Genocide and Crimes against Humanity

A word for a crime without a name

In 1941, Winston Churchill said that the world was in the presence of "a crime without a name". The Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin had already been searching for one. He had studied the mass murder of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and he had fled the Nazis; dozens of his own relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. In 1944 he joined the Greek word genos (race, people) with the Latin -cide (killing) to create a new word: genocide.

Lemkin then campaigned for an international law. The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide on December 9, 1948, one day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The legal definition

Article II of the Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such". The acts are:

1. killing members of the group;
2. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Two points matter. First, intent must be proven, which is difficult. Second, the definition covers only national, ethnic, racial and religious groups; mass killing of political opponents or social classes is a crime against humanity but may not be genocide in law. Historians and lawyers sometimes disagree about whether events meet the legal test. Some scholars also use the term cultural genocide for policies meant to destroy a group's culture and identity, such as forcibly transferring children, an idea you will meet in Indigenous Peoples Worldwide.

Cases since 1900

The Armenian Genocide (1915–1923). During the First World War, the Ottoman government arrested Armenian leaders in Constantinople on April 24, 1915, then deported Armenian communities toward the Syrian desert. Men were often killed outright; women, children and the elderly died on death marches and in camps from violence, hunger and disease. Estimates of the dead range from about 600 000 to more than one million; Armenian sources often give 1.5 million. The estimates differ mainly because sources disagree about how many Armenians lived in the empire before 1915 (Ottoman census figures are lower than Armenian Church figures) and how many survived. Assyrian and Greek Christians were also targeted. Canada's Parliament recognized the Armenian Genocide in 2004. The government of Turkey still rejects the term genocide.

The Holodomor (1932–1933). Stalin's grain requisitions and collectivization caused a famine that killed millions of people in Soviet Ukraine, with most demographic estimates (reconstructed from Soviet census and registration records) between about 3.5 and 5 million, while the regime sealed off starving villages. In 2008 Canada passed a law recognizing the Holodomor as genocide. Some historians debate whether Stalin intended to destroy Ukrainians as a national group or whether the famine came from brutal policies aimed at peasants generally; a famine in Kazakhstan in the same years also killed more than a million people.

The Holocaust (1941–1945) and the genocide of the Roma and Sinti are covered in The Holocaust.

Cambodia (1975–1979). The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot emptied cities and forced people into rural labour camps to build an agrarian communist society. About 1.5 to 2 million people, roughly a fifth to a quarter of the population, died from execution, starvation and overwork. Educated people, religious groups and ethnic minorities were targeted. In 2018 a UN-backed court convicted the two surviving senior Khmer Rouge leaders of genocide against the Vietnamese minority, and one of them also of genocide against the Cham Muslim minority.

Rwanda (1994). After decades of colonial-era classification of Rwandans as "Hutu" and "Tutsi" on identity cards, and after a civil war, Hutu extremists began killing on April 7, 1994. In about 100 days, an estimated 500 000 to more than 1 million people were murdered (800 000 is the figure most often cited; a 2002 Rwandan government census of victims counted more than 1 million), most of them Tutsi, along with Hutu who opposed the killing. Radio stations such as RTLM spread propaganda calling Tutsi "cockroaches". The Canadian general Roméo Dallaire, commander of the small UN force, had warned UN headquarters in January 1994 and asked for authority to act; instead, the UN reduced his force.

Srebrenica (1995). During the war in Bosnia, Bosnian Serb forces captured the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica in July 1995 and killed about 8000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys. Two international courts have ruled it a genocide.

Can genocide be predicted and prevented?

The genocide scholar Gregory Stanton describes genocide as a process with stages. His model began with eight stages in 1996 and was expanded to ten. It is a tool for recognizing warning signs, not a law of history: stages overlap and do not always come in order.

Justice after genocide

• The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–1946) tried Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
• The UN created special tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1994). In 1998 the Rwanda tribunal convicted Jean-Paul Akayesu, a mayor, of genocide: the first such conviction by an international court. It also ruled that rape can be an act of genocide.
• The International Criminal Court (ICC), set up by the Rome Statute of 1998, began work in 2002 in The Hague. Canada was a strong supporter.
• Rwanda also used local community courts called gacaca to try nearly two million cases and encourage reconciliation.

Justice is often slow and partial. Many perpetrators were never tried, and denial, the last of Stanton's stages, continues in many cases.