Genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo Imagine every person living in the state of Minnesota being killed for no reason. Five and a half million people killed because someone doesn’t approve of how they look. That is what it is like with genocide, innocent people killed because their physical characteristics or ethnicity doesn’t please others. A genocide that killed five and a half million recently began in the African country of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and still continues to this day. The genocide that took place in the Democratic Republic of Congo began in 1996, was provoked by the Rwanda genocide, fought between the Tutsis and the Hutus, and is the deadliest conflict since World War II.
Origins
The Democratic Republic of Congo has always been an extremely poor country. They rank as the poorest country in the world but have a high number of natural resources (“World Without Genocide”). The Congo has an unemployment rate of around ninety-five percent, more than half of the Congo people do not have access to clean water, and their mortality rates among children is highest of any country in world (“Congo Voice”). Their economic situation made it even harder for the
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It is possible that up to a million more were killed, but many deaths weren’t accounted for because their bodies had decomposed or were eaten before anyone knew. About half of the people killed in this genocide were under the age of five (“World Without Genocide”). That is just a hard thing to hear, so many children killed for literally no reason at all. They could barely walk and talk so what did they do to deserve to be killed? Rape has also been terribly bad the Congo (“World Without Genocide”). As if the famine, disease, and deaths of many people you know wasn’t bad enough imagine having to deal with being raped as
From the dawn of time to even now, genocides have been happening throughout history. Some earlier genocides have not even been recorded or documented. Genocides happen because one group wants complete control and absolute power of another. People can be killed for having different ideals or being different. Knowing this, one could see that genocides only end with senseless and brutal discrimination and death. From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge carried out a genocide in Cambodia killing all people who seemed to oppose them and their communist government (“The Cambodian Genocide”).
Throughout the years there has unfortunately been several instances of genocide and one of the most horrifying and tragic genocides was with the Nazi Holocaust that took place from 1938 until 1945. Another one of the horrifying genocides in history was the Bosnia-Herzegovina genocide that took place from 1992 until 1995. A genocide is essentially a systematic murder. Genocide is basically an attempted murder on individuals based on social or political reasons. Bosnia-Herzegovina was responsible for 200,000 deaths and the Nazi Holocaust was responsible for 6,000,000 deaths! Just because the amount of deaths between the two are drastically different does not mean that they did not both do a tremendous amount of damage and take a great deal of
Genocide is a term that causes many to feel suffering, pain, grief, and truly understand brutality. When people hear this word, they think of bloodbath, chaos, instability, mass extermination, and loss. It is a word that evokes fear and agony. It is a word that right away directs us to think about the sadistic Adolf Hitler who annihilated millions of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, and many more lives. We think of King Leopold II of Belgium who was greedy for a drink of innocent Congolese blood.
In the Darfur Genocide over four million people were displaced and over two million people were killed. It may not seem like a lot of people were killed but if you think about how many people of the same race were killed then it might change your mind. People who live in
Sub point 1: Problem 2: Another huge problem is their lack of education. In another website called Education in Democratic Republic of the Congo, updated on April 19, 2017 by the USAID, 3.5 million children of primary school age are not enrolled in school. This issue is also largely affecting their health issue as well, because people have no knowledge of how to prevent diseases from spreading into their bodies, such as malaria as mentioned earlier. For most of us, who had K-12 education without any restrictions, these problems might be totally unimaginable.
Somewhere around 2 million people died by starvation, torture, or having been executed. Most Cambodians as a child starved in house after the genocide. As a world leader President Nixon didn’t help out Cambodians with food and medical supplies because USA was at war with Vietnam and Vietnam was allied with Cambodia. Quoted from world info, “The international Red Cross had supplied emergency rations to the refugees. ”(Mitchell)
Many times we may hear but not respond, we see and don’t move and having the ability to take action we don’t even move a finger until the situation is out of control. It’s amazing how ignorant and stubborn the human race can be. This is exactly the response of many nations when it comes to genocide. Genocide is the systematic killing of all the people from a national, ethnic, or religious group. Two of the most recent genocides in history are the genocide of Rwanda and the genocide of Cambodia.
Genocide occurs in several nations and causes millions of lives to be lost. The slaughter of innocent men, women, and children continue daily, and will happen until the world and its people grow tired of the unnecessary loss of life and work to aid those in need. Darfurians are a prime example of what can happen when ones lives are not valued because of the difference in beliefs.
The horrors of genocide are terrible and can’t seem realistic to a person, but it still goes on. Preventative measures must be put in place to stop perpetrators in their
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, a.k.a. the DRC, or more commonly “the Congo”, has experienced an endless nightmare of violence, poverty, famine, sickness, and murder for the past 16 years. The constant bloodshed between the national and armed forces has led to countless civilian deaths, or the genocide in the Congo. Before I go on any further, I must explain what a genocide is. A genocide is the attempted destruction of an entire group of people. The most famous example is the Holocaust in which 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II. It is tragic to say that history has repeated itself and over 5 to 7 million Congolese civilians have lost their lives since 1996. In order to truly understand the events that are transpiring
In 2003 there was a mass slaughter and and rape of the people in Darfur. This happened to so many people like men, women, and children. Many people suffered from the mass torturing. This is known as a genocide. The genocide has been going on for about 13 years and is still going on today. This genocide is the first genocide in the 21st century. The darfur genocide was gruesome. Since the Darfur bloodshed was gruesome and had people attacking, it led the United States and Court to believe it was considered a genocide. Darfur is a horrible time in history for so many people. The Janjaweed and the Sudanese forces attacked hundreds of villages in Darfur. The genocide is what caused so many people to suffer from the United States, court, crimes
Genocide has been around for many centuries. One of the most known happened in 1915 when residents of the Ottoman Empire were told to leave upon orders from the government. Due to the long and harsh travels, there was an enormous amount of disease trapped in the concentration camps. With that alone, there was an estimated amount of one million Armenians killed. Another example of genocide is when the Khmer Rouge took control of the Cambodian government in 1975. Citizens who were suspected of receiving an education were tortured at the Tuol Sleng prison. In four years, approximately two million Cambodians died in the “Killing Fields.” A Civil War in Rwanda aroused tension between the Tutsi minority and Hutu minority. When the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down, there was no doubt that a war was about to break out. The two minorities found themselves in the center of the conflict; in the end, the “outbreak” claimed the lives of an estimated 100,000 people. About a decade ago, the Sudan government showed an act of genocide when they murdered 300,000 Darfuri citizens and displacing two million. In addition to that, Native Americans died from colonial conflict, disease, and discrimination devastated their population. Within this time period, over nine million Natives died
This is a tale of horror and tragedy in the Congo, beginning with the brutal and exploitative regime of King Leopold II of Belgium, and culminating with the downfall of one of Africa’s most influential figures, Patrice Lumumba. The Congo is but one example of the greater phenomenon of European occupation of Africa. The legacy of this period gives rise to persistent problems in the Congo and throughout Africa. Understanding the roots and causes of this event, as focused through the lense of the Congo, is the subject of this paper.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), located in Central Africa, struggles daily because the government fails. The country has been in civil conflicts for nearly a decade, this however is not the main health hazard. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Congo was a popular location for slave trade, while foreign powers intruded they also exposed the area to their diseases that have remained for centuries. These diseases have developed
In the past, many incidents of genocide have occurred, like the Armenian genocide or the Rwandan genocide. While these incidents may seem unrelated to current times, similar incidents are starting to occur in many parts of the world and one such place is Congo. Many sources hint that the conflict that occurs in Congo is a genocide because many elements of genocide appear in the conflict like classification or dehumanization. While what they say has some truth in the sense that this conflict contains some element of genocide but, not enough elements are present to make it a genocide. Although many would believe that the conflict in Congo is a genocide, there is evidence of the conflict being a territorial and power dispute because some countries invading Congo want the resources, others want power, and the cause of the conflict in Congo is the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.