Genocide involves the extermination of a large group of people
What is genocide?
Genocide is the worst crime against humanity.
It involves the mass extermination of a whole group of people, reported the BBC.
The term was coined in 1943 by a Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin and combines the Greek word “genos” (race or tribe) and the Latin word “cide” (to kill).
He campaigned for genocide to be recognised under international law, which happened eight years later under the UN Convention on Genocide.
Under the convention, all 147 UN states have a duty to “prevent and punish” genocide.
Countries are obligated to stop “genocide” by military force if necessary, which some claim has made states shy away from classing cases – such as Rohingya – as genocide.
In his book Rwanda and Genocide in the 20th Century, Alain Destexhe, former secretary-general of international aid charity Medecins Sans Frontieres, said genocide has lost its initial meaning.
He said: “Genocide is a crime on a different scale to all other crimes against humanity and implies an intention to completely exterminate the chosen group.
“Genocide is therefore both the gravest and greatest of the crimes against humanity.”
What atrocities have been classed as genocide?
It is said that there have been three genocides under the 1948 convention.
The first, recognised by 29 countries, was the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1920.
It is claimed that this happened during and after World War One in which Turkey and Germany fought against the British Empire, France and the United States.
Up to 270 Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople, now Istanbul, were rounded up, arrested and deported to the Turkish region of Ankara and many were murdered.
The Holocaust in World War Two saw the systematic murder of six million European Jews by Adolf Hitlzer’s Nazi Germany.
The mass slaughter of up to one million Tutsi people in Rwanda in 1994 has also been classed as genocide.
In Bosnia, the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica has been ruled to be genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
More than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks, mainly men and boys, were killed around the town of Srebrenica.
Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb army commander, has been jailed for life by a UN court after being found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The 74-year-old former Bosnian Serb’s brutish leadership during the country’s 1990s conflict was blamed for the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II.
The 1992-1995 war killed 100,000 people and displaced 2.2million as ethnic rivalries tore apart Yugoslavia.
Mladic came to symbolise a barbaric plan to rid multi-ethnic Bosnia of Croats and Muslims, fuelled by the desire for a “Greater Serbia” that would create an ethnically pure state.
The charges he faced related to the infamous massacre of Bosniaks in Srebrenica and the killing of civilians in Sarajevo.
He was also accused of having a hand in the forcible deportation on Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats or other non-Serbs and terror attacks against civilians.