Radovan Karadzic was a war criminal who was able to escape prosecution for his war crimes during the genocide in Bosnia. In a particularly strange twist, Karadzic assumed the name Dragan Dabic and rose in the ranks of the alternative healing community in Belgrade. [more inside]
posted by reenum on Dec 9, 2009 - 20 comments

Doubt [print version] is an article by Andrew Rice about Leopold Munyakazi, a professor of French at Goucher College, who has been accused by the Rwandan government of being a genocidaire. His defenders, including the late Alison Des Forges, claim that the Hutu Munyakazi, who's married to a Tutsi, is being targeted by Paul Kagame's administration because he's a dissenter who's challenged the official account of the genocide. Into this complicated affair steps documentarian Charlie Ebersol who wants to profile Munyakazi for his NBC primetime news show Wanted, which has been received with considerable opprobrium and which may already have been canceled.
posted by Kattullus on Aug 3, 2009 - 9 comments

Forgive and Forget? "Rwanda's warring population has a lot to account for, and a lot to reconcile. Can science point the way to understanding?"
posted by homunculus on Jul 20, 2009 - 5 comments

Intended Consequences. It is estimated that 20,000 children were born as the result of rape during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that claimed the lives of over 800,000 Tutsis. Many of these women also contracted HIV/AIDS as a result. Not only do the mothers have to live with memories of this incredibly horrible event, but they along with their children are shunned by other Tutsi survivors. [more inside]
posted by itchylick on Apr 20, 2009 - 22 comments

The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is a directory of historic sites that interpret themes related to ethical, political, and social issues worldwide.
posted by Miko on Apr 17, 2009 - 5 comments

BABIES’ skulls dashed against rocks; attempts to twist off the heads of toddlers. Girls, their mothers and grandmothers (and sometimes male relatives too) raped at knife- or gunpoint, the weapons then used to inflict mutilation. Women hauled off to camps or just tied to trees and gang-raped. Thousands of children, some as young as nine, snatched or recruited by armed gangs (or regular forces) and made into drug-crazed killers, the girls among them often serially abused or taken by commanders as “wives”. Such are the horrors reported from some recent conflict zones... [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Feb 21, 2009 - 41 comments

"The Lord’s Resistance Army is now on the loose, moving from village to village, seemingly unhindered, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say the fighters have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army." [more inside]
posted by IvoShandor on Feb 6, 2009 - 52 comments

Magomed Yevloyev, who blogged human rights abuses committed by police in Russia's volatile Ingushetia region, was shot in the temple while in police custody today. The site, ingushetiya.ru (English version), reported the brutal anti-insurgent "Dirty War" tacticts committed by police against Ingushetia's civilian population.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot on Aug 31, 2008 - 17 comments

Women and the Holocaust is a site about women's experiences in the Holocaust. It has poetry, testimonials, personal reflections, tributes, essays and more.
posted by Kattullus on Aug 5, 2008 - 10 comments

China is making a concerted effort to colonize Africa with dire consequences for Africans. In protest to China's involvement in Darfur's genocide, Steven Spielberg has resigned as Artistic Director of the Beijing Olympics.
posted by MetaMan on Jul 19, 2008 - 98 comments

Canada has apologised for forcing more than 100,000 aboriginal children to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools aimed at assimilating them. Controversial former Minister Kevin Annett has written two books on the subject of residential school abuse in Canada [Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust and Love and Death in the Valley]. Unrepentant - Kevin Annett and Canada's Genocide reveals Canada’s darkest secret - that the Canadian residential school system, the Christian churches along with state authorities implemented a policy of genocide against Canada's native population. Related: Deliver Us From Evil
posted by chuckdarwin on Jun 29, 2008 - 28 comments

The Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence is a scholarly database of case studies focusing on massacres and genocides of the 20th century, both transnational and national. It also includes theoretical papers. [more inside]
posted by elgilito on Apr 28, 2008 - 6 comments

The Genocide Olympics. The human rights group Dream for Darfur is trying to use the Olympics to pressure China to change its policies on Sudan and the genocide in Darfur. [more inside]
posted by homunculus on Mar 30, 2008 - 13 comments

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor. The Holodomor was the starvation of millions of Ukranians at the hands of the Soviets. The Ukranian government is using this year to push for greater recognition for the genocide. Ukranian communities in Australia, Canada and all over the globe are holding events all year in the lead up to this years Holodomor day on November 25.
posted by sien on Mar 9, 2008 - 14 comments

Harvard Professor Samantha Power's book A Problem from Hell is on syllabi across the country, and is the bible of humanitarian hawks who decry our failure to intervene in the Rwandan or Sudanese genocides. As one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors, she's getting a lot of press for her positions: pro-intervention, obviously, critical of Israel, pro-UN, pro-internationalism, and, perhaps unsurprisingly given her husband's role in ignoring the Rwandan genocide, anti-Clinton.
posted by anotherpanacea on Mar 7, 2008 - 85 comments

"By the time I cut his balls off," one settler boasted, "he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket." The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked "provided they were black".
posted by nasreddin on Jan 11, 2008 - 74 comments

Genocide: An inconvenient truth "The Armenian genocide bill has been attacked by both the right and the left -- and it may make matters worse. But it's necessary." [Cookie.]
posted by homunculus on Oct 16, 2007 - 56 comments

...These findings come from a poll released today by ORB, the British polling agency that has been tracking public opinion in Iraq since 2005. In conjunction with their Iraqi fieldwork agency a representative sample of 1,499 adults aged 18+ answered the following question: How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)?

Answer: 1,220,580
Tables pdf
FinalDeadNumbersWEIGHTED.xls
See also Poll: Civilian toll in Iraq may top 1M
See also None Dare Call It Genocide
posted by y2karl on Sep 17, 2007 - 131 comments

"So much for “never again.” So the problem has obviously not disappeared."
Raul Hilberg (1926-2007, NYT obit) explains why he added a chapter on Rwanda to the last edition of The destruction of the European Jews, a work that took him a lifetime and 3 editions to complete, meeting with indifference, then with criticism from those who didn't share his (at the beginning) functionalist view of the Holocaust. Hilberg became involved in other controversies about the Holocaust, but "The Destruction..." remains the "the closest of any work in print to being the Summa of Holocaust studies" (Christopher Browning). Also: Hilberg intervied by Claude Lanzmann in "Shoah" (YT) (previously).
posted by elgilito on Aug 7, 2007 - 41 comments

The Man of the Hole
posted by stbalbach on Jul 23, 2007 - 24 comments

Musekeweya ("new dawn") is a phenomenally popular radio drama broadcast out of Kigali, Rwanda. The soap, funded by Dutch NGO La Benevolencija, follows the story of two star-crossed lovers who come from opposing villages involved in an increasingly violent struggle. Thought Rwandan law makes it difficult to discuss the genocide in the media, the show aims to open a dialog using the fictional villages of Bumanzi and Muhumuro as a proxy for Hutus and Tutsis. A soap opera may seem like an unlikely vehicle to tackle a topic of such national importance, but it's actually not uncommon. And, certainly, Rwanda is a country that knows all too well about the power of radio
posted by meta_eli on Jul 8, 2007 - 8 comments

Whatever one's opinion of its possible limitations, the 2006 Iraq mortality survey produced epidemiological evidence that coalition forces have failed to protect Iraqi civilians... If, for the sake of argument, the study is wrong and the number of Iraqi deaths is less than half the infamous figure, is it acceptable that "only" 300,000 have died? Last November, with no explanation, the Iraqi Ministry of Health suddenly began citing 150,000 dead, five times its previous estimate. Is that amount of death acceptable? In January, the United Nations reported that more than 34,000 Iraqis were killed violently in the last year alone. Is that acceptable?

Regarding The Number, the result of what one of the study's authors calls an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide... [more within]
posted by y2karl on Mar 7, 2007 - 44 comments

Hrant Dink, Armenian Newspaper Editor, Murdered in Istanbul an ethnic Armenian newspaper editor that was sentenced to 6 months in jail for "insulting Turkishness" by discussing the Armenian Genocide in Turkey was shot dead while leaving his newspaper office today.
posted by k8t on Jan 19, 2007 - 44 comments

What can two nerds from Chicago do about the crisis in Darfur? Donor fatigue means the marginal value of each life has effectively dropped to zero. Kill 5 people, kill 500, kill 500,000 - it makes no difference - each added fatality has absolutely no policy impact and won’t change the situation one iota. It’s not that as many as 500,000 (essentially an entire Seattle) have died in Darfur. The horrific thing is that they could kill another 500,000 and nobody will bat an eyelash.
posted by notsnot on Dec 5, 2006 - 95 comments

The largely forgotten holocaust of the Ukrainian people began when Stalin imposed collectivism upon the farms, sealing state borders & refusing any seed grain until ficticious and unattainable production goals were met. The Ukrainian upper class were executed, the peasantry left to starve to death. In all, seven million people died, one out of every four citizens. At this Ukranian art site, a collection of stamps commemorating the event & a gallery of "genocide art" continue to speak for the dead.
posted by jonson on Oct 22, 2006 - 55 comments

Meet our new Special Envoy to Darfur, where genocide is taking place-- Andrew Natsios--he did a heckuva job at the Big Dig in Boston, and in misunderestimating the costs of Iraq, and --while head of USAid--at refusing funding AIDS drugs in Africa because many Africans 'don't know what Western time is.
posted by amberglow on Sep 19, 2006 - 65 comments

The Ghetto Diary of Eli Lesky, The Fifth Horseman, the Buchewald Series, artwork by Joseph Bau; Paintings of the Hmong Migration; Visualizing Otherness - Nazi and other racist propaganda - all this and much, much more from the University of Minnesota's The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
posted by madamjujujive on Jul 27, 2006 - 18 comments

Is the Bush administration really serious about NATO and UN protection to stop the Darfur genocide? "Is it only weak and incompetent, or is it two-faced?"

What can U.S. citizens do to help end this genocide? For starters, take to the streets: you can register for an April 30th demonstration on the Golden Gate Bridge & at the Presidio, or in Washington, DC. You can also ask your Rep. to sponsor House Resolution 723, a measure that urges the President to help deploy a NATO bridging force to the Darfur region.
posted by n_s_1 on Apr 26, 2006 - 56 comments

Ripples of Genocide. Journey through Eastern Congo with Angelina Jolie, commentary by John Prendergast, photos by Ed Parsons and Laura Engelbrecht.
posted by semmi on Apr 22, 2006 - 13 comments

The sad aftermath of the Rwanda genocide.
posted by semmi on Feb 17, 2006 - 4 comments

Let's Play Genocide MTV's Darfur Digital Activist online game contest has posted the four finalist teams' prototypes for voting. In Fetching Water, "you are a Darfurian trying to to make it the well to get water without becoming a victim of the Janjaweed." When do social impact games cross the line from raising awareness into trivializing?
posted by Cassford on Feb 3, 2006 - 15 comments

Genocide in Slow Motion. "[For every Genocide this century], we have wrung our hands afterward and offered the lame excuse that it all happened too fast, or that we didn't fully comprehend the carnage when it was still under way. And now the same tragedy is unfolding in Darfur, but this time we don't even have any sort of excuse. In Darfur genocide is taking place in slow motion, and there is vast documentary proof of the atrocities."
posted by dgaicun on Jan 20, 2006 - 25 comments

The conference at Wannsee occurred on January 20, 1942.
The Holocaust had been going on for at least one year; the camp at Dachau had been in operation for several years. The Final Solution was already underway. At issue at Wannsee, in the relaxed and distinctively upper middle-class atmosphere of that SS guest-house for the fifteen highly placed Nazis was the best strategy for genocide. Less than one year after the conference a little girl who had been hiding in Holland is sent to the Bergen camp in northern Germany. She spends more than six years looking for four perfect pebbles
posted by Smedleyman on Jan 18, 2006 - 16 comments

Goodnight, mr. Wiesenthal
posted by matteo on Sep 20, 2005 - 68 comments

This week, the New Republic's &c. blog is providing a primer on the Darfur conflict. Today's post: why the genocide started, how it is being carried out, and whether it is getting worse. Registration is required, but you can find a userid and password here.
posted by hellx on Jul 18, 2005 - 4 comments

With "freedom" as a goal of US policy, what are the real benefits of democracy? In the developing world, no democracy has ever had a famine as Nobel-winner Amartya Sen demonstrated, and citizens of democratic nations have equivalent economies, longer lifespans and better educations than autocracies. Unfortunately, it appears that democracies do go to war with each other (although less, statistically). On the other hand, high levels of political freedom decrease terrorism and prevent genocides. Obviously, democracies also do bad things, but is there a better form of government?
posted by blahblahblah on May 30, 2005 - 29 comments

Armenian Genocide Plagues Ankara 90 Years On This weekend, Armenians commemorated the 90th anniversary of the genocide of 1915. But Turkey has yet to recognize the crime -- the first genocide of the 20th century. By refusing to use the word "genocide," Turkey could complicate its efforts to join the European Union.
posted by Postroad on May 18, 2005 - 11 comments

Eleven years ago this month a genocide of horrific proportions nearly destroyed a country. We must never forget.
posted by ScaryShrink on Apr 18, 2005 - 15 comments

"Between 1915 and 1918 the Ottoman Empire, ruled by Muslim Turks, carried out a policy to eliminate its Christian Armenian minority. This genocide was preceded by a series of massacres in 1894-1896 and in 1909, and was followed by another series of massacres beginning in 1920. By 1922 Armenians had been eradicated from their historic homeland." Since the early 1920s, successive Turkish governments have maintained an ostentatious silence on the subject, broken only to issue denials that the genocide ever occurred, and denunciations of those who assert that it did. In 1990, for example, the Turkish ambassador to the U.S. dismissed the holocaust as resulting from "a tragic civil war initiated by Armenian nationalists."

This Sunday in NYC, thousands will gather to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the genocide and protest the Turkish denials.
posted by jenleigh on Apr 14, 2005 - 74 comments

There was no honour to be had in Rwanda.
11 years ago this week, the Rwandan Genocide began and didn't end until almost a million Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, were dead - killed by their own countrymen in the span of 100 days.

Romeo Dallaire was the Force Commander of the UN troops in Rwanda at the time. Increasing unrest and killings along with intelligence obtained from an informant led him to conclude that the genocide was coming and that it could be stopped if action was taken quickly and decisively enough. He requested 2000 additional troops and the authority to plan and execute an operation to halt the genocide before it began.

The UN Security Council denied both requests, and reduced the UN force in Rwanda to 260 troops. One million Rwandans died. Romeo Dallaire and 260 Canadian, Ghanian, and Dutch soldiers are directly credited with saving over 20,000 Tutsis that would have died.

Dallaire's career as a soldier is over. But he knows that if the effort is not made, another genocide like Rwanda will happen. It may already be too late to stop the next one.
posted by Dipsomaniac on Apr 12, 2005 - 41 comments

Which companies and nations are propping up the Khartoum regime? Sudan - News and Analysis by Eric Reeves
posted by semmi on Feb 23, 2005 - 4 comments

Congratulations to the winner of this year's Sundance World Cinema Documentary Audience Award - The story of the Canadian general who, under the auspices of the United Nations, could only watch helplessly as the Rwandan genocide occured.
posted by Caffine_Fiend on Feb 1, 2005 - 18 comments

Vice President Cheney declares the no-wmd report justifies war. So what exactly were they going to do to us that was dangerous, think about the act? In related news, widespread genocide is a potential thought of an african government, let's get em?
posted by omidius on Oct 7, 2004 - 98 comments

Powell declares a genocide in Darfour , marking a turnaround in America's appraisal of the situation in Sudan. Will something finally be done? And is Powell off the ranch on this, or this actually the policy of the Bush administration? Previously discussed in a number of threads.
posted by hank_14 on Sep 9, 2004 - 23 comments

Dying in Darfur. Can the ethnic cleansing in Sudan be stopped?
posted by homunculus on Aug 24, 2004 - 80 comments

The situation in Sudan is grim. About a million people have been displaced and the threat of mass starvation is real. The Sudanese government said today that it would grant permits to aid workers to enter Darfur. One group is the International Committee of Red Cross. You can find donation information on their website.
posted by john on May 24, 2004 - 11 comments

Becoming Evil : Boston WTKK-FM radio's Jay Severin advocates genocide of American-Muslims - this is the advocacy of domestic terrorism. And not the mere targeting of civilians but the murder of over three million men, women, and children. Why shouldn't Jay Severin be arrested and charged, under the Patriot Act, with aiding and abetting US domestic terrorist groups which advocate such violence? [Scroll down towards the bottom of the Globe story for a transcript of the quote in context.]
James Waller has studied the process by which individuals and society come to commit mass atrocities , and says of his theories: "...[the] explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil." Hesiod Lists some of WTTK's advertisers : Purina, Hilton Resorts, 99 Restaurant and Pub, A.T. & T. Wireless. Still, Orcinus is my favorite "rise of extremist terrorist hate speech in America" news source. Germany has laws against such hate speech - which it believes to be so dangerous as to override free speech considerations - But we've got the USA PATRIOT Act, right?
posted by troutfishing on Apr 27, 2004 - 104 comments

"But maybe it was the right policy after all."
on the 10th aniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, Jay Bryant suggests that perhaps Clinton's policy of non-intervention was the "right policy after all". This comes a few days after another fellow right wing columnist suggests from her suburban home in south carolina that we should "nuke the Sunni Triangle" (and any innoncent who happens to live there) - apparently her entire family agrees. Do they utterly lack sensitivity and should be ignored? or are these valid opinions worth publishing?
posted by specialk420 on Apr 7, 2004 - 34 comments

Ghosts of Rwanda
10 years later, FRONTLINE delivers one of the most powerful episodes in their excellent series of reports. Also covered in The Economist last week, and a couple years ago in The Atlantic in a sublime article: "Bystanders to Genocide". When you first heard about the tragedy did you wish you could have done something, if you had only known more?
posted by specialk420 on Apr 1, 2004 - 40 comments

The Genocidal Moon

"There will be a purge on God’s orders, and evil will be eliminated like shadows," the Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myong Moon, the owner and primary funder of money-losing right-wing Washington Times, said last week. (The comments were posted online by Rev. Moon’s webmaster and picked up by blogger John Gorenfeld.) "Gays will be eliminated, the 3 Israels will unite. If not then they will be burned. We do not know what kind of world God will bring but this is what happens. It will be greater than the communist purge but at God’s orders."

How should the media be responding to this call for genocide? Have any major media outlets been covering this story? Why not?
posted by nofundy on Jan 13, 2004 - 26 comments