Portal:Genocide

Topics Culture Geography Health History Mathematics Nature People Philosophy Religion Society Technology Template:/box-header This portal concerns genocide and strives to provide information on genocide. This portal provides a central location in which all related genocide article may be found. Main articles: wiktionary:Genocide and Genocide Genocide is the mass killing of a population of people as defined by Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Template:/box-footer "A genocide begins with the killing of one man — not for what he has done, but because of who he is. A campaign of 'ethnic cleansing' begins with one neighbour turning on another. Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations." - Kofi Annan, Nobel lecture 2001 "If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged." - Noam Chomsky, lecture at St. Michael's College, 1990 "We are living in a time of the trivialization of the word 'Holocaust,' What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date." -Simon Wiesenthal, AP Interview 1999 "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." -Martin Niemöller, from the poem "First they came..." During World War II ghettos were established by the Nazis to confine Jews, Romani and Serbs into tightly packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe. Starting in 1939, the Nazis began to systematically move Polish Jews into designated areas of large Polish cities. The first large ghetto at Tuliszków was established in December 1939 or January 1940, followed by the Łódź Ghetto in April 1940 and the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1940, with many other ghettos established throughout 1940 and 1941. The Ghettos were walled off, and any Jew found leaving them was shot. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of these Ghettos, with 380,000 people and the Łódź Ghetto, the second largest, holding about 160,000. Ghettos established by the Nazis in which Jews were confined, and later shipped to concentration camps. The situation in the ghettos was brutal. In Warsaw, 30% of the population were forced to live in 2.4% of the city's area, a density of 9.2 people per room. In the ghetto of Odrzywół, 700 people lived in an area previously occupied by 5 families, between 12 and 30 to each small room. The Jews were not allowed out of the ghetto, so they had to rely on food supplied by the Nazis: in Warsaw this was 253 calories (1,060 kJ) per Jew, compared to 669 calories (2,800 kJ) per Pole and 2,613 calories (10,940 kJ) per German. With crowded living conditions, starvation diets, and little sanitation (in the Łódź Ghetto 95% of apartments had no sanitation, piped water or sewers) hundreds of thousands of Jews died of disease and starvation. In 1942, the Nazis began Operation Reinhard, the systematic deportation to extermination camps during the Holocaust. The authorities deported Jews from everywhere in Europe to the ghettos of the East, or directly to the extermination camps -- almost 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto alone to Treblinka over the course of 52 days. In some of the Ghettos the local resistance organisations started Ghetto uprisings. None were successful, and the Jewish populations of the ghettos were almost entirely killed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghettos_in_occupied_Europe_1939-1944 "A relic of the Armenian massacres at Erzingan", image taken from US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau's memoirs (1918). Gregory H. Stanton is the founder (1999) and president of Genocide Watch , the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and is the founder (1999) and Chair of the International Campaign to End Genocide. He is the Vice President (2005 - 2007) of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. Early life and academic background Gregory Stanton comes from the lineage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women's suffrage activist, and Henry Brewster Stanton, an anti-slavery leader. Actively involved in human rights since the 1960's, when he was a voting rights worker in Mississippi, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast, and as the Church World Service/CARE Field Director in Cambodia in 1980. He has been a Law Professor at Washington and Lee University, American University and the University of Swaziland. Stanton is the James Farmer Professor of Human Rights at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He has degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Law School, and a Doctorate in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. He was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2001-2002). Career Dr. Stanton served in the State Department (1992-1999), where he drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, and the Central African Arms Flow Commission. He also drafted the U.N. Peacekeeping Operations resolutions that helped bring about an end to the Mozambique civil war. In 1994, Stanton won the American Foreign Service Association's prestigious W. Averell Harriman award for "extraordinary contributions to the practice of diplomacy exemplifying intellectual courage," based on his dissent from U.S. policy on the Rwandan genocide. He wrote the State Department options paper on ways to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice in Cambodia. Since leaving the State Department in 1999 to found Genocide Watch, Stanton has been deeply involved in the U.N. - Cambodian government negotiations that have brought about creation of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, for which he has drafted internal rules of procedure and evidence. From 1999 - 2000, he also served as Co-Chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court. Before he joined the State Department, Stanton was a legal advisor to RUKH, the Ukrainian independence movement, work for which he was named the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America's 1992 Man of the Year. He was the Chair of the American Bar Association Young Lawyer's Division Committee on Human Rights and a member of the A.B.A.'s Standing Committee on World Order Under Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Stanton Template:/box-header 12 April 2007 File:MURAN.gif Mummified victims of the Rwanda genocide. Photo by Emmanuel Cattier. A United Nations exhibition, titled "Lessons from Rwanda", about the 1994 Rwanda genocide, has been dismantled and postponed because Turkey "objected to a sentence in the text, which showed how the Armenian killings contributed to the creation of the term genocide". The disputed sentence was: Following World War 1, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes. The Republic of Turkey has long disputed that the event constituted genocide, claiming rather that the Armenian deaths were a result of inter-ethnic strife, disease and famine during the turmoil of World War I. The exhibit was set up in the visitors lobby on Thursday, 5 April, and was due to be opened on Monday, 9 April 2007, by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "Lessons from Rwanda" was created by Aegis Trust, an anti-genocide NGO, and approved by the U.N. Department of Public Information. The exhibit also mentioned the Holocaust the Cambodian killing fields and crimes committed in Bosnia, East Timor and Sudan. On Saturday, 7 April ,James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis, was told by the UN to remove the sentence. Aegis resisted the Secretary General’s request. Smith explains, "Had we been asked to remove reference of atrocities to Jews because Germany objected, we would have been equally resistant." The suggestion by Armen Martirosyan, the Armenian ambassador to the UN, to remove the words "in Turkey" were not acceptable to the UN. Baki Ilkin, the Turkish ambassador to the UN, said that Turkey expressed "discomfort over the text's making references to the Armenian issue and drawing parallels with the genocide in Rwanda." On Monday, the panels in the visitor's lobby had been turned around to prevent it being seen by the public. Farhan Haq, U.N. associate spokesman, said that the review process which takes into account "all positions" had not been followed and that "the exhibition has been postponed until the regular review process is completed." Manoel de Almeida e Silva, an official in the strategic communications division, said the exhibit would take place. "We are committed to it. It is a very important issue." References Further reading *Staff. Ban Ki-Moon to speak at opening of UN exhibition on Rwanda’s Genocide, Aegis Trust, 30 April 2007. * Human rights Criminal justice Religion Philosophy Politics Society War History International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals) It is commonly accepted that, at least since World War II, genocide has been illegal under customary international law as a peremptory norm, as well as under conventional international law. Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish, for prosecution, since intent, demonstrating a chain of accountability, has to be established. International criminal courts and tribunals function primarily because the states involved are incapable or unwilling to prosecute crimes of this magnitude themselves. For more information see: Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (ad hoc tribunals) International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court) To date all international prosecutions for genocide have been brought in specially convened international tribunals. Since 2002, the International Criminal Court can exercise its jurisdiction if national courts are unwilling or unable to investigate or prosecute genocide, thus being a "court of last resort," leaving the primary responsibility to exercise jurisdiction over alleged criminals to individual states. Due to the United States concerns over the ICC, the United States prefers to continue to use specially convened international tribunals for such investigations and potential prosecutions. For more information see: Genocide: International prosecution of genocide (International Criminal Court) References Category:Genocide Template:/box-header Right now you can help us by doing the following: 1. Create a logo for the Genocide portal This logo will be used to list the Genocide portal in related portals under their "RELATED PORTALS" section. Please save your logo to wikipedia and place the link to the image on the following page: Logo Thank you. The Genocide Portal staff look forward to seeing your designs. --EricSRodrigues154 02:03, 17 April 2007 (UTC) Template:/box-footer The Holocaust Armenian Genocide Sudan Rwanda Srebrenica genocide Fondation chirezi Nonkilling Autogenocide Crime against humanity Nazi eugenics Historical revisionism (negationism) International Association of Genocide Scholars Universal jurisdiction Völkerstrafgesetzbuch Ethnic cleansing War crime Cultural genocide Gendercide Minority Rights Group International Policide Genocide Convention External links Voices of the Holocaust - a learning resource at the British Library Genocide Studies Program at Yale Institute for the Study of Genocide-International Association of Genocide Scholars International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). The following Wikimedia sister projects provide more on this subject: Topics Culture Geography Health History Mathematics Nature People Philosophy Religion Society Technology