genocide

Deliberate and systematic destruction of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group defined by the exterminators as undesirable. The term is commonly applied to the policies of the Nazis during World War II (what they called the ‘final solution’ – the extermination of all ‘undesirables’ in occupied Europe, particularly the Jews, in the Holocaust).

Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born lawyer, coined the term in 1943, combining the Greek word ‘genos’ (race or tribe) with the Latin word ‘cide’ (to kill). After witnessing the horrors of the Holocaust, Lemkin campaigned to have genocide recognized as a crime under international law, and in December 1948 his efforts gave way to the adoption of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, which came into effect in January 1951.

Although most commonly used to describe the Holocaust, the term has also been applied to the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks (1915–20), of the Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda (1994), and of Bosnian Muslims by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia (1992–95).

The first case to put into practice the convention on genocide was that of Jean Paul Akayeshu, the Hutu mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba at the time of the killings, who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by a special international tribunal in September 1998. In 2001, the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia handed down its first sentence for the crime of genocide to General Radislav Krstic, found guilty of killing up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. In December 2001, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević was charged with genocide in Bosnia, becoming the most prominent European to face a war crimes court since the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders at the end of World War II.

As defined by the 1948 United Nations convention, genocide has often turned out to be difficult to prove, and experts and analysts have differed on what qualifies as ‘genocide’. Some claim that there has been only one genocide in the 20th century – the Holocaust, while others have provided a long list of what they consider cases of genocide, including the Soviet manmade famine of Ukraine (1932–33), the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975), and the Khmer Rouge killings in Cambodia in the 1970s.