Deaths / Victims / Killers / Place / Date
1. xxxxx / Jews, gypsies, Poles, Russians / Nazis / occupied Europe / 1939-45
2. xxx / Serbs / Croats / Yugoslavia / 1941-45
3. xx / Polish officers / Russians / Katyn / 1940
4. xx /Jews / Ukrainians / Ukraine / 1917-20
5. xxxxx / political opponents / Russians / Russia / 1929-39
6. xxx / ethnic minorities / Russians / Russia / 1943-46
7. xxxx / Armenians / Turks / Armenia / 1915
8. xx / Hereros / Germans / Southwest Africa / 1904
9. xxx / Hindus, Moslems / Moslems, Hindus / India, Pakistan / 1947
xx = 10,000 or more; xxx = 100,000 or more; xxxx = 1,000,000 or more; xxxxx = 10,000,000 or more
An unusually candid statement about the role of intent in genocide emerged when the Paraguayan government was charged with complicity in the disappearance of the Guayaki Indians, who had been enslaved, tortured, deprived of food and medicine, and massacred. Paraguay's defence minister replied quite simply that there had been no intent to destroy the Guayaki: 'Although there are victims and victimizers, there is not the third element necessary to establish the crime of genocide- that is, «intent». Therefore, as there is no intent, one cannot speak of "genocide". Brazil's Permanent Representative to the UN similarly rebutted charges of Brazilian genocide against Amazonian Indians: . . there was lacking the special malice or motivation necessary to characterize the occurrence of genocide. The crimes in question were committed for exclusively economic reasons, the perpetrators having acted solely to take possession of the lands of their victims.
Deaths / Victims / Killers / Place / Date
1. XX / Indians / Brazilians / Brazil / 1957-68
2. X / Ache Indians / Paraguayans / Paraguay / 1970s
3. XX / Argentine civilians / Argentine army / Argentina / 1976-83
4. XX / Moslems, Christians / Moslems, Christians / Lebanon / 1975-90
5. X / Ibos / North Nigerians / Nigeria / 1966
6. XX / opponents / dictator / Equatorial Guinea / 1977-79
7. X / opponents / Emperor Bokassa / Central African Republic / 1978-79
8. XXX / South Sudanese / North Sudanese / Sudan / 1955-72
9. XXX / Ugandans / Idi Amin / Uganda / 1971-79
10. XX / Tutsi / Hutu / Rwanda / 1962-63
11. XXX / Hutu / Tutsi / Burundi / 1972-73
12. X / Arabs / Blacks / Zanzibar / 1964
13. X / Tamils, Sinhalese / Sinhalese, Tamils / Sri Lanka / 1985
14. xxxx / Bengalis / Pakistan army / Bangladesh / 1971
15. xxxx / Cambodians / Khmer Rouge / Cambodia / 1975-79
16. XXX / communists & Chinese / Indonesians / Indonesia / 1965-67
17. XX / Timorese / Indonesians / East Timor / 1975-76
x = less than 10,000; xx = 10,000 or more; xxx = 100,000 or more; xxxx = 1,000,000 or more
Some mass killings, such as those of Jews and gypsies by Nazis, were unprovoked; the slaughter was not in retaliation for previous murders committed by the slaughtered. In many other cases, however, a mass killing culminates a series of murders and countermurders. When a provocation is followed by massive retaliation out of all proportion to the provocation, how do we decide when 'mere' retaliation becomes genocide? At the Algerian town of Setif in May 1945, celebrations of the end of the Second World War developed into a race riot in which Algerians killed 103 French. The savage French response consisted of planes destroying forty-four villages, a cruiser bombarding coastal towns, civilian commandos organizing reprisal massacres, and troops killing indiscriminately. The Algerian dead numbered 1,500 according to the French, 50,000 according to the Algerians. The interpretations of this event differ as do the estimates of the dead: to the French, it was suppression of a revolt; to the Algerians, it was a genocidal massacre.
Instances of genocide prove as hard to pigeonhole in their motivation as in their definition. While several motives may operate simultaneously, it is convenient to divide them into four types. In the first two types there is a real conflict of interest over land or power, whether or not the conflict is also disguised in ideology. In the other two types such conflict is minimal, and the motivation is more purely ideological or psychological. Perhaps the commonest motive for genocide arises when a militarily stronger people attempt to occupy the land of a weaker people, who resist. Among the innumerable straightforward cases of this sort are not °nly the killing of Tasmanians and Australian Aborigines by white Australians, but also the killings of American Indians by white Americans, of Araucanian Indians by Argentinians, and of Bushmen and Hottentots by the Boer settlers of South Africa.
Another common motive involves a lengthy power struggle within a pluralistic society, leading to one group seeking a final solution by killing the other. Cases involving two different ethnic groups are the killing of Tutsi in Rwanda by Hutu in 1962—63, of Hutu in Burundi by Tutsi in 1972-73, of Serbs by Croats in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, of Croats by Serbs at the end of that war, and of Arabs in Zanzibar by blacks in 1964. However, the killer and killed may belong to the same ethnic group and may differ only in political views. Such was the case in history's largest known genocide, claiming an estimated twenty million victims in the decade 1929—39 and sixty-six million between 1917 and 1959—that committed by the Russian government against its political opponents, many of whom were ethnic Russians. Political killings lagging far behind this record are the Khmer Rouge purge of several million fellow Cambodians during the 1970s, and Indonesia's killing of hundreds of thousands of communists in 1965-67. In these two motives for genocide, the victims could be viewed as a significant obstacle to the killers' control of land or power. At the opposite extreme are scapegoat killings of a helpless minority blamed for frustrations of their killers. Jews were killed by fourteenth-century Christians as scapegoats for the bubonic plague, by early twentieth-century Russians as scapegoats for Russia's political problems, by Ukrainians after the First World War as scapegoats for the Bolshevist threat, and by the Nazis during the Second World War as scapegoats for Germany's defeat in the First World War. When the US Seventh Cavalry machine-gunned several hundred Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in 1890, the soldiers were taking belated revenge for the Sioux's annihilating counterattack on Custer's Seventh Cavalry force at the Battle of the Little Big Horn fourteen years previously. In 1943-44, at the height of Russia's suffering from the Nazi invasion, Stalin ordered the killing or deportation of six ethnic minorities who served as scapegoats: the Balkars, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Ingush, Kalmyks, and Karachai. Racial and religious persecutions have served as the remaining class of motives. While I do not claim to understand the Nazi mentality, the Nazis' extermination of Gypsies may have stemmed from relatively 'pure' racial motivation, while scapegoating joined religious and racial motives in the extermination of Jews. The list of religious massacres is almost infinitely long. It includes the First Crusaders' massacre of all Moslems and Jews in Jerusalem when that city was finally captured in 1099, and the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of French Protestants by Catholics in 1572. Of course, racial and religious motives have contributed heavily to genocide provoked by land struggles, power struggles, and scapegoating.