Armenian Genocide

Genocide is a word that many people feel they know the meaning of. Unfortunately many people are wrong when they try to define it. It's a very complex word that can be manipulated and twisted to sound how certain people want it to sound. People including myself thought knew what genocide means but there are so many ways of twisting around the definition it makes it a very difficult word to truly identify and have one simple set meaning for it. Due to its complex definition its very difficult to distinguish whether or not certain events in history can truly be labeled as genocide. These debates and studies are still taking place today and are getting more and more difficult to understand. When someone keeps changing a words true meaning, how can you truly make decisions that are quite crucial and life changing? It's a very difficult thing to understand and I think we will continue to struggle with it for many years to come.

The man who came up with the actual definition of genocide that we use today is a man by the name of Raphael Lemkin, who was a polish scholar of international law. He fled the German occupation of Poland in 1939 for Sweden, he then moved to New York to lobby the United Nations for an international genocide convention. He called for an international convention that like that against slavery and piracy would make international crimes out of the destruction of groups be known as "Acts of Barbarity". Lemkin was not satisfied with this very broad term. Years later he came upon Plato's use of the Greek word "genos" which meant race or tribe. Then the idea naturally occurred to Lemkin to add the Latin word "cide" meaning killer or act of killing in Latin. And this is how the word genocide was born. The actual definition of the word genocide is an ation committed to destroy , in whole or in part, a ntional, ethinc, racial, or religious group, whether it be killing causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a

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group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group".(b)

Due to the tricky wording of this definition its very hard to pin point what is and is not genocide. For instance can we label slavery in early America genocide. It is a subject often talked about and still debated today. It is true that African Americans were held against their will to do forced manual labor by their masters. Many of them were treated very cruelly, beaten, starved, and unable to be taught how to read and write. But is all of this technically considered genocide. Because many slave owners intents were not to cause a wipe out of this race but to use them and treat them unfairly to do the work that they did not want to do and get it done at a much faster rate. I am not condoning this type of behavior, what slave owners did to helpless African Americans was definently inhumane and wrong but can we truly label this time in history genocide. Again the definition makes it very hard to determine whether it was or was not.

The reason why the definition of genocide is so politically controversial is due simply to the fact that all the correct circumstances have to be present to actually call and label an historical event genocide. It does not matter if a group of thousands of people were murdered and tortured, or forced to leave where they were currently residing, all that matters is whether or not the right circumstances were present while all of this was taking place. Mainly the circumstance being if it was ordered, and who it was ordered by. Whether it was done privately or if it was ordered by a person of high political power, and how it was ordered to be done. So many things play such a huge role in whether or not we can label an historical event genocide. At first glance it may seem simple but you have to understand the details of the actual event and the term genocide.

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One of the first events that questioned whether an act was considered genocide was the event that took place in Armenia in 1914. By the 1890's young Armenians began to press for political reforms, calling for a constitutional government, the right to vote and an end to discriminatory practices such as special taxes levied solely against them because they were Christians. In response to their pleas all that came was brutal persecutions. Between 1894 an 1896 over one hundred thousand inhabitants