2. What is Mass killings and Genocide
Global Trend of Mass Killing and Genocide
The Armenian Genocide
The Bosnian Genocide
International Response
The future trends
3. There are, broadly, two main areas of contention in the question of genocide.
Firstly, there is a lack of agreement over the very definition of the term, and even
whether this matters for how perpetrators should be dealt with.
Secondly, scholars are divided over the extent to which genocide is strictly a
phenomenon of the modern era and linked to modern state-building and nationalism,
or is a recurrent feature of human history.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide was passed by the UN
General Assembly in December 1948 and became international law in 1951.
The term was not employed in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal
established by the Allies under the London Agreement of 8 August 1945. There were
several references to acts of “extermination” including “on political, racial or religious
grounds”, mostly but not solely in reference to persecution of Jews, and they were
subsumed within the category of “crimes against humanity”
Because the crime of genocide was not part of international law prior to 1945, trials of
former Nazi officials and collaborators post-Nuremburg have usually involved
charges of “crimes against humanity” with no mention of “genocide”. This was the
case, for example, in the most prominent of the post-Nuremburg trials of Nazis, the
case of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. Eichmann’s fifteen count indictment cited
“physical extermination of the Jews” among other “crimes against humanity” (The
Trial of Adolf Eichmann, 1961).
4. The term “genocide” was coined by Polish legal scholar Raphael
Lemkin in 1943 proposing that a new crime of “barbarity” under
international law be created to cover acts that included, among others,
“acts of extermination” directed against “ethnic, religious or social collectivities
whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.)”.
“Genocide,” a term used to describe violence against members of a national,
ethnical, racial or religious group with the intent to destroy the entire group.
In 1948, the United Nations declared genocide to be an international crime;
the term would later be applied to the horrific acts of violence committed
during conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and in the African country of Rwanda
in the 1990s.
5. 1. CLASSIFICATION: All cultures have categories to distinguish people into “us and them” by
ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality: German and Jew, Hutu and Tutsi.
2. SYMBOLIZATION: We give names or other symbols to the classifications. We name people
“Jews” or “Gypsies”, or distinguish them by colors or dress; and apply the symbols to members
of groups.
3. DISCRIMINATION: A dominant group uses law, custom, and political power to deny the
rights of other groups.
4. DEHUMANIZATION: One group denies the humanity of the other group. Members of it are
equated with animals, vermin, insects or diseases
5. ORGANIZATION: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state, often using militias to
provide deniability of state responsibility (the Janjaweed in Darfur.)
6. OLARIZATION: Extremists drive the groups apart. Hate groups broadcast polarizing
propaganda. Laws may forbid intermarriage or social interaction.
7. PREPARATION: National or perpetrator group leaders plan the “Final Solution” to the
Jewish, Armenian, Tutsi or other targeted group “question.”
8. PERSECUTION: Victims are identified and separated out because of their ethnic or religious
identity.
9. EXTERMINATION begins, and quickly becomes the mass killing legally called “genocide.
10. DENIAL is the final stage that lasts throughout and always follows genocide. It is among the
surest indicators of further genocidal massacres.
6.
7.
8. In 1915, leaders of the Turkish government set in motion a plan to expel and
massacre Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Though reports vary, most
sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at
the time of the massacre. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations
finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenians were dead, with many more
forcibly removed from the country.
The Armenian people have made their home in the Caucasus region of Eurasia for
some 3,000 years. For some of that time, the kingdom of Armenia was an
independent entity–at the beginning of the 4th century AD, for instance, it became the
first nation in the world to make Christianity its official religion–but for the most part,
control of the region shifted from one empire to another. During the 15th century,
Armenia was absorbed into the mighty Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman rulers, like most of their subjects, were Muslim. They permitted religious
minorities like the Armenians to maintain some autonomy, but they also subjected
Armenians, who they viewed as “infidels,” to unequal and unjust treatment. Christians
had to pay higher taxes than Muslims, for example, and they had very few political
and legal rights.
9. In spite of these obstacles, the Armenian community thrived under Ottoman rule.
They tended to be better educated and wealthier than their Turkish neighbors, who in
turn tended to resent their success. This resentment was compounded by suspicions
that the Christian Armenians would be more loyal to Christian governments (that of
the Russians, for example, who shared an unstable border with Turkey) than they
were to the Ottoman caliphate.
These suspicions grew more acute as the Ottoman Empire crumbled. At the end of
the 19th century, the despotic Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid II–obsessed with loyalty
above all, and infuriated by the nascent Armenian campaign to win basic civil rights–
declared that he would solve the “Armenian question” once and for all. “I will soon
settle those Armenians,” he told a reporter in 1890. “I will give them a box on the ear
which will make them…relinquish their revolutionary ambitions.”
In 1914, the Turks entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. (At the same time, Ottoman religious authorities declared
jihad, or holy war, against all Christians except their allies.) Military leaders
began to argue that the Armenians were traitors: If they thought they could win
independence if the Allies were victorious, this argument went, the Armenians
would be eager to fight for the enemy. As the war intensified, Armenians
organized volunteer battalions to help the Russian army fight against the Turks
in the Caucasus region.
10. On April 24, 1915, the Armenian genocide began. That day, the Turkish
government arrested and executed several hundred Armenian intellectuals.
After that, ordinary Armenians were turned out of their homes and sent on
death marches through the Mesopotamian desert without food or water.
Frequently, the marchers were stripped naked and forced to walk under the
scorching sun until they dropped dead. People who stopped to rest were
shot.
At the same time, the Young Turks created a “Special Organization,” which
in turn organized “killing squads” or “butcher battalions” to carry out, as one
officer put it, “the liquidation of the Christian elements.”
11. The Armenians were an enemy force, they argue, and their slaughter was a
necessary war measure. Today, Turkey is an important ally of the U.S. and other
Western nations, and so their governments have likewise been reluctant to condemn
the long-ago killings. In March 2010, a U.S. Congressional panel at last voted to
recognize the genocide.
12.
13. In April 1992, the government of the Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence
from Yugoslavia. Over the next several years, Bosnian Serb forces, with the backing of the Serb-
dominated Yugoslav army, targeted both Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croatian civilians for atrocious
crimes resulting in the deaths of some 100,000 people (80 percent Bosniak) by 1995. It was the worst act
of genocide since the Nazi regime’s destruction of some 6 million European Jews during World War II.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Balkan states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro,
Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia became part of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. After the
death of longtime Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito in 1980, growing nationalism among the different
Yugoslav republics threatened to split their union apart.
This process intensified after the mid-1980s with the rise of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who
helped foment discontent between Serbians in Bosnia and Croatia and their Croatian, Bosniak and
Albanian neighbors. In 1991, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia declared their independence; during the
war in Croatia that followed, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army supported Serbian separatists there in
their brutal clashes with Croatian forces.
ATTACK ON SREBRENICA: JULY 1995
By the summer of 1995, three towns in eastern Bosnia–Srebrenica, Zepa and Gorazde–remained under
control of the Bosnian government. The U.N. had declared these enclaves “safe havens” in 1993, to be
disarmed and protected by international peacekeeping forces. On July 11, however, Bosnian Serb forces
advanced on Srebrenica, overwhelming a battalion of Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed there.
Serbian forces subsequently separated the Bosniak civilians at Srebrenica, putting the women and girls
on buses and sending them to Bosnian-held territory. Some of the women were raped or sexually
assaulted, while the men and boys who remained behind were killed immediately or bussed to mass
killing sites. Estimates of Bosniaks killed by Serb forces at Srebrenica range from around 7,000 to more
than 8,000.
