Gaza Genocide The Latest Effort To Wipe Out An Entire Culture
In what can only be described as an ongoing genocide, Israel has slaughtered an estimated 59,000 Palestinians, destroyed wide swaths of land and has blocked food shipments which has led to starvation deaths of historic proportions, especially among children in Gaza.
The genocide in Gaza continues while the U.S. provides powerful weapons of war.
And like other genocides in history, political, historical and psychological factors too often have limited the world leaders’ responses to shamefully pleading ignorance and crying crocodile tears, while the mass killings and starvation continues.
The war in Gaza is the latest in a long series of horrific attempts to wipe out entire cultures. It seems that periodically people show their worst sides and the very worst comes when one nation tries to disappear another.
The most publicized genocide was Adolf Hitler’s attempt to extinguish the Jews during the Holocaust of World War II. The U.S. did not intervene but was surely aware of the mass killings.
In the summer of 1942 Eduard Schulte, a German industrialist with access to secrets of the SS leadership, notified Gerhart Riegner, the Geneva-based representative of the World Jewish Congress, about “a plan to exterminate all Jews from Germany and German controlled areas in Europe.”
The State Department was notified but kept the information from President Roosevelt because of opposition to loosening emigration restrictions for the endangered Jews, a result of anti-Semitism within the State Department and other agencies of the U.S. government.
Treasury Department officials learned of the suppressed report and told President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the mass killings. In 1944, Roosevelt ordered the creation of an agency to try to rescue European Jews. But by then, it was too late for the millions who had already been murdered.
As monstrous as the Holocaust was, it was one of many genocide that have been written out of the history books even though their barbarity was even worse the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews.
Here are three of the more brutal but less publicized attempts at genocide in the 20th century.
Herero and Nama Genocide
As many as 100,000 members of the Herero and Nama peoples were massacred between 1904 and 1908 in a campaign of ethnic extermination and collective punishment by the German Empire in colonial German South West Africa, now Namibia.
Historians have said that the Herero genocide set a precedent in Imperial Germany that would be a blueprint for Nazi Germany’s establishment of death camps.
German colonial authorities and European settlers sought to create a predominantly white “new African Germany.” The native populations would be put onto reservations and their land distributed among settlers and companies. Under German colonial rule, colonists were encouraged to seize land and cattle from the Herero and Nama peoples and to subjugate them as slave laborers.
Resentment grew among the natives over loss of status and property to German ranchers, mistreatment by the white occupiers and the dismantling of traditional political hierarchies. Oppression included the rape of Herero women and girls by Germans, a crime that the German judges and prosecutors did not punish.
In 1903 the Herero were further inflamed because of a German plan to divide their territory with a railway line and set up reservations where they would be concentrated. The Herero had already ceded more than a quarter of their 50,000 square miles of rich, farming land to German colonists.
The Hereros were looked down upon as animals and one missionary reported that “the settler holds that the native has a right to exist only in so far as he is useful to the white man.” One example of the contempt held by the colonists was the concubinage of native women who were taken by male European traders and ranchers both willingly and by force.
Eventually, the anger of the Herero or Ovaherero could not be contained and they rebelled against German colonial rule. They were sorely overmatched as in August 1904, the Germans defeated the Ovaherero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of dehydration as the Germans prevented the Herero from leaving the Namib desert.
In October 1904, the Germans began their bloodbath, leading to the killing of between 24,000 and 100,000 Hereros and 10,000 Nama. Thousands of defeated Hereros and Namas were imprisoned in concentration camps, where most died of diseases, abuse, and exhaustion. Hundreds of the skulls and other remains of the slaughtered tribesmen were taken to Germany to promote racial superiority.
The Germans were ruthless in their assaults on the Herero. Tribal wells were poisoned while males were summarily executed and women and children were driven into the desert to die from starvation and thirst. Bounties were offered to anyone who captured a Herero or Maherero.
Prisoners were herded into labor camps, where they were sold to private companies as slaves or exploited as human guinea pigs in medical experiments. Shootings, hangings, beatings, and other harsh treatment were common.
In 2004, the German government apologized for the crimes but ruled out financial compensation for the victims’ descendants. In July 2015, the German government and the speaker of the Bundestag officially called the events a “genocide” but still refused to consider reparations.
In 2018, the final batch of remains was returned to Namibia. Petra Bosse-Huber, a German Protestant bishop, described the ethnic cleansing as “the first genocide of the 20th century.” In May 2021, more than a century after the tribal genocide, the German government issued an official statement in which it said that Germany “apologizes and bows before the descendants of the victims. Germany asks for forgiveness for the sins of their forefathers. The suffering, inhumanity and pain inflicted on the tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children by Germany during the war in what is today Namibia must not be forgotten. It must serve as a warning against racism and genocide.”
That year, the German government agreed to pay 1.1 billion euros over 30 years to fund projects in communities that were impacted by the genocide.
Kurdish Genocide
The Anfal campaign, also known as the Kurdish genocide, was an assault against the Kurdish people by the Iraqis from 1986 to 1989. An estimated 185,000 people were killed and more than 1,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed.
The brutal campaign in the Kurdistan region of Iraq was ordered by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in an effort to suppress the Kurdish population’s autonomy movement. It included chemical attacks, bombings, executions and mass killings.
Many Kurdish villages were destroyed, and their inhabitants were rounded up, detained, and executed without trial. Kurds were relocated, and many Kurdish men and boys were killed in mass executions. Women and children were taken to internment camps where they were executed or died due of of deprivation.
On March 16, 1988, Iraqis dropped chemical in the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing an estimated 5,000 people while others suffered long-term effects including birth defects, cancer, infertility, and miscarriages.
The Anfal campaign was the culmination of long-standing efforts by the Ba‘ath regime to end to Kurdish aspirations toward greater autonomy and independence. It came toward the end of the Iran-Iraq war that lasted from 1980–1988 as Kurdish rebels stepped into a security vacuum in the north. The Anfal campaign was the regime’s revenge.
The Kurdish national movement and the modern state of Iraq grew from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The victorious powers, England and France, created new states but the Kurds remained the largest such non-state nation, inhabiting a vast territory that comprised significant parts of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq.
The history of the Kurdish independence movement in Iraq started in the early 1920s with the unsuccessful rebellions of Sheikh Mahmoud Barzinji, who titled himself “King of Kurdistan.” The movement was suppressed after the British authorities called in the RAF to bomb the Kurds.
When Iraqi invade Iran in 1980, the Kurdish in Iraq began a guerilla war against the government. But in 1983, the Iraqi government arrested 8,000 Kurdish members of the Barzani tribe and executed them. During the battle for Haj Omran, the Iraqi government also used gas weapons for the first time against both Kurdish and Iranian forces.
With the war with Iraq coming to a close, Saddam Hussein, appointed his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, to lead the fight against the rebellious Kurds. Al-Majid planned to make the countryside inhospitable to the insurgents by razing the villages they relied on for food and shelter. By the summer of 1987, his forces had succeeded in destroying all villages they could reach.
Anfal was a large-scale military campaign that included Iraqi air force planes that carried out the chemical strikes to kill and flush out the rural Kurds. The Iraqi army pummeled Kurdish areas with mortar and artillery fire and rounded up the fleeing villagers and drove them to the transit camp at Topzawa.
In the afternoon of March 16, the Iraqi air force launched a massive chemical strike against the area of Halabja and Khurmal. It is generally reported that 5,000, mostly civilians died from nerve gas. Human Rights Watch said “at least fifty thousand and possibly as many as a hundred thousand persons” died in the Kurdish genocide.
In Topzawa, boys and men between 15 and 60 were separated from their families, hauled to execution sites in western Iraq, where they were killed and buried in mass graves. Those who managed to flee to Iran or Turkey were allowed to return to Iraq for one month in 1988. Returnees were herded into resettlement camps after their information was taken. Anyone who returned (or was caught) after that month was again subject to arrest and execution.
Detention camps like the one at Dibs were established to accommodate thousands of prisoners. From Dibs, detainees were transferred to Nugra Salman in a depression in the desert southwest of Samawah. Nugra Salman held an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 prisoners during the Anfal campaign.
In September 1988, the Iraqi government determined that the male Kurdish population between 15 and 50 had either been killed or fled. The remaining Kurdish resistance escaped to Iran. An amnesty was issued, and the detained women, children and elderly were sent to camps where they lived under military rule until a regional autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan was achieved in 1991.
The Anfal campaign received limited attention in America in part because the U.S. had historically cooperated with Iraq in its conflicts with Iran. The focus on Kurdish identity also was not familiar to many Americans.
Mayan Genocide
The Mayan genocide in Guatemala, also known as the Silent Holocaust and the CIA’s secret genocide, unfolded in the late 20th century, claiming the lives of 200,000 indigenous Mayan people.
The Guatemalan government attacked small Mayan communities in an effort that was particularly intense during the 1980s, when the government launched Operation Sophia a secret plan to capture and kill so-called communists among the Mayans.
Operation Sophia was created to eliminate the entire Mayan population, and 200,000 native people were killed and 1.5 million more were displaced and fled to Mexico to live in refugee camps.
Villages were destroyed, livestock was slaughtered, water supplies were poisoned, and sacred structures were desecrated. The Guatemalan military raped, tortured, and used other forms of violence to terrorize the Mayans. Thousands of people were kidnapped and disappeared, their bodies never recovered. The conflict only came to an end in 1996 after other nations intervened to sue for peace.
Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the U.S. backed military regimes.
The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the left wing Guerrilla Army of the Poor operated. The Guatemalan military viewed the Maya as siding with the insurgency and began a campaign of mass killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants.
While massacres of indigenous peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s. The military carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict and acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983.
The rights abuses were so severe that even the U.S. with its anti-communist policy “kept its assistance comparatively limited. For most of the 1980’s the Guatemalan army relied on fellow pariah-states like Argentina and South Africa for supplies.”
Government forces carried out 92 percent of civilian executions and the United Nations-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) concluded that U.S. training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques “had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.”
Former military dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled from 1982–1983)was indicted for his role in the most intense stage of the genocide. He was convicted in 2013 of ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Indigenous group. The sentence was overturned, and his retrial was not completed by the time of his death in 2018.
The Mayan genocide began during the Guatemalan Civil War from 1960–1996 as a series of Guatemalan military governments took power following the CIA-instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état. The coup deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and marked the end of the Guatemalan Revolution. The goals of the 1954 coup were to halt the increasingly progressive policies of the democratically-elected Guatemalan government. The policies clashed with the business interests of U.S. companies in the midst of the Cold War, notably the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita).
The coup installed the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, the first in a series of U.S.-backed authoritarian rulers in Guatemala. The government collected intelligence on suspected “subversives”, which would have included leftists, trade unionists, student activists, clergy, etc. The intelligence was used to draw up lists of persons to be assassinated.
Victims were deprived of their liberty arbitrarily, they were almost always subjected to interrogation, accompanied by torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In the majority of cases, the detainees disappeared or were executed.
Despite government claims of left wing insurgents, it was later determined that guerrilla groups lacked the potential to pose an imminent threat to the state.
The use of terror in Guatemala emerged in the mid-1960s when the military government began to use “disappearances” as a tactic to dismantle the infrastructure of the guerrillas.
President Julio César Méndez Montenegro gave right wing forces carte blanche to engage in “any means necessary” to pacify the country. In the city and in the countryside, persons suspected of leftist sympathies began to disappear or turn up dead at an unprecedented rate.
With increased military aid from the United States, the 5,000-man Guatemalan Army mounted a large pacification effort in the departments of Zacapa and Izabal in October 1966. Col. Carlos Arana Osorio was appointed commander and took charge of the counter-terror program with guidance and training from 1,000 US Green Berets.
A new plainclothes secret police agency known as the “Detective Corps of the National Police” abducted and murdered thousands of suspected subversives in Guatemala City. As in an earlier campaign in Zacapa, bodies were found floating in rivers. Each day, mutilated, unidentified corpses were displayed in the amphitheater of the General Hospital of Guatemala City for relatives of missing persons to identify.
Under president and dictator Jose Efrain Ríos Montt, the abuse of the civilian population by the army peaked. Civilians in “red” areas are reported to have been beheaded, garroted, burned alive, bludgeoned to death, or hacked to death with machetes. In many cases, the Guatemalan military specifically targeted children and the elderly.
Montt was an Evangelical Christian, and he used his religious zealotry to justify the massacres.
“They are communists and therefore atheists and therefore they are demons and therefore you can kill them,” was how one journalist explained Montt’s rationale.
In March 2013, Rios Montt was tried for the genocide of at least 1,771 members of the Maya Ixils began. He was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. Ten days later, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala overturned the verdict. On July 7, 2015, Ríos Montt was declared mentally unfit to stand trial for committing genocide.
Circassian Genocide
The Circassian genocide of the early 19th century claimed 1.5 million lives. The 19th century’s first genocide was carried out by Imperial Russian forces who eliminated more than 90 percent of the Circassian people.
The Circassians had lived in the North Caucasus region in central Russia for thousands of years. During the Russo-Circassian war, the Russian Empire sought to push their border south into the Caucasus mountains. Russia wanted greater access to the Black Sea, and used genocidal tactics against the Circassians.
The Russians spoiled food and destroyed homes while they carried kidnappings, mass deportation, and summary executions. Historians believe that more than 1.5 million Circassian people were slaughtered as Russian forces swept south toward the Black Sea. Circassia was then annexed by Russia.
Most of the victims were Circassians, who are predominantly Muslims. The Imperial Russian Army impaled their victims and tore open the bellies of pregnant women to intimidate the Circassians and devastate their morale. Russian generals like Grigory Zass described the Circassians as “subhuman filth” and a “lowly race” to justify the slaughter] and their use as human test subjects in unethical scientific experiments. Russian soldiers were also permitted to rape Circassian women.
The defeated native Circassian population was largely decimated or expelled to the Ottoman Empire. Only those who accepted Russification and made agreements with Russian troops, were spared.
Circassian officials sought help from England in 1864 but were unsuccessful. That year, the Imperial Russian Army launched a campaign of mass deportation of Circassia’s surviving population. By 1867, a large portion of the Circassians were expelled. Many died from epidemics or starvation. Some were reportedly eaten by dogs after their death, while others died when their ships sank during storms.
The Russian Federation classifies the events in Circassia as a mass migration but not a genocide. May 21 is observed annually as the Circassian Day of Mourning in the Circassian diaspora which is primarily concentrated in Turkey and Jordan, with some 750,000 living in Russia’s North Caucasus Economic Region.
Prior to the genocide, more than 4 million Circassians lived in their homeland in the Caucasus. The Russian empire’s decision to launch genocide against Circassians was driven by anti-Muslim sentiments and by Tsarist Russia’s “messianic self-image” as the champion of Eastern Orthodoxy against non-Christian inhabitants in its territories. Russian Tsars viewed the Circassian tribes in the Caucasus as “primitive” humans to either be forcibly converted to Christianity or exterminated and expelled.
During the reign of Catherine II, the Russian army started entering Circassian soil and erecting forts, in an attempt at quick annexation. In 1764, Circassian prince Misost Bematiqwa started the Circassian resistance in Eastern Circassia.
In 1799, Russian general Fyodor Bursak organized several raids against the Western Circassians, and ordered his men to burn Circassian villages, including those loyal to the Russian Empire.
From 1802 to 1806, General Pavel Tsitsianov led campaigns against Circassian villages. He referred to the Circassians as “untrustworthy swine” to “show how insignificant they are compared to Russia.”
In 1805, a plague struck Kabardia and General Glazenap used the pandemic as an excuse to burn down 80 villages, terrorize the people into submission and to wreak vengeance upon the Kabardians.
In 1808, a Russian commission decided that in order to end Circassian resistance against the Russian Empire, the Circassians would need to be eliminated from their homeland. Russian troops destroyed villages while continuing a series of assassinations, kidnappings and the execution of whole families. The Russian military destroyed crops and livestock and killed Circassian civilian farmers.
In addition to carrying out brutal massacres of Circassian women and children, various cruel practices included collecting skulls and amputated body parts of Circassians.
In 1833, Colonel Grigory Zass was appointed a Russian commander. Zass received wide authority to act as he saw fit. He was a racist who considered Circassians to be inferior and believed the Circassians should be treated “just like wild animals”. Zass advocated ruthless military methods, including burning people alive, cutting off and showing heads, burning populated villages to the ground, spreading epidemics on purpose, and mass rape of children.
In March 1864, a surrounded Circassian army refused to surrender and committed mass suicide. Around the same time, a final battle took place in Qbaada in 1864 between the remaining Circassian army of 20,000 men and women, consisting of local villagers and militia and a Russian army of 100,000 men, consisting of Cossack and Russian horsemen, infantry and artillery. The Circassians were defeated, and after the battle, masses of Circassians were driven to Sochi, where thousands died as they awaited deportation.