Genocide

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Each year on April 24, people all around the globe take time to commemorate the loss of 1.5 million Armenian lives. The mass killings, which took place from 1915 to 1916, claimed the lives of well over half the Armenian population within the Ottoman Empire.

In 1933 there were over 9 million Jewish people living in Europe. At the end of World War II, only one third of the Jewish population in Europe remained. During the Holocaust, approximately 6 million Jews were murdered alongside hundreds of thousands of other targeted people, including certain persons of Slavic descent, persons with mental and physical disabilities, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah's Witnesses, political prisoners and homosexuals.

In an attempt to prevent any future occurrence of atrocities like these, the United Nations developed the "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." Approved in December 1948 and entered into force in January 1951, the convention defines the term genocide as "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." To most of us, that a group of people could deliberately be singled out and systematically murdered is too gruesome to consider. But it has happened, and it may be happening right now.

To Coin a Phrase The term "genocide" was first used in 1933 by Raphael Lemkin, speaking in regard to German occupation policies in Europe. Lemkin again used the term, this time in print, in 1944 in his published work entitled "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation - Analysis of Government - Proposals for Redress." It is for this reason that I took the liberty of inventing the word, "genocide." The term is from the Greek word genes meaning tribe or race and the Latin cide meaning killing. Genocide tragically enough must take its place in the dictionary of the future beside other tragic words like homicide and infanticide ... the term does not necessarily signify mass killings although it may mean that. More often it refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.