Human Rights Violations

Russian Pogroms

Russia was a vast empire with many different ethnic minorities.

The czars wanted to maintain tight control over these minorities, as well as promote Russian nationalism.

This policy of Russification, was an attempt to make all the different ethnic minorities living in Russia think, act, and believe as Russians.

Russian Czars often persecuted non-Russians including Poles, Ukraninans, and Armenians.

Russian Czars wanted one language (Russian), and one religion (Russian Orthodox).

Russian Pogroms

These restrictions on religion caused conflict with Jews living in Russia,

Jews were not allowed to have certain jobs and were not allowed to live in certain areas in Russia.

These policies encouraged violent attacks on Jews, known as pogroms.

Russian authorities stood by and watched the homes of Jews burned and their businesses looted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ7X01ZknQ0

Holocaust

One of Hitler’s goals was to create “living space” for Germans who he considered racially superior.

Hitler planned to destroy those who he found inferior.

Jews were the main target, but he also wanted to destroy Slavs, Gypsies, and the mentally or physically disabled.

The attempt to destroy an entire ethnic or religious group is called genocide.

Holocaust

Hitler committed genocide against the Jews.He began by limiting the rights and

encouraging the violence against the Jews.Most notably, on November 8, 1938,

organized violence against the Jews occurred with the burning of Jewish synagogues, businesses, cemeteries, schools, and homes.

This night was known as Kristallnacht.The next day, 30,000 Jews were arrested for

being Jewish.

Final Solution

On January 20, 1942 Nazi leaders met in Berlin to discuss the “final solution of the Jewish question”.

The Nazis made plans to round up Jews from the vast areas of Nazi controlled Europe and take them to detention centers known as concentration camps.

At these concentration camps, healthy individuals would work as slaves until they dropped dead of exhaustion, disease, or malnutrition.

Most others, including the elderly, sick, or young children would be sent to extermination camps.

It was in these extermination camps where these individuals were executed in large gas chambers.

Auschwitz

The Nazis constructed gas chambers (rooms that filled with poison gas to kill those inside) to increase killing efficiency and to make the process more impersonal for the perpetrators.

At the Auschwitz camp complex, the Birkenau killing center had four gas chambers. During the height of deportations to the camp, up to 6,000 Jews were gassed there each day.

Millions of people were imprisoned and abused in the various types of Nazi camps.

Under SS management, the Germans and their collaborators systematically murdered more than three million Jews in the killing centers alone.

Only a small fraction of those imprisoned in Nazi camps survived.

Cambodia

Cambodia

During the Vietnam War, fighting spilled over into the neighboring country of Cambodia.

During the Vietnam War, Cambodia served as a supply route for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces (Communist).

North Vietnam sent supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Cambodia to guerilla forces located in South Korea.

In 1970, the United States bombed that route and then invaded Cambodia

Cambodia

After the Americans left, Cambodian communists guerillas known as the Khmer Rouge, took control of the Cambodian government.

Under the leadership of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge began a reign of terror to remove all western influence from Cambodia.

The Khmer Rouge drove people from the cities and forced them to work in the fields.

They slaughtered or caused the death of more than a million Cambodians

During the time of Pol Pot, about 1.5 million Cambodians out of a total population of 7 to 8 million died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork.

Their bodies were buried in mass graves that became known as “Killing Fields.”

http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/pol-pot.htm

http://www.history.com/topics/pol-pot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SI8RF6wDE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfNJkBrHoi8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q0EgUQNaDQhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP8RVziFuSU

Africa

Rwanda

Rwanda

Africa was controlled by Europe to provide raw materials and new markets for industrialized goods.

This period, known as Imperialism, had a negative effect on African culture and did not completely end until after World War II.

A major effect of Imperialism on Africa is tribalism.

When the Europeans took control, they redrew Africa's boundaries to suit themselves. They had little regard for the tribal boundaries already in place.

Rwanda

Another example of tribalism leading to gross human rights violations is the civil war in Rwanda between the Hutu and Tutsi.

Tribal rivalries had existed for years between these groups, often leading to violence since independence.

In 1994, the United Nations had concluded a peace agreement to end the violence in their country.

Unfortunately, it was short lived. The Hutu dominated Rwandan army initiated a genocide against the Tutsi, killing more than a million of them in under a year.

This was ended when a Tutsi rebel army seized the government. Since this time, UN Peacekeeping forces have worked to end the violence, with little success.

Rwanda

http://www.history.com/topics/rwandan-genocide

Darfur

Sudan is the largest country in Africa.

Located in Northeastern Africa, it borders the Red Sea and falls between Egypt, Chad, Uganda, as well as six other countries.

The capitol, Khartoum, is in the Northeastern part of the country.

Darfur is a region in Western Sudan that encompasses an area roughly the size of Spain.

The population of Darfur is estimated at 6,000,000 people.

The conflict in Darfur has also increased tensions in neighboring Chad and the Central African Republic as hundreds of thousands of refugees stream over the two countries’ borders to escape violence.

Darfur

The “Darfur Genocide” refers to the current mass slaughter and rape of Darfuri men, women and children in Western Sudan.

The killings began in 2003 and continue still today, as the first genocide in the 21st century.

The genocide is being carried out by a group of government-armed and funded Arab militias known as the Janjaweed (which loosely translates to ‘devils on horseback’).

The Janjaweed systematically destroy Darfurians by burning villages, looting economic resources, polluting water sources, and murdering, raping, and torturing civilians.

Darfur

Attacks on Darfuri villages commonly begin with Sudanese Air Force bombings.

Air campaigns are often followed by Janjaweed militia raids.

All remaining village men, women, and children are either murdered or forced to flee.

Looting, burning food stocks, enslaving and raping women and children, and stealing livestock are common.

Dead bodies are tossed in wells to contaminate water supplies and entire villages are burned to the ground.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-U5BDLo4Ws

Apartheid In Africa

For nearly 350 years, Europeans ruled South Africa.

Although South Africa won independence from Britain in 1910, its white citizens alone held political power.

To control the nation’s government and economy, whites in 1948 made official a system of apartheid in South Africa.

Apartheid means separation of the races.The system of apartheid forced black Africans and

other non-whites to live in certain zones, the segregation of public facilities and transportation.

Apartheid

The whites goal was to ensure economic and political power and social supremacy.

New laws, for example, restricted better paying jobs in mines to whites only.

Blacks were pushed into low-paying, low-skill jobs.

Blacks had to carry an I.D. card with them at all times and were evicted from the best land, which was set aside for whites.

Blacks were forced onto crowded, dry pieces of land, unsuitable for living.

Anti-Apartheid Movement

In 1912, a political party known as the African National Congress (ANC), was organized in South Africa.

The ANC used boycotts and non-violent civil disobedient tactics to oppose the apartheid.

In 1960, the police killed 69 people and wounded 180 at a demonstration in Sharpeville.

Nelson Mandela, an important leader of the ANC, was sentenced to prison for life for conspiracy.

Mandela became an important figure in the fight for freedom in Southern Africa.

Anti-Apartheid Movement

Mandela encouraged civil disobedience in order for blacks to show opposition to the apartheid.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison, often in isolation, yet he remained a powerful symbol of the struggle against the apartheid.

By 1989, the apartheid had been banned through the efforts of those like Mandela, who was later freed from prison.

Mandela would become the first president of the new, democratic South Africa in 1994.

http://www.history.com/topics/apartheid