What is Genocide?

* Armenia * Holocaust * Cambodia * Bosnia * Rwanda *

History of Genocide

Genocide, from the Greek - Genos (family, tribe, race) and the Latin –Caedes (massacre; prounounced kay-dees), was originally coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish legal scholar, in 1943. There exists, however, a large debate on how to properly define the word “genocide” and moreover, what events constitute genocide or are otherwise crimes against humanity or war crimes.

In 1948, the United Nation’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined 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:

• Killing members of the group;
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
  physical destruction in whole or in part;
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• ...Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."