Exploring 20th century genocides
THE AGE OF GENOCIDE
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.
GENOCIDE
GENO – MEANING RACE
CIDE – MEANING KILLING
The word genocide was coined in
the midst of the Holocaust.
The word was created in 1943 by
Raphael Lemkin
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,
1904-05
Death toll: 60,000 (3/4 of the
population)


The East Timor Genocide, 1975- 1999
Death toll: 120,000 (20% of the
population)
The Armenian Genocide, Ottoman
Empire, 1915-23
Death toll: Up to 1.5 million

The Mayan Genocide, Guatemala,
1981-83
Death toll: Tens of thousands

The Ukrainian Famine, 1932-1933
Death toll: 7 million

Iraq, 1988
Death toll: 50-100,000

The Nanking Massacre, 1937-1938
Death toll: 300,000 (50% of the pop)

The Bosnian Genocide, 1991-1995
Death toll: 8,000

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 Rwandan Genocide, 1994
Death toll: 800,000

The Darfur Genocide, Sudan ,
2003-present
Death toll: debated. 100,000?
300,000? 500,000?

The Cambodian Genocide, 1975-79
Death toll: 2 million
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'.
60,000 dead
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.
The documentary, The Armenian
Genocide aired on PBS in April, 2006.
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 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 killings constituted a genocide.
23 countries acknowledge the event was genocide
In early October 2007, the U.S. Congress opened
debate on whether or not to declare the Armenian
event a genocide – much to the dismay of the Turkish
government. HOW DOES THIS EFFECT US????
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 ( Pol Pot) , 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 the
stage for the long, bloody, and disastrous occupation of the territory
that ended only after an international peacekeeping force was
introduced in 1999.
Guatemala
The 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 systematic
and deliberate murder of at least 50,000 and possibly as
many as 100,000 Kurds. It was the culmination of a long
term strategy to solve what the government saw as its
“Kurdish problem”.
Halabja (March ’88) was one
chapter of this campaign in
which chemical weapons were
used against this Kurdish
Village.
Bosnia, 1991-1995
Bosnia was part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire
until 1878 and then of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire until the First World War.
After the war it was united with other Slav
territories to form Yugoslavia, essentially ruled
and run by Serbs from the Serbian capital,
Belgrade.
Yugoslavia disintegrated in June 1991
In 1992 in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina,
conflict between the three main ethnic groups,
the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, resulted in
genocide committed by the Serbs against the
Muslims in Bosnia.
The Legacy of Mogadishu
1993
 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 (“Blackhawk Down”)
 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.
Rwanda
1994
800,000 Tutsis were murdered by
Hutus in a 3 month period. The
international community watched the
event unfold and did nothing.
“Hotel Rwanda”
Rwandan Women Change Their World
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.
Never Again?
GENOCIDE
Genocides of the 20th Century
 Turkey, 1915: 1,500,000 Armenians
 USSR, 1934-39: 13,000,000
 Germany, 1939-1945: 11,000,000
 Japan, 1941-44: 5,000,000
Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide.
8 Genocide = Crime Against Humanity – a violation
of international law
•
•
As of Oct 2005, 137 nations have ratified this law
Including:






The United States (signed 1948)
China (signed 1949)
Cambodia (signed 1950)
Rwanda (signed 1975)
Bosnia-Herzegovina (signed 1993)
Sudan (signed 2003)
And after the law was
created…
 China, 1966-69: 11,000,000
 Cambodia, 1975-79: 1,700,000
 East Timor, 1976-98: 600,000
 Bosnia, 1992-96: 180,000
 Rwanda, 1994: 800,000 (in 100 days)
Was it vague?
 Article II: In the present Convention,
genocide means any of the following acts
committed with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group
 2 elements:
 Mental element = intent
 Physical = five identified acts
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
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;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Genocide
Wednesday, March 25
OBJECTIVES:
To understand causes of Genocide
Understanding of the 8 Stages of Genocide
What causes Genocide
1.
Institutions of government
a.
2.
Context
a.
3.
totalitarian systems
Possibility sharply increases when the government is involved
in international or domestic wars
Motives
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
to destroy a group that is perceived as a threat to the ruling
power
involves the destruction of those who are hated, despised, or
conversely are envied or resented
pursuit of an ideological transformation of society
purification, or the attempt to eliminate from society perceived
alien beliefs, cultures, practices, and ethnic groups
economic gain
The Eight Stages of Genocide
 Genocide is a process that develops in eight
stages that are predictable but not
unchangeable.
 The later stages must be preceded by the early
stages, though earlier stages continue to
operate throughout the process.
By Gregory H. Stanton (Originally written in 1996 at the Department of State;
presented at the Yale University Center for International and Area Studies in 1998)
Stages of genocide
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Classification
Symbolization
Dehumanization
Organization
Polarization
Preparation
Extermination
Denial
1) Classification
 All cultures have categories to distinguish
people into "us and them" by ethnicity, race,
religion, or nationality: German and Jew, Hutu
and Tutsi. Bipolar societies that lack mixed
categories, such as Rwanda and Burundi, are the
most likely to have genocide.
US
THEM
2) Symbolization
 We give names or other symbols to the classifications. We
name people "Jews" or "Gypsies", or distinguish them by
colors or dress; and apply them to members of groups.
Classification and symbolization are universally human
and do not necessarily result in genocide unless they lead
to the next stage, dehumanization. When combined with
hatred, symbols may be forced upon unwilling members
of pariah groups: the yellow star for Jews under Nazi rule,
the blue scarf for people from the Eastern Zone in Khmer
Rouge Cambodia.
3) Dehumanization
 One group denies the humanity of the other
group. Members of it are equated with
animals, vermin, insects or diseases.
Dehumanization overcomes the normal
human revulsion against murder.
4) Organization
 Genocide is always organized, usually by the
state, though sometimes informally (Hindu
mobs led by local RSS militants) or by
terrorist groups. Special army units or militias
are often trained and armed. Plans are made
for genocidal killings.
5) Polarization
 Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate
groups broadcast polarizing propaganda.
Laws may forbid intermarriage or social
interaction. Extremist terrorism targets
moderates, intimidating and silencing the
center
6) Preparation
 Victims are identified and separated out
because of their ethnic or religious identity.
Death lists are drawn up. Members of victim
groups are forced to wear identifying
symbols. They are often segregated into
ghettoes, forced into concentration camps,
or confined to a famine-struck region and
starved.
7) Extermination
 Extermination begins, and quickly becomes the mass
killing legally called "genocide." It is "extermination"
to the killers because they do not believe their
victims to be fully human. When it is sponsored by
the state, the armed forces often work with militias
to do the killing. Sometimes the genocide results in
revenge killings by groups against each other,
creating the downward whirlpool-like cycle of
bilateral genocide (as in Bosnia).
8) Denial
 Denial is the eighth stage that always follows a
genocide. It is among the surest indicators of further
genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide
dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover
up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They
deny that they committed any crimes, and often
blame what happened on the victims. They block
investigations of the crimes, and continue to govern
until driven from power by force, when they flee into
exile. There they remain with impunity, like Pol Pot or
Idi Amin, unless they are captured and a tribunal is
established to try them.