Past Genocides

While Genocide Intervention Network focuses on ongoing situations of systematic, deliberate killing, severe torture or rape of civilians on a massive scale, we also acknowledge the impact that past genocides have had our activism and current atrocities committed against civilians. By understanding the affects of these multiple events, it reminds us of the importance of our current work towards a world without genocide.

In her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power highlights five genocides which occurred during the 20th Century.

Armenia

Beginning in 1915, ethnic Armenians living in the Ottoman empire were rounded up, deported and executed on orders of the government. The combination of massacres, forced deportation marches and concentration camp deaths due to disease is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of more than 1 million ethnic Armenians and Assyrians between 1915 and 1923.

The Holocaust

After coming to power in 1933 on the basis of providing an ethnic and political scapegoat for Germany’s post-World War I problems , the Nazi Party implemented a highly organized strategy of the persecution and murder of “undesireables” including Jews, Slavs, Roma, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnessess, homosexuals, as well as political and religious dissidents.

The Nazis promulgation of the Nuremburg Laws stripped citizenship from German Jews on the basis of their religious identity. Shortly thereafter, in November 1938, the organized pogrom of Kristallnacht signaled a change in policy, featuring the mass deportations of German Jews to concentration camps. As the Nazis conquered large areas of Europe, Jews and other undesirables across Nazi-controlled areas were similarly deported. When the German Army invaded the Soviet Union, it soon gave rise to Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads operating throughout Eastern Europe and Russia, killing more than one million Jews and tens of thousands of other civilians. In 1942, a conference at Wansee developed the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, the systematic extermination of European Jewry. The construction of extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkanau, Treblinka, Belzec, Chelmno and Sobibor enabled the Nazis to kill 2.7 million Jews and other “undesirables” through the use of cyanide gas, summary executions and medical experimentation. Poor living conditions in non-extermination camps led to the deaths of millions more. It is estimated that 6 million Jews, two out of every three living in Europe, and another 5 million undesirables were killed by 1945.

Cambodia

When the Khmer Rouge took control of the Cambodian government in 1975, they declared the beginning of a new age dedicated to a peasant-oriented society. After outlawing education, religion, healthcare and technology, the Khmer Rouge ordered the evacuation of Cambodia’s cities and forced these residents to labor without adequate food or rest. At the same time as summarily executing those who were unable to keep up, the Khmer Rouge began to target suspected political dissidents. These citizens, including doctors, teachers and those suspected of being educated were singled out for torture at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison. In four years, between 1.7 and 2 million Cambodians died in the Khmer Rouge’s ‘Killing Fields’.

Bosnia

In the late-1980’s, the heterogeneous Yugoslav federation began to cleave along ethnic lines. Civil war erupted in 1992 against a backdrop of increasingly nationalist politics, including the idea of “Greater Serbia”. Between 1992 and 1995, Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks soldiers and paramilitaries used widespread use of rape, torture and forcible displacement against civilians. The actions of some Serb units were particularly heinous, featuring attempts to eliminate non-Serb culture, a tactic soon to be known as “ethnic cleansing”. Across Bosnia and Herzegovina civilians were herded into camps as small scale massacres were committed. The most notorious of these was the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, when more than 7,500 Bosniak men and boys in the U.N.-safe area, were executed by forces under General Radko Mladic. The estimates for the human cost of the Bosnian civil wars range from 96,000 to 200,000, with a recent University of Washington-Harvard University study placing the fatalities near 167,000. Violence against civilians in Yugoslavia led to the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in 1993.

Rwanda

Since independence, Rwandan society featured tensions between the Tutsi minority and the Hutu majority, leading to massacres amd expulsions in 1959 and 1963. On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, was killed when his plane was shot down outside of the country’s capital, Kigali. Habyarimana’s assassination provided the spark for an organizated campaign of violence against Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians across the country. In 100 days, extremist Hutu groups, including the Interahamwe and the Presidential Guard, used radios to direct the killings of civilians across the country. Despite the efforts of the UNAMIR Peacekeepers, extremists were able to kill between 800,000 to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days. In 1994, the United Nations created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), dedicated to bringing those responsible for the genocide to justice. While slow, the ICTR has determined that the widespread rapes committed during the Rwandan genocide may also be considered an act of torture and genocide on their own.

For more information about past genocides, visit

The Armenian Genocide Museum-institute
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The Museum of Tolerance
USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education
The Killing Fields Museum
Research and Documentation Center Sarejevo
Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre