Genocides in history
Encyclopedia
Genocide
is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(CPPCG) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the groups 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."
The preamble to the CPPCG not only states that "genocide is a crime under international law
, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations
and condemned by the civilized world", but that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity".
Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide is certainly not taken lightly and will almost always be controversial. The following list of genocides and alleged genocides should be understood in this context and cannot be regarded as the final word on these subjects.
legal definition has been criticized by some historians and sociologists, for example M. Hassan Kakar in his book The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 argues that the international definition of genocide is too restricted, and that it should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator and quotes Chalk and Jonassohn: "Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group so defined by the perpetrator."
Some critics of the current definition of genocide under international law have also argued that the definition was partly influenced by Joseph Stalin
, and that this is the reason why it does not include political groups.
According to R. J. Rummel
, genocide has 3 different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by a government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership. The legal meaning of genocide refers to the international treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This also includes actions that are not actually killings but tend to eliminate the group, such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. It is to avoid confusion regarding what meaning is intended that Rummel created the term democide
for the third meaning.
Jones continues by saying that the less a people have in common with another group the easier it is for the aliens to be defined as less than human and from there it is but a short step to an argument that says if they are a threat, then they should "be eliminated in order that we may live (Them or us)." But after making this assessment Jones continues "The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their early study, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to 'objective' facts, most previous accounts aimed rather to praise the writer's patron (normally the leader) and to emphasize the superiority of one's own gods and religious beliefs."
Scholars of antiquity differentiate between genocide and gendercide
, in which males were killed but the children (particularly the girls) and women were incorporated into the conqueror's society. Jones notes that "Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire's root-and branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and the destruction of Melos by Athens
during the Peloponnesian War
(fifth century BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides
in his 'Melian Dialogue
'."
Jared Diamond
has suggested that genocidal violence may have caused the Neandertals to go extinct
. Ronald Wright has also suggested such a genocide.
The Old Testament
describes the genocides of Amalek
ites and Midian
ites. Jones quotes Jerusalem-based Holocaust Studies Professor Yehuda Bauer
: "As a Jew, I must live with the fact that the civilization I inherited ... encompasses the call for genocide in its canon." The Book of Esther
asserts that a genocide of Jews by Haman
in ancient Persia was averted due to the efforts of Mordecai
and Esther
.
The Yu Ding
(禹鼎) records that Liwang of Zhou
(d. 828 BC) ordered his army not to leave the old and young of a rebel country alive.
Ben Kiernan
, a Yale scholar, has labelled the destruction of Carthage
at the end of the Third Punic War
(149–146 BC) "The First Genocide".
Ran Min
(died 352) is mostly known for his famous order to execute all of the Wu Hu
.
A massacre
was said to have been committed by Xue Rengui
(614–683) against the Tiele people
.
Konraad Elst stated that:
For its sheer magnitude in scope and death toll, coupled with its occasional (though not continuous) intention to exterminate entire Hindu communities, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, which was never fully called off since the first naval invasion in 636 CE, can without exaggeration be termed genocide. To quote Will Durant's famous line: "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within." (Story of Civilization, vol.1, Our Oriental Heritage, New York 1972, p. 459) http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/irin/genocide.html
The Anasazi civilization in the American Southwest was destroyed in a genocide that took place circa 800 AD, suggests a new study. "The history of every one of these peoples [among the North American Indians] is a series of almost incessant struggles with neighboring tribes", Ludwik Krzywicki has observed. In his view the Iroquois
'exterminated' the Erie and 'ravaged' the Illinois.
Quoting Eric Margolis, Jones observes that in the 13th century the Mongol
horsemen of Temüjin Genghis Khan
were genocidal killers (génocidaires) who were known to kill whole nations, leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones. He ordered the extermination of the Tata Mongols, and all Kankalis
males in Bukhara "taller than a wheel" using a technique called measuring against the linchpin
. Rosanne Klass has referred to the Mongols' rule of Afghanistan as "genocide" Rogerius, a monk who survived the Mongol invasion of Europe
, pointed out not only the genocidal element of the occupation, but also that the Mongols especially "found pleasure" in humiliating women. China suffered a drastic decline in population. The Chin census of 1195 showed a population of 50 million people in north China [whereas] the first Mongol census of 1235–36 counted only 8.5 million.
The Vietnamese
committed genocide against the Cham people during the 1471 Vietnamese invasion of Champa
, ransacking and burning Champa, slaughtering thousands of Cham people, and forcibly assimilating them into Vietnamese culture.
set foot on the Americas to the 1890 massacre of Sioux
at Wounded Knee
by the United States military, the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere may have declined, the direct cause mostly from disease, to 1.8 from as many as 100 million. In Brazil alone the indigenous population
has declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated 3 million to some 300,000 (1997). Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. This population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Colombian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe and/or Western civilization
often favoring wildly higher figures."
Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic
disease was the overwhelming direct cause of the population decline of the American natives
. After first contacts with Europeans
and Africans, some believe that the death of 90 to 95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World
diseases such as smallpox
and measles
. Some estimates indicate case fatality rates of 80-90% in Native American populations during smallpox epidemics.
One of the most important yet highly disputed pieces of information regarding the intentional ethnocide
of indigenous populations in the Americas was possible intentional use of disease as a biological weapon, which was first posited by British forces under the command of Jeffery Amherst. There is, however, only one documented case of germ warfare, involving British commander Jeffrey Amherst. It is uncertain whether this documented British attempt successfully infected the Indians.
Some historians argue that genocide, a crime of intent, was not the intent of European colonization while in America. The Reverend Stafford Poole
, a Catholic priest, wrote: "There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda
term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of the Jews
and Armenians
, to mention but two of the major victims of this century."
In his book American Holocaust, David Stannard
argues that the destruction of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, in a "string of genocide campaigns" by Europeans and their descendants, was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard's perspective has been further refined by Ward Churchill
, who has said "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed." Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been challenged because he does not cite any demographic evidence to support this number, and because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. Noble David Cook, Latin Americanist and history professor at Florida International University
, considers books such as Stannard's– a number of which were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage to America– to be an unproductive return to Black Legend
-type explanations for depopulation. According to Noble David Cook, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact."
In 2003, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
urged Latin Americans to not celebrate the Columbus Day holiday. Chavez blamed Christopher Columbus
for leading the way in the mass genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish.
American writer David Quammen
has likened the colonial America
n policies and practices toward Native Americans
with those of Australia toward its aboriginal
populations, calling them "brutal, hypocritical, opportunistic, and even genocidal in the fullest sense of the word."
Authors such as the Holocaust expert David Cesarani
have argued that the government and policies of the United States of America against certain indigenous peoples in furtherance of Manifest destiny
constituted genocide. Cesarani states that "in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American
Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust". He quotes David E. Stannard
, author of American Holocaust, who speaks of the "genocidal and racist horrors against the indigenous peoples that have been and are being perpetrated by many nations in the Western Hemisphere, including the United States...."
Determining how many people died as a direct result of armed conflict between Native Americans, and Europeans and their descendants, is difficult as accurate records were not always kept. Various statistics have been developed concerning the devastation of the American Indian Wars on the peoples involved. One notable study by Gregory Michno used records dealing with figures "as a direct result of" engagements and concluded that "of the 21,586 total casualties tabulated in this survey, military personnel and civilians accounted for 6,596 (31%), while Indian casualties totaled about 14,990 (69%)." for the period of 1850–90. However, Michno says he "used the army's estimates in almost every case" & "the number of casualties in this study are inherently biased toward army estimations".
In God, Greed, and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the Centuries, Grenke quotes Chalk and Jonassohn with regards to the Cherokee Trail of Tears
that "an act like the Cherokee
deportation would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today". The Indian Removal Act
of 1830 led to the Trail of Tears
. About 17,000 Cherokees — along with approximately 2,000 black slaves owned by Cherokees — were removed from their homes. The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with one party, estimated 4,000 deaths.
The Conquest of the Desert
was a military campaign directed mainly by General Julio Argentino Roca
in the 1870s, which established Argentine dominance over Patagonia
, which was inhabited by indigenous peoples, leaving more than 1,300 indigenous dead.
Jens Andermann has noted that the contemporary sources on that campaign indicate that it was a genocide by the Argentine
government against the indigenous tribes. Others perceive the campaign as intending to suppress specifically those groups of aboriginals that refused to submit to the white government and carried out attacks on the white and mestizo civilian settlements. This recent argument – usually summarized as "Civilization or Genocide?"– questions whether the Conquest of the Desert was really intended to exterminate the aborigines.
was a period of conflict between the British
colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land
(now Tasmania
) in the early years of the 19th century. The conflict, in combination with introduced diseases and other factors, had such devastating impact on the Tasmanian Aboriginal population that it was reported the Tasmanian Aborigines had been exterminated. In the 19th century, smallpox
was the principal cause of Aboriginal deaths. Historian Geoffrey Blainey says that by 1830 in Tasmania: "Disease had killed most of them but warfare and private violence had also been devastating."
After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin
, Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide; however, the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect, because more recent detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction by historians who specialise in Australian history have raised questions about some of the details and interpretations in the earlier histories. In a chapter describing these developments, Ann Curthoys concludes "It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century, how best to conceptualize it, and how to consider what that historical knowledge might mean for us now, morally and intellectually, in the present."
, was the first modern genocide. Secher's claims caused a minor uproar in France amongst scholars of modern French history, as mainstream authorities on the period — both French and foreign — published articles rejecting Secher's claims. Claude Langlois (of the Institute of History of the French Revolution) derides Secher's claims as "quasi-mythological". Timothy Tackett of the University of California summarizes the case as such: "In reality... the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides — initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves. The Vendeans were no more blameless than were the republicans. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate." Hugh Gough (Professor of history at University College Dublin) called Secher's book an attempt at historical revisionism
unlikely to have any lasting impact.
Concerning the controversy, Michel Vovelle, a specialist on the French Revolution, remarked: "A whole literature is forming on "Franco-French genocide", starting from risky estimates of the number of fatalities in the Vendean wars: 128,000, 400,000... and why not 600,000? Despite not being specialists in the subject, historians such as Pierre Chanu have put all the weight of their great moral authority behind the development of an anathematizing discourse, and have dismissed any effort to look at the subject reasonably." Roger Price writes in a similar manner: "Some historians like Pierre Chanu, supported by the conservative media... frequently exaggerating the number of deaths they have described the repression of counter-revolutionary movements in the Vendée as heralding Nazi genocide. This essentially ahistorical, and indeed hysterical approach, can only be understood as a feature of the politics of the reactionary right of our own time." Ferenc Féhér comments that Secher draws conclusions "on the basis of almost no evidence".
Despite widespread opposition to Secher and Chanu's assessment of the war, some American scholars have cited Secher's claims in their own work. Adam Jones
, cited Secher in his summary of the Vendée uprising in Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Mark Levene, an historian who specializes in the study of genocide, cites Secher in describing the Vendée as "an archetype of modern genocide".
, director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Connecticut, argued that during the Philippine-American War
(1899–1902) and pacification campaign (1902–1913), the operations launched by the U.S. against the Filipinos, an integral part of its pacification program, which claimed the lives of over a million Filipinos, constituted genocide.
In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported: "The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...." U.S. Army Gen. Leonard Wood
, who took part in the Moro Crater massacre
in 1906, called for the extermination of all Filipino Muslims since, according to him, they were irretrievably fanatical.
Gore Vidal
, in an exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books about the Philippines campaign says, discussing General J. Franklin Bell
's own reporting that American troops were responsible for 600,000 dead men, women, and children on the island of Luzon
alone, "If this is not a policy of genocide (no dumb letters on the dictionary meaning of the word), it will do until the real thing comes along."
Total Filipino casualties was and is still a highly-debated and politicized
number. A discussion and analysis of this is contained in John M. Gates, "War-Related Deaths in the Philippines", Pacific Historical Review. It is estimated that some 34,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives and as many as 200,000 civilians may have died directly or indirectly as a result of the war, most due to a major cholera
epidemic that broke out near its end. Another estimate, in the Encarta Encyclopedia, is that between 200,000 and 600,000 Filipinos died during the war with fewer than 5,000 American deaths. More deaths occurred during the pacification program (1902–1913) following the declaration of victory in the war. One estimate of total Filipino deaths is as high as 1.4 million.
in German South-West Africa
(present-day Namibia
) in 1904–1907 was the first organized state genocide according to the Whitaker Report (1985), prepared for the United Nations but not adopted; the Herero were also the first ethnic group to be subjected to genocide in the 20th century. Eighty percent of the total Herero population and 50 percent of the total Nama population were killed in a brutal scorched earth campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha
. In total, between 24,000 up to 100,000 Herero perished along with 10,000 Nama.
Towards the end of the War of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) the English Rump Parliament
sent the New Model Army
to Ireland to subdue and take revenge on the Catholic population of the country and to prevent Royalists loyal to Charles II
from using Ireland as a base to threaten England. Initially under the command of Oliver Cromwell
and later under other parliamentary
generals, the New Model army carried this out. Coupled to the war aim of securing the country for the English Parliament were several other interrelated objectives. Punitive confiscation of the lands of Irish families involved in fighting the parliamentary forces was implemented . This became a continuation of the Elizabethan policy of encouraging Protestant settlement of Ireland, because New Model army soldiers—Protestant to a man and who were owed considerable back pay—could be paid in confiscated Irish lands rather than in cash raised through English parliamentary taxes.
During the Interregnum (1651–1660), this policy was enhanced with the passing of the Act of Settlement of Ireland
in 1652 whose goal was a further transfer of land from Irish to English hands. The immediate war aims and the longer term policies of the English Parliamentarians resulted in an attempt by the English to transfer the native Irish Catholic population to the western fringes of Ireland to make way for Protestant settlers. This policy has been summed up by a phrase attributed to Cromwell "To Hell or to Connaught" and has been described by historians as ethnic cleansing
, if not genocide.[The Act of Settlement of Ireland], and the parliamentary legislation which succeeded it the following year, is the nearest thing on paper in the English, and more broadly British, domestic record, to a programme of state-sanctioned and systematic ethnic cleansing of another people. The fact that it did not include 'total' genocide in its remit, or that it failed to put into practice the vast majority of its proposed expulsions, ultimately, however, says less about the lethal determination of its makers and more about the political, structural and financial weakness of the early modern English state. For instance, though the Act begins rather ominously by claiming that it was not its intention to extirpate the whole Irish nation, it then goes on to list five categories of people who, as participators in or alleged supporters of the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath, would automatically be forfeit of their lives. It has been suggested that as many as 100,000 people would have been liable under these headings. A further five categories—by implication an even larger body of 'passive' supporters of the rebellion—were to be spared their lives but not their property."
During the years of the Irish Famine, Ireland produced enough food, flax and wool not only to feed and clothe its nine million people, but enough for eighteen million. A few nationalist historians argue that in this sense the famine was artificial, not caused by a shortage of food but by the British government's choice to close the ports as had been done in previous Irish crop blights; as John Mitchell put it, "The Almighty sent the potato blight... but the English created the famine".
Francis A. Boyle, a professor of International Law at the University of Illinois
, finding that the government violated sections (a), (b), and (c) of Article 2 of the CPPCG and committed genocide, issued a formal legal opinion to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
on May 2, 1996, stating that "Clearly, during [the Irish Potato Famine
] years [of] 1845 to 1850 the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, and racial group commonly known as the Irish People." Law professor Charles E. Rice
of Notre Dame
likewise issued a formal opinion, also based on Article 2, that the government had committed genocide.
Contesting claims of genocide, Belfast
-born and Cambridge
-educated historian Peter Gray concludes that UK government policy "was not a policy of deliberate genocide", but a dogmatic refusal to admit that the policy was wrong, which "amounted to a sentence of death to many thousands". Professor James S. Donnelly Jr., a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
, wrote that "...it is also my contention that while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish..."
Records show that Ireland exported food during the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.
Cecil Woodham-Smith, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 that, "...no issue has provoked so much anger or so embittered relations between the two countries
as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation." Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine. However, Woodham-Smith does not accept that the famine amounted to genocide: "These misfortunes were not part of a plan to destroy the Irish nation; they fell on the people because the government of Lord John Russell
was afflicted with an extraordinary inability to foresee consequences. It has been frequently declared that the parsimony of the British government during the famine was the main cause of the sufferings of the people, and parsimony was certainly carried to remarkable lengths; but obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance probably contributed more."
Irish historian Cormac O' Grada disagrees with the claim that the famine was genocide on two grounds: firstly, he writes, "genocide includes murderous intent and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish" . and that most people in Whitehall "hoped for better times in Ireland. and secondly accusations of genocide overlook or ignore "the enormous challenges facing relief efforts, both central, local, public and private". Cormac views that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than that of genocide. He also says that "no academic historian takes seriously any more the claim of 'genocide'", which were only supported by "a few nationalist historians".
Peaking around 8-9 million in the early 19th century, Ireland's population fell to around 4 million during the Famine, because of emigration and starvation.
Genocide scholar W.D. Rubinstein seems to agree with Cormac. In his book Genocide he wrote that: "The Irish Famine cannot in truth be described as an example of genocide, but nor, in truth, was it nineteenth-century Britain's finest hour."
in the Northwest Caucasus for nearly a hundred years, trying to get Circassia's prominent position along the Black Sea
coast. After a century of insurgency and all-out war and continual failure to end the affair, the Tsar ordered the expulsion of most of the Muslim population of the North Caucasus. This event is remembered among Circassians as a national tragedy and is well-known among other Caucasian peoples and in Turkey as well. In the modern context of the word, there have been many claims, by Circassians, by Western historians (Colarusso, Charles King, etc.), by Turks and by Chechens that the events of the 1860s constituted one of the first "modern" horrible genocides in modern history, where a whole population is eliminated to satisfy the desires (in this case economic) of a powerful country.
Among many historians (including also John Colarusso, Charles King, etc.), Antero Leitzinger wrote in an article called "The Circassian Genocide", initially published in the Turkistan News, that a genocide committed against the Circassian nation by Czarist Russia in the 19th century has been almost entirely forgotten, and that it was the largest genocide of the 19th century. Approximately 1-1.5 million Circassians were killed, and upon the order of the Tsar, most of the Muslim population was deported (i.e., all except Ossete Muslims and Kabardins; the modern Circassians and Abazins either managed to escape or, as is the case with most, returned; at the time after the deportation, as Charles King notes in his books, travelers who searched throughout the area for Circassians could not find any left except the Kabardins), mainly to the Ottoman Empire, causing the exile of another 1.5 million Circassians and others. This effectively annihilated (or deported) 90% of the nation. Circassians were viewed as tools by the Ottoman government, and settled in restive areas whose populations had nationalist yearnings- Armenia, the Arab regions and the Balkans. Many more Circassians were killed by the policies of the Balkan states, primarily Serbia and Bulgaria, which became independent at that time. Still more Circassians were forcefully assimilated by nationalist Muslim states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, etc.) who looked upon non-Turk/Arab ethnicity as a foreign presence and a threat.
In May 1994, the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin
admitted that resistance
to the tsarist forces was legitimate, but he did not recognize "the guilt of the tsarist government for the genocide." In 1997 and 1998, the leaders of Kabardino-Balkaria
and of Adygea sent appeals to the Duma
to reconsider the situation and to issue the needed apology; to date, there has been no response from Moscow. In October 2006, the Adygeyan public organizations of Russia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Syria, the USA, Belgium, Canada and Germany sent the president of the European Parliament
a letter with a request to recognize the genocide against Adygean (Circassian) people.
On 5 July 2005 the Circassian Congress, an organisation that unites representatives of the various Circassian peoples in the Russian Federation, called on Moscow first to acknowledge and then to apologize for Tsarist policies that Circassians say constituted a genocide. Their appeal pointed out that "according to the official tsarist documents more than 400,000 Circassians were killed, 497,000 were forced to flee abroad to Turkey, and only 80,000 were left alive in their native area." The movement has since been campaigning for the recognition of the "Circassian genocide". Nevertheless, whether it is considered genocide or not, just as is the case with the Armenians and Jews, the Circassians view the memory of the brutal expulsions and killings at the hands of Russia and the suffering that the Russians inflicted upon them as a central part of the Circassian identity.
who lived in an area that stretched from the west end of the Great Wall of China to present-day eastern Kazakhstan, and from present-day northern Kyrgyzstan to southern Siberia (most of this area is called Xinjiang nowadays) were the last nomadic empire
to threaten China, which they did from the early 17th century to the middle of the 18th century. After a series of inconclusive military conflicts that started in the 1680s, the Dzungars were subjugated by the Manchu
-led Qing dynasty
(1644–1911) in the late 1750s. According to Qing scholar Wei Yuan
, 40% of the 600,000 Zunghar people were killed by smallpox
, 20% fled to Russia
or sought refuge among the Kazakh
tribes, and 30% were killed by the army. Clarke has argued that the Qing campaign in 1757-58 "amounted to the complete destruction of not only the Zunghar state but of the Zunghars as a people." Historian Peter Perdue has attributed the decimation of the Dzungars to a "deliberate use of massacre" and has described it as an "ethnic genocide". Mark Levene, a historian whose recent research interests focus on genocide, has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was "arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence."
, death toll estimates range from 5 million to over 20 million.
sent a correspondence to the government of the Ottoman Empire
, a member of the Central Powers
, over massacres the Allies alleged were taking place within the Empire. (For more details see the section Ottoman Empire (Turkey)).
" in reference to that regime's persecution of its Christian minorities including Armenians
, Assyrians
and Greeks
among others. Many researches consider these events to be part of the same policy of planned ethnoreligious purification of the Turkish state followed by the Young Turks
.
This joint statement stated:
The Armenian Genocide ' onMouseout='HidePop("3617")' href="/topics/Romanization_of_Armenian">translit.:
; )-—also called a host of other names refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian
population of the Ottoman Empire
during and just after World War I. It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches
under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees. The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and a half million.
On 15 September 2005, a United States Congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide
, which did not pass, called upon the President to "ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes."
On 16 December 2003, the BBC reported that, "The Swiss lower house of parliament has voted to describe the mass killings of Armenians during the last years of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. [...] Fifteen countries have now agreed to label the killings as genocide. They include France [in 2001], Argentina and Russia." On 12 October 2006, French lawmakers "approved a bill making it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I amounted to genocide. Turkey quickly objected, with its Foreign Ministry saying that the decision "dealt a heavy blow" to Turkish-French relations and 'created great disappointment in our country.'"
The Armenian and their distribution throughout Anatolia during the Ottoman Empire and before (largely a result of Persian scorched earth tactics in a 16th century war in the area) should be considered. The resources published in those years are telling various numbers. Very few of them actually state that there were over 2,000,000 Armenians back then, which is contrary to genocide allegations. However, that was only the maximum estimate, and even a considerably lower number would still classify as genocide due to motives, large amounts killed, and so on.
In 2005, Turkey made a proposal to form a joint historian committee between Turkish, Armenian and historians of various nationalities, who would aim to shed light on the issue of whether this was a genocide or not. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was quoted to say that "Turkey would be willing to face whatever the result the research produces".
The Assyrian Genocide
(also known as Sayfo or Seyfo; Aramaic
: ܩܛܠܐ ܕܥܡܐ ܐܬܘܪܝܐ or ܣܝܦܐ) was committed against the Assyrian population of the Ottoman Empire
during the First World War by the Young Turks
. The Assyrian
population of northern Mesopotamia
(Tur Abdin
, Hakkari
, Van
, Siirt
region in modern-day southeastern Turkey and Urmia
region in northwestern Iran) was forcibly relocated and massacred by Ottoman (Turkish
and allied Kurdish
) forces between 1914 and 1920 under the regime of the Young Turks. This genocide is considered to be a part of the same policy of extermination as the Armenian Genocide
and Greek genocide. The Assyro-Chaldean National Council stated in a December 4, 1922, memorandum that the total death toll is unknown, but it estimates that about 750,000 "Assyro-Chaldeans" died between 1914–1918.
The Greek genocide refers to the fate of the Greek
population of the Ottoman Empire during and in the aftermath of World War I (1914–1923). Like Armenians and Assyrians, the Greeks were subjected to various forms of persecution
including massacres, expulsion
s, and death marches by Young Turks
. George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, among other diplomats, noted the massacres and deportations of Greeks during the post-Armistice period. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks may have died during this period as a result of these persecutions.
The Dersim massacre
refers to the depopulation of Dersim in Turkish Kurdistan
, in 1937-1938, in which approximately 65,000-70,000 Alevi Kurds were killed and thousands were driven into exile. A key component of the Turkification
process was the policy of massive population resettlement. Referring to the main policy document in this context, the 1934 law on resettlement, a policy targeting the region of Dersim as one of its first test cases, with disastrous consequences for the local population. Dersim genocide discussed in the European Parliament in Brussels
Dr. Michael Ellman claims that the 'national operations
' of the NKVD
, particularly the 'Polish operation
', may constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention. The terror against the church may also qualify.
In 2009, Poland received documents from Ukraine which show that the aim of the Katyn massacre
of over 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD
in 1940 was to deprive Poland
of a whole class of intellectuals, officers, landowners, and others.
During the Russian Civil War
the Bolshevik
s engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Don Cossacks
. The most reliable estimates indicate that out of a population of three million, between 300,000 and 500,000 were killed or deported in 1919–20.
The Soviet famine of 1932-1933
that affected Ukraine
, Kazakhstan
, and some densely populated regions of Russia, has a special connotation in Ukraine where it is called the Holodomor
. The famine was caused by the confiscation of the whole 1933 harvest in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, and some other parts of the Soviet Union, leaving the peasants too little to feed themselves. As a result, an estimated ten million died Soviet-wide, including over seven million in Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million elsewhere. In addition to the requisitioning of crops in Ukraine, all food was confiscated by Soviet authorities. Any and all aid and food was prohibited from entering the regions affected. Ukraine's Yuschenko's administration was attempting to have the latter recognised as an act of genocide. This move is opposed by the Russian government and some members of the Ukrainian parliament. In November 2006 during a remembrance ceremony held in Kiev, a big board listed ten other countries that recognised the Holodomor
as a genocide: Australia, Argentina, Georgia, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Lithuania, Poland, USA, Hungary. A Ukrainian court found Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Stanislav Kosior, Pavel Postyshev, Vlas Chubar and Mendel Khatayevich guilty of genocide on 13 January 2010 As of 2010, Moscow's official position is that the famine took place, but it is not an ethnic genocide; current pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych
has supported this position.
The Stalinist deportations
are also extremely controversial. During and after World War II, many minority ethnic groups, especially those from the North Caucasus, were exiled to Siberia, usually involving massacres as well. In many cases the targeted group was accused of collaborating with the Nazis. In some cases this was correct, as was the case with the Kalmyks, but with others, such as the deportation of the Chechens, it is usually discredited.
According to some authors, such as John B. Dunlop or Tony Wood Chechevitsa (or "Operation Lentil
" in Russian, according to Tony Wood, its first two syllables "point a finger at its intended targets", though while the Chechens were the main targets, they were not the only victims) is particularly troubling. The operation is referred to by Chechens often as "Aardakh" (the Exodus). It was initiated on October 13, 1943 when about 120,000 men were moved into the Republic of Checheno-Ingushetia, supposedly for mending bridges. On February 23, 1944 (on Red Army day), the entire population was summoned to local party buildings where they were told they were going to be deported as punishment for their alleged collaboration with the Germans. The inhabitants were rounded up and imprisoned in Studebaker trucks and sent to Siberia. Many times, resistance was met with slaughter, and in one such instance, in the aul of Khaibakh, about 700 people were locked in a barn and burned to death by NKVD general Gveshiani, who was praised for this and promised a medal by Lavrentiy Beria
. By the next summer, Checheno-Ingushetia was dissolved; a number of Chechen and Ingush placenames were replaced with Russian ones; mosques and graveyards were destroyed, and a massive campaign to burn numerous historical Chechen texts was nearly complete (leaving the world depleted of what was more or less the only source of central Caucasian literature and historical texts except for sparse texts about the Chechens, Ingush, etc., not written by themselves, but by Georgians) Throughout the North Caucasus, about 700,000 (according to Dalkhat Ediev, 724297 , of which the majority, 412,548, were Chechens, along with 96,327 Ingush, 104,146 Kalmyks, 39,407 Balkars and 71,869 Karachais). Many died on the trip, and the extremely harsh environment of Siberia (especially considering the amount of exposure) killed many more. The NKVD, supplying the Russian perspective, gives the statistic of 144,704 people killed in 1944-1948 alone (with a death rate of 23.5% for all groups), though this is dismissed by many authors such as Tony Wood as a far understatement . Estimates for Chechen deaths alone (excluding the NKVD statistic), range from about 170,000 to 200,000 , thus ranging from over a third of the total Chechen population to nearly half being killed (of those that were deported, not counting those killed on the spot) in those 4 years alone (death rates for other groups during those four years hover around 20%). In addition to being recognized by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, the European Union Parliament also recognized it as a genocide in 2004.
Estonia attempted to charge Soviet-era officials with genocide on the grounds that the exiles to Siberia constituted genocide. A memorial at Vilna in Lithuania is dedicated to the genocide victims of Stalin as well as Hitler, and the state-run Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania focuses on Stalin's imprisonment and deportation of Lithuanians.
, Nazis and fascists established the puppet Croatian state known as Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia
) or NDH. Immediately after its establishment, the NDH began a terror campaign against Serbs, Jews and Romani people. From 1941 to 1945, when Josip Broz Tito
's partisans liberated Croatia, the Ustashe regime killed approximately 300,000-350,000 people, mostly Serbs and almost the entire Jewish and Romani population, many of them in the Jasenovac
concentration camp. Helen Fein
has estimated that the Ustashe killed virtually every Romani in the country.
Some also consider the crimes of the Chetniks
in Bosnia against non-Serbs to constitute acts of Genocide.
. The Parsley Massacre
, known in the Dominican Republic as "El Corte" (the Cutting), lasted approximately five days. Trujillo had his soldiers apply parsley to suspected Haitians and they would ask, "What is this?" Spanish speaking people would be able to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley perfectly, "perejil". In Haitian Creole, the word for parsley is "persil". Those who would have trouble pronouncing "perejil" would be assumed to be Haitian and slaughtered. The violence resulted in the deaths of 20,000 to 30,000 people.
Because the universal acceptance of international law
s, defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, with the promulgation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), those criminals who were prosecuted after the war in international courts, for taking part in the Holocaust were found guilty of crimes against humanity and other more specific crimes like murder. Nevertheless the Holocaust is universally recognized to have been a genocide and the term, that had been coined the year before by Raphael Lemkin
, appeared in the indictment of the 24 Nazi leaders, Count 3, stated that all the defendants had "conducted deliberate and systematic genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and national groups...."
The term "the Holocaust" is generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist German Workers Party
in Germany led by Adolf Hitler
. A majority of scholars do not include other groups in the definition of the Holocaust, reserving the term to refer only to the genocide of the Jews, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question
."
The Holocaust was accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society
was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps
were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich
conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen
murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."
Other targets of the Nazi mass murder or "Nazi genocidal policy", included Slavs (Poles
, Russians
, Ukrainians
, Belarusians
, Serbs
, and others), Romani people (see Porajmos
), mentally ill (see T-4 Euthanasia Program), Homosexuals and "sexual deviants", Jehovah's Witnesses
, and political opponents. R. J. Rummel
estimates that 16,315,000 people died as a result of genocide, just over 10.5 million Slavs, just under 5.3 million Jews, 258,000 Romani and 220,000 homosexuals. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition would produce a death toll of 17 million. A figure of 26 million is given in Service d'Information des Crimes de Guerre: Crimes contre la Personne Humain, Camps de Concentration. Paris, 1946, p. 197. Adam Jones has argued that the Nazi killing of 2.8 million Soviet POWs in eight months in 1941-2 was an act of "gendercide" (since only men were killed) and that it "vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated mass killing in human history."
In the longer term, the Nazis wanted to exterminate some 30–45 million Slavs. According to Roger Chickering, "Had the Germans won the war, they would have undertaken the largest genocide
in history." Some historians speak of the siege of Leningrad
operations in terms of genocide, as a "racially motivated starvation policy" that became an integral part of the unprecedented German war of extermination against populations of the Soviet Union generally.
millions of Muslim
s, Hindu
s and Sikh
s were slaughtered based on being on the wrong side of the newly formed border. When the partition lines were drawn, many Muslims who found themselves on the Indian side of the border were targeted by Sikh and Hindu mobs. Similarly, many Sikhs and Hindus suffered at the hands of Muslim mobs in Pakistan. Estimates of the total number of dead vary from 500,000 to 1 million. In addition approximately 7 million Muslims migrated to Pakistan while approximately the same number of Hindus and Sikhs migrated to India. The violence was especially gruesome in the densely populated plains of Punjab
. At the end of the Partition violence, very few Muslims remained in Indian Punjab, and very few Hindus and Sikhs remained in Pakistani Punjab. The situation was comparatively better in the other partitioned province of Bengal
.
's Republic of China
government supported Muslim warlord
Ma Bufang
when he launched seven expeditions into Golog, causing the death of thousands of Tibetans.
Author Uradyn Erden Bulag called the events that followed genocidal and David Goodman called them ethnic cleansing. One Tibetan counted the number of times Ma attacked him, remembering the seventh attack which made life impossible. Ma was highly anti-communist, and he and his army wiped out many Tibetans in the northeast and eastern Qinghai, and also destroyed Tibetan Buddhist Temples. Ma also patronized the Panchen Lama
, who was exiled from Tibet by the Dalai Lama's government.
s, defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, with the promulgation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). The CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)). After the minimum 20 countries became parties to the Convention, it came into force as international law on 12 January 1951. At that time however, only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) were parties to the treaty, which caused the Convention to languish for over four decades.
in Central and Eastern Europe (which displaced more than twenty million people in total). Estimates of the total number of dead range from 500,000 to 2,000,000, where the higher figures include deaths from famine and disease as well as from violent acts. Many German civilians were also sent to internment and labor camps. RJ Rummel estimates that 1,585,000 Germans were killed in Poland and 197,000 were killed in Czechoslovakia. The events have been usually classified as population transfer
, or as ethnic cleansing
.
Martin Shaw (2007) and W.D. Rubinstein (2004) describe the expulsions as genocide.
Felix Ermacora
writing in 1991, (in line with a minority of legal scholars, considered ethnic cleansing to be genocide) and stated that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was genocide.
, former president of Australia's Human Rights Commission thinks that Australia's "Stolen Generation
" — where from 1900 to 1970, 20,000 to 25,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their natural families (see the Bringing Them Home
report) — "It clearly was attempted genocide ... [because it] was believed that the Aboriginal people would die out". However the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Not only has the number of children removed from their parents been questioned, but also the intent and effects of the government policy.
—which led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government by local African revolutionaries—John Okello
claimed in radio speeches to have killed or imprisoned tens of thousands of his "enemies and stooges," but actual estimates of the number of deaths vary greatly, from "hundreds" to 20,000. Some Western newspapers give figures of 2,000–4,000; the higher numbers may be inflated by Okello's own broadcasts and exaggerated reports in some Western and Arab news media. The killing of Arab prisoners and their burial in mass grave
s was documented by an Italian film crew, filming from a helicopter, in Africa Addio
. Many Arabs fled to safety in Oman
, and by Okello's order no Europeans were harmed. The post-revolution violence did not spread to Pemba. Leo Kuper
described the killing of Arabs in Zanzibar as a genocide.
n civil war, some 200,000 people died. More than one million people were forced to flee their homes and hundreds of villages were destroyed. The officially chartered Historical Clarification Commission
attributed more than 93% of all documented violations of human rights to Guatemala's military government; and estimated that Maya
Indians
accounted for 83% of the victims. It concluded in 1999 that state actions constituted genocide.
In 1999, Nobel peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchú
brought a case against the military leadership in a Spanish Court. Six officials, among them Efraín Ríos Montt
and Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores
, were formally charged on 7 July 2006 to appear in the Spanish National Court after Spain's Constitutional Court ruled in 2005 that Spanish courts can exercise universal jurisdiction
over war crimes committed during the Guatemalan Civil War
published a book, available on the web, called "Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900", In Chapter 8 called "Statistics Of Pakistan's Democide
Estimates, Calculations, And Sources" he looks at the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War
. Rummel wrote:
Rummel goes on to collate what he considers the most credible estimates published by others into what he calls democide
. He writes that "Consolidating both ranges, I give a final estimate of Pakistan's democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000." Other authors like Anthony Mascarenhas and Donald W. Beachler have cited a figure ranging between 1 - 3 million civilians killed by the Pakistan Army
; Bleacher states that both Pakistan and its primary ally the USA have denied all Genocide allegations.
A case was filed in the Federal Court of Australia on 20 September 2006 for alleged crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during 1971 by the Pakistani Armed Forces and its collaborators:
On 21 May 2007, at the request of the applicant "Leave is granted to the applicant to discontinue his application filed on 20 September 2006." (FILE NO: (P)SYG2672/2006)
The Guinness Book of Records lists the atrocities in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) as one of the top 5 genocides in the 20th century.
's independence in 1962, there have been two events called genocide in the country. The 1972 mass-killings of Hutu
by the Tutsi
army, and the 1993 killing of Tutsi by the Hutu population that is recognised as an act of genocide in the final report of the International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi presented to the United Nations Security Council
in 2002.
on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate. In 1990, a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsi
refugees called the Rwandan Patriotic Front
(RPF) invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda. The Rwandan Civil War, fought between the Hutu
regime, with support from Francophone nations of Africa and France itself, and the RPF, with support from Uganda
, vastly increased the ethnic tensions in the country and led to the rise of Hutu Power
.
As an ideology, Hutu Power asserted that the Tutsi intended to enslave Hutus and must be resisted at all costs. Despite continuing ethnic strife, including the displacement of large numbers of Hutu in the north by the rebels and periodic localized extermination of Tutsi to the south, pressure on the government of Juvénal Habyarimana resulted in a cease-fire in 1993 and the preliminary implementation of the Arusha Accords
.
The assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994 was the proximate cause of the mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus. The mass killings were carried out primarily by two Hutu militias associated with political parties: the Interahamwe
and the Impuzamugambi
. The genocide was directed by a Hutu power group known as the Akazu
. The mass killing also marked the end of the peace agreement meant to end the war, and the Tutsi RPF restarted their offensive, eventually defeating the Hutu army and seizing control of the country.
have died of starvation since the mid-1990s, with aid groups and human rights NGOs stating often that North Korea has systematically and deliberately prevented food aid from reaching the areas most devastated by food shortages. Up to one million have died in North Korea's political prison camps which detain dissidents and their entire families, including children, for perceived political offenses.
In 2004, Yad Vashem
, in response to the BBC documentary, "Access to Evil", which includes witness testimonies from camp survivors and a former guard of gas chambers and mass killings occurring systematically in the camps, called on the international community in 2004 to investigate “political genocide” in North Korea, yet no substantial action has been taken to this day to interven.
In September 2011, the Harvard International Review published an article which argued that North Korea was violating the UN Genocide Convention in every possible way, through its systematic killing of half-Chinese babies and religious groups.
was the first President of Equatorial Guinea
, from 1968 until his overthrow in 1979. During his presidency, his country was nicknamed "the Auschwitz
of Africa". Nguema's regime was characterized by its abandonment of all government functions except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; he acted as chief judge and sentenced thousands to death. This led to the death or exile of up to 1/3 of the country's population. Out of a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 had been killed, in particular those of the Bubi ethnic minority on Bioko
associated with relative wealth and intellectualism. Uneasy around educated people, he had killed everyone who wore spectacles. All schools were ordered closed in 1975. The economy collapsed, and skilled citizens and foreigners left.
On August 3, 1979, he was overthrown by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
. Macías Nguema was captured, tried for genocide and other crimes along with 10 others. All of them were found guilty, four received terms of imprisonment, while Nguema and the other six were executed a few weeks later on September 29.
John B. Quigley in The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis points out that at Macías Nguema's trial for genocide that Equatorial Guinea had not ratified the Genocide convention and that records of the court proceedings show that there was some confusion over whether Nguema and his co-defendants were tried under the laws of Spain (the former colonial power), or whether the trial was justified on the claim that the Genocide Convention was part of customary international law. Quigley states that "The Macias case stands out as the most confusing of domestic genocide prosecutions from the standpoint of the applicable law. The Macias conviction is also problematic from the standpoint of the identity of the protected group."
The Khmer Rouge
, or more formally, the Communist Party of Kampuchea
, led by Pol Pot
, Ta Mok
and other leaders, organized the mass killing of ideologically suspect groups, ethnic minorities like the ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese (or Sino-Khmers), Chams and Thais
, former civil servants, former government soldiers, Buddhist monks, secular intellectuals and professionals, and former city dwellers. Khmer Rouge cadres defeated in factional struggles were also liquidated in purges. The total number of victims is estimated at approximately 1.7 million Cambodia
ns between 1975–1979, including deaths from slave labour.
This episode is widely seen as a genocide. For example "since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program" has been included as part of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies
, and in 2003 Khieu Samphan
, the Cambodian head of state under the Khmer Rouge, was quoted as saying "I have found it so difficult to believe what people told me of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime, but today, I am very clear that there was genocide"
Andrew Perrin a reporter for Time Asia, wrote an article in 2003 in which he stated that a "genocide [was] committed by the Khmer Rouge against Cambodia's small Muslim
Cham population". During the massacres by the government, a disproportionate number of Chams were killed compared with ethnic Khmers. Ysa Osman, a researcher at the Documentation Center of Cambodia concludes,"Perhaps as many as 500,000 died. They were considered the Khmer Rouge's No. 1 enemy. The plan was to exterminate them all" because "they stood out. They worshiped their own god. Their diet was different. Their names and language were different. They lived by different rules. The Khmer Rouge wanted everyone to be equal, and when the Chams practiced Islam they did not appear to be equal. So they were punished."
In 1997 the Cambodian Government asked the United Nations
to provide assistance in setting up a genocide tribunal. It took nine years to agree on what form the shape and structure of the court would be — a hybrid of Cambodian and international laws — before the judges were sworn in in 2006 . The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on 18 July 2007. On 19 September 2007 Nuon Chea, second in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior surviving member, was charged with war crime
s and crimes against humanity. He will face Cambodian and foreign judges at the special genocide tribunal.
was occupied by Indonesia
from 1975 to 1999 as an annexed territory with Indonesian provincial status. A detailed statistical report prepared for the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor
cited a lower range of 102,800 conflict-related deaths in the period 1974-1999, namely, approximately 18,600 killings and 84,200 excess deaths from hunger and illness, including the Indonesian military using "starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese" most of which occurred during the Indonesian occupation. Earlier estimates of deaths during the occupation range from 60,000 to 200,000.
According to Sian Powell writing in The Australian
, a UN report states that the Indonesian military used starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese, along with Napalm
and chemical weapons
, obtained from the United States, which poisoned the food and water supply. Ben Kiernan has written in War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975–99: Comparative Reflections on Cambodia that
Ben Kiernan draws a comparison with the Khmer Rouge Cambodian genocide, and accuses the west of hypocrisy in ignoring one whilst protesting about the other.
during the Dirty War
(1976–1983), was found guilty of six counts of murder, six counts of unlawful imprisonment, and seven counts of torture in a federal court. The judge who presided over the case, Carlos Rozanski, described the offences as part of a systematic attack that was intended to destroy parts of society that the victims represented and as such it was genocide.
Rozanski noted that the CPPCG does not include the elimination of political groups, (because that group was removed at the behest of Stalin), but instead based his findings on 11 December 1946 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 96
barring acts of genocide "when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part" (which passed unanimously), because he considered the original UN definition to be more legitimate than the politically compromised CPPCG definition.
/Phalange
militias, near the beginning of the 1982–2000 South Lebanon conflict. The number of victims of the massacre is estimated at 700-3500. Responsibility for the massacre has been attributed to the Phalangists as the perpetrators, and indirectly to Israel
as the ally of the Phalangists.
On December 16, 1982, the United Nations General Assembly
condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide. Paragraph 2, which "resolved that the massacre was an act of genocide", was adopted by ninety-eight votes to nineteen, with twenty-three abstentions: All Western democracies abstained from voting.
According to William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland
, "the term genocide (...) had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision". This opinion is a reflection of the comments made by some of the delegates who took part in the debate. While all acknowledged that it was a massacre, the claim that it was a genocide was disputed, for example the delegate for Canada stated "[t]he term genocide cannot, in our view, be applied to this particular inhuman act". The delegate of Singapore
added that "[his] delegation regret[ted] the use of the term "an act of genocide" (...) [as] the term 'genocide' is used to mean acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". and that "[he] also question[ned] whether the General Assembly ha[d] the competence to make such determination", and the United States commented that "[w]hile the criminality of the massacre was beyond question, it was a serious and reckless misuse of language to label this tragedy genocide as defined in the 1948 Convention (...)".
Citing Sabra and Shatila as an example, Leo Kuper notes the reluctance of the United Nations to respond or take action in actual cases of genocide against the most egregious violators, but its willingness to charge "certain vilified states, and notably Israel", with genocide. In his view:
In a Belgium court case
lodged on 18 June 2001 by 23 survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, the prosecution alleged that Ariel Sharon
, former Israeli defense minister (and Israel's Prime Minister in 2001–2006), as well as other Israelis committed a number of crimes including genocide, because "all the constituent elements of the crime of genocide, as defined in the 1948 Convention and as reproduced in article 6 of the ICC Statute and in article 1§1 of the law of 16 June 1993, 29 are present". This allegation was not tested in a Belgian court because on 12 February 2003 the Court of Cassation (Belgian Supreme Court) ruled that under international customary law, acting heads of state and government can not become the objects of proceedings before criminal tribunals in foreign states (although for the crime of genocide they could be the subjects of proceedings of an international tribunal). This ruling was a reiteration of a decision made a year earlier by the International Court of Justice on 14 February 2002. Following these rulings in June 2003 the Belgian Justice Ministry decided to start a proceeding to transfer the case to Israel, so to date the accusation that the massacres in Sabra and Shatila were a genocide has not been tested in any court.
Having established a broader definition of Genocide Kakar goes on to claim that during the Soviet war in Afghanistan
(1979–1989), "The Afghans are among the latest victims of genocide by a superpower. Large numbers of Afghans were killed to suppress resistance to the army of the Soviet Union, which wished to vindicate its client regime and realize its goal in Afghanistan. Thus, the mass killing was political".
, nominated as president of the International War Crimes Tribunal, had been describing the US war in Vietnam as a genocide since 1967, even before he was aware of the horrifying effects of napalm
and Agent Orange
on the Vietnamese
population.
A film called U.S. Techniques of Genocide in Vietnam describes the use of elaborate U.S. weapons against civilian targets in Vietnam such as anti-personnel weapons designed to kill human targets while causing minimal damage to buildings, steel pellet bombs that zigzag in all directions and the internationally banned dum-dum bullet.
Agent Orange
, used to devastate crops, which the US drenched Vietnam in so as to starve the communist fighters, has left to this day millions of deaths, disabilities, increased risk of diseases such as cancer, and most of all birth defects among the civilian population. Vietnam said that half a million people had died as a result of chemical defoliants the United States used in the country.
's former Soviet-backed Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam
was tried in an Ethiopian court, in absentia
, for his role in mass killings. Mengistu's charge sheet and evidence list was 8,000 pages long. The evidence against him included signed execution orders, videos of torture sessions and personal testimonies. The trial began in 1994 and on 12 December 2006 Mengistu was found guilty of genocide and other offences. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007. Ethiopian law defines genocide as any act committed with the intent to wipe out political and not just ethnic groups.
106 Derg
officials were accused of genocide during the trials, but only 36 of them were present in the court. Several former members of the Derg have been sentenced to death. Zimbabwe
has refused to respond to Ethiopia's request that Mengistu be extradited, which has permitted him to avoid his Ethiopian life imprisonment sentence. Mengistu supported Robert Mugabe
, the long-standing President of Zimbabwe, during his leadership of Ethiopia.
Some experts have estimated that 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed during Mengistu's rule. Amnesty International
estimates that up to 500,000 people were killed during the Ethiopian Red Terror
Human Rights Watch
describes the Red Terror as "one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa." During his reign it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning. Mengistu himself is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting them, saying that he was leading by example.
On December 23, 2005 a Dutch court ruled in a case brought against Frans van Anraat
for supplying chemicals to Iraq, that "[it] thinks and considers it legally and convincingly proven that the Kurdish population meets the requirement under the genocide conventions as an ethnic group. The court has no other conclusion than that these attacks were committed with the intent to destroy the Kurdish population of Iraq." and because he supplied the chemicals before 16 March 1988, the date of the Halabja poison gas attack
he is guilty of a war crime but not guilty of complicity in genocide.
In the 1970s, during the Indian Emergency, thousands of Sikh
s campaigning for autonomous government were imprisoned. In 1984, during an Indian Army
assault called Operation Bluestar, thousands of innocent Sikhs were killed in the Golden Temple and the Sikh Reference Library
was burned. After the October 1984 Assassination of Indira Gandhi, thousands of Sikhs were killed in the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots
by Hindu mobs The 1984 Anti-Sikh riots
have been identified as a genocide because of the mobs' targeting behavior.
, presented a report on Tibet to the International Commission of Jurists
(an NGO). The press conference address on the report states in paragraph 26 that
The report of the International Commission of Jurists (1960) is widely misquoted as stating that there was physical genocide (mass killings). It actually claims that there was only cultural genocide.
ICJ Report (1960) page 346: "The committee found that acts of genocide had been committed in Tibet in an attempt to destroy the Tibetans as a religious group, and that such acts are acts of genocide independently of any conventional obligation. The committee did not find that there was sufficient proof of the destruction of Tibetans as a race, nation or ethnic group as such by methods that can be regarded as genocide in international law".
However cultural genocide is also contested by some academics such as Barry Sautman. Tibetan is the everyday language of Tibetans in Tibet. In addition Tibetans are exempt from the one child policy.
Adam Jones
, a specialist on genocide, argued that the struggle session
s after the 1959 Tibetan uprising
may be considered genocide, based on the claim that the conflict resulted in 92,000 deaths. However, according to tibetologist Tom Grunfeld, "the veracity of such a claim is difficult to verify."
of the Tikuna people
took place in 1988, and was initially treated as homicide. During the massacre four people died, nineteen were wounded, and ten disappeared. Since 1994 it has been treated by Brazilian courts as a genocide. Thirteen men were convicted of genocide in 2001. In November 2004, after an appeal was filed before Brazil's federal court, the man initially found guilty of hiring men to carry out the genocide was acquitted, and the other men had their initial sentences of 15–25 years reduced to 12 years.
In November 2005 during an investigation by the Brazilian authorities, code-named Operation Rio Pardo, Mario Lucio Avelar, a Brazilian public prosecutor in the city of Cuiabá
, told Survival International
that he believed that there were sufficient grounds to prosecute for genocide of the Rio Pardo
Indians. In November 2006 twenty-nine people were held in custody for the alleged genocide with others such as a former police commander and the governor of Mato Grosso state implicated in the alleged.
In a newsletter published on 7 August 2006 the Indianist Missionary Council reported that: "In a plenary session, the [Brazilian] Supreme Federal Court (STF) reaffirmed that the crime known as the Haximu Massacre
[perpetrated on the Yanomami Indians in 1993] was a genocide and that the decision of a federal court to sentence miners to 19 years in prison for genocide in connection with other offenses, such as smuggling and illegal mining, is valid. It was a unanimous decision made during the judgment of Extraordinary Appeal (RE) 351487 today, the 3rd, in the morning by justices of the Supreme Court". Commenting on the case the NGO Survival International
said "The UN convention on genocide, ratified by Brazil, states that the killing 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group' is genocide. The Supreme Court's ruling is highly significant and sends an important warning to those who continue to commit crimes against indigenous peoples in Brazil."
, Pygmies were hunted down and eaten by both sides of the war, who regarded them as subhuman. Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti
pygmies, has asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity and also as an act of genocide. According to a report by Minority Rights Group International there is evidence of mass killings, cannibalism and rape. The report, which labeled these events as a campaign of extermination, linked much of the violence to beliefs about special powers held by the Bambuti. In Ituri district, rebel forces ran an operation code-named "Effacer le tableau" (to wipe the slate clean). The aim of the operation, according to witnesses, was to rid the forest of pygmies.
(2007) reported genocidal killings committed against Somalia's Bantu population and Jubba Valley
dwellers from 1991 onwards noting that "Somalia is a rare case in which genocidal acts were carried out by militias in the utter absence of a governing state structure."
(ICTY) delivered its first conviction for the crime of genocide, against General Krstić
for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide. This judgement was upheld by the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) in its February 2007 ruling in the case of Bosnia vs Serbia. However, contrary to the claim made by Bosnia, the ICJ did not find that genocide had been committed on the wider territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, limiting local genocide to the Srebrenica. Before this ruling the term Bosnian Genocide
had been used by some academics, and human rights
officials.
In 2010, Vujadin Popović
, Lieutenant Colonel
and the Chief of Security of the Drina Corps of the Bosnian Serb Army, and Ljubiša Beara
, Colonel
and Chief of Security of the same army, were convicted of genocide, extermination, murder and persecution
by the ICTY for their role in the Srebrenice massacre and sentenced to a life in prison.
German courts have handed down several convictions for genocide during the Bosnian War
. Novislav Djajic was indicted for participation in genocide, but the Higher Regional Court failed to find that there was sufficient certainty, for a criminal conviction, that he had intended to commit genocide. Nevertheless Djajic was found guilty of 14 cases of murder and one case of attempted murder. At Djajic's appeal on 23 May 1997, the Bavaria
n Appeals Chamber found that acts of genocide were committed in June 1992, confined within the administrative district of Foca
. The Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht
) of Düsseldorf, in September 1997, handed down a genocide conviction against Nikola Jorgic
, a Bosnian Serb from the Doboj
region who was the leader of a paramilitary group located in the Doboj region. He was sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment
for his involvement in genocidal actions that took place in regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, other than Srebrenica; and "On 29 November 1999, the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) of Düsseldorf condemned Maksim Sokolovic to 9 years in prison for aiding and abetting the crime of genocide and for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions".
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
(ICTR) is a court under the auspices of the United Nations
for the prosecution of offenses committed in Rwanda
during the genocide that occurred there
during April and May, 1994, commencing on April 6. The ICTR was created on November 8, 1994 by the Security Council of the United Nations to judge those people responsible for the acts of genocide and other serious violations of the international law performed in the territory of Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between January 1 and December 31, 1994.
As of mid-2011, the ICTR has convicted 57 accused persons (including 19 whose cases are on appeal) and acquitted eight. Another ten persons are still on trial while one
is awaiting trial. Nine remain at large. The first trial, of Jean-Paul Akayesu
, ended in 1998 with his conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity. This was notable as the world's first conviction for the crime of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
. Jean Kambanda
, interim Prime Minister during the genocide, pled guilty.
The on-going racial conflict in Darfur
, Sudan
, which started in 2003, was declared a "genocide" by United States Secretary of State
Colin Powell
on September 9, 2004 in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
. Since that time however, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council has followed suit. In fact, in January 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, issued a report to the Secretary-General stating that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide." Nevertheless, the Commission cautioned that "The conclusion that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as
the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide."
In March 2005, the Security Council formally referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
(ICC), taking into account the Commission report but without mentioning any specific crimes. Two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution. As of his fourth report to the Security Council, the Prosecutor has found "reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals identified [in the UN Security Council Resolution 1593] have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes", but did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute for genocide.
In April 2007, the Judges of the ICC issued arrest warrants against the former Minister of State for the Interior, Ahmad Harun, and a Militia Janjaweed
leader, Ali Kushayb
, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On July 14, 2008, prosecutors at the ICC, filed ten charges of war crimes against Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir
, three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder. The ICC's prosecutors have claimed that al-Bashir "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity. The ICC's prosecutor for Darfur, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is expected within months to ask a panel of ICC judges to issue an arrest warrant for al-Bashir. On 4 March 2009 the ICC issued a warrant for al-Bashir's arrest for crimes against humanity and crimes, but not genocide. This is the first warrant issued by the ICC against a sitting head of state.
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of...
(CPPCG) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the groups 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."
The preamble to the CPPCG not only states that "genocide is a crime under international law
International law
Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
and condemned by the civilized world", but that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity".
Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clear-cut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide is certainly not taken lightly and will almost always be controversial. The following list of genocides and alleged genocides should be understood in this context and cannot be regarded as the final word on these subjects.
Alternative meanings of genocide
Much of the debate about genocides revolves around the proper definition of the word "genocide". The exclusion of social and political groups as targets of genocide in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of GenocideConvention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of...
legal definition has been criticized by some historians and sociologists, for example M. Hassan Kakar in his book The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 argues that the international definition of genocide is too restricted, and that it should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator and quotes Chalk and Jonassohn: "Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group so defined by the perpetrator."
Some critics of the current definition of genocide under international law have also argued that the definition was partly influenced by Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, and that this is the reason why it does not include political groups.
According to R. J. Rummel
R. J. Rummel
Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination...
, genocide has 3 different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by a government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership. The legal meaning of genocide refers to the international treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This also includes actions that are not actually killings but tend to eliminate the group, such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. It is to avoid confusion regarding what meaning is intended that Rummel created the term democide
Democide
Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the...
for the third meaning.
Before 1490
Adam Jones explains, in his book Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, that people throughout history have always had the ability to see other groups as alien; he quotes Chalk and Jonassohn: "Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant 'the people' to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals. (Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 28.)"Jones continues by saying that the less a people have in common with another group the easier it is for the aliens to be defined as less than human and from there it is but a short step to an argument that says if they are a threat, then they should "be eliminated in order that we may live (Them or us)." But after making this assessment Jones continues "The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their early study, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to 'objective' facts, most previous accounts aimed rather to praise the writer's patron (normally the leader) and to emphasize the superiority of one's own gods and religious beliefs."
Scholars of antiquity differentiate between genocide and gendercide
Gendercide
Gendercide is a neologism that refers to the systematic killing of members of a specific sex.-Gendercide:Gendercide is gender-selective mass killing. The term was first used by Mary Anne Warren in her 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection...
, in which males were killed but the children (particularly the girls) and women were incorporated into the conqueror's society. Jones notes that "Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire's root-and branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and the destruction of Melos by Athens
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
during the Peloponnesian War
Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War, 431 to 404 BC, was an ancient Greek war fought by Athens and its empire against the Peloponnesian League led by Sparta. Historians have traditionally divided the war into three phases...
(fifth century BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides
Thucydides
Thucydides was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC...
in his 'Melian Dialogue
Melian dialogue
The Melian Dialogue, contained in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, is an account of the confrontation between the people of Melos, a small island in the southern Aegean Sea, and the Athenians in 416–415 BC. Melos was a neutral island, lying just east of Sparta; the Athenians wanted to...
'."
Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond
Jared Mason Diamond is an American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is currently Professor of Geography and Physiology at UCLA...
has suggested that genocidal violence may have caused the Neandertals to go extinct
Neanderthal extinction hypotheses
Neanderthal extinction hypotheses are theories about how Neanderthals became extinct around 30,000 years ago. Since their discovery, both the Neanderthals' place in the human family tree and their relation to modern Europeans has been hotly debated...
. Ronald Wright has also suggested such a genocide.
The Old Testament
Old Testament
The Old Testament, of which Christians hold different views, is a Christian term for the religious writings of ancient Israel held sacred and inspired by Christians which overlaps with the 24-book canon of the Masoretic Text of Judaism...
describes the genocides of Amalek
Amalek
The Amalekites are a people mentioned a number of times in the Hebrew Bible. They are considered to be descended from an ancestor Amalek....
ites and Midian
Midian
Midian , Madyan , or Madiam is a geographical place and a people mentioned in the Bible and in the Qur'an. It is believed to be in northwest Saudi Arabia on the east shore of the Gulf of Aqaba and the northern Red Sea...
ites. Jones quotes Jerusalem-based Holocaust Studies Professor Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer
Yehuda Bauer is a historian and scholar of the Holocaust. He is a Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.-Biography:...
: "As a Jew, I must live with the fact that the civilization I inherited ... encompasses the call for genocide in its canon." The Book of Esther
Book of Esther
The Book of Esther is a book in the Ketuvim , the third section of the Jewish Tanakh and is part of the Christian Old Testament. The Book of Esther or the Megillah is the basis for the Jewish celebration of Purim...
asserts that a genocide of Jews by Haman
Haman
Haman can be a surname which is a corruption of the German Hamann. It is also a biblical surname as described below. It also refers to:*Haman , appears in the Book of Esther and is the main antagonist in the Jewish holiday of Purim....
in ancient Persia was averted due to the efforts of Mordecai
Mordecai
Mordecai or Mordechai is one of the main personalities in the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible. He was the son of Jair, of the tribe of Benjamin.-Biblical account:...
and Esther
Esther
Esther , born Hadassah, is the eponymous heroine of the Biblical Book of Esther.According to the Bible, she was a Jewish queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus...
.
The Yu Ding
Ding (vessel)
A ding is an ancient Chinese cauldron with legs, a lid and two handles opposite each other. They were made in two shapes with round vessels having three legs and rectangular ones four....
(禹鼎) records that Liwang of Zhou
King Li of Zhou
King Li of Zhou was the tenth sovereign of the Chinese Zhou Dynasty. Estimated dates of his reign are 877–841 BC or 857–842 BC ....
(d. 828 BC) ordered his army not to leave the old and young of a rebel country alive.
Ben Kiernan
Ben Kiernan
Benedict F. Kiernan is the Whitney Griswold Professor of History, Professor of International and Area Studies and Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University. He is a prolific writer on the Cambodian genocide...
, a Yale scholar, has labelled the destruction of Carthage
Carthage
Carthage , implying it was a 'new Tyre') is a major urban centre that has existed for nearly 3,000 years on the Gulf of Tunis, developing from a Phoenician colony of the 1st millennium BC...
at the end of the Third Punic War
Third Punic War
The Third Punic War was the third and last of the Punic Wars fought between the former Phoenician colony of Carthage, and the Roman Republic...
(149–146 BC) "The First Genocide".
Ran Min
Ran Min
Ran Min , also known as Shi Min , posthumously honored by Former Yan as Heavenly Prince Daowu of Wei , courtesy name Yongzeng , nickname Jinu , was a military leader during the era of Sixteen Kingdoms in China and the only emperor of the short-lived state Ran Wei . Ran is an uncommon Chinese...
(died 352) is mostly known for his famous order to execute all of the Wu Hu
Wu Hu
Wu Hu was a Chinese term for the northern non-Chinese nomadic tribes which caused the Wu Hu uprising, and established the Sixteen Kingdoms from 304 to 439 AD.-Definition:...
.
A massacre
Massacre
A massacre is an event with a heavy death toll.Massacre may also refer to:-Entertainment:*Massacre , a DC Comics villain*Massacre , a 1932 drama film starring Richard Barthelmess*Massacre, a 1956 Western starring Dane Clark...
was said to have been committed by Xue Rengui
Xue rengui
Xue Ren'gui , formal name Xue Li but went by the courtesy name of Rengui, was one of the most famous Chinese generals during the early Tang Dynasty, due to references to him in popular literature...
(614–683) against the Tiele people
Tiele people
The Tiele or Tele , were a confederation of nine Turkic peoples living to the north of China and in Central Asia, emerging after the disintegration of the Xiongnu confederacy...
.
Konraad Elst stated that:
For its sheer magnitude in scope and death toll, coupled with its occasional (though not continuous) intention to exterminate entire Hindu communities, the Islamic campaign against Hinduism, which was never fully called off since the first naval invasion in 636 CE, can without exaggeration be termed genocide. To quote Will Durant's famous line: "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within." (Story of Civilization, vol.1, Our Oriental Heritage, New York 1972, p. 459) http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/irin/genocide.html
The Anasazi civilization in the American Southwest was destroyed in a genocide that took place circa 800 AD, suggests a new study. "The history of every one of these peoples [among the North American Indians] is a series of almost incessant struggles with neighboring tribes", Ludwik Krzywicki has observed. In his view the Iroquois
Iroquois
The Iroquois , also known as the Haudenosaunee or the "People of the Longhouse", are an association of several tribes of indigenous people of North America...
'exterminated' the Erie and 'ravaged' the Illinois.
Quoting Eric Margolis, Jones observes that in the 13th century the Mongol
Mongol Empire
The Mongol Empire , initially named as Greater Mongol State was a great empire during the 13th and 14th centuries...
horsemen of Temüjin Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....
were genocidal killers (génocidaires) who were known to kill whole nations, leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones. He ordered the extermination of the Tata Mongols, and all Kankalis
Kankalis
Kankalis or Qanqlis or Kangly were a Turkic people of Eurasia. They were three ruling clans of Pechenegs. They first appear on history as minor branch of ancient Oghuz Turks. They formed one of the five sections which Oghuz khan divided his subjects. After the fall of Pecheneg Khanate in early...
males in Bukhara "taller than a wheel" using a technique called measuring against the linchpin
Measuring against the linchpin
Measuring against the linchpin was a method of determining which enemy civilians would be beheaded, used by the Mongols and other tribes that lived in the Mongolian plateau....
. Rosanne Klass has referred to the Mongols' rule of Afghanistan as "genocide" Rogerius, a monk who survived the Mongol invasion of Europe
Mongol invasion of Europe
The resumption of the Mongol invasion of Europe, during which the Mongols attacked medieval Rus' principalities and the powers of Poland and Hungary, was marked by the Mongol invasion of Rus starting in 21 December 1237...
, pointed out not only the genocidal element of the occupation, but also that the Mongols especially "found pleasure" in humiliating women. China suffered a drastic decline in population. The Chin census of 1195 showed a population of 50 million people in north China [whereas] the first Mongol census of 1235–36 counted only 8.5 million.
The Vietnamese
Vietnamese people
The Vietnamese people are an ethnic group originating from present-day northern Vietnam and southern China. They are the majority ethnic group of Vietnam, comprising 86% of the population as of the 1999 census, and are officially known as Kinh to distinguish them from other ethnic groups in Vietnam...
committed genocide against the Cham people during the 1471 Vietnamese invasion of Champa
1471 Vietnamese invasion of Champa
1471 Vietnamese invasion of Champa under Emperor Lê Thánh Tông was a military expedition that is widely regarded as marking the downfall of Champa. The Vietnamese forces attacked and sacked the capital Vijaya, and decimated the Cham army...
, ransacking and burning Champa, slaughtering thousands of Cham people, and forcibly assimilating them into Vietnamese culture.
Americas
From the 1490s when Christopher ColumbusChristopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
set foot on the Americas to the 1890 massacre of Sioux
Sioux
The Sioux are Native American and First Nations people in North America. The term can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or any of the nation's many language dialects...
at Wounded Knee
Wounded Knee Massacre
The Wounded Knee Massacre happened on December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, USA. On the day before, a detachment of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Major Samuel M...
by the United States military, the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere may have declined, the direct cause mostly from disease, to 1.8 from as many as 100 million. In Brazil alone the indigenous population
Indigenous peoples in Brazil
The Indigenous peoples in Brazil comprise a large number of distinct ethnic groups who inhabited the country prior to the European invasion around 1500...
has declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated 3 million to some 300,000 (1997). Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. This population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Colombian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe and/or Western civilization
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
often favoring wildly higher figures."
Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic
Pandemic
A pandemic is an epidemic of infectious disease that is spreading through human populations across a large region; for instance multiple continents, or even worldwide. A widespread endemic disease that is stable in terms of how many people are getting sick from it is not a pandemic...
disease was the overwhelming direct cause of the population decline of the American natives
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
. After first contacts with Europeans
European ethnic groups
The ethnic groups in Europe are the various ethnic groups that reside in the nations of Europe. European ethnology is the field of anthropology focusing on Europe....
and Africans, some believe that the death of 90 to 95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World
Old World
The Old World consists of those parts of the world known to classical antiquity and the European Middle Ages. It is used in the context of, and contrast with, the "New World" ....
diseases such as smallpox
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
and measles
Measles
Measles, also known as rubeola or morbilli, is an infection of the respiratory system caused by a virus, specifically a paramyxovirus of the genus Morbillivirus. Morbilliviruses, like other paramyxoviruses, are enveloped, single-stranded, negative-sense RNA viruses...
. Some estimates indicate case fatality rates of 80-90% in Native American populations during smallpox epidemics.
One of the most important yet highly disputed pieces of information regarding the intentional ethnocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
of indigenous populations in the Americas was possible intentional use of disease as a biological weapon, which was first posited by British forces under the command of Jeffery Amherst. There is, however, only one documented case of germ warfare, involving British commander Jeffrey Amherst. It is uncertain whether this documented British attempt successfully infected the Indians.
Some historians argue that genocide, a crime of intent, was not the intent of European colonization while in America. The Reverend Stafford Poole
Stafford Poole
The Reverend Stafford Poole, C.M., is a priest, full-time research historian, formerly a history professor and president of St. John's Seminary College in Camarillo, California. He is known for his extensive writings about the Virgin of Guadalupe.Poole was born in Oxnard, California, the son of...
, a Catholic priest, wrote: "There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of the Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
and Armenians
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...
, to mention but two of the major victims of this century."
In his book American Holocaust, David Stannard
David Stannard
David Edward Stannard is an American historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. He is particularly known for his book American Holocaust , on the genocide of the native American population.-Early life:He was born to Florence E. Harwood Stannard and David L. Stannard,...
argues that the destruction of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, in a "string of genocide campaigns" by Europeans and their descendants, was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard's perspective has been further refined by Ward Churchill
Ward Churchill
Ward LeRoy Churchill is an author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government...
, who has said "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed." Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been challenged because he does not cite any demographic evidence to support this number, and because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. Noble David Cook, Latin Americanist and history professor at Florida International University
Florida International University
Florida International University is an American public research university in metropolitan Miami, Florida, in the United States, with its main campus in University Park...
, considers books such as Stannard's– a number of which were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage to America– to be an unproductive return to Black Legend
Black Legend
The Black Legend refers to a style of historical writing that demonizes Spain and in particular the Spanish Empire in a politically motivated attempt to morally disqualify Spain and its people, and to incite animosity against Spanish rule...
-type explanations for depopulation. According to Noble David Cook, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact."
In 2003, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez
Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías is the 56th and current President of Venezuela, having held that position since 1999. He was formerly the leader of the Fifth Republic Movement political party from its foundation in 1997 until 2007, when he became the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela...
urged Latin Americans to not celebrate the Columbus Day holiday. Chavez blamed Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...
for leading the way in the mass genocide of the Native Americans by the Spanish.
American writer David Quammen
David Quammen
David Quammen is a science, nature and travel writer whose work has appeared in publications such as National Geographic, Outside, Harper's, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times Book Review....
has likened the colonial America
Colonial America
The colonial history of the United States covers the history from the start of European settlement and especially the history of the thirteen colonies of Britain until they declared independence in 1776. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands launched major...
n policies and practices toward Native Americans
Native Americans in the United States
Native Americans in the United States are the indigenous peoples in North America within the boundaries of the present-day continental United States, parts of Alaska, and the island state of Hawaii. They are composed of numerous, distinct tribes, states, and ethnic groups, many of which survive as...
with those of Australia toward its aboriginal
Australian Aborigines
Australian Aborigines , also called Aboriginal Australians, from the latin ab originem , are people who are indigenous to most of the Australian continentthat is, to mainland Australia and the island of Tasmania...
populations, calling them "brutal, hypocritical, opportunistic, and even genocidal in the fullest sense of the word."
United States of America
Authors such as the Holocaust expert David Cesarani
David Cesarani
David Cesarani OBE is an English historian who specialises in Jewish history, especially the Holocaust. He has also written several biographies, notably Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind.-Early life:...
have argued that the government and policies of the United States of America against certain indigenous peoples in furtherance of Manifest destiny
Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny was the 19th century American belief that the United States was destined to expand across the continent. It was used by Democrat-Republicans in the 1840s to justify the war with Mexico; the concept was denounced by Whigs, and fell into disuse after the mid-19th century.Advocates of...
constituted genocide. Cesarani states that "in terms of the sheer numbers killed, the Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
Genocide exceeds that of the Holocaust". He quotes David E. Stannard
David Stannard
David Edward Stannard is an American historian and Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. He is particularly known for his book American Holocaust , on the genocide of the native American population.-Early life:He was born to Florence E. Harwood Stannard and David L. Stannard,...
, author of American Holocaust, who speaks of the "genocidal and racist horrors against the indigenous peoples that have been and are being perpetrated by many nations in the Western Hemisphere, including the United States...."
Determining how many people died as a direct result of armed conflict between Native Americans, and Europeans and their descendants, is difficult as accurate records were not always kept. Various statistics have been developed concerning the devastation of the American Indian Wars on the peoples involved. One notable study by Gregory Michno used records dealing with figures "as a direct result of" engagements and concluded that "of the 21,586 total casualties tabulated in this survey, military personnel and civilians accounted for 6,596 (31%), while Indian casualties totaled about 14,990 (69%)." for the period of 1850–90. However, Michno says he "used the army's estimates in almost every case" & "the number of casualties in this study are inherently biased toward army estimations".
In God, Greed, and Genocide: The Holocaust Through the Centuries, Grenke quotes Chalk and Jonassohn with regards to the Cherokee Trail of Tears
Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears is a name given to the forced relocation and movement of Native American nations from southeastern parts of the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830...
that "an act like the Cherokee
Cherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...
deportation would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today". The Indian Removal Act
Indian Removal Act
The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830.The Removal Act was strongly supported in the South, where states were eager to gain access to lands inhabited by the Five Civilized Tribes. In particular, Georgia, the largest state at that time, was involved in...
of 1830 led to the Trail of Tears
Trail of Tears
The Trail of Tears is a name given to the forced relocation and movement of Native American nations from southeastern parts of the United States following the Indian Removal Act of 1830...
. About 17,000 Cherokees — along with approximately 2,000 black slaves owned by Cherokees — were removed from their homes. The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with one party, estimated 4,000 deaths.
Argentina
The Conquest of the Desert
Conquest of the Desert
The Conquest of the Desert was a military campaign directed mainly by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s, which established Argentine dominance over Patagonia, which was inhabited by indigenous peoples...
was a military campaign directed mainly by General Julio Argentino Roca
Julio Argentino Roca
Alejo Julio Argentino Roca Paz was an army general who served as President of Argentina from 12 October 1880 to 12 October 1886 and again from 12 October 1898 to 12 October 1904.-Upbringing and early career:...
in the 1870s, which established Argentine dominance over Patagonia
Patagonia
Patagonia is a region located in Argentina and Chile, integrating the southernmost section of the Andes mountains to the southwest towards the Pacific ocean and from the east of the cordillera to the valleys it follows south through Colorado River towards Carmen de Patagones in the Atlantic Ocean...
, which was inhabited by indigenous peoples, leaving more than 1,300 indigenous dead.
Jens Andermann has noted that the contemporary sources on that campaign indicate that it was a genocide by the Argentine
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
government against the indigenous tribes. Others perceive the campaign as intending to suppress specifically those groups of aboriginals that refused to submit to the white government and carried out attacks on the white and mestizo civilian settlements. This recent argument – usually summarized as "Civilization or Genocide?"– questions whether the Conquest of the Desert was really intended to exterminate the aborigines.
Australia
The Black WarBlack War
The Black War is a term used to describe a period of conflict between British colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in the early nineteenth century...
was a period of conflict between the British
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
colonists and Tasmanian Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land
Van Diemen's Land
Van Diemen's Land was the original name used by most Europeans for the island of Tasmania, now part of Australia. The Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was the first European to land on the shores of Tasmania...
(now Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
) in the early years of the 19th century. The conflict, in combination with introduced diseases and other factors, had such devastating impact on the Tasmanian Aboriginal population that it was reported the Tasmanian Aborigines had been exterminated. In the 19th century, smallpox
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
was the principal cause of Aboriginal deaths. Historian Geoffrey Blainey says that by 1830 in Tasmania: "Disease had killed most of them but warfare and private violence had also been devastating."
After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos and -cide...
, Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide; however, the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect, because more recent detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction by historians who specialise in Australian history have raised questions about some of the details and interpretations in the earlier histories. In a chapter describing these developments, Ann Curthoys concludes "It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century, how best to conceptualize it, and how to consider what that historical knowledge might mean for us now, morally and intellectually, in the present."
France
In 1986 Reynald Secher wrote a controversial book entitled: A French Genocide: The Vendée, in which he argued that the actions of the French republican government during the revolt in the Vendée (1793–1796), a popular mostly Catholic uprising against the anti-clerical Republican government during the French RevolutionFrench Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
, was the first modern genocide. Secher's claims caused a minor uproar in France amongst scholars of modern French history, as mainstream authorities on the period — both French and foreign — published articles rejecting Secher's claims. Claude Langlois (of the Institute of History of the French Revolution) derides Secher's claims as "quasi-mythological". Timothy Tackett of the University of California summarizes the case as such: "In reality... the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides — initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves. The Vendeans were no more blameless than were the republicans. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate." Hugh Gough (Professor of history at University College Dublin) called Secher's book an attempt at historical revisionism
Historical revisionism
In historiography, historical revisionism is the reinterpretation of orthodox views on evidence, motivations, and decision-making processes surrounding a historical event...
unlikely to have any lasting impact.
Concerning the controversy, Michel Vovelle, a specialist on the French Revolution, remarked: "A whole literature is forming on "Franco-French genocide", starting from risky estimates of the number of fatalities in the Vendean wars: 128,000, 400,000... and why not 600,000? Despite not being specialists in the subject, historians such as Pierre Chanu have put all the weight of their great moral authority behind the development of an anathematizing discourse, and have dismissed any effort to look at the subject reasonably." Roger Price writes in a similar manner: "Some historians like Pierre Chanu, supported by the conservative media... frequently exaggerating the number of deaths they have described the repression of counter-revolutionary movements in the Vendée as heralding Nazi genocide. This essentially ahistorical, and indeed hysterical approach, can only be understood as a feature of the politics of the reactionary right of our own time." Ferenc Féhér comments that Secher draws conclusions "on the basis of almost no evidence".
Despite widespread opposition to Secher and Chanu's assessment of the war, some American scholars have cited Secher's claims in their own work. Adam Jones
Adam Jones (Canadian scholar)
Adam Jones is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC, Canada. He is executive director of the nongovernmental organization Gendercide Watch...
, cited Secher in his summary of the Vendée uprising in Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. Mark Levene, an historian who specializes in the study of genocide, cites Secher in describing the Vendée as "an archetype of modern genocide".
Philippines
In an article "We Charge Genocide: A Brief History of US in the Philippines" that appeared in the December 2005 issue of Political Affairs (an online magazine that bills itself, "Marxist Thought Online"), E. San Juan, Jr.E. San Juan, Jr.
Epifanio San Juan, Jr., also known as E. San Juan, Jr. , is a known Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist, video/film maker, editor, and poet whose works related to the Filipino Diaspora in English and Filipino languages have...
, director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Connecticut, argued that during the Philippine-American War
Philippine-American War
The Philippine–American War, also known as the Philippine War of Independence or the Philippine Insurrection , was an armed conflict between a group of Filipino revolutionaries and the United States which arose from the struggle of the First Philippine Republic to gain independence following...
(1899–1902) and pacification campaign (1902–1913), the operations launched by the U.S. against the Filipinos, an integral part of its pacification program, which claimed the lives of over a million Filipinos, constituted genocide.
In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported: "The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog...." U.S. Army Gen. Leonard Wood
Leonard Wood
Leonard Wood was a physician who served as the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Military Governor of Cuba and Governor General of the Philippines. Early in his military career, he received the Medal of Honor. Wood also holds officer service #2 in the Regular Army...
, who took part in the Moro Crater massacre
Moro Crater massacre
The Moro Crater massacre is a name given to the final phase of the First Battle of Bud Dajo, a military engagement of the Philippine-American War which took place March 10, 1906, on the isle of Jolo in the southern Philippines. Forces of the U.S...
in 1906, called for the extermination of all Filipino Muslims since, according to him, they were irretrievably fanatical.
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...
, in an exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books about the Philippines campaign says, discussing General J. Franklin Bell
J. Franklin Bell
James Franklin Bell was Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1906 to 1910.Bell was a major-general in the Regular United States Army, commanding the Department of the East, with headquarters at Governors Island, New York at the time of his death in 1919...
's own reporting that American troops were responsible for 600,000 dead men, women, and children on the island of Luzon
Luzon
Luzon is the largest island in the Philippines. It is located in the northernmost region of the archipelago, and is also the name for one of the three primary island groups in the country centered on the Island of Luzon...
alone, "If this is not a policy of genocide (no dumb letters on the dictionary meaning of the word), it will do until the real thing comes along."
Total Filipino casualties was and is still a highly-debated and politicized
Politicized issue
A politicized issue or hot-button issue is a social, economic, theological, spiritual, scientific or legal issue which has become a political issue, as a result of deliberate action or otherwise, whereby people become politically active over that issue....
number. A discussion and analysis of this is contained in John M. Gates, "War-Related Deaths in the Philippines", Pacific Historical Review. It is estimated that some 34,000 Filipino soldiers lost their lives and as many as 200,000 civilians may have died directly or indirectly as a result of the war, most due to a major cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
epidemic that broke out near its end. Another estimate, in the Encarta Encyclopedia, is that between 200,000 and 600,000 Filipinos died during the war with fewer than 5,000 American deaths. More deaths occurred during the pacification program (1902–1913) following the declaration of victory in the war. One estimate of total Filipino deaths is as high as 1.4 million.
German South-West Africa
The Herero and Namaqua GenocideHerero and Namaqua Genocide
The Herero and Namaqua Genocide is considered to have been the first genocide of the 20th century. It took place between 1904 and 1907 in German South-West Africa , during the scramble for Africa...
in German South-West Africa
German South-West Africa
German South West Africa was a colony of Germany from 1884 until 1915, when it was taken over by South Africa and administered as South West Africa, finally becoming Namibia in 1990...
(present-day Namibia
Namibia
Namibia, officially the Republic of Namibia , is a country in southern Africa whose western border is the Atlantic Ocean. It shares land borders with Angola and Zambia to the north, Botswana to the east and South Africa to the south and east. It gained independence from South Africa on 21 March...
) in 1904–1907 was the first organized state genocide according to the Whitaker Report (1985), prepared for the United Nations but not adopted; the Herero were also the first ethnic group to be subjected to genocide in the 20th century. Eighty percent of the total Herero population and 50 percent of the total Nama population were killed in a brutal scorched earth campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha
Lothar von Trotha
Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha was a German military commander widely condemned for his conduct of the Herero Wars in South-West Africa, especially for the events that led to the near-extermination of the Herero....
. In total, between 24,000 up to 100,000 Herero perished along with 10,000 Nama.
War of the Three Kingdoms
Towards the end of the War of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) the English Rump Parliament
Rump Parliament
The Rump Parliament is the name of the English Parliament after Colonel Pride purged the Long Parliament on 6 December 1648 of those members hostile to the Grandees' intention to try King Charles I for high treason....
sent the New Model Army
New Model Army
The New Model Army of England was formed in 1645 by the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War, and was disbanded in 1660 after the Restoration...
to Ireland to subdue and take revenge on the Catholic population of the country and to prevent Royalists loyal to Charles II
Charles II of England
Charles II was monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.Charles II's father, King Charles I, was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War...
from using Ireland as a base to threaten England. Initially under the command of Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who overthrew the English monarchy and temporarily turned England into a republican Commonwealth, and served as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland....
and later under other parliamentary
Roundhead
"Roundhead" was the nickname given to the supporters of the Parliament during the English Civil War. Also known as Parliamentarians, they fought against King Charles I and his supporters, the Cavaliers , who claimed absolute power and the divine right of kings...
generals, the New Model army carried this out. Coupled to the war aim of securing the country for the English Parliament were several other interrelated objectives. Punitive confiscation of the lands of Irish families involved in fighting the parliamentary forces was implemented . This became a continuation of the Elizabethan policy of encouraging Protestant settlement of Ireland, because New Model army soldiers—Protestant to a man and who were owed considerable back pay—could be paid in confiscated Irish lands rather than in cash raised through English parliamentary taxes.
During the Interregnum (1651–1660), this policy was enhanced with the passing of the Act of Settlement of Ireland
Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652
The Act for the Settlement of Ireland imposed penalties including death and land confiscation against participants and bystanders of the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and subsequent unrest.-Background:...
in 1652 whose goal was a further transfer of land from Irish to English hands. The immediate war aims and the longer term policies of the English Parliamentarians resulted in an attempt by the English to transfer the native Irish Catholic population to the western fringes of Ireland to make way for Protestant settlers. This policy has been summed up by a phrase attributed to Cromwell "To Hell or to Connaught" and has been described by historians as ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
, if not genocide.[The Act of Settlement of Ireland], and the parliamentary legislation which succeeded it the following year, is the nearest thing on paper in the English, and more broadly British, domestic record, to a programme of state-sanctioned and systematic ethnic cleansing of another people. The fact that it did not include 'total' genocide in its remit, or that it failed to put into practice the vast majority of its proposed expulsions, ultimately, however, says less about the lethal determination of its makers and more about the political, structural and financial weakness of the early modern English state. For instance, though the Act begins rather ominously by claiming that it was not its intention to extirpate the whole Irish nation, it then goes on to list five categories of people who, as participators in or alleged supporters of the 1641 rebellion and its aftermath, would automatically be forfeit of their lives. It has been suggested that as many as 100,000 people would have been liable under these headings. A further five categories—by implication an even larger body of 'passive' supporters of the rebellion—were to be spared their lives but not their property."
Great Irish Famine
During the years of the Irish Famine, Ireland produced enough food, flax and wool not only to feed and clothe its nine million people, but enough for eighteen million. A few nationalist historians argue that in this sense the famine was artificial, not caused by a shortage of food but by the British government's choice to close the ports as had been done in previous Irish crop blights; as John Mitchell put it, "The Almighty sent the potato blight... but the English created the famine".
Francis A. Boyle, a professor of International Law at the University of Illinois
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
, finding that the government violated sections (a), (b), and (c) of Article 2 of the CPPCG and committed genocide, issued a formal legal opinion to the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education
The New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education is a government agency of the U.S. state of New Jersey. Its core mission is to promote Holocaust education throughout the state by surveying, designing, encouraging and promoting Holocaust and genocide education and awareness...
on May 2, 1996, stating that "Clearly, during [the Irish Potato Famine
Irish Potato Famine (1845–1849)
In Ireland, the Great Famine was a period of mass starvation, disease and emigration between 1845 and 1852. It is also known, mostly outside Ireland, as the Irish Potato Famine...
] years [of] 1845 to 1850 the British government pursued a policy of mass starvation in Ireland with intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, and racial group commonly known as the Irish People." Law professor Charles E. Rice
Charles E. Rice
Charles Edward Rice is an American legal scholar, Catholic apologist, and author of several books. He is best known for his career at the Notre Dame Law School at Notre Dame, Indiana. He began teaching there in 1969, and in 2000 earned Professor Emeritus status...
of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac is a Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, an unincorporated community north of the city of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States...
likewise issued a formal opinion, also based on Article 2, that the government had committed genocide.
Contesting claims of genocide, Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
-born and Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
-educated historian Peter Gray concludes that UK government policy "was not a policy of deliberate genocide", but a dogmatic refusal to admit that the policy was wrong, which "amounted to a sentence of death to many thousands". Professor James S. Donnelly Jr., a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
, wrote that "...it is also my contention that while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish..."
Records show that Ireland exported food during the Famine. When Ireland had experienced a famine in 1782–83, ports were closed to keep Irish-grown food in Ireland to feed the Irish. Local food prices promptly dropped. Merchants lobbied against the export ban, but government in the 1780s overrode their protests. No such export ban happened in the 1840s.
Cecil Woodham-Smith, an authority on the Irish Famine, wrote in The Great Hunger; Ireland 1845-1849 that, "...no issue has provoked so much anger or so embittered relations between the two countries
Anglo-Irish relations
British–Irish relations, or Anglo-Irish relations, refers to the relationship between the Government of Ireland and the Government of the United Kingdom since most of Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1922 as the Irish Free State.Relations between the two states have been...
as the indisputable fact that huge quantities of food were exported from Ireland to England throughout the period when the people of Ireland were dying of starvation." Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout most of the five-year famine. However, Woodham-Smith does not accept that the famine amounted to genocide: "These misfortunes were not part of a plan to destroy the Irish nation; they fell on the people because the government of Lord John Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, KG, GCMG, PC , known as Lord John Russell before 1861, was an English Whig and Liberal politician who served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century....
was afflicted with an extraordinary inability to foresee consequences. It has been frequently declared that the parsimony of the British government during the famine was the main cause of the sufferings of the people, and parsimony was certainly carried to remarkable lengths; but obtuseness, short-sightedness and ignorance probably contributed more."
Irish historian Cormac O' Grada disagrees with the claim that the famine was genocide on two grounds: firstly, he writes, "genocide includes murderous intent and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish" . and that most people in Whitehall "hoped for better times in Ireland. and secondly accusations of genocide overlook or ignore "the enormous challenges facing relief efforts, both central, local, public and private". Cormac views that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than that of genocide. He also says that "no academic historian takes seriously any more the claim of 'genocide'", which were only supported by "a few nationalist historians".
Peaking around 8-9 million in the early 19th century, Ireland's population fell to around 4 million during the Famine, because of emigration and starvation.
Genocide scholar W.D. Rubinstein seems to agree with Cormac. In his book Genocide he wrote that: "The Irish Famine cannot in truth be described as an example of genocide, but nor, in truth, was it nineteenth-century Britain's finest hour."
Russian Empire
The Russian Tsarist Empire waged war against CircassiaCircassia
Circassia was an independent mountainous country located in the Caucasus region of Eurasia and was the largest and most important country in the Caucasus. Circassia was located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea...
in the Northwest Caucasus for nearly a hundred years, trying to get Circassia's prominent position along the Black Sea
Black Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
coast. After a century of insurgency and all-out war and continual failure to end the affair, the Tsar ordered the expulsion of most of the Muslim population of the North Caucasus. This event is remembered among Circassians as a national tragedy and is well-known among other Caucasian peoples and in Turkey as well. In the modern context of the word, there have been many claims, by Circassians, by Western historians (Colarusso, Charles King, etc.), by Turks and by Chechens that the events of the 1860s constituted one of the first "modern" horrible genocides in modern history, where a whole population is eliminated to satisfy the desires (in this case economic) of a powerful country.
Among many historians (including also John Colarusso, Charles King, etc.), Antero Leitzinger wrote in an article called "The Circassian Genocide", initially published in the Turkistan News, that a genocide committed against the Circassian nation by Czarist Russia in the 19th century has been almost entirely forgotten, and that it was the largest genocide of the 19th century. Approximately 1-1.5 million Circassians were killed, and upon the order of the Tsar, most of the Muslim population was deported (i.e., all except Ossete Muslims and Kabardins; the modern Circassians and Abazins either managed to escape or, as is the case with most, returned; at the time after the deportation, as Charles King notes in his books, travelers who searched throughout the area for Circassians could not find any left except the Kabardins), mainly to the Ottoman Empire, causing the exile of another 1.5 million Circassians and others. This effectively annihilated (or deported) 90% of the nation. Circassians were viewed as tools by the Ottoman government, and settled in restive areas whose populations had nationalist yearnings- Armenia, the Arab regions and the Balkans. Many more Circassians were killed by the policies of the Balkan states, primarily Serbia and Bulgaria, which became independent at that time. Still more Circassians were forcefully assimilated by nationalist Muslim states (Turkey, Syria, Iraq, etc.) who looked upon non-Turk/Arab ethnicity as a foreign presence and a threat.
In May 1994, the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin
Boris Yeltsin
Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Originally a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin emerged under the perestroika reforms as one of Gorbachev's most powerful political opponents. On 29 May 1990 he was elected the chairman of...
admitted that resistance
Resistance movement
A resistance movement is a group or collection of individual groups, dedicated to opposing an invader in an occupied country or the government of a sovereign state. It may seek to achieve its objects through either the use of nonviolent resistance or the use of armed force...
to the tsarist forces was legitimate, but he did not recognize "the guilt of the tsarist government for the genocide." In 1997 and 1998, the leaders of Kabardino-Balkaria
Kabardino-Balkaria
The Kabardino-Balkar Republic , or Kabardino-Balkaria , is a federal subject of Russia located in the North Caucasus. Population: -Geography:The republic is situated in the North Caucasus mountains, with plains in the northern part....
and of Adygea sent appeals to the Duma
Duma
A Duma is any of various representative assemblies in modern Russia and Russian history. The State Duma in the Russian Empire and Russian Federation corresponds to the lower house of the parliament. Simply it is a form of Russian governmental institution, that was formed during the reign of the...
to reconsider the situation and to issue the needed apology; to date, there has been no response from Moscow. In October 2006, the Adygeyan public organizations of Russia, Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Syria, the USA, Belgium, Canada and Germany sent the president of the European Parliament
European Parliament
The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union . Together with the Council of the European Union and the Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU and it has been described as one of the most powerful legislatures in the world...
a letter with a request to recognize the genocide against Adygean (Circassian) people.
On 5 July 2005 the Circassian Congress, an organisation that unites representatives of the various Circassian peoples in the Russian Federation, called on Moscow first to acknowledge and then to apologize for Tsarist policies that Circassians say constituted a genocide. Their appeal pointed out that "according to the official tsarist documents more than 400,000 Circassians were killed, 497,000 were forced to flee abroad to Turkey, and only 80,000 were left alive in their native area." The movement has since been campaigning for the recognition of the "Circassian genocide". Nevertheless, whether it is considered genocide or not, just as is the case with the Armenians and Jews, the Circassians view the memory of the brutal expulsions and killings at the hands of Russia and the suffering that the Russians inflicted upon them as a central part of the Circassian identity.
Qing empire
The Dzungar (or Zunghar) are Oirat MongolsOirats
Oirats are the westernmost group of the Mongols who unified several tribes origin whose ancestral home is in the Altai region of western Mongolia. Although the Oirats originated in the eastern parts of Central Asia, the most prominent group today is located in the Republic of Kalmykia, a federal...
who lived in an area that stretched from the west end of the Great Wall of China to present-day eastern Kazakhstan, and from present-day northern Kyrgyzstan to southern Siberia (most of this area is called Xinjiang nowadays) were the last nomadic empire
Nomadic empire
Nomadic empires, sometimes also called Steppe Empires, Central or Inner Asian Empires, are the empires erected by the bow-wielding, horse-riding, nomadic peoples in the Eurasian steppe, from Classical Antiquity to the Early Modern era .The nomadic or semi-nomadic Cimmerians, Avars, Magyars,...
to threaten China, which they did from the early 17th century to the middle of the 18th century. After a series of inconclusive military conflicts that started in the 1680s, the Dzungars were subjugated by the Manchu
Manchu
The Manchu people or Man are an ethnic minority of China who originated in Manchuria . During their rise in the 17th century, with the help of the Ming dynasty rebels , they came to power in China and founded the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which...
-led Qing dynasty
Qing Dynasty
The Qing Dynasty was the last dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 with a brief, abortive restoration in 1917. It was preceded by the Ming Dynasty and followed by the Republic of China....
(1644–1911) in the late 1750s. According to Qing scholar Wei Yuan
Wei Yuan
Wei Yuan , born Wei Yuanda , courtesy names Moshen and Hanshi , was a Chinese scholar from Shaoyang, Hunan. He moved to Yangzhou in 1831, where he remained for the rest of his life. Wei obtained the provincial degree in the Imperial examinations and subsequently worked in the secretariat of...
, 40% of the 600,000 Zunghar people were killed by smallpox
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
, 20% fled to Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
or sought refuge among the Kazakh
Kazakhs
The Kazakhs are a Turkic people of the northern parts of Central Asia ....
tribes, and 30% were killed by the army. Clarke has argued that the Qing campaign in 1757-58 "amounted to the complete destruction of not only the Zunghar state but of the Zunghars as a people." Historian Peter Perdue has attributed the decimation of the Dzungars to a "deliberate use of massacre" and has described it as an "ethnic genocide". Mark Levene, a historian whose recent research interests focus on genocide, has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was "arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence."
Congo free state
See Congo Free StateCongo Free State
The Congo Free State was a large area in Central Africa which was privately controlled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Its origins lay in Leopold's attracting scientific, and humanitarian backing for a non-governmental organization, the Association internationale africaine...
, death toll estimates range from 5 million to over 20 million.
1915 to 1950
In 1915, during World War I, the concept of Crimes against humanity was introduced into international relations for the first time when the Allied PowersAllies of World War I
The Entente Powers were the countries at war with the Central Powers during World War I. The members of the Triple Entente were the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire; Italy entered the war on their side in 1915...
sent a correspondence to the government of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
, a member of the Central Powers
Central Powers
The Central Powers were one of the two warring factions in World War I , composed of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria...
, over massacres the Allies alleged were taking place within the Empire. (For more details see the section Ottoman Empire (Turkey)).
Ottoman Empire/Turkey
On May 24, 1915, the Allied Powers (Britain, France, and Russia) jointly issued a statement explicitly charging for the first time ever another government of committing "a crime against humanityCrime against humanity
Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings...
" in reference to that regime's persecution of its Christian minorities including Armenians
Armenians
Armenian people or Armenians are a nation and ethnic group native to the Armenian Highland.The largest concentration is in Armenia having a nearly-homogeneous population with 97.9% or 3,145,354 being ethnic Armenian....
, Assyrians
Assyrian people
The Assyrian people are a distinct ethnic group whose origins lie in ancient Mesopotamia...
and Greeks
Greeks
The Greeks, also known as the Hellenes , are a nation and ethnic group native to Greece, Cyprus and neighboring regions. They also form a significant diaspora, with Greek communities established around the world....
among others. Many researches consider these events to be part of the same policy of planned ethnoreligious purification of the Turkish state followed by the Young Turks
Young Turks
The Young Turks , from French: Les Jeunes Turcs) were a coalition of various groups favouring reformation of the administration of the Ottoman Empire. The movement was against the absolute monarchy of the Ottoman Sultan and favoured a re-installation of the short-lived Kanûn-ı Esâsî constitution...
.
This joint statement stated:
- "[i]n view of these new crimes of TurkeyOttoman EmpireThe Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
against humanity and civilization, the Allied GovernmentsAllies of World War IThe Entente Powers were the countries at war with the Central Powers during World War I. The members of the Triple Entente were the United Kingdom, France, and the Russian Empire; Italy entered the war on their side in 1915...
announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman GovernmentOttoman EmpireThe Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres".
Armenian
The Armenian Genocide ' onMouseout='HidePop("3617")' href="/topics/Romanization_of_Armenian">translit.:
Romanization of Armenian
- Hübschmann-Meillet :In linguistic literature on Classical Armenian, the commonly used transliteration is that of Hübschmann-Meillet .It uses a dot above mark to express the aspirates, t῾, ch῾, č῾, p῾, k῾...
; )-—also called a host of other names refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian
Armenians
Armenian people or Armenians are a nation and ethnic group native to the Armenian Highland.The largest concentration is in Armenia having a nearly-homogeneous population with 97.9% or 3,145,354 being ethnic Armenian....
population of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
during and just after World War I. It was implemented through wholesale massacres and deportations, with the deportations consisting of forced marches
Death march
A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees. Those marching must walk over long distances for an extremely long period of time and are not supplied with food or water...
under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees. The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and a half million.
On 15 September 2005, a United States Congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...
, which did not pass, called upon the President to "ensure that the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian Genocide, and for other purposes."
On 16 December 2003, the BBC reported that, "The Swiss lower house of parliament has voted to describe the mass killings of Armenians during the last years of the Ottoman Empire as genocide. [...] Fifteen countries have now agreed to label the killings as genocide. They include France [in 2001], Argentina and Russia." On 12 October 2006, French lawmakers "approved a bill making it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during and after World War I amounted to genocide. Turkey quickly objected, with its Foreign Ministry saying that the decision "dealt a heavy blow" to Turkish-French relations and 'created great disappointment in our country.'"
The Armenian and their distribution throughout Anatolia during the Ottoman Empire and before (largely a result of Persian scorched earth tactics in a 16th century war in the area) should be considered. The resources published in those years are telling various numbers. Very few of them actually state that there were over 2,000,000 Armenians back then, which is contrary to genocide allegations. However, that was only the maximum estimate, and even a considerably lower number would still classify as genocide due to motives, large amounts killed, and so on.
In 2005, Turkey made a proposal to form a joint historian committee between Turkish, Armenian and historians of various nationalities, who would aim to shed light on the issue of whether this was a genocide or not. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was quoted to say that "Turkey would be willing to face whatever the result the research produces".
Assyrian
The Assyrian Genocide
Assyrian genocide
The Assyrian Genocide refers to the mass slaughter of the Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac population of the Ottoman Empire during the 1890s, the First World War, and the period of 1922-1925...
(also known as Sayfo or Seyfo; Aramaic
Syriac language
Syriac is a dialect of Middle Aramaic that was once spoken across much of the Fertile Crescent. Having first appeared as a script in the 1st century AD after being spoken as an unwritten language for five centuries, Classical Syriac became a major literary language throughout the Middle East from...
: ܩܛܠܐ ܕܥܡܐ ܐܬܘܪܝܐ or ܣܝܦܐ) was committed against the Assyrian population of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
during the First World War by the Young Turks
Young Turks
The Young Turks , from French: Les Jeunes Turcs) were a coalition of various groups favouring reformation of the administration of the Ottoman Empire. The movement was against the absolute monarchy of the Ottoman Sultan and favoured a re-installation of the short-lived Kanûn-ı Esâsî constitution...
. The Assyrian
Assyrian people
The Assyrian people are a distinct ethnic group whose origins lie in ancient Mesopotamia...
population of northern Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
(Tur Abdin
Tur Abdin
Tur Abdin is a hilly region of south east Turkey incorporating the eastern half of Mardin Province, and Şırnak Province west of the Tigris, on the border with Syria. The name 'Tur Abdin' is from the Syriac language meaning 'mountain of the servants '. Tur Abdin is of great importance to Syriac...
, Hakkari
Hakkari Province
Hakkâri Province is a province in the south east corner of Turkey. The administrative centre is located in the city of Hakkâri . The province covers an area of 7,121 km² and has a population of 251,302 . The province had a population of 236,581 in 2000.The province was created in 1936 out of...
, Van
Van Province
Van Province is a province in eastern Turkey, between Lake Van and the Iranian border. It is 19,069 km2 in area and had a population of 1,035,418 at the end of 2010....
, Siirt
Siirt Province
Siirt Province is a province of Turkey, located in the southeast. The province borders Bitlis to the north, Batman to the west, Mardin to the southwest, Şırnak to the south, and Van to the east. It has an area of 5,406 km² and a total population of 300,695...
region in modern-day southeastern Turkey and Urmia
Urmia
- Demographics :According to official census of 2006, the population of Urmia is about 871,204.- Language :The population of Urmia is mainly Azerbaijani people, with Kurdish, Assyrian Christian, and Armenian minorities...
region in northwestern Iran) was forcibly relocated and massacred by Ottoman (Turkish
Turkish people
Turkish people, also known as the "Turks" , are an ethnic group primarily living in Turkey and in the former lands of the Ottoman Empire where Turkish minorities had been established in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Greece, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Romania...
and allied Kurdish
Kurdish people
The Kurdish people, or Kurds , are an Iranian people native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey...
) forces between 1914 and 1920 under the regime of the Young Turks. This genocide is considered to be a part of the same policy of extermination as the Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...
and Greek genocide. The Assyro-Chaldean National Council stated in a December 4, 1922, memorandum that the total death toll is unknown, but it estimates that about 750,000 "Assyro-Chaldeans" died between 1914–1918.
Greek
The Greek genocide refers to the fate of the Greek
Ottoman Greeks
Ottoman Greeks were ethnic Greeks who lived in the Ottoman Empire , the Republic of Turkey's predecessor...
population of the Ottoman Empire during and in the aftermath of World War I (1914–1923). Like Armenians and Assyrians, the Greeks were subjected to various forms of persecution
Persecution
Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of an individual or group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution, ethnic persecution, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these terms. The inflicting of suffering, harassment, isolation,...
including massacres, expulsion
Population transfer
Population transfer is the movement of a large group of people from one region to another by state policy or international authority, most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion...
s, and death marches by Young Turks
Young Turks
The Young Turks , from French: Les Jeunes Turcs) were a coalition of various groups favouring reformation of the administration of the Ottoman Empire. The movement was against the absolute monarchy of the Ottoman Sultan and favoured a re-installation of the short-lived Kanûn-ı Esâsî constitution...
. George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office, among other diplomats, noted the massacres and deportations of Greeks during the post-Armistice period. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks may have died during this period as a result of these persecutions.
Dersim Kurds
The Dersim massacre
Dersim Massacre
The Dersim Massacre took place in 1937 and 1938 in Dersim, now called Tunceli Province, in Turkey. It was the outcome of a Turkish military campaign against the Dersim Rebellion by local ethnic minority groups against Turkey's Resettlement Law of 1934...
refers to the depopulation of Dersim in Turkish Kurdistan
Turkish Kurdistan
Turkish Kurdistan is an unofficial name for the southeastern part of Turkey, which is inhabited predominantly by ethnic Kurds. The area covers between 190,000 to 230,000 km² , or nearly a third of Turkey...
, in 1937-1938, in which approximately 65,000-70,000 Alevi Kurds were killed and thousands were driven into exile. A key component of the Turkification
Turkification
Turkification is a term used to describe a process of cultural or political change in which something or someone who is not a Turk becomes one, voluntarily or involuntarily...
process was the policy of massive population resettlement. Referring to the main policy document in this context, the 1934 law on resettlement, a policy targeting the region of Dersim as one of its first test cases, with disastrous consequences for the local population. Dersim genocide discussed in the European Parliament in Brussels
Soviet Union
There are several documented instances of unnatural mass death occurring in the Soviet Union. These include the Soviet-wide famines in the early 1920s and early 1930s and deportations of ethnic minorities.Katyn Massacres
Dr. Michael Ellman claims that the 'national operations
Mass operations of the NKVD
Mass operations of the NKVD were carried out during the Great Purge and targeted specific categories of people. As a rule, they were carried out according to the corresponding order of the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Nikolai Yezhov....
' of the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
, particularly the 'Polish operation
Polish operation of the NKVD
The Genocide of Poles in the Soviet Union often referred to as, the Polish operation of the NKVD, was a coordinated action of the Soviet NKVD and the Communist Party in 1937–1938 against the entire Polish minority living in the Soviet Union, representing only 0.4 percent of Soviet citizens...
', may constitute genocide as defined by the UN convention. The terror against the church may also qualify.
In 2009, Poland received documents from Ukraine which show that the aim of the Katyn massacre
Katyn massacre
The Katyn massacre, also known as the Katyn Forest massacre , was a mass execution of Polish nationals carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs , the Soviet secret police, in April and May 1940. The massacre was prompted by Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to execute all members of...
of over 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
in 1940 was to deprive Poland
Second Polish Republic
The Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; a period in Polish history in which Poland was restored as an independent state. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland , the Polish state was...
of a whole class of intellectuals, officers, landowners, and others.
Decossackisation
During the Russian Civil War
Russian Civil War
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...
the Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
s engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Don Cossacks
Don Cossacks
Don Cossacks were Cossacks who settled along the middle and lower Don.- Etymology and origins :The Don Cossack Host was a frontier military organization from the end of the 16th until the early 20th century....
. The most reliable estimates indicate that out of a population of three million, between 300,000 and 500,000 were killed or deported in 1919–20.
Holodomor
The Soviet famine of 1932-1933
Soviet famine of 1932-1933
The Soviet famine of 1932–1933 killed many millions in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union. These areas included Ukraine, Northern Caucasus, Volga Region and Kazakhstan, the South Urals, and West Siberia...
that affected Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
, Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the ninth largest country in the world, it is also the world's largest landlocked country; its territory of is greater than Western Europe...
, and some densely populated regions of Russia, has a special connotation in Ukraine where it is called the Holodomor
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
. The famine was caused by the confiscation of the whole 1933 harvest in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, and some other parts of the Soviet Union, leaving the peasants too little to feed themselves. As a result, an estimated ten million died Soviet-wide, including over seven million in Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million elsewhere. In addition to the requisitioning of crops in Ukraine, all food was confiscated by Soviet authorities. Any and all aid and food was prohibited from entering the regions affected. Ukraine's Yuschenko's administration was attempting to have the latter recognised as an act of genocide. This move is opposed by the Russian government and some members of the Ukrainian parliament. In November 2006 during a remembrance ceremony held in Kiev, a big board listed ten other countries that recognised the Holodomor
Holodomor
The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR between 1932 and 1933. During the famine, which is also known as the "terror-famine in Ukraine" and "famine-genocide in Ukraine", millions of Ukrainians died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of...
as a genocide: Australia, Argentina, Georgia, Estonia, Italy, Canada, Lithuania, Poland, USA, Hungary. A Ukrainian court found Joseph Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Stanislav Kosior, Pavel Postyshev, Vlas Chubar and Mendel Khatayevich guilty of genocide on 13 January 2010 As of 2010, Moscow's official position is that the famine took place, but it is not an ethnic genocide; current pro-Russian Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych
Viktor Yanukovych
Viktor Fedorovych Yanukovych is a Ukrainian politician who has been the President of Ukraine since February 2010.Yanukovych served as the Governor of Donetsk Oblast from 1997 to 2002...
has supported this position.
Post-World War II deportations of North Caucasian and Baltic Sea peoples
The Stalinist deportations
Population transfer in the Soviet Union
Population transfer in the Soviet Union may be classified into the following broad categories: deportations of "anti-Soviet" categories of population, often classified as "enemies of workers," deportations of entire nationalities, labor force transfer, and organized migrations in opposite...
are also extremely controversial. During and after World War II, many minority ethnic groups, especially those from the North Caucasus, were exiled to Siberia, usually involving massacres as well. In many cases the targeted group was accused of collaborating with the Nazis. In some cases this was correct, as was the case with the Kalmyks, but with others, such as the deportation of the Chechens, it is usually discredited.
According to some authors, such as John B. Dunlop or Tony Wood Chechevitsa (or "Operation Lentil
Operation Lentil (Caucasus)
Operation Lentil was the Soviet expulsion of the whole of the native Chechen and Ingush populations of the North Caucasus to Siberia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan during World War II....
" in Russian, according to Tony Wood, its first two syllables "point a finger at its intended targets", though while the Chechens were the main targets, they were not the only victims) is particularly troubling. The operation is referred to by Chechens often as "Aardakh" (the Exodus). It was initiated on October 13, 1943 when about 120,000 men were moved into the Republic of Checheno-Ingushetia, supposedly for mending bridges. On February 23, 1944 (on Red Army day), the entire population was summoned to local party buildings where they were told they were going to be deported as punishment for their alleged collaboration with the Germans. The inhabitants were rounded up and imprisoned in Studebaker trucks and sent to Siberia. Many times, resistance was met with slaughter, and in one such instance, in the aul of Khaibakh, about 700 people were locked in a barn and burned to death by NKVD general Gveshiani, who was praised for this and promised a medal by Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Beria
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was a Georgian Soviet politician and state security administrator, chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus under Joseph Stalin during World War II, and Deputy Premier in the postwar years ....
. By the next summer, Checheno-Ingushetia was dissolved; a number of Chechen and Ingush placenames were replaced with Russian ones; mosques and graveyards were destroyed, and a massive campaign to burn numerous historical Chechen texts was nearly complete (leaving the world depleted of what was more or less the only source of central Caucasian literature and historical texts except for sparse texts about the Chechens, Ingush, etc., not written by themselves, but by Georgians) Throughout the North Caucasus, about 700,000 (according to Dalkhat Ediev, 724297 , of which the majority, 412,548, were Chechens, along with 96,327 Ingush, 104,146 Kalmyks, 39,407 Balkars and 71,869 Karachais). Many died on the trip, and the extremely harsh environment of Siberia (especially considering the amount of exposure) killed many more. The NKVD, supplying the Russian perspective, gives the statistic of 144,704 people killed in 1944-1948 alone (with a death rate of 23.5% for all groups), though this is dismissed by many authors such as Tony Wood as a far understatement . Estimates for Chechen deaths alone (excluding the NKVD statistic), range from about 170,000 to 200,000 , thus ranging from over a third of the total Chechen population to nearly half being killed (of those that were deported, not counting those killed on the spot) in those 4 years alone (death rates for other groups during those four years hover around 20%). In addition to being recognized by the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, the European Union Parliament also recognized it as a genocide in 2004.
Estonia attempted to charge Soviet-era officials with genocide on the grounds that the exiles to Siberia constituted genocide. A memorial at Vilna in Lithuania is dedicated to the genocide victims of Stalin as well as Hitler, and the state-run Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania focuses on Stalin's imprisonment and deportation of Lithuanians.
Croatia
After the Nazi invasion of the Kingdom of YugoslaviaKingdom of Yugoslavia
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a state stretching from the Western Balkans to Central Europe which existed during the often-tumultuous interwar era of 1918–1941...
, Nazis and fascists established the puppet Croatian state known as Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia
Independent State of Croatia
The Independent State of Croatia was a World War II puppet state of Nazi Germany, established on a part of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. The NDH was founded on 10 April 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers. All of Bosnia and Herzegovina was annexed to NDH, together with some parts...
) or NDH. Immediately after its establishment, the NDH began a terror campaign against Serbs, Jews and Romani people. From 1941 to 1945, when Josip Broz Tito
Josip Broz Tito
Marshal Josip Broz Tito – 4 May 1980) was a Yugoslav revolutionary and statesman. While his presidency has been criticized as authoritarian, Tito was a popular public figure both in Yugoslavia and abroad, viewed as a unifying symbol for the nations of the Yugoslav federation...
's partisans liberated Croatia, the Ustashe regime killed approximately 300,000-350,000 people, mostly Serbs and almost the entire Jewish and Romani population, many of them in the Jasenovac
Jasenovac concentration camp
Jasenovac concentration camp was the largest extermination camp in the Independent State of Croatia and occupied Yugoslavia during World War II...
concentration camp. Helen Fein
Helen Fein
Helen Fein is a historical sociologist, Professor, specialized on genocide, human rights, collective violence and other issues. She is an author and editor of 12 books and monographs, Associate of International Security Program , a founder and first President of the International Association of...
has estimated that the Ustashe killed virtually every Romani in the country.
Some also consider the crimes of the Chetniks
Chetniks
Chetniks, or the Chetnik movement , were Serbian nationalist and royalist paramilitary organizations from the first half of the 20th century. The Chetniks were formed as a Serbian resistance against the Ottoman Empire in 1904, and participated in the Balkan Wars, World War I, and World War II...
in Bosnia against non-Serbs to constitute acts of Genocide.
Dominican Republic
In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of Haitians living in the Dominican RepublicDominican Republic
The Dominican Republic is a nation on the island of La Hispaniola, part of the Greater Antilles archipelago in the Caribbean region. The western third of the island is occupied by the nation of Haiti, making Hispaniola one of two Caribbean islands that are shared by two countries...
. The Parsley Massacre
Parsley Massacre
In October 1937, Dominican President Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of the Haitian population living in the borderlands with Haiti. The violence resulted in the killing of 20,000On October 2, 1937, Trujillo had ordered 20,000 Haitian cane workers executed because they could not roll the "R"...
, known in the Dominican Republic as "El Corte" (the Cutting), lasted approximately five days. Trujillo had his soldiers apply parsley to suspected Haitians and they would ask, "What is this?" Spanish speaking people would be able to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley perfectly, "perejil". In Haitian Creole, the word for parsley is "persil". Those who would have trouble pronouncing "perejil" would be assumed to be Haitian and slaughtered. The violence resulted in the deaths of 20,000 to 30,000 people.
Nazi Germany and occupied Europe
International law
Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
s, defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, with the promulgation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), those criminals who were prosecuted after the war in international courts, for taking part in the Holocaust were found guilty of crimes against humanity and other more specific crimes like murder. Nevertheless the Holocaust is universally recognized to have been a genocide and the term, that had been coined the year before by Raphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. He is best known for his work against genocide, a word he coined in 1943 from the root words genos and -cide...
, appeared in the indictment of the 24 Nazi leaders, Count 3, stated that all the defendants had "conducted deliberate and systematic genocide – namely, the extermination of racial and national groups...."
The term "the Holocaust" is generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist German Workers Party
National Socialist German Workers Party
The National Socialist German Workers' Party , commonly known in English as the Nazi Party, was a political party in Germany between 1920 and 1945. Its predecessor, the German Workers' Party , existed from 1919 to 1920...
in Germany led by Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
. A majority of scholars do not include other groups in the definition of the Holocaust, reserving the term to refer only to the genocide of the Jews, or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...
."
The Holocaust was accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society
Nuremberg Laws
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were antisemitic laws in Nazi Germany introduced at the annual Nuremberg Rally of the Nazi Party. After the takeover of power in 1933 by Hitler, Nazism became an official ideology incorporating scientific racism and antisemitism...
was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps
Nazi concentration camps
Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime...
were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...
conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen
Einsatzgruppen were SS paramilitary death squads that were responsible for mass killings, typically by shooting, of Jews in particular, but also significant numbers of other population groups and political categories...
murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Romani were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal nation."
Other targets of the Nazi mass murder or "Nazi genocidal policy", included Slavs (Poles
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
, Russians
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
, Ukrainians
Ukrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...
, Belarusians
Belarusians
Belarusians ; are an East Slavic ethnic group who populate the majority of the Republic of Belarus. Introduced to the world as a new state in the early 1990s, the Republic of Belarus brought with it the notion of a re-emerging Belarusian ethnicity, drawn upon the lines of the Old Belarusian...
, Serbs
Serbs
The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...
, and others), Romani people (see Porajmos
Porajmos
The Porajmos was the attempt made by Nazi Germany, the Independent State of Croatia, Horthy's Hungary and their allies to exterminate the Romani people of Europe during World War II...
), mentally ill (see T-4 Euthanasia Program), Homosexuals and "sexual deviants", Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The religion reports worldwide membership of over 7 million adherents involved in evangelism, convention attendance of over 12 million, and annual...
, and political opponents. R. J. Rummel
R. J. Rummel
Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination...
estimates that 16,315,000 people died as a result of genocide, just over 10.5 million Slavs, just under 5.3 million Jews, 258,000 Romani and 220,000 homosexuals. Donald Niewyk suggests that the broadest definition would produce a death toll of 17 million. A figure of 26 million is given in Service d'Information des Crimes de Guerre: Crimes contre la Personne Humain, Camps de Concentration. Paris, 1946, p. 197. Adam Jones has argued that the Nazi killing of 2.8 million Soviet POWs in eight months in 1941-2 was an act of "gendercide" (since only men were killed) and that it "vies with the genocide in Rwanda as the most concentrated mass killing in human history."
In the longer term, the Nazis wanted to exterminate some 30–45 million Slavs. According to Roger Chickering, "Had the Germans won the war, they would have undertaken the largest genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
in history." Some historians speak of the siege of Leningrad
Siege of Leningrad
The Siege of Leningrad, also known as the Leningrad Blockade was a prolonged military operation resulting from the failure of the German Army Group North to capture Leningrad, now known as Saint Petersburg, in the Eastern Front theatre of World War II. It started on 8 September 1941, when the last...
operations in terms of genocide, as a "racially motivated starvation policy" that became an integral part of the unprecedented German war of extermination against populations of the Soviet Union generally.
Partition of India in 1947
During the 1947 Partition of IndiaPartition of India
The Partition of India was the partition of British India on the basis of religious demographics that led to the creation of the sovereign states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India on 14 and 15...
millions of Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
s, Hindu
Hindu
Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...
s and Sikh
Sikh
A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...
s were slaughtered based on being on the wrong side of the newly formed border. When the partition lines were drawn, many Muslims who found themselves on the Indian side of the border were targeted by Sikh and Hindu mobs. Similarly, many Sikhs and Hindus suffered at the hands of Muslim mobs in Pakistan. Estimates of the total number of dead vary from 500,000 to 1 million. In addition approximately 7 million Muslims migrated to Pakistan while approximately the same number of Hindus and Sikhs migrated to India. The violence was especially gruesome in the densely populated plains of Punjab
Punjab region
The Punjab , also spelled Panjab |water]]s"), is a geographical region straddling the border between Pakistan and India which includes Punjab province in Pakistan and the states of the Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and some northern parts of the National Capital Territory of Delhi...
. At the end of the Partition violence, very few Muslims remained in Indian Punjab, and very few Hindus and Sikhs remained in Pakistani Punjab. The situation was comparatively better in the other partitioned province of Bengal
Bengal
Bengal is a historical and geographical region in the northeast region of the Indian Subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. Today, it is mainly divided between the sovereign land of People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, although some regions of the previous...
.
Republic of China and Tibet
The KuomintangKuomintang
The Kuomintang of China , sometimes romanized as Guomindang via the Pinyin transcription system or GMD for short, and translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party is a founding and ruling political party of the Republic of China . Its guiding ideology is the Three Principles of the People, espoused...
's Republic of China
Republic of China
The Republic of China , commonly known as Taiwan , is a unitary sovereign state located in East Asia. Originally based in mainland China, the Republic of China currently governs the island of Taiwan , which forms over 99% of its current territory, as well as Penghu, Kinmen, Matsu and other minor...
government supported Muslim warlord
Warlord
A warlord is a person with power who has both military and civil control over a subnational area due to armed forces loyal to the warlord and not to a central authority. The term can also mean one who espouses the ideal that war is necessary, and has the means and authority to engage in war...
Ma Bufang
Ma Bufang
Ma Bufang was a prominent Muslim Ma clique warlord in China during the Republic of China era, ruling the northwestern province of Qinghai. His rank was Lieutenant-general...
when he launched seven expeditions into Golog, causing the death of thousands of Tibetans.
Author Uradyn Erden Bulag called the events that followed genocidal and David Goodman called them ethnic cleansing. One Tibetan counted the number of times Ma attacked him, remembering the seventh attack which made life impossible. Ma was highly anti-communist, and he and his army wiped out many Tibetans in the northeast and eastern Qinghai, and also destroyed Tibetan Buddhist Temples. Ma also patronized the Panchen Lama
Panchen Lama
The Panchen Lama , or Bainqên Erdê'ni , is the highest ranking Lama after the Dalai Lama in the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism...
, who was exiled from Tibet by the Dalai Lama's government.
1951 to 2000
Universal acceptance of international lawInternational law
Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
s, defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, with the promulgation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). The CPPCG was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948 and came into effect on 12 January 1951 (Resolution 260 (III)). After the minimum 20 countries became parties to the Convention, it came into force as international law on 12 January 1951. At that time however, only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) were parties to the treaty, which caused the Convention to languish for over four decades.
Expulsion of Germans after World War II
With at least 12 million Germans directly involved, possibly 14 million or more, it was the largest movement or transfer of any single ethnic population in modern history and the largest among the, post-war expulsionsWorld War II evacuation and expulsion
Forced deportation, mass evacuation and displacement of peoples took place in many of the countries involved in World War II. These were caused both by the direct hostilities between Axis and Allied powers, and the border changes enacted in the pre-war settlement...
in Central and Eastern Europe (which displaced more than twenty million people in total). Estimates of the total number of dead range from 500,000 to 2,000,000, where the higher figures include deaths from famine and disease as well as from violent acts. Many German civilians were also sent to internment and labor camps. RJ Rummel estimates that 1,585,000 Germans were killed in Poland and 197,000 were killed in Czechoslovakia. The events have been usually classified as population transfer
Population transfer
Population transfer is the movement of a large group of people from one region to another by state policy or international authority, most frequently on the basis of ethnicity or religion...
, or as ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing is a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic orreligious group from certain geographic areas....
.
Martin Shaw (2007) and W.D. Rubinstein (2004) describe the expulsions as genocide.
Felix Ermacora
Felix Ermacora
Felix Ermacora was the leading human rights expert of Austria and a member of the Austrian People's Party...
writing in 1991, (in line with a minority of legal scholars, considered ethnic cleansing to be genocide) and stated that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was genocide.
Australia 1900-1969
Sir Ronald WilsonRonald Wilson
Sir Ronald Darling Wilson, AC, KBE, CMG, QC was a distinguished Australian lawyer, judge and social activist serving on the High Court of Australia between 1979 and 1989 and as the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission between 1990 and 1997.Wilson is probably best known as...
, former president of Australia's Human Rights Commission thinks that Australia's "Stolen Generation
Stolen Generation
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments...
" — where from 1900 to 1970, 20,000 to 25,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their natural families (see the Bringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home
Bringing Them Home is the title of the Australian "Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families"...
report) — "It clearly was attempted genocide ... [because it] was believed that the Aboriginal people would die out". However the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Not only has the number of children removed from their parents been questioned, but also the intent and effects of the government policy.
Zanzibar
In 1964, towards the end of the Zanzibar RevolutionZanzibar Revolution
The Zanzibar Revolution by local African revolutionaries in 1964 overthrew the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government. An ethnically diverse state consisting of a number of islands off the east coast of Tanganyika, Zanzibar had been granted independence by Britain in 1963...
—which led to the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar and his mainly Arab government by local African revolutionaries—John Okello
John Okello
John Gideon Okello was an East African revolutionary and the leader of the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964. This revolution overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah and led to the proclamation of Zanzibar as a republic.-Youth:...
claimed in radio speeches to have killed or imprisoned tens of thousands of his "enemies and stooges," but actual estimates of the number of deaths vary greatly, from "hundreds" to 20,000. Some Western newspapers give figures of 2,000–4,000; the higher numbers may be inflated by Okello's own broadcasts and exaggerated reports in some Western and Arab news media. The killing of Arab prisoners and their burial in mass grave
Mass grave
A mass grave is a grave containing multiple number of human corpses, which may or may not be identified prior to burial. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave, although the United Nations defines a mass grave as a burial site which...
s was documented by an Italian film crew, filming from a helicopter, in Africa Addio
Africa Addio
Africa Addio is a 1966 Italian documentary about the end of the colonial era in Africa. The film was released in a shorter format under the names "Africa Blood and Guts" in the USA and "Farewell Africa" in the UK...
. Many Arabs fled to safety in Oman
Oman
Oman , officially called the Sultanate of Oman , is an Arab state in southwest Asia on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by the United Arab Emirates to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the southwest. The coast is formed by the Arabian Sea on the...
, and by Okello's order no Europeans were harmed. The post-revolution violence did not spread to Pemba. Leo Kuper
Leo Kuper
Leo Kuper was a writer and philosopher. He was born to a Lithuanian Jewish family in South Africa. He trained as a lawyer before becoming a sociologist specialising in the study of genocide....
described the killing of Arabs in Zanzibar as a genocide.
Guatemala 1968-1996
During the GuatemalaGuatemala
Guatemala is a country in Central America bordered by Mexico to the north and west, the Pacific Ocean to the southwest, Belize to the northeast, the Caribbean to the east, and Honduras and El Salvador to the southeast...
n civil war, some 200,000 people died. More than one million people were forced to flee their homes and hundreds of villages were destroyed. The officially chartered Historical Clarification Commission
Historical Clarification Commission
The Historical Clarification Commission was Guatemala's truth and reconciliation commission.The creation of the CEH was ordered by the Oslo Accords of 1994 that sought to bring an end to the Central American nation's three-decade-long Civil War, during which an estimated 200,000 people lost their...
attributed more than 93% of all documented violations of human rights to Guatemala's military government; and estimated that Maya
Maya peoples
The Maya people constitute a diverse range of the Native American people of southern Mexico and northern Central America. The overarching term "Maya" is a collective designation to include the peoples of the region who share some degree of cultural and linguistic heritage; however, the term...
Indians
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
accounted for 83% of the victims. It concluded in 1999 that state actions constituted genocide.
In 1999, Nobel peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is an indigenous Guatemalan, of the K'iche' ethnic group. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the plight of Guatemala's indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War , and to promoting indigenous rights in the country...
brought a case against the military leadership in a Spanish Court. Six officials, among them Efraín Ríos Montt
Efraín Ríos Montt
José Efraín Ríos Montt is a former de facto President of Guatemala, dictator, army general, and former president of Congress. In the 2003 presidential elections, he unsuccessfully ran as the candidate of the ruling Guatemalan Republican Front .Huehuetenango-born Ríos Montt remains one of the most...
and Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores
Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores
Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores was the 27th President of Guatemala from 8 August 1983 to 14 January 1986. A member of the military, he was President of Guatemala during a time of increased repression and death squad activity...
, were formally charged on 7 July 2006 to appear in the Spanish National Court after Spain's Constitutional Court ruled in 2005 that Spanish courts can exercise universal jurisdiction
Universal jurisdiction
Universal jurisdiction or universality principle is a principle in public international law whereby states claim criminal jurisdiction over persons whose alleged crimes were committed outside the boundaries of the prosecuting state, regardless of nationality, country of residence, or any other...
over war crimes committed during the Guatemalan Civil War
Pakistan (Bangladesh War of 1971)
In 1997 R. J. RummelR. J. Rummel
Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination...
published a book, available on the web, called "Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900", In Chapter 8 called "Statistics Of Pakistan's Democide
Estimates, Calculations, And Sources" he looks at the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War
Bangladesh Liberation War
The Bangladesh Liberation War was an armed conflict pitting East Pakistan and India against West Pakistan. The war resulted in the secession of East Pakistan, which became the independent nation of Bangladesh....
. Rummel wrote:
- In East PakistanEast PakistanEast Pakistan was a provincial state of Pakistan established in 14 August 1947. The provincial state existed until its declaration of independence on 26 March 1971 as the independent nation of Bangladesh. Pakistan recognized the new nation on 16 December 1971. East Pakistan was created from Bengal...
(now BangladeshBangladeshBangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...
) [the President of PakistanPresident of PakistanThe President of Pakistan is the head of state, as well as figurehead, of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Recently passed an XVIII Amendment , Pakistan has a parliamentary democratic system of government. According to the Constitution, the President is chosen by the Electoral College to serve a...
, General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, and his top generals] also planned to murder its Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. They also planned to indiscriminately murder hundreds of thousands of its Hindus and drive the rest into India. And they planned to destroy its economic base to insure that it would be subordinate to West Pakistan for at least a generation to come. This plan may be perceived as genocide.
Rummel goes on to collate what he considers the most credible estimates published by others into what he calls democide
Democide
Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the...
. He writes that "Consolidating both ranges, I give a final estimate of Pakistan's democide to be 300,000 to 3,000,000, or a prudent 1,500,000." Other authors like Anthony Mascarenhas and Donald W. Beachler have cited a figure ranging between 1 - 3 million civilians killed by the Pakistan Army
Pakistan Army
The Pakistan Army is the branch of the Pakistani Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. The Pakistan Army came into existence after the Partition of India and the resulting independence of Pakistan in 1947. It is currently headed by General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. The Pakistan...
; Bleacher states that both Pakistan and its primary ally the USA have denied all Genocide allegations.
A case was filed in the Federal Court of Australia on 20 September 2006 for alleged crimes of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during 1971 by the Pakistani Armed Forces and its collaborators:
On 21 May 2007, at the request of the applicant "Leave is granted to the applicant to discontinue his application filed on 20 September 2006." (FILE NO: (P)SYG2672/2006)
The Guinness Book of Records lists the atrocities in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) as one of the top 5 genocides in the 20th century.
Burundi 1972 and 1993
Since BurundiBurundi
Burundi , officially the Republic of Burundi , is a landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa bordered by Rwanda to the north, Tanzania to the east and south, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the west. Its capital is Bujumbura...
's independence in 1962, there have been two events called genocide in the country. The 1972 mass-killings of Hutu
Hutu
The Hutu , or Abahutu, are a Central African people, living mainly in Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern DR Congo.-Population statistics:The Hutu are the largest of the three peoples in Burundi and Rwanda; according to the United States Central Intelligence Agency, 84% of Rwandans and 85% of Burundians...
by the Tutsi
Tutsi
The Tutsi , or Abatutsi, are an ethnic group in Central Africa. Historically they were often referred to as the Watussi or Watusi. They are the second largest caste in Rwanda and Burundi, the other two being the Hutu and the Twa ....
army, and the 1993 killing of Tutsi by the Hutu population that is recognised as an act of genocide in the final report of the International Commission of Inquiry for Burundi presented to the United Nations Security Council
United Nations Security Council
The United Nations Security Council is one of the principal organs of the United Nations and is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Its powers, outlined in the United Nations Charter, include the establishment of peacekeeping operations, the establishment of...
in 2002.
Rwanda 1994
The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of an estimated 800,000 people. Over the course of approximately 100 days from the assassination of President Juvénal HabyarimanaJuvénal Habyarimana
Juvénal Habyarimana was the third President of the Republic of Rwanda, the post he held longer than any other president to date, from 1973 until 1994. During his 20-year rule he favored his own ethnic group, the Hutus, and supported the Hutu majority in neighboring Burundi against the Tutsi...
on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate. In 1990, a rebel group composed mostly of Tutsi
Tutsi
The Tutsi , or Abatutsi, are an ethnic group in Central Africa. Historically they were often referred to as the Watussi or Watusi. They are the second largest caste in Rwanda and Burundi, the other two being the Hutu and the Twa ....
refugees called the Rwandan Patriotic Front
Rwandan Patriotic Front
The Rwandan Patriotic Front abbreviated as RPF is the current ruling political party of Rwanda, led by President Paul Kagame. It governs in a coalition with other parties...
(RPF) invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda. The Rwandan Civil War, fought between the Hutu
Hutu
The Hutu , or Abahutu, are a Central African people, living mainly in Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern DR Congo.-Population statistics:The Hutu are the largest of the three peoples in Burundi and Rwanda; according to the United States Central Intelligence Agency, 84% of Rwandans and 85% of Burundians...
regime, with support from Francophone nations of Africa and France itself, and the RPF, with support from Uganda
Uganda
Uganda , officially the Republic of Uganda, is a landlocked country in East Africa. Uganda is also known as the "Pearl of Africa". It is bordered on the east by Kenya, on the north by South Sudan, on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the south by...
, vastly increased the ethnic tensions in the country and led to the rise of Hutu Power
Hutu Power
Hutu Power was an ideology propounded by the Akazu and other Hutu extremists in Rwanda. It contributed to the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu.-Background:...
.
As an ideology, Hutu Power asserted that the Tutsi intended to enslave Hutus and must be resisted at all costs. Despite continuing ethnic strife, including the displacement of large numbers of Hutu in the north by the rebels and periodic localized extermination of Tutsi to the south, pressure on the government of Juvénal Habyarimana resulted in a cease-fire in 1993 and the preliminary implementation of the Arusha Accords
Arusha Accords
The Arusha Accords were a set of five accords signed in Arusha, Tanzania on August 4, 1993, by the government of Rwanda and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front , under mediation, to end a three-year Rwandan Civil War...
.
The assassination of Habyarimana in April 1994 was the proximate cause of the mass killings of Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus. The mass killings were carried out primarily by two Hutu militias associated with political parties: the Interahamwe
Interahamwe
The Interahamwe is a Hutu paramilitary organization. The militia enjoyed the backing of the Hutu-led government leading up to, during, and after the Rwandan Genocide. Since the genocide, they have been forced out of Rwanda, and have sought asylum in Congo...
and the Impuzamugambi
Impuzamugambi
The Impuzamugambi , which means "Those who have the same goal" or "Those who have a single goal" in the Kinyarwanda language, was a Hutu militia in Rwanda formed in 1992...
. The genocide was directed by a Hutu power group known as the Akazu
Akazu
The Akazu was an informal organization of Hutu extremists, a circle of relatives and close friends of then Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and his influential wife Agathe Habyarimana...
. The mass killing also marked the end of the peace agreement meant to end the war, and the Tutsi RPF restarted their offensive, eventually defeating the Hutu army and seizing control of the country.
North Korea
Several millions in North KoreaNorth Korea
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea , , is a country in East Asia, occupying the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Its capital and largest city is Pyongyang. The Korean Demilitarized Zone serves as the buffer zone between North Korea and South Korea...
have died of starvation since the mid-1990s, with aid groups and human rights NGOs stating often that North Korea has systematically and deliberately prevented food aid from reaching the areas most devastated by food shortages. Up to one million have died in North Korea's political prison camps which detain dissidents and their entire families, including children, for perceived political offenses.
In 2004, Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
, in response to the BBC documentary, "Access to Evil", which includes witness testimonies from camp survivors and a former guard of gas chambers and mass killings occurring systematically in the camps, called on the international community in 2004 to investigate “political genocide” in North Korea, yet no substantial action has been taken to this day to interven.
In September 2011, the Harvard International Review published an article which argued that North Korea was violating the UN Genocide Convention in every possible way, through its systematic killing of half-Chinese babies and religious groups.
Equatorial Guinea
Francisco Macías NguemaFrancisco Macías Nguema
Francisco Macías Nguema was the first President of Equatorial Guinea, from 1968 until his overthrow in 1979.-Rise to power:...
was the first President of Equatorial Guinea
Equatorial Guinea
Equatorial Guinea, officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea where the capital Malabo is situated.Annobón is the southernmost island of Equatorial Guinea and is situated just south of the equator. Bioko island is the northernmost point of Equatorial Guinea. Between the two islands and to the...
, from 1968 until his overthrow in 1979. During his presidency, his country was nicknamed "the Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...
of Africa". Nguema's regime was characterized by its abandonment of all government functions except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; he acted as chief judge and sentenced thousands to death. This led to the death or exile of up to 1/3 of the country's population. Out of a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 had been killed, in particular those of the Bubi ethnic minority on Bioko
Bioko
Bioko is an island 32 km off the west coast of Africa, specifically Cameroon, in the Gulf of Guinea. It is the northernmost part of Equatorial Guinea with a population of 124,000 and an area of . It is volcanic with its highest peak the Pico Basile at .-Geography:Bioko has a total area of...
associated with relative wealth and intellectualism. Uneasy around educated people, he had killed everyone who wore spectacles. All schools were ordered closed in 1975. The economy collapsed, and skilled citizens and foreigners left.
On August 3, 1979, he was overthrown by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is an Equatoguinean politician who has been President of Equatorial Guinea since 1979. He ousted his uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema, in an August 1979 military coup and has overseen Equatorial Guinea's emergence as an important oil producer, beginning in the 1990s...
. Macías Nguema was captured, tried for genocide and other crimes along with 10 others. All of them were found guilty, four received terms of imprisonment, while Nguema and the other six were executed a few weeks later on September 29.
John B. Quigley in The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis points out that at Macías Nguema's trial for genocide that Equatorial Guinea had not ratified the Genocide convention and that records of the court proceedings show that there was some confusion over whether Nguema and his co-defendants were tried under the laws of Spain (the former colonial power), or whether the trial was justified on the claim that the Genocide Convention was part of customary international law. Quigley states that "The Macias case stands out as the most confusing of domestic genocide prosecutions from the standpoint of the applicable law. The Macias conviction is also problematic from the standpoint of the identity of the protected group."
Cambodia
Khmer Rouge
The Khmer Rouge literally translated as Red Cambodians was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, who were the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Nuon Chea, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan...
, or more formally, the Communist Party of Kampuchea
Communist Party of Kampuchea
The Communist Party of Kampuchea, also known as Khmer Communist Party , was a communist party in Cambodia. Its followers were generally known as Khmer Rouge .-Foundation of the party; first divisions:...
, led by Pol Pot
Pol Pot
Saloth Sar , better known as Pol Pot, , was a Cambodian Maoist revolutionary who led the Khmer Rouge from 1963 until his death in 1998. From 1976 to 1979, he served as the Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea....
, Ta Mok
Ta Mok
Ta Mok , which means "Grandfather Mok" in Khmer, was the nom de guerre of Chhit Choeun , a senior figure in the leadership of the Khmer Rouge...
and other leaders, organized the mass killing of ideologically suspect groups, ethnic minorities like the ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese (or Sino-Khmers), Chams and Thais
Thai people
The Thai people, or Siamese, are the main ethnic group of Thailand and are part of the larger Tai ethnolinguistic peoples found in Thailand and adjacent countries in Southeast Asia as well as southern China. Their language is the Thai language, which is classified as part of the Kradai family of...
, former civil servants, former government soldiers, Buddhist monks, secular intellectuals and professionals, and former city dwellers. Khmer Rouge cadres defeated in factional struggles were also liquidated in purges. The total number of victims is estimated at approximately 1.7 million Cambodia
Cambodia
Cambodia , officially known as the Kingdom of Cambodia, is a country located in the southern portion of the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia...
ns between 1975–1979, including deaths from slave labour.
This episode is widely seen as a genocide. For example "since 1994, the award-winning Cambodian Genocide Program" has been included as part of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, commonly referred to simply as the MacMillan Center, is Yale University's research and educational center for international affairs and cultural studies.-History:...
, and in 2003 Khieu Samphan
Khieu Samphan
Khieu Samphan was the president of the state presidium of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976 until 1979. As such, he served as Cambodia's head of state and was one of the most powerful officials in the Khmer Rouge movement, though Pol Pot was the group's true political leader and held the most...
, the Cambodian head of state under the Khmer Rouge, was quoted as saying "I have found it so difficult to believe what people told me of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime, but today, I am very clear that there was genocide"
Andrew Perrin a reporter for Time Asia, wrote an article in 2003 in which he stated that a "genocide [was] committed by the Khmer Rouge against Cambodia's small Muslim
Muslim
A Muslim, also spelled Moslem, is an adherent of Islam, a monotheistic, Abrahamic religion based on the Quran, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God as revealed to prophet Muhammad. "Muslim" is the Arabic term for "submitter" .Muslims believe that God is one and incomparable...
Cham population". During the massacres by the government, a disproportionate number of Chams were killed compared with ethnic Khmers. Ysa Osman, a researcher at the Documentation Center of Cambodia concludes,"Perhaps as many as 500,000 died. They were considered the Khmer Rouge's No. 1 enemy. The plan was to exterminate them all" because "they stood out. They worshiped their own god. Their diet was different. Their names and language were different. They lived by different rules. The Khmer Rouge wanted everyone to be equal, and when the Chams practiced Islam they did not appear to be equal. So they were punished."
In 1997 the Cambodian Government asked the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
to provide assistance in setting up a genocide tribunal. It took nine years to agree on what form the shape and structure of the court would be — a hybrid of Cambodian and international laws — before the judges were sworn in in 2006 . The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on 18 July 2007. On 19 September 2007 Nuon Chea, second in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior surviving member, was charged with war crime
War crime
War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...
s and crimes against humanity. He will face Cambodian and foreign judges at the special genocide tribunal.
East Timor under Indonesian occupation
East TimorEast Timor
The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, commonly known as East Timor , is a state in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecusse, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor...
was occupied by Indonesia
Indonesia
Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...
from 1975 to 1999 as an annexed territory with Indonesian provincial status. A detailed statistical report prepared for the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor
Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor
The Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor was an independent truth commission established in East Timor in 2001 under the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor and charged to “inquire into human rights violations committed...
cited a lower range of 102,800 conflict-related deaths in the period 1974-1999, namely, approximately 18,600 killings and 84,200 excess deaths from hunger and illness, including the Indonesian military using "starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese" most of which occurred during the Indonesian occupation. Earlier estimates of deaths during the occupation range from 60,000 to 200,000.
According to Sian Powell writing in The Australian
The Australian
The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....
, a UN report states that the Indonesian military used starvation as a weapon to exterminate the East Timorese, along with Napalm
Napalm
Napalm is a thickening/gelling agent generally mixed with gasoline or a similar fuel for use in an incendiary device, primarily as an anti-personnel weapon...
and chemical weapons
Chemical warfare
Chemical warfare involves using the toxic properties of chemical substances as weapons. This type of warfare is distinct from Nuclear warfare and Biological warfare, which together make up NBC, the military acronym for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical...
, obtained from the United States, which poisoned the food and water supply. Ben Kiernan has written in War, Genocide, and Resistance in East Timor, 1975–99: Comparative Reflections on Cambodia that
the crimes committed ... in East Timor, with a toll of 150,000 in a population of 650,000, clearly meet a range of sociological definitions of genocide used by most scholars of the phenomenon, who see both political and ethnic groups as possible victims of genocide. The victims in East Timor included not only that substantial 'part' of the Timorese 'national group' targeted for destruction because of their resistance to Indonesian annexation—along with their relatives, as we shall see—but also most members of the twenty-thousand strong ethnic Chinese minority prominent in the towns of East Timor, whom Indonesian forces singled out for destruction, apparently because of their ethnicity 'as such.'
Ben Kiernan draws a comparison with the Khmer Rouge Cambodian genocide, and accuses the west of hypocrisy in ignoring one whilst protesting about the other.
Dirty War in Argentina
In September 2006, Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, who had been the police commissioner of the province of Buenos AiresBuenos Aires Province
The Province of Buenos Aires is the largest and most populous province of Argentina. It takes the name from the city of Buenos Aires, which used to be the provincial capital until it was federalized in 1880...
during the Dirty War
Dirty War
The Dirty War was a period of state-sponsored violence in Argentina from 1976 until 1983. Victims of the violence included several thousand left-wing activists, including trade unionists, students, journalists, Marxists, Peronist guerrillas and alleged sympathizers, either proved or suspected...
(1976–1983), was found guilty of six counts of murder, six counts of unlawful imprisonment, and seven counts of torture in a federal court. The judge who presided over the case, Carlos Rozanski, described the offences as part of a systematic attack that was intended to destroy parts of society that the victims represented and as such it was genocide.
Rozanski noted that the CPPCG does not include the elimination of political groups, (because that group was removed at the behest of Stalin), but instead based his findings on 11 December 1946 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 96
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 96
United Nations General Assembly Resolution 96 of 11 December 1946, titled "The Crime of Genocide", was a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly during its first session that affirmed that genocide was a crime under international law...
barring acts of genocide "when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part" (which passed unanimously), because he considered the original UN definition to be more legitimate than the politically compromised CPPCG definition.
Sabra-Shatila, Lebanon
The Sabra and Shatila massacre was carried out in September 1982 against Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Maronite ChristianLebanese Forces
The Lebanese Forces is a Lebanese political party. Founded as a militia by Bachir Gemayel during the Lebanese Civil War, the movement fought as the main militia within the Christian-dominated Lebanese Front...
/Phalange
Kataeb Party
The Lebanese Phalanges , better known in English as the Phalange , is a traditional right-wing Lebanese political party. Although it is officially secular, it is mainly supported by Maronite Christians. The party played a major role in the Lebanese War...
militias, near the beginning of the 1982–2000 South Lebanon conflict. The number of victims of the massacre is estimated at 700-3500. Responsibility for the massacre has been attributed to the Phalangists as the perpetrators, and indirectly to Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
as the ally of the Phalangists.
On December 16, 1982, the United Nations General Assembly
United Nations General Assembly
For two articles dealing with membership in the General Assembly, see:* General Assembly members* General Assembly observersThe United Nations General Assembly is one of the five principal organs of the United Nations and the only one in which all member nations have equal representation...
condemned the massacre and declared it to be an act of genocide. Paragraph 2, which "resolved that the massacre was an act of genocide", was adopted by ninety-eight votes to nineteen, with twenty-three abstentions: All Western democracies abstained from voting.
According to William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland
National University of Ireland
The National University of Ireland , , is a federal university system of constituent universities, previously called constituent colleges, and recognised colleges set up under the Irish Universities Act, 1908, and significantly amended by the Universities Act, 1997.The constituent universities are...
, "the term genocide (...) had obviously been chosen to embarrass Israel rather than out of any concern with legal precision". This opinion is a reflection of the comments made by some of the delegates who took part in the debate. While all acknowledged that it was a massacre, the claim that it was a genocide was disputed, for example the delegate for Canada stated "[t]he term genocide cannot, in our view, be applied to this particular inhuman act". The delegate of Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
added that "[his] delegation regret[ted] the use of the term "an act of genocide" (...) [as] the term 'genocide' is used to mean acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group". and that "[he] also question[ned] whether the General Assembly ha[d] the competence to make such determination", and the United States commented that "[w]hile the criminality of the massacre was beyond question, it was a serious and reckless misuse of language to label this tragedy genocide as defined in the 1948 Convention (...)".
Citing Sabra and Shatila as an example, Leo Kuper notes the reluctance of the United Nations to respond or take action in actual cases of genocide against the most egregious violators, but its willingness to charge "certain vilified states, and notably Israel", with genocide. In his view:
This availability of a scapegoat state in the UN restores members with a record of murderous violence against their subjects a self-righteous sense of moral purpose as principled members of 'the community of nations'... Estimates of the numbers killed in the Sabra-Shatila massacres range from about four hundred to eight hundred - a minor catastrophe in the contemporary statistics of mass murder. Yet a carefully planned UN campaign found Israel guilty of genocide, without reference to the role of the Phalangists in perpetrating the massacres on their own initiative. The procedures were unique in the annals of the United Nations.
In a Belgium court case
War Crimes Law (Belgium)
Belgium's War Crimes Law invokes the concept of universal jurisdiction to allow anyone to bring war crime charges in Belgian courts, regardless of where the alleged crimes have taken place....
lodged on 18 June 2001 by 23 survivors of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, the prosecution alleged that Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon
Ariel Sharon is an Israeli statesman and retired general, who served as Israel’s 11th Prime Minister. He has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006....
, former Israeli defense minister (and Israel's Prime Minister in 2001–2006), as well as other Israelis committed a number of crimes including genocide, because "all the constituent elements of the crime of genocide, as defined in the 1948 Convention and as reproduced in article 6 of the ICC Statute and in article 1§1 of the law of 16 June 1993, 29 are present". This allegation was not tested in a Belgian court because on 12 February 2003 the Court of Cassation (Belgian Supreme Court) ruled that under international customary law, acting heads of state and government can not become the objects of proceedings before criminal tribunals in foreign states (although for the crime of genocide they could be the subjects of proceedings of an international tribunal). This ruling was a reiteration of a decision made a year earlier by the International Court of Justice on 14 February 2002. Following these rulings in June 2003 the Belgian Justice Ministry decided to start a proceeding to transfer the case to Israel, so to date the accusation that the massacres in Sabra and Shatila were a genocide has not been tested in any court.
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
M. Hassan Kakar presents an argument in a chapter called "Genocide Throughout the Country" in his book The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 that the international definition of genocide is too restricted, and that it should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator as described by Chalk and Jonassohn: "Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator."Having established a broader definition of Genocide Kakar goes on to claim that during the Soviet war in Afghanistan
Soviet war in Afghanistan
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a nine-year conflict involving the Soviet Union, supporting the Marxist-Leninist government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan against the Afghan Mujahideen and foreign "Arab–Afghan" volunteers...
(1979–1989), "The Afghans are among the latest victims of genocide by a superpower. Large numbers of Afghans were killed to suppress resistance to the army of the Soviet Union, which wished to vindicate its client regime and realize its goal in Afghanistan. Thus, the mass killing was political".
US invasion of Vietnam
French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul SartreJean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the leading figures in 20th century French philosophy, particularly Marxism, and was one of the key figures in literary...
, nominated as president of the International War Crimes Tribunal, had been describing the US war in Vietnam as a genocide since 1967, even before he was aware of the horrifying effects of napalm
Napalm
Napalm is a thickening/gelling agent generally mixed with gasoline or a similar fuel for use in an incendiary device, primarily as an anti-personnel weapon...
and Agent Orange
Agent Orange
Agent Orange is the code name for one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand, during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth...
on the Vietnamese
Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:* Of, from, or related to Vietnam, the easternmost country on the Indochina Peninsula in Southeast Asia.** Of, from, or related to the former country of North Vietnam** Of, from, or related to the former country of South Vietnam...
population.
A film called U.S. Techniques of Genocide in Vietnam describes the use of elaborate U.S. weapons against civilian targets in Vietnam such as anti-personnel weapons designed to kill human targets while causing minimal damage to buildings, steel pellet bombs that zigzag in all directions and the internationally banned dum-dum bullet.
Agent Orange
Agent Orange
Agent Orange is the code name for one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand, during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth...
, used to devastate crops, which the US drenched Vietnam in so as to starve the communist fighters, has left to this day millions of deaths, disabilities, increased risk of diseases such as cancer, and most of all birth defects among the civilian population. Vietnam said that half a million people had died as a result of chemical defoliants the United States used in the country.
Ethiopia
EthiopiaEthiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
's former Soviet-backed Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam
Mengistu Haile Mariam
Mengistu Haile Mariam is a politician who was formerly the most prominent officer of the Derg, the Communist military junta that governed Ethiopia from 1974 to 1987, and the President of the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia from 1987 to 1991...
was tried in an Ethiopian court, in absentia
In absentia
In absentia is Latin for "in the absence". In legal use, it usually means a trial at which the defendant is not physically present. The phrase is not ordinarily a mere observation, but suggests recognition of violation to a defendant's right to be present in court proceedings in a criminal trial.In...
, for his role in mass killings. Mengistu's charge sheet and evidence list was 8,000 pages long. The evidence against him included signed execution orders, videos of torture sessions and personal testimonies. The trial began in 1994 and on 12 December 2006 Mengistu was found guilty of genocide and other offences. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007. Ethiopian law defines genocide as any act committed with the intent to wipe out political and not just ethnic groups.
106 Derg
Derg
The Derg or Dergue was a Communist military junta that came to power in Ethiopia following the ousting of Haile Selassie I. Derg, which means "committee" or "council" in Ge'ez, is the short name of the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army, a committee of...
officials were accused of genocide during the trials, but only 36 of them were present in the court. Several former members of the Derg have been sentenced to death. Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe is a landlocked country located in the southern part of the African continent, between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the southwest, Zambia and a tip of Namibia to the northwest and Mozambique to the east. Zimbabwe has three...
has refused to respond to Ethiopia's request that Mengistu be extradited, which has permitted him to avoid his Ethiopian life imprisonment sentence. Mengistu supported Robert Mugabe
Robert Mugabe
Robert Gabriel Mugabe is the President of Zimbabwe. As one of the leaders of the liberation movement against white-minority rule, he was elected into power in 1980...
, the long-standing President of Zimbabwe, during his leadership of Ethiopia.
Some experts have estimated that 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed during Mengistu's rule. Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
estimates that up to 500,000 people were killed during the Ethiopian Red Terror
Red Terror (Ethiopia)
The Ethiopian Red Terror, or Qey Shibir , was a violent political campaign in Ethiopia that most visibly took place once Communist Mengistu Haile Mariam achieved control of the Derg, the military junta, 3 February 1977...
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
describes the Red Terror as "one of the most systematic uses of mass murder by a state ever witnessed in Africa." During his reign it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning. Mengistu himself is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting them, saying that he was leading by example.
Iraqi Kurds
- See also 1988 Anfal campaign
Frans van Anraat
Frans Cornelis Adrianus van Anraat is a Dutch businessman who sold raw materials for the production of chemical weapons to Iraq during the reign of Saddam Hussein.-Business in Iraq:...
for supplying chemicals to Iraq, that "[it] thinks and considers it legally and convincingly proven that the Kurdish population meets the requirement under the genocide conventions as an ethnic group. The court has no other conclusion than that these attacks were committed with the intent to destroy the Kurdish population of Iraq." and because he supplied the chemicals before 16 March 1988, the date of the Halabja poison gas attack
Halabja poison gas attack
The Halabja poison gas attack , also known as Halabja massacre or Bloody Friday, was a genocidal massacre against the Kurdish people that took place on March 16, 1988, during the closing days of the Iran–Iraq War, when chemical weapons were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Kurdish town of...
he is guilty of a war crime but not guilty of complicity in genocide.
India
In the 1970s, during the Indian Emergency, thousands of Sikh
Sikh
A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism. It primarily originated in the 15th century in the Punjab region of South Asia. The term "Sikh" has its origin in Sanskrit term शिष्य , meaning "disciple, student" or शिक्ष , meaning "instruction"...
s campaigning for autonomous government were imprisoned. In 1984, during an Indian Army
Indian Army
The Indian Army is the land based branch and the largest component of the Indian Armed Forces. With about 1,100,000 soldiers in active service and about 1,150,000 reserve troops, the Indian Army is the world's largest standing volunteer army...
assault called Operation Bluestar, thousands of innocent Sikhs were killed in the Golden Temple and the Sikh Reference Library
Sikh Reference Library
The Sikh Reference Library was a repository of over 1,500 rare manuscripts located in the Golden Temple at Amritsar, Punjab which was destroyed during Operation Blue Star. In 1984, the library's contents were confiscated by the Central Bureau of Investigation and the empty building allegedly burned...
was burned. After the October 1984 Assassination of Indira Gandhi, thousands of Sikhs were killed in the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots
1984 anti-Sikh riots
The 1984 Anti-Sikh pogroms / riots or the 1984 Sikh Massacre was a sikh genocide there was four days of violence in northern India, particularly Delhi, during which armed mobs killed Sikhs, looted and set fire to Sikh homes, businesses and schools, and attacked gurdwaras, in response to the...
by Hindu mobs The 1984 Anti-Sikh riots
1984 anti-Sikh riots
The 1984 Anti-Sikh pogroms / riots or the 1984 Sikh Massacre was a sikh genocide there was four days of violence in northern India, particularly Delhi, during which armed mobs killed Sikhs, looted and set fire to Sikh homes, businesses and schools, and attacked gurdwaras, in response to the...
have been identified as a genocide because of the mobs' targeting behavior.
Tibet
On 5 June 1959 Shri Purshottam Trikamdas, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of IndiaSupreme Court of India
The Supreme Court of India is the highest judicial forum and final court of appeal as established by Part V, Chapter IV of the Constitution of India...
, presented a report on Tibet to the International Commission of Jurists
International Commission of Jurists
The International Commission of Jurists is an international human rights non-governmental organization. The Commission itself is a standing group of 60 eminent jurists , including members of the senior judiciary in Australia, Canada, and South Africa and the former UN High Commissioner for Human...
(an NGO). The press conference address on the report states in paragraph 26 that
The report of the International Commission of Jurists (1960) is widely misquoted as stating that there was physical genocide (mass killings). It actually claims that there was only cultural genocide.
ICJ Report (1960) page 346: "The committee found that acts of genocide had been committed in Tibet in an attempt to destroy the Tibetans as a religious group, and that such acts are acts of genocide independently of any conventional obligation. The committee did not find that there was sufficient proof of the destruction of Tibetans as a race, nation or ethnic group as such by methods that can be regarded as genocide in international law".
However cultural genocide is also contested by some academics such as Barry Sautman. Tibetan is the everyday language of Tibetans in Tibet. In addition Tibetans are exempt from the one child policy.
Adam Jones
Adam Jones (Canadian scholar)
Adam Jones is a political scientist, writer, and photojournalist based at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in Kelowna, BC, Canada. He is executive director of the nongovernmental organization Gendercide Watch...
, a specialist on genocide, argued that the struggle session
Struggle Session
A struggle session was a form of public humiliation used by the Communist Party of China to enforce a reign of terror in the Mao Zedong era to shape public opinion and to humiliate, persecute, and/or execute political rivals, so-called class enemies...
s after the 1959 Tibetan uprising
1959 Tibetan uprising
The 1959 Tibetan uprising, or 1959 Tibetan Rebellion began on 10 March 1959, when a revolt erupted in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, which had been under the effective control of the Communist Party of China since the Seventeen Point Agreement in 1951...
may be considered genocide, based on the claim that the conflict resulted in 92,000 deaths. However, according to tibetologist Tom Grunfeld, "the veracity of such a claim is difficult to verify."
Brazil
The Helmet MassacreHelmet Massacre
The Helmet Massacre of the Tikuna people took place in 1988, and was initially treated as homicide. During the massacre four people died, nineteen were wounded, and ten disappeared. Since 1994 it has been treated by the Brazilian courts as a genocide. Thirteen men were convicted of genocide in 2001...
of the Tikuna people
Ticuna language
Tïcuna, or Tïkuna, is a language spoken by approximately 40,000 people in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. It is the native language of the Tïcuna people. Tïcuna is generally classified as a language isolate, but may be related to the extinct Yuri language...
took place in 1988, and was initially treated as homicide. During the massacre four people died, nineteen were wounded, and ten disappeared. Since 1994 it has been treated by Brazilian courts as a genocide. Thirteen men were convicted of genocide in 2001. In November 2004, after an appeal was filed before Brazil's federal court, the man initially found guilty of hiring men to carry out the genocide was acquitted, and the other men had their initial sentences of 15–25 years reduced to 12 years.
In November 2005 during an investigation by the Brazilian authorities, code-named Operation Rio Pardo, Mario Lucio Avelar, a Brazilian public prosecutor in the city of Cuiabá
Cuiabá
Under the Koppen climate classification, Cuiaba features a tropical wet and dry climate. Cuiabá is famous for its searing heat, although temperatures in winter can arrive sporadically at 10 degrees, indeed atypical, caused by cold fronts coming from the south, and that may only last one or two...
, told Survival International
Survival International
Survival International is a human rights organisation formed in 1969 that campaigns for the rights of indigenous tribal peoples and uncontacted peoples, seeking to help them to determine their own future. Their campaigns generally focus on tribal peoples' fight to keep their ancestral lands,...
that he believed that there were sufficient grounds to prosecute for genocide of the Rio Pardo
Rio Pardo
For the Brazilian tribe, see Rio Pardo Rio Pardo is a municipality in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. Its coordinates are . The population in 2004 was 37,395, the area is 2187.5 km² The elevation is 41 m....
Indians. In November 2006 twenty-nine people were held in custody for the alleged genocide with others such as a former police commander and the governor of Mato Grosso state implicated in the alleged.
In a newsletter published on 7 August 2006 the Indianist Missionary Council reported that: "In a plenary session, the [Brazilian] Supreme Federal Court (STF) reaffirmed that the crime known as the Haximu Massacre
Haximu massacre
The Haximu Massacre, also known as the Yanomami Massacre, was an armed conflict in Brazil in 1993. The conflict occurred just outside of Haximu, Brazil, near the Venezuela border, beginning in mid-June or July of 1993. Approximately 16 Yanomami people were killed by a group of garimpeiros...
[perpetrated on the Yanomami Indians in 1993] was a genocide and that the decision of a federal court to sentence miners to 19 years in prison for genocide in connection with other offenses, such as smuggling and illegal mining, is valid. It was a unanimous decision made during the judgment of Extraordinary Appeal (RE) 351487 today, the 3rd, in the morning by justices of the Supreme Court". Commenting on the case the NGO Survival International
Survival International
Survival International is a human rights organisation formed in 1969 that campaigns for the rights of indigenous tribal peoples and uncontacted peoples, seeking to help them to determine their own future. Their campaigns generally focus on tribal peoples' fight to keep their ancestral lands,...
said "The UN convention on genocide, ratified by Brazil, states that the killing 'with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group' is genocide. The Supreme Court's ruling is highly significant and sends an important warning to those who continue to commit crimes against indigenous peoples in Brazil."
Democratic Republic of Congo
During the Congo Civil WarSecond Congo War
The Second Congo War, also known as Coltan War and the Great War of Africa, began in August 1998 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo , and officially ended in July 2003 when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power; however, hostilities continue to this...
, Pygmies were hunted down and eaten by both sides of the war, who regarded them as subhuman. Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti
Mbuti
Mbuti or Bambuti are one of several indigenous pygmy groups in the Congo region of Africa. Their languages belong to the Central Sudanic and also to Bantu languages.-Overview:...
pygmies, has asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity and also as an act of genocide. According to a report by Minority Rights Group International there is evidence of mass killings, cannibalism and rape. The report, which labeled these events as a campaign of extermination, linked much of the violence to beliefs about special powers held by the Bambuti. In Ituri district, rebel forces ran an operation code-named "Effacer le tableau" (to wipe the slate clean). The aim of the operation, according to witnesses, was to rid the forest of pygmies.
Somalia
The Social Science Research CouncilSocial Science Research Council
The Social Science Research Council is a U.S.-based independent nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research in the social sciences and related disciplines...
(2007) reported genocidal killings committed against Somalia's Bantu population and Jubba Valley
Jubba Valley
The Juba Valley is a valley in Northeast Africa.It follows the line of the Juba River north from the Indian Ocean to the Somalia/Ethiopia border, and then splits, one branch following the Dawa River west along the Ethiopia/Kenya border then north into Ethiopia, and the other branch follows the...
dwellers from 1991 onwards noting that "Somalia is a rare case in which genocidal acts were carried out by militias in the utter absence of a governing state structure."
Ad hoc tribunals
In 1951 only two of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) were parties to the CPPCG: France and the Republic of China. The CPPCG was ratified by the Soviet Union in 1954, the United Kingdom in 1970, the People's Republic of China in 1983 (having replaced the Taiwan-based Republic of China on the UNSC in 1971), and the United States in 1988. So it was only in the 1990s that the international law on the crime of genocide began to be enforced.Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-1995
In 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former YugoslaviaInternational Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991, more commonly referred to as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia or ICTY, is a...
(ICTY) delivered its first conviction for the crime of genocide, against General Krstić
Radislav Krstic
Radislav Krstić was the Deputy Commander and later Chief of Staff of the Drina Corps of the Army of Republika Srpska from October 1994 until 12 July 1995...
for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide. This judgement was upheld by the International Court of Justice
International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice is the primary judicial organ of the United Nations. It is based in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands...
(ICJ) in its February 2007 ruling in the case of Bosnia vs Serbia. However, contrary to the claim made by Bosnia, the ICJ did not find that genocide had been committed on the wider territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, limiting local genocide to the Srebrenica. Before this ruling the term Bosnian Genocide
Bosnian Genocide
The term Bosnian Genocide refers to either the genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995 or the ethnic cleansing campaign that took place throughout areas controlled by the Bosnian Serb Army during the 1992–1995 Bosnian War....
had been used by some academics, and human rights
Human rights
Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
officials.
In 2010, Vujadin Popović
Vujadin Popović
Vujadin Popović is a Bosnian Serb who participated in the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was Lieutenant Colonel and the Chief of Security of the Drina Corps of the Bosnian Serb Army....
, Lieutenant Colonel
Lieutenant colonel
Lieutenant colonel is a rank of commissioned officer in the armies and most marine forces and some air forces of the world, typically ranking above a major and below a colonel. The rank of lieutenant colonel is often shortened to simply "colonel" in conversation and in unofficial correspondence...
and the Chief of Security of the Drina Corps of the Bosnian Serb Army, and Ljubiša Beara
Ljubiša Beara
Ljubiša Beara is a Bosnian Serb who participated in the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was Colonel and Chief of Security of the Bosnian Serb Army Main Staff....
, Colonel
Colonel
Colonel , abbreviated Col or COL, is a military rank of a senior commissioned officer. It or a corresponding rank exists in most armies and in many air forces; the naval equivalent rank is generally "Captain". It is also used in some police forces and other paramilitary rank structures...
and Chief of Security of the same army, were convicted of genocide, extermination, murder and persecution
Persecution
Persecution is the systematic mistreatment of an individual or group by another group. The most common forms are religious persecution, ethnic persecution, and political persecution, though there is naturally some overlap between these terms. The inflicting of suffering, harassment, isolation,...
by the ICTY for their role in the Srebrenice massacre and sentenced to a life in prison.
German courts have handed down several convictions for genocide during the Bosnian War
Bosnian War
The Bosnian War or the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between April 1992 and December 1995. The war involved several sides...
. Novislav Djajic was indicted for participation in genocide, but the Higher Regional Court failed to find that there was sufficient certainty, for a criminal conviction, that he had intended to commit genocide. Nevertheless Djajic was found guilty of 14 cases of murder and one case of attempted murder. At Djajic's appeal on 23 May 1997, the Bavaria
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
n Appeals Chamber found that acts of genocide were committed in June 1992, confined within the administrative district of Foca
Foca
Foča is a town and municipality in southeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina on the Drina river, in the Foča Region of the Republika Srpska entity.-Early history:...
. The Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht
Oberlandesgericht
The Oberlandesgericht is one of the 'ordinary courts' in Germany...
) of Düsseldorf, in September 1997, handed down a genocide conviction against Nikola Jorgic
Nikola Jorgic
Nikola Jorgic is a Bosnian Serb from the Doboj region who was the leader of a paramilitary group located in the Doboj region. In 1997, Nikola was convicted of genocide in Germany. This was the first conviction won against participants in the Bosnian Genocide...
, a Bosnian Serb from the Doboj
Doboj
Doboj is a city and a municipality in northern Bosnia and Herzegovina, situated in the northern part of the Republika Srpska entity on the river Bosna. Doboj is the largest national railway junction; as such, the seats of the Republika Srpska Railways, and the Railways Corporation of Bosnia and...
region who was the leader of a paramilitary group located in the Doboj region. He was sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment
Life imprisonment
Life imprisonment is a sentence of imprisonment for a serious crime under which the convicted person is to remain in jail for the rest of his or her life...
for his involvement in genocidal actions that took place in regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, other than Srebrenica; and "On 29 November 1999, the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) of Düsseldorf condemned Maksim Sokolovic to 9 years in prison for aiding and abetting the crime of genocide and for grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions".
Rwanda
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is an international court established in November 1994 by the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 955 in order to judge people responsible for the Rwandan Genocide and other serious violations of international law in Rwanda, or by Rwandan...
(ICTR) is a court under the auspices of the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
for the prosecution of offenses committed in Rwanda
Rwanda
Rwanda or , officially the Republic of Rwanda , is a country in central and eastern Africa with a population of approximately 11.4 million . Rwanda is located a few degrees south of the Equator, and is bordered by Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo...
during the genocide that occurred there
Rwandan Genocide
The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people in the small East African nation of Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days through mid-July, over 500,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate...
during April and May, 1994, commencing on April 6. The ICTR was created on November 8, 1994 by the Security Council of the United Nations to judge those people responsible for the acts of genocide and other serious violations of the international law performed in the territory of Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between January 1 and December 31, 1994.
As of mid-2011, the ICTR has convicted 57 accused persons (including 19 whose cases are on appeal) and acquitted eight. Another ten persons are still on trial while one
Bernard Munyagishari
Bernard Munyagishari is a Hutu man accused of having had a prominent role in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. According to the 2005 indictment against him, as a commander of the Interahamwe, he created a special unit for the rape and murder of Tutsi women. and also the massacre of Rwanda Patriotic Front...
is awaiting trial. Nine remain at large. The first trial, of Jean-Paul Akayesu
Jean Akayesu
Jean-Paul Akayesu is a former teacher, school inspector, and Mouvement Démocratique Républicain politician from Rwanda. He served as mayor of Taba commune from April 1993 until June 1994....
, ended in 1998 with his conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity. This was notable as the world's first conviction for the crime of genocide, as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948 as General Assembly Resolution 260. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. It defines genocide in legal terms, and is the culmination of...
. Jean Kambanda
Jean Kambanda
Jean Kambanda was the Prime Minister in the caretaker government of Rwanda from the start of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide...
, interim Prime Minister during the genocide, pled guilty.
International Criminal Court
The ICC can only prosecute crimes committed on or after 1 July 2002.Darfur, Sudan
- See also: Second Sudanese Civil WarSecond Sudanese Civil WarThe Second Sudanese Civil War started in 1983, although it was largely a continuation of the First Sudanese Civil War of 1955 to 1972. Although it originated in southern Sudan, the civil war spread to the Nuba mountains and Blue Nile by the end of the 1980s....
, Darfur conflictDarfur conflictThe Darfur Conflict was a guerrilla conflict or civil war centered on the Darfur region of Sudan. It began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and Justice and Equality Movement groups in Darfur took up arms, accusing the Sudanese government of oppressing non-Arab Sudanese in...
The on-going racial conflict in Darfur
Darfur
Darfur is a region in western Sudan. An independent sultanate for several hundred years, it was incorporated into Sudan by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1916. The region is divided into three federal states: West Darfur, South Darfur, and North Darfur...
, Sudan
Sudan
Sudan , officially the Republic of the Sudan , is a country in North Africa, sometimes considered part of the Middle East politically. It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the northeast, Eritrea and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the...
, which started in 2003, was declared a "genocide" by United States Secretary of State
United States Secretary of State
The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence...
Colin Powell
Colin Powell
Colin Luther Powell is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He was the first African American to serve in that position. During his military...
on September 9, 2004 in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations
The United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations is a standing committee of the United States Senate. It is charged with leading foreign-policy legislation and debate in the Senate. The Foreign Relations Committee is generally responsible for overseeing and funding foreign aid programs as...
. Since that time however, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council has followed suit. In fact, in January 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, issued a report to the Secretary-General stating that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide." Nevertheless, the Commission cautioned that "The conclusion that no genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as
the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide."
In March 2005, the Security Council formally referred the situation in Darfur to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court
International Criminal Court
The International Criminal Court is a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression .It came into being on 1 July 2002—the date its founding treaty, the Rome Statute of the...
(ICC), taking into account the Commission report but without mentioning any specific crimes. Two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution. As of his fourth report to the Security Council, the Prosecutor has found "reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals identified [in the UN Security Council Resolution 1593] have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes", but did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute for genocide.
In April 2007, the Judges of the ICC issued arrest warrants against the former Minister of State for the Interior, Ahmad Harun, and a Militia Janjaweed
Janjaweed
The Janjaweed is a blanket term used to describe mostly gunmen in Darfur, western Sudan, and now eastern Chad...
leader, Ali Kushayb
Ali Kushayb
Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, commonly known as Ali Kushayb, is a former senior Janjaweed commander supporting the Sudanese government against Darfur rebel groups, and currently is sought under an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. He was known as aqid al oqada ...
, for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On July 14, 2008, prosecutors at the ICC, filed ten charges of war crimes against Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir
Omar al-Bashir
Lieutenant General Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir is the current President of Sudan and the head of the National Congress Party. He came to power in 1989 when he, as a brigadier in the Sudanese army, led a group of officers in a bloodless military coup that ousted the government of Prime Minister...
, three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and two of murder. The ICC's prosecutors have claimed that al-Bashir "masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups in Darfur because of their ethnicity. The ICC's prosecutor for Darfur, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is expected within months to ask a panel of ICC judges to issue an arrest warrant for al-Bashir. On 4 March 2009 the ICC issued a warrant for al-Bashir's arrest for crimes against humanity and crimes, but not genocide. This is the first warrant issued by the ICC against a sitting head of state.
See also
- DemocideDemocideDemocide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the...
- murder by government, includes historical genocide and politicide - Command responsibilityCommand responsibilityCommand responsibility, sometimes referred to as the Yamashita standard or the Medina standard, and also known as superior responsibility, is the doctrine of hierarchical accountability in cases of war crimes....
- Crime against humanityCrime against humanityCrimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum, "are particularly odious offenses in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings...
- Human rightsHuman rightsHuman rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...
- International humanitarian lawInternational humanitarian lawInternational humanitarian law , often referred to as the laws of war, the laws and customs of war or the law of armed conflict, is the legal corpus that comprises "the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Conventions, as well as subsequent treaties, case law, and customary international law." It...
- International lawInternational lawPublic international law concerns the structure and conduct of sovereign states; analogous entities, such as the Holy See; and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond...
- Mass killings under Communist regimesMass killings under Communist regimesMass killings occurred under some Communist regimes during the twentieth century with an estimated death toll numbering between 85 and 100 million. Scholarship focuses on the causes of mass killings in single societies, though some claims of common causes for mass killings have been made...