What is genocide?

Genocide is a concept developed in the 1940s by a Jewish lawyer who tried to find an expression to designate what had been accomplished by the Nazis during the Second World War. This word refers to any attempt to exterminate a group of people because of their ethnicity, race, religion or nationality.

Genocide is considered a crime against humanity through a determination made by the UN, in 1948. Crimes committed and identified as practices of genocide are currently tried by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. Brazil already had a case of genocide registered in Roraima, in the 1990s.

Accessalso: Babi Yar massacre - the biggest extermination in WWII against Kiev's Jews

meaning of genocide

The horrors of the Holocaust led a Jewish lawyer to coin the word "genocide". [1]

The term “genocide” did not exist until the 1940s. It was because of the Holocaust, the systematized extermination of Jews, during World War II, that such a word was created. A Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin

proposed, in 1943, the use of it to define the actions taken by the Nazis against this ethnic group.

Lemkin's proposal was contained in a book completed in 1943, but published only the following year. The book is called Axis rule in occupied Europe(“Axis Domain in Occupied Europe,” in free translation), and in it Lemkin proposed that the Nazis used genocide to exterminate Jews, Gypsies, and to achieve other goals.

The word created by Lemkin was the result of a combination of two others - genos (Greek word meaning “race”) and cites (Latin word meaning “to kill”). So the junction genos + cites resulted in: genocide. Therefore, the meaning of the word refers to coordinated actions with the objective of exterminating people from a certain group.

In this way, genocide is never something related to individuals, but to the group. The extermination of intent individuals destroy the totality that group, that is, to extinguish a certain race, culture, religion or nationality.

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Genocide currently

Genocide is considered a crime against humanity, and this definition took place after the horrors practiced during World War II were verified. With the formation of the United Nations, a series of actions were taken to prevent events such as the Holocaust from happening again.

Thus, through the General Assembly of the United Nations, on December 9, 1948, the Resolution 260 A (III), who published the “Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. This document defined genocide as a crime against humanity and proposed conditions for international cooperation against this practice.

In this declaration, it was decided, in Article 1, that:

The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in times of peace or in times of war, is a crime under the right of peoples, who are already committed to preventing and punishing.|1|

This definition concluded that genocide refers to “the acts listed below, committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. The practices that characterize a genocide, in the understanding of the UN, are:

1. Murder of group members;
2. Serious attack to the physical and mental integrity of group members;
3. Deliberate submission of the group to conditions of existence that will lead to its physical destruction, total or partial;
4. Measures aimed at preventing births within the group;
5. Forced transfer of children from the group to another group.|1|

The crimes of genocide are currently tried by the International Criminal Court (or International Court of Justice) located in the city of The Hague in the Netherlands. The Hague Court is not only responsible for matters relating to the crime of genocide but also for issues related to international law.

In some cases, the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, can be called upon to try crimes against humanity, such as genocide. [2]

In this way, crimes of genocide can be brought to The Hague, as long as a government has an interest in doing so or if it is unable to hold such a judgment in its territory. Recent cases of trials involving genocides refer to acts of this type that took place in Bosnia during the Bosnian War, at the Yugoslavia's fragmentation process.

During the processes linked to this war, some names, such as: Slobodan Praljak, Bosnian-Croatian general; RadovanKaradzic, president of the Serbs in Bosnia; and RatkoMladic, a Bosnian Serb general, were convicted of crimes committed against the Bosnian population (Bosnian Muslims) during the conflict.

During this war, genocidal practices were carried out against the Bosnian population by Serbs and Croats, both against Bosnian independence. The most symbolic case was the Srebrenica Massacre, in which some eight thousand Bosnians were murdered by Serbian army forces and buried in mass graves.

Accessalso: Katyn Massacre - the assassination of thousands of Poles by order of the USSR

Genocides in history

The Armenian genocide was carried out by the Ottomans during the 1910s and 1920s, resulting in the deaths of 1.5 million people. [1]

Throughout history, several genocides have been carried out, and despite the expression having emerged later today, based on historical knowledge, we can define certain events as genocides. The most symbolic case, and perhaps the best known, was the Holocaust, called by the Jews the Shoa.

In this genocide, the Nazis carried out the extermination of populations from Jews, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, black and homosexuals. It is estimated that, during this barbarism, six million people have died in concentration camps and extermination camps, being victims of shootings, gas chambers and other practices of extreme violence.

Another remarkable event is the Tutsi genocide, carried out by the Hutu ethnic group, in Rwanda, during the civil war that befell this African country from 1990 to 1994. It is estimated that about 800,000 Tutsis have been killed by Hutu guerrillas throughout Rwandan territory only in 1994.

At the beginning of the 20th century, there was the Armenian genocide against the population of Armenian origin (they were Christians) who inhabited the territory of the ottoman empire. Thousands of people were forced to cross desert regions on foot, and thousands more were executed. It is estimated that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed.

Leopold II was the Belgian king who imposed a rule of slavery and violence that resulted in the death of 10 million people in the Belgian Congo. [1]

Another case that cannot be forgotten was the Congolese genocide, practiced by the Belgians in their African colony, the Belgian Congo. The Belgians, at the behest of Leopold II, king of the country, systematically exploited millions of people in his colony through violent practices that included amputations and murders. It is estimated that 10 million Congolese have died because of these actions.

There was also the genocide in Cambodia, commanded by Pol Pot, during the period that his party, the Khmer Rouge, dominated the Asian country. It is estimated that 1.5 million peopleweredead in the Cambodian genocide.

Other leaders known for practices perceived as genocidal were Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung, both responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the Soviet Union and in China, respectively.

Accessalso: Understand what human rights are all about

Genocide in Brazil

Brazil has already had its own genocide, and this is information that few people know. Historians discuss the idea of genocideindigenous, since centuries of violent practices against indigenous populations resulted in the death of millions of people and the emergence of a culture of prejudice and violence against these populations.

There are discussions among historians and other scholars of the human sciences who talk about the genocideblack, that is, State practices that systematized the murder of black people in Brazil. The discussion around this issue is mainly inserted in police violence against the black population, especially those who live in the periphery.

Anyway, Brazil has a case of genocide recognized by law. This case occurred in the 1990s and is related to the Yanomami, indigenous people victim of a massacre carried out by miners who illegally extracted gold from Yanomami territory, located in northern Roraima. The case was brought to justice, and the miners were convicted of the crime of genocide.

The terrible event happened when 22 miners, at war with the Yanomami, invaded the indigenous territory and surrounded a village, finding there only elderly people, women and children. The action of the miners resulted in the death of dozens of people, all of them dead with great violence. This event was known as Haximu Massacre.

This case went through the courts for many years and sentenced some of the miners to up to 20 years in prison. In 2006, our country's Supreme Court defined the Haximu Massacre as genocide. This event, in addition to the great repercussion in Brazil, became internationally known, being reported by major newspapers at the time.

Note

|1| Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. To access, click on here.

Image credits

[1] Everett Historical and Shutterstock

[2] Ankor Light and Shutterstock

By Daniel Neves
History teacher