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The term genocide is of recent derivation; etymologically, it combines the Greek for group, tribe-genos, with the Latin for killing-cide.
In 1933, the jurist Raphael Lemkin submitted to the International Conference for Unification of Criminal Law a proposal to declare the destruction of racial, religious or social collectivities a crime in international law. In 1944 he published a monograph, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he detailed the exterminatory and other practices and policies pursued by the Third Reich and its allies. He went on to argue the case for the international regulation of the "practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups," a practice which he referred to now as genocide. Lemkin was also instrumental in lobbying United Nations officials and representatives to secure the passage of a resolution by the General Assembly affirming that "genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices are punishable." The matter was referred for consideration to the UN Economic and Social Council, their deliberations culminating with the signing of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide (UNCG).
Although every mass killing involves unique circumstances, certain underlying conditions are common to most genocide acts. The offending nation, or perpetrator, is usually a non-democratic country that views the targeted group as a barrier or threat to maintaining power, fulfilling an ideology, or achieving some other goal.
Most genocide occurs during a crisis such as war, state breakdown, or revolution, and the crisis is blamed by the perpetrators on the victims. In addition, the governments of other countries that might have interfered with or kept silent about the genocide, may support the perpetrators directly or indirectly by their lack of action.
Generally-speaking, the history of genocides is linked to the history of colonialism. Christopher Columbus opened the way to the settlers who gradually killed all the native populations of the Caribbean islands and Central America. It happened again with the genocide of the Tasmanian and Aborigines in Australia and the North-American Indians less than 150 years ago. Whole people and cultures have been erased from the planet and will never come back.
The first genocide of the twentieth century occurred in 1915, when 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire.
25 to 27 million died in 1933 from famine in Russia and Ukraine, following Stalin’s policy to implement collectivization.
The Holocaust, ordered by Aldolf Hilter, started in 1941 going to May 1945. Somewhere between 600 000 and 3 million Jews were killed. Genocide also targeted at Slavs, Gypsies and Jehovahs Witnesses as well as other groups, such as homosexuals, prostitutes and communists, as part of a wider democide.
Japanese are held responsible for several genocides before and during 1920s-1945.: the Nanjing Massacre (300,000 people killed in two weeks), the Wan Bao Hill Incident, the Black Sun 731 Project in Manchuria and other targeted at Chinese, Koreans, Philippines, Vietnamese, Indonesians and Burmeses.
One million Hindus and Moslems died when the British pulled out of India.
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot exterminated between one-third and one-half of the population. About 8 million Khmer people lived there prior to April 17th, 1975. By January 1979, 3 million have vanished.
Roughly 800,000 Tutsis (one-half of Rwanda's Tutsi) population and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutus in 1994.
The "ethnic cleansing" in the remnants of Yugoslavia led by Milosevic and other fascists groups (Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks). More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred in Srebrenica in July 1995.
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