Top ten ethnic/national genocides in history

Source: Hough, P. (2003) Understanding Global Security (Routledge).

Rafael Lemkin

Rafael Lemkin, an International Law lecturer at Yale University, both coined the term genocide and played a leading role in the formulation of the UN’s 1948 ‘Genocide Convention’. Lemkin was a Polish Jew who fled Nazi persecution in 1939, moving initially to Sweden before then embarking on an academic and activist career in the United States. Lemkin’s1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe was the first publication to use the term genocide which he defined as ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups completely’ (Lemkin 1944: 79). The word, which combines the Greek genos (meaning race / family) with the Latin ‘cide’ (to kill), had particular resonance to him since forty-nine members of his family and six million of his fellow nationals had been murdered by what Churchill called the ‘crime without a name’. Lemkin went on to play the leading role in the drafting of the UN convention on genocide and participate as an advisor at the Nuremberg trials against Nazi war criminals. Something of a forgotten hero, Lemkin’s grave at the Mount Hebron Cemetery, New York refers to him aptly as the ‘Father of the Genocide Convention’.

Lemkin, R. (2008[1944]) Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress. Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange.