Now Is Time To Recall
Genocides Overlooked
While we watch in real time as the world teeters on the brink of another war, we would be wise to recall the horrors that past wars brought, including those that may not have attracted the world’s attention for various reasons.
In particular, the Nazis slaughtered 6 million Jews but other historical prolonged acts of violence of monumental proportions have received less attention in recent history, like the British destruction of the Zulu Nation of Africa, the millions exterminated by Cambodia’s Pol Pot and the still, unknown number of Uyghurs imprisoned and tortured in China today.
The Jewish holocaust was a genocide of white people that spilled into much of Europe, and was part of a larger, worldwide conflagration while the Zulus, people of Cambodia and the Uyghurs are African and Asian, people of color, and their plights were not seen as related to larger geopolitical issues. Yet these three moments in history have had huge ramifications that may not be apparent to many.
Little is generally publicly known about the Zulus, other than longstanding stereotypes of wild, uncivilized and uneducated warriors. The unimagineable breath of the Cambodian genocide is generally understated or is locked away in the nation’s collective amnesia to forget the blunders of the Vietnam War. The extent of mass imprisonment of Uyghurs is at generally viewed as an internal problem of China that many countries would rather simply ignore, to the detriment of the Uyghurs.
Shaka kaSenzangakhona, also known as Shaka Zulu and Sigidi kaSenzangakhona, was the founder of the Zulu Kingdom and was king from 1816 to 1828. Known by some as the “black Napoleon,” he was one of the most influential monarchs of the Zulu people in southern Africa, responsible for re-organizing the military into a formidable force.
Shaka’s reign coincided with the start of the Mfecane/Difaqane (“Upheaval” or “Crushing”), a period of devastating warfare and chaos in southern Africa between 1815 and about 1840 that depopulated the region. At the time of his death, Shaka ruled over 250,000 people and led an army of more than 50,000 warriors. His 12-year reign as king resulted in a massive number of deaths, mostly due to the disruptions the Zulu caused in neighboring tribes. By the time of Shaka’s assassination in 1828, the Zulu kingdom was the greatest power in southern Africa, remaining a powerful force even against Britain’s modern army in 1879.
The Anglo-Zulu War was fought in 1879 between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom. The British eventually won the war, ending Zulu dominance of the region and splitting the dominant Zulu kingdom into numerous sects.
Surviving stereotypes of Shaka as a degenerate and pathological monster are largely the creation of Nathaniel Isaacs in his book, “Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa in 1836.” Other debunked, racist myths concern Shaka’s brutality of forcing his warriors to slog for miles barefoot while they covered 50 miles a day.
Pol Pot governed Cambodia as Prime Minister of a nation renamed as “Democratic Kampuchea” between 1976 and 1979, a period where 1.5 million to 2 million people were killed either as perceived government opponents, malnutrition and poor medical care. The genocide eliminated around a quarter of Cambodia’s population.
In 1959, Pol Pot helped form the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). By 1968, he launched war against the government of Norodom Sihanouk, who was a puppet king while the regime was still controlled by the French. Sihanouk was ousted in a 1970 coup and Lon Nol took control, with support of the U.S. military. In April 1970, North Vietnamese armies, in collaboration with the Viet Cong, invaded Cambodia to attack Lon Nol’s forces, leading South Vietnam and the United States to send troops to bolster Lon Nol. During this period, the U.S. dropped three times as many bombs on Cambodia as they had on Japan during World War II. The bombs targeted Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge encampments, but primarily affected civilians, fueling recruitment to the Khmer Rouge.
Aided by the Việt Cộng militia and North Vietnamese troops, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge forces advanced and controlled all of Cambodia by 1975.
Pol Pot transformed Cambodia into a one-party state and sought unsuccessfully to create a completely agrarian socialist society, patterned after the “Great Leap Forward” an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party from 1958 to 1962. The Great Leap ended in abject failure with millions dying of starvation in China.
In Cambodia, the Pol Pot government forcibly relocated the urban population to the countryside to work on collective farms, money was abolished and all citizens were made to wear the same black clothing. The result was mass starvation and worse.
The Khmer Rouge had long mistrusted Phnom Penh’s population, considering as traitors the many peasant refugees who had fled the Khmer Rouge’s advance. Shortly after taking the city, the Khmer Rouge announced that its inhabitants had to evacuate to escape a forthcoming U.S. bombing raid; the group falsely claimed that the population would be allowed to return after three days.
The evacuation entailed moving more than 2.5 million people out of the city with very little preparation including between 15,000 and 20,000 people who were removed from the city’s hospitals and forced to march. The forced march took place in the hottest month of the year and an estimated 20,000 people died along the route.
Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge had a policy of state atheism. Buddhist monks were viewed as social parasites and designated a “special class.” The Tuol Sleng School, known as S-21, housed those regarded as enemies of the government who were tortured and killed. Between 15,000 and 20,000 people were killed at S-21 during the Khmer Rouge period.
The government invented claims of assassination attempts against its leading members to justify the internal crack-down and party members were tortured after being accused of being spies for either the CIA, the Soviet KGB, or the Vietnamese.
In rural areas, most of the killings were done by young cadres who were enforcing what they believed to be the government’s will. Peasant cadres tortured and killed those they disliked and many cadres ate the livers of their victims and tore unborn fetuses from their mothers for use as kun krak talismans.
Purges in the Pol Pot government generated growing discontent and by 1978 Cambodian soldiers were rebelling in the east, with support from the newly unified Vietnam which invaded Cambodia in December 1978, toppling Pol Pot and installing a rival Marxist–Leninist government in 1979.
An estimated 300,000 Cambodians starved to death between 1979 and 1980, largely as a result of the after-effects of Khmer Rouge policies.
The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group originating from the general region of Central and East Asia. The Uyghurs are recognized as native to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in Northwest China and are one of China’s 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities.
The Uyghurs gradually started to become Islamized in the 10th century and most Uyghurs identified as Muslims by the 16th century. Islam has since played an important role in Uyghur culture and identity while gaining increasing wrath of the Chinese government.
Since 2014, the Chinese government has subjected Uyghurs in Xinjiang to widespread abuses that include forced labor, severe ill-treatment, forced sterilization, forced contraception and forced abortion.
Scholars estimate that at least one million Uyghurs have been arbitrarily detained in internment camps since 2017 while the government claims the camps reeducate Uyghurs to ensure adherence to Chinese Communist Party ideology. It is the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II, while thousands of mosques have been destroyed or damaged, and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools. The Chinese government publicly denies that it has committed human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
In January 2020, President Ghulam Osman Yaghma of the East Turkistan Government-in-Exile wrote that “the world is silently witnessing another Holocaust like genocide in East Turkistan….as the President of East Turkistan Government-in-Exile, on behalf of East Turkistan and its people, we again call on the international community including world governments to acknowledge and recognize China’s brutal Holocaust like the oppression of East Turkistan’s people as a genocide.”
The United States was the first country to declare the human rights abuses a genocide, announcing its finding on Jan. 19, 2021, in the final act of the Trump administration and a day before the inauguration of President Biden. Lawmakers in a number of countries have passed non-binding motions describing China’s actions as genocide, including the House of Commons of Canada, the Dutch parliament, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, the Seimas of Lithuania and the French National Assembly.
Several African countries, including Algeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Nigeria, and Somalia, signed a July 2019 letter that publicly praised China’s human rights record and dismissed reported abuses in Xinjiang.
Many countries in the Middle East signed a UN document defending China’s human rights record while Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and the Philippines have issued statements of support for China’s policies.