Armenia

Beginning in 1915, ethnic Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were rounded up, deported and executed on orders of the government.

The combination of massacres, forced deportation marches and deaths due to disease in concentration camps is estimated to have killed more than 1 million ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks between 1915 and 1923.

Hitler did not fear retribution for the Holocaust. Why? He didn’t think the world would care, asking as he prepared to invade Poland “Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians? “In 1915, there were 2 million Armenians living in the declining Ottoman Empire. But under the cover of World War I, the Turkish government systematically destroyed 1.5 million people in attempts to unify all of the Turkish people by creating a new empire with one language and one religion.

This ethnic cleaning of Armenians, and other minorities, including Assyrians, Pontian and Anatolian Greeks, is today known as the Armenian Genocide.

Despite pressure from Armenians and activists worldwide, Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the genocide, claiming that there was no premeditation on the deaths of the Armenians.

Precursors to GenocideHistory of the Region

The Armenians have lived in the southern Caucasus since the 7th century BC and have fought to maintain control against other groups such as the Mongolian, Russian, Turkish, and Persian empires. In the 4th century, the reigning king of Armenia became a Christian. He mandated that the official religion of the empire be Christianity, although in the 7th century AD all countries surrounding Armenia were Muslim. Armenians continued to be practicing Christians, despite the fact that they were many times conquered and forced to live under harsh rule.

The roots of the genocide lie in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. At the turn of the 20th Century, the once widespread Ottoman Empire was crumbling at the edges. The Ottoman Empire lost all of its territory in Europe during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, creating instability among nationalist ethnic groups.

The First Massacres

There was growing tension between Armenians and Turkish authorities at the turn of the century. Sultan Abdel Hamid II, known as the “bloody sultan”, told a reporter in 1890, “I will give them a box on the ear that will make them relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”

In 1894, the “box on the ear” massacre was first of the Armenian massacres. Ottoman forces, military and civilians alike attacked Armenian villages in Eastern Anatolia, killing 8,000 Armenians, including children. One year later, 2,500 Armenian women were burned to death in Urfa Cathedral. Around the same time, a group of 5,000 were killed after demonstrations begging for international intervention to prevent massacres upset officials in Constantinople. By 1896, historians estimate that over 80,000 Armenians had been killed.

The Rise of the Young Turks

In 1909, the Ottoman Sultan was overthrown by a new political group – the “Young Turks”, a group eager for a modern, westernized style of government. At first, Armenians were hopeful that they would have a place in the new state, but they soon realized that the new government was xenophobic and exclusionary to the multi-ethnic Turkish society. To consolidate Turkish rule in the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks devised a secret program to exterminate the Armenian population.

WWI

In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The outbreak of war would provide the perfect opportunity to solve the “Armenian question” once and for all.

Military leaders accused Armenians of supporting the Allies under the assumption that the people were naturally sympathetic toward Christian Russia. Consequently, Turks disarmed the entire Armenian population. Turkish suspicion of the Armenian people led the government to push for the “removal” of the Armenians from the war zones along the Eastern Front.

Genocide BeginsTransmitted in coded telegrams, the mandate to annihilate Armenians came directly from the Young Turks. Armed roundups began on the evening of April 24, 1915, as 300 Armenian intellectuals – political leaders, educators, writers, and religious leaders in Constantinople – were forcibly taken from their homes, tortured, then hanged or shot.

The death marches killed roughly 1.5 million Armenians, covered hundreds of miles and lasted multiple months. Indirect routes through wilderness areas were deliberately chosen in order to prolong marches and keep the caravans away from Turkish villages.

In the wake of the disappearance of the Armenian population, Muslim Turks quickly assumed ownership of everything left behind. The Turks demolished any remnants of Armenian cultural heritage including masterpieces of ancient architecture, old libraries and archives. The Turks leveled entire cities including the once thriving Kharpert, Van and the ancient capital at Ani, to remove all traces of the three thousand year old civilization.

No Allied power came to the aid of the Armenian Republic and it collapsed. The only tiny portion of historic Armenia to survive was the easternmost area because it became part of the Soviet Union. The University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies compiled figures by province and district that show there were 2,133,190 Armenians in the empire in 1914 and only about 387,800 by 1922.

An Unsuccessful Call to Arms in the West

At the time, international informants and national diplomats recognized the atrocities being committed as an atrocity against humanity.

Leslie Davis, U.S. consul in Harput noted, “these women and children were driven over the desert in midsummer and robbed and pillaged of whatever they had … after which all who had not perished in the meantime were massacred just outside the city.”

In a 1915 letter home, Swedish Ambassador Per Gustaf August Cosswa Anckarsvärd noted, “The persecutions of the Armenians have reached hair-raising proportions and all points to the fact that the Young Turks want to seize the opportunity … [to] put an end to the Armenian question. The means for this are quite simple and consist of the extermination of the Armenian nation.”

Even Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, noted “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations; they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race.”

The New York Times also covered the issue extensively — 145 articles in 1915 alone — with headlines like “Appeal to Turkey to Stop Massacres.” The newspaper described the actions against the Armenians as “systematic,” “authorized,” and “organized by the government.”

The Allied Powers (Great Britain, France, and Russia) responded to news of the massacres by issuing a warning to Turkey, “the Allied governments announce publicly that they will hold all the members of the Ottoman Government, as well as such of their agents as are implicated, personally responsible for such matters.” The warning had no effect.

Because Ottoman Law prohibited taking pictures of Armenian deportees, photo evidence that documented the severity of the ethnic cleansing is rare. In an act of defiance, officers from the German Military Mission documented atrocities occurring in concentration camps. While many pictures were intercepted by Ottoman intelligence, lost in Germany during WWII, or forgotten in dusty drawers, the Armenian Genocide Museum of America has captured some of these photos in an online exhibit.

Portraits of survivors of the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan. The inscription reads, “These eyes have seen Genocide.

Recognizing GenocideToday Armenians commemorate those who lost their lives during the genocide on April 24, the day in 1915 when several hundred Armenian intellectuals and professionals were arrested and executed as the start of the genocide.

In 1985, the United States named this day “National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man”, in “honor of all of the victims of genocide, especially the one and one-half million people of Armenian ancestry who were the victims of the genocide perpetrated in Turkey.”

Today, recognizing the Armenian Genocide is a hot-button issue as Turkey criticizes scholars for both inflating the death toll and for blaming Turks for deaths that the government says occurred because of starvation and the cruelty of war. In fact, speaking about the Armenian genocide in Turkey is punishable by law. As of 2014, 21 countries total have publicly or legally recognized this ethnic cleansing in Armenia as genocide.

In 2014, on the eve of the 99th anniversary of the genocide, Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, offered condolences to the Armenian people, saying, “The incidents of the first world war are our shared pain.”

However, many feel that offerings are useless until Turkey recognizes the loss of 1.5 million people as genocide. In response Erdogan’s offering, Armenian President Serzh Sarkisian said, “The denial of a crime constitutes the direct continuation of that very crime. Only recognition and condemnation can prevent the repetition of such crimes in the future.”

Ultimately, the recognition of this genocide is not only important to redress the affected ethnic groups, it is essential for the development of Turkey as a democratic state. If the past is denied, genocide is still occurring.  A  Swedish Parliament Resolution asserted in 2010 that, “the denial of genocide is widely recognized as the final stage of genocide, enshrining impunity for the perpetrators of genocide, and demonstrably paving the way for future genocides.”

The Holocaust

After coming to power in 1933, Germany's Nazi Party implemented a highly organized strategy of persecution, murder and genocide aimed at ethnically "purifying" Germany, a plan Hitler called the “Final Solution”.

Six million Jews and five million Slavs, Roma, disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and political and religious dissidents were killed during the Holocaust.

After coming to power in 1933, Germany’s Nazi Party implemented a highly organized strategy of persecution, murder, and genocide aimed at ethnically “purifying” Germany, a plan Hitler called the “Final Solution”.

Six million Jews and five million Slavs, Roma, disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and political and religious dissidents were killed during the Holocaust.

As Champetier de Ribes, the French Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials explained, “This [was] a crime so monstrous, so undreamt of in history … that the term ‘genocide’ has had to be coined to define it.”

Precursors to GenocideAfter Germany’s loss in WWI, the Treaty of Versailles punished Germany by placing tough restrictions on the country. The treaty made Germany take full responsibility for the war, reduced the extent of German territory, severely limited the size and placement of their armed forces, and forced Germany to pay the allied powers reparations. These restrictions not only increased social unrest but, combined with the start of the Great Depression, collapsed the German economy as inflation rose alongside unemployment.

In the German parliament, the Nazi party, led by Adolf Hitler, gained popularity. The number of seats Nazis controlled in the parliament rose from 12 in 1928 to 230 in 1932, making them the largest political party. The strong showing guaranteed the Nazi party would need to be part of any political coalition. Believing he could check Hitler’s ambition, President Hindenburg reluctantly made Hitler the Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933.

Shortly after Hitler came to power, the Reichstag building, seat of the German parliament, burnt down. Communists were blamed for setting the fire and Hindenburg declared a state of emergency, passing the Reichstag Fire Decree that suspended basic rights like trial by jury. The German Communist Party was suspended and over 4,000 members were detained without trial. The next month, Hitler’s cabinet passed the Enabling Act which allowed him to enact laws without the consent of the parliament for four years, effectively transforming the German government into a de facto Nazi dictatorship.

From this moment on, the Nazi regime adopted hundreds of laws restricting the rights and liberties of the Jewish people. Jews were expelled from the civil service and barred from entering particular professions, stripped of their citizenship, and forbidden from intermarrying or even having a relationship with anyone of “German or German-related blood”.

The government defined a Jewish person as someone with three or four Jewish grandparents, not someone who had religious convictions. This meant that people who had never practiced, or hadn’t practiced Judaism in many years, or even converted to Christianity were subjected to persecution. Although anti-semitism was pervasive in 1930s Germany, these restrictions frequently extended to any person the Nazis considered to be “non-Aryan”.

— Kristallnacht —

The Night of Broken Glass

Throughout the nights of November 9-10, 1938, rioting across Germany, Austria, and part of German-controlled Czechoslovakia targeted Jewish people and their places of business and worship. These nights have come to be known as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of the Broken Glass”.

Over those two nights, hundreds (and possibly thousands) of synagogues were burned; more than 7,000 Jewish-owned businesses were looted and destroyed, and almost 100 Jews were killed during the violence. Some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and transported to concentration camps.

The rioting was triggered by the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, by a Polish Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, on November 7th. Grynszpan did not attempt to escape and claimed that the assassination was motivated by the persecution of the Jewish people. Despite being attended to by Hitler’s personal physician, vom Rath died two days later.

Although the events of November 9th and 10th were reported to be a spontaneous outburst of violence among the German people, they wereactually closely organized by the Nazis.

After this night, the German government supported dozens of laws and decrees that took away Jews property and livelihood. By the end of the year, Jews were prohibited from attending school. One billion reichsmarks of Jewish property was seized as collective punishment against the nation’s Jews for the murder of von Rath. Those able to flee the country did. In the year after Kristallnact, more than 100,000 Jews left Germany as the situation deteriorated.

World War IIThroughout the late-1930s, the Nazi government began to forcibly acquire ethnically German territory in Austria and Czechoslovakia that was taken from Germany at the end of the First World War. Although the international community initially allowed Germany to incorporate these territories into the growing German Empire, it became increasingly clear that Hitler’s ambition did not stop at these small territories. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Britain and France responded by declaring war on Germany, beginning the Second World War.

Between April and June of 1940, Germany invaded Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg consolidating power across neutral Western Europe. On June 22, 1940, France signed an armistice with Germany, which divided France between the German-occupied territory in the north and the Vichy regime in the south. Although officially neutral, the French state during this time was generally pro-Nazi and cooperated with Germany’s racial policies.

In the first half of 1941, after conquering Yugoslavia and Greece, Germany broke off its alliance with the Soviet Union and launched an invasion of the Soviet Union known as Operation Barbarossa. Hitler described his vision for the war with the Soviet Union as an “extermination of Bolshevik Commissars and of the Communist intelligentsia”.

To the Nazi regime, there would have been no doubt that a war against Bolshevism was implicitly a war against the Jewish population of the Soviet Union. A division of Hitler’s SS known as theEinsatzgruppen traveled behind the German army and acted as death squads, exterminating civilian populations in the most efficient way possible. During the early part of Operation Barbarossa these were frequently people who had fled the Nazi’s earlier invasion of Poland.

On December 7, 1941, the United States entered the war following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Four days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, bringing them into the European Theatre.

Beginning with the British air raids on Cologne in May of 1942, the Allies launched a strategic bombing campaign that would target cities and industrial plants across the Reich for the next three years. In the summer of 1942, Germany and its allies focused on the Soviet Union unsuccessfully. The Soviet Union gained the dominant role, which it would maintain for the rest of the war.

On June 6, 1944, also known as D-Day, more than 150,000 Allied soldiers landed in France. In December the Germans started an unsuccessful counterattack in Belgium and northern France, known as the Battle of the Bulge. Continuing to gain momentum, the Soviets began an offensive in January 1945, liberating western Poland and then forcing Hungary to surrender.

On April 16, 1945 Soviets surrounded Berlin, Germany’s capital. When the Soviets began advancing towards the Reich Chancellery, Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. Then on May 7th, Germany surrendered to the Western Allies in Reims, France and a few days later to the Soviets in Berlin. All told more than 60 million people, or about 3% of the world’s population at the time, were killed during the course of the Second World War.

— The “Final Solution” —

Ghettos, Concentration Camps and Death Camps

Jews were forced to move, often to different cities or countries, and live in designated areas, referred to as ghettos. Most of the ghettos were “open” which meant Jews were free to come and go during the daytime. As time past, more and more ghettos became “closed” meaning that Jews were trapped and not allowed to leave. No ghettos were ever established within the borders of Germany and most were only meant as a temporary means of isolating Jews from the German population until they could be moved elsewhere.

When the Nazi’s rose to power they built facilities to hold and, eventually kill, their enemies. When the first concentration camps were built in 1933, this primarily meant political dissidents and opponents of the Nazi government, such as German Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats but would grow to include asocial groups – Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the homeless, the mentally ill and homosexuals.  It was not until Kristallnachtthat the prisoners became primarily Jewish.

Once Germany took over Poland in 1939, it created forced-labor camps. Thousands of prisoners died from working conditions, exhaustion, and starvation. After the outbreak of World War II, the number of concentration camps increased exponentially. The number of prisoners of war camps also rose, but after the first years of the war most were converted into concentration camps. Nazis forcibly relocated Jews from ghettos to concentration camps.

Treatment inside the concentration camps were horrible. Prisoners were given tiny rations of food and forced into physical labor. They often slept more than three to a bed without pillows or blankets, even in the winter months. In many concentration camps, Nazi doctors conductedmedical experiments on prisoners against their will, in many cases killing the prisoners in the process.

In 1942, fifteen Nazi leaders met at a conference in Wannsee, Germany to discuss the “Jewish Question”. Their job was to decide the most efficient way to exterminate the Jews. They decided that Jews would be sent to extermination camps where they would be sent to showers. But instead of water coming out of the faucet, they faced their death when poisonous Zyklon-B gas leaked through the showerheads to suffocate them. This decision at the conference is called the “Final Solution.”

It was not until this point in the war that systemic extermination of the Jewish people was considered. Before this point, none of the concentration camps had been built to explicitly carry out the mass murder of the Nazi’s enemies.

The first such extermination camps were introduced during Operation Reinhardt, which targeted the elimination of the Jewish people within the General Government of Occupied Poland and Ukraine. After the first killing center open at Chelmno, the use of these extermination tactics spread quickly. At the height of deportations, the Birkenau killing center murdered 6,000 Jews a day.

While there were only 23 main camps between 1933 to 1945, the Nazi regime established some20,000 other camps used for forced labor, transit or temporary internment. During the Holocaust it is estimated that 6 million Jews were slaughtered along with, 3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 3 million Polish Catholics, 700,000 Serbians, 250,000 Gypsies, Sinti, and Lalleri, 80,000 Germans (for political reasons), 70,000 German handicapped, 12,000 homosexuals, and 2,500 Jehovah’s Witnesses.

The ResponseU.S. Response

After WWII had ended, photographs of the Holocaust stunned the public. Newspapers in the United States had reported on the oppression of the Jews in Germany during the war. In 1942, many newspapers were writing details of the Holocaust, but these stories were short and were not widely read. In 1943, after sources had confirmed the killings of at least two million Jews in concentration camps across Europe a Gallup poll found that less than half of Americans believed these reports to be true; 28% thought they were “just a rumor”. The reports were unconfirmed and sometimes denied by the United States government.

In 1944, Josiah DuBois, Jr. wrote a memorandum to then-Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews”, which condemned the bureaucratic interference of U.S. State Department policies in obstructing the evacuation of Holocaust Refugees from Romania and Occupied France. The Report would spur the Roosevelt administration to create the War Refugee Board later that year.

The International Response

Despite, wide reporting of Holocaust atrocities including gas chambers, many prominent analysts doubted the authenticity of these reports. Prominently, Roger Allen, a member of the British Foreign Office discounted intelligence reports on the use of gas chambers in Polish extermination camps because he could “never understand what the advantage of a gas chamber over a simple machine gun or over starving people would be.”

Advocacy organizations worldwide called for British Royal Air Forces to bomb concentration camps particularly at Auschwitz. Although the plan was adopted by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill poor information-sharing between parts of the British government led the order to be ignored and the plan dropped. Such calculations were hardly the low point of Allied Responses. One story has that, low on supplies, the Nazis offered the British a million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks, which one British diplomat promptly refused saying, “What would I do with one million Jews? Where would I put them?”

Although many people responded with obstructionism and doubt,   several rescue operations  were run throughout Axis-controlled Europe. Some were the work of prominent individuals like Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz who worked largely alone while other operations were far more complex. A network of Catholic bishops and clergymen organized local protests and shelter campaigns throughout much of Europe that are today estimated to have saved 860,000 lives. Danish fishermen clandestinely ferried more than 7,000 Jews into neutral Sweden while the French town of Chambon-sur-Lignon sheltered between 3,000 and 5,000 refugees.

— Refugees Refused —

The Journey of the St. LouisOn May 19th, 1939, the S.S. St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba with 937 passengers; almost all of them were Jews escaping with their lives. This was one of the last ships that left Germany before the outbreak of World War II. Most of the passengers had applied for U.S. visas and were only planning on staying in Cuba until they could enter into the United States. The U.S. State Department in Washington, the U.S. consulate in Havana, and the owner of the St. Louis were aware that they might not be able to enter Cuba, but the passengers were never told.

The passengers had landing certificates and transit visas by the Cuban Director-General of Immigration, Manuel Benitez Gonzalez. But, a week before the ship left, Cuban President Federico Laredo Bru published a decree that overturned all recent landing certificates. For them to land in Cuba, they needed written authorization from the Cuban Secretaries of State and Labor and a $500 bond. Most of the passengers were not prepared for the bureaucratic mess they were about to face in Cuba.

The St. Louis arrived in Havana harbor on May 27th. Of the 937 passengers on board, only 28 passengers were allowed into Cuba. 22 of these passengers were Jewish and had valid U.S. visas, 4 were Spanish citizens and 2 were Cuban nationals, all with valid documents. This story gained a lot of publicity; it was spread throughout Europe and the United States. The U.S. newspapers reported the story compassionately, but only a handful suggested that the refugees should come to the United States. The United States government decided not to take the steps to permit the passengers into the country.

After the U.S. government refused to permit the passenger’s refuge, the St. Louis left Cuba for Europe. The St. Louis sailed so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami. The passengers were able to find refuge in other European countries so they didn’t have to return to Germany. Great Britain took 288, the Netherlands admitted 181; Belgium took 214, and 224 passengers found temporary refuge in France. When  Germany invaded Western Europe, 532 of the original passengers were trapped. Just over half survived the Holocaust.

The AftermathNuremberg Trials

To prosecute the leaders of the Holocaust, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg was formed in 1946. The U.S., the UK, the Soviet Union and France each supplied two judges (a primary and an alternate) and a prosecution team for the trial. Twelve leading Nazi officials were sentenced to death for the crimes they had committed, while three received life sentences in prison, and four had prison terms for up to twenty years.

Three defendants were acquitted. However, many of the Nazis who perpetrated the Holocaust were never tried or punished, including Hitler who had committed suicide. Since then, the international community has continued and improved accountability through forums such as the International Criminal Court, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

The Word ‘Genocide’

Raphael Lemkin, a holocaust survivor who worked on the Nuremberg Trials, coined the term genocide and spent 4 years pushing for it to be added to international law. As Champetier de Ribes, the French Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials explained “This [was] a crime so monstrous, so undreamt of in history throughout the Christian era up to the birth of Hitlerism that the term ‘genocide’ has had to be coined to define it.” Ultimately, in 1948 The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide was adopted, and it entered into force in 1951. The convention defined genocide in legal terms based on Lemkin’s work, and is the basis for genocide prevention efforts today.

The Pledge: Never Again

After the Nuremberg war crimes trials finished, the United States spearheaded the effort to end genocide and become a champion for the prevention of crimes against humanity. The U.S. pushed for greater international effort, helping to draft the 1948 Genocide Convention. President Harry Truman addressed Congress urging the Convention’s passage. He stressed the role the United States had to play in “outlawing the world-shocking crime of genocide.”

These pleas went unheard and though an original signatory of the convention the United States did not ratify the Genocide Convention for another forty years and then  only with reservations. Presidents of the U.S. have vowed “never again” but have looked the other way when genocide happened again and again.

To fill this void, civil society organizations such as United to End Genocide have taken up the pledge and advocate for the international responsibility to prevent mass atrocities like genocide.

Cambodia

When the Khmer Rouge took control of the Cambodian government in 1975 they began a "re-education" campaign targeting political dissidents.

These citizens, including doctors, teachers and students suspected of receiving education were singled out for torture at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison.

In the four years after they took power, between 1.7 and 2 million Cambodians died in the Khmer Rouge’s "Killing Fields." 

The Khmer Rouge took control of the Cambodian government in 1975, with the goal of turning the country into a communist agrarian utopia. In reality, they emptied the cities and evacuated millions of people to labor camps where they were starved and abused.

Doctors, teachers and other educated people, as well as monks, the rich, and anyone perceived to be in opposition were tortured and killed.

It is estimated that between 1.7 and 2 million Cambodians died during the 4 year reign of the Khmer Rouge, with little to no outcry from the international community.

Precursors to Genocide: Rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol PotThe Communist Party of Kampuchea, informally known as the Khmer Rouge, referencing the majority ethnicity of the country and red as the color of communism, was originally born out of the struggle against French colonization and was influenced by the Vietnamese. The movement was fueled by the first Indochina War in the 1950s, evolving into an official party in 1968 and grew over the next 20 years.

In the years leading up to the Khmer Rouge’s regime, the neighboring Vietnam War spilled over into Cambodia. U.S. troops used Cambodia as a regrouping zone in addition to bombing parts of the country to destroy suspected Viet Cong targets, setting the foundation for animosity toward the West.

In March 1970, Marshal Lon Nol, backed by pro-American associates, staged a successful coup to depose Prince Sihanouk as the head of state. The Khmer Rouge headed by Pol Pot, allied itself with Sihanouk, setting the stage to become a major player in the civil war that followed.

With help from the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge began beating Lon Nol’s forces on the battlefields. And their growth was aided by the fact that Lon Nol’s Khmer Republic government, with assistance from the U.S., dropped about a half million tons of bombs on the country, killing as many as 300,000 people between January and August of 1973, further disenchanting them from the West.

On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge seized control of the country’s capital city, Phnom Penh, effectively ousting the Lon Nol government. They immediately began emptying the city’s population into labor camps in the countryside, where physical abuse, disease, exhaustion, and starvation were extremely prevalent.

Their policies were radical adaptations of Maoist and Marxist-Leninist theories, attempting to transform Cambodia into a rural, classless society comprised of collectivized farms. The country’s name was changed to Democratic Kampuchea in 1976 and Pol Pot declared it “Year Zero” as he began building his new republic.

The hypocrisy of the Khmer Rouge can be directly seen in their leadership, as many of the higher ranking officials were university-educated. In particular was “Brother Number One” – Pol Pot himself. Born as Saloth Sar in 1925, he came from a small village roughly 100 miles north of Phnom Penh. His family was relatively affluent and owned 50 acres of rice paddy, roughly 10 times the national average. He attended a French Catholic primary school in Phnom Penh until 1949, when he moved to Paris for post-secondary education and became active in communist groups.

Genocide BeginsThe Khmer Rouge regime was extremely brutal. The regime generally singled out doctors, teachers, monks, journalists, the rich, artists, anyone with an education, and ethnic or religious minorities. But they also executed people who could no longer work or make the journey to the camps, those perceived to be in opposition to the party (whether or not this was true), as well as the families of those were deemed undesirable so that they could not be chased down for revenge.

Unlike in other genocides or conflicts, no one was immune from being branded an enemy of the state. Even if one was considered to be on the right side that could change the next day – many Khmer Rouge members were also killed during purges.

Children and babies were not exempt from their cruelty; it was often noted “to stop the weeds you must also pull up their roots.” Anyone affiliated with Lon Nol’s regime or military was also immediately killed.

No evidence was needed in order to send one to prison and people often fabricated their confessions of various crimes, with the belief that this would end their torment. In reality, they were more often than not executed once they gave up a list of names of new people to arrest.

Cambodian refugee children, who fled with their families after Khmer Rouge raids, wait for food at aid station outside of Phnom Penh in 1975. (AP Photo/Tea Kim Heang aka Moonface)

In the beginning, executions were not necessary – starvation served as an effective tool to dispose of undesirable populations, but as more and more people were sent to prison, the Khmer Rouge moved over to a system of “killing fields,” establishing hundreds all over Cambodia.

As the genocide progressed,  survival was determined by one’s ability to do work on the collective farms. This meant many of Cambodia’s elderly, handicapped, ill, and children became targets due to their inability to undertake harsh manual labor.

Money, free markets, schools, private property, foreign styles of clothing, religious practices, and other aspects of traditional Khmer culture were abolished, and buildings such as schools, pagodas, and government properties were turned into prisons, stables, camps, and granaries. Family relationships were heavily criticized, and the Khmer Rouge insisted that everyone consider “Angka” (translated to the Organization, referring to the top level of the regime) as their mother and father. Child soldiers were a huge tool of the Khmer Rouge, as they were easy to control and would follow orders without hesitation, to the point where many were forced to shoot their own parents.

International Response

The international community was largely silent during the course of the genocide. Neither the U.S. nor Europe called attention to the genocides as they were happening, although scholars and others in the West tried to bring attention to the atrocities being committed. At this time the U.S. had just lost the war in Vietnam, resulting in the government’s reluctance to involve itself in the region again. While their public stance against the killing gradually strengthened, it did not amount to action. It wasn’t until the regime was overthrown that the atrocities that had been committed gained the focus of the international media. However, this still did not lead to an international investigation.

— Conflict in Context —

The Killing FieldsThe killing fields were sites set up all over the country where the Khmer Rouge took people to be killed once they could no longer work, had “confessed” to their alleged crimes, or simply just were not seen as being useful anymore. It is estimated that over one million people were killed at these sites and were buried in mass graves.

Today many of the killing fields have been excavated to give the victims a proper burial but some are also inaccessible due to landmines. One of the more famous ones is Choeung Ek located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Here people were taken for execution after enduring

torture and interrogation at the S-21 prison, a former high school. It has been turned into a memorial site for visitors to learn about the genocide and pay their respects to the victims.

In 1984, a movie entitled “The Killing Fields” was released. It documented the horrifying conditions that Cambodians were forced to live in through the stories of American journalist Sydney Schanberg and his Cambodian colleague Dith Pran. When the Khmer Rouge takes Phnom Penh, Schanberg is able to evacuate but Pran is not, and he is eventually arrested. The movie shows the ordeal he is put through and his harrowing escape. For many outside of the country, this was their first look at what the Khmer Rouge regime was like.

Fall of the Khmer RougeClashes with Vietnam broke out in 1977 and on January 7, 1979 Vietnam invaded Cambodia, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge and installing a socialist regime comprised of Khmer Rouge defectors. The rest of the party fled west into the jungles along the Thai border, carrying out guerilla attacks against the Vietnamese.

Many of the Khmer Rouge’s members escaped to Thailand, where they received aid from Western countries. Soviet-bloc countries also sought to keep Cambodia’s seat at the UN, and the U.S. voted in favor of this too. While they did not necessarily condone the Khmer Rouge’s actions, they also wanted to show their disapproval of Vietnam’s presence in Cambodia, one of many ways that Cold War politics fueled decision making.

For another decade, the Khmer Rouge fought the Vietnam-backed government with support from China and the Soviet Union. The violence and instability of this period result in the deaths of thousands of Cambodians, as well as a large influx of hundreds of thousands refugees into Thailand, still traumatized by their experiences under the Khmer Rouge and in search of food, medical care, and security.

In 1989, Vietnam withdrew their troops due to economic sanctions the U.S. had placed on Cambodia and a lack of aid from the Soviet Union (their main supporter). A temporary coalition government was formed and in 1991 a peace agreement was signed between opposing parties. Elections were set for 1993, and the former monarch, Prince Sihanouk, was elected.

Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge as an insurgency until 1997 when he was arrested and placed under house arrest. The organization continued to exist until 1999, by which point most members had defected, been arrested, or died.

— Conflict in Context —

Brother Number OneOn August 13, 1978, members of the Khmer Rouge unexpectedly attacked and kidnapped Kerry Hamill, John Dawson Dewhirst and Stuart Glass — three friends linked by their love of rowing — after their ship was inadvertently blown into the dangerous waters of Cambodia. Glass was immediately shot while Hamill and Dewhirst were taken as hostages into the notorious S-21 prison.

Brother Number One, directed by New Zealand filmmaker Annie Goldson, reveals Rob Hamill’s intimate journey to forgiveness as he testifies at the Cambodia War Crimes Tribunal on behalf of his brother, Kerry Hamill.

Through real footage of the trial, viewers are provided an emotional connection with Rob Hamill as he confronts Comrade Duch, the Prison Chief of S-21 and the man that brutally tortured and murdered his brother.

The title of the documentary offers compelling insight as well. The double entendre of Brother Number One not only refers to Kerry, the first of three brothers born to the Hamill family, but also to Pol Pot, the main political leader of the Cambodia genocide, who was known as “Brother Number One” in Communist propaganda.

Life after the Khmer RougeRebuilding the country was extremely difficult as there was little foreign aid and all existing infrastructure had been destroyed by Pol Pot’s regime. For a long time, the country did not have any doctors, teachers, engineers, or other professionals because they had all been executed.

PTSD was very prevalent among survivors, though it largely went untreated throughout the 1990s due to the lack of healthcare professionals in the country, as well as a tradition of silence surrounding the atrocities. The level of destruction inflicted by the Khmer Rouge has greatly contributed to the large amounts of poverty that many Cambodians face today.

In 2003, the Cambodian government agreed to the establishment of a UN-backed tribunal to prosecute those who committed atrocities between 1975 and 1979, resulting in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). Unfortunately by this time many of the top-level

Khmer Rouge members had either died or fled the country and were unable to be prosecuted. This included Pol Pot, who died of natural causes in 1998 without any charges pressed against him.

The ECCC has been criticized for its speed and inefficiency – there have only been five indictments and one conviction, including Pol Pot’s second-in-command Nuon Chea and, Kaing Guek Eav (known as Duch) the commandant of the infamous S-21 prison in Phnom Penh where thousands were held for interrogation and torture.

Cambodia today is still in a state of recovery from the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. The country is laden with millions of landmines, which have contributed to more deaths and disabilities even up to the present. It is estimated that roughly 40,000 people in Cambodia are amputees due to landmines. Many families separated during the period of the regime still have not reunited.

Though the Khmer Rouge no longer exists, many participants in Cambodian politics were previously influential members of the organization. This includes Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge battalion commander. There are also former members living in the countryside; in many villages people have lived side by side with them for decades.

Rwanda

Civil war broke out in Rwanda in 1990, exacerbating tensions between the Tutsi minority and Hutu majority.

In 1994, returning from a round of talks, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down outside of the country’s capital, Kigali.

Habyarimana’s death provided the spark for an organized campaign of violence against Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians across the country.

The Rwandan genocide is one of the heaviest moments in human history. An airplane crash in 1994 carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi provided a spark for an organized campaign of violence against the Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians across the country.

Approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were slaughtered in a carefully organized program of genocide over 100 days, making history as the quickest killing spree the world has ever seen.

Genocide BeginsCivil war broke out in Rwanda in 1990, exacerbating existing tensions between the Tutsi minority and Hutu majority. The civil war began when Rwandan exiles formed a group called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and launched an offensive against Rwanda from their home base in Uganda.

The RPF, which was comprised of mostly Tutsis, placed blame on the government for failing to address the Tutsi refugees. All Tutsis in the country were characterized as accomplices of the RPF and all Hutu members of the opposition parties were deemed traitors. Despite the opposition forces reaching a peace agreement in 1992, political negotiations continued in attempts to achieve harmony between the Tutsis and Hutus.

On April 6th 1994, as Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana returned from a round of talks in neighboring Tanzania, he was killed when his plane was shot down outside of the country’s capital, Kigali.

Soldiers inspect the wreckage of the plane shot down April 6, 1994, killing Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira. Photo by Corinne Dufka/HRW

Following the crash, the U.S. Deputy Assistance Secretary of State warned of “the strong likelihood that widespread violence could break out.”

The president’s death provided a spark for an organized campaign of violence against Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians across the country. In just a matter of hours, Hutu rebels surrounded the capital and took over the streets of Kigali. Within a day, the Hutus had successfully eliminated Rwanda’s moderate leadership. As the weeks progressed, Tutsis and anyone suspected of having any ties to a Tutsi, were killed.

The political vacuum enabled Hutu extremists to take control of the country. Detailed lists of Tutsi targets were prepared in advance and government radio stations called upon Rwandans to murder their neighbors. These specific lists included names, addresses and plates. Through radio hate speech, people were encouraged to take the streets and exterminate those who matched the list.

The Power of the Radio

The radio was utilized to not only list the location of specific Tutsis to be targeted, but to also justify the genocide. Radio hosts discussed discrimination the Hutus suffered under the power of the Tutsis. Strong connotations describing Hutus as slaves during colonization painted the Rwandan genocide as a type of slave rebellion. Radio stories were used to anger the Hutus and channel that anger into action. Radio was also used to dehumanize Tutsis by calling them “cockroaches,” making acts of violence against them seem less inhumane.

The extremist Hutus strategy turned into an extermination campaign as they began to encounter resistance from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi rebel group. The RPF fought back as the violence grew more severe, creating a toxic mix of both civil war and genocide. In response, the Hutus changed their strategy, believing if the opposition was completely exterminated, their majority power and status would be reassured and preserved. Thus, they set out to get rid of the Tutsis completely.

In addition to the brutal mass killings, systematic rape was also widely used as a weapon of war during the Rwandan genocide. The exact number is unknown, but it is estimated that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped. It was considered another way to destroy the Tutsi ethnic group, through both the emotional pain (so the woman could “die of sadness”), and through the health problems that would be a result. Often times, women did not even have to succumb to the aftermath of rape as they were often immediately killed right after.

Over the course of the 100 days, the RPF began to make gains on both the battlefield and in the negotiations led by Tanzania. By early July, the RPF had control of the majority of the country. Fearing reprisal killings, hundreds of thousands of Hutus fled the country.

Who Are the Hutus and Tutsis?

Rwanda is composed of three main ethnic groups: Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. Nearly 85% of the population identified as Hutu, making it the majority group in Rwanda. Tutsi comprised 14% of the population and Twa made up 1%.

The colonial power, Belgium, believed that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu and the Twa and put the Tutsis in charge of Rwanda. At the end of colonial rule, however, Belgium began giving more power to the Hutus. As the Hutus gained more leverage, they began to drive the Tutsis out of Rwanda and significantly lowered the population of Tutsis in the country.

Precursors to GenocideEthnic tensions existed in Rwanda for centuries, growing even more extreme after Rwanda gained independence from Belgium in 1962. In the 1990’s, the Hutu political elite blamed the Tutsi population for increasing political, social, and economic problems in the country. They also associated Tutsi civilians with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel group.

Many Hutus resented the Tutsi, as they were typically considered the elite and had ruled the country for decades. As a result, they also feared the Tutsi and were determined to hold on to their own power. When President Habyarimana’s (a Hutu) plane crashed, Hutu extremists assumed it was the Tutsis who shot it down. Immediately, Hutus set out to destroy the entire Tutsi population and seek revenge on the power that had always been deemed the elite.

The ResponseFrom the beginning, despite claiming to be caught unaware by the killings, the United States and international community knew of the danger and disorder in Rwanda. But no actions were taken to stop the killings. Months before the killing began, General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the UN Peacekeepers in Rwanda, sent a now infamous “genocide fax”, warning of an “anti-Tutsi extermination” plot.

The media covered eyewitness accounts and direct stories from missionaries who were unable to save their Rwandan friends from inevitable death. Stories hit the front pages of the Washington Post and theNew York Times, even with descriptions of six foot high piles of corpses. There were Defense Intelligence Agency reports that stated the killings were directly administrated by the government and intelligence memos that reported the ringleaders of the genocide.

The United States

Despite these reports, President Clinton specifically avoided calling the massacre genocide to avoid U.S. involvement. The Clinton administration

held on to the idea that there were no U.S. interests in Rwanda, so it was not their place to intervene. They also believed that U.S. credibility would be diminished if they deemed Rwanda acts of genocide and then did not step it to intervene.

A senior U.S. official described the decision to not intervene in Rwanda as “a foregone conclusion.”Military intervention was not on the table for discussion; it was automatically concluded that the United States would not take part in stopping the Rwandan genocide.

The International Community

International leaders also refused to use their authority to challenge the legitimacy of the genocidal government. When disapproval was finally voiced, the perpetrators in Rwanda did not stop the killing. The whole world saw what was happening, yet refused to step in.

A UN peacekeeping operation (UNAMIR) was sent to Rwanda in April. The mission, however, failed to be sufficient and was extremely ill equipped. There was a lack of functioning vehicles and the ones that were available were hand-me-downs. Medical quickly supplies ran out with no money to restock and other supplies could rarely be replaced.

The United States was the main proponent in backing the UNAMIR’s exit of Rwanda. U.S. officials felt that a small peacekeeping mission would result in a large and costly war for Americans. Belgium joined the United States in calling for a full UN exit in April of 1994. The Security Council later voted in mid-May to send 5,000 troops back to Rwanda after reports that the genocide spread. However, by the time the force returned, the genocide had long been over.

Those in power at the time claim that the information available was overlooked in the confusion of the civil war and the rapidity with which the genocide unfolded. But newly released archived materials of discussions within the U.S. government and the UN Security Council suggest more could and should have been done to prevent and respond to the Rwanda genocide.

The AftermathWhen the killing stopped, the RPF established a coalition government with Pasteur Bizimungu (a Hutu) as president and Paul Kagame (a Tutsi) as vice president and defense minister.

The UN also reinstated and revamped the UNAMIR operation in Rwanda, which remained there until March 1996. UNAMIR provided humanitarian relief in the aftermath of the genocide.

The outflow of former genocidaire’s across the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo has had lasting effects that continue to reverberate in the region today.

The effect that the genocide posed on the people of Rwanda is immeasurable. The people were tortured and terrorized as they saw those they love die and feared the loss of their own life. It is estimated that nearly 100,000 children were orphaned, abducted or abandoned. Twenty-six percentof the Rwandan population still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder today.

In 1994, the United Nations created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), dedicated to bringing those responsible for the genocide to justice. Although slow-moving, the ICTR began trying and indicting perpetrators in 1995.

The United Nations conducted more than 70 tribunal cases and Rwandan courts have tried up to 20,000 individuals. However, trying individuals in courts proved to be a challenging process as the location of many perpetrators was unknown.

To deal with the thousands of accused and to foster reconciliation, the traditional community court system known as “Gacaca” was used, leading to over 1.2 million cases being tried. The ICTR has also determined that the widespread rapes committed during the Rwandan genocide may also be considered an act of torture and genocide on their own. The ICTR closed at the end of 2014.

“Rwanda can be a paradise again, but it will take the love of the entire world…and that’s as it should be, for what happened in Rwanda happened to us all – humanity was wounded by the genocide.”– Immacuée Ilibagiza, Rwandan author

Bosnia

Beginning in 1991, Yugoslavia began to break up along ethnic lines.

When the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) declared independence in 1992 the region quickly became the central theater of fighting. 

The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in areas under their control in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The war in Bosnia claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people. 

In 1991, Yugoslavia began to break up along ethnic lines. When the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia) declared independence in 1992 the region quickly became the central theater of fighting.The Serbs targeted Bosniak and Croatian civilians in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The war in Bosnia claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people and displaced more than two million.

The height of the killing took place in July 1995 when 8,000 Bosniaks were killed in what became known as the Srebrenica genocide, the largest massacre in Europe after the Holocaust.

Precursors to GenocideThe Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was formed at the end of World War II, comprised of Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia with numerous ethnic groups making up the population. This included Orthodox Christian Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Muslim ethnic Albanians.

Tensions in the Balkans were common, but once President Josip Broz Tito came to power in 1943, he ruled with an iron fist and was typically able to keep them in check through a   dictatorship . Though he was considered to be a “benevolent dictator” and at times quite ruthless, Tito’s efforts ensured that no ethnic group dominated the country, banning political mobilization and seeking to create a unified Yugoslav identity. However, after his death in 1980, the order he imposed began to unravel.

The various ethnic groups and republics inside Yugoslavia sought independence, and as the end of the Cold War neared, the country spiraled out of control. Serb nationalism was fueled as Slobodan Milosevic rose to power in 1987. Milosevic used nationalist feelings to his advantage, making changes to the constitution favoring Serbs, creating a military that was 90 percent Serbian, and extending his power over the country’s financial, media, and security structures. With the help of Serbian separatists in Bosnia and Croatia, he stoked ethnic tensions by convincing Serbian populations that other ethnic groups posed a threat to their rights.

Ethnic Cleansing BeginsYugoslavia began to collapse in June 1991 when the republics of Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. The Yugoslav army, largely composed of Serbs, invaded Croatia under the guise of trying to protect ethnic Serb populations there. They took the city of Vukovar, carrying out mass executions of hundreds of Croat men, burying them in mass graves. This was the beginning of the ethnic cleansings that characterized the atrocities committed during the Yugoslav Wars.

Bosnia came next in April 1992. Following their independence, Serbian forces accompanied by Bosnian Serbs attempted to ethnically cleanse the territory of the Bosniaks. Using former Yugoslavian military equipment, they surrounded Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital city. Snipers hid in the hills and shot at civilians as they tried to get food and water. Mass executions, concentration camps, rape and sexual violence, and forced displacement were all extremely prevalent. The “siege of Sarajevo” is considered to be one of the most dramatic and representative parts Yugoslavia’s breakup, with thousands  killed over the course of nearly four years.

Attempts at mediation by the European Union were unsuccessful and the United Nations (UN) refused to intervene, aside from providing limited troop convoys for humanitarian aid. Later on, the UN tried to establish six “safe areas,” including Srebrenica and Sarajevo, but these were ineffective. Peacekeepers did not have the capabilities to truly protect the people seeking refuge there, and all except Sarajevo eventually fell under Serb control.

Genocide at Srebrenica

In July 1995, Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladic, descended upon the town of Srebrenica and began shelling it. At this point, the enclave was protected by only 450 Dutch peacekeepers armed with light fuel and expired ammunition – their force was so weak that a Dutch commander had reported that the unit was no longer militarily operational a month prior. The peacekeepers requested support from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) but were denied. Srebrenica fell to the Serbs in one day.

Mladic expelled 25,000 women and children from the town, while his forces tried to hunt down approximately 15,000 Bosniak men who had tried to escape to safety in central Bosnia. Up to 3,000 were killed, either by gunshot or by decapitation, while trying to escape. Many Bosniaks sought refuge at a UN base in nearby Potocari, but were not safe there for long.

Serb forces caught up with them by the afternoon and the next day, buses arrived at Potocari to take them away, again separating the children and women from the men. Serb troops forced the Dutch peacekeepers to hand over their uniforms and helmets so that they could use them to lure civilians out of hiding and trick them into thinking they were headed to safety.

At the end of the four day massacre, up to 8,000 men and teenage boys had been killed, and many women were subject to torture, rape, and other forms of sexual violence. Thousands were buried in mass graves. In order to conceal their crimes, Serb forces dug up the original graves of many victims and moved them across a large piece of territory.

There were clear indications that an attack at Srebrenica was being planned, yet the international community did not equip the peacekeeping forces there with the support necessary to protect the thousands who either lost their lives or were terrorized. The atrocities committed at Srebrenica are considered to be the worst on European soil after the Holocaust.

The ResponseWhile the war was widely covered in the press and individual policymakers at times took strong stands against human rights abuses in Bosnia, in general the UN, the European Union, the United States and Russia minimized the aggressive nature of the conflict and treated the fighting as a conflict between equal warring parties. Seeking to avoid the moral responsibilitiesof responding to a genocide, many of these countries referred to the conflict as “ethnic cleansing” rather than “genocide”.

The U.S. ResponseUp until 1995, the American government refused to take the lead onBosnia. The U.S. resisted sending in their own troops, and also vetoed Security Council draft resolutions to increase the number of UN peacekeepers. During his campaign, Bill Clinton criticized the Bush administration for their lack of action, but when he was elected in 1992, his Administration followed the same pattern.

In 1995, American foreign policy toward Bosnia changed. Evidence of the atrocities being committed, including those at Srebrenica, was becoming common knowledge and the United States’ lack of action was becoming an embarrassment. President Clinton told his national security advisers that the war was “killing the U.S. position of strength in the war” and he did not want failure in Bosnia to tarnish his chances at re-election. Despite all efforts to keep American troops out of Europe, he eventually realized that there was no effective way to end the war without it.

The International ResponseThe UN was hesitant to directly fight the Bosnian Serbs for fear of threatening their neutrality between nations and groups. The international community finally responded to the war after Serb forces took the town of Zepa, in addition to dropping a bomb in a crowded Sarajevo market. Senior representatives of the United States and its allies agreed to deploy NATO forces to Gorazde and defend the town’s civilian population. This plan was later extended to include the cities of Bihac, Sarajevo and Tuzla.

In August 1995, after the Serbs refused to comply with a UN ultimatum, NATO forces in conjunction with Bosnian and Croatian forces began an aerial bombing campaign. With Serbia’s economy crippled by UN trade sanctions and its military forces under assault in Bosnia after three years of warfare, Milosevic agreed to enter negotiations that led to a ceasefire. By the end of the war, roughly 100,000 people had died.

AftermathIn November 1995, the Dayton Accords were signed in Dayton, Ohio, officially ending the war in Bosnia. This peace agreement established two semi-autonomous entities within Bosnia-Herzegovina: the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, inhabited primarily by Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats, and the Republika Srpska (which includes Srebrenica), dominated by Serbs, both with their own political structures, economies, and educational systems, though connected through a central government.

Refugees were guaranteed the right to return to their pre-war homes, but only a small number of Bosniaks opted to go back to Srebrenica, which had been re-inhabited by Bosnian Serbs who had also been internally displaced by the war. An influx of international assistance came after the fighting, including reconstruction efforts by non-governmental organizations, UN agencies, and foreign governments and militaries and over $14 billion in aid.

Dayton’s Drawbacks

The Dayton Accords were successful in stopping the violence and allowing the region to create some form of normality, but it has turned out to be a somewhat of band-aid solution that set the stage for further divisions between Bosnia’s ethnic groups. For instance, Bosnia has a three-member presidency requiring one Croat, one Bosniak, and one Serb to represent their constituencies, but because each member is able to veto legislation that is seen as threatening to his own group’s interests, it has been nearly impossible to come to consensus for most of the

important issues at the central-government level. Furthermore, this type of system still excludes other minority groups in the country such as the Roma and Jews.

The fact is that the Dayton Accords were not meant to be a long-term solution to the problems of the country; they were meant to stop the killing and secure peace. Eventually they were supposed to be replaced with a more streamlined government structure. The hope was that in working together and creating a unified Bosnian identity, the mistrust between ethnic groups would fall away – this has not been the case. Though they may live side-by-side, Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs essentially leadsegregated lives. People identify themselves through their ethnicity rather than their citizenship.

The legacy of the Dayton Accords is evident within Bosnia-Herzegovina, as its economic development has lagged behind its Balkan counterparts. Unemployment remains a problem for a large portion of the country, and corruption is very prevalent. The country is currently trying to join the European Union, but a failure on the part of Serb, Bosniak, and Croat leaders to agree on details for a reform program have delayed their application for membership.

Criminal Tribunal

The UN Security Council passed resolution 827 establishing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, Netherlands in May 1993, before the war had even ended, after they were briefed on reports of massacres, rape and torture, extreme violence in the cities, and massive suffering of the hundreds of thousands who had been expelled from their homes.

The ICTY was formed to end the impunity of the perpetrators of mass atrocities, and was the first tribunal to prosecute genocide. It also has given survivors of rape, torture, and other heinous crimes the opportunity to tell their stories of what they experienced and what happened to their loved ones and be heard.

The ICTY was slow to start. A chief prosecutor was not named until 1994, and even after, the governments of Serbia and Croatia refused to turn their war crimes suspects or share information with the tribunal until their membership to the EU was jeopardized due to their lack of cooperation.

NATO showed its weakness again when members failed to arrest suspects in Bosnia out of fear of endangering their forces. However, since delivering its first sentence in 1996, the ICTY has

convicted more than 60 people involved with crimes against various ethnic groups in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. More than 160 have been charged, including high and mid-level political, military, and police leaders from multiple sides of the conflict.

It was ruled in 2001 that genocide occurred in Srebrenica, and in 2007 the International Court of Justice stated that Serbia violated the Genocide Convention by not doing enough to prevent it.

Former leader, Slobodan Milosevicreceived 3 indictments from the ICTY for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Kosovo in 1999, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Croatia between 1991 and 1992, and genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. His trial, delayed multiple times due to his health, began in February 2002 and he pled not guilty to all 66 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. In 2006, he was found dead in his cell in The Hague, months before his trial was expected to end.

After evading arrest for over a decade,Ratko Mladic, the man accused of leading the siege of Sarajevo and orchestrating the genocide at Srebrenica, began his trial in 2012 and it is expected to end in 2015. He faces 11 charges, including 2 counts of genocide and has pled not guilty to all of them. His behavior in the courtroom has apparently ranged from unremorseful to sarcastic to mocking, at times making gestures at the witnesses. The defense portion of the trial began in 2014, arguing that he was simply following orders– a common justification by those who have committed mass atrocities.

Finding Justice

Many survivors have had to live their lives not knowing what happened to their family members. Over20,000 people are still missing. When Serb forces dug up graves with bulldozers and trucks in Srebrenica in an attempt to move them to hide their crimes, many of the bodies were scattered. As such, finding the remaining missing persons has been extremely difficult. Those who are found are almost impossible to identify due to the condition of their remains.

In 1995, President Bill Clinton founded the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) to aid in the search and identification of missing persons found at disaster sites or war zones using forensic methods that matches the DNA of survivors to the unearthed remains. So far, the ICMP has been successful in identifying nearly 7,000 bodies in Srebrenica.

Recognizing GenocideWhile both the ICTY and ICJ have considered the atrocities committed in the former Yugoslav region to constitute genocide, this has not been a shared sentiment around the world. Notably, both Russia and Serbia have denied that the Srebrenica massacre amounted to genocide.

In July 2015, the UN Security Council held a meeting in preparation for the 20th anniversary of Srebrenica, and reportedly Serbia asked Russia to veto a draft resolution that would formally condemn the massacre as genocide. Russia used its veto to kill the resolution, stating that calling the crimes a genocide would prompt further tensions in the region.

Serbia has acknowledged that the crimes at Srebrenica occurred but has never used the word genocide to describe them. Arrests for Srebrenica-related crimes were not made in Serbia until March of 2015. Denial also runs strong in the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska, with the Bosnian Serb leaderMilorad Dodik called Srebrenica, “the greatest deception of the 20th century.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power was a journalist in Sarajevo when the attack on Srebrenica occurred and a first-hand witness to the suffering that the war caused. In response to Russia’s veto, she said, “It mattered hugely to the families of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide. Russia’s veto is heartbreaking for those families and it is a further stain on this Council’s record”.

Denialist rhetoric trivializes the experiences of victims and survivors, and minimizes the true weight of what occurred during the 1990s. Reconciliation cannot be possible without recognition of the crimes committed. Nothing can bring back their loved ones or erase their trauma, but by acknowledging these events as what they are, the survivors can begin the healing process and find closure for what they experienced.

Darfur

Over a decade ago the Government of Sudan carried out genocide against Darfuri civilians, murdering 300,000 & displacing over 2 million people.

In addition to the ongoing crisis in Darfur, forces under the command of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir have carried out attacks against civilians in the disputed Abyei territory, and the states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

The SituationTo this day, the Sudanese government continues its long-standing policy of attacking innocent civilians. In addition to the ongoing crisis in Darfur, forces under the command of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir have carried out attacks against civilians in the disputed Abyei territory, and South Kordofan and Blue Nile States.

Throughout its offensives, the Sudanese government continues to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity against its own civilians. Well over a million civilians have been displaced or severely affected by violence throughout the last two years.

Indiscriminate aerial bombardments and ground attacks are preventing farmers from planting crops in the southern border regions of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, and denial of international humanitarian aid has set up a crisis that could near famine conditions.

— Conflict in Context —

50 Years of War

As a colony of the United Kingdom, the British Civil Secretary in Sudan formalized a policy of separate governance for north and south Sudan in 1930 because of their many religious and cultural differences. By 1946, as World War II had ended and the global movement towards decolonization gained momentum, Britain decided to merge north and south Sudan into a single administrative region. It was this unified country that would be granted independence in 1956. The First Sudanese Civil War (1955-1972) was fought between the northern government and south Sudanese rebels demanding a return to the 1930s division that would grant them greater representation and regional autonomy.

A peace agreement between the warring north and south in 1972 resulted in an 11 year cease-fire until unresolved tensions reignited into the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005) that was again fought for southern autonomy. The government combination of combat tactics and conflict-induced famine led to the death of an estimated 2 million Sudanese during the Second Sudanese Civil War, marking it the deadliest conflict in civilian causalities since World War II.

One of the conditions of the 2005 peace agreement between the northern government and southern rebels was the establishment of a referendum on whether the region should remain part of Sudan or become an independent country. In February of 2011 the referendum showed almost 99% of southern Sudanese had voted for independence, and by July of 2011, South Sudan became an independent state.

However, since 2011 violence has escalated in regions along Sudan’s border with the newly independent Republic of South Sudan. Several issues, including border demarcation and an agreement over oil, remain unresolved and threaten a return to war between Sudan and South Sudan.

Genocide in Darfur

With the international community focused on resolving the conflicts between the north and the south, a growing conflict in Darfur was virtually ignored.

In 2003, the situation exploded as the government of Sudan responded to a rebellion in the Darfur region of Sudan, beginning a genocidal campaign against civilians that resulted in the deaths of over 300,000 and the displacement of over three million Darfuris.

In 2010, the Sudanese government and the Darfuri rebels signed a ceasefire agreement and began long-term peace talks known as the Doha peace forum. During these negotiations, steps were made to provide Darfur with increased regional autonomy under the Sudanese government rather than allow it a referendum to become an independent state like South Sudan.

However, since 2011, there has been no additional progress on these agreements and violence in the region continues to escalate with over 400,000 newly displaced in 2014.

Growing Conflict: Abyei, Blue Nile and South Kordofan

Abyei: According to the 2005 peace agreement, the disputed region of Abyei was to hold a referendum on whether it wanted to join an independent South Sudan or remain part of Sudan. However, in May 2011 Sudan invaded Abyei, displacing over 110,000 civilians and leading to the deployment of a UN Interim Security Force of 4,200 peacekeepers. The referendum still has not been held and 48,000 people remain displaced.

Blue Nile and South Kordofan: According to the North-South peace agreement, two Sudanese states bordering South Sudan were supposed to carry out popular consultations about how they would fit into a new Sudan, however fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and rebels broke out in June and September 2011. Since then, the government of Sudan has utilized its military forces to launch attacks in civilian areas including targeting churches and schools as well as fields essential to the livelihood of civilians blocked by the government from international aid.

Food as a Weapon of WarIn fighting rebels, the Sudanese government uses starvation as a weapon of war. Attacks on civilians disrupt the crucial cultivation season, resulting in emergency levels of food insecurity putting half a million civilian lives at risk.

The Sudanese government has cut off nearly all access to rebel-held areas and is preventing humanitarian organizations and the UN from providing desperately needed aid.

What We Are Calling ForThe Sudanese government remains willing to use deadly force against the Sudanese people to further his own political goals. We call on the U.S. government to respond to the Sudanese government’s atrocities against civilians by:

Pressing for full and unfettered access for international humanitarian organizations to South Kordofan, Blue Nile and Darfur and immediately, preparing alternative means of distributing emergency aid to civilians wherever denial of aid is being used as a weapons of war;

Pushing the United Nations Security Council to demand the government of Sudan immediately cease conducting aerial bombardments in South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and Darfur;

Pushing the United Nations Security Council to authorize a peacekeeping force for South Kordofan and Blue Nile that contains a human rights monitoring component, along with the appropriate resources and mandate necessary to protect civilians;

Working to expand the existing United Nations arms embargo for Darfur to all of Sudan; Holding perpetrators of violence accountable, including President Bashir, by

strengthening and expanding U.S. and UN sanctions against those responsible for violence in South Kordofan, Blue Nile, and Abyei; and

Demanding an independent international investigation into crimes committed against civilians in Abyei, Blue Nile, and South Kordofan through the International Criminal Court.

Tell Sec. of State Kerry: Protect the People of Darfur

Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, the same man responsible for genocide in Darfur has continued his attacks on Darfur and expanded his killing into the states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile – slaughtering men, women and children and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

Throughout its offensives, the Sudanese government continues to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity against its own civilians. The people of Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile need you to take action. Now.

We can not stand by and watch as Bashir gets away with murder. Please tell Secretary of State John Kerry to stop looking the other way as Bashir continues to wage war against the people of Sudan.