Portal:Genocide

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The Genocide Portal

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.

In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.

The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in about 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008. Genocide, especially large-scale genocide, is widely considered to signify the epitome of human evil. Genocide has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". (Full article...)

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Ghettos established by the Nazis in which Jews were confined, and later shipped to concentration camps.

During World War II, ghettos were established by the Nazis to confine Jews, Romani and Serbs into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe. Starting in 1939, the Nazis began to systematically move Polish Jews into designated areas of large Polish cities. The first large ghetto at Tuliszków was established in December 1939 or January 1940, followed by the Łódź Ghetto in April 1940 and the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940, with many other ghettos established throughout 1940 and 1941. The ghettos were walled off, and any Jew found leaving them was shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of these ghettos, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000.

The situation in the ghettos was brutal. In Warsaw, 30% of the population were forced to live in 2.4% of the city's area, a density of 9.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywół, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by 5 families, between 12 and 30 to each small room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on food supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 253 calories (1,060 kJ) per Jew, compared to 669 calories (2,800 kJ) per Pole and 2,613 calories (10,940 kJ) per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Łódź Ghetto 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation.

In 1942, the Nazis began Operation Reinhard, the systematic deportation to extermination camps during the Holocaust. The authorities deported Jews from everywhere in Europe to the ghettos of the East, or directly to the extermination camps -- almost 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka over the course of 52 days. In some of the Ghettos the local resistance organisations started ghetto uprisings. None were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed.

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Israel W. Charny (born 1931) is an Israeli psychologist and genocide scholar. He is the editor of two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide, and executive director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. (Full article...)

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"Over the past five years, I have often recalled that the United Nations’ Charter begins with the words: “We the peoples.” What is not always recognized is that “we the peoples” are made up of individuals whose claims to the most fundamental rights have too often been sacrificed in the supposed interests of the state or the nation. A genocide begins with the killing of one man – not for what he has done, but because of who he is. A campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ begins with one neighbour turning on another. Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations."

— Kofi Annan, Nobel lecture, 2001

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Selected images

Image 1Picture showing Armenians killed during the Armenian Genocide. Image taken from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, written by Henry Morgenthau, Sr. and published in 1918.
Image 2Mummified victims of the Rwandan Genocide (1994) at Murambi Technical School. Photograph taken in July 2001 by Emmanuel Cattier.
Image 3Corpse of Soviet Famine victims transported to the cemetery. (Kherson)
Image 4"A relic of the Armenian massacres at Erzingan", image taken from US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's memoirs (1918).
Image 5Bones of anti-Nazi German women still are in the crematoriums in the German concentration camp at Weimar (Buchenwald), Germany, taken by the 3rd U.S. Army. Prisoners of all nationalities were tortured and killed. 04/14/1945
Image 6The bodies of the dead lie awaiting burial in a mass grave at the camp. (Bergen-Belsen concentration camp)
Image 7Rwandan refugee camp in Zaire.
Image 8Original caption states: "Deep gashes delivered by the killers are visible in the skulls that fill one room at the Murambi School." Aftermath of Rwandan genocide.
Image 9Gas canisters and hair of Holocaust victims from a Nazi concentration camp.
Image 10Emaciated corpses of children in Warsaw Ghetto.

Did you know...

... that in South Africa's genocide case against Israel, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to "punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide" against Palestinians in Gaza?
... that the 1914 Greek deportations have been described as "a trial run for the Armenian Genocide"?
... that the first use of the phrase "crimes against humanity" in diplomacy was in a May 1915 Entente declaration condemning the Armenian Genocide?
... that historian Dirk Moses argues that The Problems of Genocide include "blinding us to other types of humanly caused civilian death"?
... that in Open Wounds, Vicken Cheterian argues that "by censoring the Armenian Genocide, its impact, traces and consequences do not simply disappear. It continues in various forms"?
... that in his book, Uğur Ümit Üngör argues that the Armenian Genocide contributed to The Making of Modern Turkey?

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Genocide lists

International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals)

It is commonly accepted that, at least since World War II, genocide has been illegal under customary international law as a peremptory norm, as well as under conventional international law. Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish, for prosecution, since intent, demonstrating a chain of accountability, has to be established. International criminal courts and tribunals function primarily because the states involved are incapable or unwilling to prosecute crimes of this magnitude themselves.

For more information see:

Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals)

International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court)

To date all international prosecutions for genocide have been brought in specially convened international tribunals. Since 2002, the International Criminal Court can exercise its jurisdiction if national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute genocide, thus being a "court of last resort," leaving the primary responsibility to exercise jurisdiction over alleged criminals to individual states. Due to the United States concerns over the ICC, the United States prefers to continue to use specially convened international tribunals for such investigations and potential prosecutions.^[1]

For more information see:

Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court)

References
^ "Statement by Carolyn Willson, Minister Counselor for International Legal Affairs, on the Report of the ICC, in the UN General Assembly" (PDF). (123 KiB) November 23 2005