GENOCIDE IN THE WORLD

Please answer the following questions in complete sentences:

Out of the four genocides you read about in class today, which one do you think was the most devastating? Use information from today’s reading to help you answer the question. 

**For those of you who were absent, I posted the reading from today's class below.**

Darfur

The “Darfur Genocide” refers to the current mass slaughter and killing of Darfuri men, women and children in Western Sudan. The killings began in 2003 and continue still today, as the first genocide in the 21st century.

The population of Darfur is estimated at 6,000,000 people. The genocide is being carried out by a group of government-armed and funded Arab militias known as the Janjaweed (which loosely translates to ‘devils on horseback’). The Janjaweed systematically destroy Darfurians by burning villages, looting economic resources, polluting water sources, and murdering, raping, and torturing civilians. These militias are historic rivals of the main rebel groups, the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM), and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). As of today, over 480,000 people have been killed, and over 2.8 million people are displaced. The conflict is still ongoing.

The Holocaust

The Holocaust was the mass murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II, a program of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, throughout German-occupied territory. Besides Jews, other groups killed during the Holocaust include Romanians, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war, and Polish and Soviet civilians.

The conflict started in the early 1930s and ended in 1945. The Holocaust finally ended when Allied soldiers liberated camps as they advanced into Germany. Many soldiers were horrified by what they saw. The guards and Nazi leaders who were captured were put on trial at Nuremburg after the war.

Soviet Union

Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, was one of the most ruthless humans ever to hold power. In order to keep power, between 1937 and 1938, the Soviet secret police detained 1,548,367 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day. These were mostly intellectuals, critics of his rule, and those suspected of going against the party.

Stalin also set in motion events designed to cause a famine in the Ukraine. This was intended to destroy the people there seeking independence from his rule. As a result, an estimated 7 million people perished in this farming area, known as the breadbasket of Europe, with the people deprived of the food they had grown with their own hands.

After the war, Stalin continued his control over Ukraine and Eastern Europe and no punishment was ever given to him. To this day, it is unknown exactly how many were killed in the Soviet Union and forced famine in the Ukraine, but it most likely millions.

Rwanda

Beginning on April 6, 1994, and for the next hundred days, up to 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutu militia using clubs and machetes, with as many as 10,000 killed each day. Rwanda is one of the smallest countries in Central Africa, with just 7 million people, and is comprised of two main ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Although the Hutus account for 90 percent of the population, in the past, the Tutsi minority was considered the aristocracy of Rwanda and dominated Hutu peasants for decades.

Following independence from Belgium in 1962, the Hutu majority seized power and reversed the roles, oppressing the Tutsis through systematic discrimination and acts of violence. As a result, over 200,000 Tutsis fled to neighboring countries and formed a rebel guerrilla army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front. The killings only ended after armed Tutsi rebels, invading from neighboring countries, managed to defeat the Hutus and halt the genocide in July 1994. By then, over one-tenth of the population, an estimated 800,000 persons, had been killed.