Genocides in the 20th century
Woman in front of wall of names at memorial center, Potocari. Srebrenica, Bosnia & Herzegovina. Photographer: Giovanni Vale (Shutterstock, 2015).
Genocides in the 20th century
The act of killing has occurred since the beginning of time. As forensic archaeology has shown, in the prehistoric era (around five-thousand years ago) humans lived in an ungoverned, anarchist state, where death by violent trauma was rampant (Pinker, 2011). Through the ages, through wars, rebellions, revolutions, and chaos, killing has been an innate yet unrepentant thread in the fabric of civilization. Today, there is a common acknowledgement in the immorality of killing, yet it does not stop.
Indeed, some of the most severe violations of human life have been committed within the 20th century. Although mass killings and systematic murders have occurred throughout the centuries, the term ‘genocide’ (from the Greek ‘genos’- race, and the Latin ‘cide’– killing) was not coined until 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin was a Polish lawyer who spent much of his career campaigning for the international legislative recognition of genocide (United Nations, 2020).
In 1946 the United Nations General Assembly officially recognized genocide as a crime under international law (United Nations, 2020). Two years later, it went on to be classified as an independent crime in the in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) (United Nations, 1951).
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, such as; (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group (United Nations, 1951).
Tragically, throughout the 20th Century, there have been numerous genocides across the globe. It is estimated that these deaths have amounted to over 40 million lives (Payaslian, 2019).
Armenian Genocide 1915-1918
The Armenian Genocide resulted in the death of two million lives at the hands of the Young Turks (political reform movement). The people of Armenia were exterminated through massacres and forced deportations from their homeland (Gavin, 2020).
The Soviet Famine 1932-1933
During the time of the Soviet Union, a communist dictatorship lead by Joseph Stalin, 7 million people died in Ukraine from a calculated famine designed to eradicate the Ukrainian people who sought independence from the regime (Gavin, 2020).
The Holocaust 1941-1945
The Holocaust (1941-1945), which shaped Lemkin’s work and served as the underpinning event for the establishment of the Genocide Convention, is perhaps one of the most widely recognized genocides. It resulted in the death of 6 million European Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany during World War 2, around two thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. The majority of these deaths occurred in concentration camps, where Jews were sentenced to death in gas chambers, through shootings, or starvation (Gavin, 2020).
Cambodian Genocide 1975-1979
‘What is rotten must be removed,’ a slogan of the communist Khmer Rouge regime, led by Pol Pot, which caused the death of 2 million Cambodians (around 25% of the country’s population). In Pot’s mission to create an ‘agrarian utopia,’ Cambodians died through overworking, malnutrition, disease, and deadly purges, which were aimed at elite groups within the society (Gavin, 2020).
Rwandan Genocide 1994
Many years of ethnic tensions in Rwanda led to a bloody genocide in 1994, where 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu extremists. The Tutsis were considered the elite of Rwanda’s population, despite being a minority, and decades of power struggle between the two groups eventually led to the massacre of the Tutsis by Hutu forces using weapons such as clubs and machetes (Gavin, 2020) over a period of 100 days (BBC News, 2019).
There were many more genocides committed through the 1900s. These include:
Herero and Namaqua (1904-1908, 70,000 and 7000 deaths)
Assyrians and Greeks (1913-1924, 1 million deaths)
Nanking, China (1937, 300,000 deaths)
Bangladesh (1971, approx. 3 million deaths)
Ethiopia (1976-78, 10,000-500,000 deaths) (Taylor, 2015)
Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995, 200,000 deaths) (Gavin, 2020).
Causes of genocide
These horrific crimes which leave little to no justification or rationale beg the question: What causes such inhumanity?
There are many interpretations of why genocide occurs, the following just three of many:
- Institutions of government. Genocide, the intent to eradicate a targeted group of people, occurs largely within totalitarian, dictatorial, or fascist lead states; Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany, for example. In states which allow its citizens to exercise their civil liberties, democracies, practically no genocide is present (Rummel, 2020).
- Context. Genocide is amplified during times of conflict, whereby “war has always been an excuse, cover, or stimulus for genocide and mass murder” (Rummel, 2020).
- Motive. This is a multi-layered construct. More often than not, genocide is committed against a group of people considered to pose a threat to the ruling or emerging dominant power, such as the Hutus in Rwanda, or the independence campaigners in Ukraine. Another accepted motive is that of destroying those who are hated or who are envied, such as Hitler’s hatred of the Jewish people who had built a prosperous community for themselves (Rummel, 2020). The pursuit of an ideological transformation within a society is also a motive which is prevalent within states where genocide is enacted; Pot’s pursuit of an agrarian utopia epitomizes this. A further two motives are based on the premises of purification, or ethnic cleansing as is often used, as well as economic gain (Rummel, 2020).
Justice and resolution
It is certain that genocide is one of the most severe indictments of society. However, justice has still not been brought to many of the victims. There are still states who refuse to take accountability for the past crimes of their nations. Modern day Turkey, for example, is strictly opposed to recognizing the Armenian Genocide for the crime that it was, leading to other governments’ reluctance to also do so, governments who want to maintain a cordial relationship with Turkey (Stout, 2020).
Evidently, despite many years passing since the horrific events, political bias and the self-interest of nations still permeate into the fundamental humanity we might hope to be governed by. However, there are systems in place, working to rectify this. The Genocide Convention seeks to prevent its enactment, whilst ensuring that those who do are convicted, held accountable, and sentenced for their crimes (United Nations, 1951), and efforts by campaign groups to bring light and acknowledgement to these humanitarian atrocities continue.
Article by
Costadina Tsoukala-Steggell
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