Niezależna Gazeta Obywatelska

(FILES) An unlocated document shows men standing besides skulls and bones of Armenian victims of the Turkish deportation in the second part of the 1910’s. It is almost 60 years since the word „genocide” entered the lexicon of international law, and it has been used to characterize officially the mass slaughter of Armenians, Jews and Rwandans in the 20th century. It was first used at the military war crimes tribunal at Nuremburg in 1945 at the end of World War II, though in the end the Nazis on trial there were found guilty of „crimes against humanity”. The word was invented in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who found shelter in the United States. It is a hybrid, combining the Greek word „genos”, meaning a race or people, and the Latin suffix „-cide” (as in fratricide or parricide), itself a formation from the Latin verb „caedere” to kill. The UN recognised in 1985 the killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians between 1915 and 1917 as a genocide, as well as the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany, and in June 1994 the killing of an estimated 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis by their Hutu compatriots that same year. AFP PHOTO FILES