AP WORLD MASS ATROCITIES

topic 7.8

genocide

acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group

Namibia

• 1904-1905

• german colony in Africa, Lt. General Von Trotha wants to wipe out rebellious tribes

• issued order to exterminate Herero tribe from the region

the Armenian Genocide

• 1915

• Turkish gov’t started to expel and massacre this group in the ottoman empire

• caused 1.5 mill Armenians to die

• contraversy: to this day, turkish gov’t denies the genocide occurred and it is illegal to discuss

the Ukrainian Famine

• 1932-1933

• Stalin set in motion events designed to cause a famine here to destroy the people seeking independence from his rule

• an estimated 7 million people died in this farming area, where these people were deprived of the food they had grown with their own hands.

Nanking Massacre

• 1937-1938

• Japanese imperial army marched into Chinese town and murdered half of the citizens (300,000)

• this 6 weeks of carnage became known as R*** of Nanking

• represents the single worst tragedy in the ww2 era in both Europe and the pacific

the Holocaust

• 1939-1945

• systematic, bureacratic, and state sponsered persecution and murder of 6 million Jews by Nazi regime collaborators

• means sacrifice by fire

• the Nazis believed that Germans were racially superior and that the Jews were an alien threat to the so called German racial community

Cambodia

• 1975-1979

• Khmer Rouge ruthlessly imposed an extremist program to recontruct this country into an agrarian, communist society

• the population was made to work as laborers in one huge federation of collective farms

• all inhapitatns of towns and cities forced to go to labor camps

• people who refused were killed, all poli and civil rights were abolished

• 21% of population killed

East Timor Genocide

• 1975-1999

• indonesion invasion of this region set stage for long, bloody woccupation of territory that ended after an international peacekeeping force was intorduced in 1999

• over 73,000 died due to hunger and illness as result of population being forced to lie in resettlement camps

The Mayan Genocide

• 1981-1983; Guatemala

• in early 1980s, rural Mayan communities were seen as allies of rebel forces

• led to the racially motivated extermiantion of defenseless communities, including children, women, and elderly

• killed 626 people, while displacing over 1.5 million

Iraq

• 1988

• the Anfal campaign against the Kurds was a systematic and deliberate murder of 50,000 Kurds

• was the culmination of a long-term strategy to solve what the government saw as a Kurdish problem

• Halabja was one chapter of this campaign I which chemical weapons were used against Kurdish villages.

Bosnia

• 1991-1995

• following ww1, united with other slav territories to form Yugoslavia, essentially ruled and run by Serbs from the capital of Belgrade

• Yugoslavia disintegrated in June 1991

• the newly formed bosnia-herzegovnia, condluf between ethnic groups resulted in genocide committed by Christian Serbs against the Muslims in bosnia

Rwanda

• 1994

• as a part of an ongoing gov’t pwer struggle, ethnic Hutus murdered 900,000 Tutsis in a 3-month period

Dafur (Sudan)

• 2003- present

• in 2003, rebel groups in this area took up arms against the sudanese government, complaining of attacks from Nomads

• gov’t responded by releasing Arab militants known as janjaweed (devil on horseback)

• in this ongoing genocide, African farmers and others in dafur are being systmecially displaced and murdered by Janjaweed.

• killed 400,00 and displaced 2.5 million.