Exploring 20th century genocides

Jennifer Gigliotti-Labay

“The aggressor ... retaliates by the most frightful cruelties. As his Armies advance, whole districts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands - literally scores of thousands - of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots who defend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there has never been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale.

“And this is but the beginning. Famine and pestilence have yet to follow in the bloody ruts of Hitler's tanks.

“We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

- Winston Churchill describing the brutality of the German forces occupying Russia, 1941.

A crime without a name…

The word genocide was coined in the midst of the Holocaust.

Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic,

racial, or religious group

The East Timor Genocide, 1975- 1999 Death toll: 120,000 (20% of the population)

The Mayan Genocide, Guatemala, 1981-83

Death toll: Tens of thousands

Iraq, 1988

Death toll: 50-100,000

The Bosnian Genocide, 1991-1995 Death toll: 8,000

The Rwandan Genocide, 1994 Death toll: 800,000

The Darfur Genocide, Sudan, 2003-2011

Death toll: debated. 100,000? 300,000? 500,000?

The Herero Genocide, Namibia, 1904-05Death toll: 60,000 (3/4 of the

population)

The Armenian Genocide, 1915-23 Death toll: Up to 1.5 million

The Ukrainian Famine, 1932-1933Death toll: 7 million

The Nanking Massacre, 1937-1938

Death toll: 300,000 (50% of the pop)

The World War II Holocaust, Europe, 1942-45

Death toll: 6 million Jews, and millions of others, including Poles, Roma, homosexuals, and the physically and mentally

handicapped,

The Cambodian Genocide, 1975-79 Death toll: 2 million

Major genocides of the 20th century

Under German colonial rule, German Southwest Africa is modern day Namibia.

German Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha said, 'I wipe out rebellious tribes with streams of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can something new emerge'.

On October 2, 1904, von Trotha issued his order to exterminate the Herero from the region. 'All the Herero must leave the land. If they refuse, then I will force them to do it with the big guns. Any Herero found within German borders, with or without a gun, will be shot. No prisoners will be taken. This is my decision for the Herero people'.

Namibia, 1904-1905

The Armenian Genocide, 1915

U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr., concluded a “race murder” was occurring. He cabled Washington and described the Turkish campaign:

”Persecution of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, whose-sale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.

These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place…there seems to be a systematic plan to crush the Armenian race.”

The documentary, The Armenian Genocide aired on PBS in April, 2006.

To this day, the Turks deny that the Genocide occurred.

This is a VERY controversial issue to the Turks.

Turkey suspended its military ties with France in 2006 after theFrench parliament's lower house adopted a bill that that wouldhave made it a crime to deny that the Armenian killingsconstituted a genocide.

23 countries acknowledge the event was genocide

In early October 2007, the U.S. Congress opened debate onwhether or not to declare the Armenian event a genocide – much to the dismay of the Turkish government.

The Armenian Controversy

Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, set in motion events designed to cause a famine in the Ukraine to destroy the people there seeking independence from his rule.

As a result, an estimated 7,000,000 persons perished in this farming area, known as the breadbasket of Europe, with the people deprived of the food they had grown with their own hands.

The Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933

In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China's capital city of Nanking and proceeded to murder 300,000 out of 600,000 civilians and soldiers in the city.

The six weeks of carnage would become known as the Rape of Nanking .

Nanking Massacre 1937-1938

Two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda competing to see who could kill (with a sword) one hundred people first. The bold headline reads, "'Incredible Record' (in the Contest to) Cut Down 100 People—Mukai 106 – 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings"

The Holocaust, 1939-1945

•The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

•"Holocaust" is a word of Greek origin meaning "sacrifice by fire“.

•The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were "racially superior" and that the Jews, deemed "inferior“, were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

Cambodia 1975-1979

The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Communist regime Khmer Rouge, which ruled the country from 1975-1979.

One Khmer slogan ran: 'To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.'

The massacres ended in 1979, when Communist Vietnam invaded the country and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime.

The Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975 set the

stage for the long, bloody, and disastrous occupation of the territory

that ended only after an international peacekeeping force was

introduced in 1999.

The East Timor Genocide 1975-1999

GuatemalaThe Mayan Genocide, 1981-83

In the words of the 1999 UN-sponsored report on the civil war: 'The Army's perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against them, demonstrating an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to extermination en masse of defenseless Mayan communities, including children, women and the elderly, through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilized world.'

The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds was a systematic

and deliberate murder of at least 50,000 and possibly as

many as 100,000 Kurds. It was the culmination of a long

term strategy to solve what the government saw as its

“Kurdish problem”.

Iraq, 1988

Bosnia was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire until 1878 and then of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the First World War.

After the war it was united with other Slav territories to form Yugoslavia, essentially ruled and run by Serbs from the Serbian capital, Belgrade.

Yugoslavia disintegrated in June 1991

In 1992 in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conflict between the three main ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against the Muslims in Bosnia.

Bosnia, 1991-1995

The Darfur ConflictThe Darfur Conflict was a guerilla conflict or civil war centered on the Darfur region of Sudan. It began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) groups in Darfur took up arms, accusing the Sudanese government of oppressing non-Arab Sudanese in favor of Sudanese Arabs.

Darfur 2003-2011Debatable death toll stands between 100,000 and 500,000.

South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011, ending decades of fighting between the mainly Muslim north and Christian and animist south.

Relatives mourn over the body of a one-year-old child who died of malnutrition in June 2004 in a refugee camp near a town in the Darfur region of Sudan.

• In September 1991, severe fighting broke out in Mogadishu, which continued in the following months and spread throughout the country, with over 20,000 people killed or injured by the end of the year. These wars led to the destruction of Somalia's agriculture, which in turn led to starvation in large parts of the country. The international community began to send food supplies to halt the starvation, but vast amounts of food were hijacked and brought to local clan leaders, who routinely exchanged it with other countries for weapons. An estimated 80 percent of the food was stolen. These factors led to even more starvation, from which an estimated 300,000 people died and another 1.5 million people suffered between 1991 and 1992.

• When, in 1993, efforts for aid had failed, a decision was made to remove the leader from power.

• What started out as an operation to capture warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid--turned into a firefight that lasted seventeen hours, left eighteen Americans dead, eighty four wounded and continues to haunt the U.S. military and American foreign policy

Mogadishu 1993

The Mogadishu Line is the point at which foreign involvement in a conflict shifts from peacekeeping or diplomacy to combat operations.[1]The term often comes about in reference to the reluctance of international actors to intervene militarily in another state for humanitarian reasons, due to a fear of combat operations that have a high human cost.

According to the US's former deputy special envoy to Somalia, Walter Clarke: "The ghosts of Somalia continue to haunt US policy. Our lack of response in Rwanda was a fear of getting involved in something like a Somalia all over again."[3]

The Legacy of Mogadishu

Rwanda 1994

800,000 Tutsis were murdered by Hutus in a 3 month period. The international community watched the event unfold and did nothing.

When the Belgian colonists arrived in 1916, they produced identity cards classifying people according to their ethnicity.

The Belgians considered the Tutsis to be superior to the Hutus. Not surprisingly, the Tutsis welcomed this idea, and for the next 20 years they enjoyed better jobs and educational opportunities than their neighbors.

Resentment among the Hutus gradually built up.

When Belgium relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutus took their place. Over subsequent decades, the Tutsis were portrayed as the scapegoats for every crisis.

History of Violence

The genocide was sparked by the death of the Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, when his plane was shot down above Kigali airport on 6 April 1994.

Whoever was responsible, within hours a campaign of violence spread from the capital throughout the country, and did not subside until three months later.

But the death of the president was by no means the only cause of Africa's largest genocide in modern times.

Rwanda

In Kigali, the presidential guard immediately initiated a campaign of retribution for the killing of the president. Leaders of the political opposition were murdered, and almost immediately, the slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began.

Within hours, recruits were dispatched all over the country to carry out a wave of slaughter.

The extremist ethnic Hutu regime in office in 1994 appeared genuinely to believe that the only way it could hang on to power was by wiping out the ethnic Tutsis completely.

Encouraged by the presidential guard and radio propaganda, an unofficial militia group called the Interahamwe (meaning those who attack together) was mobilized.

Mass Murder

Hutu: in power, the government

Tutsi: victims

Interhamwe: extremist Hutus, aggressors

RPF: Tutsi rebel militia

This is the story of an ordinary man who saved over a thousand people during the Rwandan genocide.

Hotel Rwanda

Read more at rwandanstories.o

rg

Roles in a GenocideWhat would you do?

The BYSTANDER category is larger than all the others combined!

• Finally, in July, the RPF captured Kigali. The government collapsed and the RPF declared a ceasefire.

• As soon as it became apparent that the RPF was victorious, an estimated two million Hutus fled to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).

• At first, a multi-ethnic government was set up, with a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu as president and Mr. Kagame as his deputy.

• But the pair later fell out and Bizimungu was jailed on charges of inciting ethnic violence, while Mr. Kagame became president.

• Although the killing in Rwanda was over, the presence of Hutu militias in DR Congo has led to years of conflict there, causing up to five million deaths.

• Kagame has won praise for pulling his country out of the worst spasm of violence the world has seen in decades. His government has advanced women's rights, economic development and health care. But critics say that progress has been marred by the government's authoritarian grip on control that has seen many government critics and opposition members killed. Many Rwanda watchers have begun to call his 14-year reign a dictatorship.

• Human Rights Watch, which Kigali practically views as an enemy organization, says civil and political rights in the country remain severely curtailed. It said the persistence of attacks on Rwandan government critics in exile "is striking."

Aftermath in Rwanda

Rwanda today…

Ever since the massive killing spree, the world community has been forced to acknowledge that it stood by and did nothing. The U.N. chief told a news conference he hopes to reaffirm the international community's commitment to the idea of "never again," though he said there are genocide symptoms elsewhere. Many experts say neighboring Central African Republic is at risk, Syria as well.

The-President Bill Clinton has said he regrets not doing more to prevent the slaughter in Rwanda and that "it had an enduring impact on me."

In a speech Clinton gave during a visit to Kigali in 1998, he said: "The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope."

Tomorrow?

“A Problem From Hell” America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power, 2002.

Human Rights Watch http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/14/iraq13979.htm

PBS, Ambush in Mogadishu, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ambush/etc/synopsis.html

Peace Pledge Union Information http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_genocide_intro.html

National Geographic http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/17368253.html

United Human Rights Council http://www.unitedhumanrights.org

U.S. Department of State http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/rls/18714.htm

International Institute for Genocide and International Studies http://www.genocidestudies.info/main.htm

God Sleeps in Rwanda film, www.godsleepsinrwanda.com

Yale Genocide Studies http://www.yale.edu/gsp/east_timor/

U.S. Holocaust Museum

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13431486

Bibliography