Genocide

Introduction

Genocide is an international crime involving any of the acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, these acts include 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, measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

According to sociologist and historian, U.S. Michael Mann "genocide" is the most extreme degree of intergroup violence and the most extreme of all acts of ethnic cleansing. For this author the impact of genocide during the twentieth century is devastating both by the number of victims, who number more than 70 million people, as in the extreme cruelty of the attacks. The term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by Rafael Lemkin most immediately in reaction to the Nazi “Final Solution” directed against the Jews, but it also meant to identify that crime more as the annihilation or attempted annihilation of the members of a group (genos) solely because of group association. Lemkin, a lawyer and himself a Polish-Jewish refugee, had previously (at the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Penal Law, Madrid, 1933) unsuccessfully proposed international recognition of the crime of “barbarity”— “oppressive and destructive actions directed against individuals as members of a national, religious, or racial group.” In his book, Lemkin expanded the concept of genocide to include attacks on political, economic, and ethnic groups; in addition to the Nazi campaign of annihilation, he cites among earlier instances of such attacks the Roman destruction of Carthage (146 B.C.E.), the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus (C.E. 72), and the Turkish massacre of the Armenians (1915-1917). The crime of genocide, he claims, extends beyond the attacks on civilian populations in “occupied” territory that had been addressed and some measure guarded against in international law by the Hague Conventions. The designation of groups as targets for destruction, in Lemkin's view, expands the possible rationale (and thus the threat) of systematic killing.

Discussion

In December, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as an act or acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group.” (After considerable controversy, political groups removed from the Convention's protection.) The means of genocide cited by the United Nations Convention include, in addition to actual killing, less direct methods such as the prevention of births within a group and the transfer of children to other groups. Under the U.N. Convention, charges of genocide are to be heard before the International Court of Justice. (Legislation for implementing ratification of the Convention by the United States, an original signatory in 1948, not passed by the U.S. Congress until 1988 and then with the attachment of the substantive-to extent, disabling—reservations. Ninety-seven other members of the ...