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Search this blog What is Genocide? Key Videos Podcasts and Audio. Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial What is Antisemitism? Holocaust Denial and Distortion Teaching about Antisemitism.
View Next Explore countries that are currently or have been areas of focus for the Simon-Skjodt Center. Genocide is a complex legal term, and a full criminal trial in an international court is necessary to determine what is and is not genocide. This is partly because genocide is not only the act of murdering or persecuting many people, but it is defined as a crime where there is intent to destroy a group — which is difficult to prove, particularly in retrospect.
Dr James Smith speaks about the definition of genocide in one of our podcasts. The word came into general usage only after World War II, when the full extent of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime against European Jews during that conflict became known.
In , the United Nations declared genocide to be an international crime; the term would later be applied to the horrific acts of violence committed during conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in the African country of Rwanda in the s. As a boy, Lemkin had been horrified when he learned of the Turkish massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians during World War I.
Lemkin later set out to come up with a term to describe Nazi crimes against European Jews during World War II , and to enter that term into the world of international law in the hopes of preventing and punishing such horrific crimes against innocent people. After the Nuremberg trials revealed the horrible extent of Nazi crimes, the U.
General Assembly passed a resolution in making the crime of genocide punishable under international law. The convention entered into force in and has since been ratified by more than countries.
Senate did not ratify it until , when President Ronald Reagan signed it over strong opposition by those who felt it would limit U. Though the CPPCG established an awareness that the evils of genocide existed, its actual effectiveness in stopping such crimes remained to be seen: Not one country invoked the convention during to , when the Khmer Rouge regime killed some 1.
In , the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia, and Bosnian Serb leaders targeted both Bosniak Bosnian Muslim and Croatian civilians for atrocious crimes. This resulted in the Bosnian Genocide and the deaths of some , people by
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