Genocides in history (21st century)

"[8] In literature, some scholars have popularly emphasized the role that the Soviet Union played in excluding political groups from the international definition of genocide, which is contained in the Genocide Convention of 1948,[9] and in particular they have written that Joseph Stalin may have feared greater international scrutiny of the political killings that occurred in the country, such as the Great Purge;[10] however, this claim is not supported by evidence.

[36] On 21 April 2019, Easter Sunday, three churches in Sri Lanka and three luxury hotels in the commercial capital, Colombo, were targeted in a series of coordinated Islamic terrorist suicide bombings.

[56] Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as both a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.

[59] In Ituri district, rebel forces ran an operation code-named "Effacer le tableau" (to wipe the slate clean).

[64] The genocide, which was committed against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes, led the International Criminal Court (ICC) to indict several people for crimes against humanity, rape, forced transfer and torture.

[67][68][69] Since 2014,[70] the Chinese government, under the direction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping, has pursued policies which have led to the internment of more than one million Muslims[71] and they are currently being held in secretive internment camps without any legal process (the majority of them are Uyghurs)[72][73] in what has become the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since the Holocaust.

[95] In July 2020, German anthropologist Adrian Zenz wrote in Foreign Policy that his estimate had increased since November 2019, estimating that a total of 1.8 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities had been extrajudicially detained in what he described as "the largest incarceration of an ethnoreligious minority since the Holocaust", arguing that the Chinese Government was engaging in policies in violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

For many years, the Rohingya had been one the primary targets of hate crimes and discrimination in the country, much of which was given tacit encouragement by extremist nationalist Buddhist monks and the military-controlled government.

[100][101] On 25 August 2017, the Myanmar military forces and local Buddhist extremists started attacking the Rohingya people and committing atrocities against them in the country's north-west Rakhine State.

According to the United Nations reports, as of September 2018[update], over 700,000 Rohingya people had fled or had been driven out of Rakhine state who then took shelter in the neighboring Bangladesh as refugees.

[citation needed] The 2017 persecution against the Rohingya Muslims and non-Muslims has been termed as ethnic cleansing and genocide by various United Nations agencies, International Criminal Court officials, human rights groups, and governments.

[113][114] The Myanmar leader and State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi was again criticized for her silence on the issue and her support of the military's actions.

[115] Subsequently, in November 2017, the governments of Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a deal to facilitate the return of Rohingya refugees to their native Rakhine state within two months, drawing a mixed response from international onlookers.

[116] In August 2018, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, reporting the findings of their investigation into the August–September 2017 events, declared that the Myanmar military—the Tatmadaw, and several of its commanders (including Commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing)—should face charges in the International Criminal Court for "crimes against humanity", including acts of "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide", particularly for the August–September 2017 attacks on the Rohingya.

[121] Many of the atrocities committed are blamed on a group known as "Dot Ke Beny" (Rescue the President) or "Mathiang Anyoor" (Brown caterpillar), while the SPLA claim that it is just another battalion.

[126][127] During the fighting in 2016–17 in the Upper Nile region between the SPLA and the SPLA-IO allied Upper Nile faction of Uliny, Shilluk in Wau Shilluk were forced from their homes and Yasmin Sooka, chairwoman of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, claimed that the government was engaging in "social engineering" after it transported 2,000 mostly Dinka people to the abandoned areas.

[133] In 2010, Dennis Blair, the United States Director of National Intelligence, issued a warning that "over the next five years, ... a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in southern Sudan.

"[134][135] In April 2017, Priti Patel, the Secretary of the United Kingdom's Department for International Development, declared the violence in South Sudan as genocide.

[139] ISIL commits violence against Shia Muslims, Alawites, Assyrian and Armenian Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Shabaks and Mandeans in particular.

[144][145] In late May 2014, 150 Kurdish boys from Kobani aged 14–16 were abducted and subjected to torture and abuse, according to Human Rights Watch.

[146] In the Syrian towns of Ghraneij, Abu Haman and Kashkiyeh 700 members of the Sunni Al-Shaitat tribe were killed for attempting to launch an uprising against ISIL rule.

Humans Rights commission counted that 9,347 civilians had been murdered by ISIL in Iraq,[149] then however; by 2016 a second report by the United Nations estimated 18,802 deaths.

[156] The UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right of Food and for the Prevention of Genocide have called for investigations of Saudi Arabia for crimes against humanity based on their deliberate starvation of the population of Yemen.

[171] The entire Saada Governorate was declared a military target by the coalition in May 2015; Human Rights Watch (HRW) later expressed concern that the bombing was causing unnecessarily harming civilians.

[180] In November 2020, Genocide Watch upgraded its alert status for Ethiopia as a whole to the ninth stage of genocide, extermination, referring to the Gawa Qanqa massacre, casualties of the Tigray War, 2020 Ethiopia bus attack and the Metekel massacre and listing affected groups as the Amhara, Tigrayans, Oromo, Gedeo, Gumuz, Agaw and Qemant.

[187] Political scientist Scott Straus declared that "genocide may be an appropriate term to describe the violence" following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[189] On 6 April 2022, an op-ed article which was written by Timofey Sergeytsev, What Russia Should Do with Ukraine,[190] was published by the Russian state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.

[195] A Foreign Policy article acknowledged that Putin's goal was to "erase Ukraine as a political and national entity and Russify its inhabitants", warning that Russia's war could become a genocide.

[203][204] Those who take this stance say that Israel has committed genocide in accordance with its anti-Palestinianism, Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism and the proposal to annex the West Bank.

[213][d] African Citizens highlighted the sentences, "Indisputably, the most important truth that emerges from our investigation is that the Rwandan genocide could have been prevented by those in the international community who had the position and means to do so.