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The term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, in 1944, from the roots genos ( Greek for family, tribe or race) and -cide (Latin - occidere, to kill). In the wake of the Nazi Holocaust, Lemkin successfully campaigned for the acceptance of international laws, defining and forbidding genocide. This was achieved in 1951, with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Much debate about genocide revolves around the proper definition of the word genocide. Opponents of government massacres often insist that the word's usage should include such massacres, even if international law has a narrower scope. These advocates complain that a narrower definition may be seen as exculpating the totalitarian governments that, they claim, killed over 100 million of their own citizens during the 20th century.
Others insist that the word should be used only in the accepted sense in international law, which limits the scope to "national, ethnical, racial or religious" groups, even if this excludes some massacres. These advocates claim that their preferred usage is closer to the word's literal meaning and to the primary meanings found in dictionaries. However, the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary [1] definition reads as follows: "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group".
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1948 and came into effect in January 1951. It contains an internationally-recognized definition of genocide which was incorporated into the national criminal legislation of many countries, and was also adopted by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Convention (in article 2) defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:"
The first draft of the Convention included political killings but that language was removed at the insistence of the Soviet UnionThe Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR ( Russian: ; tr. Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (SSSR) also called the Soviet Union ( ; tr. Sovetsky Soyuz , was a state in much of the northern region of Eurasia that existed from 1922 until 1. The exclusion of social and political groups as targets of genocide in this legal definition has been criticized. In common usage of the word, these target groups are often included.
Common usage also sometimes equates genocide with state-sponsored mass murder, but genocide, as defined above, does not imply mass-murder (or any murder) nor is every instance of mass-murder necessarily genocide. Neither is the involvement of a government required. The word 'genocide' is also sometimes used in a much broader sense, as in "slavery was genocide", but this usage diverges from the legal definition set by the UN.