The genocides described here are not the only examples of genocide that one can find throughout history, nor should they be considered more important than those that are not included. There should be no “hierarchy of suffering” in genocide education. Additionally, these summaries are not meant to be comprehensive histories of each genocide. They were written to align with Dr. Gregory Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide, as used in various GenEd teaching guides; as such, there are many historical details that are not included in the summaries.
Violence and destruction are raging in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Since February 2003, government-sponsored militias known as the Janjaweed have conducted a calculated campaign of slaughter, rape, starvation and displacement in Darfur. It is estimated that 400,000 people…
Beginning on April 6, 1994, groups of ethnic Hutu, armed mostly with machetes, began a campaign of terror and bloodshed which embroiled the Central African country of Rwanda. For about 100 days, the Hutu militias, known in Rwanda as Interhamwe,…
In the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conflict between the three main ethnic groups – the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims – resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. In the late 1980’s a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic came to…
From 1975-1979, Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge political party in a reign of violence, fear, and brutality over Cambodia. An attempt to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25% of the population from starvation,…
October 1, 1949 marked Mao Tse-tung’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party launched numerous movements to systematically destroy the traditional Chinese social and political system. One of Mao’s major goals was the total collectivization of…
It began with a simple boycott of Jewish shops and ended in the gas chambers of Auschwitz as Hitler and his Nazi followers attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. The Holocaust took the lives of close to…
In December of 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army marched into China’s capital city of Nanking and proceeded to murder 300,000 out of the 600,000 civilians and soldiers in the city. After just four days of fighting, Japanese troops smashed into…
In 1932-33, Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, imposed the system of land management known as collectivization. This resulted in the seizure of all privately owned farmland and livestock. By 1932, much of the wheat crop was dumped on…
The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1918. Starting in April 1915, Armenian men in the Ottoman armies, serving separately in unarmed labor battalions, were removed and murdered. Of…
The Herero Genocide occurred between 1904-1907 in current day Namibia. The Hereros were herdsmen who migrated to the region in the 17th and 18th centuries. After a German presence was established in the region in the 1800s, the Herero territory…
