Genocide Prevention in Rwanda and Abroad
Senior 6 · History (Languages)
Genocide Prevention in Rwanda and Abroad
Lesson 1 of 5
25 min
Before 1944 there was no word for the crime of trying to destroy a whole people. Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had fled to the United States and lost most of his family in the Holocaust, made one. In his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) he joined the Greek genos (race, people) and the Latin -cide (killing) to form "genocide". Lemkin then spent years persuading governments to make it a crime under international law. Ask yourself why naming a crime might help to prevent it.
On 9 December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In Article I the states that join it "undertake to prevent and to punish" genocide, in peace or in war. Article II defines genocide as any of five acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such".
Figure 1. The key to the definition is intent: the aim of destroying a group because of who its members are.
Definition
Genocide: acts such as killing or seriously harming members of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, committed with intent to destroy that group in whole or in part.
Genocide prevention: all the actions taken to stop genocide from happening, to stop it once it has begun, and to make sure it never happens again: by states, international organisations, communities and individuals.
Genocide ideology: in Rwandan law (Law N° 59 of 2018), an act done in public that shows an ideology supporting or advocating the destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
| Genocide | When | Recognised by |
|---|---|---|
| The Holocaust: the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators | 1941 to 1945 | The Nuremberg trials judged the crimes as crimes against humanity; the term genocide was used in the indictment |
| The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda: more than one million people killed in about 100 days | April to July 1994 | The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which in 1998 gave the first conviction for genocide by an international court; Rwandan courts and Gacaca |
| Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina: the killing of about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys | July 1995 | The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice |
| Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: genocide against the Vietnamese and Cham minorities | 1975 to 1979 | The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (2018) |
No single cause produces genocide. Historians and the UN identify factors that, combined, make it possible:
Warning
Use the correct name. Write "the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi". Terms such as "ethnic conflict" or "civil war" hide who was targeted and why; "double genocide" is a form of denial. The UN General Assembly marks 7 April as the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Tip
Group + intent + act. When asked whether events amount to genocide, test the three parts of the definition in turn. Intent is usually the hardest to prove, and courts infer it from plans, speeches, orders and the pattern of killing.
Important
Discuss. Lemkin believed that naming a crime and writing it into law would help prevent it. Using the factors above, explain why law alone is not enough.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the diagram, the table, the analysis and the exercises.
