Genocide (from the Greek “genos,” meaning “race;” and the Latin “cide,” meaning killing) designates any deliberate and systematic effort to destroy a racial, religious, political, or ethnic group.
There have been a number of historical incidents of attempted genocide, such as the massacre of 600,000 Armenians by the Turkish people during World War I. Still, the term itself was not coined until 1933, when the rise of nationalist and extremist movements provoked discussion and fear of widespread violence. International policies against acts of genocide were not established until the end of World War II — after Allied troops had exposed the ravages of the Nazi Holocaust. During the conviction of Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg Trials, legal precedents were set for the punishment of anyone found guilty of future attempts to exterminate whole groups of human beings. On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly established official international procedures for “the prevention of genocide and the punishment of the organizers thereof.”
Despite the threat of severe punishment by the international community, genocidal campaigns continue into the 1990s. Recent efforts at “ethnic cleansing,” in both central Africa and the Balkan region of Europe, have claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.
