Lets talk about genocide
Written by Lote Līva Leimane
Edited by Patrīcija Marta Bērziņa
*This is a fact checked piece*
The word genocide holds a lot of power. Nowadays, people use it very openly and casually to describe a bad situation but we should be careful of how we use it in order not to normalise it to the point of not being shocked anymore when we hear that there is a genocide going on somewhere on the news. So what really is a genocide? What does it mean? What is classified as a genocide? Lets dive in.
The word genocide was first coined by Polish Lawyer Raphäel Lemkin in 1944 in his book ''Axis rule in occupied Europe''. The name consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term largely in response to the Nazi systematic murder of Jewish people- Holocaust, but also as a response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. A genocide is a deliberate and systematic extermination of a particular group of people based on their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or other defining characteristic. It involves the intentional killing, harming, or persecution of individuals belonging to a specific group with the aim of destroying that group in whole or in part.
Now, when we know where the word comes from and what it stands for, let's explore the deeper meaning and how the international law sees genocide.
Under international law, genocide is recognised as a crime. But what are the requirements under the international law to categorise killings as a genocide? The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of genocide in 1948, which defines genocide as any of the following acts with intent to destroy a whole or a part of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent birth, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Genocide is considered to be one of the biggest violations of human rights and is condemned by the international community, and there are efforts to punish and prevent genocide from happening, yet it keeps happening all around the world and many of them we do not know about.
We must stay informed and vigilant and speak out when we see injustice happening, so it does not get to become a genocide.