A photograph taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 during World War II shows Jews, both adults and children, at gunpoint while SS soldiers look on. (Image credit: Photo12/Ann Ronan Picture Library via Alamy Stock Photo) Jump to:
Genocide is an attempt to partially or completely destroy a people or group, and such acts have occurred countless times throughout history and continue to occur today. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphs on a memorial stone dating back to the late 13th century BCE may contain one of the earliest known references to the people of Israel, along with the incorrect claim that Pharaoh Merneptah exterminated them all; and in 88 BCE, Mithridates, ruler of Pontus, ordered the massacre of all Italians in his lands, possibly leading to as many as 100,000 killings and the brutal Mithridatic Wars against Rome. The Romans committed genocide against their enemies on numerous occasions: for example, during the destruction of Carthage in modern-day Tunisia in 146 BCE, some 62,000 people were executed and 50,000 enslaved; and during the Gallic Wars of the first century BC, Julius Caesar claimed that his armies killed more than a million Gauls and Germans (historians now believe the actual number was much lower). Millions are also believed to have died in colonial genocides committed by European powers, especially in the New World and Africa.
However, genocide has only been internationally recognized and become a serious global issue in the last 80 years, amid the industrialization of warfare and the large-scale atrocities that occurred in the 20th century. The term is almost synonymous with the Holocaust and other massacres during World War II, when six million Jews and some 12 million others, including Roma, Russians and Poles, were killed as a result of the Nazi occupation of Europe.
The concept of genocide emerged in the 1920s as a way to describe the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1916, which may have killed more than 1 million people, according to Britannica. New reports of genocide have marred every decade since, from the massacres of communists in Russia from 1918 and in China after 1949; to the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the massacres in Rwanda in 1994, and the ongoing killings in Sudan throughout much of the 21st century.
What is genocide?
Sourse: www.livescience.com
