Genocide In Sri Lanka

Genocide is a term that can be defined as a planned and systematic destruction of whole or parts of certain national, religious, race, ethnic, cultural or political group (Akhavan 21). Genocide is deliberated with a different set of actions for a purpose to destroy an essential foundation of life. Genocide is characterized with the massive killing of members of a group, causing mental or bodily injuries to a group of people, imposing mechanisms to prevent birth, removing particular group children and putting conditions of life in order to bring to an end existence of a particular group. Therefore, genocide is an illegal action and a crime recognized and punishable by international law (Charmy 35). For instance, Rwanda genocide is characterized by ethnic tensions within the country. Initially the definition of the term genocide as by genocide convection only comprised of racial, ethnic, national and religious groups. They argued that inclusion of other groups cannot strengthen but rather weakens it. This definition failed to recognize other groups such as political groups, economic and cultural groups that are essential elements of genocide. Genocide therefore, is generally considered the worst moral crime the ruling authority can commit against those it controls Naimark (2017).

History is a phenomenon that has the propensity to repeat itself. Genocides have been committed throughout history, even before the term was assembled in 1944 and accepted by the United Nations in 1946 as a crime under international law. According to the United Nations, genocide is defined as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” A minimum of twenty-seven genocides have been documented across the world. During the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide and the Ukrainian genocide (Holodomor) transpired. Currently, in the 21st century, the world is witnessing another brutal genocide occurring in Myanmar. A kindred pattern of events is perceived throughout the duration of genocides along with

Throughout the 20th century, numerous acts of genocides have attempted to bring the complete elimination and devastation of large groups of people originating from various particular ethnicities. With these genocides occurring in many regions of the world, the perpetrators often organizing such crimes, have historically been larger and more powerful than the victims themselves. Often being the government and its military forces. However, the lack of international response associated with these genocides, further contributed to the devastating outcomes. On April 6,1994, the fastest killing spree of the century took place in Rwanda against the Tutsi minority population. With many warning signs having already been proclaimed prior to the start of the Rwandan genocide, I believe that with international interference, this bloodshed could have ultimately been prevented.

The definition of genocide, according to the United Nations, was the attempt to destroy “a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group” by killing members, causing mental or bodily harm, harsh living conditions, prevention of births, and separating children from their families. There are four patterns of genocide, which do not always occur in every genocide since they’re not all the same. The four patterns include persecution, which is hostility and ill-treatment, especially toward a specific race, political, or religious belief done by the ruler or government. Next is displacement or when a group of people is forced to leave their native country. Continuing, public humiliation is another pattern that freely shows off a group of people being tortured or persecuted in plain sight. Finally when selective groups of people face at terrible fate while another group is spared the same fate as them is selective murder. Those were the four, very cruel and unfair, patterns of genocide.

A genocide that is still currently happening is the one in Laos which is the result of the Vietnam War. It was a war against the communist North and the democratic South with the help of the U.S. The U.S got involved because they want to prevent the spread of communism, which is known as the “domino theory” where if a surrounding country falls into the ideology of … then the rest will fall with it. The leader of North Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh, a strong dictator that managed to get support of his people. He states that the South was being used as a puppet state by the American. A lot of American dislikes this war and many oppose it, however many Americans don’t know that there was actually another war going on known as the Secret War.

Genocides once in a while develop full grown from the womb of insidiousness. They regularly advance in a stepwise manner after some time, as one wrongdoing prompts to another and another.

Since humans have walked this Earth we have seen and recorded countless acts of violence that have defined our history. The reason violence still persists today is because people sometimes feel the need to kill in order to achieve a goal. Also, in history, we have seen many acts of genocide that have decimated some cultures and left other cultures powerless after they have been brutally tortured. “The term genocide emerged in the early 1940s as the Nazis carried out their crime.” Genocide is the act of one group of people destroying a certain population for their own gain. Reasons for executing a genocide include wealth, racism, land, religion, and political ideology. The most famous genocide in the world is the Holocaust and this was the deliberate

Genocide is the complete extermination a specific group. It is a significant event in History that has been repeated time and time again, from the Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Holocaust to Joseph Stalin’s Era in the USSR. These chaotic periods of mass killing are usually the result of hatred towards certain races, religions, or ethnic parties. The attackers put unnecessary blame on the other group and take action to punish them brutal instead of finding means to compromise. They fear for their potential lost of power. The victims are quickly torqued and wipe out with a little chance of protecting themselves. In this case the rapid annihilation of the Tutsi for causing the apparent social and political issues in Rwanda, Africa is a perfect example of that. This genocide became known as the “100 days of slaughter.” (BBC) In the end of this period over 800,000 (about three quarter of the entire Tutsi population) were eradicated.

Imagine this, you and your neighbors have been fighting for years. You just don’t get along. You’ve had enough of it but know that you are a family of ten and all of your neighbors in the neighborhood, they add up to 36. Surely they’re stronger than you. And one day they prove it. The 36 of them attack you and your family. They have a precise method and get it done in a short period of time. Only three people of your family survive and you’re one of them. This is what happened only about twenty years ago in the country of Rwanda. The Hutus for 100 days killed off the Tutsis, the minority. It started with a plane carrying the president of Rwanda going awry, killing every one on board. The next day, the genocide began. Almost one million civilians were killed. If that doesn’t settle in yet, think about this, six individuals, men, women, and children, were murdered every minute of every day for one hundred days. You can bet that such a horrid event still affects the nation of Rwanda to this day.

Upwards of seventy thousand Tamil civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced (United Nations, 2000). Worldwide it is known as the May massacre and black July. The systematic killings of the Tamils were considered genocide. The United Nations (2000) states, that genocide is the “ [perpetration of] violent crimes with [the] intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”(P.337). The genocide against Tamils has been going on for years and the Sri Lankan government has not been brought to justice. Till this day, the surviving Tamil civilians are kept in concentration camps where many men, women and children get tortured, kidnapped and raped. According to the Sri Lankan government, these camps were made for rehabilitation purposes. David Keen (2014) states that the use of the camp is, “a dramatic practical expression of the fact that the Tamil population as a whole was considered suspect in relation to rebellion and terrorism” (P.10). Even after the genocide and the victory of the civil war, the Sri Lankan government still has not done anything to bring equality amongst its population. Let alone any sort of independence for the Tamil civilians. The newly elected President, Mahinda Rajapaksha opted to take Sri Lanka down an authoritative road (stone, 2014). He has brought other members of his family to governmental positions creating a permanent family line of non-democratic leadership. The instability and corruption within the government will assure that the Tamils will continually be

Genocide is a term that describes violent crimes against a specific group of people with the intention of absolute abolishment. On April 7th, 1994, one of the worst crimes against humanity was unleashed in Rwanda and in the following hundred days, almost one million Tutsi and moderate Hutus were heinously slaughtered. Scott Strauss, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, describes the horrors that occurred, revealing that "Over three months, government forces with militia and civilian assistance massacred at least 800,000 people in one of the worst human rights violations of the 1900’s” (Strauss 5). During the genocide, the majority of the Tutsi population were killed by the hands of the Hutus. Sadly, the Western world stood by, ignoring

Though a broadly used term, genocide did not exist before the terrors of the Holocaust. Afterwards, the United Nations decided to give it its present definition, a mass killing of a large group of people, usually of the sam religion, ethnicity, or race. In the process, they tried to extinguish all mass murders around the world, but still many acts of genocide were conducted, for example the genocide in Bangladesh. It began in 1971, in East Pakistan. The whole genocide began as an attempt to crush forces that were seeking freedom and independence for East Pakistan. West Pakistan released a campaign of mass murder to kill millions of Bengali. The Muslim Generals then decided that they wanted Pakistan to become pure, and they killed anyone who

During the Sri Lanka Genocide, crimes against humanity were committed against the Tamlins by the Sri Lankans. Sri Lanka is an island in the Indian ocean, located south-east of India. The original name of the island is the Democratic Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka had their own language. “In 1956, the Official Language Act was enacted” (Mitchell, pg. 2). This act made the Sinhalese language the 1st language that 74% of the people on the island spoke. The different languages caused many issues on the island. This language caused some of the people to resign because they could speak this language. Since, they couldn’t resign they went against the government. The Tamils felt they weren’t important to the Sri Lanka. To make them feel important, they made

The ethnic tension between Sri Lanka’s majority and minority populations, the Sinhalese who are mostly Buddhists being the majority and the minority being mostly Hindu and are called Tamil, has been going on for many of years. Finally in 1983 the ethnic tensions finally spilled over into civil war. The civil war has been mostly between the government of Sri Lanka and the militant organization called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The LTTE are fighting for an independent Tamil state called, Tamil Eelam. The government of Sri Lanka has relied heavily on two of the four faces of power and those two would be force and persuasion, while the LTTE has used punishment as its main face of power in this

Even though the war was declared to be over in 2009, there are still on-going conflicts. From the time Sri Lanka gained its independence, which was in 1848, the Sinhalese population were in power. Successive Sinhalese governments have put into action many prejudicial laws against the Tamils. Around early 1970’s, ethnic groups who wanted independence appeared in the Tamil-dominated areas of the country, with the Liberation of the Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE) strongest among all. Despite the fact that the civil war has come to an end, there are still numerous problems that the citizens face today. Now that there is a newly elected president since January 2015, I hope for reconciliation of differences between the two ethnicities.