Statistics on Genocide (that I wish didn't exist)

by Michelle

Published October 04, 2008 @ 03:29AM PT

Over 1,000,000

6,000,000 and 5,000,000.

1,700,000.

200,000.

800,000.

Numbers, on paper, are abstractions.

But when talking about genocide, numbers are a bit more foreboding.

Over 1,000,000 Armenians.

6,000,000 Jews and 5,000,000 Roma and other "undesirables" in the Holocaust.

1,700,000 Cambodians.

200,000 Muslim Bosnians.

800,000 Rwandans.

When talking about genocide, numbers are death tolls.

Not only are numbers death tolls, but each figure represents thousands upon thousands of individual lives lost at the hands others.

1.5 Million

As many as 1.5 million Christian Armenians, out of a pre-WWI population of 1.8 million, were killed by the Ottoman Empire in present-day Turkey between 1915 and 1918.

11Million

Nearly 6 million Jews and 5 million "undesirables" were killed between 1933 and 1945 in Nazi Germany, in pursuit of Hilter's "Final Solution." Before the Nazis seized power in 1933, Europe's Jewish population was about 9.5 million, representing 60% of the world's total Jewish population. In 1950, Europe's Jewish population was only 3.5 million.

1.7 Million

During the Cambodian genocide between 1975 and 1979, approximately 1.7 million-21% of the country's total population-lost their lives at the hands of Pol Pot's extremist Khmer Rouge government.

200,000 and 8,000

Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered an estimated 200,000 Bosnian Muslims in pursuit of a "Greater Serbia" during civil war between 1992 and 1995. In one particularly shocking incident, over 8,000 Muslim men and boys were rounded-up killed execution-style by the Serbian army in Srebrenica in July 1995.

800,000

Beginning in April 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and politically-moderate Hutus were killed, largely by machetes-in a matter of a mere 100 days. Though the numbers will forever remain disputed-as is the case with all genocides-many estimates indicate as much as three-quarters of the Tutsi population in Rwanda was eliminated.

The figures are indeed stark and alarming-all the more so if one reads into them, beyond their surface representation of death tolls. Each number represents the life of one taken by another. Each number represents years of persecution, the total loss of personal security, followed by death in an abhorrently violent fashion. Each number represents community members turning against one another, witnesses to the most extreme of human behavior, families torn apart, entire populations nearly extinct, and entire nations nearly destroyed.

Lastly, the most disappointing figures:

3 Million

The Genocide Convention took effect in 1951, after the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust resulted in a consensus that genocide is a crime of concern to the entire international community. Since then, the world watched as nearly 3 million civilians were slaughtered in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

And the world is still watching-

300,000

At least 300,000 people in Darfur have been killed so far by the Sudanese government and its proxy janjaweed militias, and another 2.5 million have been displaced. (Interestingly, the government in Khartoum claims that only 10,000 have died.)

And the number is growing.