Genocide

Genocide is intentional action to destroy a group of people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group) in whole or in part. The hybrid word 'genocide' is a combination of the Greek word γένος ('race, people') and the Latin suffix -caedo ('act of killing'). The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe; The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as 'acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group', including the systematic harm or killing of its members, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to 'bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part', preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. The term has been applied to the Holocaust, and many other mass killings including the genocide of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Armenian Genocide, the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Holodomor, the Indonesian genocide, the Guatemalan genocide, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and after 1980 the Bosnian genocide, the Anfal genocide, the Darfur genocide, and the Rwandan genocide. Others are listed in Genocides in history and List of genocides by death toll. The Political Instability Task Force estimated that, between 1956 and 2016, a total of 43 genocides took place, causing the death of about 50 million people. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008. Before 1944, various terms, including 'massacre', 'crimes against humanity', and 'extermination' were used to describe intentional, systematic killings. In 1941, Winston Churchill, when describing the German invasion of the Soviet Union, spoke of 'a crime without a name'. In 1944, Raphael Lemkin created the term genocide in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The book describes the implementation of Nazi policies in occupied Europe, and cites earlier mass killings. The term described the systematic destruction of a nation or people, and the word was quickly adopted by many in the international community. The word genocide is the combination of the Greek prefix geno- (γένος, meaning 'race' or 'people') and caedere (the Latin word for 'to kill'). The word genocide was used in indictments at the Nuremberg trials, held from 1945, but solely as a descriptive term, not yet as a formal legal term.