Genocides in history

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."

Skulls of victims of the Rwandan Genocide

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.

Alternative meanings of genocide

See also: Genocide definitions

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 Genocide 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 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.

Timeline of genocides

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, 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 Amalekites and Midianites. 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."

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".

The Anasazi civilization in the American Southwest was destroyed in a genocide that took place circa 800 AD, suggests a new study.

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"

1490 to 1914

Americas

Main article: Population history of American indigenous peoples

From the 1490s when Christopher Columbus 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 American 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."

United States of America

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.

Argentina

Main articles: Conquest of the Desert and Paraguayan War

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.

Australia

Main article: Australian genocide debate

The Black War 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."

France

Main article: War in the Vendée

Mass shootings at Nantes, 1793

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 Revolution, 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".

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., 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.

German South-West Africa

Main article: Herero and Namaqua Genocide

The Herero and Namaqua Genocide 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.

Ireland

War of the Three Kingdoms

See also: Cromwellian conquest of Ireland and Cromwellian Plantation

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.

Great Irish Famine

Great Irish Famine

Main article: 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, 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 O'Grada. 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

Main articles: Muhajir (Caucasus) and Caucasian War

The Russian Tsarist Empire waged war against Circassia 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.

Qing empire

See also: Zunghar Khanate § Fall

The Dzungar (or Zunghar), Oirat Mongols 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."

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 Powers 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).

Ottoman Empire/Turkey

Main articles: Armenian Genocide, Assyrian Genocide, Greek genocide, and Dersim massacre

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 humanity" in reference to that regime's persecution of its Christian minorities including Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks among others. Many researchers 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:

"[i]n view of these new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization, the Allied Governments announce publicly to the Sublime Porte that they will hold personally responsible for these crimes all members of the Ottoman Government, as well as those of their agents who are implicated in such massacres".

Armenian

Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide (Template:Lang-hy, translit.: [Hayoc’ C’eġaspanout’youn] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help); Template:Lang-tr)-—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".

Assyrian

The Assyrian Genocide (also known as Sayfo or Seyfo; Aramaic: ܩܛܠܐ ܕܥܡܐ ܐܬܘܪܝܐ or ܣܝܦܐ, Template:Lang-tr) 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.

Greek

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, expulsions, 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.

Dersim Kurds

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. The main policy document in this context, the 1934 law on resettlement, was used to target the region of Dersim as one of its first test cases, with disastrous consequences for the local population. The Dersim genocide was discussed in the European Parliament in Brussels.

Soviet Union

Main articles: Human rights in the Soviet Union, Population transfer in the Soviet Union, Famines in Russia and USSR, Decossackization, Great Purge, Gulag, Holodomor, Sürgün, and Polish operation of the NKVD

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.

Soviet diplomatic efforts removed the extermination of political groups from the United Nations Convention on Genocide, so many of the atrocities committed by the Soviet authorities do not fall under the United Nations definition of genocide as the perpetrators of the atrocities were targeting members of political of economic groupings rather than the ethnic, racial, religious, or national groups listed in the UN convention. Nevertheless some of the gross violations of human rights committed by agents of the Bolshevik and Soviet governments by have been described by some authorities as genocide.

Decossackisation

During the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks 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.

Holodomor

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 the organisers said 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 Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych has supported this position.

Deportation of Chechen people

On February 26, 2004 the plenary assembly of the European Parliament recognized the deportation of Chechen people during Operation Lentil (23 February 1944), as an act of genocide, on the basis of the 1907 IV Hague Convention: The Laws and Customs of War on Land and the CPPCG adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948.

The Mass Deportations in the Baltic States of Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians

Mass deportation from the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia followed the Soviet occupation of those states during and after World War II.

In 2007 Estonia charged Arnold Meri (then 88 years old), a former Soviet Communist Party official and highly decorated former Red Army soldier, with genocide for his alleged role in deportations of Estonians to Soviet gulags in Siberia. Shortly after the trial opened, it was suspended because of Meri's frail health and then abandoned because he died of lung cancer. A memorial at Vilna in Lithuania is dedicated to the genocide victims of Stalin as well as Hitler, and the Museum of Genocide Victims in Lithuania, that was set up on 14 October 1992 under the auspices of the Lithuanian Minister of Culture and Education and the President of the Lithuanian Union of Political Prisoners and Deportees. The Lithuanian museum was established in the former KGB headquarters and chronicles the imprisonment and deportation of Lithuanians by officials of the Soviet Union.

Nazi Germany and occupied Europe

Main articles: The Holocaust, Racial policy of Nazi Germany, Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, and The New York Times and the Holocaust

Major deportation routes to the extermination camps in Europe.

Because of the universal acceptance of international laws, 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."

File:EG A Šiauliai Lithuania July 1941.JPG

Men are forced to dig their own graves before being shot by SS troops. Šiauliai, Lithuania, July 1941

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.

Croatia

After the Nazi invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 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.

Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia

The Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were part of an ethnic cleansing operation carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) West in the Nazi occupied regions of the Eastern Galicia (Nazi created Distrikt Galizien in General Government), and UPA North in Volhynia (in Nazi created Reichskommissariat Ukraine), beginning in March 1943 and lasting until the end of 1944. The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943 when a senior UPA commander, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, ordered the liquidation of the entire male Polish population between 16 and 60 years of age. Despite this, most of the victims were women and children. The actions of the UPA resulted in 40,000-60,000 Polish civilian casualties in Volhynia, from 25,000 to 30,000-40,000 in Eastern Galicia. The killings were directly linked with the policies of the Bandera fraction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, whose goal, specified at the Second Conference of the OUN-B, was to remove non-Ukrainians from the social and economic spheres of a future Ukrainian state.

The massacres are recognized in Poland as ethnic cleansing with "marks of genocide." According to the IPN prosecutor Piotr Zając, the crimes have a "character of genocide". However, according to Katchanovski, the actions which occurred in Volhynia cannot be classified as genocide "because there is no evidence of an intent to eliminate entire or a significant party of the Polish population, and the anti-Polish action was mostly limited to a relatively small region."

Dominican Republic

In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the execution of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. 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.

Partition of India in 1947

During the 1947 Partition of India millions of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs 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.

Republic of China and Tibet

The Kuomintang'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.

1951 to 2000

Universal acceptance of international laws, 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 expulsions 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.

Australia 1900-1969

Main articles: Stolen Generation and History wars

Sir Ronald Wilson, 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.

Vietnam War

French philosopher and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre, had been describing the US war in Vietnam as a genocide since 1967, when he headed the International War Crimes Tribunal, set up by Bertrand Russell to judge American military conduct in Indochina.

The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army committed mass killings during the capture of Hue City in the Tet Offensive. A total of 2,800 to 6,000 civilians and prisoners of war are believed to have been killed. This act has been described as genocide.

Zanzibar

In 1964, towards the end of the Zanzibar Revolution—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 graves 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.

Guatemala 1968-1996

Main article: Guatemalan civil war

During the Guatemalan 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

Pakistan (Bangladesh War of 1971)

Main articles: 1971 Bangladesh atrocities, Operation Searchlight, and Bangladesh Liberation War

In 1997 R. J. Rummel 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:

In East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) [the President of Pakistan, 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. 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 Pakistan has denied all Genocide allegations.

Between December 1970 and March 1971, Bengali nationalists subjected non-Bengali minorities, especially Biharis, to systematic persecution. It is estimated that between 15,000 and 50,000 Biharis were killed during this period, and is believed by some that elements of the Mukti Bahini, with active support from the BDR and intelligence, committed massacres against the Biharis. R J Rummel estimated that 150,000 non-Bengals were massacred by Awami League aligned militias, with a low estimate of 50,000 and a high estimate of 500,000.

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:

We are glad to announce that a case has been filed in the Federal Magistrate's Court of Australia today under the Genocide Conventions Act 1949 and War Crimes Act. This is the first time in history that someone is attending a court proceeding in relation to the [alleged] crimes of Genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during 1971 by the Pakistani Armed Forces and its collaborators. The Proceeding number is SYG 2672 of 2006. On 25 October 2006, a direction hearing will take place in the Federal Magistrates Court of Australia, Sydney registry before Federal Magistrate His Honor Nicholls.

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

Main article: Burundi genocide

Since Burundi'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.

North Korea

Several millions in North 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 offences.

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 intervene.

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 Nguema 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."

East Timor under Indonesian occupation

Main article: Indonesian occupation of East Timor

East Timor 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, 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

Commemoration in Argentina

In September 2006, Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, who had been the police commissioner of the province of Buenos Aires 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.

Sabra-Shatila, Lebanon

Main article: Sabra and Shatila massacre

The Sabra and Shatila massacre was carried out in September 1982 against Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Lebanese Maronite Christian/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:

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 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.

Soviet intervention in 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 (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".

Ethiopia

Ethiopia'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.

Iraqi Kurds

See also 1988 Anfal campaign

File:Halabja1.jpg

Photo taken in the aftermath of the Halabja poison gas attack

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.

Tibet

On 5 June 1959 Shri Purshottam Trikamdas, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India, 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

From the facts stated above the following conclusions may be drawn: ... (e) To examine all such evidence obtained by this Committee and from other sources and to take appropriate action thereon and in particular to determine whether the crime of Genocide – for which already there is strong presumption – is established and, in that case, to initiate such action as envisaged by the Genocide Convention of 1948 and by the Charter of the United Nations for suppression of these acts and appropriate redress;

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 sessions 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."

Brazil

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 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."

Democratic Republic of Congo

During the Congo Civil War, 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.

Somalia

The Social Science Research Council (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."

Azerbaijan

Main article: Khojaly massacre

The Khojaly Massacre was the killing of hundreds of ethnic Azerbaijani civilians from the town of Khojaly on 25–26 February 1992 by the Armenian and Russian armed forces during the Nagorno-Karabakh War. According to the Azerbaijani side, as well as Memorial Human Rights Center, Human Rights Watch and other international observers, the massacre was committed by the ethnic Armenian armed forces, reportedly with help of the Russian 366th Motor Rifle Regiment, apparently not acting on orders from the command. The official death toll provided by Azerbaijani authorities is 613 civilians, including 106 women and 83 children. The event became the largest massacre in the course of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

International prosecution of genocide

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

File:Milosevic-karadzic-mladic-wanted-poster.jpg

Wanted poster for war crimes suspects Milošević, Karadzić and Mladić

In 2001 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (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 Bavarian 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".

Rwanda

File:Rwanda genocide wanted poster 2-20-03.jpg

Wanted poster for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

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. Over the course of approximately 100 days from the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6 through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed, according to a Human Rights Watch estimate.

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.

Cambodia

See also: The Killing Fields, Autogenocide, and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Choeung Ek Memorial in Cambodia.

Skulls in the Choeung Ek.

The Khmer Rouge, 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 Cambodians between 1975–1979, including deaths from slave labour.

On 6 June 2003 the Cambodian government and the United Nations reached an agreement to set up the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) which would focus exclusively on crimes committed by the most senior Khmer Rouge officials during the period of Khmer Rouge rule of 1975-1979. The judges were sworn in early July 2006.

The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on 18 July 2007.

• Kang Kek Iew was formally charged with war crime and crimes against humanity and detained by the Tribunal on 31 July 2007. He was indicted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity on 12 August 2008. His appeal against his conviction for war crimes and crimes against humanity was rejected on 3 February 2012, and he is serving a sentence of life imprisonment.
• Nuon Chea, a former prime minister, who was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 19 September 2007. His trial, which is ongoing, started on 27 June 2011.
• Khieu Samphan, a former head of state, who was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 19 September 2007. His trial, which is ongoing, started on 27 June 2011.
• Ieng Sary, a former foreign minister, who was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 12 November 2007. His trial, which is ongoing, started on 27 June 2011.
• Ieng Thirith, wife of Ieng Sary and a former minister for social affairs, who was indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. She was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 12 November 2007. Proceedings against her have been suspended pending a health evaluation.

There has been disagreement between some of the international jurists and the Cambodian government over whether any other people should be tried by the Tribunal.

International Criminal Court

See also: International Criminal Court

The ICC can only prosecute crimes committed on or after 1 July 2002.

Darfur, Sudan

See also: Second Sudanese Civil War, Darfur conflict

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.

See also

• Democide - murder by government, includes historical genocide and politicide
• Command responsibility
• Crime against humanity
• Human rights
• International humanitarian law
• International law
• Mass killings under Communist regimes

References

• Braudel, Fernand, The Perspective of the World, vol. III of Civilization and Capitalism 1984 (in French 1979).
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• Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England 1983 ISBN 0-8090-1634-6
• Crosby, Alfred W., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986 ISBN 0-521-45690-8
• Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction , Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishers, 2006. ISBN 0-415-35385-8. Chapter 1: Genocide in prehistory, antiquity, and early modernity
• Levene, Mark (2008). {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) "Empires, Native Peoples, and Genocides." In A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, pp. 183–204. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
• McCarthy, Justin., Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922, (Darwin Press, 1995)
• Perdue, Peter C. (2005). {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.