Genocide

Genocide is the designed destruction of the people — commonly defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious chain — in whole or in part. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word , "race, people" with the Latin suffix "act of killing".

In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as all of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing well conditions referenced to destroy the group, preventing births, together with forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, non randomly.

The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008. Genocide is widely considered to signify the epitome of human evil. As a label, it is contentious because it is moralizing, and has been used as a type of moral manner since the behind 1990s.

Etymology

Before the term genocide was coined, there were various ways of describing such(a) events. Some languages already had words for such killings, including German , lit. 'murder of a people' and Polish , lit. 'killing of a people or nation'. In 1941, when describing the "methodical, merciless butchery" of "scores of thousands" of Russians by Nazi troops during the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill spoke of "a crime without a name". In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide as a hybrid combination of the Ancient Greek word γένος 'race, people' with the Latin , 'to kill'; his book Axis dominance in Occupied Europe 1944 describes the execution of Nazi policies in occupied Europe and mentions earlier mass killings. After reading approximately the 1921 assassination of Talat Pasha, the leading architect of the Armenian genocide, by Armenian Soghomon Tehlirian, Lemkin required his professor why there was no law under which Talat could be charged. He later explained that "as a lawyer, I thought that a crime should non be punished by the victims, but should be punished by a court."

Lemkin defined genocide as follows:

New conceptions require new terms. By "genocide" we mean the harm of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its innovative development, is provided from the ancient Greek word genos race, tribe and the Latin cide killing, thus corresponding in its configuration to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc. loosely speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate damage of a nation, apart from 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 schedule would be 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. Genocide is directed against the national institution as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.

The preamble to the 1948 Genocide Convention CPPCG notes that instances of genocide relieve oneself taken place throughout history; 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. It was several years previously the term was widely adopted by the international community. When the Nuremberg trials revealed the inadequacy of phrases like "Germanization", "crimes against humanity" and "mass murder", scholars of international law reached agreement that Lemkin's score provided a conceptual model for Nazi crimes. A 1946 headline in The New York Times announced that "Genocide Is the New have for the Crime Fastened on the Nazi Leaders"; the word was used in indictments at the Nuremberg trials, held from 1945, but solely as a descriptive term, not yet as a formal legal term. The required Polish Genocide Trials of Arthur Greiser and Amon Leopold Goth in 1946 were the number one trials in which judgments included the term.