Many war
crimes are not prosecuted (due to lack of political will, lack of effective
procedures, or other practical and political reasons), historians and lawyers
will often make a serious case that war crimes occurred, even if there was no
formal investigations or prosecution of the alleged crimes or an investigation
cleared the alleged perpetrators.
Whether you
call them massacres, genocides or crimes against humanity, some of the most
despicable crimes during war have led to countless deaths.
The
Holocaust
It was the genocide of European Jews during
World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators
systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe,
around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
The Holocaust was an ideological and
systematic state-sponsored and mass murder of millions of European Jews and
several other groups by the regime of German Nazis. This crime against humanity
happened between 1933 and 1945 when Adolf Hitler ruled Germany.
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The final solution of World War II Nazi Germany and its leader Adolf Hitler was to systematically eliminate Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and more. The Holocaust was just one of many despicable war crimes committed during World War II, but with the imprisonment, torture and execution of over six million Jews, the Holocaust truly stands above all others in the history of atrocities. Torture camps such as Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka served as homes to some of the world’s most infamous human rights violations.
Cambodian
Genocide
This
genocide resulted from the planned persecution and killing of Cambodians by the
Khmer Rouge during the Communist Party of the Kampuchea regime. Its general
secretary, Pol Pot, radically led Cambodia into a self-sufficient agrarian
society. In the process, about 1.5 to 2 million people were killed from 1975 to
1979, which was a quarter of Cambodia's population.
Pol Pot and
Khmer Rouge sought to ethnically cleanse Cambodia into a classless society
based upon the tenets of such leaders as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. These
efforts resulted in the deaths of well over a million people due to starvation,
disease, exhaustion and execution. After losing to the Vietnamese, Pol Pot fled
to the Thai border with the remnants of his party. While a faction of his
political group did place him under house arrest, he died in 1998 without ever
facing real consequences for his actions.
Nigerian
Civil War
It was a
civil war between the government of Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra. The
Republic of Biafra had seceded and declared its independence from Nigeria in
1967, leading to conflict. Biafra was led by Lt. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu and
was dominantly made of the Igbo people, while Nigeria, dominated by the
Hausa-Fulani’s, was under General Yakubu Gowon.
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This bid for
independence eventually led to what has been called the Biafran War, or
Nigerian Civil War, during which Biafra suffered from intense famine and
disease, with the death toll reaching between a half million and 2 million.
Meanwhile, numerous human rights violations were laid at the feet of Nigerian
forces, which were accused of rape, murder and civilian bombing during their
raids. Biafra couldn’t stand against Nigeria’s military strength by war’s end,
and the state surrendered on January 15th, 1970.
Armenian Genocide
It happened
during World War I in the then Ottoman Empire. Close to one million ethnic
Armenians were murdered under the watch of the Committee of Union and Progress
(CUP). The genocide was executed through mass executions, death marches towards
the Syrian Desert.
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Between 1915
and 1918, it is estimated that up to 1.5 million Armenians living in the
Ottoman Empire were killed. Many more were forced to flee the country as a
result of this systematic extermination. Historically treated as second-class
citizens, in the late 19th century, between 80,000 and 300,000 Armenians were
killed during the Hamidian massacres. The internal conflict within the Ottoman
Empire again came to a violent boiling point with the start of WWI.
Nanjing
massacre
It was a
period of mass murder and rape conducted by the Imperial Japanese troops
against the residents of Nanjing, which was the capital of China at the time.
The massacre happened during the Sino-Japanese War that occurred between 1937
and 1945. The massacre lasted for six weeks, beginning on the 13th of December,
1937.
The Imperial Japanese army captured Nanjing and killed hundreds of thousands of disarmed combatants and unarmed Chinese civilians. The massacre was accompanied by widespread rape and looting. It is estimated that over 300,000 Chinese were killed.
