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Genocide recognition politics are efforts to have a certain event (re)interpreted as a "genocide" or officially designated as such. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] Such efforts may occur regardless of whether the event meets the definition of genocide laid out in the 1948 Genocide Convention. [6]
In countries with settler colonial past, recognition of colonial genocides is difficult as the national past could be called into question. [7] Most genocides have been perpetrated by states. [8] [9]
As of June 2021, the government of Canada officially recognises eight genocides that took place beyond its borders: the Armenian genocide (1915–1917), the Holodomor (1932–1933), the Holocaust (1941-1945), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Srebrenica massacre (1995), the Genocide of Yazidis by ISIL (2014), the Uyghur genocide (2014–present; recognised by Canada in February 2021), and the Rohingya genocide (2016–present). Some activists and scholars such as Phil Fontaine and David Bruce MacDonald have argued that the Canadian government should also officially recognise various atrocities committed against the Indigenous peoples in Canada from the late 19th century until the mid-20th century as 'genocide', especially after the 2021 Canadian Indian residential schools gravesite discoveries. [10] [11] [12] [13] In October 2022, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion to have the Canadian government officially recognize the residential school system as genocide against Indigenous populations. [14] [15]
Canadian political scientist David Bruce MacDonald stated in June 2021 that it is rare for governments to recognise genocides committed by previous administrations of the same country, citing Germany as an example: it has officially recognised the Holocaust (committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War), and in May 2021 Germany officially recognised the Herero and Namaqua genocide (committed by the German Empire in 1904–1908). [12]
On 21 November 2018, a bill tabled by opposition MP Ksenia Svetlova (ZU) to recognise the Islamic State's killing of Yazidis as a genocide was defeated in a 58 to 38 vote in the Knesset. The coalition parties motivated their rejection of the bill by saying that the United Nations had not yet recognised it as a genocide. [16]
In their 2017–2021 coalition agreement published on 10 October 2017, the four parties forming the Third Rutte cabinet stated the following policy: "For the Dutch government, rulings from international courts of justice or criminal courts, unambiguous conclusions from scientific research, and findings by the UN, are leading in the recognition of genocides. The Netherlands act in accordance with the obligations arising from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. At the UN Security Council, the Netherlands are pro-active in combating ISIS and the prosecution of ISIS fighters." [17] On 22 February 2018, the Dutch House of Representatives formally recognised the Armenian genocide with 147 votes out of 150; only the three MPs of the Dutch Turks-dominated party DENK opposed recognition as a "too one-sided explanation of history". [18] Although the Dutch government stated it would not (yet) take a stand on whether it was a genocide, instead using the phrase "the Armenian genocide question", it agreed with MP Joël Voordewind's suggestion to send a government representative to attend Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day in Yerevan every 5 years "to show respect to all victims and survivors of all massacres against minorities", said Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag. [18] On 9 February 2021, a large majority of the House supported a motion calling on the government to fully recognise the Armenian genocide and dropping the phrase "the Armenian genocide question"; the only parties who did not support the call were the VVD, and again DENK. [19] Inge Drost, spokesperson for the Federation Armenian Organisations Netherlands, stated in April 2021: "Every time recognition was brought up, it turned out to be a political bargaining tool. Then a country wanted get something out of Turkey, and threatened to recognise the Armenian genocide. Then eventually, it did not happen. It's a very sensitive issue for us." [20]
The legal department of the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has a long-standing policy, dating back to the 1948 passing of the Genocide Convention, of refusing to give a legal description to potential war crimes. For this reason, it has sought to dissuade any UK governmental institution from making claims about genocide. On 20 April 2016, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom unanimously supported a motion to declare that the treatment of Yazidis and Christians by the Islamic State amounted to genocide, to condemn it as such, and to refer the issue to the UN Security Council. It was almost unprecedented for British parliamentarians to collectively to declare war-time actions as genocide, because in doing so, Conservative MPs defied their fellow party members in the UK government. Foreign Office secretary Tobias Ellwood – who was jeered at and interrupted by MPs during his speech in the debate – stated that he personally believed genocide had taken place, but that it was not up to politicians to make that determination, but to the courts. [21]
Between 1989 and 2022, the United States Department of State has formally recognized eight genocides: in Bosnia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Iraq (1995), Darfur (2004), and areas under the control of ISIS (2016 and 2017). During the last days of the Trump administration the Uyghur genocide was recognized, a decision affirmed by the Biden administration, which also recognized the Armenian genocide in April 2021 and the Rohingya genocide in Burma/Myanmar, with the determination coming in March 2022. [22] Three other cases were considered, namely Burundi in the mid-1990s, Sudan's "Two Areas" in 2013, and Burma in 2018, but ultimately the process of recognition was not completed. [22] A March 2019 USHMM report by Buchwald & Keith stated: "No formal policy exists or has existed to guide how or when the US government decides whether genocide has occurred and whether to state its conclusion publicly." [22] However, there are two memoranda – the first written by Secretary of State Warren Christopher in May 1994 regarding Rwanda, and the second by Secretary of State Colin Powell in June 2004 regarding Darfur – that provide some insight into the decision-making process, and advise or authoritise U.S. government officials on what to do in genocide recognition questions. [22]
Some governments and scholars have called France's conquest of Algeria a genocide, [23] such as Raphael Lemkin, [24] who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century and Ben Kiernan, an Australian expert on the Cambodian genocide, [25] who wrote in Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur on the French conquest of Algeria: [26]
By 1875, the French conquest was complete. The war had killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830. A long shadow of genocidal hatred persisted, provoking a French author to protest in 1882 that in Algeria, "we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him." As a French statistical journal urged five years late, "the system of extermination must give way to a policy of penetration."
— Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil
The Kurdistan Regional Government has set aside 14 April as a day of remembrance for the Al-Anfal campaign. [27] In Sulaymanya a museum was established in the former prison of the Directorate of General Security. [28] Many Iraqi Arabs reject that any mass killings of Kurds occurred during the Anfal campaign. [29]
On 28 February 2013, the British House of Commons formally recognized the Anfal as genocide following a campaign led by Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi, who is of Kurdish descent. [30]
Armenian genocide recognition is the formal acceptance of the fact that the Ottoman Empire's systematic massacres and forced deportation of Armenians from 1915 to 1923, both during and after the First World War, constituted genocide.
Most historians outside Turkey recognize the fact that the Ottoman Empire's persecution of Armenians was a genocide. [31] [32] [33] However, despite the recognition of the genocidal character of the massacre of Armenians in scholarship as well as in civil society, some governments have been reticent to officially acknowledge the killings as genocide because of political concerns about their relations with the government of Turkey. [34]
As of 2023 [update] , the governments and parliaments of 34 countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, and the United States, have formally recognized the Armenian genocide.
Three countries — Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Pakistan — deny that there was an Armenian genocide.The 1984 anti-Sikh riots, also known as the 1984 Sikh Massacre, was a series of organised pogroms [35] [36] [37] against Sikhs in India following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. [38] [39] The ruling Indian National Congress had been in active complicity with the mob, as to the organisation of the riots. [40] Government estimates project that about 2,800 Sikhs were killed in Delhi [37] [41] and 3,350 nationwide, [42] [43] whilst independent sources estimate the number of deaths at about 8,000–17,000. [44] [45] [46] [47]
On 12 August 2005 , then Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh apologised in the Lok Sabha for the riots. [48] [49] The riots are cited as a reason to support the creation of a Sikh homeland in India, often called Khalistan. [50] [51] [52]
On 15 January 2017, the Wall of Truth was inaugurated in Lutyens' Delhi, New Delhi, as a memorial for Sikhs killed during the 1984 riots (and other hate crimes across the world). [53] [54]... It was indeed a holocaust before Hitler's Holocaust. ... What happened in the heart of Africa was genocidal in scope long before that now familiar term, genocide, was ever coined.
Historian Robert Weisbord (2003) [70]
The significant number of deaths under the Free State regime has led some scholars to relate the atrocities to later genocides, though understanding of the losses under the colonial administration's rule as the result of harsh economic exploitation rather than a policy of deliberate extermination has led others to dispute the comparison; [71] there is an open debate as to whether the atrocities constitute genocide. [72] According to the United Nations' 1948 definition of the term "genocide", a genocide must be "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". [73] According to Georgi Verbeeck, this conventional definition of genocide has prevented most historians from using the term to describe atrocities in the Free State; in the strict sense of the term, most historians have rejected allegations of genocide. [74]
Sociologist Rhoda Howard-Hassmann stated that because the Congolese were not killed in a systematic fashion according to this criterion, "technically speaking, this was not genocide even in a legally retroactive sense." [75] Adam Hochschild and political scientist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja rejected allegations of genocide in the Free State because there was no evidence of a policy of deliberate extermination or the desire to eliminate any specific population groups, [76] [77] though the latter added that nevertheless there was "a death toll of Holocaust proportions," [75] which led him to call it "the Congo holocaust." [78]
... no reputable historian of the Congo has made charges of genocide; a forced labor system, although it may be equally deadly, is different.
Historian Adam Hochschild (2005) [79]
It is generally agreed by historians that extermination was never the policy of the Free State. According to Van Reybrouck, "It would be absurd ... to speak of an act of 'genocide' or a 'holocaust'; genocide implies the conscious, planned annihilation of a specific population, and that was never the intention here, or the result ... But it was definitely a hecatomb, a slaughter on a staggering scale that was not intentional, but could have been recognised much earlier as the collateral damage of a perfidious, rapacious policy of exploitation". [80] Historian Barbara Emerson stated, "Leopold did not start genocide. He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control." [81] According to Hochschild, "while not a case of genocide, in the strict sense", the atrocities in the Congo were "one of the most appalling slaughters known to have been brought about by human agency". [82] [lower-alpha 1]
Historians have argued that comparisons drawn in the press by some between the death toll of the Free State atrocities and the Holocaust during World War II have been responsible for creating undue confusion over the issue of terminology. [85] [86] In one incident, the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun used the word "genocide" in the title of a 2005 article by Hochschild. Hochschild himself criticised the title as "misleading" and stated that it had been chosen "without my knowledge". Similar criticism was echoed by historian Jean-Luc Vellut. [85] [80]
Allegations of genocide in the Free State have become common over time. [87] Martin Ewans wrote, "Leopold's African regime became a byword for exploitation and genocide." [88] According to historian Timothy J. Stapleton, "Those who easily apply the term genocide to Leopold's regime seem to do so purely on the basis of its obvious horror and the massive numbers of people who may have perished." [87] Robert Weisbord argued that there does not have to be intent to exterminate all members of a population in a genocide. [86] He posited that "an endeavor to eliminate a portion of a people would qualify as genocide" according to the UN standards and asserted that the Free State did as much. [75] Jeanne Haskin, Yaa-Lengi Meema Ngemi, and David Olusoga also referred to the atrocities as a genocide. [75] [89]
In an unpublished manuscript from the 1950s, Lemkin, who had first coined the term "genocide" in 1944, asserted the occurrence of "an unambiguous genocide" in the Free State, though he blamed the violence on what he saw as "the savagery of African colonial troops". [71] Lemkin emphasised that the atrocities were usually committed by Africans themselves who were in the pay of the Belgians. [90] These "native militia" were described by Lemkin as "an unorganized and disorderly rabble of savages whose only recompense was what they obtained from looting, and when they were cannibals, as was usually the case, in eating the foes against whom they were sent". [90] Genocide scholar Adam Jones claimed that the underrepresentation of males in Congolese population figures after Leopold's rule is evidence that "outright genocide" was the cause of a large portion of deaths in the Free State. [91]
In 1999 Hochschild published King Leopold's Ghost , a book detailing the atrocities committed during the Free State's existence. The book became a bestseller in Belgium, but aroused criticism from former Belgian colonialists and some academics as exaggerating the extent of the atrocities and population decline. [81] Around the 50th anniversary of the Congo's independence from Belgium in 2010, numerous Belgian writers published content about the Congo. Historian Idesbald Goddeeris criticised these works—including Van Reybrouk's Congo: A History—for taking a softened stance on the atrocities committed in the Congolese Free State, saying "They acknowledge the dark period of the Congo Free State, but ... they emphasize that the number of victims was unknown and that the terror was concentrated in particular regions." [92]
The term "Congolese genocide" is often used in an unrelated sense to refer to the mass murder and rape committed in the eastern Congo in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide (and the ensuing Second Congo War) between 1998 and 2003. [93] [94]The near-destruction of Tasmania's Aboriginal population has been described as an act of genocide by historians including Robert Hughes, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan, Tom Lawson, Mohamed Adhikari, Benjamin Madley, and Ashley Riley Sousa. [95] The author of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, considered Tasmania the site of one of the world's clear cases of genocide [96] and Hughes has described the loss of Aboriginal Tasmanians as "the only true genocide in English colonial history". [97] However, other historians –including Henry Reynolds, Richard Broome, and Nicholas Clements –do not agree that the colonial authorities pursued a policy of destroying the Indigenous population, although they acknowledge that some settlers supported extermination. [98] [99]
Boyce has claimed that the April 1828 "Proclamation Separating the Aborigines from the White Inhabitants" sanctioned force against Aboriginal people "for no other reason than that they were Aboriginal". However, as Reynolds, Broome and Clements point out, there was open warfare at the time. [98] [99] Boyce describes the decision to remove all Aboriginal Tasmanians after 1832—by which time they had given up their fight against white colonists—as an extreme policy position. He concludes: "The colonial government from 1832 to 1838 ethnically cleansed the western half of Van Diemen's Land and then callously left the exiled people to their fate." [100]
As early as 1852 John West's History of Tasmania portrayed the obliteration of Tasmania's Aboriginal people as an example of "systematic massacre" [101] and in the 1979 High Court case of Coe v Commonwealth of Australia, judge Lionel Murphy observed that Aboriginal people did not give up their land peacefully and that they were killed or forcibly removed from their land "in what amounted to attempted (and in Tasmania almost complete) genocide". [102]
Historian Henry Reynolds says there was a widespread call from settlers during the frontier wars for the "extirpation" or "extermination" of the Aboriginal people. [103] But he has contended that the British government acted as a source of restraint on settlers' actions. Reynolds says there is no evidence the British government deliberately planned the wholesale destruction of indigenous Tasmanians—a November 1830 letter to Arthur by Sir George Murray warned that the extinction of the race would leave "an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government" [104] —and therefore what eventuated does not meet the definition of genocide codified in the 1948 United Nations convention. He says Arthur was determined to defeat the Aboriginal people and take their land, but believes there is little evidence he had aims beyond that objective and wished to destroy the Tasmanian race. [105] In contrast to Reynolds' argument, historian Lyndall Ryan, based on a sample of massacres taking place in the Meander River region in June 1827, concludes that massacres of Aboriginal Tasmanians by white settlers were likely part of an organised process and were sanctioned by government authorities. [106]
Clements accepts Reynolds' argument but also exonerates the colonists themselves of the charge of genocide. He says that unlike genocidal determinations by Nazis against Jews in World War II, Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda and Ottomans against Armenians in present-day Turkey, which were carried out for ideological reasons, Tasmanian settlers participated in violence largely out of revenge and self-preservation. He adds: "Even those who were motivated by sex or morbid thrillseeking lacked any ideological impetus to exterminate the natives." He also argues that while genocides are inflicted on defeated, captive or otherwise vulnerable minorities, Tasmanian natives appeared as a "capable and terrifying enemy" to colonists and were killed in the context of a war in which both sides killed noncombatants. [107]
Lawson, in a critique of Reynolds' stand, argues that genocide was the inevitable outcome of a set of British policies to colonise Van Diemen's Land. [108] He says the British government endorsed the use of partitioning and "absolute force" against Tasmanians, approved Robinson's "Friendly Mission" and colluded in transforming that mission into a campaign of ethnic cleansing from 1832. He says that once on Flinders Island, indigenous peoples were taught to farm land like Europeans and worship God like Europeans and concludes: "The campaign of transformation enacted on Flinders Island amounted to cultural genocide." [109]The term "Bosnian genocide" refers to either the Srebrenica massacre, or the wider crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing campaign which was waged throughout the areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina which were controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) [110] during the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. [111] The events in Srebrenica in 1995 included the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys, as well as the mass expulsion of another 25,000–30,000 Bosniak civilians by VRS units under the command of General Ratko Mladić. [112] [113]
In the 1990s, several authorities asserted that the ethnic cleansing campaign which was carried out by elements of the Bosnian Serb army was a genocide. [114] These included a resolution by the United Nations General Assembly and three convictions for genocide in German courts (the convictions were based upon a wider interpretation of genocide than that used by international courts). [115] In 2005, the United States Congress passed a resolution declaring that "the Serbian policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing meet the terms defining genocide." [116]
The Srebrenica massacre was found to be an act of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a finding which was upheld by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). [117] On 24 March 2016, former Bosnian Serb leader and the first president of the Republika Srpska, Radovan Karadžić, was found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 40 years in prison. In 2019 an appeals court increased his sentence to life imprisonment. [118] The ICTY found the acts to have satisfied the requirements for "guilty acts" of genocide, and that, "some physical perpetrators held the intent to physically destroy the protected groups of Bosnian Muslims and Croats". [119]
In a speech before representatives of Native American peoples in June, 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom apologized for the genocide. Newsom referring to the proposed California Truth and Healing Council said, "California must reckon with our dark history. California Native American peoples suffered violence, discrimination and exploitation sanctioned by state government throughout its history .... It's called genocide. That's what it was, a genocide. No other way to describe it. And that's the way it needs to be described in the history books. We can never undo the wrongs inflicted on the peoples who have lived on this land that we now call California since time immemorial, but we can work together to build bridges, tell the truth about our past and begin to heal deep wounds." [120] [121] After hearing testimony, a Truth and Healing Council will clarify the historical record on the relationship between the state and California Native Americans. [122]
In November 2021, the board of directors of the former "University of California Hastings College of Law" voted to change the name of the institution because of namesake S. C. Hastings's involvement in the killing and dispossessing of Yuki people in the 1850s. [123] [124] The name change was approved via an act of the California Legislature (California Assembly Bill 1936, 2021-2022 regular session) and was signed into law by the Governor on 23 September 2022. The name change took effect on 1 January 2023. [125] The institution is now known as the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.The forced relocation, slaughter, and conditions during and after transfer have been described as an act of genocide by various scholars as well as the European Parliament [132] on the basis of the IV Hague Convention of 1907 and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of the U.N. General Assembly (adopted in 1948), including French historian and expert on communist studies Nicolas Werth, [133] German historian Philipp Ther, [134] Professor Anthony James Joes, [135] American journalist Eric Margolis, [136] Canadian political scientist Adam Jones, [137] professor of Islamic History at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Brian Glyn Williams, [138] scholars Michael Fredholm [139] and Fanny E. Bryan. [140] Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who initiated the Genocide Convention, assumed that genocide was perpetrated in the context of the mass deportation of the Chechens, Ingush, Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks and Karachay. [141] German investigative journalist Lutz Kleveman compared the deportation to a "slow genocide". [142] In this case this was acknowledged by the European Parliament as an act of genocide in 2004: [132]
...Believes that the deportation of the entire Chechen people to Central Asia on 23 February 1944 on the orders of Stalin constitutes an act of genocide within the meaning of the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907 and the Convention for the Prevention and Repression of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948. [143]
On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide." [144] Experts of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum cited the events of 1944 for a reason of placing Chechnya on their genocide watch list for its potential for genocide. [145] The separatist government of Chechnya also recognized it as genocide. [146] Members of the Chechen diaspora and their supporters promote 23 February as World Chechnya Day to commemorate the victims. [147]
The Chechens and Ingush, along with the Karachai and Balkars, are represented in the Confederation of Repressed Peoples (CRP), an organization that covers the former Soviet Union and aims to support and rehabilitate the rights of the deported peoples. [148]Some activists, politicians, scholars, countries, and historians go even further and consider the deportation a crime of genocide [149] [150] [151] [152] [153] or cultural genocide. [154] Norman Naimark writes "[t]he Chechens and Ingush, the Crimean Tatars, and other 'punished peoples' of the wartime period were, indeed, slated for elimination, if not physically, then as self-identifying nationalities." [155] Professor Lyman H. Legters argued that the Soviet penal system, combined with its resettlement policies, should count as genocidal since the sentences were borne most heavily specifically on certain ethnic groups, and that a relocation of these ethnic groups, whose survival depends on ties to its particular homeland, "had a genocidal effect remediable only by restoration of the group to its homeland." [151] Political scientist Stephen Blank described it both as a deportation and a genocide, a centuries-long Russian "technique of self-colonial rule intended to eliminate" minorities. [156] Soviet dissidents Ilya Gabay [157] and Pyotr Grigorenko [158] both classified the event as a genocide. Historian Timothy Snyder included it in a list of Soviet policies that “meet the standard of genocide." [159] Historians Alexandre Bennigsen and Marie Bennigsen-Broxup included the case of Crimean Tatars and Meskhetian Turks as two examples of successful genocides by Soviet governments. They summed it up by saying that Crimean Tatars, "a nation which for over five centuries had played a major part in the history of Eastern Europe has simply ceased to exist". [160] Polish scholar Tomasz Kamusella observed that Moscow attempted an "unmaking of Crimean Tatars and their language" by not allowing them even to be registered as Crimean Tatars since the deportation; they could only declare themselves as Tatars. It wasn't until the 1989 census that Crimean Tatars were again recognized as a separate nationality. The Crimean Tatar language was only allowed to be taught again in Soviet schools in the 1980s. [161]
On 12 December 2015, the Ukrainian Parliament issued a resolution recognizing this event as genocide and established 18 May as the "Day of Remembrance for the victims of the Crimean Tatar genocide." [162] The parliament of Latvia recognized the event as an act of genocide on 9 May 2019. [163] [164] The Parliament of Lithuania did the same on 6 June 2019. [165] The Canadian Parliament passed a motion on June 10, 2019, recognizing the Crimean Tatar deportation of 1944 (Sürgünlik) as a genocide perpetrated by Soviet dictator Stalin, designating May 18 to be a day of remembrance. [166] [167] On 26 April 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, under its chairman Boris Yeltsin, passed the law On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples with Article 2 denouncing all mass deportations as "Stalin's policy of defamation and genocide." [168]
# | Name | Date of recognition | Source |
---|---|---|---|
1 | ![]() | 12 December 2015 | [162] |
2 | ![]() | 9 May 2019 | [163] [164] |
3 | ![]() | 6 June 2019 | [165] |
4 | ![]() | 10 June 2019 | [166] [167] |
5 | ![]() | 12 July 2024 | [169] |
The Mesopotamian Marshes were drained in Iraq and to a smaller degree in Iran between the 1950s and 1990s to clear large areas of the marshes in the Tigris-Euphrates river system. The marshes formerly covered an area of around 20,000 km2 (7,700 sq mi). The main sub-marshes, the Hawizeh, Central, and Hammar marshes, were drained at different times for different reasons.
In the 1990s, the marshes were drained for political motives, namely to force the Marsh Arabs out of the area and to punish them for their role in the 1991 uprising against Saddam Hussein's government. [173] However, the government's stated reasoning was to reclaim land for agriculture and exterminate breeding grounds for mosquitoes. [174] The displacement of more than 200,000 of the Ahwaris, and the associated state-sponsored campaign of violence against them, has led the United States and others to describe the draining of the marshes as ecocide or ethnic cleansing. [175] [176] [177]
The draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes has been described by the United Nations as a "tragic human and environmental catastrophe" on par with the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest [178] and by other observers as one of the worst environmental disasters of the 20th century. [179]Many international organisations, governments and parliaments, as well as groups have classified ISIL's treatment of the Yazidis as genocide, and condemned it as such. The Genocide of Yazidis has been officially recognized by several bodies of the United Nations [180] [181] and the European Parliament. [182] Some states have recognized it as well, including the National Assembly of Armenia, [183] the Australian parliament, [184] the British Parliament, [185] the Canadian parliament, [186] and the United States House of Representatives. [187] Multiple individual human rights activists such as Nazand Begikhani and Dr. Widad Akrawi have also advocated for this view. [188] [189]
In 2017, CNN journalists Jomana Karadsheh and Chris Jackson interviewed former Yazidi captives and exclusively filmed the Daesh Criminal Investigations Unit (DCIU), a team of Iraqi Kurdish and western investigators who have been operating secretly in Northern Iraq, for more than two years, collecting evidence of ISIS’ war crimes. [190]
Following an initiative of MPs of the so-called "patriotic" wing of the ruling PASOK party's parliamentary group and like-minded MPs of conservative New Democracy, [215] the Greek Parliament passed two laws on the fate of the Ottoman Greeks; the first in 1994 and the second in 1998. The decrees were published in the Greek Government Gazette on 8 March 1994 and 13 October 1998 respectively. The 1994 decree, created by Georgios Daskalakis, affirmed the genocide in the Pontus region of Asia Minor and designated 19 May (the day Mustafa Kemal landed in Samsun in 1919) a day of commemoration, [216] [217] (called Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day [218] ) while the 1998 decree affirmed the genocide of Greeks in Asia Minor as a whole and designated 14 September a day of commemoration. [219] These laws were signed by the President of Greece but were not immediately ratified after political interventions. After leftist newspaper I Avgi initiated a campaign against the application of this law, the subject became subject of a political debate. The president of the left-ecologist Synaspismos party Nikos Konstantopoulos and historian Angelos Elefantis, [220] known for his books on the history of Greek communism, were two of the major figures of the political left who expressed their opposition to the decree. However, the non-parliamentary left-wing nationalist [221] intellectual and author George Karabelias bitterly criticized Elefantis and others opposing the recognition of genocide and called them "revisionist historians", accusing the Greek mainstream left of a "distorted ideological evolution". He said that for the Greek left 19 May is a "day of amnesia". [222]
In the late 2000s the Communist Party of Greece adopted the term "Genocide of the Pontic (Greeks)" (Γενοκτονία Ποντίων) in its official newspaper Rizospastis and participates in memorial events. [223] [224] [225]
The Republic of Cyprus has also officially called the events "Greek Genocide in Pontus of Asia Minor". [226]
In response to the 1998 law, the Turkish government released a statement which claimed that describing the events as genocide was "without any historical basis". "We condemn and protest this resolution" a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement said. "With this resolution the Greek Parliament, which in fact has to apologize to the Turkish people for the large-scale destruction and massacres Greece perpetrated in Anatolia, not only sustains the traditional Greek policy of distorting history, but it also displays that the expansionist Greek mentality is still alive," the statement added. [227]
On 11 March 2010, Sweden's Riksdag passed a motion recognising "as an act of genocide the killing of Armenians, Assyrians/Syriacs/Chaldeans and Pontic Greeks in 1915". [228]
On 14 May 2013, the government of New South Wales was submitted a genocide recognition motion by Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party, which was later passed making it the fourth political entity to recognise the genocide. [229]
In March 2015, the National Assembly of Armenia unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing both the Greek and Assyrian genocides. [230]
In April 2015, the States General of the Netherlands and the Austrian Parliament passed resolutions recognizing the Greek and Assyrian genocides. [231] [232]In the international community, there is a virtually unanimous consensus that in the early 1940s, the Holocaust was primarily committed against the Jews and other minorities by Nazi Germany, due to the existence of an overwhelming amount of evidence, but there are some differences in names and definitions, periodisation, scope (for example, some historians believe that the 1941–44 Romani genocide/Porajmos should be recognised as a part of the Holocaust, [234] however, other historians believe that it should be recognized as a separate genocide which was simultaneously committed with the Holocaust [235] ), attributed responsibility, and motivation. There is a wide range of Holocaust memorial days, memorials and museums, and educational policies. Unlike the politics which surrounds other genocides, much of the politics which surrounds the Holocaust is not focused on the formal recognition of it in political statements (since there already is a strong consensus with regard to it), instead, it is focused on the importance of the Holocaust, which aspects of the Holocaust should be emphasised, how to prevent the Holocaust or similar genocides from happening again, how to combat Holocaust denial, and whether Holocaust denial should be legal or illegal. Some regimes, politicians or organisations may occasionally deny or downplay the Holocaust for various reasons, such as antisemitism, opposition to the existence of the State of Israel, or a desire to compare the Holocaust to other genocides because they consider the importance of those genocides either similar to or greater than the importance of the Holocaust.
Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognised as a genocide by the Ukrainian parliament. [236] Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has run campaigns and lobbied the United Nations and the Council of Europe to recognise the Holodomor as a genocide internationally. [237] Sovereign states to have recognized Holodomor as genocide [238] [239] include Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland's senate, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, Netherlands, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, the Holy See in Vatican City and Wales. [240] [241] As the United States Congress passed resolution of recognition through the United States Senate [242] and the United States House of Representatives. [243] [244] Similarly, governments and parliaments of several other countries have also officially recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide.
In November 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by Germany, Ireland's senate, [245] Moldova, [246] [247] Romania, [248] [249] and the Belarusian opposition in exile. [250] Pope Francis compared the Russian war in Ukraine with its targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure to the "terrible Holodomor Genocide", during an address at St. Peter's Square. [251] As of August 2024, 35 countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide.
The following countries have recognised the Holodomor as a genocide:
Other political bodies whose legislatures have passed a resolution recognizing Holodomor as a genocide:
Many countries have signed declarations in statements at the United Nations General Assembly affirming that the Holodomor was as a "national tragedy of the Ukrainian people" caused by the "cruel actions and policies of the totalitarian regime". [lower-alpha 2] Similar statements were passed as resolutions by international organizations [lower-alpha 3] such as the European Parliament, [lower-alpha 4] the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), [lower-alpha 5] the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), [293] [294] and the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO). [lower-alpha 2]
Countries to have signed declarations for the United Nations on the Holodomor [lower-alpha 6] [lower-alpha 7] [297] [298] [299] include Albania, [lower-alpha 8] Argentina, [301] [302] [303] Australia, [304] [305] [306] [307] [lower-alpha 8] Austria, [lower-alpha 8] Azerbaijan, [lower-alpha 8] Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, [308] [309] Chile, Colombia, [310] [311] Czechia, [312] Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, [313] [314] Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, [315] [316] Portugal, Slovakia, [317] [318] Spain, Ukraine, and the United States. [319] [320]The German government paid war reparations to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, but not to the Romani. There were "never any consultations at Nuremberg or any other international conference as to whether the Sinti and Roma were entitled like the Jews to reparations." [321] The Interior Ministry of Wuerttemberg argued that "Gypsies [were] persecuted under the Nazis not for any racial reason but because of an asocial and criminal record". [322] When on trial for his leadership of Einsatzgruppen in the USSR, Otto Ohlendorf cited the massacres of Roma people during the Thirty Years War as a historical precedent. [323]
The European Roma Rights Centre in 2017 gave more details of the chronology of recognition and reparations:
After World War II Roma were also excluded from the right to restitution, because Federal German authorities denied that Roma were persecued due to racist reasons. After a small step in this direction in 1963, restitutions became possible in small amounts only in 1979, when the West German Federal Parliament declared that the Nazi persecution of Roma was based on racial grounds and Roma survivors were allowed to claim for restitution in a form of a onetime payment. The official acceptance of the Porajmos as genocide by the Federal Republic of Germany followed only in 1982 with a speech by Chancelor Helmut Schmidt. In August 2016, an agreement between the German Ministry for Finance and the Foreign Ministry of the Czech Republic decided on compensation for survivors of the Porajmos in the Czech Republic. This agreement, which will give 2,500 EUR to each of the handful of survivors, was greeted as a symbolic acknowledgment, but also criticised for its delay and the low amount awarded. However, this agreement has already led to renewed claims from Romani victims from the former Yugoslavia and other regions of 'romocide'. [324]
In the historiography of East Germany (GDR), the persecution of Sinti and Roma under National Socialism was largely taboo. The German historian Anne-Kathleen Tillack-Graf states that in the GDR, Sinti and Roma were not mentioned as concentration camp prisoners during the official commemorations of the liberation at the three national memorial sites Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück, just like homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses and asocial detainees. [325] West Germany recognised the genocide of the Roma in 1982, [326] and since then the Porajmos has been increasingly recognized as a genocide committed simultaneously with the Shoah. [327] The American historian Sybil Milton wrote several articles arguing that the Porajmos deserved recognition as part of the Holocaust. [328] In Switzerland, a committee of experts investigated the policy of the Swiss government during the Porajmos. [329]
Nico Fortuna, a sociologist and Roma activist, explained the distinction between Jewish collective memory of the Holocaust and the Roma experience:
Ian Hancock has also observed a reluctance among Roma to acknowledge their victimization by the Third Reich. The Roma "are traditionally not disposed to keeping alive the terrible memories from their history—nostalgia is a luxury for others". [331] The effects of the illiteracy, the lack of social institutions, and the rampant discrimination faced by Roma in Europe today have produced a people who, according to Fortuna, lack a "national consciousness ... and historical memory of the Holocaust because there is no Roma elite." [330]There is a difference between the Jewish and Roma deportees ... The Jews were shocked and can remember the year, date and time it happened. The Roma shrugged it off. They said, "Of course I was deported. I'm Roma; these things happen to a Roma." The Roma mentality is different from the Jewish mentality. For example, a Roma came to me and asked, "Why do you care so much about these deportations? Your family was not deported." I went, "I care as a Roma" and the guy said back, "I do not care because my family were brave, proud Roma that were not deported."
For the Jews it was total and everyone knew this—from bankers to pawnbrokers. For the Roma it was selective and not comprehensive. The Roma were only exterminated in a few parts of Europe such as Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and France. In Romania and much of the Balkans, only nomadic Roma and social outcast Roma were deported. This matters and influences the Roma mentality. [330]
In April 2019, Cornell University anthropologist Magnus Fiskesjö wrote in Inside Higher Ed that mass arrests of ethnic minority academics and intellectuals in Xinjiang indicated that "the Chinese regime's current campaign against the native Uighur, Kazakh and other peoples is already a genocide." [332] Later, in 2020, Fiskejö wrote in academic journal Monde Chinois that "[t]he evidence for genocide is thus already massive, and must, at the very least, be regarded as sufficient for prosecution under international law... the number of competent authorities around the world concurring that this is indeed genocide are increasing." [333]
In June 2020, after an Associated Press investigation found that Uyghurs were being subjected to mass forced sterilizations and forced abortions in Xinjiang, scholars increasingly have referred to the abuses in Xinjiang as a genocide. [334]
In July 2020, Zenz said an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) that he had previously argued that the actions of the Chinese government are a cultural genocide, not a "literal genocide", but that one of the five criteria from the Genocide Convention was satisfied by more recent developments concerning the suppression of birth rates so "we do need to probably call it a genocide". [335] The same month, the last colonial governor of British Hong Kong, Chris Patten, said that the "birth control campaign" was "arguably something that comes within the terms of the UN views on sorts of genocide". [336]
Although China is not a member of the International Criminal Court, on 6 July 2020 the self-proclaimed East Turkistan Government-in-Exile and the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement filed a complaint with the ICC calling for it to investigate PRC officials for crimes against Uyghurs including allegations of genocide. [337] [338] [339] The ICC responded in December 2020 and "asked for more evidence before it will be willing to open an investigation into claims of genocide against Uighur people by China, but has said it will keep the file open for such further evidence to be submitted." [340]
An August 2020 Quartz article reported that some scholars hesitate to label the human rights abuses in Xinjiang as a "full-blown genocide", preferring the term "cultural genocide", but that increasingly many experts were calling them "crimes against humanity" or "genocide". [337] In August 2020 the spokesperson for Joe Biden's presidential campaign described China's actions as genocide. [341]
In October 2020, the U.S. Senate introduced a bipartisan resolution designating the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese government against the Uyghur people and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang as genocide. [342] Around the same time, the House of Commons of Canada issued a statement that its Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development was persuaded that the Chinese Communist Party's actions in Xinjiang constitute genocide as laid out in the Genocide Convention. [343] The 2020 annual report by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China referred to the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs as "crimes against humanity and possibly genocide." [344] [345]
In January 2021, U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo officially declared that China was committing genocide against the Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities living in Xinjiang. [346] This declaration, which came in the final hours of the Trump administration, had not been made earlier due to a worry that it could disrupt trade talks between the US and China. On the allegations of crimes against humanity Pompeo asserted that "These crimes are ongoing and include: the arbitrary imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty of more than one million civilians, forced sterilization, torture of a large number of those arbitrarily detained, forced labor and the imposition of draconian restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression and freedom of movement." [347]
On January 19, 2021, incoming U.S. president Joe Biden's secretary of state nominee Antony Blinken was asked during his confirmation hearings whether he agreed with Pompeo's conclusion that the CCP had committed genocide against the Uyghurs, he contended "That would be my judgment as well." [348] During her confirmation hearings Joe Biden's nominee to be the US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield stated that she believed what was currently happening in Xinjiang was a genocide, adding "I lived through and experienced and witnessed a genocide in Rwanda." [349]
The US designation was followed by Canada's House of Commons and the Dutch parliament, each passing a non-binding motion in February 2021 to recognize China's actions as genocide. [350] [351]
In January 2021, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum initially stated that, "[t]here is a reasonable basis to believe that the government of China is committing crimes against humanity." [352] [353] In November 2021, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum revised its stance to state that the "Chinese government may be committing genocide against the Uyghurs." [354]
In February 2021, a report released by the Essex Court Chambers concluded that "there is a very credible case that acts carried out by the Chinese government against the Uighur people in Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region amount to crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide, and describes how the minority group has been subject to "enslavement, torture, rape, enforced sterilisation and persecution." "Victims have been "forced to remain in stress positions for an extended period of time, beaten, deprived of food, shackled and blindfolded", it said. The legal team stated that they had seen "prolific credible evidence" of sterilisation procedures carried out on women, including forced abortions, saying the human rights abuses "clearly constitute a form of genocidal conduct". [355]
On February 13, 2021, The Economist wrote that while China's treatment and persecution of Uyghurs is "horrific" and a crime against humanity, "genocide" is the wrong word for China's actions due to China not engaging in mass murder. [356]
According to a March 2021 Newlines Institute report that was written by over 50 global China, genocide, and international law experts, [357] [358] the Chinese government breached every article in the Genocide Convention, writing, "China's long-established, publicly and repeatedly declared, specifically targeted, systematically implemented, and fully resourced policy and practice toward the Uyghur group is inseparable from 'the intent to destroy in whole or in part' the Uyghur group as such." [359] [360] [361] The report cited credible reports of mass deaths under the mass internment drive, while Uighur leaders were selectively sentenced to death or sentenced to long-term imprisonment. "Uyghurs are suffering from systematic torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment, including rape, sexual abuse, and public humiliation, both inside and outside the camps", the report stated. The report argued that these policies are directly orchestrated by the highest levels of state, including Xi and the top officials of the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang. [362] It also reported that the Chinese government gave explicit orders to "eradicate tumours", "wipe them out completely", "destroy them root and branch", "round up everyone", and "show absolutely no mercy", in regards to Uyghurs, [362] [358] and that camp guards reportedly follow orders to uphold the system in place until "Kazakhs, Uyghurs, and other Muslim nationalities, would disappear...until all Muslim nationalities would be extinct". [363] According to the report "Internment camps contain designated "interrogation rooms" where Uyghur detainees are subjected to consistent and brutal torture methods, including beatings with metal prods, electric shocks, and whips." [364]
In June 2021, the Canadian Anthropology Society issued a statement on Xinjiang in which the organization stated, "expert testimony and witnessing, and irrefutable evidence from the Chinese Government's own satellite imagery, documents, and eyewitness reports, overwhelmingly confirms the scale of the genocide." [365]
In June 2021, The New York Times and ProPublica published their analysis of over 3,000 videos, concluding that after the January 2021 U.S. declaration that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang, the Chinese government started an influence campaign featuring thousands of videos of Chinese citizens denying genocide and abuses in Xinjiang on Twitter and YouTube. [366] In August 2022, the U.S. State Department published a report PRC Efforts to Manipulate Global Public Opinion on Xinjiang on the Chinese government's global efforts "to discredit independent sources that report ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity" in Xinjiang. [367] [368]
A 2023 academic book by political theorists Alain Brossat and Juan Alberto Ruiz Casado labeled the accusation of genocide as unsubstantiated. [369] They described the information used to apply the label as misleading and coming "exclusively from a few sources, for the most part overwhelmingly and openly partisan in their anti-China crusade"; they especially criticize Adrian Zenz's 2018 detainee study and 2019 sterilization study as "academically flimsy" and containing misleading or directly false claims, respectively. [369]
Academics Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung write that their research has found no evidence that Xi Jinping advocates genocide against Uyghurs. [370] : 203 Tsang and Cheung conclude that China's policies subordinate identity based on culture, religion, or minority language in an effort to establish a national identity based on Han heritage, language, and Xi Jinping Thought. [370] : 203Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who is known for coining the term genocide and campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention. During the Second World War, he campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe. It was during this time that Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe Nazi Germany's extermination policies.
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The Holodomor was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1930–1933 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
Armenian genocide recognition is the formal acceptance of the fact that the Ottoman Empire's systematic massacres and forced deportation of Armenians from 1915 to 1923, both during and after the First World War, constituted genocide.
In 1932–1933, a man-made famine, known as the Holodomor, killed 3.3–5 million people in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, included in a total of 5.5–8.7 million killed by the broader Soviet famine of 1930–1933. At least 3.3 million ethnic Ukrainians died as a result of the famine in the USSR. Scholars debate whether there was an intent to starve millions of Ukrainians to death or not.
The Holodomor was a 1932–33 man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine and adjacent Ukrainian-inhabited territories that killed millions of Ukrainians. Opinions and beliefs about the Holodomor vary widely among nations. It is considered a genocide by Ukraine, and Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has lobbied for the famine to be considered a genocide internationally. By 2022, the Holodomor was recognized as a genocide by the parliaments of 23 countries and the European Parliament, and it is recognized as a part of the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 by Russia. As of June 2023, 35 countries recognise the Holodomor as a genocide.
The Yazidi genocide was perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. It was characterized by massacres, genocidal rape, and forced conversions to Islam. The Yazidi people, who are non-Arabs, are indigenous to Kurdistan and adhere to Yazidism, which is an Iranian religion derived from the Indo-Iranian tradition. Over a period of three years, Islamic State militants trafficked thousands of Yazidi women and girls and killed thousands of Yazidi men; the United Nations reported that the Islamic State killed about 5,000 Yazidis and trafficked about 10,800 Yazidi women and girls in a "forced conversion campaign" throughout Iraq. By 2015, upwards of 71% of the global Yazidi population was displaced by the genocide, with most Yazidi refugees having fled to Iraq's Kurdistan Region and Syria's Rojava. The persecution of Yazidis, along with other religious minorities, took place after the Islamic State's Northern Iraq offensive of June 2014.
A memory law is a legal provision governing the interpretation of historical events and showcases the legislator's or judicial preference for a certain narrative about the past. In the process, competing interpretations may be downplayed, sidelined, or even prohibited.
The East Turkistan National Movement also known as the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement is a non-profit human rights and political advocacy organization established in June 2017 in Washington D.C. Salih Hudayar, a Uyghur American consultant and graduate student founded the group after pre-existing Uyghur organizations failed to openly call for East Turkestan independence deeming it "controversial".
The Xinjiang internment camps, officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of China, are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs and other Muslims since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror", a policy announced in 2014. The camps have been criticized by the governments of many countries and human rights organizations for alleged human rights abuses, including mistreatment, rape, and torture, with some of them alleging genocide. Some 40 countries around the world have called on China to respect the human rights of the Uyghur community, including countries such as Canada, Germany, Turkey and Japan. The governments of more than 35 countries have expressed support for China's government. Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs".
Since 2014, the Chinese government has committed a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang which has often been characterized as persecution or as genocide. There have been reports of mass arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, mass surveillance, cultural and religious persecution, family separation, forced labor, sexual violence, and violations of reproductive rights.
Adrian Nikolaus Zenz is a German anthropologist known for his studies of the Xinjiang internment camps and persecution of Uyghurs in China. He is a director and senior fellow in China studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist think tank established by the US government and based in Washington, DC.
Salih Hudayar is a Uyghur-American politician known for advocating for East Turkistan independence. He founded the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement and has since been leading the movement calling for the "restoration of East Turkistan's independence."
The East Turkistan Government in Exile, officially the Government in Exile of the Republic of East Turkistan, is a political organization established and headquartered in Washington, D.C. by Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other peoples from East Turkistan (Xinjiang). The ETGE claims to be the sole legitimate organization and a parliamentary-based government in exile representing East Turkistan and its people on the international stage.
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
The Uyghur Tribunal was an independent "people's tribunal" based in the United Kingdom aiming to examine evidence regarding the ongoing human rights abuses against the Uyghur people by the Government of China and to evaluate whether the abuses constitute genocide under the Genocide Convention. The tribunal was chaired by Geoffrey Nice, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Slobodan Milošević, who announced the creation of the tribunal in September 2020.
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
The OHCHR Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China is a report published on 31 August 2022 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) concerning the treatment of Uyghurs and other largely Muslim groups in China. The report concluded that "[t]he extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity." Human rights commissioner Michelle Bachelet released the report shortly before leaving the office.
In the last years of his life, Lemkin developed these ideas most fully in his research on French genocides against Algerians and Muslim Arab culture. In 1956, he collaborated with the chief of the UN Arab States Delegation Office, Muhammed H. El-Farra, to produce an article calling for the UN to charge French officials with genocide. The text that survives in Lemkin's archives contains his annotations and comments. It is notable that El-Farra wrote in language that closely resembles Lemkin's-that France was following a "long-term policy of exploitation and spoliation" in its colonial territories, squeezing nearly one million Arab colonial subjects into poverty and starvation in "conditions of life [that] have been deliberately inflicted on the Arab populations to bring about their destruction." The French authorities, El-Farra continued, "are committing national genocide by persecuting, exiling, torturing, and imprisoning arbitrarily and in conditions pernicious to their health, the Algerian leaders" who are responsible for carrying and promoting Algerian national consciousness and culture, including teachers, writers, poets, journalists, artists, and spiritual leaders in addition to political leaders.
Many Iraqi Arabs deny they occurred, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – which, however, has not been generally available; the Human Rights Watch report was translated into Arabic but has not been widely distributed.
Despite growing scholarly consensus on the fact of the Armenian Genocide...
Overwhelmingly, since 2000, publications by non-Armenian academic historians, political scientists, and sociologists... have seen 1915 as one of the classic cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And, even more significantly, they have been joined by a number of scholars in Turkey or of Turkish ancestry...
The Western scholarly community is almost in full agreement that what happened to the forcefully deported Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 was genocide...
Virtually all American scholars recognize the [Armenian] genocide...
... important developments in the historical research on the genocide over the last fifteen years... have left no room for doubt that the treatment of the Ottoman Armenians constituted genocide according to the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.
... the denialist position has been largely discredited in the international academy. Recent scholarship has overwhelmingly validated the Armenian Genocide...
To date, more than 20 countries in the world have officially recognized the events as genocide and most historians and genocide scholars accept this view.
The 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's assassination revives stark memories of some 3,000 Sikhs killed brutally in the orderly pogrom that followed her killing
around 17,000 Sikhs were burned alive or killed
Bosnian genocide can mean either the genocide committed by the Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995 or the ethnic cleansing during the 1992–95 Bosnian War.
Kai eán i Kyvérnisi gia lógous politikís skopimótitas tha aposýrei to P.D., i Aristerá tha analávei, ópos pánta, na prosférei ta ideologiká ópla tou polémou. O Ángelos Elefántis tha grápsei sto ídio téfchos ton Néon pos den ypárchei kanénas lógos na anagoréfsome tin 14 Septemvríou tou 1922 oúte kan se iméra ethnikís mnímis.Και εάν η Κυβέρνηση για λόγους πολιτικής σκοπιμότητας θα αποσύρει το Π.Δ., η Αριστερά θα αναλάβει, όπως πάντα, να προσφέρει τα ιδεολογικά όπλα του πολέμου. Ο Άγγελος Ελεφάντης θα γράψει στο ίδιο τεύχος των Νέων πως δεν υπάρχει κανένας λόγος να αναγορεύσομε την 14 Σεπτεμβρίου του 1922 ούτε καν σε ημέρα εθνικής μνήμης.[And while the Government for the sake of political expediency withdraws the Presidential Decree, the Left undertakes, as always, to offer the ideological weapons for this war. Angelos Elefantis writes in the same page of the NEA newspaper (Feb. 24, 2001) that there is no reason to proclaim the 14th of September of 1922 not even to a day of national memory.]
On 28 November 2006, the Parliament of Ukraine, with the president's support and in consultation with the National Academy of Sciences, voted to recognize the Ukrainian Famine of 1932–33 as a deliberate act of genocide against the Ukrainian people ("Zakon Ukrainy pro Holodomor"). A vigorous international campaign to have the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and other governments do the same was subsequently initiated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Since 2006, when Ukraine adopted a law designating the famine a genocide, 18 countries and 21 American states have followed suit.
A substantial majority of MPs — including most Liberals who participated — voted in favour of a Conservative motion that says China's actions in its western Xinjiang region meet the definition of genocide set out in the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. ... The final tally was 266 in favour and zero opposed. Two MPs formally abstained.
...according to an independent report by more than 50 global experts in international law, genocide and the China region.
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