genocide

The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.

[Greek genos, race + –CIDE.]

The term ‘genocide’ was introduced in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, who had escaped from German-occupied Poland to the US. As a child in the new Polish state Lemkin sensed the vulnerability of Jews, as an ethnic minority, to coercive states; his expertise in international law prompted him to develop the term to describe the systematic annihilation of an ethnic group, religion, or culture. To Lemkin's dismay, the Nuremberg Medical Trial did not recognize genocide as a crime, although medical experiments were defined as a crime against humanity. Lemkin drafted the International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 9 December 1948. It was only in 1988 that the US ratified the Convention.

Although medicine at its best is antithetical to genocide, at its worst it has facilitated genocidal atrocities. The biomedical sciences (broadly conceived) have supplied rationales for defining degenerate races. Anthropologists collecting specimens accelerated the demise of the Tasmanians, who at the turn of the century were regarded as one of the most primitive races. Physiological sciences assisted in racial classification, for example with the use of blood groups, which were linked to racial types. This reached a culmination with the Nazi measures of racial screening and genocide in the occupied East. Josef Mengele had doctorates in anthropology and medicine, and other racial experts attempted to identify residual Germanic elements among the Slavs. Not only Jews, but also gypsies were defined by the Nazis as meriting total eradiction, and numerous other ‘races’, such as the Slavs, were subjected to atrocities. Medical expertise was essential to maintain the fitness of higher races by eliminating the mentally ill and the severely disabled, and preventing reproduction of carriers of inherited diseases.

Medical expertise has provided techniques of extermination. The development of the Zyklon gas chamber was transferred from sanitary practices of delousing. Instead of killing the insect vectors of diseases, the Nazis tried to kill the human hosts of the pathogens. Each of the Nazi crematoria at Auschwitz could kill and dispose of a thousand bodies each day. This represented a highly medicalized form of genocide, using techniques and ideas of hygiene.

Genocidal measures provided an opportunity for advancing medical knowledge by the performance of human experiments, and the collection of specimens of the killed. Again, this is well illustrated by Nazi medicine. Anatomical collections included the skeletons, brains, organs, and tissue samples of persons deemed racially inferior. These collections often remained in German medical institutes until the 1990s. The anatomical atlas of Pernkopf, long a standard work, contained material from children killed in a Viennese hospital, and he also used corpses of executed persons for teaching purposes. German concentration camp experiments were conducted to determine the point that death sets in under extreme conditions of cold or immersion in seawater. Other experimental victims were used to test new vaccines and drugs after deliberate infection.

Despite Lemkin's efforts to prevent repetition of Nazi atrocities, the crime of genocide can all too easily occur. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia had a number of disturbing features, not least the prominence of physicians among the Bosnian Serb leadership. Large-scale massacres do not necessarily require medical expertise: the Turkish killing of the Armenians during World War I or the tragic massacres in Rwanda in 1995 show that all that might be necessary for such measures is to set in motion death marches — when persons would die from exhaustion — or to wield a simple machete. Genocide seems likely to remain one of the most horrific forms of pathological human behaviour.

— P. J. Weindling

Bibliography

• Kuper, L. (1977). The pity of it all. Gerald Duckworth, London.
• Horowitz, I. (1976). Genocide: state power and mass murder. Transaction Books, New Brunswick.
• Weindling, P. J. (1989). Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism. Cambridge University Press

See also eugenics; killing; racism; war.

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people defined by their nationality, or by their ethnic, cultural, or religious background. While public health has long been concerned with the promotion, provision, and protection of a population's health during war and conflict, genocide became of interest to the field of public health only in the late twentieth century. The public health impact of genocide is enormous; in the last half of the twentieth century alone, dozens of genocides—accounting for over 23 million deaths—occurred, including in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Burundi, Cambodia, and Bangladesh. Recognizing the relationship between public health and genocide is important because of the contributions public health professionals can make to preventing and mitigating genocide and its impact.

Genocide may include a direct assault on public health as it did in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, public health came face to face with genocide when acts were committed to destroy the public health of the population, thereby threatening to destroy people through inflicting serious harm to their health. Food, fuel, electricity, running water, and medical supplies were cut off from Sarajevo and its environs during the siege of that city. Since many things are essential to public health, including housing, nutrition, sanitation, and access to public health, any acts committed to destroy or seriously undermine the conditions needed for health are potentially acts of genocide if they are committed against a specific population. For instance, during the siege of Sarajevo, waterborne diseases such as hepatitis A increased because the sanitation systems no longer worked properly, 10 percent of the city's population was moderately malnourished, and the combined effects of malnutrition, cold, and lack of adequate medical care led to increased illness and deaths. In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, genocide disproportionately affected the most vulnerable Bosnians—the very young, the elderly, women, the chronically ill, and the disabled.

Genocide may also include indirect assaults on public health, as it did in Rwanda in 1994. There, massive displacement of persons from their homes created large-scale health risks to the internally displaced and refugees. While the high morbidity and mortality in the Rwandan refugee population was recognized as a public health crisis, it was also the product of genocide. Refugees from the genocide who were living in camps did not contract cholera solely because of the infectious agent, but also because they were forced to flee their homes and encounter grossly unsanitary conditions due to their status as members of an ethnic group (the Tutsi) and resultant attacks by the Hutu government.

Genocide and Other Forms of Mass Violence

Genocide is a particular type of mass violence perpetrated against a large population. Other threats to the survival of a population, such as arbitrary imprisonment, discrimination, mass and systematic rape, torture, cutting off essential civilian supplies, and forced migration, can perpetrate large-scale harm against that population and have many of the same implications for public health as overt genocide. However, since 1946, when the United Nations General Assembly declared that genocide is "a crime under international law," genocide is recognized as distinct from other forms of mass violence. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, enacted in 1951, 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 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 their group; or (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

This distinction between genocide and other forms of mass violence is as significant to public health as it is to international law. First, when public health professionals name mass violence "genocide," they can invoke the Genocide Convention in their calls for action of intervention from the international community. Second, genocide is a punishable crime under the Genocide Convention. Since many health professionals believe that justice and legal accountability facilitate both the healing of victims and primary prevention of future genocides, determining that mass violence constitutes genocide invokes legal mechanisms for punishing the perpetrators under the Genocide Convention.

The Role of Public Health

The precursors, processes, and consequences of genocide are increasingly being understood, and public health contributes to this understanding in a distinct manner from other disciplines, such as the law profession and the human rights field. Specifically, public health brings to the study of genocide the unique tools of epidemiology, which is the study of the distribution of disease and the factors associated with a disease within a population. Since public health views a specific population or group of human beings in an ecological model that includes the institutions (e.g., paramilitary organizations) and the objects (e.g., weapons of genocide) they have created, it is only natural that public health views genocide in this manner, too. Thus, public health professionals can examine genocide as a disease, along with social and behavioral factors that correlate with the disease, and may even cause it.

The work that public health professionals do to examine, prevent, and mitigate genocide can be understood in terms of the three traditional core functions of public health: assessment, policy development, and assurance of services. Assessments can be performed through data collection and analysis intended to identify, document, and notify the public about potential or ongoing genocide. Here the public health principles of disease and injury surveillance can be applied to violence against a population, and the traditional tools of public health—such as case reports and surveillance studies—are well suited to this function. A genocide may have early warning signs that public health professionals can detect, such as escalating violence, increased refugee flows out of a country, and increasing systematic discrimination. In those cases where a war strategy targets the health of an entire group of people, public health professionals are best able to recognize the nature of the genocide.

Assessment is equally important after a genocide occurs. The methods, effects, and outcomes of all public health interventions must be assessed objectively. Epidemiologic studies to determine and quantify the public health impact of genocide can be performed, as has been done in numerous studies of international and civil wars. The public health impact of genocide goes beyond the number of people killed. It must also be understood for its long-term effect on public health, including the destruction of medical facilities; the killing and flight of physicians, nurses and other health care professionals; the psychological impact on the survivors; and the interruption of programs for immunizations, infectious disease prevention, and prenatal care. Public health can also inform other types of assessments, such as retrospective studies to determine and identify the conditions, risk factors, and precursors that led to genocide.

Policy development may include recommending courses of action to prevent or mitigate a genocide. Again, policy development is an established function of public health in response to situations that threaten the health and safety of an exposed population. For instance, public health programs such as vaccination campaigns are proposed when large numbers of people living in a defined geographic area are at risk for illness or death from a contagious disease that vaccination would protect against. Similarly, public health policy proposals can advocate to protect groups at risk of genocide. Whenever there is a threat or occurrence of genocide, public health officials can advocate strongly for immediate international action. The principles of public health, coupled with the protests of public health professionals, can influence governments regarding the need, timing, and level of intervention required to protect a group from genocide.

Assurance of services may include designing and implementing programs that address the efforts at genocide. In the event of genocide, health care professionals can provide emergency services and physical and psychological treatment and rehabilitation of survivors. Interventions for complex humanitarian emergencies must be implemented as quickly as possible and made available to refugees and internally displaced persons.

Public health can play an important role in determining the truth about events of mass violence. Much of the work regarding genocide in the fields of human rights, law, and history revolves around determining the truth of claims for and against an occurrence of genocide. Public health contributes to these efforts through the powerful tool of epidemiology. With its methods for systematic compilation, consolidation, and assessment of data, epidemiology can be used by war crime tribunals to argue that specific war violations occurred on a scale consistent with crimes against humanity and possibly even genocide. For instance, epidemiologic investigations are useful in determining whether the cluster of methods that make up a policy of "ethnic cleansing" are consistent either with a series of unorganized and isolated acts or with a systematic policy of genocide—which would be a punishable act under the Genocide Convention.

S. Swiss and J. Giller have demonstrated how public health methods are critical to defining the nature of a particular mass violence, such as the systematic use of rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They estimated that "based on the assumption that 1 percent of acts of unprotected intercourse result in pregnancy, the identification of 119 pregnancies, therefore, represents some 11,900 rapes." They stress that the goal is not to arrive at a final number of events but rather to determine its magnitude and extent, since evidence of a systematic pattern is critical to determining whether rape constituted part of a policy of genocide. This is because the Genocide Convention prohibits even intent or attempts to commit genocide. Though proof of thousands of rapes is useful evidence when prosecuting a case under the Genocide Convention, the Genocide Convention focuses on the perpetrator's intent to destroy a social group in whole or in part. The degree to which a genocidal plan is successfully carried out is not part of the law of the Genocide Convention. Thus, behind the inevitable complexities that surround questions of the responsibility of the different nationality or ethnic group involved in the violence, public health can analyze a genocide from a public health perspective and can contribute to the prevention of genocide and the healing of its survivors.

(SEE ALSO: Famine; International Health; Politics of Public Health; Refugee Communities; Violence; War)

Bibliography

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. See: Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

Geller, G. A. (1995). "Humanitarian Responses to Mass Violence Perpetrated against Vulnerable Populations." British Medical Journal 311:995–1001.

Human Rights Watch (1993). War Crimes in Bosnia-Hercegovna, Vol. 2: Helsinki Watch. New York: Author.

Levy, B. S., and Sidel, V. W., eds. (1997). War and Public Health. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mann, J. M.; Gruskin, M. A.; and Annas, G. J., eds. (1999). Health and Human Rights: A Reader. New York: Routledge.

Staub, E. (1984). The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Swiss, S., and Giller, J. (1993). "Rape as a Crime of War: A Medical Perspective." Journal of the American Medical Association 270:612–613.

— DAVID P. EISENMAN

Genocide (from Gr.: genos, people or race, and Lat.: caedere, to kill) is the systematic attempt to destroy and/or eradicate an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group. The expression was first coined by the Polish writer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in his account of the Nazi occupation of eastern Europe.

Genocidal practices have been common throughout history, from the beginning of the Christian Crusades in the 11th century, with their brutal treatment of both Jews and Muslims, through Genghis Khan's ruthless expansion of the Mongol empire in the early 13th century, to the exterminations practised by Timur in Persia, India, and Syria in the late 14th century. Among many other examples, the 16th-century wars of the European Reformation saw organized massacres of religious opponents, notably by the Duke of Alba in the Netherlands. The almost complete eradication of the American Indians, particularly on the eastern coast of what is now the USA in the mid-17th century, was no less than genocide for the purposes of efficient colonization.

The 20th century has seen as much resort to genocidal policies and practices, and with as much alacrity, as at any time in history. The century was just a few years old when German colonial authorities destroyed the Herero people of South-West Africa (now Namibia). Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were massacred by the Turks in 1915 and in the years which followed, and many millions of kulaks (peasants) were killed during the Stalin collectivization drive in the early 1930s. The destruction of the kulaks introduced another, characteristically 20th-century dimension: ‘ideological’ genocide. After WW II, the political and economic instability caused by decolonization brought about yet more acts of genocide, such as the mass killings of the Ibo that precipitated the Hausa-Ibo Nigerian civil war in the mid-1960s, and the explosion of hatred between the Hutu and Tutsi people in central Africa in the 1960s, 1970s, and most recently in 1994. Ideological genocide reappeared in 1966, with the massacre of Indonesian communists, and in Cambodia in the late 1970s as the Khmer Rouge systematically eradicated the so-called ‘bourgeoisie’, killing millions. Just months before the end of the 20th century, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovar Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo in early 1999 made it plain that the inclination to gross cruelty and inhumanity had by no means gone entirely out of fashion. The outrages committed in Kosovo may be tried under the 1948 Genocide Convention, provided sufficient evidence can be collected and the alleged miscreants captured. Indonesia's ruthless oppression of the East Timorese since 1975 also at last achieved worldwide media coverage in 1999, without it being apparent as of writing what may be done to stop it.

Improvements in communications and transport, bureaucratic organization of government, the growth of the ‘police state’, industrialization, and the ease of modern weapons manufacture may all have combined to make genocide the curse of the 20th century. But if this is so, it is also the case that the 20th century has seen the most concerted efforts to define, prevent, and punish genocide. The impulse to act was provided by one of the most egregious acts of genocide in history: the Holocaust. Between the late 1930s and the end of WW II, some six million people were systematically brutalized, starved, and murdered in Nazi concentration, labour, and extermination camps. The majority of them were Jews, and others included gypsies, Slavs, political opponents such as communists, religious dissidents such as Jehovah's Witnesses, and so-called ‘social deviants’ such as homosexuals and the mentally disabled.

Widespread revulsion at the atrocities committed by the Nazis led to calls for an international code for the prohibition and punishment of such practices. Given the development after 1945 of legal thinking and procedure regarding war crimes and, in particular, crimes against humanity, many argued that it was now both necessary and possible to frame international legislation directed specifically at these most outrageous of crimes. In December 1946 the UN General Assembly unequivocally described genocide as a crime against international law and invited the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to prepare a convention. ECOSOC's deliberations resulted in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the General Assembly in December 1948.

The Genocide Convention, which entered into force in January 1951, is relatively brief, with just nineteen short articles. The first Article confirms that genocide is a crime under international law, whether committed in time of peace or during war; it is this clause which provides the principal distinction between genocide and crimes against humanity—the latter are committed in connection with, or during, war. Article II defines genocide as an act ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. As well as outright killing, genocidal acts include causing ‘bodily or mental harm’, the infliction on the group of ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’, the prevention of births within the group, and the forcible removal of children from the group to another group. It may well be that the atrocities in Kosovo, and in other parts of former Yugoslavia during the wars of the 1990s, will add one more category to the list of genocidal activities: the mass rape of women in order to destroy cultures and genetic lines (see gender).

Genocide, as defined in the Convention, is punishable, as are conspiracy, incitement, attempts to commit, and complicity in the acts listed. Any person—whatever their position in government or society—implicated in such acts would be punished, preferably by a tribunal in the state in which the act was committed, or by an ‘international penal tribunal’. From the outset, the enforcement of the Convention led to concerns about the possible violation of state sovereignty. In time these concerns gave way to a more direct and interventionist stance by the international community. As a result of the Genocide Convention and subsequent deliberations, it is now generally accepted that genocide is not an internal, domestic matter but is legitimately a question for international attention and action; a genocidal government can have no recourse to the established principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention. Neither is it possible for individuals to avoid extradition and punishment for genocidal acts through a plea of political status and asylum.

— Paul Cornish

The UN Genocide Convention, passed on 9 December 1948, defined genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…” Although political groups were not included—due to objections by the Soviet Union and other nations—most students of genocide consider such acts against political groups as genocide. UN conventions and statements of principles have created a body of “international law,” but enforcement mechanisms have been nonexistent, highly limited, or ad hoc, like the tribunals created to try perpetrators in Bosnia and Rwanda, and usually ineffective.

Perpetrators of genocide tend to offer justifications, such as destructive actions or intentions by the victims. Usually, these justifications are unfounded or greatly exaggerated; moreover, since old and young, women and children are killed, genocidal violence, even if partially defensive, is never morally justifiable. To understand the origins of genocide, it is necessary to consider societal conditions, the political system (genocide is less likely in a pluralistic, democratic society), cultural characteristics, the psychology of perpetrators and of internal bystanders (members of the society in which genocide takes place who are not themselves perpetrators), and the role of external bystanders (especially other nations).

Difficult social conditions are frequently the starting point for genocide. These are created by intense economic problems; by intense political conflict within a society—which can take varied forms, one of which is conflict between a dominant group and a subordinate group that is poor and has limited rights; or by very great and rapid social changes; or a combination of all these factors.

Under such conditions, people often scapegoat a subgroup of society for their problems, or create an ideology that promises a better life but identifies an enemy that stands in the way of its fulfillment. As the group or its members begin to harm the scapegoat or ideological enemy, they begin to change. Individuals and groups “learn by doing,” changing as the result of their own actions. Perpetrators further devalue their victims, exclude them from the human and moral realm, and create institutions to harm and kill them. An evolution of increasing violence leads to genocide.

All this is more likely to happen in cultures with certain characteristics. One of these is a history of devaluation of the group that becomes the victim. Cultural devaluation is usually deeply set and becomes influential when conditions are difficult, as was the case with anti‐Semitism in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. At times instead of devaluation by one group of another there is a history of conflict and violence between two groups, and intense mutual antagonism, as was the case in both Rwanda and Bosnia, in the 1990s. Other characteristics of culture that make the genocidal process probable include a strong respect for authority, a monolithic rather than pluralistic society, certain ways members of a group see their group, and a history of violence in dealing with conflict.

The evolution toward genocide is usually made possible by the passivity of both internal and external bystanders. Their passivity affirms the perpetrators. Early strong reactions by bystanders, such as protests, boycotts, and sanctions, occurring before the perpetrators have developed strong commitment to their ideology and murderous course, could inhibit this evolution.

There is a history of passivity. While internal enemies and the Jews were increasingly persecuted in Nazi Germany, all nations went to Berlin to participate in the 1936 Olympics. At the same time, U.S. corporations did business in Germany. Jews were kept out of the United States—only about one‐tenth of the legal quota of Jewish immigrants was filled. During World War II, the Allies refused to bomb Auschwitz or the railroad leading to it. At the time of the genocide of the Armenians by the Turks in World War I, the United States had limited influence over Turkey, but Germany, Turkey's supporter and ally, did nothing. In Cambodia in the 1970s, U.S. actions destabilized the country. Once the Communist Khmer Rouge took over, the United States had little influence over Pol Pot's genocidal regime. However, after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and stopped the genocide, the United States showed strong hostility toward Vietnam and joined with China to insist that the Khmer Rouge government was the legitimate representative of Cambodia in the United Nations. In the 1980s, the United States supported Iraq against Iran, even though it was using chemical weapons against its Kurdish citizens. Washington turned against Iraq only after it invaded Kuwait.

Early nonviolent actions by the community of nations might have inhibited the evolution and continuation of violence in the former Yugoslavia. However, the bombing of Serb positions in Bosnia, and the subsequent peacekeeping role of NATO and the United States, set a positive precedent.

The influences that give rise to genocide create other forms of violence between groups as well, including mass killings, and, at times, war. In the course of the evolution described above the targets of violence may expand, to other groups within a country, or to other countries. In Argentina, the murder of dissenters in the late 1970s was followed by the Falklands War. At times war provides a cover for genocide, or its violence makes genocide easier to commit, as it did in Nazi Germany, 1939–45, and in Turkey, 1915–16.

Cultural characteristics and political organization in the United States now make genocide unlikely, yet the history of exclusion of Native Americans and African Americans from the public domain rendered violence against them probable. The violence in the United States against Native Americans is perhaps best described not as genocide but as group violence, including mass killings. However, genocide and mass killing have fuzzy boundaries. Intense devaluation, self‐interest in gaining territory, conflict and mutual antagonism, and learning‐by‐doing probably all shared roles in the violence against Native Americans.

[See also Atrocities; Bosnian Crisis; Holocaust, U.S. War Effort and the; Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans; War Crimes.]

Bibliography

• Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 1973.
• David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of Jew: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945, 1984.
• Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, 1989.
• Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective, 1993

n.the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation.

genocidal adj.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

A collective, organized attempt systematically to destroy a politically or ethnically defined group. In addition to ideas of ‘difference’ territoriality underpins genocides, often based on some—to others—fragile historical event, concept (see lebensraum), or myth. Late twentieth-century genocides exhibited a marked spatial pattern, attacks being more frequent in the peripheral areas of the supposed ‘ethnically pure’ unit: eastern Croatia in the former Yugoslavia, and north-west Rwanda, for example.

‘Ethnic cleansing’ (the foul euphemism for genocide) is not achieved solely through mass murder, but through forced expulsions and systematic rape—to ‘cleanse’ the lineage. Typically, the overall ploy moves from segregation to isolation and elimination—which explains the vital role that ‘safe areas’ can play in countering genocide.

On December 9, 1948 the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention, an agreement to prevent genocide and punish those who design and carry it out. Lemkin himself played an important part in drafting the convention. The convention lists several actions that are defined as genocide when carried out against a religious, ethnic, national, or racial group in order to destroy part or all of that group: 1) killing people belonging to the group; 2) causing severe bodily or spiritual harm to members of the group; 3) deliberately forcing a group to live under conditions that could lead to the complete or partial destruction of the group; 4) taking measures to prevent births among a group; and 5) forcibly removing children from the group and transferring them to another group. This list of genocide crimes is very similar to those Nazi crimes that were dealt with at the first of the Nuremberg Trials. The crimes brought up at Nuremberg, defined as "crimes against humanity," included murder, cruel treatment, and persecution of a group based on its race or ethnicity in order to destroy the group. However, the Nazis tried at Nuremberg were not accused specifically of "genocide," since that crime was not included in the agreement that launched the International Military Tribunal.

The accusation of genocide was included during the later war crimes trials held at Nuremberg and at many of the Nazi criminal trials held in poland. For example, in the July 1946 trial of Arthur greiser, a Polish court convicted him of crimes of genocide committed against the Polish people.

The government of Israel joined the Genocide Convention soon after the State of Israel was established, and in 1950 passed its own Genocide Prevention and Punishment Law. The definition of genocide used in that law was the same as that of the Genocide Convention. The Israeli government also used that definition in another law it passed in 1950, the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law. This law included the definitions of "crimes against humanity" and "war crimes," which had been established before the Nuremberg Trials, and also contained the definition of a newly coined crime---"Crimes against the Jewish People." To explain this crime, the Israelis took the Genocide Convention's list of genocide crimes, but adapted it specifically to the Jewish people. Thus, "Crimes against the Jewish People" consist of any of the following actions, when carried out with the intention of annihilating part or all of the Jewish people: 1) killing Jews; 2) causing severe bodily or mental harm to Jews; 3) deliberately forcing Jews to live under conditions that could lead to their physical destruction; 4) taking measures to prevent births among Jews; 5) forcibly transferring Jewish children to another religious or national group; 6) destroying or desecrating Jewish religious or cultural treasures or values; and 7) inciting others to hate Jews.

"Crimes against the Jewish People" involve the Jewish people only, and relate to a totally unique and unparalleled case. However, the crimes perpetrated against the Jewish people in the context of the holocaust were also crimes that negated the basic principles and values of all humanity. Thus, they affected not only the Jews but also the entire world, in that they tried to remove from the world one of its many fundamental elements.

Holocaust experts all agree that genocide was a part of the Holocaust. However, some scholars also say that what the Nazis did to the Jewish people went beyond genocide for several reasons. The attempt to dehumanize and then murder every Jew, everywhere, regardless of his activities or beliefs, was unprecedented in history. Moreover, the Nazi belief that Jews had to be murdered for the sake of mankind, is a dimension not present in other acts of genocide that were carried out either before or after the Holocaust. Since the 1980s, the field of genocide studies, which usually includes the Holocaust, has grown considerably.

The deliberate killing, coordinated by the state and justified by claims of racial distinctiveness, of a population selected on cultural criteria, as of Jews in Europe during the 1940s. (See ethnic cleansing.)

— Charles Jones

For more information on genocide, visit Britannica.com.

International law defines genocide as acts intended to destroy a group of people defined by their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. The International Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, passed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 in reaction to the Nazi persecution of the Jews and other groups during World War II, lists the following prohibited acts: "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." States that are party to the treaty must bring individuals who have committed, conspired to commit, or incited genocide to trial, or deliver them to be tried before an international tribunal. The convention, moreover, calls for its signatories to take action to prevent genocide.

The Genocide Convention came into force after being ratified by twenty nations in 1951. Although the United States was one of the original signatories and President Harry S. Truman urged the Senate to ratify the treaty, the Senate resisted because of objections by some senators that the convention would infringe on American sovereignty. When the Senate in 1988 finally joined more than 120 governments by ratifying the treaty, it attached the conditions that the United States would not be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and that U. S. laws would take precedence over the convention.

Acts of genocide have a long history and they have often accompanied war, other conflicts, and colonialism. After World War II, the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal that tried top Nazi leaders interpreted its charter to mean that individuals could be prosecuted for crimes against humanity only if those crimes were committed during wartime. Rafael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer at Nuremberg who served the U. S. government during the war and coined the term "genocide," pressed the United Nations for an international standard that would prohibit genocide whenever it might occur. ("Genos" is a Greek word meaning race or tribe, and "cide" is from the Latin "cidium," killing.)

Since the passage of the Genocide Convention, numerous groups have sought recognition and redress by describing actions taken against them as genocidal. Because the terms of the convention can be interpreted strictly or broadly, there were a number of disputes over definitions, scale, and evidence. Native Americans have sought redress on the basis that the European settlement of the Americas led to death, displacement, and suffering, and that this outcome was the result of deliberate genocidal policies. A similar movement on behalf of aborigines recently gained momentum in Australia. Some Native American activists contend that genocidal policies have not ended, given the grim living conditions and poor health statistics on Native American reservations. Some African Americans seeking reparations for slavery invoke the Genocide Convention, which has no statute of limitations. Antiwar activists in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s created mock tribunals to promote their belief that U. S. military conduct in Vietnam or Soviet behavior in Afghanistan constituted genocide under international law.

Arguments remain unresolved over whether the mass killings brought about by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union and Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia qualify as genocide, since they targeted groups defined by economic and political status rather than the listed categories of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion. These and other cases, such as Turkey's attacks on its Armenian population during World War I, further illustrate the limitations of international law to prevent mass killings undertaken by governments against their own people. The feeble international response to massacres committed in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s came as some signatory governments, including that of the United States, took pains to avoid invoking the word "genocide" (using instead the euphemistic "ethnic cleansing")in order to avoid triggering the obligations called for in the Genocide Convention. After the killings ended, special international tribunals authorized by the United Nations Security Council considered charges of genocide against military and political leaders involved in both conflicts. In 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted the former prime minister, Jean Kambanda, and other defendants of genocide and other crimes and handed down life sentences. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sought convictions for former Yugoslave president Slobodan Milosevic and Serb military commanders accused of genocide.

By the end of the twentieth century the contradictions of international law, in which the principle of respect for national sovereignty clashed with the requirement that states intervene to prevent genocidal killings, had not been resolved, nor had the United States or other nations committed themselves to an openended policy of undertaking the risks of military intervention to protect foreign civilians. Despite the success of legal prosecutions for genocide, the more difficult question remained of how to prevent such crimes from occurring.

Bibliography

LeBlanc, Lawrence J. The United States and the Genocide Convention. Durham, N. C. : Duke University Press, 1991.

Power, Samantha. "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Totten, Samuel, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds. Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts. New York: Garland, 1995.

—Max Paul Friedman

Genocide is a word coined after World War II to designate a phenomenon that was not new - the extermination, usually by a government, of a group of people for their ethnic, religious, racial, or political belonging. The term implies both a deliberate intent as well as a systematic approach in its implementation. Until international law came to terms with the Holocaust of the Jewish people in Europe, the extermination of such groups was considered as a crime against humanity or as a war crime, since wars tended to provide governments the opportunity to execute their designs. In a resolution adopted in 1946, the U.N. General Assembly declared genocide a crime under international law - its perpetrators to be held accountable for their actions. Two years later, with the full support of the USSR, the same body approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that went into effect soon after.

Article II of the Convention 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; and e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another." Article III of the Convention stipulated that those who commit such acts as well as those who support or incite them are to be punished. The Convention provided for an International Court of Justice to try cases of genocide. The Tribunal was established only in 2002. Meanwhile, the genocide of Ibos in Nigeria during the 1970s was not considered by any court; those responsible for the Cambodian genocide during the 1980s were tried by a domestic court some years later; the genocide during the mid 1990s of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda was finally considered by an international court in Tanzania, while an international tribunal in The Hague undertook a review of charges of genocide against Serb, Croat, and other leaders responsible for crimes during the Balkan crisis following the collapse of Yugoslavia during the early 1990s.

Two well-known cases of genocide have affected Russia and the Soviet Union. The Young Turk Government of the Ottoman Empire implemented a deliberate and systematic deportation and extermination of its Armenian population during World War I in the Western part of historic Armenia under its domination. Eastern Armenia had been integrated into the Russian Empire by 1828. Russia, along with other European powers, had pressed Ottoman governments to introduce reforms in Ottoman Armenia and Russian Armenians were involved in the efforts to produce change. Close to one million Armenians perished as a result. The Russian army, already at war with the Ottomans, was instrumental in saving the population of some cities near its border, assisted by a Russian Armenian Volunteer Corps. Many of the survivors of the Genocide ended up in Russian Armenia and southern Russia. Others emigrated after 1920 to Soviet Armenia, mainly from the Middle East during the years following World War II. A few of the Young Turk leaders responsible for the Armenian genocide were tried by a Turkish court following their defeat in the war and condemned, largely in absentia, but the trials were halted due to changes in the domestic and international environment.

During World War II Nazi advances into Soviet territory provided an opportunity to German forces to extend the policy of extermination of Jews into those territories. Nazi leaders responsible for the Holocaust were tried and condemned to various sentences at Nuremberg, Germany, following the war.

Russian and Soviet governments have tolerated or implemented policies that, while not necessarily qualified as genocides, raise questions relevant to the subject. Pogroms against Russian Jews during the last decades of the Romanov Empire and the deportation of the Tatars from Crimea, Chechens and other peoples from their Autonomous Republics within Russia, and Mtskhetan Turks from Georgia during and immediately following World War II on suspicion of collaboration with the Germans reflect a propensity on the part of Russia and Soviet governments to resolve perceived political problems through punishment of whole groups. Equally important, the politically motivated purges engineered by Josef Stalin and his collaborators of the Communist Party and Soviet government officials and their families and various punitive actions against whole populations claimed the lives of millions of citizens between 1929 and 1939.

In one case, Soviet policy has been designated as genocidal by some specialists. As a result of the forced collectivization of farms during the early 1930s, Ukraine suffered a famine, exacerbated by a severe drought, which claimed as many as five million lives. The Soviet government's refusal to recognize the scope of the disaster and provide relief is seen as a deliberate policy of extermination.

Bibliography

Courtois, Stéphane. (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, tr. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fein, Helen. (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust. New York: The Free Press.

Walliman, Isidor, and Dobkowski, Michael N., eds. (1987). Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. New York: Greenwood Press.

Weiner, Amir. (2000). Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—GERARD J. LIBARIDIAN

The crime of destroying or conspiring to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

Genocide can be committed in a number of ways, including killing members of a group or causing them serious mental or bodily harm, deliberately inflicting conditions that will bring about a group's physical destruction, imposing measures on a group to prevent births, and forcefully transferring children from one group to another.

Genocide's archetype was the World War II Holocaust, in which German Nazis starved, tortured, and executed an estimated 6 million European Jews as part of an effort to develop a master Aryan race. Immediately upon coming to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis began a systematic effort to eliminate Jews from economic life. The Nazis defined persons with three or four Jewish grandparents as being Jewish, regardless of their religious beliefs or affiliation with the Jewish community. Those with one or two Jewish grandparents were known as Mischlinge, or half-breeds. As non-Aryans, Jews and Mischlinge lost their jobs and their Aryan clients, and were forced to liquidate or sell their businesses.

With the onset of World War II in 1939, the Germans occupied the western half of Poland, forcing nearly 2 million Jews to move into crowded captive ghettos. Many of these Jews died of starvation and disease. In 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Nazis dispatched three thousand troops to kill Soviet Jews on the spot, most often by shooting them in ditches or ravines on the outskirts of cities and towns. Meanwhile, the Nazis began to organize what they termed a final solution to the Jewish question in Europe. German Jews were required to wear a yellow star stitched on their clothing and were deported to ghettos in Poland and the Soviet Union. Death camps equipped with massive gas chambers were constructed at several sites in occupied Poland, and large crematories were built to incinerate the bodies. Ultimately, the Nazis transported millions of Jews to concentration camps, in crowded freight trains. Many did not survive the journey. Once at the death camps, many more died from starvation, disease, shooting, or routine gassings, before Allied forces liberated the survivors and forced the Nazis to surrender in 1945.

Following the exterminations of World War II, the United Nations passed a resolution in an effort to prevent such atrocities in the future. Known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (78 U.N.T.S. 278 [Dec. 9, 1948]), the resolution recognized genocide as an international crime and provided for its punishment. The convention also criminalized conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempted genocide, and complicity in genocide. Its definition of genocide specified that a person must intend to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Thus, casualties of war are not necessarily victims of genocide, even if they are all of the same national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. The convention requires signatory nations to enact laws to punish those found guilty of genocide, and allows any signatory state to ask the United Nations to help prevent and suppress acts of genocide.

The convention was, by itself, ineffective. Article XI of the convention requires the United Nations' member countries to ratify the document, which many did not do for nearly fifty years. The United States did not ratify the convention until 1988. Before doing so, it conditioned its obligations on certain understandings: (1) that the phrase intent to destroy in the convention's definition of genocide means "a specific intent to destroy"; (2) that the term mental harm used in the convention as an example of a genocidal tactic, means "permanent impairment of mental faculties through drugs or torture"; (3) that an agreement to grant extradition, which is part of the convention, extends only to acts recognized as criminal under both the country requesting extradition and the country to which the request is made; and (4) that acts in the course of armed conflict or war do not constitute genocide unless they are performed with the specific intent to destroy a group of people.

On November 4, 1988, the United States passed the Genocide Implementation Act of 1987 (18 U.S.C.A. § 1091 [1994]). This act created "a new federal offense that prohibits the commission of acts with the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in substantial part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group; and to provide adequate penalties for such acts" (S. Rep. No. 333, 100th Cong., 2d Sess. 1 [1988], reprinted in 1988 U.S.C.C.A.N. 4156).

In 1990 the U.S. Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) (8 U.S.C.A. § 1182), a comprehensive reform of immigration laws. As part of this reform, Congress mandated that aliens guilty of genocide are excluded from entry into the United States, or deported when discovered. However, the INA lacks a clear definition of genocide, referring only to the U.N. convention drafted more than forty years earlier.

The unclear definition of genocide makes its prevention and punishment difficult. Whether massive, and often barbaric, loss of life within ethnic, national, religious, or racial groups rises to the crime of genocide — or is simply an unpleasant by-product of war — is open to debate. The Holocaust of Nazi Germany is the only example recognized throughout the international community as genocide.

Apart from the Holocaust, there have been a number of other events that at least some commentators have described as genocide. These include the devastation of numerous Native American tribes through battles with European settlers and exposure to their diseases; the killing of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks during and after World War I; the deaths of more than twenty thousand Christian Orthodox Serbs, Muslims, and Roman Catholic Croats in "ethnic cleansing" arising out of the civil war in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s; and the deaths of more than a million Rwandan civilians in ethnic clashes between the Hutu and Tutsi peoples, also in the early 1990s.

Humanitarians, politicians, and international legal scholars are struggling to find an effective way to prevent and punish genocide. Many have called for revising the genocide convention to better meet the needs of the current political, social, and economic environment, by creating a broader definition of genocide and establishing procedural guidelines.

See: Hitler, Adolf; Nuremberg Trials.

The deliberate destruction of an entire race or nation. The Holocaust conducted by the Nazis in Germany and the Rwandan genocide are examples of attempts at genocide.

For other uses, see Genocide (disambiguation).

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Buchenwald concentration camp

While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention 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: 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; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."^[1]

The preamble to the CPPCG states that instances of genocide have taken place throughout history,^[1] but it was not until Raphael Lemkin coined the term and the prosecution of perpetrators of the Holocaust at the Nuremberg trials that the United Nations agreed to the CPPCG which defined the crime of genocide under international law.

There was a gap of more than forty years between the CPPCG coming into force and the first prosecution under the provision of the treaty. To date all international prosecutions of genocide, for the Rwandan Genocide, the Srebrenica Genocide, have been by ad hoc international tribunals.^[2] The International Criminal Court came into existence in 2002 and it has the authority to try people from the states that have signed the treaty, but to date it has not tried anyone.

Since the CPPCG came into effect in January 1951 about 80 member states of the United Nations have passed legislation that incorporates the provisions of the CPPCG into their municipal law, and some perpetrators of genocide have been found guilty under such municipal laws, such as Nikola Jorgic ,who was found guilty of genocide in Bosnia by a German court (Jorgic v. Germany).

Critics of the CPPCG point to the narrow definition of the groups that are protected under the treaty, particularly the lack of protection for political groups for what has been termed politicide (politicide is included as genocide under some municipal jurisdictions).^[3] One of the problems was that until there was a body of case law from prosecutions, the precise definition of what the treaty meant had not been tested in court, for example, what precisely does the term "in part" mean? As more perpetrators are tried under international tribunals and municipal court cases, a body of legal arguments and legal interpretations are helping to address these issues.

Another criticism of the CPPCG is that when its provisions have been invoked by the United Nations Security Council, they have only been invoked to punish those who have already committed genocide and been foolish enough to leave a paper trail. It was this criticism that led to the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1674 by the United Nations Security Council on 28 April 2006 commits the Council to action to protect civilians in armed conflict and to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

Genocide scholars such as Gregory Stanton have postulated that conditions and acts that often occur before, during, and after genocide— such as dehumanization of victim groups, strong organization of genocidal groups, and denial of genocide by its perpetrators— can be identified and actions taken to stop genocides before they happen. Critics of this approach such as Dirk Moses assert that this is unrealistic and that, for example, "Darfur will end when it suits the great powers that have a stake in the region".

Contents 1 Coining of the term genocide 2 Genocide as a crime 2.1 Under international law 2.1.1 Intent to destroy 2.1.2 In part 2.1.3 CPPCG coming into force 2.1.4 Security Council responsibility to protect 2.2 Under municipal law 3 Criticisms of the CPPCG and other definitions of genocide 4 International prosecution of genocide 4.1 By ad hoc tribunals 4.1.1 Nuremberg Trials 4.1.2 Rwanda 4.1.3 Former Yugoslavia 4.2 By the International Criminal Court 4.2.1 Darfur, Sudan 5 Genocide in history 6 Stages of genocide and efforts to prevent it 7 Prevention of Genocide Task Force 8 See also 9 Footnotes 10 References 11 Further reading

Coining of the term genocide

The term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, in 1944, firstly from the Latin "gens, gentis," meaning "birth, race, stock, kind" or the Greek root génos (γένος) (same meaning); secondly from Latin -cidium (cutting, killing) via French -cide.^[4][5]

In Noah 1933, Lemkin prepared an essay entitled the Crime of Barbarity in which genocide was portrayed as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, originated with the experience of the Assyrians^[6] massacred in Iraq on 11 August 1933. To Lemkin, the event in Iraq evoked "memories of the slaughter of Armenians" during World War I.^[6] He presented his first proposal to outlaw such "acts of barbarism" to the Legal Council of the League of Nations in Madrid the same year. The proposal failed, and his work incurred the disapproval of the Polish government, which was at the time pursuing a policy of conciliation with Nazi Germany.^[6]

In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin's most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in the United States. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide.^[7] Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials (the indictment of the 24 Nazi leaders specifies in Count 3 that the defendants "conducted deliberate and systematic genocide—namely, the extermination of racial and national groups..."^[8]) Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. With the support of the United States, the resolution was placed before the General Assembly for consideration. Defining genocide in 1943, Lemkin wrote:

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.^[9]

Genocide as a crime

Under international law

In the wake of the Holocaust, Lemkin successfully campaigned for the universal acceptance of international laws defining and forbidding genocide. This was achieved in 1948, with the promulgation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The CPPCG was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)). 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:

...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.

– Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II

The first draft of the Convention included political killings, but the USSR^[10] along with some other nations would not accept that actions against groups identified as holding similar political opinions or social status would constitute genocide, ^[11] so these stipulations were subsequently removed in a political and diplomatic compromise.

The Convention was manifestly adopted for humanitarian and civilizing purposes. Its objectives are to safeguard the very existence of certain human groups and to affirm and emphasize the most elementary principles of humanity and morality. In view of the rights involved, the legal obligations to refrain from genocide are recognized as erga omnes.
When the Convention was drafted, it was already envisaged that it would apply not only to then existing forms of genocide, but also "to any method that might be evolved in the future with a view to destroying the physical existence of a group".^[12] As emphasized in the preamble to the Convention, genocide has marred all periods of history, and it is this very tragic recognition that gives the concept its historical evolutionary nature.
The Convention must be interpreted in good faith, in accordance with the ordinary meaning of its terms, in their context, and in the light of its object and purpose. Moreover, the text of the Convention should be interpreted in such a way that a reason and a meaning can be attributed to every word. No word or provision may be disregarded or treated as superfluous, unless this is absolutely necessary to give effect to the terms read as a whole.^[13]
Genocide is a crime under international law regardless of "whether committed in time of peace or in time of war" (art. I). Thus, irrespective of the context in which it occurs (for example, peace time, internal strife, international armed conflict or whatever the general overall situation) genocide is a punishable international crime.

– UN Commission of Experts that examined violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.^[14]

Intent to destroy

In 2007 the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), noted in its judgement on Jorgic v. Germany case that in 1992 the majority of legal scholars took the narrow view that "intent to destroy" in the CPPCG meant the intended physical-biological destruction of the protected group and that this was still the majority opinion. But the ECHR also noted that a minority took a broader view and did not consider biological-physical destruction was necessary as the intent to destroy a national, racial, religious or ethnical group was enough to qualify as genocide.^[15]

In the same judgement the ECHR reviewed the judgements of several international and municipal courts judgements. It noted that International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice had agreed with the narrow interpretation, that biological-physical destruction was necessary for an act to qualify as genocide. The ECHR also noted that at the time of its the judgement, apart from courts in Germany which had taken a broad view, that there had been few cases of genocide under other Convention States municipal laws and that "There are no reported cases in which the courts of these States have defined the type of group destruction the perpetrator must have intended in order to be found guilty of genocide".^[16]

In part

The phrase "in whole or in part" has been subject to much discussion by scholars of international humanitarian law.^[17] The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic - Trial Chamber I - Judgment - IT-98-33 (2001) ICTY8 (2 August 2001)^[18] that Genocide had been committed. In Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic - Appeals Chamber - Judgment - IT-98-33 (2004) ICTY 7 (19 April 2004)^[19] paragraphs 8, 9, 10, and 11 addressed the issue of in part and found that "the part must be a substantial part of that group. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole." The Appeals Chamber goes into details of other cases and the opinions of respected commentators on the Genocide Convention to explain how they came to this conclusion.

The judges continue in paragraph 12, "The determination of when the targeted part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may involve a number of considerations. The numeric size of the targeted part of the group is the necessary and important starting point, though not in all cases the ending point of the inquiry. The number of individuals targeted should be evaluated not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to the overall size of the entire group. In addition to the numeric size of the targeted portion, its prominence within the group can be a useful consideration. If a specific part of the group is emblematic of the overall group, or is essential to its survival, that may support a finding that the part qualifies as substantial within the meaning of Article 4 [of the Tribunal's Statute]."^[20][21]

In paragraph 13 the judges raise the issue of the perpetrators' access to the victims: "The historical examples of genocide also suggest that the area of the perpetrators’ activity and control, as well as the possible extent of their reach, should be considered. ... The intent to destroy formed by a perpetrator of genocide will always be limited by the opportunity presented to him. While this factor alone will not indicate whether the targeted group is substantial, it can - in combination with other factors - inform the analysis."^[19]

CPPCG coming into force

After the minimum 20 countries became parties to the Convention, it came into force as international law on 12 January 1951. At that time however, only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) were parties to the treaty: France and the Republic of China. Eventually the Soviet Union ratified in 1954, the United Kingdom in 1970, the People's Republic of China in 1983 (having replaced the Taiwan-based Republic of China on the UNSC in 1971), and the United States in 1988. This long delay in support for the Genocide Convention by the world's most powerful nations caused the Convention to languish for over four decades. Only in the 1990s did the international law on the crime of genocide begin to be enforced.

Security Council responsibility to protect

UN Security Council Resolution 1674, adopted by the United Nations Security Council on 28 April 2006, "reaffirms the provisions of paragraphs 138 and 139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document regarding the responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity".^[22] The resolution commits the Council to action to protect civilians in armed conflict.

Under municipal law

Main article: Genocide under municipal laws

Since the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) came into effect in January 1951 about 80 member states of the United Nations have passed legislation that incorporates the provisions of the CPPCG into their municipal law.

Criticisms of the CPPCG and other definitions of genocide

See also: Genocide definitions

William Schabas has suggested that a permanent body as recommended by the Whitaker Report to monitor the implementation of the Genocide Convention, and require States to issue reports on their compliance with the convention (such as were incorporated into the United Nations Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture), would make the convention more effective.^[23]

Writing in 1998 Kurt Jonassohn and Karin Björnson stated that the CPPCG was a legal instrument resulting from a diplomatic compromise. As such the wording of the treaty is not intended to be a definition suitable as a research tool, and although it is used for this purpose, as it has a international legal credibility that other lack, other definitions have also been postulated. Jonassohn and Björnson go on to say that non of these alternative definitions have gained widespread support for various reasons.^[24]

Jonassohn and Björnson postulate that the major reason why no single generally accepted genocide definition has emerged is because academics have adjusted their focus to emphasise different periods and have found it expedient to use slightly different definitions to help them interpret events. For example Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn studied the whole of human history, while Leo Kuper and R. J. Rummel in their more recent works concentrated on the 20th century, and Helen Fein, Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr have looked at post World War II events. Jonassohn and Björnson are critical of some of these studies arguing that they are too expansive and concludes that the academic discipline of genocide studies is too young to have a canon of work on which to build an academic paradigm.^[24]

The exclusion of social and political groups as targets of genocide in the CPPCG legal definition has been criticized by some historians and sociologists, for example M. Hassan Kakar in his book The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982^[25] argues that the international definition of genocide is too restricted,^[26] and that it should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator and quotes Chalk and Jonassohn: "Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."^[27] While there are various definitions of the term, Adam Jones states that the majority of genocide scholars consider that "intent to destroy" is a requirement for any act to be labelled genocide, and that there is growing agreement on the inclusion of the physical destruction criterion.^[28]

Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr defined genocide as "the promotion and execution of policies by a state or its agents which result in the deaths of a substantial portion of a group ...[when] the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity, religion or nationality."^[29] Harff and Gurr also differentiate between genocides and politicides by the characteristics by which members of a group are identified by the state. In genocides, the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics, i.e., ethnicity, religion or nationality. In politicides the victim groups are defined primarily in terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups.^[30][31] Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. state that "... we follow Harff's distinction between genocides and 'pogroms,' which she describes as 'short-lived outbursts by mobs, which, although often condoned by authorities, rarely persist.' If the violence persists for long enough, however, Harff argues, the distinction between condonation and complicity collapses."^[32]

According to R. J. Rummel, genocide has 3 different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership. The legal meaning of genocide refers to the international treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This also includes non-killings that in the end eliminate the group, such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. It is to avoid confusion regarding what meaning is intended that Rummel created the term democide for the third meaning.^[33]

A major criticism of the international community's response to the Rwandan Genocide was that it was reactive, not proactive. The international community has developed a mechanism for prosecuting the perpetrators of genocide but has not developed the will or the mechanisms for intervening in a genocide as it happens. Critics point to the Darfur conflict and suggest that if anyone is found guilty of genocide after the conflict either by prosecutions brought in the International Criminal Court or in an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal, this will confirm this perception.^{[citation needed]}

International prosecution of genocide

By ad hoc tribunals

All signatories to the CPPCG are required to prevent and punish acts of genocide, both in peace and wartime, though some barriers make this enforcement difficult. In particular, some of the signatories — namely, Bahrain, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, the United States, Vietnam, Yemen, and Yugoslavia — signed with the proviso that no claim of genocide could be brought against them at the International Court of Justice without their consent.^[34] Despite official protests from other signatories (notably Cyprus and Norway) on the ethics and legal standing of these reservations, the immunity from prosecution they grant has been invoked from time to time, as when the United States refused to allow a charge of genocide brought against it by Yugoslavia following the 1999 Kosovo War.^[35]

It is commonly accepted that, at least since World War II, genocide has been illegal under customary international law as a peremptory norm, as well as under conventional international law. Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish for prosecution, because a chain of accountability must be established. International criminal courts and tribunals function primarily because the states involved are incapable or unwilling to prosecute crimes of this magnitude themselves.

Nuremberg Trials

Main article: Nuremberg Trials

Because the universal acceptance of international laws, defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, with the promulgation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), those criminals who were prosecuted after the war in international courts, for taking part in the Holocaust were found guilty of crimes against humanity and other more specific crimes like murder. Nevertheless the Holocaust is universally recognized to have been a genocide and the term, that had been coined the year before by Raphael Lemkin,^[36] appeared in the indictment of the 24 Nazi leaders, Count 3, stated that all the defendants had "conducted deliberate and systematic genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and national groups..."^[37]

Rwanda

Main article: Rwandan Genocide

Skulls of Rwandan genocide victims in museum

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is a court under the auspices of the United Nations for the prosecution of offenses committed in Rwanda during the genocide which occurred there during April, 1994, commencing on 6 April. The ICTR was created on 8 November 1994 by the Security Council of the United Nations in order to judge those people responsible for the acts of genocide and other serious violations of the international law performed in the territory of Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between 1 January and 31 December 1994.

So far, the ICTR has finished nineteen trials and convicted twenty five accused persons. Another twenty five persons are still on trial. Nineteen are awaiting trial in detention. Ten are still at large. The first trial, of Jean-Paul Akayesu, began in 1997. Jean Kambanda, interim Prime Minister, pleaded guilty.^[38]

Former Yugoslavia

Main articles: Bosnian Genocide and List of Bosnian genocide prosecutions

The term Bosnian Genocide is used to refer either to the genocide committed by Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995,^[39] or to ethnic cleansing that took place during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War (an interpretation rejected by a majority of scholars).^[40]

In 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judged that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was an act of genocide.^[41]

On 26 February 2007 the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in the Bosnian Genocide Case upheld the ICTY's earlier finding that the Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide, but found that the Serbian government had not participated in a wider genocide on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, as the Bosnian government had claimed.^[42]

On 12 July 2007, European Court of Human Rights when dismissing the appeal by Nikola Jorgic against his conviction for genocide by a German court (Jorgic v. Germany) noted that the German courts wider interpretation of genocide has since been rejected by international courts considering similar cases.^[43][44][45] The ECHR also noted that in the 21 century "Amongst scholars, the majority have taken the view that ethnic cleansing, in the way in which it was carried out by the Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to expel Muslims and Croats from their homes, did not constitute genocide. However, there are also a considerable number of scholars who have suggested that these acts did amount to genocide"^[46]

About 30 people have been indicted for participating in genocide or complicity in genocide during the early 1990s in Bosnia. To date after several plea bargains and some convictions that were successfully challenged on appeal only Radislav Krstic had been found guilty of complicity in genocide in an international court.^{[citation needed]} Three others have been found guilty of participating in genocides in Bosnia by German courts, one of whom Nikola Jorgic lost an appeal against his conviction in the European Court of Human Rights. Several former members of the Bosnian Serb security forces are currently on trial in Bosnia and Herzegovina indicted on several charges including genocide.

Slobodan Milosevic, as the former President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia was the most senior political figure to stand trial at the ICTY. He died on 11 March 2006 during his trial where he was accused of genocide or complicity in genocide in territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina, so no verdict was returned. In 1995 the ICTY issued a warrant for the arrest of Bosnian Serbs Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic on several charges including genocide. On 21 July 2008 Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade, and he is currently in The Hague prison awaiting trial. Ratko Mladic is still at large.

By the International Criminal Court

To date all international prosecutions for genocide have been brought in specially convened international tribunals. Since 2002, the International Criminal Court can exercise its jurisdiction if national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute genocide, thus being a "court of last resort," leaving the primary responsibility to exercise jurisdiction over alleged criminals to individual states. Due to the United States concerns over the ICC, the United States prefers to continue to use specially convened international tribunals for such investigations and potential prosecutions.^[47]

Darfur, Sudan

Main article: War in Darfur

The on-going conflict in Darfur, Sudan, which started in 2003, was declared a "genocide" by United States Secretary of State Colin Powell on 9 September 2004 in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.^[48] Since that time however, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council has followed suit. In fact, in January 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, issued a report to the Secretary-General stating that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide."^[49] Nevertheless, the Commission cautioned that "The conclusion that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide."^[49] In March 2005, the Security Council formally referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, taking into account the Commission report but without mentioning any specific crimes.^[50] Two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution.^[51] As of his fourth report to the Security Council, the Prosecutor has found "reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals identified [in the UN Security Council Resolution 1593] have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes," but did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute for genocide.^[52]

In April 2007, the Judges of the ICC issued arrest warrants against the former Minister of State for the Interior, Ahmad Harun, and a Militia Janjaweed leader, Ali Kushayb, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.^[53]

On 14 July 2008, prosecutors at the International Criminal Court (ICC), filed ten charges of war crimes against Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir: three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder. The ICC's prosecutors have claimed that al-Bashir "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity. The ICC's prosecutor for Darfur, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is expected within months to ask a panel of ICC judges to issue an arrest warrant for al-Bashir.^[54]

Genocide in history

Main article: Genocides in history

The preamble to the CPPCG not only states that "genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world", but that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity".

Determining which historical events constitute genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. Furthermore, in nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide is certainly not taken lightly and will almost always be controversial. Revisionist attempts to deny or challenge genocides (mainly the Holocaust) are, in some countries, illegal.

Stages of genocide and efforts to prevent it

For genocide to happen, there must be certain preconditions. Foremost among them is a national culture that does not place a high value on human life. A totalitarian society, with its assumed superior ideology, is also a precondition for genocidal acts.^[55] In addition, members of the dominant society must perceive their potential victims as less than fully human: as “pagans,” “savages,” “uncouth barbarians,” “unbelievers,” “effete degenerates,” “ritual outlaws,” “racial inferiors,” “class antagonists,” “counterrevolutionaries,” and so on.^[56] In themselves, these conditions are not enough for the perpetrators to commit genocide. To do that—that is, to commit genocide—the perpetrators need a strong, centralized authority and bureaucratic organization as well as pathological individuals and criminals. Also required is a campaign of vilification and dehumanization of the victims by the perpetrators, who are usually new states or new regimes attempting to impose conformity to a new ideology and its model of society.^[57]

– M. Hassan Kakar^[58]

In 1996 Gregory Stanton the president of Genocide Watch presented a briefing paper called "The 8 Stages of Genocide" at the United States Department of State.^[59] In it he suggested that genocide develops in eight stages that are "predictable but not inexorable".^[59][60]

The Stanton paper was presented at the State Department, shortly after the Rwanda genocide and much of the analysis is based on why that genocide occurred. The preventative measures suggested, given the original target audience, were those that the United States could implement directly or use their influence on other governments to have implemented.

Stage	Characteristics	Preventive measures
1. Classification	People are divided into "us and them".	"The main preventive measure at this early stage is to develop universalistic institutions that transcend... divisions."
2. Symbolization	"When combined with hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members of pariah groups..."	"To combat symbolization, hate symbols can be legally forbidden as can hate speech".
3. Dehumanization	"One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases."	"Local and international leaders should condemn the use of hate speech and make it culturally unacceptable. Leaders who incite genocide should be banned from international travel and have their foreign finances frozen."
4. Organization	"Genocide is always organized... Special army units or militias are often trained and armed..."	"The U.N. should impose arms embargoes on governments and citizens of countries involved in genocidal massacres, and create commissions to investigate violations"
5. Polarization	"Hate groups broadcast polarizing propaganda..."	"Prevention may mean security protection for moderate leaders or assistance to human rights groups...Coups d’état by extremists should be opposed by international sanctions."
6. Preparation	"Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious identity..."	"At this stage, a Genocide Emergency must be declared. ..."
7. Extermination	"It is "extermination" to the killers because they do not believe their victims to be fully human."	"At this stage, only rapid and overwhelming armed intervention can stop genocide. Real safe areas or refugee escape corridors should be established with heavily armed international protection."
8. Denial	"The perpetrators... deny that they committed any crimes..."	"The response to denial is punishment by an international tribunal or national courts."

In a paper for the Social Science Research Council Dirk Moses criticises Stanton approach concluding:

In view of this rather poor record of ending genocide, the question needs to be asked why the "genocide studies" paradigm cannot predict and prevent genocides with any accuracy and reliability. The paradigm of "genocide studies," as currently constituted in North America in particular, has both strengths and limitations. While the moral fervor and public activism is admirable and salutary, the paradigm appears blind to its own implication in imperial projects that are themselves as much part of the problem as they are part of the solution. The US government called Darfur a genocide to appease domestic lobbies, and because the statement cost it nothing. Darfur will end when it suits the great powers that have a stake in the region.

– Dirk Moses^[61]

Prevention of Genocide Task Force

On 8 December 2008, the Prevention of Genocide Task Force, co-chaired by Madeline Albright, a former US Secretary of State, and William Cohen, a former US Secretary of Defence, released its final report which concludes that the US government can prevent genocide and mass atrocities in the future.^[62]

In the words of Mr. Cohen, “This report provides a blueprint that can enable the United States to take preventive action, along with international partners, to forestall the specter of future cases of genocide and mass atrocities.”^[63]

Recommendations include:

• a proactive role of the US president which would demonstrate to the US and the World that preventing genocide and mass atrocities is a national priority
• creating an body within the United States National Security Council to analyze threats and consider preventative action
• set up a fund of $250 million for crisis prevention and response
• help create an international network for the sharing of information and the coordination of preventative action ^[64]

See also

Genocide portal

Look up genocide in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Autogenocide
• Cultural genocide
• Ethnocide
• Fondation Chirezi
• Gendercide
• International Association of Genocide Scholars
• Minority Rights Group International
• Nazi eugenics
• Policide
• Ten Threats identified by the UN
• Universal jurisdiction
• Völkerstrafgesetzbuch

Footnotes

1. ^ ^{a b} Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
2. ^ Verdirame, Guglielmo "The Genocide Definition in the Jurisprudence of the Ad Hoc Tribunals", International & Comparative Law Quarterly (2000), 49 : 578-598 Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/S002058930006437X. Abstract
3. ^ Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Macmillan, 2007 ISBN 0805079831, 9780805079838. p. 101, see footnote
4. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, second edition draft entry 2004. "genocide".
5. ^ Raphael Lemkin Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress Chapter IX: Genocide a new term and new conception for destruction of nations, (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), pages 79 - 95
6. ^ ^{a b c} Raphael Lemkin - EuropeWorld, 22/6/2001
7. ^ "By 'genocide', we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group." Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, ix. 79. As quoted in the 3rd Oxford English Dictionary.
8. ^ Oxford English Dictionary "Genocide" citing Sunday Times 21 October 1945.
9. ^ Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Wash., D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79.
10. ^ Robert Gellately & Ben Kiernan (2003). The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 267. ISBN 0521527503. http://books.google.com/books?id=Ay76mYBLU3sC&pg=PA267&dq=where+Stalin+was+presumably+anxious+to+avoid+his+purges+being+subjected+to+genocidal+scrutiny&ei=spQHR_3wH4PupwLX9JCgDQ&ie=ISO-8859-1&sig=suohkDH9HmLiBxpySx1tf8bEOn8. 
11. ^ Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 8. ISBN 0-521-42214-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=29u-vt_KgGEC&pg=PA8&lpg=PA8&dq=genocide+political+economic+groups+soviet+union&source=web&ots=uDb44sHgNn&sig=p3cz359teRaU5hdnZD7bImddDP4#PPA8,M1. ]
12. ^ From a statement made by Mr. Morozov, representative of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, on 19 April 1948 during the debate in the Ad Hoc Committee on Genocide (E/AC.25/SR.12).
13. ^ See Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, opened for signature on 23 May 1969, United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 1155, No. I-18232.
14. ^ Mandate, structure and methods of work: Genocide I of the UN Commission of Experts to examine violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, created by Security Council resolution 780 (1992) of 6 October 1992.
15. ^ European Court of Human Rights Judgement in Jorgic v. Germany (Application no. 74613/01) paragraphs 18, 36,74
16. ^ European Court of Human Rights Judgement in Jorgic v. Germany (Application no. 74613/01) paragraphs 43-46
17. ^ What is Genocide? McGill Faculty of Law (McGill University)
18. ^ Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic - Trial Chamber I - Judgment - IT-98-33 (2001) ICTY8 (2 August 2001)
19. ^ ^{a b} Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic - Appeals Chamber - Judgment - IT-98-33 (2004) ICTY 7 (19 April 2004)
20. ^ Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic - Appeals Chamber - Judgment - IT-98-33 (2004) ICTY 7 (19 April 2004) See Paragraph 6: "Article 4 of the Tribunal's Statute, like the Genocide Convention, covers certain acts done with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such."
21. ^ Statute of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, U.N. Doc. S/25704 at 36, annex (1993) and S/25704/Add.1 (1993), adopted by Security Council on 25 May 1993, U.N. Doc. S/RES/827 (1993).
22. ^ Resolution 1674 (2006)
23. ^ William Schabas War crimes and human rights: essays on the death penalty, justice and accountability, Cameron May, 2008 ISBN 1905017634, 9781905017638. p. 791
24. ^ ^{a b} Kurt Jonassohn & Karin Solveig Björnson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective: In Comparative Perspective, Transaction Publishers, 1998, ISBN 0765804174, 9780765804174. pp. 133-135
25. ^ M. Hassan Kakar Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 University of California press © 1995 The Regents of the University of California.
26. ^ M. Hassan Kakar 4. The Story of Genocide in Afghanistan: 13. Genocide Throughout the Country
27. ^ Frank Chalk, Kurt Jonassohn The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, Yale University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-300-04446-1
28. ^ Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishers, 2006. ISBN 0-415-35385-8. Chapter 1: The Origins of Genocide pp.20-21
29. ^ What is Genocide? McGill Faculty of Law (McGill University) source cites Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides, International Studies Quarterly, 37:3, 1988
30. ^ Origins and Evolution of the Concept in the Science Encyclopedia by Net Industries. states "Politicide, as [Barbara] Harff and [Ted R.] Gurr define it, refers to the killing of groups of people who are targeted not because of shared ethnic or communal traits, but because of 'their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups' (p. 360)". But does not give the book title to go with the page number.
31. ^ Staff. There are NO Statutes of Limitations on the Crimes of Genocide! On the website of the American Patriot Friends Network. Cites Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr "Toward empirical theory of genocides and politicides," International Studies Quarterly 37, 3 [1988].
32. ^ Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. of Holocaust and gun control^{[dead link]}, Washington University Law Quarterly 1997, (Cite as 75 Wash. U. L.Q. 1237). Article cites Citing Barbara Harff, Recognizing Genocides and Politicides, in GENOCIDE WATCH 27 (Helen Fein ed., 1992) pp.37,38
33. ^ Domocide versus genocide; which is what?
34. ^ United Nations Treaty Collection (As of 9 October 2001): Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on the web site of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
35. ^ (See for example the submission by Agent of the United States, Mr. David Andrews to the ICJ Public Sitting, 11 May 1999)
36. ^ Oxford English Dictionary: 1944 R. Lemkin Axis Rule in Occupied Europe ix. 79 "By 'genocide' we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group."
37. ^ Oxford English Dictionary "Genocide" citing Sunday Times 21 October 1945
38. ^ These figures need revising they are from the ICTR page which says see www.ictr.org
39. ^ Staff. Bosnian genocide suspect extradited, BBC, 2 April 2002
40. ^ European Court of Human Rights - Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, 12 July 2007. § 47
41. ^ The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia found in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic - Trial Chamber I - Judgment - IT-98-33 (2001) ICTY8 (2 August 2001) that genocide had been committed. (see paragraph 560 for name of group in English on whom the genocide was committed). It was upheld in Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic - Appeals Chamber - Judgment - IT-98-33 (2004) ICTY 7 (19 April 2004)
42. ^ "Courte: Serbia failed to prevent genocide, UN court rules". Associated Press. 2007-02-26. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/02/26/international/i033600S38.DTL&type=politics. 
43. ^ ECHR Jorgic v. Germany. § 42 citing Prosecutor v. Krstic, IT-98-33-T, judgment of 2 August 2001, §§ 580
44. ^ ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, 12 July 2007. § 44 citing Prosecutor v. Kupreskic and Others (IT-95-16-T, judgment of 14 January 2000), § 751. In 14 January 2000 the ICTY ruled in the Prosecutor v. Kupreskic and Others case that the killing of 116 Muslims in order to expel the Muslim population from a village, was persecution, not of genocide.
45. ^ ICJ press release 2007/8 26 February 2007
46. ^ ECHR Jorgic v. Germany Judgment, 12 July 2007. § 47
47. ^ Statement by Carolyn Willson, Minister Counselor for International Legal Affairs, on the Report of the ICC, in the UN General AssemblyPDF (123 KB) 23 November 2005
48. ^ POWELL DECLARES KILLING IN DARFUR 'GENOCIDE', The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, September 9, 2004
49. ^ ^{a b} Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary-GeneralPDF (1.14 MB), 25 January 2005, at 4
50. ^ Security Council Resolution 1593 (2005)PDF (24.8 KB)
51. ^ SECURITY COUNCIL REFERS SITUATION IN DARFUR, SUDAN, TO PROSECUTOR OF INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT, UN Press Release SC/8351, March 31, 2005
52. ^ Fourth Report of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to the Security Council pursuant to UNSC 1593 (2005)PDF (597 KB), Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, December 14, 2006.
53. ^ Statement by Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, to the United Nations Security Council pursuant to UNSCR 1593 (2005), International Criminal Court, 5 June 2008
54. ^ Walker, Peter (2008-07-14). "Darfur genocide charges for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/14/sudan.warcrimes1?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews. Retrieved on 2008-07-15. 
55. ^ M. Hassan Kakar References Chapter 4. The Story of Genocide in Afghanistan Footnote 9. Citing Horowitz, quoted in Chalk and Jonassohn, Genocide, 14.
56. ^ M. Hassan Kakar References Chapter 4. The Story of Genocide in Afghanistan Footnote 10. Citing For details, see Carlton, War and Ideology.
57. ^ M. Hassan Kakar References Chapter 4. The Story of Genocide in Afghanistan Footnote 11. Citing Horowitz, quoted in Chalk and Jonassohn, Genocide, 13.
58. ^ M. Hassan Kakar ,Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982, University of California Press, 1995.
59. ^ ^{a b} Gregory Stanton. The 8 Stages of Genocide, Genocide Watch, 1996
60. ^ The FBI has found somewhat similar stages for hate groups.
61. ^ Dirk Moses Why the Discipline of "Genocide Studies" Has Trouble Explaining How Genocides End?, Social Science Research Council, 22 December 2006
62. ^ Christian Science Monitor 9 December 2008
63. ^ PGTF press release
64. ^ Report of the Prevention of Genocide Task Forcepp. 111-114

References

• Kakar, M. Hassan. Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979–1982. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ISBN 0520085914.

Further reading

Books

• Andreopoulos, George J., ed. (1994). Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0812232496. 
• Chalk, Frank; Kurt Jonassohn (1990). The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300044461. 
• Charny, Israel W. (1 December 1999). Encyclopedia of Genocide. ABC-Clio Inc. ISBN 0874369282. 
• Conversi, Daniele (2005). "Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and nationalism". in Gerard Delanty, Krishan Kumar (eds). Handbook of Nations and Nationalism. vol. 1. London: Sage Publications. pp. 319–333. ISBN 1412901014. 
• Harff, Barbara (August 2003). Early Warning of Communal Conflict and Genocide: Linking Empirical Research to International Responses. Westview Press. ISBN 0813398401. 
• Hochschild, Adam (1998). King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 0395759242. 
• Horowitz, Irving (2001). Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (5th ed.). Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0765800942. 
• Jonassohn, Kurt; Karin Björnson (1998). Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1560003146. 
• Kelly, Michael J. (2005). Nowhere to Hide: Defeat of the Sovereign Immunity Defense for Crimes of Genocide & the Trials of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. Peter Lang. ISBN 0820478350. 
• Kiernan, Ben (2007). Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300100981. 
• Laban, Alexander (2002). Genocide: An Anthropological Reader. Blackwell Publishing. ISBN 063122355X. 
• Lemarchand, René (1996). Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521566231. 
• MacKinnon, Catharine A. (2006). Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674025555. 
• Power, Samantha (2003). "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0060541644. 
• Rosenfeld, Gavriel D. (1999). "The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship". Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13 (1): 28-61. doi:10.1093/hgs/13.1.28. 
• Rotberg, Robert I.; Thomas G. Weiss (1996). From Massacres to Genocide: The Media, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Crises. Brookings Institution Press. ISBN 0815775903. 
• Rummel, R.J. (March 1997). Death by Government. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1560009276. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM. 
• Shaw, Martin (2007). What is Genocide?. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 0745631827. 
• Sunga, Lyal S. (1997). The Emerging System of International Criminal Law: Developments in Codification and Implementation. Kluwer. ISBN 9041104720. 
• Sunga, Lyal S. (1992). Individual Responsibility in International Law for Serious Human Rights Violations. Springer. ISBN 0792314530. 
• Totten, Samuel; William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny (2008). Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (3rd ed.). Routledge. ISBN 0415990858. 
• Valentino, Benjamin A. (2004). Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0801439655. 
• "Preventing Genocide and Mass Killing: The Challenge for the United Nations" (PDF). Archived from the original on 2007-07-03. http://web.archive.org/web/20070703100816/http://www.minorityrights.org/admin/Download/pdf/MRGGenocideReport.pdf. PDF (366 KB), report by Minority Rights Group International, 2006

Overviews

• "Aegis Trust (genocide prevention trust)". Archived from the original on 2007-04-04. http://web.archive.org/web/20070404004937/http://www.aegistrust.org/.  An independent international organisation dedicated to eliminating genocide
• BBC on defining genocide
• Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; Responding to Threats of Genocide
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide at Law-Ref.org - fully indexed and crosslinked with other documents
• Documents and Resources on War, War Crimes and Genocide
• Facing History and Ourselves
• Genocide Intervention Network
• Genocide Watch stages of genocide
• International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS)
• Institute for the Study of Genocide/International Association of Genocide Scholars
• Never Again International youth genocide prevention organization; organized the 2004 Rwanda Forum at the Imperial War Museum in London.
• Never Again Wiki
• OneWorld Perspectives Magazine: Preventing Genocide (April/May 2006)- global human rights and development network looks at genocide from a variety of perspectives
• Staff, The Crime of Genocide in Domestic Laws and Penal Codes, Prevent Genocide International
• Voices of the Holocaust - a learning resource at the British Library
• Worst Genocides of the 20th Century - a list of the some of the worst genocides in the 20th century. Listing from the most amount of victims to the least amount.
• Test of Genocide in Cambodia and Reparations for the Khmer Rouge (Democratic Kampuchea) period (Court Monitoring and Analysis)
• Genocide & Crimes Against Humanity - a learning resource, highlighting the cases of Myanmar, Bosnia, the DRC, and Darfur
• Whitaker Report

Resources

• Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation
• USA for UNHCR Web site
• War Crimes TV Videos and Communities against War Crimes and Genocide

Research Programs

• Centre for the Study of Genocide and Mass Violence, Sheffield, United Kingdom
• Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, University of Minnesota
• Genocide Studies Program, Yale University
• GenoDynamics: Understanding Genocide Through Time and Space by Christian Davenport (University of Maryland) and Allan Stam (Dartmouth University)
• Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies, Concordia University
• Minorities at Risk project at the University of Maryland
• The Inforce Foundation (International Forensic Centre of Excellence), UK

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - folkemord, folkedrab

Nederlands (Dutch)
volkenmoord

Français (French)
n. - génocide

Deutsch (German)
n. - Völkermord

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - γενοκτονία

Italiano (Italian)
genocidio

Português (Portuguese)
n. - genocídio (m)

Русский (Russian)
геноцид

Español (Spanish)
n. - genocidio

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - folkmord

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
种族灭绝, 集体屠杀

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 種族滅絕, 集體屠殺

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 집단 학살

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 集団殺害

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) الابادة الجماعيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮רצח עם, ג'נוסייד‬

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