Title: Genocide - HISTORY
Headings: Genocide
Genocide
Contents
WHAT IS GENOCIDE?
NUREMBERG TRIALS
THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION
BOSNIAN GENOCIDE
RWANDAN GENOCIDE
THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT (ICC)
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Content: As a boy, Lemkin had been horrified when he learned of the Turkish massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I.
Lemkin later set out to come up with a term to describe Nazi crimes against European Jews during World War II, and to enter that term into the world of international law in the hopes of preventing and punishing such horrific crimes against innocent people. In 1944, he coined the term “genocide” by combining genos, the Greek word for race or tribe, with the Latin suffix cide (“to kill”). NUREMBERG TRIALS
In 1945, thanks in no small part to Lemkin’s efforts, “genocide” was included in the charter of the International Military Tribunal set up by the victorious Allied powers in Nuremberg, Germany. The tribunal indicted and tried top Nazi officials for “crimes against humanity,” which included persecution on racial, religious or political grounds as well as inhumane acts committed against civilians (including genocide). After the Nuremberg trials revealed the horrible extent of Nazi crimes, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution in 1946 making the crime of genocide punishable under international law. THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION
In 1948, the United Nations approved its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), which defined genocide as any of a number of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This included killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, inflicting conditions of life intended to bring about the group’s demise, imposing measures intended to prevent births (i.e., forced sterilization) or forcibly removing the group’s children. Genocide’s “intent to destroy” separates it from other crimes of humanity such as ethnic cleansing, which aims at forcibly expelling a group from a geographic area (by killing, forced deportation and other methods). The convention entered into force in 1951 and has since been ratified by more than 130 countries. Though the United States was one of the convention’s original signatories, the U.S. Senate did not ratify it until 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed it over strong opposition by those who felt it would limit U.S. sovereignty.