The genocide of indigenous peoples is the mass destruction of entire communities of indigenous peoples.
Indigenous peoples are understood to be people whose historical and
current territory has become occupied by colonial expansion, or the
formation of a state by a dominant group such as a colonial power.
While the concept of genocide was formulated by Raphael Lemkin in the mid-20th century, the earlier expansion of various European colonial powers such as the Spanish and British empires, and the subsequent establishment of colonies on indigenous territory, frequently involved acts of genocidal violence against indigenous groups in the Americas, Australia, Africa and Asia.[2]
According to Lemkin, colonization was in itself "intrinsically genocidal". He saw this genocide as a two-stage process, the first being the destruction of the indigenous population's way of life. In the second stage, the newcomers impose their way of life on the indigenous group.[3][4] According to David Maybury-Lewis, imperial and colonial forms of genocide are enacted in two main ways, either through the deliberate clearing of territories of their original inhabitants in order to make them exploitable for purposes of resource extraction or colonial settlements, or through enlisting indigenous peoples as forced laborers in colonial or imperialist projects of resource extraction.[5] The designation of specific events as genocidal is often controversial.[6]
Some scholars, among them Lemkin, have argued that cultural genocide, sometimes called ethnocide, should also be recognized. A people may continue to exist, but if they are prevented from perpetuating their group identity by prohibitions against cultural and religious practices that are the basis of that identity, this may also be considered a form of genocide. Examples include the treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese government and Native Americans by the US government.[7][8][9][10][10]
According to Lemkin, colonization was in itself "intrinsically genocidal". He saw this genocide as a two-stage process, the first being the destruction of the indigenous population's way of life. In the second stage, the newcomers impose their way of life on the indigenous group.[3][4] According to David Maybury-Lewis, imperial and colonial forms of genocide are enacted in two main ways, either through the deliberate clearing of territories of their original inhabitants in order to make them exploitable for purposes of resource extraction or colonial settlements, or through enlisting indigenous peoples as forced laborers in colonial or imperialist projects of resource extraction.[5] The designation of specific events as genocidal is often controversial.[6]
Some scholars, among them Lemkin, have argued that cultural genocide, sometimes called ethnocide, should also be recognized. A people may continue to exist, but if they are prevented from perpetuating their group identity by prohibitions against cultural and religious practices that are the basis of that identity, this may also be considered a form of genocide. Examples include the treatment of Tibetans by the Chinese government and Native Americans by the US government.[7][8][9][10][10]
Genocide debate
The UN definition, which is used in international law, is narrower than Lemkin's, and states that genocide is: "...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
- (a) Killing members of the group;
- (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."[12]
Pre–1948 examples
A scene depicting the (Qing Dynasty's) genocidal campaign against the Miao people at Lancaoping in 1795.
In the 16th century, the expansion of European empires led to the conquering of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia. This period of expansion resulted in several instances of massacres, and genocide. Many indigenous peoples, such as the Yuki, the Pallawah and Herero, were brought to the brink of extinction. In some cases, entire tribes were annihilated.[19][20]
Colonialism and genocide in the Americas
From the colonial period of the early 1500s through the twentieth century, the indigenous peoples of the Americas have experienced massacres, torture, terror, sexual abuse, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.[21] Historians and scholars whose work has examined this history in the context of genocide have included historian David Stannard[22] and anthropological demographer Russell Thornton,[23] as well as scholar activists such as Vine Deloria, Jr., Russell Means and Ward Churchill. Stannard compares the events of colonization in the Americas with the definition of genocide in the 1948 UN convention, and writes that "In light of the U.N. language—even putting aside some of its looser constructions—it is impossible to know what transpired in the Americas during the sixteenth seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not conclude that it was genocide".[24] Thornton describes as genocide the direct impact of warfare, violence and massacres, many of which had the effect of wiping out entire ethnic groups.[25] Political scientist Guenter Lewy says the label of genocide is not applicable and views the "sad fate" of the Native Americans as "not a crime but a tragedy, involving an irreconcilable collision of cultures and values. [...] The new Americans, convinced of their cultural and racial superiority, were unwilling to grant the original inhabitants of the continent the vast preserve of land required by the Indians’ way of life."[26] Native American Studies professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz says, "Proponents of the default position emphasize attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonization of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease."[27]By 1900 the indigenous population in the Americas declined by more than 80%, and by as much as 98% in some areas. The effects of diseases such as smallpox, measles and cholera during the first century of colonialism contributed greatly to the death toll, while violence, displacement and warfare by colonizers against the Indians contributed to the death toll in subsequent centuries.[28] As detailed in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present, "It is also apparent that the shared history of the hemisphere is one framed by the dual tragedies of genocide and slavery, both of which are part of the legacy of the European invasions of the past 500 years. Indigenous people north and south were displaced, died of disease, and were killed by Europeans through slavery, rape and war. In 1491, about 145 million people lived in the western hemisphere. By 1691, the population of indigenous Americans had declined by 90-95 percent, or by around 130 million people."[29] See below for examples of state-sponsored murder against the Native peoples of California.
Spanish colonization of the Americas
A 16th-century illustration by Flemish Protestant Theodor de Bry for Las Casas's Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, depicting Spanish atrocities during the conquest of Cuba
It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas up to eight million indigenous people died marking the first large-scale act of genocide of the modern era.[30] Acts of brutality in the Caribbean and the systematic annihilation occurring on the Caribbean islands prompted Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas to write Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias ("A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies") in 1552. Las Casas wrote that the indigenous population on the Spanish colony of Hispaniola had been reduced from 400,000 to 200 in a few decades.[31] His writings were among those that gave rise to Leyenda Negra (Black Legend) to describe Spanish cruelty in the Indies.[32] Noble David Cook, writing about the Black Legend and the conquest of the Americas wrote, "There were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact" and instead suggests the near total decimation of the indigenous population of Hispaniola as mostly having been caused by diseases like smallpox.[33]
With the initial conquest of the Americas completed, the Spanish implemented the encomienda system. In theory, encomienda placed groups of indigenous peoples under Spanish oversight to foster cultural assimilation and conversion to Christianity, but in practice led to the legally sanctioned exploitation of natural resources and forced labor under brutal conditions with a high death rate. Though the Spaniards did not set out to exterminate the indigenous peoples, believing their numbers to be inexhaustible, their actions led to the annihilation of entire tribes such as the Arawak.[34] In the 1760s, an expedition dispatched to fortify California, led by Gaspar de Portolà and Junípero Serra, was marked by slavery, forced conversions and genocide through the introduction of disease.[35]
Canada
Officially, the last of the Beothuks, Shanawdithit (ca. 1801 – June 6, 1829)
._Daughter_of_Beothuk_woman_called_%27Elizabeth%27_%26_husband_Samuel_Anstey_(1832-1923)._Twillingate.jpg)
Suzannah Anstey (née Manuel. 1832–1911). Daughter of Beothuk woman called 'Elizabeth' & husband Samuel Anstey (1832–1923). Twillingate
Scholars have not generally described the process of settler colonialism in Canada as genocidal, although some scholars have argued that it should be recognized as such. More recent understandings of the concept of genocide and its relation to settler colonialism have led modern scholars to a renewed discussion of the genocidal aspects of the Canadian states' role in producing and legitimating the process of physical and cultural destruction of Indigenous people.[36] In the 1990s some scholars began pushing for Canada to recognize the Canadian Indian residential school system as a genocidal process rooted in colonialism.[37] This public debate led to the formation of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was formed in 2008.[38][39]
By 1829, with the death of Shanawdithit, the Beothuk people, the indigenous people of Newfoundland were officially declared extinct after suffering epidemics, starvation, loss of access to food sources, and slaughter by English and French fishermen and traders.[40]
The residential school system was established following the passage of the Indian Act in 1876. The system was designed to remove children from the influence of their families and culture with the aim of assimilating them into the dominant Canadian culture.[41] The final school closed in 1996.[42] Over the course of the system's existence, about 30% of native children, or roughly 150,000, were placed in residential schools nationally; at least 6,000 of these students died while in attendance.[43][44] The system has been described as cultural genocide: "killing the Indian in the child."[45][46][47] Part of this process during the 1960s through the 1980s, dubbed the Sixties Scoop, was investigated and the child seizures deemed genocidal by Judge Edwin Kimelman, who wrote: "You took a child from his or her specific culture and you placed him into a foreign culture without any [counselling] assistance to the family which had the child. There is something dramatically and basically wrong with that."[48] another aspect of the residential school systems was its use of forced sterilization of Indigenous women who chose not to follow the schools advice of marrying non-Indigenous men. Indigenous women made up only 2.5% of the Canadian population, but 25% of those who were sterilized under the Canadian Eugenics laws (such as the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta) - many without their knowledge or consent.[49]
The Executive Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the state pursued a policy of cultural genocide through forced assimilation.[50] The ambiguity of the phrasing allowed for the interpretation that physical and biological genocide also occurred. The Commission, however, was not authorized to conclude that physical and biologcial genocide occurred, as such a finding would imply a difficult to prove legal responsibility for the Canadian government. As a result, the debate about whether the Canadian government also committed physical and biological genocide against Indigenous populations remains open.[38][39]
Mexico
In 1835, the government of Mexican state Sonora put a bounty on the Apache which, over time, evolved into a payment by the government of 100 pesos for each scalp of a male 14 or more years old.[51] Author and historian James L. Haley wrote: "Beginning in 1837 Chihuahua state also offered bounty, 100 pesos per warrior, 50 pesos per woman, and 25 pesos per child, nothing more or less than genocide."[51] According to Harris Worcester: "The new policy attracted a diverse group of men, including Anglos, runaway slaves led by Seminole John Horse, and Indians — Kirker used Delawares and Shawnees; others, such as Terrazas, used Tarahumaras; and Seminole Chief Coacoochee led a band of his own people who had fled from Indian Territory."[52]Yaquis
The Mexican government's response to the various uprisings of the Yaqui tribe have been likened to genocide particularly under Porfirio Diaz.[53] Due to slavery and massacre, the population of the Yaqui tribe in Mexico was reduced from 30,000 to 7,000 under Diaz's rule. One source estimates at least 20,000 out of these Yaquis were victims of state murders in Sonora.[54][55]The Southern Cone.
Both Argentina and Chile launched campaigns of territorial expansion in the second half of the 19th century, at the expenses of indigenous peoples and neighbor states. The so-called Pacification of the Araucania by the Chilean army dispossessed the up-to-then independent Mapuche people between the 1860s and the 1880s, as did Argentina with the Conquest of the Desert.[56] In southern Patagonia, both states occupied indigenous land and ocean, and facilitated the genocide implemented by sheep-farmers and the Salesian priests in Tierra del Fuego.[57] Argentina also expanded northward, dispossessing a number of Chaco peoples through a policy that may be considered as genocidal.[58]United States colonization and westward expansion
In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands launched colonization efforts in the part of North America that is now the United States.[59] The United States has not been legally admonished by the international community for genocidal acts against its indigenous population, but many historians and academics describe events such as The Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre and the Mendocino War as genocidal in nature.[60] The letters of British commander Jeffery Amherst indicated genocidal intent when he authorized the deliberate use of disease-infected blankets as a biological weapon against indigenous populations during the 1763 Pontiac's Rebellion, saying, "You will Do well to try to Inoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execreble Race", and instructing his subordinates, "I need only Add, I Wish to Hear of no prisoners should any of the villains be met with arms."[13][61][62] When smallpox swept the northern plains of the U.S. in 1837, the U.S. Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered that no Mandan (along with the Arikara, the Cree, and the Blackfeet) be given smallpox vaccinations, which were provided to other tribes in other areas.[63][64][65]Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears
Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830 the American government began forcibly relocating East Coast tribes across the Mississippi. The removal included many members of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations, among others in the United States, from their homelands to Indian Territory in eastern sections of the present-day state of Oklahoma. About 2,500–6,000 died along the Trail of Tears. [66] Chalk and Jonassohn assert that the deportation of the Cherokee tribe along the Trail of Tears would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today.[67] The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the exodus. About 17,000 Cherokees—along with approximately 2,000 Cherokee-owned black slaves—were removed from their homes.[68] The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with one party, estimated 4,000 deaths.[69]Historians such as David Stannard[70] and Barbara Mann[71] have noted that the army deliberately routed the march of the Cherokee to pass through areas of known cholera epidemic, such as Vicksburg. Stannard estimates that during the forced removal from their homelands, following the Indian Removal Act signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, 8000 Cherokee died, about half the total population.[70]
American Indian Wars
A mass grave being dug for frozen bodies from the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, in which the U.S. Army killed 150 Lakota people, marking the end of the American Indian Wars
During the American Indian Wars, the American Army carried out a number of massacres and forced relocations of Indigenous peoples that are sometimes considered genocide. The Sand Creek Massacre, which caused outrage in its own time, has been called genocide. General John Chivington led a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia in a massacre of 70–163 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho, about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants. Chivington and his men took scalps and other body parts as trophies, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia.[72] In defense of his actions Chivington stated,
Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.
— - Col. John Milton Chivington, U.S. Army[73]
Colonization of California
The U.S. colonization of California started in earnest in 1845, with the Mexican–American War. With the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, signed in 1848, supposedly giving the United States authority over 525,000 square miles of new territory. In addition to Gold Rush slaughter, there was also a large number of state-subsidized massacres by colonists against Native Americans in the territory, causing several entire ethnic groups to be wiped out. In one such series of conflicts, the so-called Mendocino War and the subsequent Round Valley War, the entirety of the Yuki people was brought to the brink of extinction, from a previous population of some 3,500 people to fewer than 100. According to Russell Thornton, estimates of the pre-Columbian population of California was at least 310,000, and perhaps as much as 705,000. By 1849, due to Spanish and Mexican colonization and epidemics this number had decreased to 100,000. But from 1849 and up until 1890 the Indigenous population of California had fallen below 20,000, primarily because of the killings.[74] At least 4,500 California Indians were killed between 1849 and 1870, while many more perished due to disease and starvation.[75] 10,000 Indians were also kidnapped and sold as slaves.[76]One California law made it legal to declare any jobless Indian a vagrant, then auction his services off for up to four months. And it permitted whites to force Indian children to work for them until they were eighteen, provided that they obtained permission from what the law referred to as a 'friend' was obtained first. Whites hunted down adult Indians in the mountains, kidnapped their children, and sold them as apprentices for as little as $50. Indians could not complain in court because by another California statute 'no Indian or Black or Mulatto person was permitted to give evidence in favor of or against a white person'. One contemporary wrote "The minor are sometimes guilty of the most brutal acts with the Indians... such incidents have fallen under my notice that would make humanity weep and men disown their race".[77] The towns of Marysville and Honey Lake paid bounties for Indian scalps. Shasta City offered $5 for every Indian head brought to City Hall; and California's State Treasury reimbursed many of the local governments for their expenses.
Politics of modern Brazil
It has also been argued that genocide has occurred during the modern era with the ongoing destruction of the Jivaro, Yanomami and other tribes.[78][79] Over 80 indigenous tribes disappeared between 1900 and 1957, and of a population of over one million during this period 80% had been killed through deculturalization,[how?] disease, or murder.[80]Russian Empire's conquest of Siberia
The Russian conquest of Siberia was accompanied by massacres due to indigenous resistance to colonization by the Russian Cossacks, who savagely crushed the natives. At the hands of people like Vasilii Poyarkov in 1645 and Yerofei Khabarov in 1650 some peoples like the Daur were slaughtered by the Russians to the extent that it is considered genocide. 8,000 out of a previously 20,000 strong population in Kamchatka remained after being subjected to half a century of Cossacks slaughter.[81]
In the 1640s the Yakuts were subjected to massacres during the Russian advance into their land near the Lena river, and on Kamchatka in the 1690s the Koryak, Kamchadals, and Chukchi were also subjected to massacres by the Russians.[82] When the Russians did not obtain the demanded amount of yasak from the natives, the Governor of Yakutsk, Piotr Golovin, who was a Cossack, used meat hooks to hang the native men. In the Lena basin, 70% of the Yakut population died within 40 years, and rape and enslavement were used against native women and children in order to force the natives to pay the Yasak.[83]
In Kamchatka the Russians savagely crushed the Itelmens uprisings against their rule in 1706, 1731, and 1741, the first time the Itelmen were armed with stone weapons and were badly unprepared and equipped but they used gunpowder weapons the second time. The Russians faced tougher resistance when from 1745-56 they tried to exterminate the gun and bow equipped Koraks until their victory. The Russian Cossacks also faced fierce resistance and were forced to give up when trying unsuccessfully to wipe out the Chukchi through genocide in 1729, 1730-1, and 1744-7.[84] After the Russian defeat in 1729 at Chukchi hands, the Russian commander Major Pavlutskiy was responsible for the Russian war against the Chukchi and the mass slaughters and enslavement of Chukchi women and children in 1730-31, but his cruelty only made the Chukchis fight more fiercely.[85] A genocide of the Chukchis and Koraks was ordered by Empress Elizabeth in 1742 to totally expel them from their native lands and erase their culture through war. The command was that the natives be "totally extirpated" with Pavlutskiy leading again in this war from 1744-47 in which he led to the Cossacks "with the help of Almighty God and to the good fortune of Her Imperial Highness", to slaughter the Chukchi men and enslave their women and children as booty. However the Chukchi ended this campaign and forced them to give up by killing Pavlitskiy and decapitating his head.[86] The Russians were also launching wars and slaughters against the Koraks in 1744 and 1753-4. After the Russians tried to force the natives to convert to Christianity, the different native peoples like the Koraks, Chukchis, Itelmens, and Yukagirs all united to drive the Russians out of their land in the 1740s, culminating in the assault on Nizhnekamchatsk fort in 1746.[87] Kamchatka today is European in demographics and culture with only 2.5% of it being native, around 10,000 from a previous number of 150,000, due to the mass slaughters by the Cossacks after its annexation in 1697 of the Itelmen and Koryaks throughout the first decades of Russian rule.[88] The genocide by the Russian Cossacks devastated the native peoples of Kamchatka and exterminated much of their population.[89][90] In addition to committing genocide they Cossacks also devastated the wildlife by slaughtering massive numbers of animals for fur.[91] 90% of the Kamchadals and half of the Vogules were killed from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and the rapid genocide of the indigenous population led to entire ethnic groups being entirely wiped out, with around 12 exterminated groups which could be named by Nikolai Iadrintsev as of 1882. Much of the slaughter was brought on by the fur trade.[92]
The Aleuts in the Aleutians were subjected to genocide and slavery by the Russians for the first 20 years of Russian rule, with the Aleut women and children captured by the Russians and Aleut men slaughtered.[93]
The Russian colonization of Siberia and treatment of the resident indigenous peoples has been compared to European colonization of the Americas, with similar negative impacts on the indigenous Siberians as upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas. One of these commonalities is the appropriation of indigenous peoples' land.[94]
Japanese colonization of Hokkaido
The Ainu are an indigenous people in Japan (Hokkaidō).[95] In a 2009 news story, Japan Today reported, "Many Ainu were forced to work, essentially as slaves, for Wajin (ethnic Japanese), resulting in the breakup of families and the introduction of smallpox, measles, cholera and tuberculosis into their community. In 1869, the new Meiji government renamed Ezo as Hokkaido and unilaterally incorporated it into Japan. It banned the Ainu language, took Ainu land away, and prohibited salmon fishing and deer hunting."[96] Roy Thomas wrote: "Ill treatment of native peoples is common to all colonial powers, and, at its worst, leads to genocide. Japan's native people, the Ainu, have, however, been the object of a particularly cruel hoax, as the Japanese have refused to accept them officially as a separate minority people."[97] The Ainu have emphasized that they were the natives of the Kuril islands and that the Japanese and Russians were both invaders.[98] In 2004, the small Ainu community living in Russia in Kamchatka Krai wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to reconsider any move to award the Southern Kuril islands to Japan. In the letter they blamed the Japanese, the Tsarist Russians and the Soviets for crimes against the Ainu such as killings and assimilation, and also urged him to recognize the Japanese genocide against the Ainu people, which was turned down by Putin.[99]Vietnamese conquest of Champa
Dzungar genocide
The massacre of Oroi-Jalatu, 1756. Manchu general Zhao Hui attacked the Dzungars at night.
Some scholars estimate that about 80% of the Dzungar (Western Mongol) population (600,000 or more) were destroyed by a combination of warfare and disease in the Dzungar genocide during the Qing conquest of Dzungar Khanate in 1755–1757, in which Manchu Bannermen and Khalkha Mongols exterminated the Dzungar Oirat Mongols.[100] Mark Levene, a historian whose recent research interests focus on genocide,[101] has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was "arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence."[102]
Anti-Zunghar Uyghur rebels from the Turfan and Hami oases had submitted to Qing rule as vassals and requested Qing help for overthrowing Zunghar rule. Uyghur leaders like Emin Khoja were granted titles within the Qing nobility, and these Uyghurs helped supply the Qing military forces during the anti-Zunghar campaign.[103][104][105] The Qing employed Khoja Emin in its campaign against the Zunghars and used him as an intermediary with Muslims from the Tarim Basin to inform them that the Qing were only aiming to kill Oirats (Zunghars) and that they would leave the Muslims alone, and also to convince them to kill the Oirats (Zunghars) themselves and side with the Qing since the Qing noted the Muslims' resentment of their former experience under Zunghar rule at the hands of Tsewang Araptan.[106]
The Qing were the ones who unified Xinjiang and changed its demographic situation.[107] The depopulation of northern Xinjiang after the Buddhist Öölöd Mongols (Zunghars) were slaughtered, led to the Qing settling Manchu, Sibo (Xibe), Daurs, Solons, Han Chinese, Hui Muslims, and Turkic Muslim Taranchis in the north, with Han Chinese and Hui migrants making up the greatest number of settlers. Since it was the crushing of the Buddhist Öölöd (Dzungars) by the Qing which led to the promotion of Islam and the empowerment of the Muslim Begs in southern Xinjiang, and migration of Muslim Taranchis to northern Xinjiang, it was proposed by Henry Schwarz that "the Qing victory was, in a certain sense, a victory for Islam".[108] Xinjiang's identity as a unified geographic region was created and developed by the Qing. It was the Qing who contributed to the rise of Turkic Muslim power in the region since Mongol power was crushed by the Qing while Turkic Muslim culture and identity was tolerated or even promoted by the Qing.[109]
Kim Lacy Rogers wrote: "In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while the Hmong lived in south-western China, their Manchu overlords had labelled them 'Miao' and targeted them for genocide when they defied being humiliated, oppressed, and enslaved."[110][111]
British Empire
Ireland's Holocaust mural in Belfast. British government policy during the time of The Great Famine in Ireland remains controversial.
In places like the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada settler colonialism caused the indigenous population to decrease by over half after becoming a British colony. Foreign land viewed as attractive for settlement was declared as terra nullius or "nobody's land". The indigenous inhabitants were therefore denied any sovereignty or property rights in the eyes of the British.[112] This justified invasion and the violent seizure of native land to create colonies populated by British settlers. Colonization like this usually caused a large decrease in the indigenous population from war, newly introduced diseases, massacre by colonists and attempts at forced assimilation. The settlers from Britain and Europe grew rapidly in number and created entirely new societies. The indigenous population became an oppressed minority in their own country. The gradual violent expansion of colonies into indigenous land could last for centuries, as it did in the Australian frontier wars and American Indian Wars.[113]
Genocide and discrimination has a severely negative impact on the indigenous peoples. The number of Australian Aborigines declined by 84% after British colonization.[114] The Maori population of New Zealand suffered a 57% drop from its highest point.[115] In Canada, the indigenous first nations population of British Columbia decreased by 75%.[116] Surviving indigenous groups continued to suffer from severe racially motivated discrimination from their new colonial societies.[117] Aboriginal children, the Stolen Generations, were confiscated by the Australian government and subject to forced assimilation and child abuse for most of the 20th century. Aborigines were only granted the right to vote in 1962.[118] According to the New Zealand Ministry of Health, in the present day "Māori adults were almost twice as likely as non-Māori adults to have experienced any type of racial discrimination".[119] Similarly, the Canadian government has apologized for its historical "attitudes of racial and cultural superiority" and "suppression" of the first nations, including its role in residential schools where first nation children were confined and abused.[120] Canada has been accused of genocide for its historical compulsory sterilization of indigenous peoples in Alberta during the fears of jobs being stolen by immigrants and living lives of poverty provoked by the great depression.[121]
It has proven a controversial question whether the drastic population decline can be considered an example of genocide, and scholars have argued whether the process as a whole or specific periods and local processes qualify under the legal definition. Raphael Lemkin, the originator of the term "genocide", considered the colonial replacement of Native Americans by English and later British colonists to be one of the historical examples of genocide.[122] Historian Niall Ferguson has referred to the case in Tasmania as "an event that truly merits the now overused term 'genocide'",[123] and mentions Ireland and North America as areas that suffered ethnic cleansing at the hands of the British.[124] According to Patrick Wolfe in the Journal of Genocide Research, the "frontier massacring of indigenous peoples" by the British constitutes a genocide.[125]
Colonization of Australia and Tasmania
The so-called extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines is regarded as a classic case of near genocide by Lemkin, most comparative scholars of genocide, and many general historians, including Robert Hughes, Ward Churchill, Leo Kuper and Jared Diamond, who base their analysis on previously published histories.[126] Between 1824 and 1908 White settlers and Native Mounted Police in Queensland, according to Raymond Evans, killed more than 10,000 Aborigines, who were regarded as vermin and sometimes even hunted for sport.[127]Of an estimated population in 1788 of over half a million, fewer than 50,000 Australian Aborigines survived by 1900. Most perished from introduced diseases, but possibly 20,000 Aborigines were killed by British troops, police, and settlers in warfare and massacres accompanying their dispossession.[128]Ben Kiernan, an Australian historian of genocide, treats the Australian evidence over the first century of colonization as an example of genocide in his 2007 history of the concept and practice, Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur.[129] The Australian practice of removing the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent from their families, has been described as genocidal.[130][131] The 1997 report "Bringing them Home" concluded that the forced separation of Aboriginal children from their family constituted an act of genocide. [132] In the 1990s a number of Australian state institutions, including the state of Queensland, apologized for its policies regarding forcible separation of aboriginal children.[133] Another allegation against the Australian state is the use of medical services to Aboriginals to administer contraceptive therapy to aboriginal women without their knowledge or consent, including the use of Depo Provera, as well as tubal ligations. Both forced adoption and forced contraception would fall under the provisions of the UN genocide convention.[134] Some Australian scholars, including historian Geoffrey Blainey, political scientist Ken Minogue and prominently professor Keith Windschuttle, reject the view that Australian aboriginal policy was genocidal.[135]
Rubber Boom in Congo and Putumayo
Amazonian Indians enslaved during the rubber boom in the Putumayo region of Peru
From 1879 to 1912, the world experienced a rubber boom. Rubber prices skyrocketed, and it became increasingly profitable to extract rubber from rainforest zones in South America and Central Africa. Rubber extraction was labor-intensive, and the need for a large workforce had a significant negative effect on the indigenous population across Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia and in the Congo. The owners of the plantations or rubber barons were rich, but those who collected the rubber made very little, as a large amount of rubber was needed to be profitable. Rubber barons rounded up all the Indians and forced them to tap rubber out of the trees. Slavery and gross human rights abuses were widespread, and in some areas 90% of the Indian population was wiped out. One plantation started with 50,000 Indians and when the killings were discovered, only 8,000 were still alive. These rubber plantations were part of the Brazilian rubber market which declined as rubber plantations in Southeast Asia became more effective.[136]
Roger Casement, an Irishman travelling the Putumayo region of Peru as a British consul during 1910-1911, documented the abuse, slavery, murder and use of stocks for torture against the native Indians: [137]
"The crimes charged against many men now in the employ of the Peruvian Amazon Company are of the most atrocious kind, including murder, violation, and constant flogging."
Congo Free State
Under Leopold II of Belgium the population loss in the Congo Free State is estimated at sixty percent.[138] Congo Free State was especially hard hit by sleeping sickness and smallpox epidemics.[139]Herero and Namaqua genocide
Atrocities against the indigenous African population by the German colonial empire can be dated to the earliest German settlements on the continent. The German colonial authorities carried out genocide in German South-West Africa (GSWA) and the survivors were incarcerated in concentration camps. It was also reported that, between 1885 and 1918, the indigenous population of Togo, German East Africa (GEA) and the Cameroons suffered from various human rights abuses including starvation from scorched earth tactics and forced relocation for use as labour. The German Empire's action in GSWA against the Herero tribe is considered by Howard Ball to be the first genocide of the 20th century.[140] After the Herero, Namaqua and Damara began an uprising against the colonial government,[141] General Lothar von Trotha, appointed as head of the German forces in GSWA by Emperor Wilhelm II in 1904, gave the order for the German forces to push them into the desert where they would die.[142] In 2004, the German state apologised for the genocide.[143] While many argue that the military campaign in Tanzania to suppress the Maji Maji Rebellion in GEA between 1905 and 1907 was not an act of genocide, as the military did not have as an intentional goal the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Africans, according to Dominik J. Schaller, the statement [Note 2] released at the time by Governor Gustav Adolf von Götzen did not exculpate him from the charge of genocide, but was proof that the German administration knew that their scorched earth methods would result in famine.[144] It is estimated that 200,000 Africans died from famine with some areas completely and permanently devoid of human life.[145][146][147]
Japanese genocide of Oroqen and Hezhen
The Japanese performed "bacterial experiments" on the Oroqen people and forced opium on them which led to death and their population declining until only 1,000 remained.[148][149][150][151][152] The Japanese banned Oroqen from communicating with other ethnicities, and forced them to hunt animals to them in exchange for starvation rations and unsuitable clothing which let them die from the weather. The Japanese also forced Oroqen adults older than 18 to take opium. After 2 Japanese troops were killed in Alihe by an Oroqen hunter, the Japanese poisoned 40 Oroqen to death.[153] The Japanese forced Oroqen to fight for them in the war which led to a massive population derease of Oroqen people.[154]The Hezhen population declined by 90% due to deaths from Japanese cruelty, opium, such as slave labor and relocation by the Japanese.[155][156][157][158] Only 300 Hezhen were left alive when the Japanese were defeated in 1945 from the earlier figure of 1,200 in 1930.[159] It has been described as genocide.[160]
Contemporary examples
The genocide of indigenous tribes is still an ongoing feature in the modern world, with the ongoing depopulation of the Jivaro, Yanomami and other tribes in Brazil having been described as genocide.[79] The states actions in Bangladesh, against the Jumma have been described internationally as ethnic cleansing and genocide.[161][162][163] Paraguay has also been accused of carrying out a genocide against the Aché whose case was brought before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. The commission gave a provisional ruling that genocide had not been committed by the state, but did express concern over "possible abuses by private persons in remote areas of the territory of Paraguay."[164]Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, the persecution of the indigenous tribes of the Chittagong Hill Tracts such as the Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Jumma people and others who are mainly Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, and Animists, has been described as genocidal.[165][166][167][168][169] The Chittagong Hill Tracts are located bordering India, Myanmar and the Bay of Bengal, and is the home to 500,000 indigenous people. The perpetrators are the Bangladeshi military and the Bengali Muslim settlers, who together have burned down Buddhist and Hindu temples, killed many Chakmas, and carried out a policy of gang-rape against the indigenous people. There are also accusations of Chakmas being forced to convert to Islam. The conflict started soon after Bangladeshi independence, in 1972 when the Constitution imposed Bengali as the sole official language, Islam as the state religion - with no cultural or linguistic rights to minority populations. Subsequently, the government encouraged and sponsored massive settlement by Bangladeshis in the region, which changed the demographics from 98 percent indigenous in 1972 to fifty percent by 2000. The government allocated a full third of the Bangladeshi military to the region to support the settlers, sparking a protracted guerrilla war between Hill tribes and the military.[166] During this conflict which officially ended in 1997 a large number of human rights violations against the indigenous peoples have been reported.[170] Amnesty estimates that there are currently only 900 internally displaced indigenous families. After 1997 the region has become peaceful. However following the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord in 1997, according to Amnesty International as of June 2013 the Bangladeshi government made "praiseworthy progress" in implementing the terms of the peace accord and in addressing the indigenous people's concerns over the return of their land. , of whom Bangladesh has promised their best efforts in ensuring their welfare.[171] Chakmas also live in India's Tripura state where a Tripuri separatist movement is going on.[172]Brazil
Indigenous protesters from Vale do Javari in Belém
In the late 1950s until 1968, the state of Brazil submitted their indigenous peoples of Brazil to violent attempts to integrate, pacify and acculturate their communities. In 1967 public prosecutor Jader de Figueiredo Correia, submitted the Figueiredo Report to the dictatorship which was then ruling the country, the report which ran to seven thousand pages was not released until 2013. The report documents genocidal crimes against the indigenous peoples of Brazil, including mass murder, torture and bacteriological and chemical warfare, reported slavery, and sexual abuse. The rediscovered documents are being examined by the National Truth Commission who have been tasked with the investigations of human rights violations which occurred in the periods 1947 through to 1988. The report reveals that the IPS had enslaved indigenous people, tortured children and stolen land. The Truth Commission is of the opinion that entire tribes in Maranhão were completely eradicated and in Mato Grosso, an attack on thirty Cinturão Largo left only two survivors. The report also states that landowners and members of the IPS had entered isolated villages and deliberately introduced smallpox. Of the one hundred and thirty-four people accused in the report the state has as yet not tried a single one,[173] since the Amnesty Law passed in the end of the dictatorship does not allow trials for the abuses which happened in such period. The report also detailed instances of mass killings, rapes, and torture, Figueiredo stated that the actions of the IPS had left the indigenous peoples near extinction. The state abolished the IPS following the release of the report. The Red Cross launched an investigation after further allegations of ethnic cleansing were made after the IPS had been replaced. [174][175]
Colombia
In the protracted conflict in Colombia, indigenous groups such as the Awá, Wayuu, Pijao and Paez people have become subjected to intense violence by right-wing paramilitaries, leftist guerrillas, and the Colombian army.[176][177] Drug cartels, international resource extraction companies and the military have also used violence to force the indigenous groups out of their territories.[178][179][180] The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia argues that the violence is genocidal in nature, but others question whether there is a "genocidal intent" as required in international law.[181][182]Congo (DRC)
In the Democratic Republic of Congo genocidal violence against the indigenous Mbuti, Lese and Ituri peoples has been endemic for decades. During the Congo Civil War (1998–2003), Pygmies were hunted down and eaten by both sides in the conflict, who regarded them as subhuman.[183] Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, has asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity and also as an act of genocide.[184] According to a report by Minority Rights Group International there is evidence of mass killings, cannibalism and rape. The report, which labeled these events as a campaign of extermination, linked much of the violence to beliefs about special powers held by the Bambuti.[185] In Ituri district, rebel forces ran an operation code-named "Effacer le Tableau" (to wipe the slate clean). The aim of the operation, according to witnesses, was to rid the forest of pygmies.[186][187][188]East Timor genocide
Indonesia invaded East Timor or Timor-Leste, which had previously been a Portuguese colony, in 1975. Following this, the Indonesian government encouraged repressive military policies to deal with ethnic protests and armed resistance in the area and encouraged settlement to the region by people from other parts of Indonesia. The violence between 1975 and 1993 had claimed between 120,000 and 200,000 people. The repression entered the international spotlight in 1991 when a protest in Dili was disrupted by Indonesian forces who killed over 250 people and disappeared hundreds of others. The Santa Cruz massacre, as the event became known, drew significant international attention to the issue (highlighted with the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize being provided to Catholic Bishop Carlos Belo and resistance leader José Ramos-Horta). Following the international outcry, the Indonesian government began organizing a host of paramilitary groups in East Timor which continued harassing and killing pro-independence activists. At the same time, the Indonesian government significantly increased efforts at population resettlement to the area and destruction of infrastructure and the environment used by East Timorese communities. This eventually resulted in an international intervention force to be deployed for a vote by the population for independence of East Timor in 1999. The vote was significant in favor of independence and the Indonesian forces withdrew, although paramilitaries continued carrying out reprisal attacks for a few years.[189][190] A UN Report on the Indonesian occupation identified starvation, defoliant and napalm use, torture, rape, sexual slavery, disappearances, public executions, and extrajudicial killings as sanctioned by the Indonesian government and the entire colflict resulting in reducing the population to a third of its 1975 level.[191]Guatemalan genocide
During the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) the state forces carried out violent atrocities against the Maya. The government considered the Maya to be aligned with the communist insurgents, which they sometimes were but often were not. Guatemalan armed forces carried out three campaigns that have been described as genocidal. The first was a scorched earth policy which was also accompanied by mass killing, including the forced conscription of Mayan boys into the military where they were sometimes forced to participate in massacres against their own home villages. The second was to hunt down and exterminate those who had survived and evaded the army and the third was the forced relocation of survivors to "reeducation centers" and the continued pursuit of those who had fled into the mountains.[192] The armed forces used genocidal rape of women and children as a deliberate tactic. Children were bludgeoned to death by beating them against walls or thrown alive into mass graves where they would be crushed by the weight of the adult dead thrown atop them.[193] An estimated 200,000 people, most of them Maya, disappeared during the Guatemalan Civil War.[188] After the 1996 peace accords, a legal process was begun to determine the legal responsibility of the atrocities, and to locate and identify the disappeared. In 2013 former president Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to 80 years imprisonment.[194] Ten days later, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala overturned the conviction.[195][196]Irian Jaya/West Papua
From the time of its independence until the late 1960s, the Indonesian government sought control of the Western half of the island of New Guinea, the area called Irian Jaya or West Papua, which had remained under the control of the Netherlands.[197] When it finally achieved internationally recognized control of the area, a number of clashes occurred between the Indonesian government and the Free Papua Movement. The government of Indonesia began a series of measures aimed to suppress the organization in the 1970s and the suppression reached high levels in the mid-1980s.[198] The resulting human rights abuses included extrajudicial killings, torture, disappearances, rape, and harassment of indigenous people throughout the province.[199] A 2004 report by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School identified both the mass violence and the transmigration policies which encouraged Balinese and Javanese families to relocate to the area as strong evidence "that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide."[200] Genocide against indigenous people in the region were key claims made in the U.S. case of Beanal v. Freeport, one of the first lawsuits where indigenous people outside the U.S. petitioned to get a ruling against a multinational corporation for environmental destruction outside of the U.S. While the petitioner, an indigenous leader, claimed that the mining company Freeport-McMoRan had committed genocide through environmental destruction which "resulted in the purposeful, deliberate, contrived and planned demise of a culture of indigenous people," the court found that genocide pertains only to destruction of indigenous people and did not apply to the destruction of the culture of indigenous people; however, the court did leave open the opportunity for the petitioners to amend their filings with additional claim.[201]Myanmar
In Myanmar (Burma), the long-running civil war between the Military Junta and the insurgents has resulted in widespread atrocities against the indigenous Karen people some of whom are allied with the insurgents. These atrocities have been described as genocidal.[202] Burmese General Maung Hla stated that one day the Karen will only exist "in a museum"[203] The government has deployed 50 battalions in the Northern sector systematically attacking Karen villages with mortar and machine gun fire, and landmines. At least 446,000 Karen have been displaced from their homes by the military.[202][204] Karen are also reported to have been subjected to forced labor, genocidal rape, child labor and the conscription of child soldiers.[205] The Rohingya people have also been subjected to Persecution of Muslims in Myanmar mass killings and forced displacement. The Myanmar army burned their villages and forced them to flee the country. Mass graves of many victims of genocide were discovered. By 2017 over 600,000 Rohingya people fled to Bangladesh, who were praised for giving shelter to them.[206][207]Paraguay
There are 17 indigenous tribes who live primarily in the Chaco region of Paraguay. In 2002, their numbers were estimated at 86,000. During the period between 1954 and 1989, when the military dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner ruled Paraguay, the indigenous population of the country suffered from more loss of territory and human rights abuses than at any other time in the nation's history. In early 1970, international groups claimed that the state was complicit in the genocide of the Aché, with charges ranging from kidnapping and the sale of children, withholding medicines and food, slavery and torture.[208] During the 1960s and 1970s, 85% of the Aché tribe died, often hacked to death with machetes, in order to make room for the timber industry, mining, farming and ranchers.[78] According to Jérémie Gilbert, the situation in Paraguay has proven that it is difficult to provide the proof required to show "specific intent", in support of a claim that genocide had occurred. The Aché, whose cultural group is now seen as extinct, fell victim to development by the state who had promoted the exploration of their territories by transnational companies for natural resources. Gilbert concludes that although a planned and voluntary destruction had occurred, it is argued by the state that there was no intent to destroy the Aché, as what had happened was due to development and was not a deliberate action.[209][210]Tibet
On 5 June 1959 Shri Purshottam Trikamdas, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India, presented a report on Tibet to the International Commission of Jurists (an NGO):| “ | From the facts stated above the following conclusions may be drawn: ... (e) To examine all such evidence obtained by this Committee and from other sources and to take appropriate action thereon and in particular to determine whether the crime of Genocide – for which already there is strong presumption – is established and, in that case, to initiate such action as envisaged by the Genocide Convention of 1948 and by the Charter of the United Nations for suppression of these acts and appropriate redress;[211] | ” |
According to the Tibet Society of the UK, "In all, over one million Tibetans, a fifth of the population, had died as a result of Chinese occupation right up until the end of the Cultural Revolution."
