Genocide

Genocide is the systematic killing of substantial numbers of people on the basis of ethnicity, religion, political opinion, social status or other particularity. The most widely known example is the Holocaust of 6 million Jews during World War II; although the Nazis also killed millions of Christians and Gypsies. Lesser known in the West are Stalin's forced starvation of Ukrainian farmers, or Mao's murder of 20 to 60 million Chinese.

Related Topics:
Ethnicity - Religion - Political opinion - Social status - Holocaust - Stalin - Forced starvation of Ukrainian farmers - Mao

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The annihilation of most native americans by several means (such as the killing of the buffalo, for example) can also be considered genocide. Although such killing sprees also took place in most of the american continent (in some countries there is almost no indian population like in Argentina, were the genocide was sponsored by the goverment).

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However, the term genocide has also been defined more broadly or narrowly, on the one hand by historians and sociologists and on the other by legal experts or diplomats.

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Most generally, genocide is the deliberate destruction of a social identity. Various parties at various times have defined it in more limited ways. One popular limitation is to limit it to deliberate killing. This limitation was, however, explicitly rejected by the first formal definition of genocide under the Geneva Convention. Likewise, that Convention limited the social identities covered to national identity alone. Others have limited genocide to cover just ethnicity, race, and religion as social identities. Sometimes political identities are covered. With the rise of anti-nationalist sentiment, national identity, itself, is frequently identified as a cause of genocide and is therefore a social identity deliberately targeted for destruction by policies opposed to genocide. It is apparent that not only is there no clear consensus as to the meaning of the word genocide, but that some definitions are contradictory.

Related Topics:
Social identity - Geneva Convention - National identity - Nationalist

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The term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), a Polish Jewish legal scholar, in 1943, from the roots genos (Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin - occidere, to massacre). In the wake of the Nazi 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.

Related Topics:
Raphael Lemkin - 1900 - 1959 - Polish - 1943 - Greek - Latin - Nazi - Holocaust - International laws - 1948 - Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

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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.

Related Topics:
12 January - 1951 - UN Security Council - France - Republic of China - Soviet Union - 1954 - United Kingdom - 1970 - People's Republic of China - 1983 - 1971 - United States - 1988 - 1990s

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