Prevention of Genocide Humankind Has Thesis

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Both Nazism and Communism have been proved of being highly ineffective and dangerous for humanity.

Some of the reasons which made it easier for the genocide that took place during the Holocaust to occur were Hitler's clever schemes and the favorable conditions in which Germans were searching for a scapegoat that they could blame for their deficiencies.

The Khmer Rouge regime has ruled over Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 and it is yet another example of genocide when considering the number of innocents that it claimed and the reasons it had for doing so. Despite the fact that both the Khmer Rouge Regime and the Nazi Regime were guilty of taking the lives of millions, the methods through which the two acted are opposite with one being communist and the other fascist.

With the Marxist leader Pol Pot in charge, the Khmer Rouge army attempted to take Cambodia back to its roots by constraining people from urban areas to work as slaves in the country side. After several insignificant attempts the Communists managed to attract attention from the people in 1970. (bbc) a civil war lasted for five years and it ended with the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975.

While living in a remote area before achieving victory, Pol Pot had learn from the tribes that civilization was not necessary for people to safely coexist. He later decided to transform Cambodia by getting the people out of the cities and installing a system that would lack civilization altogether. The measures taken by the Khmer Rouge regime were harsh and they involved the killing of anyone that was considered intellectual or educated. There were often cases in which illiterate members of the Khmer Rouge would force people to work until their last breath. Some estimates claim that nearly 2.5 millions perished under the unfair ruling of Pol Pot in the four-year period of the regime. The Cambodian leader is believed to have committed genocide on four accounts which include the annihilation of the Buddhist monks and of the Vietnamese, Chinese, and Muslim Chams. (Andreopoulos)

The Khmer Rouge ruling has been overturned in 1979 with the coming of the Vietnamese troops into the country and left way for the world to observe the massacre that has happened in Cambodia.

One of the most terrible cases of genocide in recent years is the Rwandan massacre where around 800,000 from the Tutsi tribe have been murdered by Hutu tribesmen.(bbc) the motive, or the pretext for the bloodshed had been the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana whose plane had been shot down on the 6th of April 1994. (bbc) According to a French official report from that time, the plane had been shot down at the orders of, Paul Kagamethe, the Rwandan President at that time. In spite of the replies coming from Rwanda claiming that Kagamethe had nothing to do with the terrorist act, a wave of violence was already sweeping the country.

Apparently, Habyarimana's death had been the single motive that the Hutus lacked in order to raise their arms against the Tutsis. Rwanda had been no stranger to violence, as the situation has been tensed ever since the Belgian colonists have discriminated the Hutus as being of lower intellectual capacity than the Tutsis. (bbc)

The Hutus started to rise against the Tutsis since 1959 when a large part of the Tutsis had been slaughtered as a result of a Hutu riot. The Tutsis began to feel the disastrous effects of the persecutions after the Belgian government has granted Rwanda its independence. Tension was beginning to rise and the Hutus were taking every opportunity to condemn the Tutsis as being at the center of the causes leading to the deterioration of the general situation in the country.

After Habyarimana began to lose popularity among the Hutus, he decided to bring back his followers by using the Tutsis attempt to take charge of the country in his favor. Habyarimana's death had provided the Hutus with a reason to start a wave of mass murders around the country killing everyone that were from the opposition. A militia group was soon formed and Hutus were moving around the country encouraging every other Hutu to join them in murdering innocent people.

The U.N. had decided not to intervene in the civil war after the killing of 10 of its soldiers and the Rwandan Patriotic Front was left to deal with the insurgency of Hutus.

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(bbc) the fighting lasted from April till June 1994 and ended with the RPF capturing the Rwandan capital and overthrowing the government. The U.N. troops later joined the RPF in providing aid for Rwanda's loses, but still nothing could be done to bring back the innocent that died for an absurd cause.

The Rwanda genocide is thought to be among the ones that could have safely been prevented by the outside world. Rwanda's problem had been that the country "was simply too little, too far away, too poor, and too black for the 'developed' world to care about." (Taylor, 1999)

It would appear that even after the passing of 46 years from the 1948 Geneva Convention and the actions that have been proposed in order to prevent genocide world wide the U.N. had not been ready, or did not want to be ready, to cope with the threat of genocide. Whereas the Hutus were mercilessly killing their very neighbors, the U.N. committee and the rest of the countries refrained from calling the action genocide. If the action were to be cataloged as being genocide, special measures had to be taken to sort the situation and to begin immediate evacuation.

Alison Des Forges explain that genocides like that in Rwanda and others could have been prevented if people were to examine all the features that indicated a possible uprising within the country. (Des Forges)

After approximately forty years from the Holocaust the great powers of the world were assumed to be ready for preventing genocide from happening. The case of previous Yugoslavia is proof that anti-genocide plans had not been made nor were the world leaders willing to give support in case of risk. In the broken states of former Yugoslavia terror had been at home as women and children were raped and killed in what once had been a civilized region. This particular genocide took place with the help of communist President Slobodan Milosevic that managed to get the Serb public against all non-Serbs serving him with the opportunity to start a strategy of ethnic cleansing.

The world has had much to learn from its past full of crime, but regardless of the amendments that have been done concerning genocidal research, the act of genocide is still present in the 21st century. This is possible because of the fact that there are no expert institutions that could either forecast the danger of genocide or prevent it.

There are a lot of centers world wide where genocide is studied, but the sheer analysis of the topic is of little importance as long as no tangible actions are done in order to actually prevent it from happening.

The reason for which most nations abstained from joining a united front that would fight genocide during the first years after the 1948 Convention was that during that period most people did not wish to use their resources to help people of different ethnicity. According to Herbert Hirsch, the U.S. had been one of the nations that have had issues concerning racism and social inequality during the 1950s itself. With the coming of Lyndon Baines Johnson in office, the situation was bound to change because the new President had set a program that would revolutionize the U.S. through programs known as "the Great Society." (Hirsch)

The change included both political and cultural changes which began to be seen with the birth of the eccentric rock and roll music and other activities that were perceived to be strange and suspicious. The difference was made with the coming of President Kennedy and the anti-Vietnam war movements, actions which triggered the signal that the U.S. had begun its road towards democracy.

Evolution does indeed make the difference between the people with prejudices from the early twentieth century and the open-minded people of today. What is more troubling is that despite the fact that concepts have changed, today's people also tend to hesitate when they are required to act for the help of others.

The U.N. Security Council commenced to economically sanction nations as early as 1966 in Rhodesia, 1977 in South Africa, and later in several areas around the world during the 1990s (Riemer). The Security Council did not apply the sanctions to directly denounce genocidal acts, but the sanctions were given as penalties for the reason that the particular countries that have received them have committed abuse of human rights. In the.....

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