What is a Genocide?

What is a Genocide?

Genocide is mass murder - the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.

What is the definition of a genocide according to the UN?

Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as...

"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

Where did the term genocide come from?


The term genocide was coined following the Holocaust in WW2. Since then, it seems that as a human race, we have still not learnt from the horrors of the Holocaust.

Examples of 'genocide'

In the Bosnian genocide of 1995, 8000 Bosnian men and boys were slaughtered in Srebrenica. In the Rwandan Genocide an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered within 3 months in 1994.  I will be blogging about the Rwandan genoide in the next article.