Many acts of genocide have been committed over the course of history. The memorial stone from the late 13th century B.C. has Egyptian hieroglyphs that may be the earliest known mention of Israel. During the destruction of Carthage in Tunisia in 146 B.C., an estimated 62,000 people were executed and 50,000 were enslaved, as well as in the Gallic Wars of the first. Europeans are thought to have killed millions of people in colonial genocides in the New World and Africa.
In the last 80 years, genocide has become a major world concern, along with the industrialization of warfare and the large scale atrocities of the 20th century. Six million Jews and 12 million other people, including Romani, Russians, and Poles, were murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
The term "genocide" was first used in the 1920s to describe the slaughter of more than one million people by the Ottoman Empire. There have been new reports of genocide every decade since 1949, from the communist mass killings in Russia since 1918, to the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the killings in Sudan that have been ongoing for most of the 21st
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish international lawyer who in the late 1920s read about the massacres and other brutalities carried out by the "Three Pashas" government, came up with the term "genocide" The Young Turks leaders were not tried for their crimes. Lemkin escaped Poland during World War II and lectured in Sweden, but 49 of his relatives were killed during the Holocaust. He introduced the word genocide in a legal review of the Nazi occupation of Europe that he wrote after moving to the US. According to the United Nations, "genos" is the Greek word for race or tribe and "cide" is the Latin word for killing.
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"He saw it being done again in the Holocaust, and that's when he came up with the idea of the nonprofit," said Gregory Stanton, a former U.S. State Department diplomat. Lemkin realized that international law wasn't enough to deal with the problem and that there needed to be a convention.
The Nuremberg trials were based on Lemkin's idea of genocide being a crime under international law. "Any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group" is defined by the treaty.
Killing members of a group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, causing conditions calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction, and forcibly taking their children from them to be raised elsewhere are examples of genocidal crimes. The International Criminal Court at The Hague uses the definition of genocide in their definition of genocide.
The persecutions and killings of people for their political beliefs or membership of an economic, social or cultural group are not included in the international agreements against genocide. The goal is to destroy a group. The major nations at the UN, including the U.K., the U.S., Russia and France, didn't want a broad definition of what constituted a war crime.
When the convention was first agreed, Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union at the time, was one of the biggest opponents to a broader definition of genocide. The Soviet Union is thought to have killed more people than any other entity, except possibly Communist China.
The Soviet Union and China have never been put on trial for genocide, but rulers and officials from other countries have. According to the University of Minnesota, between 1.5 and 3 million people were killed by the communist Khmer Rouge movement in Cambodia. From 1997 to 2012 two of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders were found guilty of war crimes by a joint United Nations and Cambodian tribunal; the crimes included genocide based on Khmer Rouge persecutions of Cambodian ethnic groups.
The victims of genocide were communists. More than 400,000 people were killed during the Indonesian genocide in 1965, in which the Western-aligned government targeted Communist Party members and sympathizers, as well as ethnic and religious groups. According to the Holocaust Museum Houston, up to 200,000 people were murdered during the civil war of the 1960s to the 1990s in Guatemala.
Ethnic differences have led to genocide in the world. More than 4 million Native Americans died before 1900, according to a study published in the journal The American Historical Review. According to a study, the U.S. has been accused of genocide against Black Americans. The persecutions and mass killings of Indigenous groups in Central and South America have been described as genocide.
There were massacres of ethnic groups in Europe during and after Yugoslavia's break up. According to the Holocaust Museum Houston, Bosnian Serbs killed tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats in acts of genocide. The Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed as many as 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, is included in the total.
Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered and hundreds of thousands of women were raped by the Hutu extremists over a 100 day period. The deaths of more than 200,000 people and the displacement of millions of people have been caused by ethnic differences in Sudan. The conflict has been described as the first genocide of the 21st century.
Accusations of genocide have been leveled at Russia since it invaded Ukraine. Although Russians and Ukrainians share a common origin, they are not the same as national groups and ethnic groups. He said that genocide is the intentional destruction of a national group and that the Ukrainians are definitely a national group. Up to 5 million people were killed in the Great Famine of 1932 and 1933 in the Soviet Union, and the situation in Ukraine is complicated by that memory. It's estimated that at least 3.8 million Ukrainians died between those years due to the effects of its effects. The Soviet Union was accused of committing a genocide against the Ukrainians in the 1980's.
The persecution of ethnic Uyghurs in China's far west is considered an ongoing genocide. An unofficial U.K.-based tribunal determined that the Chinese government's forced contraceptives on the Uyghurs were acts of genocide. More than 70 witnesses testified at the tribunal in London that China had imprisoned and tortured more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslims in the 1980's and 90's.
The accusations were denied by China. He said that the Chinese government has violated every single act of genocide. The Uyghurs are being wiped out by China.
There are more genocides to come, according to experts. Some parts of India, where political, ethnic and religious tensions threaten to break out into mass violence, as well as parts of West Africa, where countries such as Nigeria, are experiencing Islamist insurgencies, are of particular concern.
It is now possible to identify potential genocides before they happen by studying telltale aspects of a society. There are 10 stages of a genocide listed by the nonprofit group Genocide Watch, including elements like the separate classification within a country of distinct ethnic, racial, religious or national groups and efforts to dehumanize them. Denying is when the perpetrators of genocide pretend it didn't happen.
It's hard to convince political leaders to act in the face of an impending genocide. He asked how you could engage the consciousness and the will of policymakers to stop the process. I don't believe we've solved that yet.
It was originally published on Live Science
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