https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GenocideGenocide
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This article is about the crime. For other uses, see Genocide (disambiguation).
Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group) in whole or in part. The hybrid word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word génos ("race, people") and the Latin suffix -cide ("act of killing").[1] The United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".[2][3]
The term genocide was coined in response to the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide;[4][5][6][7][8] it has subsequently been applied to many other mass killings, well-known examples including the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Holodomor, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and, more recently, the Guatemalan genocide, the Kurdish genocide, the Bosnian genocide, and the Rwandan genocide.[a]
[b]Etymology[edit]
Genocide has become an official term used in international relations. Before 1944, various terms, including "massacre" and "crimes against humanity" were used to describe intentional, systematic killings (and in 1941, Winston Churchill described the mass killing of Russian POWs and civilians by the German army as "a crime without a name.")[9] In 1943[10] or 1944, Raphael Lemkin created the term genocide, being inspired by the Armenian experience at the hands of the Ottoman Turks,[4][5][6][7][8] to describe policies of systematic murder, in particular those being carried out by the Nazis, and the word was quickly adopted by many in the international community. The word genocide is the combination of the Greek prefix geno- (meaning "tribe" or "race") and caedere (the Latin word for "to kill"), and is defined as a specific set of violent crimes that are committed against a certain group with the attempt to remove the entire group from existence or to destroy them.
The word genocide was later included as a descriptive term to the process of indictment, but not yet as a formal legal term[11] According to Lemkin, genocide was defined as "a coordinated strategy to destroy a group of people, a process that could be accomplished through total annihilation as well as strategies that eliminate key elements of the group's basic existence, including language, culture, and economic infrastructure.” He created a concept of mobilizing much of the international relations and community, to working together and preventing the occurrence of such events happening within history and the international society.[12] Australian anthropologist Peg LeVine coined the term "ritualcide" to describe the destruction of a group's cultural identity without necessarily destroying its members.[13]
The study of genocide has mainly been focused towards the legal aspect of the term. Formally recognizing the act of genocide as a crime involves the undergoing prosecution that begins with not only seeing genocide as outrageous past any moral standpoint, but also may be a legal liability within international relations. When genocide is looked at in a general aspect it is viewed as the deliberate killing of a certain group. Yet is commonly seen to escape the process of trial and prosecution due to the fact that genocide is more often than not committed by the officials in power of a state or area.[clarification needed] In 1648 before the term genocide had been coined, the Peace of Westphalia was established to protect ethnic, national, racial and in some instances religious groups. During the 19th century humanitarian intervention was needed due to the fact of conflict and justification of some of the actions executed by the military.[14]
Raphael Lemkin, in his work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), or possibly in 1943, coined the term "genocide" by combining Greek genos (γένος, 'race, people') and Latin caedere ('to kill').[15]
Lemkin defined genocide as follows:
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.[16]
The preamble to the Genocide Convention (CPPCG) notes that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history,[17] but it was not until Lemkin coined the term and the prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials that the United Nations defined the crime of genocide under international law in the Genocide Convention.
During a video interview with Raphael Lemkin for the CBS, news commentator Quincy Howe asked him about how he came to be interested in the crime of genocide. He replied: "I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians, then after the Armenians, Hitler took action".[18][19]
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