Genocide

During a **genocide**, a group (often a government, army, or paramilitary) tries to destroy another group because of their ethnicity, race, nationality, and/or religion. Genocide is always an intentional act - never an accident.

In a genocide, the targeted (victim) group is killed in large numbers. However, genocide also involves other methods. These include preventing the group from being able to survive (for example, by starving them); forcing them to assimilate; destroying their culture; and/or stopping them from having children.

Genocide is often motivated by hatred or fear of the targeted group, like racism or antisemitism. Other genocides happen for political reasons.

## Etymology

The word _genocide_ was created by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, in 1944. It combined the words _genos_ (Greek for "family, tribe or race") and _-cide_ (from the Latin _occidere_, "to kill").

In 1933 Lemkin spoke at a League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid. He delivered an essay called the _Crime of Barbarity._ On 11 August 1933, a group of Assyrians were massacred in Iraq. This reminded Lemkin of the Armenian Genocide during World War I. In his essay, Lemkin described genocide and called it a crime against international law.

### Early 20th century

Several major genocides happened in the early 20th century.

In the Herero and Namaqua Genocide (1904-1907), soldiers of the German Empire killed thousands of Bantu and Khoisan peoples in German South West Africa (now Namibia).

Between 1915-1917, the Young Turks in the Ottoman Empire committed the Armenian Genocide. During this genocide, most Armenians were deported, assimilated, forced to convert to Islam, and/or killed.

### World War II

The word _genocide_ was first used to describe the Holocaust, when Nazis killed 6 million Jews and millions of others during World War II.

The Ustase of Croatia also committed genocide during World War II. They killed about a million Serbs in death camps, especially Jasenovac.

In the 1937-1938 Nanjing Massacre, the Imperial Japanese Army attacked, raped, tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Nanjing, China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

### After World War II

Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge (led by Pol Pot) killed 1.5 million to 2 million ethnic minorities and religious groups in the Cambodian Genocide. This was a quarter of Cambodia's 1975 population.

The 1994 Rwandan Genocide is another well-known example. In a short time, Hutu people killed about a million Tutsi people (along with Hutus who were against the genocide).

During the Bosnian Genocide in 1992-1995, The Bosnian Serb Forces killed around 100,000 ethnic Bosniaks in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The largest killing happened in the village of Srebrenica, in what is called the Srebrenica massacre. Over 8,000 were killed in that massacre alone.

The Darfur conflict began in Sudan in 2003. The United States government and many others have described it as a genocide.

## Laws today

In 1948 the United Nations passed the Genocide Convention, which defined genocide and made it a crime against international law.

Today, the International Criminal Court has the power to judge anyone who has participated in a genocide.

## Related pages

- Ethnic cleansing
- Genocidal massacre
- Historical revisionism
- Crimes against humanity
- Holocaust uniqueness debate