20th Century Genocide
Lauren Schneider
Created on April 26, 2021
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Genocide in the 20th Century
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The peoples of Namibia had lived alongside each other in relative peace prior to the arrival of the Europeans. The Damara people worked copper and were hunters. The Herero and Nama peoples, the largest groups, were livestock farmers. The Ovambo grew crops and were metalworkers. The San were nomadic hunters.The native people were unaware that a rich supply of gold, silver and diamonds lay in Namibia’s soil. The first Germans settlers arrived in the 1840s as missionaries and traders. Soon a large number more arrived in pursuit of Namibia’s rich resources. Then, in 1884, the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, took over all of South West Africa. Farms were bought and land deals were done. Credit was offered to farmers who had large debts. The German military governor, Major Theodor Leutwein, set up political rivalry between the Nama and Herero peoples, creating tension between the previously tolerant groups. The Namibian people decided to take the issue into their own hands. The Hereros mounted an attack on German forces in January 1904 on hearing that they were to be put into reservations to make way for a new railroad. They killed German men, sparing only the women, children and missionaries. Major Leutwin was replaced by Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha, who already had a brutal record in East Africa. He equipped himself with 10,000 men and a plan to go to war against the Nama and Herero. Herero warriors were driven out into the Kalahari Desert where the water in the wells was systematically poisoned. The 150-mile border was guarded to prevent them returning. Many of the women and children were driven out into the Omaheke desert, where they died of starvation and thirst. Others were forced to become slaves.
NamibianGenocide
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Armenian Genocide
The Armenian people lived in the Ottoman Empire. (The empire doesn’t exist any more as it became the Republic of Turkey, and there is now a country called Armenia). The Ottoman Empire was mainly Muslim, but the Armenians were Christians, and had limited freedoms. From 1914 onwards, the Ottoman government ran a propaganda drive against the Armenian people living within the Ottoman empire. This drive tried to convince the public that the Armenian people were the enemy. In April 1915, the Ottoman government put about 250 Armenian community leaders in prison. Many of them were executed. In September 1915, the government passed a law saying that they could take anything that belonged to Armenian people, including their land and homes. The government also began the mass murder of Armenian people, often by burning, poisoning or drowning large groups together. At least 500,000 died. Many Armenian people were also forced to leave the country.
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Consequences An estimated 2,000,000 Cambodians died from starvation, torture or execution between 1975-1979. This was approximately 30% of the population. 95% of the Buddhist temples were destroyed. Victims included Cambodia’s Buddhist monks, the Vietnamese, Chinese, Thais, Cham Muslims and the Kola. The genocide ended when the Vietnamese army invaded in January 1979 and liberated the Cambodian people from the Khmer Rouge. After the invasion, 600,000 Cambodians fled to Thai border camps. Some 10,000,000 landmines were left in the ground.
Buddhism The Khmer Rouge government attacked people who followed the Buddhist religion because it was believed that they could not be loyal to the government if they were loyal to their religion. By 1979, only 2,000 of the original 70,000 monks of Cambodia survived.
The Vietnamese The Vietnamese were targeted as a minority group for elimination. This was a genocidal attempt to wipe out a group regardless of its political persuasion. There were specific instructions from the Khmer Rouge leadership to do this.
Cambodia
French colonial rule ended in Cambodia in 1954 and the country was then ruled by its monarch King Sihanouk. By the 1960s the Cambodian Communist Party had organized a resistance movement against the king. The Khmer Rouge was a Communist guerrilla group led by Pol Pot, who later became leader of the Cambodia. He had a vision to create a country where people would farm the land and the country would be free of institutions, formal structures or capitalist influence. The Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia on 17 April 1975. They immediately declared ‘year zero’ and set about purifying the country. They banned all institutions, including stores, banks, hospitals, schools, religion, and even the family, in pursuit of their vision. People were forced to work 12-14 hours a day, every day of the week. Children were separated from their parents to work in mobile groups or as soldiers. People were fed one watery bowl of soup a day with a few grains of rice thrown in. Babies, children, adults and the elderly were killed everywhere. The Khmer Rouge killed people if they opposed their ideas or did not work hard enough. They murdered the educated and ‘intellectuals’, which included those with the ability to read. The Vietnamese minority was specifically targeted. Everyone had to pledge total allegiance to Angkor, the Khmer Rouge government. Not doing so resulted in death. It was a campaign based on fear.
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Bosnian Genocide
The wars that broke out in the 1990s in the area called the Balkans in southern Europe were ethnic in nature. They occurred as a result of the break-up of former Yugoslavia in 1991. Yugoslavia had been a peaceful, multi-ethnic nation, but in the 1990s, it was torn apart by fierce civil war that quickly turned into genocidal massacres. The nation-state of Yugoslavia had been formed after the Second World War by the union of Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Bosnia. It was home to the South Slavs and to other ethnic minorities. President Marshall Tito held these former republics together from 1946-1980. Then in the mid-1980s, a slow-down in the economy led to uncertainty for the multi-ethnic population. During this period, Slobodan Milosevic was elected President of Serbia and of the Communist Party. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, as each of the Balkan states sought its own national identity, extremist Serbs promoted fear and hate of the Muslims. There was emphasis on a Serb national identity and a programme of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (the expelling or killing of members of an ethnic group) began to take shape.Cultural monuments and public meeting places were destroyed and Sarajevo’s National Library burnt down. There was also mass evacuation of people. Some sought refuge in other countries; others ended up in concentration camps .The siege of Sarajevo, 1992-96 The battle for the city of Sarajevo began in April 1992. Heavy fighting broke out during a peace demonstration. The Serb-controlled army confiscated all weapons. Unarmed civilians were left to defend themselves in the intense shelling. An estimated 10,000 people were killed or missing in Sarajevo, including over 1,500 children. 56,000 people were wounded. In Bosnia’s Prijedor region, non-Serbs were identified by white armbands and forced out of their homes. More than 47,000 homes were destroyed. The worst single atrocity was the massacre of some 7,500 civilian Muslim men in the city of Srebrenica in July 1995. It was the largest mass murder in Europe since the Second World War. Serb forces separated civilian men from women and murdered the men, despite the presence of the international community and UN peacekeepers. An estimated minimum of 200,000 Bosnian Muslims, 10,000 Kosovar Albanians and thousands of Croatians were murdered. 1,500,000 million books were destroyed. 1,200 mosques were damaged or destroyed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. 2,200,000 people were displaced from their homes by the end of the Bosnian crisis in 1995.