| Genocide is the attempted destruction of a people, usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group. Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, combining the Greek word γένος (genos, "race, people") with the Latin suffix -caedo ("act of killing").In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such" including the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately imposing living conditions that seek to "bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part", preventing births, or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in about 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008. Genocide is widely considered to signify the epitome of human evil. As a label, it is contentious because it is moralizing, and has been used as a type of moral category since the late 1990s. |
