“Genocide remains the most pressing human rights question of the 21st century.”
- An Ordinary Man
To date, an estimated 2000 people have already died as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as Putin, by some accounts, hopes to end Ukraine’s statehood and return its citizens back into the Russian fold. No longer viewed as a mere occupation, many, instead, see Putin’s war as a genocide of the Ukrainian nation.
The United Nations, in 1948, defined genocide as not only the killing of national, ethnic, or religious groups, but also the causing of bodily and mental harm, and even the imposing of living conditions meant to destroy a people or group. Most Americans view the Holocaust as the world's worst case of mass murder that caused the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of Nazi Germany. In more recent memory, however, is the world’s seventh-worst genocide of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994.
For modern-day Africa, it was another atrocity, colonialism, that created significant problems when countries and borders were redrawn with little regard for the people who lived there. As a result, warring tribes were often haphazardly thrown together. Such was the case in Rwanda, where Tutsis and Hutus, with only minor physical differences, were enough to create a history of racial conflict. In fact, in the early 1930s, national identification cards were mandated to document each individual by their corresponding ethnic group. The Tutsis, although once the ruling class in Rwanda, were unseated by the Hutus in the early 1960s, at the urging of their new colonizers, Belgium, causing mass flight by Tutsis to Uganda and elsewhere. By 1994, Hutus held power with 85 percent of the population, while Tutsi totaled just 14 percent.
Beginning in the early 1990s, Tutsi exiles, now organized as a rebel army, began returning to reclaim their land from a crumbling Hutu majority. To counter their insurgency, the Hutu army rallied, despite a presidential peace accord in 1993. Then, following the assassination of the Hutu president in April 1994, war broke out and continued for 100 days into July. Hutus, using national ID cards, were able to effectively identify and kill their Tutsi rivals, encouraged to “cut the tall trees down”, a reference to the taller Tutsi population. But it wasn’t just armies killing armies, it was neighbors killing neighbors until by some accounts, nearly 800,000 people were dead.
In Paul Rusesabagina’s 2006 book, “An Ordinary Man”, Rusesabagina gives his personal account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda while serving as general manager of a preeminent hotel. Sheltering over 1200 Rwandans from the massacre, Rusesabagina details how he used bribes of money and alcohol to keep his guests safe until an escape route was possible. The Rwanda genocide ended with the extermination of approximately 10 percent of the country’s population, and nearly 70 percent of the Tutsi people, while millions more fled the country, yet again. Rusesabagina’s story was also the focus of the 2004 movie, “Hotel Rwanda”.
Today, in China, one to three million Uyghur Muslims are being held in labor camps without legal recourse. Subjected to forced sterilization, mandatory abortions, and even claims of organ harvesting, the minority population is experiencing plummeting birth rates. In Myanmar, Rohingya Muslims are also facing genocide by the country’s Buddhist majority with more than 3000 killed, and another 500,000 fleeing their homes.
American philosopher, Howard Zinn once said: “Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.” Through intolerance and envy, men are encouraged to view those with dissimilar traits or differing opinions as subhuman. And while the goal of genocide may be power, it is the ability to which ordinary people can be manipulated to a cause and turn against their fellow man, that allows this evil to continue.
The Holocaust was supposed to be the last time mankind would tolerate such barbaric acts. But as the war rages on between Russia and Ukraine, it is unlikely to be the last. Growing polarization, here and abroad, will guarantee that it doesn’t.
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