruction has to be proved.

Related concepts

Genocide is nowadays considered a crime against humanity; the initial definition of that concept established during the Nuremberg trials was however restricted to acts committed during wartime or directed against the peace and would therefore not have included all acts of genocide.

As mentioned above, state-sponsored mass murder is sometimes equated with genocide. The more precise term for this is democide.

Cultural genocide refers to the deliberate destruction of a culture, without necessarily fulfilling the criteria of genocide. This term has been criticized as trying to benefit from the emotionally charged nature of "genocide".

Current campaigns of genocide

On February 23, 1998 Osama bin Ladin of al Qaida issued a fatwah calling for the killing of "Americans and their allies-civilian and military" [1].

Major cases of genocide

• Nazi genocide before and during World War II (1933-1945).
  • Holocaust: approximately 6 million people killed. [1] Genocide targeted at Jews.
  • Genocide also targeted at Slavs, Gypsies and Jehovahs Witnesses. Approximately 21 million Soviets, among them 7 million civilians, were killed in "Operation Barbarossa", the invasion of the Soviet Union. Civilians were rounded up and burned or shot in many cities conquered by the nazis. Since the Slavs were considered "sub-human", this was ethnically targeted mass murder.
  • Nazis also killed other groups, such as those suffering from birth defects, mental retardation or insanity; homosexuals, prostitutes and communists, as part of a wider mass murder.

• Rwanda (April 1994)
  • Roughly 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutus. See Rwanda/History.

• Armenian (1915-1923) genocide by the Young Turk government
  • Approximately 0.6-1.5 millions Armenians in Ottoman Empire were killed [2]. The Turkish government officially denies that there was any genocide, claiming that most of the Armenian deaths resulted from armed conflict, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War.
  • See also: Armenian Genocide

• Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) in France can also be considered as a case of genocide.

• Soviet Union
  • Note: various advocates dismiss reports of Soviet genocide, as in Ukraine, as anti-soviet propaganda
  • Some advocates have argued that the millions of civilian killings done by the Soviet government should not be called "genocide" since the motivation for the murders is outside of the legal definition of genocide.
    • Ukrainians - Claims of 5 million civilians starved to death for refusing to cooperate with "collective farming" rules [2]
    • Crimean Tatars
    • Don Cossacks
    • Chechens
    • Volga Germans
    • Kalmyks
    • Meskhetians
    • Lithuanians
    • Latvians
    • Estonians
    • Jews
    • Orthodox priests
    • others

• People's Republic of China
  • Mao's regime killed large number of people, depending on which sources are accepted. (Please provide accurate source.) The Chinese government accepts the lower figure.
    • Some have argued that the government of the People's Republic of China has committed genocide by killing members of many minority ethnic groups, including Uighurs, Tibetans and others during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Others argue that this is not a case of genocide but mass murder because while minority ethnic groups were killed, so were members of the majority Han Chinese, and at no time has the PRC government undertaken policies specifically to kill minority groups.

• Japanese genocide before and during World War II (1920s-1945).
  • Nanjing Massacre: approximately 300,000 people killed during the three months following the fall of Nanjing to the Japanese. Genocide targeted at Chinese at other places of China: Manchuria, the Wan Bao Hill Incident, Xiangyang.
  • smaller scale Genocide also targeted at Koreans, Filipinos, Dutch, Vietnamese, Indonesians and Burmese.

• Cambodia (1975-1979) murdered between 900,000 and 2 million of its civilians after the Vietnam War.
  • Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, murdered many other groups as part of a wider campaign of mass murder, such as intellectuals and professionals
  • Groups that were target of genocide during Pol Pot's rule:
    • Chinese (200 thousands)
    • Vietnamese (150 thousands)
    • Buddhist monks (40-60 thousands)
    • Thai (12 thousands)
  • The genocidal Pol Pot regime was removed by a Vietnamese occupation. (According to some writers, during the 1980s and 1990s, Pol Pot's guerilla group was supported by the United Kingdom and the USA as his genocidal history was considered preferable to the Vietnamese occupation.)

• Bosnia (1992-1995)
  • Organized ethnic cleansing carried out by Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Muslims) throughout the period.
  • More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica in July 1995. See also History of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

• North America
  • Lord Jeffrey Amherst approved spreading smallpox among Native Americans intentionally during Pontiacs Rebellion by distributing infected blankets. See http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/amherst/lord_jeff.html.
  • Indian Removal resulted in the death of many thousands of Native Americans.
  • See Indian Massacres, Trail of Tears, Extermination of the Pequots in 1637.

• Central America (1980s)
  • Death squads were active in terrorizing, kidnapping, and murdering political opponents in El Salvador.

• South America (1970s)
  • Argentina's government was involved in a "dirty war" in which political opponents were kidnapped and murdered.

• Australia
  • Genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines.
  • Many argue that the removal of Aboriginal children from their families by the Australian government constituted genocide; see Stolen Generation

• Lebanon
  • Sabra and Shatila massacre, committed by Lebanese Christians, in an area surrounded by Israeli forces. The United Nations declared it to be an act of genocide. Some claim that this declaration was political, the proper classification of the event being a massacre, since no party in the conflict implemented a systematic policy of exterminating Palestinians.

• Iraq
  • In 1988, Iraq used Sarin to kill the population of a Kurd village.

• Indonesia
  • In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor with quiet approval of the USA and its subjugation of that nation involved the deaths of thousands of civilians which has been estimated to be, in proportionate numbers, worse than the killings committed by the contemporary Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia.

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[1] Figures from R. J. Rummel, "Death by Government".
[2] Figure from Britannica

Further Reading

• Problem from Hell America's Failure to Prevent Genocide, Samantha Power, Basic Books, 2002, hardcover, 640 pages, ISBN 0465061508

External Link

• BBC on defining genocide