Genocide

Genocide is violence against any specific people group, whether distinguished by race, ethnicity, nationality or religion, with the goal of eliminating people group in its entirety.¹ The term “genocide” was not widely used until the United Nations declared the act an international crime in 1948, following World War II. Genocide was later used to describe a number of conflicts throughout the 20th century. In the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge’s regime in Cambodia killed 1.7 million people. From 1992–199, the Bosnian Genocide of the Bosnian Muslim and Croatian people in former Yugoslavia resulted in a death toll of nearly 100,000. Meanwhile, throughout the 1990s, 500,000–800,000 Tutsi people were killed by the Hutu majority in Rwanda.² In 2000, the Darfur people in South Sudan were targeted by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s forces, many of which now reside in refugee camps. Between 2014 and 2015, the Yazidi, Shiite and Muslim people in Iraq became the subject of mass genocide as ISIS burned villages and carried out mass killings across both Syria and Iraq. In 2017, Myanmar Tatmadaw — military forces — murdered, raped, tortured and abused the Muslim Rohingya people, leading to 700,000 Rohingya fleeing to nearby Bangladesh.³