The act of genocide is as old as humanity itself. Genocide as a crime, was only officially recognised with the 1948 convention on genocide, brought about by the efforts of Raphael Lemkin.
The 20th Century was particularly brutal and began with the campaign against the Herero, by German Colonialists in Namibia in 1908 in which 800,000 Herero tribesmen and women are said to have been killed. Following this came the three year-long campaign against Turkish Armenians by Mustafa Kemal’s Young Turks which saw the death of some 1.5 million people between the years of 1914 to 1918.
From 1932 to 1933 Stalin starved 7,000,000 during the Ukrainian Holodomar and across the other side of the world the victorious Japanese army butchered 300,000 vanquished Chinese soldiers in what is known as “the Rape of Nanking”.
In 1942 the Wannsee Conference convened to settle the question; what is to be the final solution to the ‘Jewish problem’. 6 million were slaughtered, with cold, Teutonic efficiency. By the time Raphael Lemkin’s plea had been heard, already 15.6 million people where dead through acts of genocide.
It should have ended there, with the global, unanimous ratification of the Genocide Convention, yet from 1975 to 1979 2 million Cambodians lost their lives in the killing-fields of the Khmer Rouge. Then, during the three years between 1992 and 1995, as the former Yugoslavia writhed in conflict, Serbian nationalists began a genocidal campaign against the Bosnian Muslims, killing some 200,000 and culminating in the massacre in Srebrenica in July 1995 – where, in a UN enclave, a supposed safe haven, the Vojska Republike Srpske, the infamous VRS lead by Ratko Mladic, massacred 8,000 Bosnian men.
Then in 1994, in the tiny central African country of Rwanda, a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus lost their lives at the hands of the Hutu majority. For 100 days, there was non stop slaughter that the rest of the world, save a few brave volunteer peace-keepers, did little to prevent.
In 2003, began the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, where the government- sponsored militia, the Arab Janjaweed, laid waste to the region and killed between 250,000 to 400,000 people, mostly from the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit ethnic groups. Although the mass-murder and widespread destruction of African villages that was seen in Darfur from 2003-2005 has come to an end, approximately 2.7 million people remain displaced, both in and outside Sudan’s boarders, too afraid to return to their homes.
Recently, Aegis has broadened the focus of its Darfur work to concentrate on prospects for peace and stability across the whole of Sudan. Recent clashes in South Sudan have caused serious concern that the shaky peace brought about by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) could collapse. The CPA ended 20 years of civil war between North and South Sudan, a conflict in which up to 2 million people died. If it were to fail now, the consequences would be disastrous.
