9781422281369

Critical World Issues

Genocide

Critical World Issues

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Critical World Issues

Genocide

Albert Ward

Mason Crest Philadelphia

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Printed and bound in the United States of America. CPSIA Compliance Information: Batch #CWI2016. For further information, contact Mason Crest at 1-866-MCP-Book. First printing 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

on file at the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-1-4222-3656-7 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-4222-8136-9 (ebook) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4222-3337-5 (hc) ISBN 978-1-4222-8622-7 (ebook)

1. Southwestern States—Juvenile literature. 2. Arizona—Juvenile literature. 3. California—Juvenile literature. 4. Nevada—Juvenile literature. I. Title. F785.7.L37 2015 979—dc23 2014050200

Critical World Issues series ISBN: 978-1-4222-3645-1

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Table of Contents 1: What Is Genocide?..............................................7 2: Has There Always Been Genocide? ................23 3: What are the Causes of Genocide? ..................33 4: Infamous Genocides ........................................45 5: How Does Genocide Affect People? ................65 6: Can Genocide Be Stopped? ..............................77 Appendix: Genocide by Continent, Since 1900 ..91 International Organizations ..............................100 Series Glossary....................................................102 Further Reading..................................................104 Internet Resources ..............................................106 Index....................................................................108 Photo Credits/About the Author........................112

KEY ICONS TO LOOK FOR :

Text-dependent questions: These questions send the reader back to the text for more careful attention to the evidence presented there.

Words to understand: ;OLZL ^VYKZ ^P[O [OLPY LHZ` [V \UKLYZ[HUK KLÄUP[PVUZ ^PSS increase the reader's understanding of the text, while building vocabulary skills.

Series glossary of key terms: This back-of-the book glossary contains terminology used throughout this series. Words found here increase the reader's HIPSP[` [V YLHK HUK JVTWYLOLUK OPNOLY SL]LS IVVRZ HUK HY[PJSLZ PU [OPZ ÄLSK Research projects: Readers are pointed toward areas of further inquiry connected to each chapter. Suggestions are provided for projects that encourage deeper research and analysis. Sidebars: This boxed material within the main text allows readers to build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspectives by weaving together additional information to provide realistic and holistic perspectives.

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1

What Is Genocide?

F or most of his adult life, Muhamed Cehajic worked as a teacher. He lived in a small city called Prijedor, which had a population of about 90,000. It was located in the province of Bosnia, which for most of the twentieth century was part of a country called Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia had been created shortly after World War I ended in 1918, by uniting several provinces in southeastern Europe where Slavic peoples lived. However, by the late 1980s tensions were beginning to show among Yugoslavia’s different ethnic and religious groups. One group, the Serbs, were led by a man named Slobodan Milosevic. He was president of the Serbian Republic, which like Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia. However, Milosevic wanted to expand his province and create a “Greater Serbia” that would be open to all of the ethnic Serbs from Yugoslavia.

United Nations forensic experts unearth victims from a mass grave in Bosnia. The victims were killed by Bosnian Serb soldiers in Srebrenica during July 1995.

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At this time Prijedor was inhabited by two communities— Bosniaks, who were mainly Muslims, and Serbs, who were pre- dominantly Orthodox Christians. These two groups of people had been enemies in the past, but for forty years they had lived peacefully side by side. Muhamed was a Muslim, but he knew and liked many Serbs. In 1990, when he was 51, Muhamed decided to run for office as mayor of the city. The entire Muslim community

Words to Understand in This Chapter

abduction— taking someone away by force. anti-Semitism— prejudice against Jews. atrocity— a shockingly cruel act, usually involving violence.

classification— the allocation of items or people into groups according to type. concentration camp— a prison camp used in war for the incarceration of political prisoners or civilians. dehumanization— the process of removing a person’s or group’s human qualities, in the eyes of others. economic depression— a long period when trade is very slack, marked by high unemployment and poverty. ghetto— a run-down area of a city lived in by a minority group, especially a group experiencing discrimination. polarization— the process of exaggerating the differences between items or people so that those differences become ever more clear-cut s and extreme. propaganda— organized publicity, often by a government, to promote a particular view. refugee— someone who is seeking refuge, especially from war or persecution, by going to a foreign country. symbolization— the process of identifying a particular group with a symbol.

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Genocide

A Bosnian Serb T-54 tank passes through the Bosnian village of Modrica in January 1995. Like most genocides, the ethnic cleansing inflicted by Serbs on Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s required planning and organization.

voted for him, and he won the election. Muhamed was very happy in his new job, and worked hard for the city. Then, the following year, catastrophe struck. Civil war broke out in Yugoslavia, and the country began to fall apart. The province of Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1992. Most of Bosnia’s population was Muslim, although it had a large Serbian minority who wished to remain part of Yugoslavia. Milosevic ordered the national army of Yugoslavia, which was dominated by Serbs, to attack Sarajevo,

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What Is Genocide?

A Bosniak man mourns the loss of his wife and daughter at a cemetery in Sarajevo, 1993.

Bosnia’s capital city. Serb snipers terrorized the city by shoot- ing down civilians in the streets. There were many casualties, including 3,500 children. The Bosnian Muslims were no match for the Yugoslav army, and the Serbs gradually took control of the region. As each town was captured, they rounded up the local Muslim population and either imprisoned them in concentration camps or, in some cases, massacred them. Women and girls were fre- quently the victims of rape. The plan was to turn Bosnia into a purely Serbian province. The process became known as “ethnic cleansing.”

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Genocide

In the spring of 1992, Serb army forces took control of Prijedor. They ordered Muhamed to go on the radio and tell the people of the city to surrender their weapons to the Serbs. Instead, Muhamed told the citizens to remain calm and to use peaceful means to resist the illegal Serb government that the army had formed. Prison Camp Muhamed was removed from his job as mayor, and later arrest- ed by Serb police. He was sent to a prison camp in a nearby city called Omarska. Prisoners at Omarska slept on the floor, and were fed one meal a day—a slice of bread and a bowl of thin soup. Conditions were filthy, and lice infested the prisoners’ hair and beards. They were regularly tortured and beaten, and many did not survive. Muhamed was held at Omarska for five weeks. Then, one night toward the end of July, 1992, he and six others—all high- ranking men from Prijedor—were led away by guards. They were never seen again. Muhamed was killed for no other rea- son than because he was a Muslim, and a leader of his commu- nity. Sadly, his story is not unusual. The Western powers tried through diplomatic means to bring the fighting to an end. Safe havens were established by the UN, but these were ignored by the Serbs. In one safe haven, at Srebrenica, a Serbian force rounded up 7,500 Muslim men and boys between the ages of 12 and 60, and slaughtered them in July 1995. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an inter- national organization established in 1949 by the United States

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What Is Genocide?

and countries of western Europe to promote international defense and collective security, responded to this atrocity . They launched a major bombing campaign, attacking Serb positions throughout Bosnia. The Serbs found they had no choice but to negotiate. A peace deal was agreed to in 1995. By this time, however, 200,000 Muslims had been massacred; over 20,000 were missing, feared dead; and two million Muslims had become refugees . What Is Genocide Genocide is defined as any action aimed at the destruction of a group of people, such as a nation, an ethnic group, or a race. An ethnic group is a community whose members shares a similar culture or background, and a race is a group of people who share similar physical characteristics, such as skin color and/or physical features. The term “genocide” was invented in 1944 by a Polish- American legal expert named Raphael Lemkin. He decided a new word was needed to describe the large-scale, deliberate massacres that the Nazis were carrying out against the Jews and other ethnic or national groups at that time living in the parts of Europe that had been occupied by the armies of Nazi Germany. Lemkin combined the Greek word genos , meaning race or tribe, and –cide from the Latin word for killing. Ever since the word genocide was created, there has been a debate about its exact meaning, and about what it should include. Some have argued that the term should include only actions that cause death. Others believe that the destruction of culture, religion, and language are also serious crimes worthy

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Genocide

Dr. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide,” also helped to draft the UN Genocide Convention in 1948. This internation- al legislation was intended to prevent and

punish the crime of genocide—the mass

destruction of national, ethnic, racial, or reli- gious groups.

of being called genocide. There are also arguments over what kinds of groups can be considered victims of genocide. As well as national, ethnic, and racial groups, some insist that political groups or economic classes can also suffer from a genocidal attack. How Is Genocide Defined? The United Nations (UN), an organization of countries formed after World War II, passed a law in 1948 making genocide ille- gal. The UN defined “genocide” as any act committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. This included the following kinds of activity: • Killing members of the group. • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

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What Is Genocide?

• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. • Imposing measures intended to prevent births with- in the group. • Forcibly transferring children of the group to anoth- er group. According to this definition, the attempt to destroy a polit- ical movement or economic class would not be classed as geno- cide. Cases like these may, however, be treated as “crimes against humanity.” The UN also limited its definition to phys- ical or psychological attacks, and did not include acts that attack a group’s cultural or religious identity. What Are the Six Stages of Genocide? Genocide occurs for many different historical and political rea- sons, but different occurrences tend to have certain features in common. Researchers have attempted to identify these com- mon features in the hope that this might increase the chances of predicting and preventing them in the future. Genocide expert Dr. Gregory Stanton has suggested that there are six stages in the build-up to genocide: 1. Classification . A government or group wishing to carry out genocide will first classify who is included in the group they wish to destroy. Classification can be done on the basis of physical appearance, for

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Genocide