1948 UN convention says genocide is ‘act
committed with intent to destroy in whole or in
part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’;
many massacres still not recognized.
PARIS — Germany recognized for the first time
Friday that it committed genocide during its
colonial occupation of Namibia more than a
century ago.
Derived from the Greek “genos” (people) and
Latin “cide” (to kill), genocide is defined under a
1948 UN convention as an “act committed with
intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national,
ethnic, racial or religious group.”
The Namibian massacres have been called the
first genocide of the 20th century by historians. It
was the first of many, some of which are still
struggling for recognition. Here is an overview:

The Holocaust
The term genocide was used for the first time
within a legal framework by the victorious Allies
in 1945 to try Germany’s Nazi leaders at
Nuremburg for the murder of six million Jews
during World War II.
The accused were eventually convicted of crimes
against humanity.
It paved the way for the UN’s 1948 Genocide
Convention which for the first time codified the
crime of genocide.
The attempted extermination of Europe’s Jews by
Nazis began after the invasion of Poland in 1939
and was carried out on an industrial scale in its
death camps.
More than a third of the world’s Jewish
population died in what the Nazis called their
“Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”
As well as gas chambers, many were worked or
starved to death and mobile mobile death squads
called Einsatzgruppen mowed down one million
people in what is known as the “Holocaust by
bullets.” Some half a million people from ethnic groups
variously known as Roma, Sinti or gypsies were
also murdered, as the Nazis considered them, like
the Jews, to be “subhuman.”

Namibia
Germany ruled what was then called German
South West Africa as a colony from 1884 to 1915.
Colonial troops and settlers in 1904-1908 killed
tens of thousands of indigenous Herero and
Nama people.
Hundreds of Herero and Nama were beheaded
after their deaths and their skulls were handed to
German researchers in Berlin for since
discredited “scientific” experiments to prove the
racial superiority of whites over blacks.
Friday’s announcement comes after more than
five years of negotiations between Germany and
Namibia, with Berlin also pledging financial
support worth more than one billion euros for
projects.

Armenians
Armenia says Ottoman forces massacred up to
1.5 million Armenians during World War I
between 1915 and 1917.
Last month US President Joe Biden recognized the
killings as genocide in a watershed for
descendants of those who died.
Starting with Uruguay in 1965, nations including
France, Germany, Canada and Russia have
previously recognized the genocide.
But a clear US statement had proved elusive
under previous presidents worried about
damaging relations with Washington’s key NATO
ally Turkey.
The charge is vehemently rejected by Turkey —
inheritor of the trunk of the empire — which
admits nonetheless that vast numbers of
Armenians perished as the Ottomans battled
tsarist Russia.
But it claims as many Turks died and denies the
existence of a deliberate policy of genocide.

Rwanda
The Rwandan genocide began in April 1994
shortly after the ethnic Hutu president was killed
when his plane was shot down.
For 100 days militias and soldiers from the Hutu
majority butchered men, women and children
from the Tutsi minority.
The killing ended only when the Tutsi-led
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took over in July
1994, having defeated the Hutu extremists.
At least 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and some
moderate Hutus, were killed, according to the UN.
The UN set up the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda which issued the world’s
first genocide conviction in 1998.
The court tried several dozen people before it
wrapped up its work in 2015.
Trials of Rwandan genocide suspects have also
taken place in Belgium, Canada, Finland, France,
Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and
Switzerland.

Sudan
The International Criminal Court in 2010 added
three genocide counts to charges against Sudan’s
then president Omar al-Bashir over fighting that
erupted in Darfur in 2003 and which the UN
estimates has left 300,000 dead.
Bashir has repeatedly denied the charges. He was
the first sitting president of a country to be
wanted by the ICC, and the first person to be
charged with genocide.

Rohingya
Another 21st century crime is the massacres of
the Muslim Rohingya people who are widely seen
as illegal immigrants in Myanmar, denied
citizenship and stripped of rights.
Myanmar is facing a barrage of legal challenges
to hold it accountable over the alleged genocide
against its Rohingya population in 2017.
This includes a case launched by Gambia at the
International Court of Justice, the UN’s top court
in The Hague. The ICC also approved an
investigation into the military crackdown that
forced some 740,000 Rohingya to flee.
UN investigators in 2018 branded the bloody
expulsion a genocide, and called for the
prosecution of Myanmar’s top generals.

1 picture:The German Kamelreiterpatrouille, or ‘Camel Rider Patrol,’ in Southwest Africa, 1906 – 1918. (Budesarchiv Bild); Surviving. Herero after the escape through the arid desert of Omaheke in German South-West Africa, modern day Namibia. (Public domain)

2 picture:In this photograph taken on May 1, 1945, US
soldiers look at a pile of prisoner’s bodies in a train near
Dachau Concentration Camp, after the camp was liberated by the US army on April 29, 1945. (Eric Schwab / AFP)

3 picture:A young Rwandan girl walks through Nyaza cemetery outside Kigali, Rwanda, on Monday November 25, 1996, where thousands of victims of the 1994 genocide are buried (APPhoto/Ricardo Mazalan).

4 picture:Broken dishes can be seen in the burned out remains of ahouse in Myo Thu Gyi village near Maungdaw, Rakhine State, Myanmar, on August 31, 2017. (AFP Photo/Stringer)

But how did they know humans lived on the other side of the planet and why did they travel millions of miles to get to us! And i know it's more than our just resources!