Many genocides, persecutions, and mass killings have been committed in Muslim-majority countries or by Islamic governments. In just the twentieth century, millions of people have been killed. Several historians and scholars such as Wolfgang G. Schwanitz and Benny Morris have described Islam and jihad as the causative factor in these killings. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
The Hamidian massacres [7] also called the Armenian massacres, were massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1890s. Estimated casualties ranged from 100,000 [8] to 300,000, [9] resulting in 50,000 orphaned children. [10] The massacres are named after Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who, in his efforts to maintain the imperial domain of the declining Ottoman Empire, reasserted pan-Islamism as a state ideology. [11] Although the massacres were aimed mainly at the Armenians, in some cases they turned into indiscriminate anti-Christian pogroms, including the Diyarbekir massacres, where, at least according to one contemporary source, up to 25,000 Assyrians were also killed. [12]
The Adana massacre ( Armenian: Ադանայի կոտորած, Turkish: Adana Katliamı) occurred in the Adana Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire in April 1909. A massacre of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims in the city of Adana amidst the Ottoman countercoup of 1909 expanded to a series of anti-Armenian pogroms throughout the province. [13] Around 20,000 to 25,000 people were killed in Adana and surrounding towns, mostly Armenians; [14] it was reported that about 1,300 Assyrians were also killed during the massacres. [15] Unlike the earlier Hamidian massacres, the events were not organized by the central government but instead instigated by local officials, intellectuals, and Islamic clerics, including Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) supporters in Adana. Professor of History Ronald Grigor Suny from the University of Michigan describes Adana as "more like an urban riot that degenerated into a pogrom rather than a state-initiated mass killing". [16]
The Armenian genocide [a] was the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was implemented primarily through the mass murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children.
Before World War I, Armenians occupied a somewhat protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians had occurred in the 1890s and 1909. The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses—especially during the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars—leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians would seek independence. During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory in 1914, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians. Ottoman leaders took isolated instances of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, though no such rebellion existed. Mass deportation was intended to permanently forestall the possibility of Armenian autonomy or independence.
On 24 April 1915, the Ottoman authorities arrested and deported hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders from Constantinople. At the orders of Talaat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million Armenians were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacres. In the Syrian Desert, the survivors were dispersed into concentration camps. In 1916, another wave of massacres was ordered, leaving about 200,000 deportees alive by the end of the year. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors continued through the Turkish War of Independence after World War I, carried out by Turkish nationalists.
This genocide put an end to more than two thousand years of Armenian civilization in eastern Anatolia. Together with the mass murder and expulsion of Assyrian/Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians, it enabled the creation of an ethnonationalist Turkish state, the Republic of Turkey. The Turkish government maintains that the deportation of Armenians was a legitimate action that cannot be described as genocide. As of 2023, [update] 34 countries have recognized the events as genocide, concurring with the academic consensus.
The Sayfo ( Syriac: ܣܲܝܦܵܐ, lit. 'sword'), also known as the Seyfo or the Assyrian genocide, was the mass slaughter and deportation of Assyrian/ Syriac Christians in southeastern Anatolia and Persia's Azerbaijan province by Ottoman forces and some Kurdish tribes during World War I.
The Assyrians were divided into mutually antagonistic churches, including the Syriac Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Chaldean Catholic Church. Before World War I, they lived in mountainous and remote areas of the Ottoman Empire, some of which were effectively stateless. The empire's nineteenth-century centralization efforts led to increased violence and danger for the Assyrians.
The Greek genocide [17] [18] [19] [20] [A 1] ( Greek: Γενοκτονία των Ελλήνων, romanized: Genoktonía ton Ellínon), which included the Pontic genocide, was the systematic killing of the Christian Ottoman Greek population of Anatolia which was carried out mainly during World War I and its aftermath (1914–1922) on the basis of their religion and ethnicity. [26] It was perpetrated by the government of the Ottoman Empire led by the Three Pashas and by the Government of the Grand National Assembly led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, [27] against the indigenous Greek population of the Empire. The genocide included massacres, forced deportations involving death marches through the Syrian Desert, [28] expulsions, summary executions, and the destruction of Eastern Orthodox cultural, historical, and religious monuments. [29] Several hundred thousand Ottoman Greeks died during this period. [30] Most of the refugees and survivors fled to Greece (adding over a quarter to the prior population of Greece). [31] Some, especially those in Eastern provinces, took refuge in the neighbouring Russian Empire.
By late 1922, most of the Greeks of Asia Minor had either fled or had been killed. [32] Those remaining were transferred to Greece under the terms of the later 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, which formalized the exodus and barred the return of the refugees. Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period, including Assyrians and Armenians, and some scholars and organizations have recognized these events as part of the same genocidal policy. [33] [20] [34] [19] [35]
The Allies of World War I condemned the Ottoman government–sponsored massacres. In 2007, the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution recognising the Ottoman campaign against its Christian minorities, including the Greeks, as genocide. [20] Some other organisations have also passed resolutions recognising the Ottoman campaign against these Christian minorities as genocide, as have the national legislatures of Greece, [36] [37] [18] Cyprus, [38] the United States, [39] [40] [41] [42] Sweden, [43] [44] Armenia, [45] the Netherlands, [46] [47] Germany, [48] [49] Austria [50] [51] and the Czech Republic. [52] [53] [54]
The Bangladesh genocide ( Bengali: একাত্তরের গণহত্যা, romanized: Ekāttorer Gôṇôhôtyā, lit. '71's genocide', Bengali: বাঙালি গণহত্যা, romanized: Bāṅāli Gôṇôhôtyā, lit. 'Bengali genocide') was the ethnic cleansing of Bengalis, especially Bengali Hindus, residing in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) during the Bangladesh Liberation War, perpetrated by the Pakistan Armed Forces and the Razakars. [55] It began on 25 March 1971, as Operation Searchlight was launched by West Pakistan (now Pakistan) to militarily subdue the Bengali population of East Pakistan; the Bengalis comprised the demographic majority and had been calling for independence from the Pakistani state. Seeking to curtail the Bengali self-determination movement, erstwhile Pakistani president Yahya Khan approved a large-scale military deployment, and in the nine-month-long conflict that ensued, Pakistani soldiers and local pro-Pakistan militias killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women in a systematic campaign of mass murder and genocidal sexual violence. [56] In their investigation of the genocide, the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists concluded that Pakistan's campaign involved the attempt to exterminate or forcibly remove a significant portion of the country's Hindu populace. [57]
The West Pakistani government, which had implemented discriminatory legislation in East Pakistan, [58] asserted that Hindus were behind the Mukti Bahini (Bengali resistance fighters) revolt and that resolving the local "Hindu problem" would end the conflict—Khan's government and the Pakistani elite thus regarded the crackdown as a strategic policy. [59] Genocidal rhetoric accompanied the campaign: Pakistani men believed that the sacrifice of Hindus was needed to fix the national malaise. [60] In the countryside, Pakistan Army moved through villages and specifically asked for places where Hindus lived before burning them down. [61] Hindus were identified by checking circumcision or by demanding the recitation of Muslim prayers. [62] This also resulted in the migration of around eight million East Pakistani refugees into India, 80-90% of whom were Hindus. [63]
Pakistan's imams declared Bengali Hindu women to be "war booty”; [64] [65] and Pakistani fatwa were issued legitimizing Bengali Hindu women as spoils of war. [65] [66] Women who were targeted often died in Pakistani captivity or committed suicide, while others fled to India. [67]
Pakistan's activities during the Bangladesh Liberation War served as a catalyst for India's military intervention in support of the Mukti Bahini, triggering the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. The conflict and the genocide formally ended on 16 December 1971, when the joint forces of Bangladesh and India received the Pakistani Instrument of Surrender. As a result of the conflict, approximately 10 million East Bengali refugees fled to Indian territory while up to 30 million people were internally displaced out of the 70 million total population of East Pakistan. There was also ethnic violence between the Bengali majority and the Bihari minority during the conflict; between 1,000 and 150,000 Biharis were killed in reprisal attacks by Bengali militias and mobs, as Bihari collaboration with the West Pakistani campaign had led to further anti-Bihari sentiment. Since Pakistan's defeat and Bangladesh's independence, the title " Stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh" has commonly been used to refer to the Bihari community, which was denied the right to hold Bangladeshi citizenship until 2008.
Allegations of a genocide in Bangladesh were rejected by most UN member states at the time and rarely appear in textbooks and academic sources on genocide studies. [68]
The Anfal campaign [b] was a counterinsurgency operation which was carried out by Ba'athist Iraq from February to September 1988 during the Iraqi–Kurdish conflict at the end of the Iran–Iraq War. The campaign targeted rural Kurds [69] because its purpose was to eliminate Kurdish rebel groups and Arabize strategic parts of the Kirkuk Governorate. [70] The Ba’athist regime committed atrocities on the local Kurdish population, mostly civilians. [71]
The Iraqi forces were led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, on the orders of President Saddam Hussein. The campaign's name was taken from the title of the eighth chapter of the Qur'an (al-ʾanfāl).
In 1993, Human Rights Watch released a report on the Anfal campaign based on documents captured by Kurdish rebels during the 1991 uprisings in Iraq; HRW described it as a genocide and estimated between 50,000 and 100,000 deaths. This characterization of the Anfal campaign was disputed by a 2007 Hague court ruling, which stated that the evidences from the documents were not sufficient to establish the charge of genocide.{{Efn|Sources on the 2007 Hague court ruling:
Anti-gay purges in Chechnya, a part of the Russian Federation, have included forced disappearances, secret abductions, imprisonment, torture and extrajudicial killing by authorities targeting persons based on their perceived sexual orientation, primarily gay men. At least 2 of the 100 people, whom authorities detained on suspicion of being gay or bisexual, have reportedly died after being held in what human rights groups and eyewitnesses have called concentration camps. [72]
These killings have been described as a genocide. [73]
Large-scale killings and civil unrest primarily targeting members and supposed sympathizers of the Communist Party (PKI) were carried out in Indonesia from 1965 to 1966. Other affected groups included alleged communist sympathisers, Gerwani women, trade unionists, [74] ethnic Javanese Abangan, [75] ethnic Chinese, atheists, so-called " unbelievers", and alleged leftists in general. According to the most widely published estimates at least 500,000 to 1.2 million people were killed, [76]: 3 [77] [78] [79] with some estimates going as high as two to three million. [80] [81] The atrocities, sometimes described as a genocide [82] [83] [76] or politicide, [84] [85] were instigated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Research and declassified documents demonstrate the Indonesian authorities received support from foreign countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom. [86] [87]: 157 [88] [89] [90] [91]
The East Timor genocide refers to the "pacification campaigns" of state terrorism which were waged by the Indonesian New Order government during the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor. The majority of sources consider the Indonesian killings in East Timor to constitute genocide, [92] [93] [94] while other scholars disagree on certain aspects of the definition. [95]
The Yazidi genocide was perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. [96] [97] [98] It was characterized by massacres, genocidal rape, and forced conversions to Islam. The Yazidi people, who are non- Arabs, are indigenous to Kurdistan and adhere to Yazidism, which is an Iranian religion derived from the Indo-Iranian tradition. Over a period of three years, Islamic State militants trafficked thousands of Yazidi women and girls and killed thousands of Yazidi men; [99] the United Nations reported that the Islamic State killed about 5,000 Yazidis [100] and trafficked about 10,800 Yazidi women and girls in a "forced conversion campaign" [101] [102] throughout Iraq. By 2015, upwards of 71% of the global Yazidi population was displaced by the genocide, with most Yazidi refugees having fled to Iraq's Kurdistan Region and Syria's Rojava. [103] [104] The persecution of Yazidis, along with other religious minorities, took place after the Islamic State's Northern Iraq offensive of June 2014. [105] [106]
Amidst numerous atrocities committed by the Islamic State, the Yazidi genocide attracted international attention and prompted the United States to establish CJTF–OIR, a large military coalition consisting of many Western countries and Turkey, Morocco, and Jordan. Additionally, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia made emergency airdrops to support Yazidi refugees who had become trapped in the Sinjar Mountains due to the Islamic State's Northern Iraq offensive of August 2014. During the Sinjar massacre, in which the Islamic State killed and abducted thousands of the trapped Yazidis, the United States and the United Kingdom began carrying out airstrikes on the advancing Islamic State militants, while the People's Defense Units and the Kurdistan Workers' Party jointly formed a humanitarian corridor to evacuate the rest of the Yazidi refugees from the Sinjar Mountains. [107]
In addition to the United Nations, several countries and organizations have designated the anti-Yazidi campaign of the Islamic State as a definite genocide. These include: the Council of Europe and the European Union, the United States, Canada, Armenia, and Iraq. [96] [97]
The persecution of Christians by the Islamic State involves the systematic mass murder [108] [109] [110] of Christian minorities, within the regions of Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya controlled by the Islamic terrorist group Islamic State. Persecution of Christian minorities climaxed following the Syrian civil war and later by its spillover. [111] [112]
According to US diplomat Alberto M. Fernandez, "While the majority of the victims of the conflict which is raging in Syria and Iraq have been Muslims, Christians have borne a heavy burden given their small numbers." [113]
On February 3, 2016, the European Union recognized the persecution of religious minorities, including Christians, by the Islamic State as genocide. [114] [115] [116] The vote was unanimous. The United States House of Representatives followed suit on March 15, 2016, declaring that these atrocities against minorities were genocide. [117] On April 20, 2016, the British Parliament unanimously voted to denounce the actions against minorities as genocide. [118]
The number of Armenian children under twelve years of age made orphans by the massacres of 1895 is estimated by the missionaries at 50.000.
The genocide was committed by two subsequent and chronologically, ideologically, and organically interrelated and interconnected dictatorial and chauvinist regimes: (1) the regime of the CUP, under the notorious triumvirate of the three pashas (Üç Paşalar), Talât, Enver, and Cemal, and (2) the rebel government at Samsun and Ankara, under the authority of the Grand National Assembly (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi) and Kemal. Although the process had begun before the Balkan Wars, the final and most decisive period started immediately after WWI and ended with the almost total destruction of the Pontic Greeks
The total number of Christians who fled to Greece was probably in the region of 1.2 million with the main wave occurring in 1922 before the signing of the convention. According to the official records of the Mixed Commission set up to monitor the movements, the "Greeks' who were transferred after 1923 numbered 189,916 and the number of Muslims expelled to Turkey was 355,635 [Ladas I932, 438–439; but using the same source Eddy 1931, 201 states that the post-1923 exchange involved 192,356 Greeks from Turkey and 354,647 Muslims from Greece].
As far as the other three groups are concerned, namely members of the Awami League, students and Hindus, only Hindus would seem to fall within the definition of ' a national, ethnical, racial or religious group '. There is overwhelming evidence that Hindus were slaughtered and their houses and villages destroyed simply because they were Hindus. The oft repeated phrase ' Hindus are enemies of the state ' as a justification for the killing does not gainsay the intent to commit genocide; rather does it confirm the intention. The Nazis regarded the Jews as enemies of the state and killed them as such. In our view there is a strong prima facie case that the crime of genocide was committed against the group comprising the Hindu population of East Bengal.
Over the next few months, at least 500,000 people were killed (the total may be as high as one million). The victims included members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), ethnic Chinese, trade unionists, teachers, activists, and artists.
The new telegrams confirm the US actively encouraged and facilitated genocide in Indonesia to pursue its own political interests in the region, while propagating an explanation of the killings it knew to be untrue.
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