A New Word, Genocide, By Raphael Lemkin

Genocide is according the united nations, any of the following actions committed with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: 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, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Most people who hear the word are confused at first because it isn’t a very common term. According to endgenocide.org, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin sought to create a new term to describe Nazi policies of the systematic murder of Jewish people in 1944 he succeeded. His new word, genocide, is a combination of two words. Those words are the Greek word “genos” meaning race or tribe and the latin word “cide” meaning killing. The United Nations affirmed genocide as an international law in 1964, it took two more years however for them to provide an actual legal definition for the crime. They did this with the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. This gave people a way to understand what qualified as genocide and what was just a battle in a war or a for a lack of better words simple massacre.

Throughout history there were many acts of genocide. The most commonly known example is the Holocaust. In this act of genocide six million Jews and five million Slavs, Roma, disabled, Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexuals, and political and religious dissidents were killed . The tragedy, led by Adolf Hitler, was considered a serious war crime by the newly formed United Nations. After the holocaust the United...

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...on people face a similar fate in Darfur….” says one website. They say that America made promises to prevent any more bloodshed in the country, but never held up that promise. “The Khartoum government has systematically obstructed access to Darfur and blocked international efforts to establish a relief program,” says the web page. Because of the lack of effort Darfur suffers from the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. In all of these events the UN will take steps after to rectify the situation and prevent it in the future. There is little to no way to guarantee that these kinds of tragedies will never happen again, however the UN can make steps to improve the world’s response and overall international and national laws to prevent future case as best as possible. Which is why the UN continues to update policies to keep up with the ever changing times.