Genocides recognised by the UN: from Armenia to Rwanda
Agence France Presse
April 19 2005
19/04/2005 AFP
PARIS, April 19 (AFP) – 4h58 – It is almost 60 years since the word
“genocide” entered the lexicon of international law, and it has been
used to characterise officially the mass slaughter of Armenians,
Jews and Rwandans in the 20th century.
It was first used at the military war crimes tribunal at Nuremburg
in 1945 at the end of World War II, though in the end the Nazis on
trial there were found guilty of “crimes against humanity”.
The word was invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who
found shelter in the United States. It is a hybrid, combining the
Greek word “genos”, meaning a race or people, and the Latin suffix
“-cide” (as in fratricide or parricide), itself a formation from the
Latin verb “caedere” to kill.
On December 11 1946 the United Nations gave the word a formal
definition as “the denial of the right to existence of entire human
groups” in reference to the killing of Jews during World War II.
On December 9 1948, the UN unanimously adopted a convention on
genocide, identifying it as a crime “committed with the intention to
destroy in whole or part a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group.”
The UN recognised in 1985 the killing of hundreds of thousands of
Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as a genocide, as well as the mass
murder of Jews by Nazi Germany, and in June 1994 the killing of
an estimated 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis by their Hutu compatriots that
same year.
Beyond these three instances, the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established by the UN Security Council,
in 2001 sentenced a Bosnian Serb general to 35 years in jail for
“complicity in genocide” in connection with the massacre of 7,000
Muslim cvilians in Srebenica in 1995.
The UN and Cambodia have agreed that former Khmer Rouge leaders of
a regime that was responsible for the deaths of almost two million
Cambodianspercent of the population) should face charges of crimes
against humanity and genocide. Their trial could start in the coming
months.
In January this year a UN committee decided that though crimes against
humanity had been committed in the Darfur region of Sudan they did
not amount to genocide in the absence of any evidence of central
government genocidal intention.
Some historians argue that mass killings, such as those of Chinese
by Mongols in the 13th century and of the indigenous peoples of the
Americas by conquistadors and colonists are covered by the definition.
Armenians are preparing to mark the 90th anniversary on April 24 of
the start of the controversial 1915-1917 massacres, which they say
1.5 million of their kinsmen perished.
Ankara argues that 300,000 Armenians and thousands of Turks were killed
in what was civil strife during World War I when the Armenians rose
against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.