The definition of ‘genocide’ was established in 1948 on the United Nations Genocide Convention. According to the Convention, genocide is a crime under international law that is ‘committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’. (Some countries include ‘political groups’ as a fifth possible category, but not the UN definition.) The Convention outlines five acts that may constitute genocide: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (as outlined in Article II).
Group membership is a crucial concept in the definition of genocide. To prove that genocide has been committed, it must be demonstrated that the victims were targeted because of their real (or perceived) membership in a group. If the victims’ cohesive group membership cannot be proved, and it appears that the victims were selected randomly, the crime of genocide cannot be proven. The essentiality of group membership is expressed by the very term ‘genocide’—the word was coined in 1944 by a Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin to describe the Holocaust, as a combination of the Greek word genos, that is race or tribe, and the Latin word cide which means killing.
In order to be regarded as genocide, ‘the killing must be performed with specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such’
As former secretary-general of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), Alain Destexhe, has explained in his book Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century, ‘The term genocide has fallen victim to “a sort of verbal inflation, in much the same way as happened with the word fascist,” becoming “dangerously commonplace.”’ It needs to be stressed that a crime against humanity is different from genocide. A crime against humanity is a widespread or systematic attack on a civilian population. The ’attack’ can take multiple forms—for instance murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or even sexual violence, torture, and imprisonment. That is to say, killing on a mass scale, or serious deprivation of a civilian population’s physical liberty may all constitute a crime against humanity, but do not necessarily qualify as genocide. In order to be regarded as genocide, ‘the killing must be performed with specific intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such’. While crimes against humanity may target mixed civilian populations, in the case of genocide the targeted group must have a shared nationality, ethnicity, race or religion—and the group must be targeted ‘as such’. That is to say, when it comes to genocide, the victims must be targeted for their group membership with the intention of destroying the group as such. By the same token, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and mass killings are all horrific crimes, while they are also distinct from genocide.
On the other hand, while when we hear the term ‘genocide’, we usually think of a form of mass killing, it is important to recognise that genocide does not necessarily involve large masses of people killed (and not all ‘mass killings’ are ‘genocide’). To provide an example: today, the Toto are considered to be the world’s smallest ethnic group, with only 2,000 members. Even if just a few members of the Toto were killed (or suffered any of the other four acts of genocide, outlined in Article II above), the murders could be recognised as genocide, if the Toto were targeted for their membership in the Toto ethnic group. The number of people who are killed therefore matters less than the fact that they were targeted for their group membership.
Keeping the definition of genocide clear is crucially important in a world thorn by war. While all wars are tragic, inhuman, and marked with crimes and acts of injustice, not all wars descend into genocide. Genocide is sometimes referred to as the ‘crime of crimes’, and it is not advisable to reduce the seriousness of the claim of an act of genocide by using it too frequently and uncarefully, and by mistakenly accusing a party of committing it. Although the claim of genocide is always very emotional and often overshadowed by political considerations, before recklessly throwing it around, it is advisable to allow the claim to be proven or disproven in front of a court of justice after years of careful and thorough investigation.
