Pol Pot,
Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Franco, Kai-Shek, Mao, Hussein – all well-known
names. Most likely though, they are known for the wrong reasons. Asked to
associate single words with any of these names and many people would come up
with a list looking something like this: dictator, despot, genocide, holocaust,
brutal etc.
One of 500 Dafur refugee children's drawings
from the Waging Peace collection
We know
their names because of the atrocities committed under their rule.
Stalin is
estimated to have had 40-60 million killed during his regime.
Mao Tse
Tung had somewhere between 45 million and 75 million killed whilst in power.
During Hitler’s
Reich the number of deaths is estimated at 17-20 million.
Chiang
Kai-Shek murdered about 10 million.
Approximately
2 million were killed during Hussein’s rule. Pol Pot’s Cambodian rule killed a
similar number.
The number
killed during Idi Amin’s reign is indeterminate but estimated at between
100,000 to 500,000. Franco, in Spain, is responsible for about 400,000 deaths.
Those
eight names, all from the 20th century, were responsible for at least
a conservative estimate of 116 million deaths. The death toll could have been
as high as 170 million. And that number is only by those eight. Others that
could be mentioned are: the dictator Milosevic, and the genocides of Rwanda, Dafur,
Armenia, and the Rape of Nanking.
More than 116
– 170 million wrong reasons for knowing their names.
In 1948
the Genocide Convention was drafted and gained 153 state parties to it (as of
February 2025.) The Convention defines genocide as the ‘… intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group…’ The Convention includes in the rubric of
genocide not simply outright killing, but also the causing of bodily or mental
harm, deliberately imposing conditions of life that will bring about destruction,
preventing births within the group, and forcibly transferring children from the
group to another group.
When
genocide is considered in the light of this Convention, then the total numbers
given above are likely to rise by a considerable number of orders of magnitude.
This
definition also enables us to recognise a number of other historical events as
genocide. The colonisation (including slaughter) of native Americans by
European invaders from the 16th century onwards, the Atlantic slave
trade, the stolen generation in Australia.
Genocide
did not end with the signing of the Genocide Convention, and genocide did not
end with the shift from the 20th to the 21st century.
Genocide is continuing.
We can name
the names of those contributing to genocide today.
They also will be known for all the wrong reasons when the history of the 21st
century is written.
