The Passing of Dith Pran Brings Up the Subject of Genocide

The recent passing of Dith Pran has brought up many conversations regarding Genocide. We all are aware that Dith Pran was the survivor of Khmer Rouge where 2 million Cambodian men, women, and children were tortured and killed during the reign of Pol Pot.

Most discussions on Genocide take us to the Holocaust, which took place during the Nazi regime in Germany. It is said that more than 6 million Jewish men, women, and children died in this genocide. Although Hitler put to death more than just Jewish people, he put to death the physically handicapped; people of color; polish people; Catholics; Ukrainian Jews and many more. In fact we may never know just how many people died at the hands of the Germans in WWII.

The word Genocide had no definition until 1948 when it was defined as: to destroy a national ethical, racial, religious group in part or whole (Wikipedia encyclopedia).

Genocide is, to put it lightly, the act of men to remove a complete peoples from existence. There have been many forms of genocide throughout our world. Each one seems to be more ugly than the next, but all remain inhumane to say the least.

In my research on the subject I found a list that reads like this (these are only a few):

1904 - Hereros

1915 - Armenian (committed by Ottoman Turkey)

1915 -1945 Russian Germans

1933 - Holodomor

1939 - Russia under Joseph Stalin

1941 - Shoah

1941 Parajmos

1941-1945 WWII Polish, Jewish, Catholic, Russian, and Yugoslavia lost 1 million to genocide

1944 - Chechen People

1950 - Australia (the British made an attempt to remove all Aboriginal's from Australia)

1971 - Bangladesh

1971 - East Bengal

1972 - Burundi

1975 - Cambodia 20% of the population died

1982 - Guatemala

1982 - Iraq (Kurds)

1992 - Bosnia

1994 - Rwanda

2004 - Sudan

2007 - Argentina

2008 - Darfur

2008 - Kenya

There is no mention of the Native American's and the genocide of millions of them right here in the United States. This writer for one would include them in the list.

Why does a people believe, they have the right to wipe another off the face of this earth. There is a group established called Genocide Watch, they have published a paper called The 8 Stages of Genocide. You can read this paper and the descriptions of these 8 stages on http://www.genocidewatch.org/8stages.htm. In short the stages are, Classification; Symbolization; Dehumanization; Organization; Polarization; Preparation; Extermination; and Denial. Genocide Watch believes that Genocide can be stopped in any one of these stages. Their mission statement is to predict, prevent, stop and punish genocide and other forms of mass murder. They seek to raise awareness and influence public policy concerning potential and actual genocide. Their purpose is to build an international movement to prevent and stop genocide. Perhaps this group is the needed movement of the future to save those who are victims of this horrible crime.

The world needs to make a stand against this horrendous crime and this is at least a step in the right direction.

References - www.genocidewatch.org
www.preventgenocide.org