The History of Genocide

Mr. Herbert

What is Genocide?

• Genocide is the mass killing of a group of people, as defined as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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 group 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.“

• Genocide can also be called “ethnic cleansing”

• The word genocide is derived from Latin– Genos = race– Caedere = to kill

History of Genocide• Genocides have occurred throughout ALL of

history. The Old Testament not only describes the genocides of Amalekites and Midianites but justifies them through references to the word of God.

• The destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War (149–146 BC) may be the first documented genocide we known of.

From 1492 when Christopher Columbus set foot on the Americas to the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee by the United States militia, to Andrew Jackson’s “Trail of Tears”, the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere may have declined by as many as 100 million.

The Armenian Genocide 1915- 1923

Beginning in April 1915, the government of Turkey began executing Armenian leaders and starving out those that followed them. Many Armenians were told they were being “drafted” into World War I. In reality they were simply being sent to death camps.

It is believed that approximately 1.5 million Armenians were killed between 1915 and 1923

The Armenians refer to this event as “The Great Crime”. During this genocide, Armenians were made to march hundreds of miles without food or water to the desert area now known was Syria.

To this day, the government of Turkey (a major U.S. ally) refuses to acknowledge this event as an act of genocide, despite the word “genocide” originally being used to describe this event

There are several documented instances of unnatural mass death occurring in the Soviet Union. Most, like the Armenian genocide, involve deportations of ethnic minorities leading to widespread famine in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

During the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Cossacks, a population of largely anti-Communist Eastern Slavic peoples. The most reliable estimates indicate that out of a population of three million, between 300,000 and 500,000 were killed or deported in 1919–20.

The genocide against the Cossacks may very well be the first genocide documentedwith official government resolutions The policy was established by a secret resolution of the Bolshevik Party on January 24, 1919, which ordered local branches to "carry out mass terror against wealthy Cossacks, exterminating all of them; carry out merciless mass terror against any and all Cossacks taking part in any way, directly or indirectly, in the struggle against Soviet power.”

The 1933 famine that affected Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other regions of Russia was caused by the confiscation of the whole 1933 harvest in Ukraine and in Kazakhstan leaving the peasants too little to feed themselves. As a result 6 million died Soviet-wide, including 2.6 to 3.5 million Ukrainians and 1.3 to 1.5 million Kazakhs. Officially Moscow recognizes that the famine took place, but refuses to class it as a ethnic genocide

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 (NAZI) in Germany led by Adolf Hitler

The Holocaust -1940’s

During a period of 100 days in 1994, officially 937,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus in Rwanda. The rate at which people were killed far exceeded any other genocide in history. Bodies were left wherever they were slain, mostly in the streets and their homes. The method of killing was done mostly with machetes, leaving 20% of the country dead.

It is estimated that nearly 10,000 people were killed per day; 400 every hour;7 every minute

In 2004, it became widely known that there was an organized campaign by Janjaweed militias (nomadic Arab shepherds with the support of Sudanese government troops) to get rid of 80 black African groups from the Darfur region of western Sudan

Meanwhile, despite 400,000 casualties, the United Nations refused to acknowledge that Darfur was an ongoing genocide until after a peace accord was negotiated in 2011.

Since the beginning of March 2011, the stability of the Syrian Arab Republic has degenerated at an alarming rate. Massacres and mass atrocities against pro-democracy protesters and the civilian population are being committed by Syrian security forces under the command of the al-Assad government. Protests turned violent as former Syrian troops defected and formed the “Free Syrian Army,” which the Syrian governmentcontinues to call a “terrorist” organization to justify its all out war against the rebels andSunni Muslim civilians.

Syria – the next US intervention?

Genocide or civil war?What began as the violent repression of civilian protests has escalated to a civil war. Whole cities have been shelled by Syrian tanks and mortars, and investigations have led several countries to accuse government forces of using chemical weapons against civilians. Reports of human rights abuses by rebel forceshave increased. One group ofjihadist rebels has declared itself an al-Qaeda affiliate. With over one million people displaced and the death toll over 70,000, the war rages on,threatening the stability of the region.