genocide

History

2022

We explain what genocide is, when this term arises and some examples. In addition, genocidal acts and their international regulation.

Genocide is related to crimes against humanity.

What is genocide?

Genocide consists of a set of planned and coordinated actions aimed at the extermination or mental and physical injury of an ethnic, religious or national group.

A genocide violates some or all of the human rights, and can be carried out with actions ranging from deprivation of means for subsistence to torture and mass murder.

Also, according to the definition of the United Nations, agenocide is a set of acts perpetrated with the aim of partially or totally destroying a community ethnic, religious or national. At first, the definition also included political groups, but it was due to intense pressure from the Soviet Union that category was removed.

Genocides are always acts of extreme hatred that seek the annihilation of an ethnic, religious or other group.

Studies affirm that only during the 20th century the number of people who died as a result of genocides was 70 million.

The term is also related to crimes against them humanity, defined in the London Charter in 1945, of which the Nazis were accused in the Nuremberg Tribunals.

The term genocide was not defined until 1944, when it was necessary to name the mass murders against communities or groups in some specific way. Let's see how this term comes up.

When did the term genocide come up?

The word genocide has appeared in court records as a descriptive term.

In 1944, a lawyer named Rafaél Lemkin, of Polish origin, coined the term to be able to refer to the anti-Semitic events in the European continent, carried out by the Nazis. That definition was included in his book «Axis power in occupied Europe«.

For the creation of the term genocide, Greek and Latin bases were used, combining geno, from Greek, which means race with cidio, from Latin, which means murder.

The word genocide It is not a legal term but it appeared in the court records as a descriptive term.

The United Nations considers genocide an international crime that must be prevented as well as punished, it is intolerable, it implies a very serious crime against all humanity.

Examples of genocides

  • Jewish Genocide (Holocaust). The Nazi regime, under Adolf Hitler, attempted to exterminate the population Jewry of the European continent, carrying out a genocide over 6 million Jews. The deaths were consummated by hangings, shots, beatings, extreme hunger, suffocation with poisonous gases, among others.
  • Cambodia Genocide. Around 2 million people were massively murdered, between 1975 and 1979, by the regime communist (Khmer Rouge) under Pol Pot's command.
  • Rwanda Genocide. About 1 million people were executed in 1994. It is recognized for having been the nation whose courts sanctioned the first conviction for sexual violence considered as an act of genocide for having considered rape as torture.
  • Guatemala Genocide. In the 1980s, about 200,000 people were killed. In 2013, former Head of State Rios Montt was convicted in Guatemala of crimes against humanity and genocide against the Mayan town of Ixil.

Genocidal acts

The kidnapping and transfer of children is considered a genocidal act.

Among the acts considered genocidal are:

  • The kidnapping and transfer of children from the attacked group.
  • The forced submission to subhuman conditions that have as a consequence the death.
  • The direct killing of the members of the group of individuals.
  • Inflection of serious physical or mental injury.
  • Reproductive interventions that prevent children from being born into the dominated group.

International regulation on genocides

Spain is an example of a nation that expanded the term, including criminal actions that seek the total or partial elimination of ethnic, religious, national and disabled groups.

However, we can say without exaggeration that France was the nation that extended the most the legislation corresponding to the victims of the crimes of genocide, adding to these categories: "group determined based on any other arbitrary criterion."

Historians have also pronounced their firm rejection of genocides, calling them the highest degree of intercultural, intergroup and international violence.

The cruelty of these historical episodes was extreme and unprecedented. That is why crimes against humanity such as genocide are imprescriptible. This means that they cannot prescribe or lose validity as a criminal charge over the years, regardless of the legislation of each nation. This is regulated in the 1968 War Crimes Convention.

Characteristics of genocides

The genocide tries to eliminate an entire group simultaneously.

Although the term genocide is related to war, debates have been opened since the purpose of the war It is to disarm the enemy, or to take control of some territory or resource, not to eliminate it completely.

It is also possible to differentiate genocide from serial murder, since in the first one attempts are made to eliminate an entire group simultaneously, and in the second, periodic and successive murders are committed.

It is even debated whether the use of weapons of mass destruction implies genocide or not. The term has been in existence for a few years and its definition is not yet complete.

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