Genocide
According to Raphael Lemkin, the central definition of genocide was “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” in which its members were not targeted as individuals, but rather as members of the group. From an international law perspective, the Genocide Convention limits it to any of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
Those five acts are:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the 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;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
The colloquial understanding of genocide is heavily influenced by the Holocaust as its model. Genocide is innocent victims being targeted for their ethnic identity. Genocide is widely considered to be the epitome of human evil and is often referred to as the “crime of crimes.”
With all of this as background, should the persecution of white farmers in South Africa be considered genocide?