Portal:Genocide

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The Genocide Portal

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.

The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in about 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008. Genocide, especially large-scale genocide, is widely considered to signify the epitome of human evil. Genocide has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". (Full article...)

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Greek civilians mourn their dead relatives, Great Fire of Smyrna, 1922.

The Greek genocide, part of which is known as the Pontic genocide, was the systematic genocide of the Christian Ottoman Greek population from its historic homeland in Anatolia during World War I and its aftermath (1914–22). It was instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish national movement against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire and it included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches, summary expulsions, arbitrary execution, and the destruction of Christian Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. According to various sources, several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece (amounting to over a quarter of the prior population of Greece). Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire. Thus by the end of the 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War, most of the Greeks of Asia Minor had either fled or had been killed. Those remaining were transferred to Greece under the terms of the later 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which formalized the exodus and barred the return of the refugees. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars and organizations have recognized these events as part of the same genocidal policy.

The Allies of World War I condemned the Ottoman government-sponsored massacres as crimes against humanity. More recently, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution in 2007 recognizing the Ottoman campaign against Christian minorities of the Empire, including the Greeks, as genocide. Some other organizations have also passed resolutions recognizing the campaign as a genocide, as have the parliaments of Greece, Cyprus, Sweden, Armenia, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.

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Raphael Lemkin was a lawyer of Polonized-Jewish descent who is best known for coining the word genocide and initiating the Genocide Convention. Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1943 or 1944 from the rooted words genos (Greek for family, tribe, or race) and -cide (Latin for killing).

In 1933 Lemkin made a presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid, for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. The concept of the crime, which later evolved into the idea of genocide, was based on the Armenian Genocide and prompted by the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during the 1933 Simele massacre. In 1934 Lemkin, under pressure from the Polish Foreign Minister for comments made at the Madrid conference, resigned his position and became a private solicitor in Warsaw. While in Warsaw, Lemkin attended numerous lectures organized by the Free Polish University, including the classes of Emil Stanisław Rappaport and Wacław Makowski.

In 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Lemkin's most important work, entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in the United States. This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II, along with the definition of the term genocide. Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offense against international law was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials. In 1945 to 1946, Lemkin became an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson.

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"Over the past five years, I have often recalled that the United Nations’ Charter begins with the words: “We the peoples.” What is not always recognized is that “we the peoples” are made up of individuals whose claims to the most fundamental rights have too often been sacrificed in the supposed interests of the state or the nation. A genocide begins with the killing of one man – not for what he has done, but because of who he is. A campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ begins with one neighbour turning on another. Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations."

— Kofi Annan, Nobel lecture, 2001

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Image 1Picture showing Armenians killed during the Armenian Genocide. Image taken from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, written by Henry Morgenthau, Sr. and published in 1918.
Image 2Original caption states: "Deep gashes delivered by the killers are visible in the skulls that fill one room at the Murambi School." Aftermath of Rwandan genocide.
Image 3Bones of anti-Nazi German women still are in the crematoriums in the German concentration camp at Weimar (Buchenwald), Germany, taken by the 3rd U.S. Army. Prisoners of all nationalities were tortured and killed. 04/14/1945
Image 4Corpse of Soviet Famine victims transported to the cemetery. (Kherson)
Image 5Rwandan refugee camp in Zaire.
Image 6"A relic of the Armenian massacres at Erzingan", image taken from US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's memoirs (1918).
Image 7The bodies of the dead lie awaiting burial in a mass grave at the camp. (Bergen-Belsen concentration camp)
Image 8Gas canisters and hair of Holocaust victims from a Nazi concentration camp.
Image 9Emaciated corpses of children in Warsaw Ghetto.
Image 10Mummified victims of the Rwandan Genocide (1994) at Murambi Technical School. Photograph taken in July 2001 by Emmanuel Cattier.

Did you know...

... that in South Africa's genocide case against Israel, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to "punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza?
... that the first use of the phrase "crimes against humanity" in diplomacy was in a May 1915 Entente declaration condemning the Armenian Genocide?
... that in his book, Uğur Ümit Üngör argues that the Armenian Genocide contributed to The Making of Modern Turkey?
... that the 1914 Greek deportations have been described as "a trial run for the Armenian Genocide"?
... that in Open Wounds, Vicken Cheterian argues that "by censoring the Armenian Genocide, its impact, traces and consequences do not simply disappear. It continues in various forms"?
... that historian Dirk Moses argues that The Problems of Genocide include "blinding us to other types of humanly caused civilian death"?

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Genocide lists

International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals)

It is commonly accepted that, at least since World War II, genocide has been illegal under customary international law as a peremptory norm, as well as under conventional international law. Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish, for prosecution, since intent, demonstrating a chain of accountability, has to be established. International criminal courts and tribunals function primarily because the states involved are incapable or unwilling to prosecute crimes of this magnitude themselves.

For more information see:

Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals)

International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court)

To date all international prosecutions for genocide have been brought in specially convened international tribunals. Since 2002, the International Criminal Court can exercise its jurisdiction if national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute genocide, thus being a "court of last resort," leaving the primary responsibility to exercise jurisdiction over alleged criminals to individual states. Due to the United States concerns over the ICC, the United States prefers to continue to use specially convened international tribunals for such investigations and potential prosecutions.^[1]

For more information see:

Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court)

References
^ "Statement by Carolyn Willson, Minister Counselor for International Legal Affairs, on the Report of the ICC, in the UN General Assembly" (PDF). (123 KiB) November 23 2005