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Genocides persist, nearly 70 years after the Holocaust – but there are recognized ways to help prevent them

Kerry Whigham, Assistant Professor of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, Binghamton University, State University of New York, The Conversation on

Published in Political News

The newly formed United Nations passed its first international treaty on Dec. 9, 1948, just three years after the Holocaust ended. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was designed to prevent genocide from ever happening again.

But governments worldwide currently remain far from the goal of preventing genocide – despite 152 of them eventually signing on to the Genocide Convention.

Genocide, meaning actions taken with the intent to destroy a group of people because of their identity, happened again in Cambodia in the 1970s. The communist Khmer Rouge regime tried to kill all ethnic Vietnamese and Cham people in the country, resulting in the deaths of 1.5 million to 3 million people. And it happened in 1994 in Rwanda, when the Hutu ethnic group murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis.

Today, governments are also carrying out genocide against ethnic minorities in Myanmar, where the military is killing the Muslim Rohingya people. Many experts and some governments, including the United States, also say genocide is happening in China, where the national government is arbitrarily detaining Uyghur people.

Some human rights experts also say that there is growing evidence Russia is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people.

Genocide has not been prevented, almost 75 years after the Genocide Convention was passed, in part because of a misunderstanding about how genocide happens and what prevention looks like.

 

As co-director of Binghamton University’s Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention and a program director at the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, I focus on helping students and government officials understand five important things that scholars and practitioners have learned about preventing genocide. Here are those five key points.

Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin first coined the term genocide in 1944. Specifically, the Genocide Convention protects racial, ethnic, religious and national identities.

Although this destruction often happens through mass murder, it can take other forms. It can mean taking children of one group away from their parents and transferring them to another group, for example.

Genocides are not events that happen overnight. They are long-term social and political processes that begin long before mass killing.

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