Genocide

Raphael Lemkin, an international lawyer from Poland who escaped the Nazi invasion, and who was familiar with the Armenian massacre by the Ottoman Empire during World War I, coined the word genocide, from the Greek geno meaning "race" or "tribe" and the Latin cide meaning "killing". He had been drafting international law that recognized the complete destruction of a people by another as a crime beyond the parameters of war and he sought to bring international attention to this type of behavior. He does add that a group does not have to be physically exterminated to suffer genocide. If the destruction of the national pattern is successful, and the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor is successfully imposed, then genocide has been successful. (1)

External articles

 * Mr. Bush and Genocide, Washington Post, February 12, 2006.

External sources

 * (1) "A Problem from Hell" America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power copyright 2002 by Basic Books.
 * Raphael Lemkin, "Genocide", American Scholar, Volume 15, no. 2 (April 1946), p. 227-230.