9 Things You Should Know About Genocide

Because several genocides began in April or have a major anniversary in the month, many organizations and institutions around the world have set aside April to be a month of genocide awareness and action against genocide. Here are nine things you should know about genocide in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries:

1. The term genocide was coined in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin from the rooted words genos (Greek for family, tribe, or race) and -cide (Latin for killing). Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who emigrated to the U.S. in 1941, drafted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a resolution which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. The Genocide Convention was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations.

2. Article 2 of the Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group:

(a) Killing its members;

(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.

3. In what is widely considered the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire subjected the Armenian people to deportation, expropriation, abduction, torture, massacre, and starvation during World War I. The genocide began on April 24, 1915, when the Turkish government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals. A group of nationalists known as the “Young Turks” organized “killing squads” or “butcher battalions” to carry out, as one officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian elements.” An estimated 1.5 million of the 2 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire died between 1915 and 1923. Keep reading

In calling for the forced sterilization of Christians and Muslims in India earlier this month, a Hindu political leader was advocating the commission of genocide against these religious groups and warrants international condemnation. It is noteworthy that India ratified the Genocide Convention only on the condition that none of its citizens could be tried by an international court for committing genocide.