The Silent Killers; the Reality of Genocide

The word genocide carries a specific connotation. Most people immediately picture Hitler and the Holocaust during the Nazi regime.  Without a doubt, the Holocaust was the largest in scale and deaths.  However, the last century has seen numerous ethnic cleansings and genocides.  Many Americans would struggle to name any other genocides, but Africa has witnessed multiple in the past few decades.

A sign in front of the Dachau concentration camp. 

Many aspects came together to spark the Holocaust.  Norman Naimark tells how some Young Turks from the Armenian genocide as well as Stalin's ideologies influenced Hitler's policies (2001). Originally, Hitler wanted a pure race so he used eugenics to create the best possible race of Germans.  Eugenics is improving the qualities of a population through selective breeding of those who have desirable traits.  Then Hitler's policy turned towards forced deportation of all Jews out of Germany and surrounding areas if possible.  While others were confined in ghettos to separate them from the rest of the population.  This quickly turned into a policy of complete annihilation of all Jewish people including women and children.  Concentration camps with gas chambers for mass killings became much more frequent in 1941.  Naimark attributes this to the resilience of both the Soviet Union and Britain along with the United States entering the war.  The Nazi party wanted to have one less "problem" to deal with, so Hitler increased the killings to "get it out of the way" (Naimark, 2001, p. 79).  World War II served as the perfect cover for these mass murders.  Other nations were too preoccupied  to notice or realize the true scale of it. This was a relatively silent mass murder of millions of people.  Hitler took a page from the Ottoman Empire who used World War I as an opportunity to slaughter countless Armenians.

Similar trends can be seen in Africa today.  The past decade the genocide in Darfur, Sudan has devastated the region including surrounding countries.  Similar to the situation in Rwanda that culminated in a genocide during the 1990's, tensions escalated in Sudan after becoming an independent country from Britain.  This has largely been a silent issue to the American public just as the genocide of the Jews was during WWII.  An Arab led group called the Janjaweed constantly are bombing and burning villages due mostly to competition for resources and land. Nearly half a million have been killed with another 2.8 million displaced, yet it is rarely talked about.  In fact 15 kids died over this past weekend!

If it wasn't for Ben Affleck and a few other political advocates, the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo would go unnoticed to most Americans.  Affleck, who founded Eastern Congo Initiative, recently testified in front of Congress about the situation there.  It has the makings to turn into a genocide, but hasn't been recognized as one yet.  The World Without Genocide webpage claims that it is the deadliest area since WWII with 5.4 million deaths since 1996.

The Holocaust was revealed too late to save millions of Jews, but we need to make these "silent killings" in the Darfur and the Congo a public issue to stop the death of millions more!


References:

Naimark, N. M. (2001). Fires of hatred. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Worldwithoutgenocide.org. (2014). Democratic republic of the congo | world without genocide. [online] Retrieved from: http://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/congo [Accessed: 5 Mar 2014].

Worldwithoutgenocide.org. (2014). Darfur genocide | world without genocide. [online] Retrieved from: http://worldwithoutgenocide.org/genocides-and-conflicts/darfur-genocide [Accessed: 5 Mar 2014].

Yahoo News. (2014). U.n. says central africa, south sudan refugees 'in poor shape', children hardest hit. [online] Retrieved from: http://news.yahoo.com/u-n-says-central-africa-south-sudan-refugees-160149193.html;_ylt=A0LEVz1HZRZTPyQAetFXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0ZG44cmVwBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkA1ZJUDMwNF8x [Accessed: 5 Mar 2014].