When was the last time you heard a politician or news anchor use the word ‘genocide’ in the present tense? For example, why did American diplomats bend over backwords to avoid using genocide as a definition for the bloodshed that occured in Rwanda? In his radio broadcast addressing the verbal gymanstics involved in contemporary diplomacy, Barnaby Mason, diplomatic correspondent to the BBC, explains that

There was only one oblique reference recalling that the killing of members of an ethnic group with the intention of destroying it was a crime under international law.

Using the word itself - calling a spade a spade - would have mattered because, if it was genocide, how could you not act, however difficult it was?

In a similar way, British officials in the early 1990s tended to describe the fighting in Bosnia as civil war rather than Serb aggression - the phrase implied that all the parties were as bad as each other and weakened the demand for intervention.

This diplomatic sleight of hand is also compounded by the growing usage of insidiously useful terms such as ethnic cleansing. It seems that while holocaust movies like Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful and The Pianist were garnering considerable attention at the box office, contemporary acts of horror became conveniently easier to equivocate.

It’s been a decade since close to a million people were massacred in Rwanda. Will an entire generation be raised on the underlying assumption that genocide is purely a historical occurance?