ABSTRACT
This research paper investigates the process of genocide and mass crimes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The paper focuses on five episodes of genocide in the twentieth century (the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Srebrenica Genocide) that scholars and experts have declared to constitute genocides under the UN international legal definition of the crime. Six essential factors have been shown to be common components in and between 20th-century instances thorough investigation. The research paper then explores incidents of mass atrocities in the twenty-first century (Darfur Sudan, North-western Yemen, Rakhine Myanmar,), the majority of which are still ongoing. While all of them have potential genocidal components, they are all demonstrated to be vague in their exact nature.
This is because, at the time of writing, none of them had been classified as genocides by the world community. As a result, this study applies the fuzzy-set qualitative technique of analysis to conduct a comparative analysis of genocide instances from the twentieth century and mass atrocities from the twenty-first century. This paper demonstrates how the 21st-century instances correlate closely with the 20th-century cases. The comparable numbers across the various examples imply that genocides continue to occur in the twenty-first century, and the author highlights the lessons learned from the study.
KEYWORDS
Genocide, Extermination, Massacre, Perpetrator, fractionalization.
INTRODUCTION
The word “never again” has been a rallying cry against genocide across the world since it was engraved onto homemade placards by inmates at the freshly freed Buchenwald camp. The discriminated against pledged never to be stomped on again, the dismissed vowed to stand up, and the ignored vowed never to be forgotten. Despite memorializing the Holocaust and ensuring that its narrative is taught to children and adults alike, its lessons appear to have been overlooked.
The “millions of victims of genocidal violence in the twentieth century are a testament to the ever-present risk of genocide” and the international community’s failure to prevent it. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan referred to this at the first-ever session commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, saying that while “we rightfully vow never again…action is considerably tougher.” To its regret, the world has failed to prevent or stop genocide more than once since the Holocaust.”
This study will look at how genocide is defined and differentiated from other crimes against humanity. It will also address some of the debates around how genocide has been defined and how it has been carried out in practice.
Methodology
Cases
Ten particular conflict scenarios will be used in this study, divided into two groups of five examples each for comparative purposes. The next paragraph will discuss the final five incidents of war from the 21st century, which follow the first five cases of genocide from the 20th century. Internationally recognized genocides from the 20th century are those that the world community has come to recognize as such.
These incidents include the genocides that took place in Armenia (1915–1916), the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi Regime (1941–1945), Cambodia (1975–1979), Rwanda (1994), and Srebrenica, Bosnia (1995) during the Yugoslav Wars. These examples were chosen from the relevant scholarly literature on genocide studies because they represent the most commonly acknowledged genocides of the 20th century. Additionally, these five instances show the factors derived from the literature research. The second set of five incidents all includes mass murders that might be considered genocides in the twenty-first century. This research’s importance is further supported by the fact that no study has yet analyzed all five of these situations jointly or done so utilizing a comparative approach.
These incidents have/are happening in the Sudanese provinces of Darfur (2003–2004), Yemen (now), and Rakhine (currently) While enormous atrocities took place throughout the course of each of these incidents, the international community has not formally recognized any of them as genocides. Thus, to clarify and identify the nature of these contemporary occurrences, this research will be able to examine and contrast these examples with the genocidal cases from the 20th century indicated in the preceding paragraph. Labels are crucial for describing, debating, and comprehending historical events, after all. Therefore, improper identification will only cause misunderstandings and uncertainty regarding significant past and contemporary events.
Review of the Literature
The literature on genocide looks at several factors that have been identified as indicators and predictors of genocide. Although there may be other reasons, this literature study will focus on the six primary ones that recurred often in Genocide Studies Research. These particular factors include nationalism, conflict, militarism, ethnic cleavage, and regime type. As a result, the research is separated into five pieces, one for each variable and one for the conclusion.
Nationalism
Scholars have identified nationalism as one of the primary causes of genocide. This is due to the fact that nationalistic ideologies and narratives frequently appeal to ethnonationalism concerns, making them lethal and fostering the conditions necessary for genocide to occur. In reality, many genocides of the 20th century are remembered for having as their main objective the implementation of ideas, theories, or ideologies, and these ideologies are virtually invariably nationalistic in origin. Some academic work highlights the advantages of nationalism in that it may support nation-building by fostering an ethos that unites communities. Conversely, Genocidal policies may and do result from the adoption of nationalistic ideologies that are based on fear and are extremely discriminatory in terms of who is included and excluded (in-group/out-group).
In several of the most well-known and horrifying genocides of the 20th century, including Armenia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia (Srebrenica), and Rwanda, nationalism has been revealed to be a crucial factor. Although it is required, nationalism is not a sufficient prerequisite for genocide, therefore this necessitates a closer examination of the idea in connection to genocide. Following their military and political defeats in 1908–1915, the Young Turks (the government that arose following the fall of the Ottoman Empire) embraced a Pan-Turkic, patriotic ideology. This newly developed and cultivated nationalism altered Turkish identity as well as the perception of Armenians in Turkey, which went from being loyal to being a threat – from being an in-group to an out-group. Another well-known illustration is the group known as the Nazis, who took control of Germany in the early 1930s and enacted their own ideology that stressed racial purity and resulted in legal marking, discrimination, and the killing of Jews, Roma, and other groups.
This patriotic philosophy, which placed a premium on racial purity, ultimately resulted in the expulsion of Jews and other groups from German society, which served as the foundation for the Holocaust. What matters is how nationalism can be and is frequently is used by state regimes, which may have disastrous implications for both out-groups distinct from the particular nation (Armenians, Jews, etc.) Numerous elements, some of which have been alluded to in the preceding paragraphs, frequently make up nationalism. The Herero/Nama Genocide, the Armenian Genocide, the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the genocide committed by the Hutu Power against the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Holocaust all had elements of religion and race. While other times it means excluding people from a national group, as was the case in Pol Pot’s Cambodia where religious practice was outlawed along with minority and foreign languages being suppressed, as was the case with the Young Turks’ linking of the Islamic Religion and the Turkish Race.
Nationalism is made up of a variety of diverse elements, all of which, when united, have the potential to cause mass slaughter. These particular elements include racism, religious bigotry, expansionism, and the cultivation of idealization.
War
Even while none is a necessary prerequisite for the other to occur, the majority of experts feel that war and genocide are extremely closely connected. Even if the kinds of war have changed, this is true of both modern and pre-modern genocides since conflict allows for the advancement of a state’s vile objectives and aspirations.20 As an illustration, between 1955 and 2000, 80 % of the 36 occurrences of genocide that have been proven happened during a civil war. Genocides, as defined by the UN and other definitions of the term, happen during conflict for a variety of causes.
The Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide are two significant examples that took place during major conflicts, in this instance World Wars One and Two, respectively. Jacques Semelin adds that in non-total wars like the Yugoslav Wars, where the Srebrenica genocide took place, opportunities are provided to abolish conventional social order, rules, and other taboos by establishing restricted areas where everything is permissible, perpetrators are shielded from witnesses, and perpetrators are protected by a coordinated hierarchy. The Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, and the Bosnian Serb campaign against Muslims and Croats all illustrate this point. Warfare also provides a cover for genocide perpetrators to eliminate undesirable elements from society.
Militarism/Militarization
Militarization/militarism needs their own category since they are related to but different from the previous two elements that are crucial to genocide. Militarization refers to the physical tools that a regime or national elites need in order to carry out genocide rather than the dichotomy of whether a conflict was there or not and being concerned with a nation’s ideology. A militarised culture has the power to incite and mobilize the military as well as different facets of civil society towards genocide. Because of this, paramilitary groups are extremely prevalent among those responsible for genocide, such as the Schutzstaffel and Einsatzgruppen in Germany or the Interahamwe in Rwanda. Military fear, which the Young Turks experienced during the First World War, is a significant prelude to genocide and can persuade militaries to support final-solutions-oriented programs.
Therefore, for genocide to happen, both the physical and cultural conditions must be met, which militarised civilizations eventually may and do. In the end, militarization entails mobilizing society as a whole to address internal or foreign dangers, as was the case with the Young Turks and the Armenian Genocide. This may be done by mobilizing the military through training, obtaining weapons, raising the military budget, etc.
Fractionalizing ethnic groups
Although there is greater debate over the precise impacts of ethnic fractionalization as a variable in connection to wars and genocide, it is nevertheless a significant one. With the idea that most ethnic conflicts in highly fractionalized governments or areas will more likely escalate to violence, this concept assesses ethnic divisions within a society. While some researchers, like Harff, tend to concentrate on assessing the ethnic traits of the elite, while significant, they neglect to look at the wider population as a whole and the percentage of the population that belongs to the largest ethnic group.
It was discovered that the likelihood of mass executions for them was more likely impacted by the degree of public support for guerrilla forces as well as the insurgents’ overall danger to the state. These results imply that mass killings are often motivated as a premeditated military response to threats to a regime’s authority and that mass killings are less likely to be utilized as a tactic in a conflict if the threat is not there.
Valentino, Huth, and Balch-Lindsay remark that twenty-three of the forty-nine genocides and politicides recorded by Harff and Gurr from 1945 to 2000 happened during guerrilla conflicts and disagree that ethnic fractionalization is a primary cause of mass deaths. In other words, the authors propose that at least some genocides may have a counterinsurgency-related motivation.
Regime Type
Many academics draw attention to the particular government in power and its connection to various genocides. This makes sense given that genocides almost typically call for a high level of centralization as well as some type of bureaucratic organization unless a prospective victim group is extremely tiny. The systematic killing of innocent people by state bureaucracy is how Irving Horowitz, for instance, defines genocide. Omer Bartov also recognized that genocidal processes are organised and managed by states, and that this has become a mainstay of contemporary society. Genocides, especially those committed in the modern age, such as the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide, are all instances of state-sponsored mass murder that varied in their degree of effectiveness.
This section will concentrate more on the sort of ruling entity, notably democracies, authoritarian governments, and transitional democracies, as the nationalism section previously discussed ideology that certain regimes may create and embrace. When Eric D. Weitz claims that genocides sometimes occur during periods of severe social and political crises, in addition to times of combat, he offers one possible explanation for why this would be the case. Such illiberal democratic or semi-democratic institutions, in general, are unable to satisfactorily resolve conflicts through peaceful means or successfully repress dissidents.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The Comparative Analysis of top genocides in History
Genocide has been recognized as one of the most heinous crimes against humanity in the history of war crimes. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin invented the term ‘genocide,’ combining the Greek word ‘Geno,’ which means race or tribe, with the Latin suffix ‘-cide,’ which implies murdering. Genocide is defined as actions undertaken with the goal of entirely or partially eradicating a national, ethnic, religious, or racial group via murdering, causing physical injury, inflicting horrors, and/or preventing birth in that group The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (UNCPPCG) was adopted in 1948 and went into effect in 1951. Even though all countries have not signed the ‘Genocide Convention’ (UNCPPCG), they are nonetheless bound by international law and have a duty to prevent and punish genocide.
Nonetheless, there is a distinction to be made between genocide and slaughter. There is no identifiable group or community targeted in the case of massacres of individuals, as there is in the case of genocide. It is crucial to emphasize that, while many of the incidents from the twentieth century below are technically genocides, they are not legally recognized as such. There are several legal flaws in the UNCPPCG’s definition of genocide that prohibit instances from being recognized as genocides.
Holocaust
The Holocaust was an organized, state-sponsored extermination of 6 million Jews by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship in Germany. 200,000 Roma, 2-3 million Soviet prisoners of war, Polish intellectuals, homosexuals, mentally and physically deformed, communists, socialists, and trade unionists were also victims of the Holocaust. Because of this atrocity, the years 1942-1945 are forever etched in human history.
Holodomor
From 1932 to 1933, the territory of Ukraine saw the Holodomor or silent slaughter. Many think it was a systematic starving of Ukrainian peasants by the Stalin administration in the former Soviet Union. According to some historians, the Holodomor killed 3.3 million people.
Genocide in Cambodia
From 1975 to 1979, the South East Asian nation of Cambodia persecuted 2 million people in an attempt to enforce radical agricultural reform along the lines of Mao Zedong’s communist ideas. Individuals were forced to work ceaselessly on collective farms regardless of their age, gender, or health. Religion was forbidden; companies, schools, and colleges were closed; and anybody educated was executed by the Khmer Rouge administration, commanded by the cruel Pol Pot. (, n.d.) Many argue that because these activities were not specifically targeted against a specific population, they cannot strictly be classified as genocide. It was, however, one for all practical purposes.
Genocide Against the Armenians
The Turkish government initiated the Armenian genocide in 1915 in order to exterminate the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. As the Young Turks took control in Turkey, they began a systematic murder of educated Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians, followed by death marches across the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. It is believed that 1.5 million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians were killed in this planned genocide. Nonetheless, Turkey does not recognise this occurrence as genocide, and the United States only recognised it as such in 2010.
Genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The Bosnian genocide occurred in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s collapse from 1989 to 1993. In 1971, Muslims were the biggest single religious community in Bosnia, with Serbs and Croats in the minority. As the demand for a ‘Greater Serbia’ increased, Bosnian Serb troop assaulted Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croatians, culminating in the extermination of 100,000 people, or 80 percent of Bosnia, by 1995. Bosnian Serbs also assaulted the UN-protected territory of Srebrenica in 1995, committing horrible sexual crimes against women while executing males in mass death sites. In 2001, the International Court of Justice judged the Srebrenica massacre to be genocide.
The Genocide in Rwanda
The Rwandan genocide happened as a result of existing tensions between the dominant Hutu and minority Tutsi communities. Prior to its independence in 1962, Rwanda was a Belgian colony in which the Tutsis (minority group) perpetrated crimes against the Hutus. As the Hutus took power after independence, they unleashed a wave of atrocities against the country’s minority Tutsi people.
Between April and July of 1994, the Rwandan army and the administration in power backed widespread persecution of Tutsis in the country.Nearly a million Tutsis are said to have been slain, and millions more have been displaced. The majority of these crimes were committed by the Interahamwe, an extreme Hutu militia group. The International Criminal Tribunal was established in Rwanda to try the perpetrators of the genocide.
Genocide Against the Kurds
Iraq was a Shia majority country with a Kurd minority in 1987-88. More than 100,000 Kurds in northern Iraq were massacred ruthlessly under Saddam Hussein’s reign. Iraqi soldiers deployed chemical weapons on Kurds in March 1988, killing hundreds of women, children, and entire families. This operation was known as Al-Anfal, although Iraq refuses to recognise it as genocide.
Genocide in Bangladesh
In 1971, Bangladesh declared independence from Pakistan. Yet, this was preceded by a violent battle that took the lives of around 300,000 ethnic Bengalis. The Pakistani Army and militias committed war crimes such as mass rapes, deportation, and massacres of people, mainly against the Hindu minority population. Bangladesh established International Criminal Tribunals in 2010, which convicted 26 persons of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Genocide in Guatemala
Guatemala’s government is accused of genocide against the indigenous Malay majority people. The ‘Silent Holocaust’ occurred, when about 200,000 indigenous Malay people were punished.
Sudan/Darfur (2003-2004)
The mass atrocities that occurred in Darfur, Sudan in 2003 by government forces and the Janjaweed against the people in Darfur are telling due to the factors that were present at the time of the operations. Firstly, nationalism was highly present during the conflict. In 1989, General Omar Al-Bashir seized control of Sudan in a military coup and promoted Arab nationalism. His government would later adopt a policy of Arabization in the Darfur region, consistently favouring Arabs over the local ethnic groups in the region.
Al Bashir’s regime would also fund, arm, and use the dreaded Janjaweed paramilitary forces, which were responsible for numerous fatalities in the region. Aside from militia forces, Sudan’s militarization in 2003 was high, with high military expenditures in comparison to GDP and health spending, high military personnel in relation to the population at large as well as physicians, and a medium quantity of overall heavy weaponry in relation to the population.
Furthermore, the government’s state structure at the time was completely autocratic, with numerous datasets giving low ratings in terms of tenure, checks and balances, and civil liberties safeguards for individuals. Other significant factors included a civil war, economic strains involving population, natural, and technological disasters preceding and occurring during the mass atrocities (with more resulting in the aftermath of the events in Darfur), and a high level of ethnic, but not religious, fractionalization.
Rakhine, Myanmar (2017-present)
The violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017 was mostly carried out by military troops (supported by the government), as well as local Rakhine Buddhists and government officials. 177 Several academics have verified the presence of nationalism throughout the mass tragedy (fuzzy-set score of 1.00). This Burmese-Buddhist nationalism can be traced back to before Burma’s decolonization from the British when the majority of Buddhists saw the indirect rule of ethnic minorities (ex. Indian immigrants and officials, Rohingya self-rule, etc.) as a threat to the social structure, Buddhist religion, and Bamar/Burmese culture.
Following independence, the Buddhist and Burmese majority implemented unitary rule and grouping actions on the Rohingya (such as revoking citizenship, promoting stereotypes about the group being “Bengalis,” and so on). Even after democratic elections in the mid-2010s, the government tried to reinforce nationalist tropes about the Rohingya. 179 In terms of militarism, Myanmar is extremely militarized now, and this was also true in 2017.
According to the GMI, the country scored either high or very high (the highest possible) in the militarization categories of military personnel, expenditures, and total militarization level (the only category that did not receive a high rating was heavy weaponry, for which Myanmar received a medium).
Authors have described the government’s state structure at the time as a transitional democracy, semi-democratic, and an anocracy, with citizens voting against the major government/military party prior to the recent military takeover in 2021. When Freedom House data from 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 were examined, Burma barely scored high enough to be classified as somewhat free. Yet, in the years preceding and after the time period studied, Burma received dozens of not free (NF), demonstrating how insecure civil rights and freedoms have been in the state that was a transitional democracy and is now under military junta authority (at the time of writing).
Yemen (from 2016 until the present)
The Yemeni government, supported by Saudi coalition forces, has been committing mass crimes against the mostly Shia Houthi rebels.165 Over 13,000 Yemeni civilians have been murdered since March 2015, mostly as a result of purposeful targeting by aerial bombings as well as air and naval blockades. Yemen is a wonderful illustration of nationalism since the Houthi, Shia rebels see the Sunni government in Yemen’s south as being distinct from them.
With the Arab Spring in 2011, a rising contempt for democratic procedures, and a plot to diminish local autonomy in favor of international interests, The Houthi rebels demonstrate the country’s developing nationalism as well as their desire to split from a distinct ethnic and religious minority in southern Yemen.
CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
Origin
The phrase “crimes against humanity” was first used internationally in a 1915 declaration by the governments of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia, which condemned the Turkish government for alleged massacres of Armenians as “crimes against humanity and civilization for which all members of the Turkish Government will be held responsible together with its agents implicated in the massacres,”
Early development
Nuremberg Tribunal:
Despite this early usage of the phrase, the first prosecutions for crimes against humanity occurred in 1945, during the Second World War, before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg. Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or prosecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution or in connection with any crime within the Tribunal’s jurisdiction, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated, were defined as crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Charter.
Tokyo Tribunal:
The same term of crimes against humanity was included in the Tokyo Charter of 1946, which established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East.
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was founded by the UN Security Council in 1993 to investigate and punish genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed in the former Yugoslavia. The ICTY’s definition of crimes against humanity revived the original ‘Nuremberg’ link between crimes against humanity and armed conflict, linking crimes against humanity to both international and non-international armed conflict, and expanded the list of criminal acts used in Nuremberg to include imprisonment, torture, and rape.
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR):
In response to the genocide that occurred between April and July 1994, the United Nations Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in 1994. The connection between crimes against humanity and any sort of armed conflict was removed from the ICTR Statute. Rather, cruel actions must be part of a “systematic or widespread attack against any civilian population on national, political, ethnic, racial, or religious grounds,” according to Article 3 of the ICTR Statute. Due to the internal nature of the Rwandan struggle, crimes against humanity would have been unlikely to be prosecuted if the link to armed combat had been maintained.
CASES
According to the Appeals Chamber in Kunarac et al., “for an accused’s actions to amount to a crime against humanity, they must be part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.” This phrase has been interpreted to include five components:
– There must be an attack – The perpetrator’s actions must be included in the attack – The attack must be directed against any civilian population
– The attack must be widespread or systematic “- The perpetrator must be aware that his actions are part of a pattern of widespread or systematic crimes directed against civilians and that his actions fit into such a pattern.”
In Prosecutor v. Kambanda, one of the first judgements of an international criminal court on the crime of
genocide, a Trial Chamber of the ICTR stated:
“The crime of genocide is distinct because of its element of dolus spe-cialis (special intent), which requires that the crime be committed with the intent ‘to destroy in whole or in part, a national ethnic, racial, or religious group as such; thus, the Chamber is of the opinion that genocide constitutes the crime of crimes, which must be considered when determining the sentence.”
In the subtitle of his seminal monograph “Genocide in International Law,” William Schabas referred to genocide as the “crime of crimes.”
In Prosecutor v. Krstic, the ICTY Appeals Chamber stated: “Among the heinous crimes that this Tribunal is obligated to punish, genocide is singled out for special
condemnation and opprobrium.” The ICTR Trial Chamber ruled in Prosecutor v. Akayesu that “the offence of genocide exists to safeguard certain groups from extermination or attempted extermination.”
Is it possible to distinguish between national and ethnic groups?
In Prosecutor v. Akayesu, the concept of a national group was limited to a State’s nationals and in the case of Prosecutor v. Krstic, the Trial Chamber appears to have based its classification of Bosnian Muslims as a national group on the fact that the Yugoslav Constitution of 1963 recognised Bosnian Muslims as a “nation
The Trial Chamber in Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana considered the words “serious bodily harm” to be largely self-explanatory, but added the helpful understanding that what is required is harm that “seriously injures the health, causes disfigurement, or causes serious injury to the external, internal organs, or senses.”
As per the case of Prosecutor v. Stakic: “It is not enough to deport a group or a portion of a group. A clear distinction must be made between physical destruction and group dissolution. The expulsion of a group or a portion of a group does not constitute genocide. According to Kreß, “This is true even if the expulsion can be characterized as a tendency to group dissolution, taking the form of fragmentation or assimilation.”
This prohibited act describes the so-called biological variant of genocide, which is aimed at destroying the group’s reproductive capacity. The Trial Chamber construed the terms so as to include “sexual mutilation, the practice of sterilization, forced birth control, separation of the sexes, and prohibition of marriages” in Prosecutor v. Akayesu.
In Prosecutor v. Blagojevic, the ICTY Trial Chamber stated that “The physical or biological destruction of the group is the likely outcome of a forcible population transfer when this transfer is carried out in such a way that the group can no longer reconstitute itself – especially when it involves the separation of its members.”
Lord Justice McCowan expressed the final, most severe consequence in Hipperson and others v. DPP when he questioned whether the goal of destroying the entire world was genocidal in nature “[The appellant] contends that these weapons endanger the entire human race and that the [genocide] definition should read ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy the human race in whole or in part.'” But the point is that the definition does not read that way.”
In thecase of Germain Katanga v. The Prosecutor between 1999 and 2003, Ituri (Democratic Republic of the Congo – DRC) was the site of a deadly battle between the ethnic groups Lendu, Ngiti, and Hema. In August 2002, the Hema-dominated Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC) took control of Bunia, the district capital.
Bogoro, a strategically significant town on the route between Bunia and the Ugandan border, has a UPC military camp in the centre of it. On February 24, 2003, a Ngiti militia invaded Bogoro with the intention of driving away or eliminating the UPC camp as well as the Hema community. A large number of individuals were murdered or raped, and the town was partially devastated.
Germain Katanga was President of the Ngiti militia and Commander or Chief of Aveba at the time. As a result of his official authority over the assailants, he was indicted by the ICC for his role in the crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated during the Bogoro attack.
The Trial Chamber determined that Katanga, while technically President, lacked operational control over all fighting units and commanders. As a result, he was cleared of some of the offenses he had committed. Nonetheless, because he supplied critical logistical support (weapons and transportation), he allowed the militia to conduct the atrocities. He was aware of their aim and knowingly assisted in the commission of the crimes; as a result, the Chamber held him guilty as an accessory to murder and war crimes of murder, assaulting a civilian population, destroying property, and pillaging.
On May 23, 2014, the Court sentenced Katanga to 12 years in prison, with credit for nearly 7 years spent at the ICC’s detention center.
CONCLUSION
Genocide is an essential issue with implications for comprehending not only the recent history but also the present. To put it another way, research like this one assists to demonstrate that genocide is not limited to the distant past. Rather, the data from this study heavily suggests that genocides, comparable to those in the 20th-century examples, are currently occurring in numerous areas throughout the world now. Also, the adoption of a comparative analysis methodology offers significant advantages compared to other methodological methods. There are significant parallels, for example, between the many episodes of genocide examined in this study. They include high levels of nationalism, the majority of which arise during the conflict, strong militarised capabilities, and unstable authoritarian governments.
Additionally, there are other distinctions that may be detected between the 20th and 21st cases as well. For example, ethnic fractionalization appears to have been more relevant and widespread in the 21st century cases compared to the 20th century examples. This might possibly affect future research on genocides or mass crimes occurring in the modern world, where ethnic fractionalization can be one of the primary warning signs evaluated. However, three of the 21st century situations (Yemen, and Myanmar) were experiencing transitions from an authoritarian state to a democratic one.
Hence, research that examines how many genocides occur during regime transitions or how to prevent the instability induced by the shift can benefit both general analysis and forecasting. In conclusion, my analysis reaffirms similar elements discovered in prior occurrences of genocide while also showing major distinctions in how genocides have altered in the twenty-first century. When instances of mass murder, ethnic violence, and other crises continue to occur in the current day, it is crucial to be able to swiftly and properly recognise what is occurring with the case in question
From there, the proper acknowledgment may be given to the situation as well as potential action to support persons who are victims of the crisis. Comparative assessments of these mass tragedies are vital in this process. It gets more difficult to identify patterns across examples that are increasingly similar when there is no comparison (or less similarity).
The commonalities between the two groups of instances allowed this study to compare genocides with cases of mass atrocities, and the mass atrocities were designated as genocides.
Yet, being able to compare and contrast genocides, war crimes, and other events, as well as the similarities and distinctions between them, can aid in the identification process. Future research can carefully choose situations defined as unique from one another (for example, war crimes and genocides) and examine their similarities as well as what distinguishes them.
Genocides are never characterized by one variable alone. Many variables always go into the creation and implementation of these tragic occurrences. This research has sought to demonstrate some of the most important ones and how they have been evident in the past and now. Not only may these features be identified by academics and other players as crucial markers of genocide, but perhaps these characteristics can be better understood by a more exact assessment.
This will be crucial, especially if the character of genocides and other major crimes continue to develop over time. In other words, even if the Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide, and Rohingya genocide employed distinct techniques and strategies, all of these events may be proven to be genocides. As they change, so must academics in order to create solutions to prevent similar catastrophes in the future.
NAME- NIKHIL RAGHAV
COLLEGE-LLOYD LAW COLLEGE