Genocide

Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group) in whole or in part. The hybrid word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word génos ("race, people") and the Latin suffix -cide ("act of killing"). The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".

The term genocide was coined in 1943 in response to mass murder of populations in the 20th century, these included the killing of Armenians beginning in 1915 and to the mass murders in Nazi controlled Europe. It has been applied to the Holocaust and many other mass killings, other well-known examples including the Greek genocide, the Assyrian genocide, the Bosnian Genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Holodomor, the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, the Cambodian genocide, and, more recently, the Guatemalan genocide, the Kurdish genocide, and the Rwandan genocide.

Before 1943, various terms, including "massacre" and "crimes against humanity" were used to describe intentional, systematic killings, and in 1941, Winston Churchill, when describing the German invasion of the Soviet Union spoke of "a crime without a name".

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