The term 'genocide' was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer. He fled his German occupation in Poland and arrived in the US in 1941. He came up with the term genocide to describe Nazi crimes against European Jews during World War II. He wanted to enter the term into the world of international law in the hopes of preventing and punishing such horrific crimes against innocent people. Since 1948, the United Nations defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". Actions included in this definition are: • Killing members of a group; • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a group; • Deliberately inflicting on the condition of life of a group calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within a group; • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. In the past, there have been mass killings, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Very often people tend to get confused between these and genocides. However, there is a significant difference between the two. Crimes against humanity focus on the killing of large numbers of individuals. For example… Thirty years war – The thirty years war took place in the Holy Roman Empire from 1618 to 1648. It is considered to be one of the most destructive wars in European history with a death toll of around 4.5 to 8 million people, which is around 60% of the population. Red terror – This was a campaign of political repressions and executions carried out by the Bolsheviks and the Bolshevik secret police in Soviet Russia. The war crime began in 1918 and ended in 1922 killing around 50,000 to 200,000 people. Genocide has a different focus. Genocide focuses not on the killing of individuals, but the destruction of groups. In other words, a large number of individuals form part of a single group, be it a national group or an ethnic group, or a religious group. The most known and the most recent ones of these are the: - Holocaust genocide The holocaust was the genocide of European Jews during World War 2 which was during the years 1939 – 1945. Adolf Hitler was appointed as chancellor of Germany in January of 1933. Subsequently, the Enabling Act of 1933 gave the government powers to make and enforce laws without the consultation of the President and thus overriding a person's rights on any particular issue. Since then the government started isolating the Jews from civil society. Later during the war, Hitler's final decision was to exterminate the Jews. In 1945 allied groups discovered chambers in which the Nazis had killed around 10 million people including 6 million Jews by either starving them or putting them in gas chambers. - ROHINGYA GENOCIDE The situation in Rohingya is sadly still ongoing. The Myanmar military is persecuting the Muslim people of Rohingya since the 1970s. The UN found evidence against the Burmese military accusing them of human rights violations, extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, summary executions, etc. the Burmese government dismissed saying that they're 'exaggerations' The first phase of this genocide began in October 2016 and went on till January 2017. The second phase began in the August of 2017 and hasn't ended since. It has caused at least a million people to flee to other countries like Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other neighbouring countries. Whenever one reads about genocide, we are confronted with the greatest curse of human history. Genocide is integral to our historical inheritance, yet the more we read about it makes us powerless at the sufferings of millions of people. But on the other, it shows us a reality that this ought to happen – Never Again! "A genocide begins with the killing of a man – not for what he has done but for who he is." -Kofi Annan