The Cambodian Genocide continues to play a role in Cambodia today. Although Cambodia has made the transition back to a functionary democracy since its constitution was ratified in as part of the UNTAC operation, the country still has difficulty addressing the crimes of its past. In , the Cambodian government approached the United Nations for assistance in prosecuting senior members of the Khmer Rouge. After the Vietnamese had taken power in , many leaders had been tried in absentia, but were never formally punished.
The courts in Cambodia, known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, attempted to identify the senior members of the regime who were most complicit with the crimes occurring. Since the court was convened, it has indicted five members of the Khmer Rouge. Three of them have been convicted and are currently serving life sentences, one died during trial, and the fifth was deemed unfit for trial and is pending further evaluation.
The Khmer Rouge trials have been a source of controversy in Cambodia because of their cost and perceived ineffectiveness. In addition to the trials, the courts are also tasked with providing victim support and documenting the crimes. There is no deadline for the court to cease operating. Many of the locations connected with the genocide are now popular tourist sites. The Tuol-Sleng museum is housed in the former S prison, the scene of many executions.
The museum itself was created by the Vietnamese and used to display the horrific crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge. It is left in a state as the Vietnamese found it. The killing fields, popularized by major motion pictures, are also popular tourist sites in Cambodia.
Signs often mark the burial places of hundreds located in mass graves. General William Westmoreland, the commander of U. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. When the Vietnamese invaded in , they were first seen as liberators from the genocidal regime of Pol Pot. The economy had failed under Pol Pot, and all professionals, engineers, technicians, and planners who could potentially reorganize Cambodia had been killed in the genocide. Instead, the US and UK offered financial and military support to the Khmer Rouge forces in exile, who had sworn opposition to Vietnam and communism.
The Vietnamese, originally seen as liberators, soon began to be viewed as unwelcome occupiers, not only because of their lengthy ten-year stay in Cambodia, but also because of the hundreds of years of animosity between the two countries.
In the early s, mass graves were uncovered throughout Cambodia. They held hundreds of skeletal remains from Khmer Rouge execution grounds, known as killing fields. Survivors suffered high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder, but their trauma often went undiagnosed and almost always went untreated.
Bringing the perpetrators to justice has proven to be a difficult task. Many suspected perpetrators were killed in the military struggle with Vietnam or eliminated as internal threats to the Khmer Rouge itself.
He died of natural causes in The last members of the Khmer Rouge were officially disbanded in Several government officials are former Khmer Rouge members and there have been considerable efforts to protect them, including denying access to witnesses because of their position.
Chea appealed the verdict but the sentence was upheld in Three are in English and two in Khmer with English subtitles. The Khmer Rouge ruled a totalitarian state in which citizens had essentially no rights — they abolished civil and political rights, private property, money, religious practices, minority languages, and foreign clothing.
Citizens could be detained for the slightest offenses, and the government set up vast prisons where people were held, tortured, and executed. Of the roughly 17, men, women, and children who were brought to S there were only about a dozen survivors. The Khmer Rouge based their policies on the idea that citizens of Cambodia had become corrupted by outside influences, especially Vietnam and the capitalist West.
They forced citizens into what they called reeducation schools, which were essentially places of state propaganda. The regime forced families to live communally with other people, in order to destroy the family structure. In addition, anyone who was believed to be an intellectual was killed: doctors, lawyers, teachers, even people who wore glasses or knew a foreign language became targets.
Specially targeted were the inhabitants of the areas close to the Vietnamese border. In total, by the end of the conflict on 31 March , approximately 50, — 65, Herero and 10, Nama had been murdered by the German ruling forces. Soldiers from the Young Turk Ottoman Army escorting thousands of Armenians on lethal marches through the empire. A photograph of Takvor and Yeghisapet Ashjian and their daughters Eugenie, Hamaspur and Mariam, an Armenian family, all of whom were killed in during the Armenian Genocide.
A photograph of an unknown Armenian girl from Shamakhi a city in modern-day Azerbaijan in the nineteenth century, prior to the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian Genocide was the mass murder of at least , and up to 1. The Armenians were a primarily Christian ethnic group who had lived in Eastern Anatolia modern day Eastern Turkey for centuries.
At the turn of the twentieth century, approximately two million Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, primarily in rural areas although there were also small communities in large urban areas such as Constantinople. As the First World War loomed, the Ottoman Empire was in a state of decline and as a result had become increasingly polarised.
This led to increase in anti-Christian sentiment and amplified the nationalist desire of the Ottoman leaders to create an ethnically homogenous community.
It was hoped that this community would then strengthen the empire through shared beliefs and, as a result, ensure its survival. As the majority of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire were Muslim, the Christian Armenians were increasingly seen as outsiders and a threat to the harmony of the empire.
During the First World War, the Ottoman Empire joined forces with Germany and Austria-Hungary but suffered several significant defeats and quickly retreated. To conceal their failure from the public, the Ottoman leaders openly blamed their defeat on Armenians in the region and stated that they had betrayed their empire by fighting for and helping the enemy forces. This deliberate falsehood acted as a catalyst and justification for the genocide of the Armenian people, whereby the CUP government used the emergency wartime conditions to create a more ethnically homogenous community.
As a result of this, Armenian soldiers were catagorised as a direct threat to the Ottoman war effort, removed from the Ottoman army, and massacred. The intellectual elite of Armenian society concentrated in areas such as Constantinople were also rounded up, imprisoned and later murdered. The remaining Armenians, primarily women, the elderly and children, were relocated from strategically important areas and forcibly marched to the Deir ez-Zor by Ottoman forces and local collaborators.
As a result of these conditions, thousands died. Young girls and women were also occasionally spared for forced labour as domestic servants, to become wives in Muslim households or to be used as sex slaves. Those who survived the death marches were imprisoned in camps, such as at Deir ez-Zor or Ras al-Ayn, where conditions were extremely poor and many thousands died of disease and malnutrition. Between March and October , there was another wave of executions, and as many as , more people were murdered.
While recognising that mass deportations of Armenians took place during the First World War, Turkey continues to insist that these were necessary security measures as a result of Armenian treachery and violence and do not amount to state-sponsored genocide or mass extermination. The Khmer Rouge were led by Pol Pot and held radical totalitarian beliefs. They wanted to create a classless, rural, agricultural society where personal property, currency, religion and individuality did not exist.
The Khmer Rouge began to implement this vision immediately after taking power on 17 April People associated in any significant way with the previous government, religion, or education, as well as members of ethnic cleansing , were targeted for persecution, imprisonment, torture and murder.
The Khmer Rouge created prisons, which were de facto execution centres. Some Cambodians were also exploited as forced labourers by the regime and died as a result of over-work and malnutrition. Later, as the economic situation worsened and paranoia increased, the Khmer Rouge also began to execute members of its own party for failing to achieve the unrealistic agricultural aims or for being supposed foreign spies.
Following the genocide Cambodia continued to be politically unstable. Although there was significant evidence of the atrocities, the Cold War continued to dominate international concerns, and many Western countries were openly hostile to the new Vietnamese installed communist government. The Genocide Memorial in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, which commemorates the Rwandan genocide.
The remains of over , people are buried here. The Genocide against the Tutsi refers to the mass murder of up to one million people, primarily Tutsi , between 7 April and 15 July The genocide was carried out by extremist Hutu army officers using military forces in Rwanda, with widespread collaboration and assistance from civilians, the local police, and the institutions of government.
Historically, the Tutsi formed the ruling class in Rwanda, with a Tutsi King ruling within a feudal system. In , the German forces agreed an alliance with the Rwandan Tutsi King, and ruled the country through the Tutsi monarchy. Following the First World War, under a League of Nations mandate, Rwanda came under control of Belgium, who continued to support the monarchy and maintain Tutsi rule. In the early s, Belgium forces introduced compulsory identification cards, which further segregated the population according to three ethnicities: Tutsi, Hutu and Twa.
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