Once again a spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of genocide. A century of war and mass murder, the most destructive 100 years in the history of mankind, is ending as it began, on yet another bloody note. But is what is happening in Kosovo genocide? This is an act defined as "the systematic and planned extermination of an entire nation, racial, political or ethnic group," a word and concept that did not exist until 1943 when it was coined to describe Hitler's war against the Jews.
A debate rages on whether the "ethnic cleansing" now going on in Kosovo fits the genocide definition, although those taking part in it are careful to note that the acts of carnage are clear crimes against humanity no matter what term is used. Clinton administration officials, under pressure to intensify NATO's air strikes, have begun using the word, but the United Nations pointedly has not.
Survivors of the century's worst horror - the Holocaust - such as the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Wiesel, say they cannot use that term yet. But Mr Wiesel adds that it does not matter what word is used; the acts being committed in Kosovo are crimes against humanity and must be stopped, "otherwise we become accomplices".
Genocide is a combination of the Greek word for race with the Latin root for kill. It was coined in 1943 by an exiled Polish Jew and professor of international law, Raphael Lemkin, who said that "a crime is occurring in Europe for which there is no name".
Prof Lemkin, who lost 49 family members in the Holocaust, became a one-man lobby in the UN after the war to force it to adopt a convention barring genocide, which the world body did with great fanfare in 1948.
But then the UN failed for 50 years to invoke its convention, which called for setting up special war crimes tribunals. In 1998 it declared that the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda by Hutu troops did fit the definition.
Crimes like the slaughter of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians by Pol Pot's fanatic communist government were never condemned by the UN as genocide.
"You have noticed we have not yet used the term `genocide' [in Kosovo] because we don't feel we have firm enough evidence; we don't know enough . . .," a UN spokesman said.
Mr Wiesel, a survivor of two Nazi death camps, said that more needs to be known. "In this case, I don't like to use the word genocide because it means the attempt to kill a large community. But what Milosevic is doing is something that could be called genocidal. What he did in Bosnia and Kosovo was to attack innocent defenceless people, uproot them and persecute and humiliate them."
Daniel Goldhagen, the author of the controversial book on the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners, said it was clear the Serb leadership, with considerable support from ordinary Serbs, was "supporting an eliminationist undertaking to rid Kosovo of its Albanians".
"They are using killing and the threat of killing and other kinds of terror to depopulate the area. What the Serbs are doing is a great crime and it is not important whether the term genocide is used or not," he said.
Mr Goldhagen is currently working on a book on the century's genocides. His book on the Nazis provoked controversy by arguing that Hitler had considerable support from ordinary Germans for killing Jews, whom he said were stripped of their reality as human beings by relentless Nazi propaganda and a history of antiSemitism in Germany.
Alan Rosenbaum, a professor at Cleveland State University and editor of a recent book called Is the Holocaust Unique?, said:
"What is happening in Kosovo is starting to look an awful lot like genocide - but genocide has many different forms."
Mr Rosenbaum said Serbs are clearly trying to chase the Albanians out and claim their land. In the case of the Holocaust, Hitler rounded up all the Jews of Europe for the purpose of exterminating them. "It was the worst case of genocide possible," he said.