The Age of Genocide

Exploring 20th century genocides

Jennifer Gigliotti-Labay

A crime without a name…

“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.

Genocidegeno – meaning racecide – meaning killing

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

The 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment

of the Crime of Genocide defined genocide as

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

national, ethnic, racial, or religious group

20th Century Genocides

With the definition of genocide in mind, try to list as many 20th century

genocides as you can.

Major genocides of the 20th century

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

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

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

The Nanking Massacre, 1937-1938Death 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

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, 1988Death 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-present Death toll: debated. 100,000? 300,000? 500,000?

Namibia, 1904-1905

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'.

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.

The Armenian Controversy

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 the

French parliament's lower house adopted a bill that that would

have 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 Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933

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.

Nanking Massacre, 1937-1938

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 and represented the single worst atrocity during the World War II era in either the European or Pacific theaters of war.

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.

Cambodia1975-1979

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 East Timor Genocide 1975-1999

The Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975 set thestage for the long, bloody, and disastrous occupation of the

territorythat ended only after an international peacekeeping force wasintroduced in 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.'

Iraq, 1988

The Anfal Campaign against the Kurds was a systematicand deliberate murder of at least 50,000 and possibly asmany as 100,000 Kurds. It was the culmination of a longterm strategy to solve what the government saw as its“Kurdish problem”.

Halabja (March ’88) was one chapter of this campaign inwhich chemical weapons were used against this KurdishVillage.

Bosnia, 1991-1995

Bosnia was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire

until 1878 and then of the Austro-HungarianEmpire until the First World War.

After the war it was united with other Slavterritories to form Yugoslavia, essentially ruled

andrun 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 ingenocide committed by the Serbs against theMuslims in Bosnia.

The Legacy of Mogadishu1993

the most violent U.S. combat firefight since Vietnam

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

Its legacy, say many experts, was a continuing U.S. reluctance to be drawn into other trouble spots such as Bosnia, Rwanda and Haiti during the 1990s.

Rwanda1994

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

Before the 1994 Rwandan genocide boys outnumbered girls in school by 9 to 1. Today boys and girls attend school in equal numbers.

Before the genocide fewer than 6 percent of college graduates were female. Today women make up as much as 50 percent of the student body on Rwandan

college campuses.

Before the genocide the government was just over 5 percent female. Today, women make up 30 percent of Rwanda’s local leadership and almost a quarter of national leadership. The Rwandan Lower House of Parliament is 49 percent women – the highest percentage of women in any parliament in the world.

Rwandan Women Change Their World

Darfur2003-present

Is it genocide? Debatable death toll stands between 100 and 500,000.

What about the Darfur crisis makes it a genocide? Why doesn’t the international community act?

What role does China play in the inaction?

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.

DarfurWhat can you do?

Teaching students about social activism

Educating yourself on the issues Demanding action from Congress Educating your community ~ raising

awareness Volunteering for refugee organizations such

as Houston’s Alliance for Multicultural

Community Service

The Age of Genocide

Exploring 20th century genocides

Jennifer Gigliotti-Labay

Bibliography “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