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Some of you may have finished this a week ago. If you did not finish reading and answering the questions- you must do this first!

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Raphael Lemkin is the Polish lawyer and linguist who coined[1] the term "genocide" - and dedicated his life to making genocide recognized as a crime.

The world has grown far too familiar with genocide; as mass killings have claimed countless lives, the word has become ingrained into our vocabularies.

But the term didn't exist until 1943, when Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it - pairing the Greek "genos," meaning race or family, with the Latin "-cidere," for killing. Lemkin, who witnessed the massacres of the early 20th century, spent his life campaigning to make the world acknowledge and prosecute[2] the crime.

A new documentary, Watchers of the Sky, tells his story. Once he'd established the word, Lemkin worked persistently in the then-newly-formed United Nations, hounding delegates to discuss his new word and acknowledge the issue.

"This was a man who didn't speak English very well, he didn't represent a country, he didn't represent an institution, he barely had a home, he barely had food - and yet he was there every day lobbying[3] to the delegates and the ambassadors to make this a crime," says Edet Belzberg, director of the film. Q1

Lemkin was born in Poland in 1900, and was instilled with a sense of justice at a very young age. As a teenager, he paid close attention to the massacre of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

He came across the story of Soghomon Tehlirian, who saw his whole family killed, but survived. Tehlirian later killed one of the masterminds of the massacre, Talaat Pasha, who was living freely. Tehlirian was arrested and went on trial.

"Lemkin read about this and at a young age he said to himself, 'Why is the killing of an individual a greater crime than the killing of millions?'" Belzberg explains. "And that really set him on his path, and he decided at that age that he was going to be the person who would develop and create the law to stop this from happening again."

At first, Belzberg says, people saw him as a pest. They hoped he would give up his preoccupation with mass killings. Then Lemkin - who was of Jewish descent - lost 49 members of his family to the Holocaust, and his determination grew even stronger.

Lemkin continued to fight genocide for his entire life. He died of a heart attack at the age of 59, while on his way to yet another meeting. Fewer than a dozen people attended his funeral. Q2

Watchers of the Sky weaves Lemkin's story - with quotes from his notes and journals - with stories of modern conflicts in Rwanda and Darfur, Sudan. The documentary includes interviews with people who continue the crusade[4] against genocide, like Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

Belzberg worked from 800 hours of footage and 5,000 stills to tell a story that spans a century. "That was the biggest challenge," Belzberg says: "to interweave in a coherent and lyrical way that people can be taken from one story to the next and not be fatigued, but be enriched by it."

Interview Highlights

On Lemkin's belief in the importance of finding a word for the crime

He believed that if he could find the right word, if he could find the word that would unite people, that would ignite people to come together to stop these crimes. He was very good at languages - he spoke about seven languages - and he thought that there wasn't a word that described the horror of this crime. And so he set off on a path to do that.

On Lemkin's personal experience with genocide as a Polish Jew

Forty-nine members of his family were killed in the Holocaust. He tried, of course, to persuade his family to leave with him in 1939 - he knew what was coming and he tried to persuade his family to go with him to America. And they said they would be fine. And although he was thinking about these crimes before, after that, he was thinking, my God, there has to be something that ... would outrage people in the same way that he was outraged by this. Q3

On Lemkin's work during and after the Nuremberg trials[5]

After having coined this word, he went to Nuremberg ... to try and get them to use this word. Genocide was not a crime at that time ... they couldn't prosecute for genocide. ... That left Lemkin completely heartbroken ...

He understood that there was a flaw in what was happening, that had Hitler not invaded Poland and had he killed all the Jews in Germany, at that time, he wouldn't have been committing a crime that could have been prosecuted by Nuremberg.

That's what really enraged Lemkin: He felt that a leader shouldn't have to cross a border in order to be held accountable for their crimes. He felt that crimes against humanity[6] and war crimes[7] weren't enough and so he continued his cause, and he then took it to the United Nations and he continued lobbying the leaders there to make this an international crime. And he continued until his death. Q4

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CommonLit | The Man Who Coined 'Genocide' Spent His Life Trying To Stop It

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Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who devised the term "genocide" to describe the deliberate killing of a large group of people based on their ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. While genocide is a widely accepted term today, and a punishable crime, this wasn't always the case.

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EVERYONE READ THIS FIRST: Genocide Overview

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EVERYONE READ THIS FIRST: Genocide Overview

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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:

1. Killing members of the group

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

5. 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.

Origin of the Term Genocide

The word "genocide" did not exist prior to 1944. It is a very specific term coined by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) who sought to describe Nazi policies of systematic murder during the Holocaust, including the destruction of European Jews. He formed the word genocide by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing.

Genocide as an International Crime

On December 9, 1948, the United Nations approved a written international agreement known as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention established genocide as an international crime, which signatory nations "undertake to prevent and punish." Preventing genocide, the other major obligation of the convention, remains a challenge that nations, institutions, and individuals continue to face.

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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.

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In 1994, Rwanda's population of 7 million was composed of three ethnic groups: Hutu (approximately 85 percent), Tutsi (14 percent) and Twa (1 percent). Between April and July 1994, at least 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were slaughtered when a Hutu extremist-led government launched a plan to murder the country's entire Tutsi minority and any others who opposed the government's policies.

There is a longstanding history of tension between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups in Rwanda, even though they speak the same language, follow similar traditions and live side by side. During the colonial period in Rwanda, the ruling Belgians favored the minority Tutsis, and gave them a range of advantages over the majority Hutus. They further divided the groups by requiring all Rwandans to carry identity cards that classified people by their ethnicity.

A Hutu revolution in 1959, supported by the Belgians, forced as many as 300,000 Tutsis to flee Rwanda, decreasing their numbers inside the country even further. In 1962, when Belgium granted Rwanda independence, the country was governed by political parties associated with the Hutu majority. Under Hutu rule, the Tutsis faced discrimination and violence, and thousands more fled to neighboring Burundi. It is estimated that by the mid-1960s, half of the Tutsi population was living outside Rwanda.

Within Rwanda, Hutu extremists among the country's political elite blamed the Tutsi population for the country's increasing social, economic, and political pressures. Civil war between Hutus and Tutsis broke out on October 2, 1990, when the Rwandan Patriot Front, the Tutsi rebel group, invaded Rwanda from the north. Hutu extremists accused all Tutsis of supporting the rebels operating outside the country.

Meanwhile, extremist Hutu leaders were secretly drawing up lists of Tutsi and moderate Hutu leaders to assassinate, and arming and training youth militias, who were responsible for some small-scale massacres These killings were documented by local and international human rights organizations as well as by a special envoy of the UN Commission on Human Rights. The Rwandan government said the killings were spontaneous and uncontrollable, and no one was brought to justice. The international community classified the violence as part of an internal conflict.

This civil war officially ended with the signing of the Arusha Accords, a power-sharing agreement, in August 1993. While Hutu leaders signed the agreement, its terms angered Hutu extremists, setting the stage for future violence. During this time, the extremists disseminated messages through the media telling their fellow Hutus that the Tutsis were planning a killing campaign against them. Radio RTLM, a private Hutu-owned radio station, relentlessly condemned Tutsis and their supporters, characterizing them as subhuman and calling them cockroaches. In this climate, beginning in 1993, Hutu political leaders began to import large numbers of machetes and distributed the weapons to the militias that supported them, the Interahamwe ("Those Who Attack Together") and the Impuzamugambi ("Those Who Have the Same Goal").
This page was last updated in July 2014.

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In 1994, Rwanda's population of 7 million was composed of three ethnic groups: Hutu (approximately 85 percent), Tutsi (14 percent) and Twa (1 percent). Between April and July 1994, at least 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutus were slaughtered when a Hutu ext

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"To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss."

From April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Nearly two million people died under the rule of the fanatical Communist movement, which imposed a ruthless agenda of forced labor, thought control, and mass execution on Cambodia. The purported goal was to transform the Southeast Asian country into a classless agrarian utopia. The result was an ancient society's wholesale destruction and a horrifying new term for the world to confront: "the killing fields."

The Khmer Rouge began their reign with the murder of surrendering officials of the former government and the brutal emptying of the capital and other cities. Black-clad soldiers marched millions of people into the countryside and put them to work as slaves digging canals and tending crops. Religion, popular culture, and all forms of self-expression were forbidden. Families were split apart, with children forced into mobile labor brigades.

Anyone who questioned the new order risked torture and death by a blow to the head. Ethnic minorities faced particular persecution. Not even members of the Khmer Rouge were safe. The movement killed thousands of its own as suspected traitors and spies for foreign powers. In time, gross mismanagement of the economy led to shortages of food and medicine, and untold numbers of Cambodians succumbed to disease and starvation.

An invasion by neighboring Vietnam finally toppled the regime. But a new civil war began and almost three decades passed before any Khmer Rouge leaders were brought to justice. In 2006, the United Nations and the Cambodian government inaugurated a joint tribunal known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). So far it has convicted three defendants and sentenced them to lengthy prison terms.

The court functions not only to return verdicts but also to try to give some measure of peace and resolution to victims and to Cambodian society as a whole. Its proceedings are open to the public; victims can register as "civil parties" to question defendants during trial sessions and seek various types of reparations.

The court has drawn criticism for the high cost of operation and the low number of indictments. But whatever its flaws, it reflects a strengthening global consensus that, no matter how much time has passed, perpetrators of the modern era's worst crimes must be brought to account, in a framework that helps survivors repair their lives.

The Museum is grateful to the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, Kingdom of Cambodia; the Documentation Center of Cambodia; and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia for their support and materials used in this case history.
This page was last updated in April 2018.

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"To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss." From April 17, 1975, to January 7, 1979, the Khmer Rouge perpetrated one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. Nearly two million people died under the rule of the fanatical Communist movement, which imposed a ruthless agenda of forced labor, thought control, and mass execution on Cambodia.

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Background - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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In response to the April 2003 rebel attack, the Sudanese government began recruiting local militias and transforming them into semi-regularized forces known as the Janjaweed. A period of intensive, systematic targeting of the civilian populations from the Fur, Zaghawa, and Masalit ethnic groups resulted in the deaths of at least 200,000 people between 2003 and 2005 alone.

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South Sudan - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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The regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) brokered a power-sharing agreement in August 2015 with support from the United States and other members of the international community.

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Bosnia-Herzegovina - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

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On April 5, 1992, the government of Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia. The creation of an independent Bosnian nation that would have a Bosniak majority was opposed by Bosnian Serbs, who launched a military campaign to secure coveted territory and "cleanse" Bosnia of its Muslim civilian population.

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In the summer of 2014, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) conducted a violent campaign against civilians in northern Iraq, in particular targeting ethnic and religious minorities.