An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies,
which have resulted in rapid growth of a variety of forms of
information. Proponents of this theory posit that these technologies are
impacting most important forms of social organization, including education, economy, health, government, warfare, and levels of democracy. The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens,
defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and
effectively”. This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been
identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase
of society.
There
is currently no universally accepted concept of what exactly can be
defined as an information society and what shall not be included in the
term. Most theoreticians agree that a transformation can be seen as
started somewhere between the 1970s, the early 1990s transformations of
the Socialist East
and the 2000s period that formed most of today's net principles and
currently as is changing the way societies work fundamentally.
Information technology goes beyond the internet,
as the principles of internet design and usage influence other areas,
and there are discussions about how big the influence of specific media
or specific modes of production really is. Frank Webster notes five
major types of information that can be used to define information
society: technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural.
According to Webster, the character of information has transformed the
way that we live today. How we conduct ourselves centers around
theoretical knowledge and information.
Kasiwulaya and Gomo (Makerere University) allude
that information societies are those that have intensified their use of
IT for economic, social, cultural and political transformation. In
2005, governments reaffirmed their dedication to the foundations of the
Information
Society in the Tunis Commitment
and outlined the basis for implementation and follow-up in the Tunis
Agenda for the Information Society. In particular, the Tunis Agenda
addresses the issues of financing of ICTs for development and Internet
governance that could not be resolved in the first phase.
Some people, such as Antonio Negri, characterize the information society as one in which people do immaterial labour.
By this, they appear to refer to the production of knowledge or
cultural artifacts. One problem with this model is that it ignores the
material and essentially industrial basis of the society. However it
does point to a problem for workers, namely how many creative people
does this society need to function? For example, it may be that you
only need a few star performers, rather than a plethora of
non-celebrities, as the work of those performers can be easily
distributed, forcing all secondary players to the bottom of the market.
It is now common for publishers to promote only their best
selling authors and to try to avoid the rest—even if they still sell
steadily. Films are becoming more and more judged, in terms of
distribution, by their first weekend's performance, in many cases
cutting out opportunity for word-of-mouth development.
Michael Buckland characterizes information in society in his book Information and Society.
Buckland expresses the idea that information can be interpreted
differently from person to person based on that individual's
experiences.
Considering that metaphors and technologies of information move
forward in a reciprocal relationship, we can describe some societies
(especially the Japanese society) as an information society because we think of it as such.
The word information may be interpreted in many different ways. According to Buckland in Information and Society,
most of the meanings fall into three categories of human knowledge:
information as knowledge, information as a process, and information as a
thing.
Thus, the Information Society refers to the social importance
given to communication and information in today's society, where social,
economic and cultural relations are involved.
In the Information Society, the process of capturing, processing
and communicating information is the main element that characterizes it.
Thus, in this type of society, the vast majority of it will be
dedicated to the provision of services and said services will consist of
the processing, distribution or use of information.
The growth of computer information in society
Internet users per 100 inhabitants
The amount of data stored globally has increased greatly since the 1980s, and by 2007, 94% of it was stored digitally.
The growth of the amount of technologically mediated information has
been quantified in different ways, including society's technological
capacity to store information, to communicate information, and to
compute information. It is estimated that, the world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, which is the informational equivalent to less than one 730-MB CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), to 295 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007. This is the informational equivalent of 60 CD-ROM per person in 2007
and represents a sustained annual growth rate of some 25%. The world's
combined technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was the informational equivalent of 174 newspapers per person per day in 2007.
The world's combined effective capacity to exchange information through two-way telecommunication networks was 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986, 471 petabytes in 1993, 2.2 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000, and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, which is the informational equivalent of 6 newspapers per person per day in 2007.
The world's technological capacity to compute information with humanly
guided general-purpose computers grew from 3.0 × 10^8 MIPS in 1986, to
6.4 x 10^12 MIPS in 2007, experiencing the fastest growth rate of over
60% per year during the last two decades.
James R. Beniger
describes the necessity of information in modern society in the
following way: “The need for sharply increased control that resulted
from the industrialization of material processes through application of
inanimate sources of energy probably accounts for the rapid development
of automatic feedback technology in the early industrial period
(1740-1830)” (p. 174)
“Even with enhanced feedback control, industry could not have developed
without the enhanced means to process matter and energy, not only as
inputs of the raw materials of production but also as outputs
distributed to final consumption.”(p. 175)
One of the first people to develop the concept of the information society was the economist Fritz Machlup. In 1933, Fritz Machlup began studying the effect of patents on research. His work culminated in the study The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States in 1962. This book was widely regarded and was eventually translated into Russian and Japanese. The Japanese have also studied the information society (or jōhōka shakai, 情報化社会).
The issue of technologies and their role in contemporary society
have been discussed in the scientific literature using a range of labels
and concepts. This section introduces some of them. Ideas of a
knowledge or information economy, post-industrial society, postmodern society, network society, the information revolution, informational capitalism, network capitalism, and the like, have been debated over the last several decades.
Fritz Machlup (1962) introduced the concept of the knowledge industry.
He began studying the effects of patents on research before
distinguishing five sectors of the knowledge sector: education, research
and development, mass media, information technologies, information
services. Based on this categorization he calculated that in 1959 29%
per cent of the GNP in the USA had been produced in knowledge
industries.
Economic transition
Peter Drucker has argued that there is a transition from an economy based on material goods to one based on knowledge. Marc Porat
distinguishes a primary (information goods and services that are
directly used in the production, distribution or processing of
information) and a secondary sector (information services produced for
internal consumption by government and non-information firms) of the
information economy.
Porat uses the total value added by the primary and secondary
information sector to the GNP as an indicator for the information
economy. The OECD
has employed Porat's definition for calculating the share of the
information economy in the total economy (e.g. OECD 1981, 1986). Based
on such indicators, the information society has been defined as a
society where more than half of the GNP is produced and more than half
of the employees are active in the information economy.
For Daniel Bell
the number of employees producing services and information is an
indicator for the informational character of a society. "A
post-industrial society is based on services. (…) What counts is not raw
muscle power, or energy, but information. (…) A post industrial society
is one in which the majority of those employed are not involved in the
production of tangible goods".
Alain Touraine
already spoke in 1971 of the post-industrial society. "The passage to
postindustrial society takes place when investment results in the
production of symbolic goods that modify values, needs, representations,
far more than in the production of material goods or even of
'services'. Industrial society had transformed the means of production:
post-industrial society changes the ends of production, that is,
culture. (…) The decisive point here is that in postindustrial society
all of the economic system is the object of intervention of society upon
itself. That is why we can call it the programmed society, because this
phrase captures its capacity to create models of management,
production, organization, distribution, and consumption, so that such a
society appears, at all its functional levels, as the product of an
action exercised by the society itself, and not as the outcome of
natural laws or cultural specificities" (Touraine 1988: 104). In the
programmed society also the area of cultural reproduction including
aspects such as information, consumption, health, research, education
would be industrialized. That modern society is increasing its capacity
to act upon itself means for Touraine that society is reinvesting ever
larger parts of production and so produces and transforms itself. This
makes Touraine's concept substantially different from that of Daniel
Bell who focused on the capacity to process and generate information for
efficient society functioning.
Jean-François Lyotard has argued that "knowledge has become the principle [sic]
force of production over the last few decades". Knowledge would be
transformed into a commodity. Lyotard says that postindustrial society
makes knowledge accessible to the layman because knowledge and
information technologies would diffuse into society and break up Grand
Narratives of centralized structures and groups. Lyotard denotes these
changing circumstances as postmodern condition or postmodern society.
Similarly to Bell, Peter Otto and Philipp Sonntag (1985) say that
an information society is a society where the majority of employees
work in information jobs, i.e. they have to deal more with information,
signals, symbols, and images than with energy and matter. Radovan Richta
(1977) argues that society has been transformed into a scientific
civilization based on services, education, and creative activities. This
transformation would be the result of a scientific-technological
transformation based on technological progress and the increasing
importance of computer technology. Science and technology would become
immediate forces of production (Aristovnik 2014: 55).
Nico Stehr
(1994, 2002a, b) says that in the knowledge society a majority of jobs
involves working with knowledge. "Contemporary society may be described
as a knowledge society based on the extensive penetration of all its
spheres of life and institutions by scientific and technological
knowledge" (Stehr 2002b: 18). For Stehr, knowledge is a capacity for
social action. Science would become an immediate productive force,
knowledge would no longer be primarily embodied in machines, but already
appropriated nature that represents knowledge would be rearranged
according to certain designs and programs (Ibid.: 41-46). For Stehr, the
economy of a knowledge society is largely driven not by material
inputs, but by symbolic or knowledge-based inputs (Ibid.: 67), there
would be a large number of professions that involve working with
knowledge, and a declining number of jobs that demand low cognitive
skills as well as in manufacturing (Stehr 2002a).
Also Alvin Toffler
argues that knowledge is the central resource in the economy of the
information society: "In a Third Wave economy, the central resource – a
single word broadly encompassing data, information, images, symbols,
culture, ideology, and values – is actionable knowledge"
(Dyson/Gilder/Keyworth/Toffler 1994).
At the end of the twentieth century, the concept of the network society gained importance in information society theory. For Manuel Castells,
network logic is besides information, pervasiveness, flexibility, and
convergence a central feature of the information technology paradigm
(2000a: 69ff). "One of the key features of informational society is the
networking logic of its basic structure, which explains the use of the
concept of 'network society'" (Castells 2000: 21). "As an historical
trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are
increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new
social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking
logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of
production, experience, power, and culture" (Castells 2000: 500). For
Castells the network society is the result of informationalism, a new
technological paradigm.
Jan Van Dijk
(2006) defines the network society as a "social formation with an
infrastructure of social and media networks enabling its prime mode of
organization at all levels (individual, group/organizational and
societal). Increasingly, these networks link all units or parts of this
formation (individuals, groups and organizations)" (Van Dijk 2006: 20).
For Van Dijk networks have become the nervous system of society, whereas
Castells links the concept of the network society to capitalist
transformation, Van Dijk sees it as the logical result of the increasing
widening and thickening of networks in nature and society. Darin Barney
uses the term for characterizing societies that exhibit two fundamental
characteristics: "The first is the presence in those societies of
sophisticated – almost exclusively digital – technologies of networked
communication and information management/distribution, technologies
which form the basic infrastructure mediating an increasing array of
social, political and economic practices. (…) The second, arguably more
intriguing, characteristic of network societies is the reproduction and
institutionalization throughout (and between) those societies of
networks as the basic form of human organization and relationship across
a wide range of social, political and economic configurations and
associations".
Critiques
The
major critique of concepts such as information society, postmodern
society, knowledge society, network society, postindustrial society,
etc. that has mainly been voiced by critical scholars is that they
create the impression that we have entered a completely new type of
society. "If there is just more information then it is hard to
understand why anyone should suggest that we have before us something
radically new" (Webster 2002a: 259). Critics such as Frank Webster
argue that these approaches stress discontinuity, as if contemporary
society had nothing in common with society as it was 100 or 150 years
ago. Such assumptions would have ideological character because they
would fit with the view that we can do nothing about change and have to
adapt to existing political realities (kasiwulaya 2002b: 267).
These critics argue that contemporary society first of all is
still a capitalist society oriented towards accumulating economic,
political, and cultural capital.
They acknowledge that information society theories stress some
important new qualities of society (notably globalization and
informatization), but charge that they fail to show that these are
attributes of overall capitalist structures. Critics such as Webster
insist on the continuities that characterise change. In this way Webster
distinguishes between different epochs of capitalism: laissez-faire
capitalism of the 19th century, corporate capitalism in the 20th century, and informational capitalism for the 21st century (kasiwulaya 2006).
For describing contemporary society based on a new dialectic of
continuity and discontinuity, other critical scholars have suggested
several terms like:
transnational network capitalism, transnational informational capitalism (Christian Fuchs
2008, 2007): "Computer networks are the technological foundation that
has allowed the emergence of global network capitalism, that is, regimes
of accumulation, regulation, and discipline that are helping to
increasingly base the accumulation of economic, political, and cultural
capital on transnational network organizations that make use of
cyberspace and other new technologies for global coordination and
communication. [...] The need to find new strategies for executing
corporate and political domination has resulted in a restructuration of
capitalism that is characterized by the emergence of transnational,
networked spaces in the economic, political, and cultural system and has
been mediated by cyberspace as a tool of global coordination and
communication. Economic, political, and cultural space have been
restructured; they have become more fluid and dynamic, have enlarged
their borders to a transnational scale, and handle the inclusion and
exclusion of nodes in flexible ways. These networks are complex due to
the high number of nodes (individuals, enterprises, teams, political
actors, etc.) that can be involved and the high speed at which a high
number of resources is produced and transported within them. But global
network capitalism is based on structural inequalities; it is made up of
segmented spaces in which central hubs (transnational corporations,
certain political actors, regions, countries, Western lifestyles, and
worldviews) centralize the production, control, and flows of economic,
political, and cultural capital (property, power, definition
capacities). This segmentation is an expression of the overall
competitive character of contemporary society." (Fuchs 2008: 110+119).
digital capitalism (Schiller 2000, cf. also Peter Glotz):
"networks are directly generalizing the social and cultural range of
the capitalist economy as never before" (Schiller 2000: xiv)
virtual capitalism: the "combination of marketing and the new
information technology will enable certain firms to obtain higher profit
margins and larger market shares, and will thereby promote greater
concentration and centralization of capital" (Dawson/John Bellamy Foster 1998: 63sq),
high-tech capitalism
or informatic capitalism (Fitzpatrick 2002) – to focus on the computer
as a guiding technology that has transformed the productive forces of
capitalism and has enabled a globalized economy.
Other scholars prefer to speak of information capitalism (Morris-Suzuki 1997) or informational capitalism (Manuel Castells 2000, Christian Fuchs
2005, Schmiede 2006a, b). Manuel Castells sees informationalism as a
new technological paradigm (he speaks of a mode of development)
characterized by "information generation, processing, and transmission"
that have become "the fundamental sources of productivity and power"
(Castells 2000: 21). The "most decisive historical factor accelerating,
channelling and shaping the information technology paradigm, and
inducing its associated social forms, was/is the process of capitalist
restructuring undertaken since the 1980s, so that the new
techno-economic system can be adequately characterized as informational
capitalism" (Castells 2000: 18). Castells has added to theories of the
information society the idea that in contemporary society dominant
functions and processes are increasingly organized around networks that
constitute the new social morphology of society (Castells 2000: 500). Nicholas Garnham
is critical of Castells and argues that the latter's account is
technologically determinist because Castells points out that his
approach is based on a dialectic of technology and society in which
technology embodies society and society uses technology (Castells 2000:
5sqq). But Castells also makes clear that the rise of a new "mode of
development" is shaped by capitalist production, i.e. by society, which
implies that technology isn't the only driving force of society.
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt
argue that contemporary society is an Empire that is characterized by a
singular global logic of capitalist domination that is based on
immaterial labour. With the concept of immaterial labour Negri and Hardt
introduce ideas of information society discourse into their Marxist
account of contemporary capitalism. Immaterial labour would be labour
"that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information,
communication, a relationship, or an emotional response" (Hardt/Negri
2005: 108; cf. also 2000: 280-303), or services, cultural products,
knowledge (Hardt/Negri 2000: 290). There would be two forms:
intellectual labour that produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts,
linguistic figures, images, etc.; and affective labour
that produces and manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease,
well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion, joy, sadness, etc.
(Ibid.).
Overall, neo-Marxist accounts of the information society have in
common that they stress that knowledge, information technologies, and
computer networks have played a role in the restructuration and
globalization of capitalism and the emergence of a flexible regime of
accumulation (David Harvey 1989). They warn that new technologies are embedded into societal antagonisms that cause structural unemployment, rising poverty, social exclusion, the deregulation of the welfare state and of labour rights, the lowering of wages, welfare, etc.
Concepts such as knowledge society, information society, network
society, informational capitalism, postindustrial society, transnational
network capitalism, postmodern society, etc. show that there is a vivid
discussion in contemporary sociology on the character of contemporary
society and the role that technologies, information, communication, and
co-operation play in it.
Information society theory discusses the role of information and
information technology in society, the question which key concepts shall
be used for characterizing contemporary society, and how to define such
concepts. It has become a specific branch of contemporary sociology.
Second and third nature
Information society is the means of sending and receiving information from one place to another. As technology has advanced so too has the way people have adapted in sharing information with each other.
"Second nature" refers a group of experiences that get made over by culture.
They then get remade into something else that can then take on a new
meaning. As a society we transform this process so it becomes something
natural to us, i.e. second nature. So, by following a particular pattern
created by culture we are able to recognise how we use and move
information in different ways. From sharing information via different
time zones (such as talking online) to information ending up in a
different location (sending a letter overseas) this has all become a
habitual process that we as a society take for granted.
However, through the process of sharing information vectors have
enabled us to spread information even further. Through the use of these
vectors information is able to move and then separate from the initial
things that enabled them to move.
From here, something called "third nature" has developed. An extension
of second nature, third nature is in control of second nature. It
expands on what second nature is limited by. It has the ability to mould
information in new and different ways. So, third nature is able to
‘speed up, proliferate, divide, mutate, and beam in on us from
elsewhere.
It aims to create a balance between the boundaries of space and time
(see second nature). This can be seen through the telegraph, it was the
first successful technology that could send and receive information
faster than a human being could move an object.
As a result different vectors of people have the ability to not only
shape culture but create new possibilities that will ultimately shape
society.
Therefore, through the use of second nature and third nature
society is able to use and explore new vectors of possibility where
information can be moulded to create new forms of interaction.
As steam power was the technology standing behind industrial society, so information technology
is seen as the catalyst for the changes in work organisation, societal
structure and politics occurring in the late 20th century.
In the book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler used the phrase super-industrial society to describe this type of society. Other writers and thinkers have used terms like "post-industrial society" and "post-modern industrial society" with a similar meaning.
Related terms
A
number of terms in current use emphasize related but different aspects
of the emerging global economic order. The Information Society intends
to be the most encompassing in that an economy is a subset of a society.
The Information Age is somewhat limiting, in that it refers to a 30-year period between the widespread use of computers and the knowledge economy,
rather than an emerging economic order. The knowledge era is about the
nature of the content, not the socioeconomic processes by which it will
be traded. The computer revolution,
and knowledge revolution refer to specific revolutionary transitions,
rather than the end state towards which we are evolving. The Information Revolution relates with the well known terms agricultural revolution and industrial revolution.
Knowledge services and knowledge value put content into an economic context. Knowledge services integrates Knowledge management, within a Knowledge organization, that trades in a Knowledge market.
In order for individuals to receive more knowledge, surveillance is
used. This relates to the use of Drones as a tool in order to gather
knowledge on other individuals. Although seemingly synonymous, each term
conveys more than nuances or slightly different views of the same
thing. Each term represents one attribute of the likely nature of
economic activity in the emerging post-industrial society.
Alternatively, the new economic order will incorporate all of the above
plus other attributes that have not yet fully emerged.
One
of the central paradoxes of the information society is that it makes
information easily reproducible, leading to a variety of freedom/control
problems relating to intellectual property.
Essentially, business and capital, whose place becomes that of
producing and selling information and knowledge, seems to require
control over this new resource so that it can effectively be managed and
sold as the basis of the information economy. However, such control can
prove to be both technically and socially problematic. Technically
because copy protection is often easily circumvented and socially rejected because the users and citizens of the information society can prove to be unwilling to accept such absolute commodification of the facts and information that compose their environment.
Responses to this concern range from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States (and similar legislation elsewhere) which make copy protection (see DRM) circumvention illegal, to the free software, open source and copyleft
movements, which seek to encourage and disseminate the "freedom" of
various information products (traditionally both as in "gratis" or free
of cost, and liberty, as in freedom to use, explore and share).
Caveat: Information society is often used by politicians meaning
something like "we all do internet now"; the sociological term
information society (or informational society) has some deeper
implications about change of societal structure. Because we lack
political control of intellectual property, we are lacking in a concrete
map of issues, an analysis of costs and benefits, and functioning
political groups that are unified by common interests representing
different opinions of this diverse situation that are prominent in the
information society.
The genocide of indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the elimination of entire communities of indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism. Genocide of the native population is especially likely in cases of settler colonialism, with some scholars arguing that settler colonialism is inherently genocidal.
While the concept of genocide was formulated by Raphael Lemkin in the mid-20th century, the expansion of various Western European colonial powers such as the British and Spanish empires and the subsequent establishment of colonies on indigenous territories frequently involved acts of genocidal violence against indigenous groups in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia. 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. 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. The designation of specific events as genocidal is often controversial.
Some scholars, among them Lemkin, have argued that cultural genocide, sometimes called ethnocide,
should also be recognized. A people group may continue to exist, but if
it is prevented from perpetuating its group identity by prohibitions of
its cultural and religious practices, practices which are the basis of
its group identity, this may also be considered a form of genocide.
Examples that can be considered this form of genocide include the
treatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs by the Government of China, the treatment of Native Americans by citizens of the United States and/or agents of the United States government, and the treatment of First Nations peoples by the Canadian government.
Genocide debate
The concept of genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin:
New conceptions require new terms.
By "genocide" we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.
This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its
modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race,
tribe) and the Latin cide (killing), thus corresponding in its formation
to such words as tyrannicide, homicide, infanticide, etc. Generally
speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction
of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of
a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of
different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of
the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups
themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of
the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national
feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and
the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and
even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. 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.
After World War II and The Holocaust,
this concept of genocide was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. For
Lemkin, genocide was broadly defined and it included all attempts to
destroy a specific ethnic group, whether they are strictly physical,
through mass killings, or whether they are strictly cultural or
psychological, through oppression and through the destruction of indigenous ways of life.
The UN's definition, which is used in international law, is narrower than Lemkin's definition, and it also states that genocide is:
"any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, 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."
The determination of whether a historical event should or should not
be considered a genocide can be a matter of scholarly debate. Historians
often draw on broader definitions such as Lemkin's, which sees
colonialist violence against indigenous peoples as inherently genocidal. For example, in the case of the colonization of the Americas, where the indigenous people of the Americas declined by up to 90% in the first
centuries of European colonization, how much of the population decline
is attributable to genocide is debatable because disease is considered
the main cause of this decline due to the fact that the introduction of
disease was partially unintentional. Some genocide scholars separate the population declines which are due to disease from the genocidal aggression of one group towards another.
Some scholars argue that an intent to commit a genocide is not needed,
because a genocide may be the cumulative result of minor conflicts in
which settlers, colonial agents or state agents perpetrate violent acts
against minority groups. Others argue that the dire consequences of European diseases among many New World populations
were exacerbated by different forms of genocidal violence, and they
also argue that intentional deaths and unintentional deaths cannot
easily be separated from each other.
Some scholars regard the colonization of the Americas as genocide,
since they argue it was largely achieved through systematically
exploiting, removing and destroying specific ethnic groups, which would
create environments and conditions for such disease to proliferate.
According to a 2020 study by Tai S Edwards and Paul Kelton,
recent scholarship shows "that colonizers bear responsibility for
creating conditions that made natives vulnerable to infection, increased
mortality, and hindered population recovery. This responsibility
intersected with more intentional and direct forms of violence to
depopulate the Americas... germs can no longer serve as the basis for
denying American genocides."
It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas, up to eight million indigenous people died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasiandiseases.
Simultaneously, wars and atrocities waged by Europeans against Native
Americans also resulted in millions of deaths. Mistreatment and killing
of Native Americans continued for centuries, in every area of the
Americas, including the areas that would become Canada, the United
States, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Chile. In the United
States, some scholars (examples listed below) state that the American Indian Wars and the doctrine of manifest destiny contributed to the genocide, with one major event cited being the Trail of Tears.
Categorization as a genocide
Historians and scholars whose work has examined this history in the context of genocide have included historian Jeffrey Ostler, historian David Stannard, anthropological demographer Russell Thornton, Indigenous Studies scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., as well as scholar-activists such as Russell Means and Ward Churchill. In his book, American Holocaust Stannard compares the events of colonization in the Americas to the definition of genocide which is written in the 1948 UN convention, and he 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.
Thornton describes the direct consequences of warfare, violence and massacres as genocides, many of which had the effect of wiping out entire ethnic groups. Political scientist Guenter Lewy
states that "even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian
population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll
caused by mistreatment and violence." Native American studies professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states,
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.
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 against the Indians
by colonizers contributed to the death toll in subsequent centuries. As detailed in American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (2015),
It is also apparent that the shared history of the hemisphere is one which is 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 both 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.
According to geographers from University College London, the colonization of the Americas by Europeans killed so many people it resulted in climate change and global cooling.
UCL Geography Professor Mark Maslin, one of the co-authors of the
study, states that the large death toll also boosted the economies of
Europe: "the depopulation of the Americas may have inadvertently allowed
the Europeans to dominate the world. It also allowed for the Industrial
Revolution and for Europeans to continue that domination."
A 16th-century illustration by Flemish ProtestantTheodor de Bry for Las Casas'Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, depicting Spanish atrocities during the conquest of Hispaniola.
Bartolome wrote: "They erected certain Gibbets, large, but low made, so
that their feet almost reached the ground, every one of which was so
ordered as to bear Thirteen Persons in Honour and Reverence (as they
said blasphemously) of our Redeemer and his Twelve Apostles, under which
they made a Fire to burn them to Ashes whilst hanging on them"
It is estimated that during the initial Spanish conquest of the Americas up to eight million indigenous people died, primarily through the spread of Afro-Eurasiandiseases, in a series of events that have been described as the first large-scale act of genocide of the modern era.
Las Casas wrote that the native population on the Spanish colony of Hispaniola had been reduced from 400,000 to 200 in a few decades. His writings were among those that gave rise to Spanish Black Legend, which Charles Gibson
describes as "the accumulated tradition of propaganda and Hispanophobia
according to which the Spanish Empire is regarded as cruel, bigoted,
degenerate, exploitative and self-righteous in excess of reality".
Historian Andrés Reséndez at the University of California, Davis
asserts that even though disease was a factor, the indigenous
population of Hispaniola would have rebounded the same way Europeans did
following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to.
He says that "among these human factors, slavery was the major killer"
of Hispaniola's population, and that "between 1492 and 1550, a nexus of
slavery, overwork and famine killed more natives in the Caribbean than
smallpox, influenza or malaria."
Noble David Cook said about the Black Legend
conquest of the Americas: "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." Instead, he estimates that the death toll
was caused by diseases like smallpox, which according to some estimates had an 80–90% fatality rate in Native American populations.
However, historian Jeffrey Ostler has argued that Spanish colonization
created conditions for disease to spread, for example, "careful studies
have revealed that it is highly unlikely that members" of Hernando de
Soto's 1539 expedition in the American South "had smallpox or measles.
Instead, the disruptions caused by the expedition increased the
vulnerability of Native people to diseases including syphilis and
dysentery, already present in the Americas, and malaria, a disease
recently introduced from the eastern hemisphere."
With the initial conquest of the Americas completed, the Spanish implemented the encomienda system in 1503. In theory, the encomienda placed groups of indigenous peoples under Spanish oversight to foster cultural assimilation and conversion to Catholicism,
but in practice it led to the legally sanctioned forced labor and
resource extraction 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. Many Arawaks died from lethal forced labor in the mines, where a third of workers died every six months. According to historian David Stannard, the encomienda
was a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native
peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths."
During the Beaver Wars of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois effectively destroyed several large tribal confederacies, including the Mohicans, Huron (Wyandot), Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock (Conestoga), and northern Algonquins,
with the extreme brutality and exterminatory nature of the mode of
warfare practised by the Iroquois causing some historians to label these
wars as acts of genocide committed by the Iroquois Confederacy.
The Carib Chief Tegremond
became uneasy with the increasing number of English and French settlers
occupying St. Kitts. This led to confrontations, which led him to plot
the settlers' elimination with the aid of other Island Caribs. However,
his scheme was betrayed by an Indian woman called Barbe, to Thomas Warner and Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc.
Taking action, the English and French settlers invited the Caribs to a
party where they became intoxicated. When the Caribs returned to their
village, 120 were killed in their sleep, including Chief Tegremond. The
following day, the remaining 2,000–4,000 Caribs were forced into the
area of Bloody Point and Bloody River, where over 2,000 were massacred, though 100 settlers were also killed. One Frenchman went mad after being struck by a manchineel-poisoned arrow. The remaining Caribs fled. Later, by 1640, those not already enslaved were removed to Dominica.
The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequots. The colonies of Connecticut and Massachusetts offered bounties for the heads of killed hostile Indians, and later for just their scalps, during the Pequot War in the 1630s; Connecticut specifically reimbursed Mohegans for slaying the Pequot in 1637. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to the West Indies;
other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious tribes.
The result was the elimination of the Pequot tribe as a viable polity in
Southern New England,
the colonial authorities classifying them as extinct. However, members
of the Pequot tribe still live today as a federally recognized tribe.
The Great Swamp Massacre was committed during King Philip's War by colonial militia of New England on the Narragansett tribe in December 1675. On December 15 of that year, Narraganset warriors attacked the Jireh Bull Blockhouse and killed at least 15 people. Four days later, the militias from the English colonies of Plymouth, Connecticut, and Massachusetts Bay
were led to the main Narragansett town in South Kingstown, Rhode
Island. The settlement was burned, its inhabitants (including women and
children) killed or evicted, and most of the tribe's winter stores
destroyed. It is believed that at least 97 Narragansett warriors and 300
to 1,000 non-combatants were killed, though exact figures are unknown. The massacre was a critical blow to the Narragansett tribe during the period directly following the massacre. However, much like the Pequot, the Narragansett people continue to live today as a federally recognized tribe.
French and Indian War and Pontiac's War, 1754–1763
On 12 June 1755, during the French and Indian War, Massachusetts governor William Shirley issued a bounty of £40 for a male Indian scalp, and £20 for scalps of Indian females or of children under 12 years old. In 1756, Pennsylvania lieutenant-governor Robert Hunter Morris, in his declaration of war against the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) people, offered "130 Pieces of Eight,
for the Scalp of Every Male Indian Enemy, above the Age of Twelve
Years", and "50 Pieces of Eight for the Scalp of Every Indian Woman,
produced as evidence of their being killed." During Pontiac's War, Colonel Henry Bouquet conspired with his superior, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to infect hostile Native Americans through biological warfare with smallpox blankets.
Officially, the last of the Beothuks, Shanawdithit (ca. 1801 – 6 June 1829)Suzannah Anstey (née Manuel. 1832–1911), daughter of Beothuk woman called 'Elizabeth' & husband Samuel Anstey (1832–1923) in Twillingate
Although not without conflict, European Canadians' early interactions with First Nations and Inuit populations were relatively peaceful. First Nations and Métis peoples played a critical part in the development of European colonies in Canada, particularly for their role in assisting European coureur des bois and voyageurs in their explorations of the continent during the North American fur trade. These early European interactions with First Nations would change from friendship and peace treaties to dispossession of lands through treaties. From the late 18th century, European Canadians forced Indigenous peoples to assimilate into a western Canadian society. These attempts reached a climax in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with forced integration and relocations.
As a consequence of European colonization, the Indigenous population declined by forty to eighty percent. The decline is attributed to several causes, including the transfer of European diseases, such as influenza, measles, and smallpox to which they had no natural immunity,
conflicts over the fur trade, conflicts with the colonial authorities
and settlers, and the loss of Indigenous lands to settlers and the
subsequent collapse of several nations' self-sufficiency.
With the death of Shanawdithit in 1829, the Beothuk people, and the indigenous people of Newfoundland
were officially declared extinct after suffering epidemics, starvation,
loss of access to food sources, and displacement by English and French
fishermen and traders. Scholars disagree in their definition of genocide in relation to the Beothuk, and the parties have different political agendas.
While some scholars believe that the Beothuk died out due to the
elements noted above, another theory is that Europeans conducted a
sustained campaign of genocide against them.
More recent understandings of the concept of "cultural 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. In the 1990s some scholars began pushing for Canada to recognize the Canadian Indian residential school system as a genocidal process rooted in colonialism. This public debate led to the formation of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission which was formed in 2008.
The Canadian Indian 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. The final school closed in 1996.
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. The system has been described as cultural genocide: "killing the Indian in the child". 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."
Another aspect of the residential school system was its use of forced
sterilization on 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.
Cover
page of official TRC summary that affirms cultural genocide of
Indigenous peoples within Canada. Entitled, "Honour the Truth,
Reconciling for the Future".
The Executive Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
found that the state pursued a policy of cultural genocide through
forced assimilation.
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 biological 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.
The use of cultural genocide is used to differentiate from the
Holocaust: a clearly accepted genocide in history. Some argue that this
description negates the biological and physical acts of genocide that
occurred in tandem with cultural destruction.
When engaged within the context of international law, colonialism in
Canada has inflicted each criterion for the United Nations definition of
the crime of genocide. However, all examples below of physical genocide
are still highly debated as the requirement of intention and overall
motivations behind the perpetrators actions is not widely agreed upon as
of yet.
Canada's actions towards Indigenous peoples can be categorized
under the first example of the UN definition of genocide, "killing
members of the group", through the spreading of deadly disease such as
during the 1862 Pacific Northwest smallpox epidemic. Further examples
from other parts of the country include the Saskatoon's freezing deaths, the epidemic of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and Two-Spirited people, and the scalping bounties offered by the governor of Nova Scotia, Edward Cornwallis.
Secondly, as affirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
the residential school system was a clear example of (b) and (e) and
similar acts continue to this day through the Millennium Scoop, as
Indigenous children are disproportionately removed from their families
and placed into the care of others who are often of different cultures
through the Canadian child welfare system.
Once again this repeats the separation of Indigenous children from
their traditional ways of life. Moreover, children living on-reserve are
subject to inadequate funding for social services which has led to
filing of a ninth non-compliance order in early 2021 to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in attempts to hold the Canadian government accountable.
In Toronto during a BLM protest, marchers carry a MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) red dress and a Mohawk Warrior Flag.
Subsection (c) of the UN definition: "deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part" is an act of genocide that has historic
legacies, such as the near and full extrapolation of caribou and bison that contributed to mass famines in Indigenous communities,
how on reserve conditions infringe on the quality of life of Indigenous
peoples as their social services are underfunded and inaccessible, and
hold the bleakest water qualities in the first world country.
Canada also situates precarious and lethal ecological toxicities that
pose threats to the land, water, air and peoples themselves near or on
Indigenous territories.
Indigenous people continue to report (d), the "imposing measures
intended to prevent births within the group", within more recent years.
Specifically through the avoidance of informed consent
surrounding sterilization procedures with Indigenous people like the
case of D.D.S. represented by lawyer Alisa Lombard from 2018 in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.
Examples such as the ones listed above have led to widespread physical
and virtual action across the country to protest the historical and
current genocidal harms faced by Indigenous peoples.
On July 28, 2022, during the visit by Pope Francis to Canada at the Notre-Dame de Québec Cathedral,
the Pope stated: "And thinking about the process of healing and
reconciliation with our indigenous brothers and sisters, never again can
the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that
one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ
ways of coercing others."
Pope Francis on his return flight to Rome on July 30, 2022, after a
week-long trip to Canada, responded to a question from a journalist:
"It's true, I didn't use the word because it didn't occur to me, but I
described the genocide and asked for pardon, forgiveness for this work
that is genocidal. For example, I condemned this too: Taking away
children and changing culture, changing mentalities, changing
traditions, changing a race, let's say, a whole culture. Yes, it's a
technical word, genocide, but I didn't use it because it didn't come to
mind, but I described it. It is true; yes, it's genocide. Yes, you all,
be calm. You can say that I said that, yes, that it was genocide."
Mexico
Graph of population decline in central Mexico caused by successive epidemics
Apaches
In 1835, the government of the Mexican state of 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. In 1837, the Mexican state of Chihuahua also offered a bounty on Apache scalps, 100 pesos per warrior, 50 pesos per woman, and 25 pesos per child.
Mayas
The Caste War of Yucatán was caused by encroachment of colonizers on communal land of Mayas in Southeast Mexico. According to political scientist Adam Jones: "This ferocious race war featured genocidal atrocities on both sides, with up to 200,000 killed."
The Mexican government's response to the various uprisings of the Yaqui tribe have been likened to genocide particularly under Porfirio Diaz. Due to 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. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he would be willing to offer apologies for the abuses in 2019.
Argentina launched campaigns of territorial expansion in the second
half of the 19th century, at the expense of Indigenous peoples and
neighbor state Chile.
Mapuche people were forced from their ancestral lands by Argentinian
military forces, resulting in deaths and displacements. During the
1870s, President Julio Argentino Roca implemented the Conquest of the Desert (Spanish: Conquista del desierto) military operation, which resulted in the subjugation, enslavement, and genocide of Mapuche individuals residing in the Pampas area.
In southern Patagonia,
both Argentina and Chile occupied indigenous lands and waters, and
facilitated the genocide implemented by sheep-farmers and businessmen in
Tierra del Fuego. Starting in the late 19th century, during the Tierra del Fuego Gold Rush, European settlers, in concert with the Argentine and Chilean governments, systematically exterminated the Selk'nam people, Yaghan, and Haush peoples. Their decimation is known today as the Selk'nam genocide.
Argentina also expanded northward, dispossessing a number of Chaco peoples through a policy that may be considered as genocidal.
Paraguay
The War of the Triple Alliance (1865-1870) was launched by the Empire of Brazil, in alliance with the Argentinian government of Bartolomé Mitre and the Uruguayan government of Venancio Flores, against Paraguay.
The governments of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay signed a secret
treaty in which the "high contracting parties" solemnly bind themselves
to overthrow the government of Paraguay. In the five years of war, the
Paraguayan population was reduced, including civilians, women, children,
and the elderly. Julio José Chiavenato, in his book American Genocide,
affirms that it was "a war of total extermination that only ended when
there were no more Paraguayans to kill" and concludes that 99.5% of the
adult male population of Paraguay died during the war. Out of a
population of approximately 420,000 before the war, only 14,000 men and
180,000 women remained.
Among
its many wars (19th century) is the War of the Triple Alliance, which
may have killed 400,000 people, including more than 60 percent of the
population of Paraguay, making it proportionally the most destructive
war in modern times.
Chile
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. First during the Arauco War and then during the Occupation of Araucanía, there was a long-running conflict with the Mapuche people, mostly fought in the Araucanía.
United States colonization of indigenous territories
Stacie Martin states that 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 Mystic massacre, the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek massacre and the Mendocino War as genocidal in nature.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states that U.S. history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma,
cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United
States committed against Indigenous peoples. From the colonial period
through the founding of the United States and continuing in the
twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse,
massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous
peoples from their ancestral territories via Indian removal policies, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.
The letters exchanged between Bouquet and Amherst during the Pontiac War show Amherst writing to Bouquet the Indigenous people needed to be exterminated:
"You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of
blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to
extirpate this execreble race."
Historians regard this as evidence of a genocidal intent by
Amherst, as well as part of a broader genocidal attitude frequently
displayed against Native Americans during the colonization of the Americas. 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.
The United States has to date not undertaken any truth commission nor built a memorial for the genocide of indigenous people.
It does not acknowledge nor compensate for the historical violence
against Native Americans that occurred during territorial expansion to
the west coast. American museums such as the Smithsonian Institution do not dedicate a section to the genocide. In 2013, the National Congress of American Indians
passed a resolution to create a space for the National American Indian
Holocaust Museum inside the Smithsonian, but it was ignored by the
latter.
The Family Planning Services and Population Research Act was passed in 1970, which subsidized sterilizations for patients receiving healthcare through the Indian Health Service.
In the six years after the act was passed, an estimated 25% of
childbearing-aged Native American women were sterilized. Some of the
procedures were performed under coercion, or without understanding by
those sterilized. In 1977, Marie Sanchez, chief tribal judge of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation
told the United Nations Convention on Indigenous Rights in Geneva, that
Native American women suffered involuntary sterilization which she
equated with modern genocide.
Native American boarding schools
The Native American boarding school system
was a 150-year program and federal policy which separated Indigenous
children from their families and sought to assimilate them into white
society. It began in the early 19th century, coinciding with the start
of Indian Removal policies.
A Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report was
published on May 11, 2022, which officially acknowledged the federal
government's role in creating and perpetuating this system.
According to the report, the U.S. federal government operated or funded
more than 408 boarding institutions in 37 states between 1819 and 1969.
431 boarding schools were identified in total, many of which were run
by religious institutions.
The report described the system as part of a federal policy aimed at
eradicating the identity of Indigenous communities and confiscating
their lands. Abuse was widespread at the schools, as was overcrowding,
malnutrition, disease and lack of adequate healthcare.
The report documented over 500 child deaths at 19 schools, although it
is estimated the total number could rise to thousands, and possibly even
tens of thousands.
Marked or unmarked burial sites were discovered at 53 schools. The school system has been described as a cultural genocide and a racist dehumanization.
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 the Indian Territory in the eastern sections of the present-day state of Oklahoma. About 2,500–6,000 died along the Trail of Tears.
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. 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.
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.
Historians such as David Stannard and Barbara Mann
have noted that the army deliberately routed the march of the Cherokee
to pass through areas of a 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, 8,000 Cherokee died, about half the total population.
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 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, which caused outrage in its own time, has been regarded as a genocide. Colonel John Chivington led a 700-man force of Colorado Territorymilitia 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. 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.
The U.S. colonization of California started in earnest in 1845, with
the Mexican–American War. With the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it
gave the United States authority over 525,000 square miles of new
territory. In addition to the 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, fewer than 100 members of the Yuki tribe were left.
According to Russell Thornton, estimates of the pre-Columbian population
of California may have been as high as 300,000.
By 1849, due to a number of epidemics, the number had decreased
to 150,000. But from 1849 and up until 1890 the Indigenous population of
California had fallen below 20,000, primarily because of the killings. At least 4,500 California Indians were killed between 1849 and 1870, while many more perished due to disease and starvation. 10,000 Indians were also kidnapped and sold as slaves. In a speech before representatives of Native American peoples in June 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom
apologized for the genocide. Newsom said, "That's what it was, a
genocide. No other way to describe it. And that's the way it needs to be
described in the history books."
One California law made it legal to declare any jobless Indian a
vagrant, then auction his services off for up to four months. It also
permitted whites to force Indian children to work for them until they
were eighteen, provided that they first obtain permission from what the
law referred to as a 'friend'. 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 of another
California statute that stated that 'no Indian or Black or Mulatto
person was permitted to give evidence in favor of or against a white
person'. One contemporary wrote, "The miners 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". The towns of Marysville
and Honey Lake paid bounties for Indian scalps. Shasta City offered $5
for every Indian head brought to City Hall; California's State Treasury
reimbursed many of the local governments for their expenses.
During the Philippine–American War, on September 28, 1901, Filipino forces defeated and nearly wiped out a US company in the Battle of Balangiga. In response, US forces carried out widespread atrocities during the March across Samar,
which lasted from December, 1901 to February, 1902. US forces killed
between 2,000 and 2,500 Filipino civilians, according to most sources,
and carried out an extensive scorched-earth
policy, which included burning down villages. Some Filipino historians
have called these killings genocidal. U.S. Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith
instructed his soldiers to "kill everyone over ten years old",
including children who were capable of bearing arms, and to take no
prisoners. However, Major Littleton Waller, commanding officer of a battalion of 315 US Marines, refused to follow his orders. Some Filipino historians estimate higher at 5,000 killed during the campaign, while other estimates are as high as 50,000.
Over 80 indigenous tribes disappeared between 1900 and 1957. During
this period, out of a population of over one million, 80% had been
killed through deculturalization, disease, or murder. It has also been argued that genocide has occurred during the modern era with the ongoing destruction of the Jivaro, Yanomami, and other tribes.
Over the course of the French conquest of Algeria
and immediately after it, a series of demographic catastrophes ensued
in Algeria between 1830 and 1871. Because the demographic crisis was so
severe, Dr. René Ricoux, head of demographic and medical statistics at
the statistical office of the General Government of Algeria, foresaw the
simple disappearance of Algerian "natives as a whole".
The demographic change in Algeria can be divided into three phases: an
almost constant decline during the conquest period, up until its
heaviest drop from an estimated 2.7 million in 1861 to 2.1 million in
1871, and finally moving into a gradual increase to a level of three million inhabitants by 1890. The causes range from a series of famines, diseases, and emigration to the violent methods used by the French army during their Pacification of Algeria, which historians argue constitute acts of 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 a genocide in German South-West Africa
(GSWA) and incarcerated the survivors 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 labor.
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. After the Herero, Namaqua and Damara began an uprising against the colonial government, General Lothar von Trotha, appointed as head of the German forces in GSWA by Emperor Wilhelm II in 1904, gave German forces the order to push them into the desert where they would die. Germany apologized for the genocide in 2004.
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 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.
200,000 Africans are estimated to have died from famine, with some
areas having been left completely and permanently devoid of human life.
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. In Kamchatka, out of a previous population of 20,000, only
8,000 remained after being subjected to half a century of Cossack
slaughter.
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. When the Russians did not obtain the demanded amount of fur tribute from the natives, Yakutsk
Governor Peter 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, native women and children having been raped and enslaved in
order to force the tribe to pay the tribute.
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 unprepared. However,
the second time, they used gunpowder weapons. The Russians faced tougher
resistance when from 1745 to 1756 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, 1730–1731, and 1744–1747.
After the Chukchi defeated the Russians in 1729, Russian
commander Major Pavlutskiy waged war against them. Chukchi women and
children were mass-slaughtered and enslaved in 1730–1731. Empress Elizabeth
ordered the Chukchis and the Koraks be genocided in 1742 to totally
expel them from their native lands and erase their culture through war.
Her command was that the natives be "totally extirpated", with
Pavlutskiy leading the war from 1744 to 1747. The Chukchi ended the
campaign and forced the Russian army to give up by killing Pavlitskiy
and decapitating him.
The Russians also waged war and slaughtered the Koraks in 1744
and 1753–1754. After the Russians tried to force them to convert to
Christianity, the different native peoples (the Koraks, Chukchis,
Itelmens, and Yukagirs) all united to drive them out of their land in the 1740s, culminating in the assault on Nizhnekamchatsk fort in 1746.
Nowadays, Kamchatka is European in demographics and culture.
Indigenous Kamchatkans only make up 2.5% of the population, which
accounts for around 10,000 people out of a previous number of 150,000.
The genocide committed by the Cossacks, as well as the fur trade which
devastated local wildlife, exterminated much of the native indigenous
population. In addition, the Cossacks also devastated the local wildlife by slaughtering massive numbers of animals for fur. Between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, 90% of the Kamchadals and half of the Vogules
were killed. 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.
In the Aleutian islands, the Aleut
natives were subjected to genocide and slavery by the Russians for the
first 20 years of Russian rule, Aleut women and children being captured
by the Russians and Aleut men slaughtered.
The Russian colonization of Siberia and the treatment of the
indigenous peoples has been compared to the 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.
The Ainu are an indigenous people in Japan (Hokkaidō). 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."
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."
The Ainu have emphasized that they were the natives of the Kuril islands and the southern half of Sakhalin, which both Japan and Russia invaded. In 2004, the small Ainu community living
in Kamchatka Krai, Russia 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 Putin turned down.
Okinawans are an indigenous people to the islands to the west of Japan, originally known as the Ryukyu Islands.
With skeletons dating back 32,000 years, the Okinawan or Ryukyu people
have a long history on the islands that includes a kingdom of its own
known as the Ryukyu Kingdom. The kingdom established trade relationships with China and Japan that began in the late 1500s and lasted until the 1860s.
In the 1590s, Japan made its first attempt at subjecting the
Ryukyu Kingdom by sending a group of 3,000 samurai armed with muskets to
conquer the Ryukyu kingdom.
Indefinite take over was not achieved; however, the Ryukyu Kingdom
became an acting colony of Japan. As a result, it paid homage to the
Japanese while feigning their own independence to China to maintain
trade.
In 1879, after a small rebellion by the Ryukyu people was
squelched, the Japanese government (the Ryukyu people had requested help
from China to break all bonds from Japan) punished Ryukyu by officially
naming it a state of Japan and re branding the kingdom as Okinawa.
Much like the Ainu, Ryukyuans were punished for speaking their own
language, forced to identify with Japanese myths and legends (forgoing
their own legends), adopt Japanese names, and reorient their religion
around the Japanese Emperor. Their homeland was also renamed Okinawa.
Japan had officially expanded their colonization to the Okinawan
islands, where natives didn't play a significant role in Japan's history
until the end of World War II.
When America brought the war to Japan, the first area that was effected were the Okinawan Islands.
Okinawan citizens forced into becoming soldiers were told that
Americans would take no prisoners. In addition to the warnings,
Okinawans were given a grenade per household, its use reserved in case
Americans gained control of the island, with the standing orders to have
a member of the household gather everyone and pull the pin for mass
suicide. Okinawans were told this was to avoid the "inevitable" torture that would follow any occupation. In
addition, the Japanese army kicked any natives out of their homes that
weren't currently serving in the army (women and children included) and
forced them into open, unprotected, spaces such as beaches and caves.
These happened to be the first places the Americans arrived on in the
island. As a result, more than 120,000 Okinawans (between a quarter and a
third of the population) died, soldiers and civilians alike.Americans took over the island and the war was soon over. America
launched their main base in Asia from Okinawa and the Emperor of Japan
approved, giving Okinawa to America for an agreed 25–50 years to move
the majority of Americans out of mainland Japan. In the end, Americans stayed in Okinawa for 74 years, without showing any signs of leaving.
During the occupation, Okinawan natives were forced to give up their
best cultivating land to Americans which they keep to this day.
Issues in Okinawa have yet to be resolved regarding the expired
stay of American soldiers. Although Okinawa was given back to Japan, the
American base still stays. The Japanese government has yet to take
action, despite Okinawans raising the Issue.
However, this is not the only problem that the Japanese government has
refused to take action on. Okinawans were ruled an Indigenous people in
2008 by the committee of the United Nations (UN), in addition to their
original languages being recognized as endangered or severely endangered
by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO).
The UN has encouraged that Okinawan history and language be mandatorily
taught in schools in Okinawa, but nothing has been done so far. Okinawans are still in a cultural struggle that matches that of the Ainu people. They are not allowed to be Japanese-Okinawan, Japanese being the only nationally or legally accepted term.
Genocide of Oroqen and Hezhen
During the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Japanese performed "bacterial experiments" on the Oroqen people. They introduced them to opium which caused their population to decline until only 1,000 of them remained alive at the end of the war.
The Japanese banned them from communicating with members of other
ethnicities, and forced them to hunt animals for them in exchange for
starvation rations and unsuitable clothing which caused them to die from
exposure to the inclement weather. The Japanese also forced Oroqen
adults who were 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. The Japanese forced the Oroqen to fight the war for them which led to a decrease in the Oroqen population.
The Hezhen population declined by 90% due to deaths from forced opium use, slave labor and relocation by the Japanese.
When the Japanese were defeated in 1945, only 300 Hezhen were left
alive out of a total pre-war population that was estimated to number
1,200 in 1930. It has been described as genocide.
The Cham and Vietnamese had a long history of conflict, with many
wars ending due to economic exhaustion. It was common that the
antagonists of the wars would rebuild their economies simply to go to
war again. In 1471, Champa was particularly weakened prior to the Vietnamese invasion by a series of civil wars. The Vietnamese conquered Champa and settled its territory with Vietnamese migrants during the march to the south after fighting repeated wars with Champa, shattering Champa in the invasion of Champa in 1471 and finally completing the conquest in 1832 under Emperor Minh Mang.
100,000 Cham soldiers besieged a Vietnamese garrison which led to anger
from Vietnam and orders to attack Champa. 30,000 Chams were captured
and over 40,000 were killed.
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) was destroyed by a combination of warfare and disease in the Dzungar genocide perpetrated during the Qing conquest of the Dzungar Khanate (1755–1757). There, ManchuBannermen and Khalkha Mongols exterminated the Dzungar Oirat Mongols. Mark Levene, a historian whose recent research interests focus on genocide, has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was "arguably the eighteenth-century genocide par excellence".
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. The Qing employed Khoja Emin in its campaign against the Dzungars 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 (Dzungars) 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.
British Empire (pre-1945)
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, and Canada, settler colonialism
was carried out by the British. Foreign land viewed as attractive for
settlement was declared "nobody's land". The indigenous inhabitants were
therefore denied any sovereignty or property rights in the eyes of the
British.
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 the American Indian Wars.
Widespread population decline occurred following conquest
principally from introduction of infectious disease. The number of
Australian Aboriginal Australians declined by 84% after British colonization. The Maori population of New Zealand suffered a 57% drop from its highest point. In Canada, the indigenous First Nations population of British Columbia decreased by 75%. Surviving indigenous groups continued to suffer from severe racially motivated discrimination from their new colonial societies. 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. Aboriginal Australians were only granted the right to vote in some states in 1962.
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. 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.
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. Historian Niall Ferguson
has referred to the case in Tasmania as follows: "In one of the most
shocking of all the chapters in the history of the British
Empire, the Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land were hunted down, confined
and ultimately exterminated: an event which truly merits the now
overused term 'genocide'.", and mentions Ireland and North America as areas that suffered ethnic cleansing at the hands of the British. According to Patrick Wolfe in the Journal of Genocide Research, the "frontier massacring of indigenous peoples" by the British constitutes a genocide.
The numerous massacres and widespread starvation that accompanied the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland
(1649–1653) has led to it being called a genocide; hundreds of
thousands of Irish civilians died, and about 50,000 Irish were sold into
indentured servitude.
As one author put it, "A loss of more than 40 per cent of the
population might, however, suggest a conscious plan of elimination based
on racial and religious hatred, which in other circumstances and times
would rightly be called genocide. Cromwell's murderous campaign in
Ireland was fuelled by a pathological hatred of Irish Catholics, which
he himself clearly expressed."
The Plantations of Ireland
were attempts to expel the native Irish from the best land of the
island, and settle it with loyal British Protestants; they too have been
described as genocidal. The Great Famine (1845–1850) has also been blamed on British policy and called genocidal. Writing in Indian Country Today,
Christina Rose drew parallels between the Irish and Native American
experience of dispossession and genocide; Katie Kane has compared the Sand Creek massacre with the Drogheda massacre. R. Barry O'Brien compared the Irish Rebellion of 1641 with the Indian Wars,
writing "The warfare which ensued... resembled that waged by the early
settlers in America with the native tribes. No mercy whatever was shown
to the natives, no act of treachery was considered dishonourable, no
personal tortures and indignities were spared to the captives. The
slaughter of Irishmen was looked upon as literally the slaughter of wild
beasts. Not only the men, but even the women and children who fell into
the hands of the English were deliberately and systematically
butchered. Year after year, over a great part of all Ireland, all means
of human subsistence was destroyed, no quarter was given to prisoners
who surrendered, and the whole population was skillfully and steadily
starved to death."
Similar to the European Colonization of The Americas, the death toll
under the British Empire is estimated to be as high as 150 million.
The so-called extinction of the Aboriginal Tasmanians
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. Between 1824 and 1908 White settlers and Native Mounted Police
in Queensland, according to Raymond Evans, killed more than 10,000
Aboriginal people, who were regarded as vermin and sometimes even hunted
for sport.
Prior to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, which marked the beginning of Britain's colonization of Australia, the Aboriginal population
had been estimated by historians to be around roughly 500,000 people;
by 1900, that number had plummeted to fewer than 50,000. While most died
due to the introduction of infectious diseases which accompanied
colonization, up to 20,000 were killed during the Australian frontier wars by British settlers and colonial authorities through massacres, mass poisonings and other actions. 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. The Australian practice of removing the children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent from their families, has been described as genocidal. The 1997 report Bringing Them Home, which examined the fate of the "stolen generations" concluded that the forced separation of Aboriginal children from their family constituted an act of genocide. In the 1990s a number of Australian state institutions, including the state of Queensland, apologized for its policies regarding forcible separation of Aboriginal children. Another allegation against the Australian state is the use of medical services to Aboriginal people 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. Some Australian scholars, including historians Geoffrey Blainey and Keith Windschuttle and political scientist Ken Minogue, reject the view that Australian Aboriginal policy was genocidal.
Famines in British India
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is a book by Mike Davis
about the connection between political economy and global climate
patterns, particularly El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). By comparing
ENSO episodes in different time periods and across countries, Davis
explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism,
and the relation with famine in particular. Davis argues that "Millions
died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of
being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.
They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were
murdered... by the theological application of the sacred principles of
Smith, Bentham and Mill."
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.
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: "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."
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. Multiple incidents of rioting against the minority communities in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and India have been documented. 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 expressed concern over "possible abuses by
private persons in remote areas of the territory of Paraguay". Yazadi genocide in Iraq remains a case of major concern.
The Bengali speaking minority of Assam was targeted by the native people of Assam in 1983, leading to 2000 - 10,000 deaths in that year alone. Part of the larger Assam Movement and longstanding hatred of Bengali-speaking people in the region, these killings have been described as genocidal in nature. Although the people of Assam claim the Bengali-speaking people are immigrants, there has been no proof to support the claim. Discrimination against Bengali-speaking people in the region continues until present day. The Matia (Goalpara) Detention Centre was established in 2018 to capture and captivate alleged Bengali speaking immigrants in Assam.
Massive crack-downs on Bengali speakers in the region have begun since
then. Over 4 million Bengali speakers were threatened of being stripped
of their citizenship in Assam.
According to Amnesty International and Reference Services Review, the indigenous Chakma people of the Chittagong hill tracts
were allegedly subjected to genocidal violence between the 1970s and
the 1990s. Their population had been dwindling since the military rule
launched by dictator Major General Ziaur Rahman,
who took control of the country after a military coup in 1975 and
reigned from 1975 to 1981. Later, his successor Lieutenant General HM Ershad who reigned from 1982 to 1990. In response, the indigenous Chakma rebels led by M.N. Larma (killed in 1983) started an insurgency
in the region in 1977. The Bangladeshi government had settled hundreds
of thousands of Bengali people in the region who now constitute the
majority of the population there. On 11 September 1996, the indigenous rebels reportedly abducted and killed 28 to 30 Bengali woodcutters. After democracy was reestablished in the country, fresh rounds of talks began in 1996 with the newly elected prime minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed of the Awami League, the daughter of the late Father of the Nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the representatives of the indigenous rebels. A peace treaty
was signed between the Government and the indigenous people on 2
December 1997, ending the 20 year long insurgency and all hostilities in
the region.
From the late 1950s until 1968, the state of Brazil submitted their
indigenous peoples to violent attempts to integrate, pacify and
acculturate their communities. In 1967, public prosecutor Jader de
Figueiredo Correia submitted the Figueiredo Report to the then-ruling dictatorship.
The report, which comprised seven thousand pages, was not released
until 2013. It documents genocidal crimes against the indigenous peoples
of Brazil, including mass murder, torture, 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 between 1947 and 1988. The report reveals that the
Indian Protection Service (IPS) had enslaved indigenous people, tortured
children, and stolen land. The Truth Commission considers that entire
tribes in Maranhão were eradicated, and that 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 134 people accused in the report, the state has until date not tried a single one,
since the Amnesty Law passed in the end of the dictatorship does not
allow trials for abuses that happened in that period. The report also
details instances of mass killings, rapes, and torture, Figueiredo
stated that the actions of the IPS had left 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.
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.
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 the Chinese occupation right up until the end of the Cultural Revolution."
In 1966 Mao Zedong accused the Inner Mongolian People's Party (IMPP) lead by the Mongol Ulanhu as a “political movement aiming to divide the motherland, China”. That accusation was used to eliminate the Mongol elite and to begin the genocide of the Mongols. The number of Mongol casualties during the Cultural Revolution is estimated between 16,222 (Chinese government) and 50,000 (independent study).
The Office of the Inner Mongolia Communist Party Committee published
statistics in 1989 which stated the total number of incarcerated Mongols
were 480,000. Independent surveys overseas estimate around half a million arrested and 100,000 deaths. When including delayed deaths (returning home after imprisonment) is an estimated 300,000 casualties. The cultural revolution became ingrained among the peasantry who caused torturing, humiliation and genocide of the Mongols. Chinese propaganda teams of the CCP came from outside to Inner Mongolia and perpetrated major atrocities in the 1970s. The CCP also imposed abortions on the Mongolians.
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.
Drug cartels, international resource extraction companies and the
military have also used violence to force the indigenous groups out of
their territories. 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.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, genocidal violence against the
indigenous Mbuti, Lese, and Ituri peoples has reportedly 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. Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of Mbuti pygmies, asked the UN Security Council to recognize cannibalism as a crime against humanity and an act of genocide.
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. In the 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.
Indonesia invadedEast Timor or Timor-Leste, which had previously been a Portuguese colony, in 1975. Following the invasion, the Indonesian government implemented repressive military policies
in an attempt to quell ethnic protests and armed resistance in the
area. People from other parts of Indonesia were encouraged to settle in
the region. The violence which occurred between 1975 and 1993 claimed
between 120,000 and 200,000 lives. The repression entered the
international spotlight in 1991 when a protest in Dili was disrupted by Indonesian forces which killed over 250 people and disappeared hundreds of others. The Santa Cruz massacre,
as the event became known, drew a significant amount of international
attention to the issue (it was highlighted when the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Catholic Bishop Carlos Belo and resistance leader José Ramos-Horta).
Following the international outcry, the Indonesian government
began to organize a host of paramilitary groups which continued to
harass and kill pro-independence activists in East Timor. At the same
time, the Indonesian government significantly increased its population
resettlement efforts in the area and intensified the destruction of the
infrastructure and the environment used by East Timorese communities. In
response to this policy, an international intervention force
was eventually deployed to East Timor in order to monitor a vote for
the independence of East Timor by its population in 1999. The vote was
significantly in favor of independence and the Indonesian forces
withdrew, but paramilitaries continued to carry out reprisal attacks for
a few years.
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. As a result, East
Timorese population declined to a third of its original size of 1975.
During the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), state forces carried out violent atrocities against Mayans.
The government considered them to be aligned with the communist
insurgents. 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 continuous pursuit of those who had fled
into the mountains.
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 being thrown alive into mass
graves where they would be crushed by the weight of an adult corpse
thrown atop them. An estimated 200,000 people, most of them Mayans, disappeared during the Guatemalan Civil War.
After the 1996 peace accords, a legal process to determine the
legal responsibility of the atrocities and to locate and identify the
disappeared ones began. In 2013, former president Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 80 years of imprisonment but the Constitutional Court of Guatemala overturned his conviction only ten days later.
Yazidis
are an indigenous minority group in the Middle East that practices its
own monotheistic religion. They have frequently been stigmatized and
targeted for violence by Islamist extremists in Iraq (most recently by ISIL,
but other Islamist groups also perpetrated acts of violence against
Yazidis in the past), with multiple studies leading researchers to
conclude that acts of genocide have been perpetrated against the Yazidi
community in Iraq, including mass killings and rape.
While acts of violence against Yazidis have been documented for
centuries, recent acts of violence against them include deadly terrorist
attacks such as the 2007 Yazidi communities bombings and the August 2014 Sinjar massacre. Yazidi women and girls have frequently been kept as sex slaves and have been subjected to slave trading by ISIL terrorists during the recent events of the genocide of Yazidis by ISIL.
This resulted in the forcible displacement of over 500,000 Yazidis from
Iraq. In 2014 alone, 5000 Yazidis were killed, but long before that
year, the genocide was already being committed against the Yazidis. It
is still going on nowadays. In February 2021, the remains of 104 Yazidis killed by ISIL were found and laid to rest.
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, which had remained under the control of the Netherlands.
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, which reached high levels in the
mid-1980s.
The resulting human rights abuses included extrajudicial
killings, torture, disappearances, rape, and harassment of indigenous
people throughout the province. 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 mostly 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."
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 the destruction of an 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.
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. Burmese General Maung Hla stated that one day the Karen will only exist "in a museum"
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. The Karen are also reported to have been subjected to forced labor, genocidal rape, child labor and the conscription of child soldiers. The Rohingya people have also been subjected to persecution
mass killings, genocidal mass rapes and forced displacement. The
Myanmar army burned their villages and forced them to flee the country.
Mass graves which contain the remains of many victims of genocide were
discovered. By 2017 over 700,000 Rohingya people fled to Bangladesh, whose government was praised for giving shelter to them.
In 2002, the numbers of the 17 indigenous tribes, which primarily live in the Chaco region of Paraguay, were estimated to be 86,000. 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, the charges being kidnappings, sale of children, withholding medicines and food, slavery and torture.
During the 1960s and 1970s, 85% of the Aché people were killed, often hacked to death with machetes, in order to make room for the timber industry, mining, farming and ranchers.
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.
Between 1996 and 2000, while under the leadership of President Alberto Fujimori, the Peruvian government carried out coercive sterilizations
on approximately 300,000 Peruvian women. The state specifically
targeted rural, impoverished, and Indigenous populations through the use
of bribes, threats, and deceitful tactics in order to perform tubal
ligations and vasectomies without the individuals' informed consent.
The crackdown on the Sri Lankan Tamils during the 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom and the Sri Lankan Civil War have been described as genocidal in nature by the United Nations.
Sri Lankan mobs brutally butchered thousands of Tamil people in 1958,
starting a series of genocides over the years that eventually led to a
civil war in 1983.
Since the end of the civil war in 2009, the Sri Lankan state has been
subject to much global criticism for violating human rights by bombing
civilian targets, using of heavy weaponry, abducting and killing of Sri
Lankan Tamils and using sexual violence.
Human Rights Watch
was the first to accuse the Sri Lankan government of genocide under
international law in December 2009. Leading American expert in
international law Professor Francis A. Boyle held an emergency meeting
with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon
to urge to stop the Tamil genocide by providing evidence of crimes
against humanity, genocide against Tamils and the international
community's failure to stop the slaughter of Tamil civilians in Sri
Lanka. In February 2020, the US State Department and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that General Shavendra Silva,
current commander of the Sri Lankan Army, was banned from entering the
United States due to war crimes committed by the 53rd division of the
Sri Lankan army, in which he has involved through command responsibility
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