Genocide

Skulls in the Nyamata Memorial Site erected in memory of the genocide of Rwanda.

Cemetery reminiscent of the Srebrenica massacre.

The genocide (from the Greek γένος génos 'lineage' and the Latin -cidio, apophony of caedere 'kill') is the intentional destruction of a people, generally defined as an ethnic, national, racial or religious group, in whole or in part.

The term "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 and is an international crime. It includes any act that consists of the "killing and serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of the members of the group, intentional submission of the group to conditions of existence that will lead to its total or partial physical destruction, measures intended to prevent births in within the group, forcibly transferring children from the group to another group”.

The term was first coined and defined by Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who in 1939 had fled the Holocaust and found asylum in the United States. In his book The Power of the Axis in Occupied Europe published in 1944 he defined genocide thus:

New conceptions require new terms. By "genocide" we refer to the structure of a nation or an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made up of the ancient Greek word genus (race, tribe) and the Latin word c/ (killing), thus corresponding in his formation to words such as tyranny, homicide, infanticide, etc. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when it is achieved through the mass killing of all members of a nation. Rather, it is a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the lives of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of political and social institutions, culture, language, national sentiments, religion and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of persons belonging to those groups. The genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.

According to American sociologist and historian Michael Mann, genocide is the most extreme degree of intergroup violence and the most extreme of all acts of ethnic cleansing. For this author, the impact of genocides during the century XX is devastating, both in terms of the number of victims, which stands at more than 70 million people, and in the extreme cruelty of the attacks.

In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious physical or mental harm, imposing living conditions designed to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly removing children from the group. Victims are selected due to their actual or perceived membership in a group, not randomly.

Definition

Legal meaning and colloquial meaning

There is a discrepancy between the legal meaning and the colloquial or profane meaning of the word, which gives rise to misunderstandings and bitter debates on the matter.

From a legal point of view, genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is considered a crime under international law. Both the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) include an identical definition:

Crime of Genocide.

" Genocide " means any of the following acts committed with the intention of totally or partially destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such:

(a) Matanza de miembros del grupo;

(b) Serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of the members of the group;

C) intentional subjection of the group to conditions of existence that are to bring about their physical, total or partial destruction;

D) Measures to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forced transfer of children from the group to another group.

In common language, however, the term has a different meaning, as stated by the Royal Spanish Academy:

Genocide: Extermination or systematic elimination of a social group on the basis of race, religion or politics.

This second meaning is what leads many people to classify as genocide certain killings of people that, in reality, do not conform to the internationally defined criminal offense of genocide.

Legal definition

The invention of the term and its first legal definition was the work of the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who upon his arrival in the United States in 1939 fleeing from Nazi persecution, undertook a determined action to denounce Nazi atrocities —"the nameless crime" as Winston Churchill called them—culminating in the 1944 publication of the book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe ('The Axis Power in Occupied Europe'), work in which he uses the term genocide for the first time.Ternon, Yves (1998). «Le siècle des genocides». Les Collections de l'Histoire (3): 104. </ref> According to the French historian Bernard Bruneteau, Lemkin saw the assumption of the crime of genocide "as the starting point of a new international law".

Lemkin composed the word genocide from genos (Greek term meaning family, tribe, race, or people) and -cide (from Latin -cidere, combinatory form of caedere, to kill). Lemkin wanted to refer with this term to the killings for racial, national or religious reasons. His initial studies had been based on the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire on the Armenian people between 1915 and 1923 and thereafter he dedicated his life to getting international standards to define and prohibit "genocide" so that it would be introduced for the groups the concept of what homicide is for individuals, the recognition of their right to exist.

In the book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin listed all the Nazi policies aimed at the annihilation of peoples -Jews and Poles in the first place- based on their national, religious and ethnic characteristics. For Lemkin, as Professor Bruneteau has highlighted, “genocide went beyond mass physical elimination, which in his view was a borderline and exceptional case; it consisted, rather, of a multiplicity of actions destined to destroy the bases of survival of a group as a group. It was a synthesis of the different acts of persecution and destruction”. Thus Lemkin proposed a broad meaning of the notion of genocide, which encompassed acts that would later be classified as ethnocide. «In a way, death was the consequence, and not the means, of the end pursued. In the genocidal action perpetrated by the Third Reich, Lemkin saw, moreover, the synthesis and fullness of all past barbarities, both those that in Antiquity and the Middle Ages sought to physically destroy some peoples, as well as those that, in the Modern Age, tried to annihilate them culturally. Nazi Europe, a continuation of these ancient practices, hierarchized groups with a view to their immediate physical annihilation (the Jews and the Gypsies) or their sociocultural extinction (the Slavs). Let us remember, then, that Lemkin did not wish to designate a new phenomenon, but rather to stigmatize a centuries-old practice of humanity by designating it as a crime under international law"

After the end of World War II Lemkin devoted all his efforts to the international recognition of the crime of genocide. In April 1946, he published an article in the American Scholar magazine that had a great impact, but the term genocide, although it was used by the accusations in the Nuremberg trial, the judges did not apply it in the sentence that condemned the Nazi leaders, but the "crime against humanity" established in the London Charter.

The London Agreement or Charter of August 8, 1945 established the Statute of the Nuremberg Tribunal and defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, slavery, deportation and any other act inhumane acts against the civilian population, or persecution for religious, racial or political reasons, when said acts or persecutions are made in connection with any crime against peace or in any war crime". On the other hand, the Convention on the imprescriptibility of war crimes and crimes against humanity considers genocide to be crimes against humanity.

However, at the end of 1946 the newly created UN General Assembly approved resolution 96 in which the term genocide appears for the first time in an international document. The resolution defined it as "a denial of the right to life of human groups", regardless of whether these "racial, religious, political or other groups have been totally or partially destroyed"; and, therefore, as a crime subject to the Law anywhere. Thus, the resolution did not distinguish between the "crime against humanity" applied in Nuremberg and that of genocide, the latter being included in a certain way in the former.

The separation between the two types of accusations occurred two years later, and the differentiation has been maintained until today, when in December 1948 the UN General Assembly approved the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that would later be ratified by each of the Member States. From the approval of the Convention against genocide the International Court of Justice was born, in accordance with the Lemkian idea that the attack against a human group is equivalent to an attack against humanity.

Pressure from the Soviet Union caused the 1948 Convention's definition of genocide to drop the reference to "political and other groups" that appeared in the 1946 resolution, thus safeguarding the Estanilist foreign policy during the war and after the war (in some areas the term genocide had begun to be used to describe the annexation of the Baltic countries by the Soviet Union). Thus, Article II of the Convention considered genocide any act "committed with the intention of destroying, totally or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group" (but not "political or of another type", as it was said in the resolution of 1946).

The definition of genocide embodied in the 1948 Convention was accepted in article 4 of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, of 1993, article 2 of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, of 1994, and the Article 6 of the 1998 Rome Statute, which created the International Criminal Court.

Sociological definition

There are debates between historians and sociologists regarding a legal concept established by Matthias Bjornulund, Eric Markusen and Matthias Mennecke as “the systematic annihilation of a population group as such”. Although these patterns have been practiced for a long time, the concept of genocide is modern, emerging in the early XX century after the annihilation committed by the Turkish Ittihadist State to the Armenian population and the deaths caused by Nazism. The evolution, characterization and delimitation of this term manages to establish the term of modern genocide. You can set the 19th century century and the XX as a starting point for the characteristics and events that define it, being its social practices mainly which not only revolve around annihilation but also encompasses the legitimization of a consensus and obedience as well as the modification of the social relations between perpetrators and affected. Defining genocide socially manages to separate this practice from human nature, which requires training, improvement, and legitimization, so that, being a social construction, it can be deconstructed.

The periodization of genocide is also possible to conceive thanks to this position since the social practice prior to its development which includes narrative and representative symbols that lead to its execution and finally to the social consequences, thus being able to establish a more exact periodization and thus being able to achieve an early warning of these processes. Once these precepts on the social practice of genocide have been established, it is possible to obtain some sociological positions on this phenomenon. By 1975 Vahakn Dadrian would define genocide as:

"... successful attempt by a ruling group invested with formal authority and/or with preponderant access to global resources of power, to reduce by coercion or lethal violence the number of a minority group, whose final extermination is expected as desirable and useful..."

Vahakn Dadrian

For sociology, some of the causes of this phenomenon include the low value of humanitarian values, collective prejudices, ethnocentrism, fanaticism, hatred and xenophobia.

Background

The annihilation of population masses is recorded by various chronicles of antiquity, this being already an ancient phenomenon, carried out by military conquests as campaigns. Examples of this are the Greek devastation in Troy or the destruction of Carthage at the hands of the Romans in 146 BC.

By 1492, the expulsion of both Muslims and Jews within the Hispanic kingdoms of their material and cultural aspects and the discovery of America which entailed the discussion of humanity or inhumanity of indigenous populations can be considered as social precedents of modern genocide. Subsequently, the period of the European colonies left a demographic footprint within their colonies, which were consequences of the conquest and others after the conquest, military technology was a key point in the inequality of dead combatants, an example of this is the battle of Omdurman in 1890 where 10,800 Sudanese died against only 49 English casualties. The economic structure introduced after these campaigns also generated deaths due to the lack of adaptation on the part of colonized settlers. This precedent is not considered an act of genocide, but the atmosphere of indifference and the scientific and state support that supported this type of action are not alien to a form of ideology with universalist pretensions.

Legal regulation of genocide

International regulation of genocide

From an international point of view, genocide is regulated by the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) of 1998 (entry into force in 2002). Together with genocide, other related crimes are punished, which are association to commit genocide, direct and public instigation, attempt and complicity.

Persons accused of genocide will be tried, in accordance with article 6 of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in a competent court of the territory where the crime was committed. However, a customary law has emerged in parallel by which the courts of any State could judge cases of genocide, even if they were committed by non-nationals and outside its territory. The International Criminal Court can also try this crime, as long as it is competent because its jurisdiction has been recognized.

The Convention affirms that it is irrelevant whether the defendant is a government official, official or individual and declares that, for the purposes of extradition, genocide will not be considered a political crime.

National regulation of genocide

However, from the national point of view, each State must transpose the criminalization of the crime to its own criminal law and establish the penalties to be applied for each of the sanctioned behaviors, so that the national courts can punish adequately and in accordance with the principle of legality, the behaviors that conform to the international classification of the crime. Nothing prevents, in this transposition to internal law, a State from expanding the conventional definition, either to expand the list of punishable behaviors, or to expand the number of groups that can be victims of the crime. In this way, Spain modified article 607 of its Criminal Code to also include groups determined "by the disability of its members" among those who may be victims of genocide. Crimes against humanity are listed below in article 607 bis of the Spanish Penal Code. France has gone further by expanding the criminalization in article 211 of its Penal Code, since it has added a closing clause that includes any other "group determined from any other arbitrary criteria".

The imprescriptibility

The prescription in criminal law is the legal institution through which the extinction of criminal responsibility occurs, due to the passage of time.

Genocide is a kind of crime against humanity or crime against humanity and its imprescriptibility is regulated by the Convention on the imprescriptibility of war crimes and crimes against humanity of November 26, 1968. In the case of Spain, crimes against humanity and genocide and the majority of crimes committed against persons and property protected in case of armed conflict (except those of article 614) do not prescribe in any case, that is, never, as established in article 131 no. 4 of the Penal Code.

Number of victims needed for genocide to occur

According to the "Ruhashyankiko Report" of the United Nations of 1973, it was argued that the murder of a single person can be an act of genocide if the intent to destroy the national, ethnic, racial or religious group to which the person belongs is found in the murder. The "Whitaker Report" The United Nations called the persecution of Baha'is in Iran genocide despite the fact that the government had only murdered 202 practitioners as of 1996. Some Brazilian courts found that the massacre of a maximum of 14 Tikuna people complied with the definition of genocide. Regardless of these UN reports and the precedent in Brazil, the ICTY for the Bosnian Genocide found that a "substantial part" of a group must be the victim of genocidal acts in order for the acts to be legally prosecuted as genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded that even if it could be proven that some persons who perpetrated genocidal acts intended to destroy the target group, this would still not be sufficient to qualify as genocide if the acts themselves did not affect a "substantial part" or the target group. What constitutes a "substantial part" is controversial, as a Bosnian municipality representing 6.7% of the Bosnian Muslim population did not qualify as a "substantial part" of the population, which is strange since the massacre in the Srebrenica area qualified as a "substantial part" of the population despite being less than 2% of the total Bosnian Muslim population. a group, a particular subset of a group is the target of a coordinated killing (such as the entire population of the group in some village), whereas a non-genocidal killing would target sporadic members of the group in different areas, in a manner probably uncoordinated.

Controversy over the scope of the concept

There has been much debate about the meaning and scope of the word genocide. It is not something related to war, because, according to Karl von Clausewitz, the purpose of war is to disarm the enemy, not to exterminate him. Genocide or mass murder also differs from serial murder, which consists of the successive and periodic murder of isolated people, while genocide is "a denial of the right to exist to entire human groups", according to the United Nations General Assembly. Genocide has, in this sense, a massive character, which is why it often requires the effective collaboration of a social structure.

Some of the criticisms of the scope of the concept of genocide focus on the fact that it is considered as such only acts carried out against national, ethnic, racial and religious groups, and not those carried out for other reasons, such as social or political. Although the initial draft of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide contemplated and extended the definition of genocide to these massacres, the reference to the need to have the support of the communist bloc (represented mainly by the USSR), which objected to this meaning. With the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a nation and the implantation of democracy in its nations, it seeks to strengthen the conviction that there are no valid reasons, neither from a legal nor an ethical point of view, for the global massacres committed against communities that who identify themselves by their political ideas are not included in this definition.

This restriction of the concept, affirm these voices, can mean the expiation of totalitarian governments that during the 20th century came to kill more than 100 million of their own citizens. In any case, these acts could be classified as crimes against humanity, constituting an international crime in accordance with article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court.

It is disputed whether genocide can be defined as:

• The use of weapons of mass destruction.
• Excessive use of force against unarmed civilians.
• Mass political murder, such as political and religious terrorism or state terrorism.

In 1985, the report of the special rapporteur on the question of genocide, Benjamin Whitaker, recognized the need for other groups (social, sexual, political) to be included through the expansion of the field of application of the Convention.

Cases of genocide

List of genocides by number of deaths

Holocaust

The Holocaust was the massive and systematic extermination plan perpetrated by the Nazi regime against the Jewish population during World War II, both in German territory and in the occupied countries.

The Holocaust included practices such as segregation, nullification of civil rights, confiscation of property, forced transfers, confinement in ghettos and concentration camps under overcrowded conditions, and finally systematic murders that included extermination camps and the poisoning in gas chambers.

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

Rwanda

Rwanda is located in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Its native ethnic population is made up mainly of a Hutu majority, but Tutsis and Twas also live side by side.

The origins of the conflict in Rwanda can be traced back to the Belgian colonial occupation. During the colony, the Belgian government established a system of racial identification cards that differentiated one ethnic group from another, favoring the Tutsi ethnic group over the Hutu majority.

Since 1950, the first frictions between ethnic groups began to take place, caused by the fear of the Tutsis of losing their privileges, once the democratic regime was established. In 1961, the Hutus win by a landslide in UN-supervised elections. Thus, on July 1, 1962, Rwanda claimed its independence from Belgium and its separation from Burundi. Grégoire Kayibanda came to power as the first democratically elected Rwandan president in 1961 and was overthrown by a coup, led by the military Juvénal Habyarimana, in 1973.

Habyarimana established a one-party regime, that of the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which consolidated policies of ethnic exclusion and hate speech against the Tutsi population, until the end of his regime on 6 April 1994; in the framework of a civil war, detonated in 1990, headed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR).

Following the signing of the Arusha Accords, the Kayibanda government agreed, together with the RPF, to the cessation of hostilities. In the same way, it commits to the political reintegration of the Tutsi refugees, as well as to submit themselves to trial for genocide before the UN Security Council (ICTP). In addition, he agrees to the creation of an International Criminal Court for Rwanda to capture and try those responsible for the massacres caused during the civil war on both the Hutu and Tutsi sides, creating a transitional government made up of both ethnic groups. Unfortunately, these agreements failed to materialize due to the assassination of President Habyarimana, which triggered the start of the genocide in Rwanda.

The main crimes committed during the Rwandan genocide, which left the country with less than 75% of the Tutsi population, are attributed to the paramilitary group commanded by the MRDN Interahamwe; However, there are also cases committed by FPR under the command of Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda.

The genocide in Rwanda is characterized by its remarkable speed. The extermination lasted from the night of April 6, 1994, with the assassination of Habyarimana, until July 18 of the same year, with the intervention of the Tutsi militia and the general ceasefire. The number of victims during the genocide They range from 500,000 to 1,000,000. Some 500 people were sentenced to death and another 100,000 remain in prison.

Trials/Sentenced

Jean Kambanda

Jean Kambanda was prime minister during the interim government, installed in Rwanda during the fall of the previous regime. He exercised both 'de facto' and 'de jure' authority and control over members of all levels of government.

He distributed weapons, incited massacres and failed in his duty to guarantee the security of the Rwandan population. He supported Radio Televisión Libre de las Mil Colinas or RTLM, the main outlet for disseminating hate speech against Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Kambanda was tried for his direct responsibility in the massacres. He was found guilty by the ICTR of six counts (genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct public incitement to commit genocide, complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity: murder and extermination) and sentenced to life in prison.

Jean Paul Akayesu

The conviction of Jean Paul Akayesu constitutes a world milestone as it is considered the first international conviction for genocide and the first to recognize sexual violence as a constitutive act of genocide. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), created on November 8, 1994, in the Akayesu case, found a defendant guilty of rape for failing to prevent or stop a rape in his official capacity, and not for having committed it personally. The court found that the rape constituted torture and that, given the circumstances, widespread rape, as part of "measures aimed at preventing births within the group," constituted an act of genocide. For example, in societies where ethnicity is determined by the identity of the father, raping a woman to impregnate her may prevent him from giving birth to her child within her own group.

Jean Paul Akayesu, former mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba, was arrested in Zambia on October 10, 1995 and transferred to the Court's Detention Unit in Arusha on May 26, 1996. The trial began in June 1997 and on September 2, 1998, Trial Chamber I found him guilty of genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, and crimes against humanity. On October 2, 1998, he was sentenced to life in prison. Akayesu is serving a life sentence in a Mali prison.

Theoneste Bagosora

Théoneste Bagosora was found guilty by a UN tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was accused of commanding the Interahamwe Hutu troops and militia, responsible for the massacre. In addition, the court found that Bagosora was "responsible" of the assassination of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana and leading members of the opposition, as well as ten Belgian soldiers.

Aloys Ntabakuze

Aloys Ntabakuze was a Hutu militia commander during the genocide. He was charged with conspiracy to commit genocide; crimes of genocide; complicity in genocide cases. Added to all this are cases of homicide, rape, persecution, extermination and “inhumane acts” as crimes against humanity. Ntabakuze was arrested on July 18, 1997, tried on December 18, and sentenced to life in prison.

Anatol Nsengiyumva

Anatol Nsengiyumva, held the position of lieutenant-colonel during the genocide in Rwanda. He commanded military operations in the northwestern sector of Rwanda, exercising his authority over the sector encompassing the city of Gisenyi.

Nsengiyumva oversaw the training of the Interahambwe militias, the main perpetrators of the genocide. He was accused of committing genocide; as well as other charges of murder, rape, persecution, extermination and crimes against humanity. He was arrested on March 2, 1996 in Cameroon and tried by the ICTR on December 18, 2008. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Gratien Kabiligi

Gratien Kabiligi was a military commander, responsible for planning, coordinating and executing military operations during the genocide in Rwanda. Kabiligi was charged with conspiring to commit genocide, crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity.He was arrested in Kenya in July 1997. Gratien Kabiligi was released after being found not guilty by a military court.

Simon Bikini

During the conflict, Simon Bikindi was a well-known singer-songwriter, as well as the chief official in the Ministry of Sport and Youth and an active member of the MRND party.

Bikindi's songs played a crucial part in the perpetration of the genocide in Rwanda by inciting hatred towards the Tutsi ethnic group. She was responsible for causing serious physical and mental harm to members of the Tutsi population, even going so far as to participate in the military training of the Interhambwe militias.

Simon Bikindi was arrested in the Netherlands in 2001 and transferred to the ICTR headquarters for trial in Arusha in 2002. He was found accused of direct incitement to commit crimes of genocide, for which he was sentenced to 15 years from prison.

Other defendants

• Théodore Sindikubwabo, Rwandan physician and politician
• Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, pastor of the Seventh-day Adventist Church
• Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, priest

Guatemala

In Guatemala, economic and political inequality led the civilian population to demonstrate in protests against the regime they considered oppressive. In 1960, what is known as the Guatemalan Civil War began, in which the Unidad Revolucionaria clashed Guatemalan National and the Armed Forces of Guatemala until the year 1966.

In 1980 the Guatemalan Army carried out Operation Sofía, a series of actions that had the objective of creating a scorched earth policy in certain Mayan communities to eliminate guerrilla resistance. Likewise, the documents record other military attacks against indigenous populations in Guatemala. The records show that this operation was part of the strategy of the de facto president of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, under the command and control of high-ranking military officers of the country, which includes the then Vice Minister of Defense, Mejía Víctores. Over three years, the actions of this operation resulted in the destruction of more than 600 villages, with more than 50,000 people missing and 1.5 million more displaced.

In 1999, a blog was made public in which the details of the forced disappearances of 183 people were recorded. The document was smuggled from the Intelligence archives of the Guatemalan Armed Forces. This blog has already been used by the families of some of the disappeared to initiate legal action in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Efraín Ríos Montt Case

On May 10, 2013, the Guatemalan court sentenced former Chief of State General José Efraín Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison for the crime of genocide, finding him guilty of said crime and of committing crimes against humanity against the Mayan Ixil population in Guatemala among other populations.

During the government of Ríos Montt (1982-1983) one of the most violent periods of the internal armed confrontation in Guatemala (1960-1996) took place. The counterinsurgency policy implemented by the State contemplated the systematic attack against the indigenous civilian population because they considered that they were or could be a source of support for the guerrilla movements in the region. On January 28, 2013, Miguel Ángel Gálvez (highest risk first judge B) opened the trial against José Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, for the crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity. In March 2013, he obtained a provisional protection from the trial. On March 19, 2013, a judge formally opened a trial against the octogenarian ex-dictator, accusing him of genocide against indigenous people during his regime (1982-1983), a crime for which he could be sentenced to half a century in prison.

The First High Risk Court A sentenced him to a total of 80 years in prison without commutation, 50 years for the crime of genocide and 30 years for crimes against the duties of humanity.

It highlights the importance of the sentence for making Ríos Montt the first Latin American ruler to be convicted of this crime, in addition to becoming the first case in which said sentence is carried out by a Court of the country in which the crimes were committed. facts of genocide.

It should also be noted that the controversy stands out, because according to the opinions of different jurists, during the process the presumption of innocence of the accused was violated in different ways, and other irregularities have been committed. In addition, among different intellectuals from civil society, who express their rejection of the crimes committed by both the military and the guerrillas, they question whether they really are genocide or war crimes.

On May 20, 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Guatemala, by the favorable vote of three of the five magistrates, annulled the sentence after analyzing a challenge raised by the defense lawyers, who allege that the former dictator stayed defenseless because on April 19 his lawyer was briefly expelled from court after accusing the court of partiality. Therefore, the sentence that sentenced former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity - the death of 1,771 Ixil indigenous people between 1982 and 1983 - is null and void. During the civil war, 200,000 people died or disappeared, most of them indigenous. and civilians, and thousands of women were victims of sexual violence. As established by the UN itself, 93% of those crimes were perpetrated by the military and paramilitaries. The general must face a new trial.

On April 1, 2018, General Efraín Ríos Montt died of heart failure in his home where he was under house arrest.

Case of Darfur

Darfur is a town in western Sudan, the third largest country in Africa. Of the estimated 26 million inhabitants in the country, approximately one third live in urban areas, more than 50% in rural areas and 7% are nomadic. The predominant religion is Islam in the north and Christianity in the south. Although the predominant language is Arabic, there are around 130 languages within the country. The country's economy is dedicated to agriculture, livestock and oil exploitation, which is why it maintains trade relations with several countries.

Although the start of the Darfur conflict dates back to 2003, there are several events of instability and violence that precede the conflict, such as peace agreements that were not respected, coups d'état or the civil war, which has left two million dead. between 1983 and 2005.

In 2003, rebel groups took up arms against the Sudanese government, which responded by attacking the civilian population, killing 300,000 people and displacing three million. The way the Sudanese government carries out these attacks is through mercenary Arab militias known as the Janjaweed or Yajaweid. Some of the crimes attributed to the Jannjaweed are death, population displacement, destruction of towns, land burning, arbitrary arrests, rape, and torture.

Despite the fact that the United Nations Organization (UN) has determined the collaboration of the Sudanese government with the Janjaweed, it has publicly denied its support, hinders the investigation of them and rejects or reduces the atrocities they carry out.

For this reason, various non-governmental organizations expressed their support for the population of Darfur, through aid, promotion of human rights and humanitarian assistance. For this reason, in 2006 the government of Sudan and rebel forces signed a peace agreement, which was not respected since the crimes and violence have continued, and has even expanded beyond Sudan.

Bosnia

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia existed from 1963 to 1992, it was made up of six republics: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, as well as two autonomous regions that are Kosovo and Vojvodina, of Hungarian tradition.

In 1980, Josip Broz “Tito” died, a leader who kept the republic unified for several decades. As the fall of the communist bloc loomed and economic difficulties arose, various separatist and nationalist movements arose, leading to the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

I am the leader of a country that has two alphabets, three languages, four religions, five nationalities, six republics, surrounded by seven neighbors; a country where 8 ethnic minorities live

Tito

Background to the conflict

The term genocide in Bosnia refers to the genocide committed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995, or the ethnic cleansing that occurred in 1992-1995 during the Bosnian war.

The Srebrenica massacre was a conflict sparked after the post-Soviet era by the breakup of Yugoslavia and stemming from the independence of Croatia and Slovenia in 1991. Due to political instability and both nationalist and religious issues, leaders Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić had the objective of grouping Serbian citizens, distributed in Yugoslavia, so that they lived in the same country.

The UN Security Council in 1993 created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to prosecute and investigate crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.

Sarajevo Market

On August 28, 1995, a projectile was launched by Bosnian Serb forces against a market in Sarajevo, killing civilians. For this reason, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) launched a two-week air campaign against Bosnian Serbs; the Bosnian Serb authorities were aware that they were losing territory and therefore attended the peace talks in Dayton Ohio in the United States.^{[citation needed]}

Dissolving the conflict

On December 14, 1995, a peace agreement was signed in Paris, France between Milošević, President of Serbia, Alija Izetbegović, President of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Franjo Tuđman, President of Croatia, stipulating a lasting ceasefire.

Relevant

• Deportation of women and children
  • In front of the television cameras, the Serbs showed how children and women were placed on buses to be deported.
  • General Ratko Mladić reported that men would take different buses to meet their families later. When the cameras left, they executed the men. About 60 trucks took men to the execution sites. Some of the executions were carried out during the night. The industrial levelers dragged the bodies into mass graves. Some were buried alive, said Jean-Rene Ruez French police, who showed evidence of the murder of Muslims in the Hague court in 1996.
• Balkanization: Geopolitical term originally used to describe the process of fragmentation of a region or state in smaller parts that do not cooperate with each other; The term arises from the conflicts that occurred in the Balkan Peninsula in the twentieth century. The term is reaffirmed in the Yugoslav wars. By extension, he also described other forms of disintegration.

Trials/Sentenced

Due to the testimonies, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ordered to find and capture Ratko Mladić for having committed war crimes and genocide, for the siege of Sarajevo, in which more than 10,000 people, and the Srebrenica massacre, which killed more than 7,000 Bosnian men and boys, which it is the largest mass murder case carried out in Europe after World War II. He was arrested on July 21, 2008 in Belgrade and there he lived protected by Slobodan Milošević and it was not until May 26, 2011, that Boris Tadić, the President of Serbia, announced the capture of Mladić and his extradition process to The Hague.

Radovan Karadžić was also charged as the intellectual author of the massacre.

Radovan Karadžić

Radovan Karadžić was born on February 15, 1948 in Vlasenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Yugoslavia). He was Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander of the Drina Corps of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) (Bosnian Serb Army) from October 1994 until July 12, 1995. He was sentenced in 2016 to 40 years in prison by the Court International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

On March 20, 2019, Radovan Karadžić was sentenced to life imprisonment on appeal.

Franjo Tudjman

Franjo Tuđman (also spelled Tudjman) was a Croatian historian, writer, and politician. He became the country's first president after its independence in 1991. He defended and supported Croatian nationalist positions after Tito's death in 1980. He led the Croatian party called Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica - HDZ in the 1990s. He is accused of having negotiated with Milosevic, through the Karađorđevo Agreement, the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina between Croatia and Serbia. He dies of cancer in 1999.

Radislav Krstic

Radislav Krstić was Chief of Staff and Deputy Commander of the Drina Corps of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS), Krstić was charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague in 1998, for the killing of 8,100 Bosnian men and boys on July 11, 1995, in the Srebrenica massacre; The Court of Appeals of the court confirmed the accusation as an assistant and collaborator in said crime, sentencing him to 35 years in prison.

Slobodan Milošević

Slobodan Milošević held the presidency of Yugoslavia (RFSY) and Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He was arrested and charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He died in the cell of the detention center in The Hague.

Ratko Mladić

Ratko Mladić was born on March 12, 1943 in Kalinovik (present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina). He was Chief of Staff of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) between 1992 and 1995. During the Bosnian War. He was charged with genocide, persecution, extermination and murder, deportation, inhumane acts, and hostage-taking. He was sentenced in 2017 to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

Others arrested for being involved were

• Ljubiša Beara, a colonel of the army of the Republika Srpska, sentenced to life imprisonment in 2004 for the interests of his family and the State
• Vujadin Popović, chief of police. Sentenced to life imprisonment
• Ljubomir Borovčanin, deputy commander of the Special Police of the Serbian Ministry of the Interior. Sentenced to 17 years in prison on 10 June 2010.
• Vinko Pandurević and Drago Nikolić, commanders who took Srebrenica, sentenced to 13 and 35 years in prison respectively.
• Radivoje Miletić and Milan Gvero, officers of the Serb army, who prevented the arrival of aid to civilians. Sentenced to 19 and 5 years in prison respectively.
• Ljube Boškoski, Macedonian Minister of the Interior of Macedonia, responsible for the attack on Ljuboten, acquitted on 19 May 2010.

Croatian Democratic Union

The Croatian Democratic Union (in Croatian: Hrvatska demokratska zajednica, HDZ) was founded on June 17, 1989 by Croatian nationalist dissidents led by Franjo Tuđman, it is the main party Croatian center-right politician and is associated with the European People's Party.

Armenian

Known as the Armenian Holocaust, it was the extermination and forced deportation of an unknown number of people, around two million Armenians, by the Young Turk government in the Ottoman Empire, from 1915 to 1923.

It is characterized by the use of forced marches to deportees in extreme conditions and the brutality of the massacres. Generally considered the first modern genocide, the deportations were known as caravans of death.

Background

For more than 600 years, the Ottoman Empire dominated a large part of a territory in which diverse communities, Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other ethnic and religious groups, coexisted harmoniously; at the end of the 19th century they began a struggle for independence, starting the XX the movement called Union and Progress, known as Young Turks, which was a progressive and nationalist political party against the monarchy, took power. At the start of the First World War in 1914, Russia attacked the Ottoman Empire, with minimal support from the Armenian population. The Armenians carried out an important uprising in the city of Van, therefore on April 24, 1915 the government arrested several Armenian leaders, and some time later the Ottoman government ordered the mass deportation of Armenians, arguing that they were a danger to the empire.

Dissolution

At the end of World War I, the Ottoman Empire and the allied powers formed the Treaty of Sevres, in which the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and Armenia achieved its independence. The Ottoman government established a court in Constantinople (Istanbul), which tried and sentenced different officials for having attempted against humanity and civilization; The Allies as well as the British continued the trials in Malta, and it was in 1921 when the surrender of prisoners and the end of the trials were negotiated.

Relevant data

Turkey was founded in 1923 and has since denied genocide, arguing that the killings were not planned or part of an extermination policy, and that most of the deaths were due to war.

Every April 24, Armenians commemorate the crimes that occurred during World War I.

In October 2009, Turkey and Armenia agreed to normalize their relations and the creation of independent historians to investigate the events of World War I.

“In a lap near Erzinghan...thousands of corpses formed a barrier of such magnitude that the Euphrates changed its course approximately one hundred yards”

Henry Morgenthau Ambassador of the United States to the Ottoman Empire.

Important characters

Ismail Enver (1881-1922), known as Enver Pasha or Enver Bey to Europeans of his day, was an Ottoman officer and leader of the Young Turk Revolution. During his tenure the First Balkan War and World War I occurred, he was known in the Ottoman Empire as Hürriyet Kahramanı, "The Hero of Freedom".

The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), in April 1912 known as the Young Turks, won an election victory, but the loss of Libya and the Dodecanese after the Italo-Turkish War of that year wiped out support to the party that it was forced to consolidate a coalition government known as the Liberal Union.

Mehmet Talat Paşa, (1872-1921) was part of the Young Turk movement, statesman, grand vizier (1917) and a major leader of the Ottoman Empire between 1913 and 1918.

He was exiled to Berlin, along with Ismail Enver Paşa and Ahmed Cemal Paşa. He was murdered on March 15, 1921 by an Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian, who accused him of ordering the massacre of his village; Tehlirian was arrested, tried and acquitted by the German courts.

Ahmed Cemal (1872-1922) was one of the three pashas who held power in the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

Ahmed Cemal was accused of persecution against Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire and sentenced to death by a military court in absentia, fled the country and did not return to Turkey. After a brief stay in Switzerland he went to Central Asia, where he worked on the modernization of the Afghan army, and then to the Caucasus, where he tried to help non-Russian peoples who were fighting for the creation of their own independent national states and resisting to be part of the Soviet Union. He was assassinated in Tbilisi (Georgia) on July 21, 1922 together with his secretary by the Armenian Stepan Dzaghigian, who considered him responsible for the genocide of his people. His body was transferred to Erzurum, in western Turkey, and buried.

Cambodia

Background

Cambodia's history has been linked to the external factors of neighbors, European colonialism, World War and Cold War. Around the 9th century the Khmer empire was founded by uniting various cities, its decline was influential on Cambodian leaders in the 1970s Part of the decline of Cambodia's power were repeated attacks by its neighbors, Vietnam and Thailand until 1863 when France conquered much of the Indochinese peninsula by establishing a protectorate over Cambodia but dividing the territory into regions without respecting the old ethnic divisions., thus generating a conflict of misunderstanding of customs between ethnic groups as well as educational inequality in the region. After the conflicts of World War II in the region, the Vietminh increased its power, managing to make the entire region independent by 1954, Vietnam being a new scenario for the Cold War.

During the years from 1954 to 1970 Cambodian Prime Minister and Prince Norodom Sihanouk did his best to keep out of the ideological conflicts surrounding the nation but North Vietnam invaded part of Laos and Cambodia in the establishment of a path of supplies for the Vietcong guerrillas, for which reason on April 30, 1970 Nixon ordered the bombing of the territory of Cambodia, making it a strategic point in the conflict. The prince continued to fight against both external and internal conflicts, these being the Khmer Rouge communist guerrillas. In 1970 Lon Nol organized a US-backed coup. This government was unpopular, turning the Khmer Rouge into a combat option against the recently installed government. Both sides, the Khmer and the coup government of Lon Nol began executing and isolating the Vietnamese from the territory due to a fear of falling back under Vietnamese rule. Following the defeat of the United States in the region, Phnom Penh began a regime that lasted 3 years and 9 months.