Notes for Mass Atrocities
Pandemic
War-related deaths continued after Armistice Day due to an influenza epidemic.
Millions of soldiers returning home spread the flu.
In 1919, the epidemic became a pandemic, killing 20 million people in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere.
India may have lost 7 million people to the disease.
The spread of the disease was another sign that while nationalism remained a powerful political force, improvements in transportation were creating a global culture that would create global challenges.
Suffering and Famine
Loss of a sense of security and hopefulness.
Lost Generation: term to describe those suffering from the shock of the war.
World War I was the bloodiest war thus far in history, resulting in tremendous suffering and death of military personnel and civilians.
Famine in the Ukraine:
Peasants resisted Stalin's collectivization of agriculture.
They hid or destroyed crops and killed livestock rather than turning them over to state control.
Famines in 1932 and 1933 were especially devastating in the Ukraine.
An estimated 7-10 million peasants died as a result of these famines.
The government took crops to feed industrial workers or for industry.
Although peasants starved, industry grew.
Ethnic conflict
Ethnic conflict drove the genocide in Bosnia.
End of World War I brought creation of new nations in Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia home to Serbians, Croats, Slovenes, and Muslims.
Marshal Josip Broz Tito led communist Yugoslavia until his death in 1980.
Tito tried to suppress separatist tendencies.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, so did Yugoslavia.
Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro declared independence.
Serbian nationalists led by Slobodan Milošević were emphatic about ethnic purity.
Serb forces committed acts of ethnic cleansing against Muslims from Bosnia and Kosovo.
Serb soldiers raped untold numbers of Muslim women.
More than 300,000 people in the region perished.
Another genocide
Another genocide erupted in 2003 in Darfur, a region located in western Sudan.
Most of the people involved were Muslim, but some were nomadic pastoralists of Arab descent, while others were non-Arab farmers.
The government of Sudan was controlled by Arab Muslims.
Two Darfur rebel groups composed of non-Arabs took up arms against the Sudanese government in response to attacks from nomads.
The government unleashed Arab militants known as the Janjaweed on the region.
Together with Sudanese forces, the Janjaweed attacked and destroyed hundreds of villages throughout Darfur.
Slaughtering more than 200,000 people, mostly non-Arab Muslim Africans.
More than one million people were displaced, creating a refugee crisis that spilled into neighboring Chad.
Despite negotiations, appeals, and the International Criminal Court charging Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir with war crimes, the genocide continued.