The Philosophy of Genocide

The concept of genocide, as it's been formulated in the UN Convention, raises a rather tricky question. Why would you place so much emphasis on the loss of a group rather than say put the emphasis on the losses of individual lives? There are two ways of arguing this. One is to say that well all groups are by their nature simply valuable, so the loss of any group is a bad thing. The corporate conception then is really quite different or distinct from the collective conception. In the corporate conception there can be a conflict between the interests of the members of the group and the group itself whereas in the collective conception there can't be.