What is Genocide?
Genocide is an internationally recognized crime where acts are committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. These acts fall into five categories:
- 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
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
There are a number of other serious, violent crimes that do not fall under the specific definition of genocide. They include crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and mass killing.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (2018, April). What is Genocide? https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/learn-about-genocide-and-other-mass-atrocities/what-is-genocide
View of a burial site in Nyanza, Rwanda.
Nyanza is a site near Kigali, Rwanda, where several thousand people were executed after being marched from the Belgian Technical School in April 1994. At the school, they had been under the protection of UN peacekeepers until the soldiers were recalled to the airport to help evacuate expatriates. This is one of the few sites where victims had the honor of individual burial; most often they were buried together in large graves. Photograph taken on November 24, 2007. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Discussion Question
What have we learned about the risk factors and warning signs of genocide?
Further Research
Other resources may be found in the Wright State University Libraries' Catalog and databases.
Choose "View Entire Collection" or "Dunbar Library - Books" from the drop-down box near the Search button.
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak by Call Number: DT450.435 .H3914 2005ISBN: 0374280827Publication Date: 2005-06-15During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetrated.
Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak by Call Number: DT450.435 .H3813 2006ISBN: 9781590512739Publication Date: 2007-10-15For years the survivors had lived in a muteness as enigmatic as the silence of those who survived the Nazi concentration camps. In Life Laid Bare, they speak for those who are no longer alive to speak for themselves; they tell of the deaths of family and friends in the churches and marshes to which they fled, and they attempt to account for the reasons behind the Tutsi extermination.
My Traitor's Heart: A South African Exile Returns to Face His Country, His Tribe, and His Conscience by Call Number: CT1929.M35 A3 1990ISBN: 087113229XPublication Date: 1990-01-01A relative of the architect of apartheid who left the country offers his observations on his return, discussing the extremists that continue to divide the country.
