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An atrocity (from the Latin atrox, "atrocious", from Latin ater ="matte black") is a term used to describe crimes or excesses ranging from an act committed against a single person to one committed against a population or ethnic group.

In general use, an atrocity or massacre designates a politically or ethnically motivated killing of civilians. In international law, more precise terms are war crime and crime against humanity.

An atrocity can be a single specific event or a series of events or can refer to genocide. The defining characteristic of an atrocity is its brutal or systematic nature. It is an act of killing that is in violation of most traditional moral principles, although some societies do not condemn such behavior. Often, hostilities exceed the legitimate mandate of killing enemy combatants to include attacks upon unarmed people, upon combatants after their surrender, or upon otherwise non-combative peoples. Thus, nearly every culture has in its history acts of killing which are atrocities.

The historical record is clouded by a failure to determine if mutilated bodies represent torture before death or mutilation of a dead body. In either case, the important effect is the propaganda value, and its effect on the morale of the enemy.

Sometimes mass killing is imposed on civilian populations of no military significance, simply as a warning. For example, Dresden or Hiroshima. In other cases, they are targeted at military sub-groups, such as African-American summary execution in the field by the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Small-scale atrocities may represent anything from disrespect, regional propaganda or both.

In modern settings not involving ethnic conflict, atrocities on individual leaders are rare, partially because they tend backfire or simply escalate, as in the case of Breaker Morant.

Contents 1 Caesar's campaigns 2 Boudica's uprising 3 Mongol Empire 4 Timur’s conquests 5 Aztec human sacrifice 6 Vlad the Impaler 7 Thirty Years' War 8 Reconquest of Ireland 9 The Deluge 10 Revolt in the Vendée 11 Taiping Rebellion 12 War of the Triple Alliance 13 Indian Wars 14 Second Boer War 15 Don Cossacks 16 Spanish Civil War 17 During World War II 17.1 Germany 17.2 Japan 17.3 United States 17.4 Soviet Union 18 Mao Zedong 19 Equatorial Guinea 20 Idi Amin Dada 21 Ethiopia 22 Western New Guinea 23 Second Congo War 24 See also 25 References

As many as 1 million people (probably 1 in 4 of the Gauls) died, another million were enslaved, 300 tribes were subjugated and 800 cities were destroyed during the Gallic Wars (present-day France). The entire population of city of Avaricum (Bourges) (40,000 in all) was slaughtered.^[3] During Julius Caesar's campaign against the Helvetii (modern-day Switzerland) approximately 60% of the tribe was destroyed, and another 20% was taken into slavery.^[4]

Boudica (d. 60/61AD) was a queen of the Celtic Iceni people of Norfolk in Roman-occupied Britain who led a major uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. They destroyed Camulodunum (Colchester, a settlement for discharged Roman soldiers), Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans). In the three cities destroyed, between 70,000 and 80,000 people are said to have been killed. Tacitus says the Britons had no interest in taking or selling prisoners, only in slaughter by gibbet, fire or cross. Cassius Dio's account gives more prurient detail: that the noblest women were impaled on spikes and had their breasts cut off and sewn to their mouths, "to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and wanton behaviour" in sacred places, particularly the groves of Andraste.^[5][6]

Quoting Eric Margolis, Adam Jones observes, in his book Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, that in the 13th century the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan were genocidal killers (génocidaires) who were known to kill whole nations leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones.^[7] Many ancient sources described Genghis Khan's conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale in their certain geographical regions, and therefore probably causing great changes in the demographics of Asia. For example, over much of Central Asia speakers of Iranian languages were replaced by speakers of Turkic languages. The eastern part of the Islamic world experienced the terrifying holocaust of the Mongol invasions, which turned northern and eastern Iran into a desert. Between 1220 and 1260, the total population of Persia may had dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine.^[8]

Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties reportedly had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million people.^[9] About half of the Russian population died during the Mongol invasion of Rus.^[10] Historians estimate that up to half of Hungary's two million population at that time were victims of the Mongol invasion of Europe.^[11]

The Pope Innocent IV’s envoy to the Mongol Khan, who passed through Kiev in February 1246, wrote:

"They [the Mongols] attacked Russia, where they made great havoc, destroying cities and fortresses and slaughtering men; and they laid siege to Kiev, the capital of Russia; after they had besieged the city for a long time, they took it and put the inhabitants to death. When we were journeying through that land we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated town, but now it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses there and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery."^[12]

Timur Lenk was a 14th century conqueror of much of Middle East and Central Asia, and founder of the Timurid dynasty. He thought of himself as a ghazi, but his biggest wars were against Muslim states. In 1383 Timur started the military conquest of Persia. He captured Herat, Khorasan and all eastern Persia to 1385 and massacred almost all inhabitants of Neishapur and other Iranian cities. When revolts broke out in Persia, he ruthlessly suppressed them, massacring the populations of whole cities. When Timur entered Delhi (India), the city was sacked, destroyed, and left in ruins. When Timur conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. In the city of Isfahan he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls, from those that his army had beheaded,^[13] and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside the Aleppo.^[14] Timur herded thousands of citizens of Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame,^[15] and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and another 90,000 more in Baghdad.^[16] After the capture of Bagdad, Timur ordered that every soldier should return with at least two severed human heads to show him (many warriors were so scared they killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign just to ensure they had heads to present to Timur). Nestorian Christians east of Iraq were almost entirely eliminated by Timur.^[17] As many as 17 million people may have died from his conquests.^[18]

The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of victims (often slaves or prisoners of war) annually to the sun god Huitzilopochtli; an offering to Huitzilopochtli would be made to restore the blood he lost, as the sun was engaged in a daily battle. Human sacrifices would prevent the end of the world that could happen on each cycle of 52 years. For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed about 80,400 people over the course of four days. According to Ross Hassing, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.^[19][20]

Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, the 15th century ruler of Wallachia in present-day Romania, has been characterized as exceedingly cruel. Impalement was his preferred method of torture and execution. As expected, death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Impalement was Vlad's favourite method of torture but was by no means his only one. The list of tortures he is alleged to have employed is extensive: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to animals, and boiling alive. No one was immune to Vlad the Impaler's attentions. His victims included women and children, peasants and great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants.^[21] In 1459, he had 30,000 of the Saxon merchants and officials of the Transylvanian city of Brasov that were breaking his authority impaled.^[22][23] In 1462 Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, during his campaign against Wallachia, was “greeted” by the sight of veritable forest of stakes on which Vlad the Impaler has impaled 20,000 Turkish prisoners.^[24] Dracula was probably killed in battle against the Ottoman near Bucharest in December of 1476.

The Thirty Years' War was fought between 1618 and 1648, primarily on the territory of Holy Roman Empire. Virtually all of the major European powers were involved. The Thirty Years' War was the most destructive conflict in Europe prior to World War I. Atrocities and massacres, such as Sack of Magdeburg, became standard methods of warfare. During the war, Germany's population was reduced by 30% on average; in the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two thirds of the population died. Germany’s male population was reduced by almost half. The population of the Czech lands declined by a third. The Swedish armies alone destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.^[25][26][27]

It is estimated that as much as a third of the entire population of Ireland perished during the civil wars and subsequent Cromwellian conquest in the mid-17th century. Since the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Ireland had been mainly under the control of the Irish Confederate Catholics. The Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland was extremely brutal, and it has been alleged that many of the army's actions during the reconquest would today be called war crimes or even genocide. William Petty who conducted the first scientific land and demographic survey of Ireland in the 1650s (the Down Survey), concluded that at least 400,000 people and maybe as many as 620,000 had died in Ireland between 1641 and 1653 many as a result of famine and plague. And this in a country of only around 1.5 million inhabitants.^[28]

During the 1640s and 1650s the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its populations (over 3 million people).^[29] First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). It is recorded that Khmelnytsky told the people that the Poles had sold them as slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews". It is estimated that 100,000 Jews were massacred and 300 of their communities destroyed. The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that period (referred to in Polish history as The Deluge) is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and jasyr (captivity in the Ottoman Empire).^[30]

Vendée is remembered as the place where the peasants revolted against the French Revolutionary government in 1793. They resented the changes imposed on the Roman Catholic Church by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and broke into open revolt in defiance of the Revolutionary government's military conscription. A guerrilla war, known as the Revolt in the Vendée, led at the outset by an underground faction called the Chouans.

Initially the Vendée rebels gained the upper hand, so on August 1 1793 the Committee of Public Safety ordered General Jean-Baptiste Carrier to carry out a pacification of the region. The Republican army was reinforced and the Vendéan army was eventually defeated. The Reign of Terror, seen elsewhere in France, was extraordinarily brutal in the Vendée. There was the massacre of 6,000 Vendée prisoners, many of them women, after the battle of Savenay. Then there was the drowning of 3,000 Vendée women at Pont-au-Baux. And 5,000 Vendée priests, old men, women, and children killed by drowning at the Loire River at Nantes in what was called the "national bath" - tied in groups in barges and then sunk into the Loire. Under orders from Committee of Public Safety in February 1794 the Republican forces launched their final "pacification" (the Vendée-Vengé or "'Vendée Avenged") - twelve columns, the colonnes infernales ("infernal columns") under Louis-Marie Turreau, were marched through the Vendée, indiscriminately targeting not only the remaining rebels and the people who had given them support, but the innocent as well.^[31][32]

Beyond this massacre there were formal orders for forced evacuation and 'scorched earth' - farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned, villages razed. There were many reported atrocities and a campaign of mass killing universally targeted at residents of the Vendée regardless of combantant status, political affiliation, age or gender. Considered by some to be the first modern genocide, and only recently understood as such.^[33][34] The campaign was ordered as such by the Comité de Salut public:

"The committee has prepared measures that tend to exterminate this rebellious race of Vendéeans, to make their abodes disappear, to torch their forests, to cut their crops."

The orders to Turreau were:

"Exterminate the brigands to the last man instead of burning the farms, punish the fleeing ones and the cowards, and crush that horrible Vendée. Combine the most assured means to exterminate all of this race of brigands."

When the campaign dragged to an end in March 1796 the estimated dead numbered between 117,000 and 500,000, out of a population of around 800,000.^[35][36][37]

During the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) that followed the secession of the Tàipíng Tiānguó (太平天國, Heavenly Kingdom of Perfect Peace) from the Qing empire both sides tried to deprive each other of the resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in general exact a brutal price from captured enemy lands in order to drastically weaken the opposition's war effort. This war truly was total in that civilians on both sides participated to a significant extent in the war effort and in that armies on both sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military forces.^[38] In total between 20 and 30 million died in the conflict making it bloodier than the World War I or Russian Civil War.^[39][40]

War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) was the bloodiest conflict in the history of South America, fought between Paraguay and the allied countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Paraguay’s prewar population of between one-half million and million was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men.^[41] The psychopatic Paraguay's dictator Francisco Solano López is widely regarded as being responsible for the war, which led to his death. "Conquer or die" became the order of the day. Lopez ordered thousands of executions in the military. In 1868, when the allies were pressing him hard, he convinced himself that his Paraguayan supporters had actually formed a conspiracy against his life. Thereupon several hundred prominent Paraguayan citizens were seized and executed by his order, including his brothers and brothers-in-law, cabinet ministers, judges, prefects, military officers, bishops and priests, and nine-tenths of the civil officers, together with 500 foreigners, among them several members of the diplomatic legations (the San Fernando massacres). The bodies were dumped into mass graves.^[42][43]

In his book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, amateur historian William M. Osborn sought to tally every recorded atrocity in the area that would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact (1511) to the closing of the frontier (1890), and determined that 9,156 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans, and 7,193 people died from those perpetrated by settlers. Osborn defines an atrocity as the murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners.^[44]

The English term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

These had originally been set up as "refugee camps" by the Army for families whose farms had been destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy (sweeping the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children, and including destroying crops, burning down homesteads and farms, poisoning wells, and salting fields) and thousands of Boers had already been brought into them.

Kitchener succeeded Roberts as commander-in-chief in South Africa in November 29, 1900 and in an attempt to break the guerilla campaign, initiated plans to "flush out guerrillas in a series of sytematic drives, organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly 'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children. . . . It was the clearance of civilians -- uprooting a whole nation -- that would come to dominate the last phase of the war."^[45] Following Kitchener's new policy, more camps were built and converted to prisons and many tens of thousands more women and children were forcibly moved to prevent the Boers from resupplying at their homes.

By August 1901, 93,940 Boers were reported to be in "camps of refuge". A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50% of the Boer child population] were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four (25%) of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died.^[46][47]

Main article: Red Terror

Following the defeat of the White Army in Russian Civil War, a policy of decossackization (Raskazachivaniye) took place on the surviving Cossacks and their homelands since they were viewed as potential threat to the new Soviet regime.^[48] That was the first example when Soviet leaders decided to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory".^[49][50] The Cossack homelands were often very fertile, and during the collectivisation campaign many Cossacks shared the fate of kulaks. The man-made Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 hit the Don and Kuban territory the hardest. According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".^[51]

The number of casualties is disputed; estimates generally suggest that between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in the Spanish Civil War. Over the years, historians kept lowering the death figures and modern research concludes that 500,000 deaths is the correct figure.^[52] Atrocities during the war were committed on both sides.^[53][54] At least 50,000 were executed during the civil war.^[55] Franco's victory was followed by tens of thousands of summary executions.^[56][57]

In his recent, updated history of the Spanish Civil War, Antony Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white terror' claimed 200,000 lives.^[58] The 'red terror' had already killed 38,000."^[59] Julius Ruiz concludes that "although the figures remain disputed, a minimum of 37,843 executions were carried out in the Republican zone with a maximum of 150,000 executions (including 50,000 after the war) in Nationalist Spain."^[60] In Checas de Madrid, César Vidal comes to a nationwide total of 110,965 victims of Republican repression; 11,705 people being killed in Madrid alone.^[61]

Main articles: Holocaust, German war crimes, and Consequences of German Nazism

During World War II, the holocaust initiated by the German National Socialist party killed millions of people: Slavs, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Serbs, and especially Jews. After the end of World War II, this genocide came to be known as the Holocaust. Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and homosexuals and anybody considered a threat to the Nazi party were rounded up and sent to labour camps, death camps, or just killed in their homes.

The Nazi occupation of Poland resulted in the death of one-fifth of the population, some 6 million people, half of them Jewish. The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people during the war, about half of all World War II casualties.^[62][63] Of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war. ^[64]

Main article: Japanese war crimes

Japanese soldiers rounded up and killed millions^[65] of civilians and prisoners of wars from surrounding nations, especially from Korea, China, Philippines and US during World War II. At least 20 million Chinese died during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).^[66][67]

Unit 731 was amongst one of the most notorious examples of wartime atrocities committed on a civilian population during World War II, where cruel and inhumane experiments were done to thousands of Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners of war. The Rape of Nanking is another example of atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers on a civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of men were slaughtered, while women of all ages were systematically raped and / or killed by Japanese soldiers.^[68]

The Three Alls Policy (Sankō Sakusen) was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three alls being: "Kill All, Burn All and Loot All". Initiated in 1940 by Ryūkichi Tanaka, the Sankō Sakusen was implemented in full scale in 1942 in north China by Yasuji Okamura who divided the territory into pacified, semi-pacified and unpacified areas. The approval of the policy was given by Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 575 on 3 December 1941.

Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45. Much of the controversy regarding Japan's role in World War II revolves around the death rates of prisoners of war and civilians under Japanese occupation. The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %.^[69]

Main article: Allied war crimes during World War II

The United States has its own list of World War II atrocities. For example, the bombings of Dresden and Tokyo in World War II, both operations which killed tens of thousands of civilians, were met with much criticism. Both cities were not defended and thousands of civilians were killed. In the case of Dresden, the bombing's intent was to further the goal of German defeat but was viewed as excessive. Many felt that not enough action was taken to prevent the loss of civilian life. In Tokyo's case the reasoning behind the bombing was the principle of Total War. The bombing, however, received similar criticism. The atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima have also been the topic of debate since the end of World War II. Although the intention behind the bombings was a quick end to the war, the military action was responsible for roughly 200,000 deaths.

Main article: Soviet war crimes

According to the historian Norman Naimark, the propaganda of Soviet troop newspapers and the orders of Soviet high command were jointly responsible for excesses by members of the Red Army. The general tenor in the writings was that the Red Army had come to Germany as an avenger and judge to punish the Germans. ^[70] On January 12, 1945 army General Cherniakhovsky turned to his troops with the words: There shall be no mercy - for nobody, as there had also been no mercy for us... The land of the fascists must become a desert …^[71]

On the German side, any organized evacuation of civilians was forbidden by the Nazi government to boost morale of the troops, now for the first time defending the "Fatherland", even when the Red Army entered German territory in the last months of 1944. It is estimated that Soviet soldiers raped at least 2,000,000 German women and girls, an estimated 200,000 of whom later died from injuries sustained, committed suicide, or were murdered outright.^[72][73][74]

Mao’s first political campaigns after founding the People’s Republic were land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, which centered on mass executions, often before organized crowds. These campaigns of mass repression targeted former KMT officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies, intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect, and significant numbers of rural gentry.^[75] The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000 killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign.^[76] Mao himself claimed a total of 700,000 killed during these early years (1949–53).^[77] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",^[78] 1 million deaths seems to be an absolute minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million and 5 million dead.^[79][80] In addition, at least 1.5 million people were sent to "reform through labour" camps (laogai).^[81] Mao’s personal role in ordering mass executions is undeniable.^[82][83] He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.^[84]

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, perished in the violence of the Cultural Revolution.^[85] When Mao was informed of such losses, particularly that people had been driven to suicide, he blithely commented: "People who try to commit suicide - don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people."^[86]

In September 1968, Francisco Macías Nguema was elected first president of Equatorial Guinea, and independence was granted in October.^[87] In July 1970, Nguema created a single-party state. In 1972 Nguema took complete control of the government and assumed the title of President for Life. Nguema’s regime was characterized by abandonment of all government functions except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; he acted as chief judge who sentenced thousands to death. This led to the death or exile of up to 1/3 of the country's population. Out of a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 had been killed.^[88][89] Uneasy around educated people, he had killed everyone who wore spectacles. All schools were ordered closed in 1975. The economy collapsed, and skilled citizens and foreigners left.^[90]

Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, is notorious for being one of the bloodiest dictators of the 20th century.^[91] The exact number of people killed is unknown. The International Commission of Jurists estimated the death toll at no fewer than 80,000 and more likely around 300,000.^[92] An estimate compiled by exile organizations with the help of Amnesty International puts the number killed at 500,000. The victims soon came to include members of other ethnic groups, religious leaders, journalists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students and intellectuals, criminal suspects, and foreign nationals. In some cases entire villages were wiped out.^[93] Bodies were dumped into the River Nile, on at least one occasion in quantities sufficient to clog the Owen Falls Hydro-Electric Dam in Jinja.^[94]

During Mengistu’s 17-year reign it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning. Mengistu himself is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting them, saying that he was leading by example.^[95] Some experts have estimated that 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed during Mengistu's rule.^[96] Amnesty International estimates that up to 500,000 people were killed during the Red Terror of 1977 and 1978.^[97] On 12 December 2006 Mengistu Haile Mariam was found guilty of genocide and other offences. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007.^[98]

Amnesty International has estimated that more than 100,000 Papuans, one-sixth of the population, have died as a result of government-sponsored violence against West Papuans,^[99] while others had previously specified much higher death tolls.^[100] In 2004 the Yale University Law School published "Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control",^[101] a 75 page report detailing the applicability of Indonesian control to each of the genocide conventions.

The Second Congo War, also known as Africa's World War, began in 1998.^[102] The largest war in modern African history, one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II, it directly involved eight African nations, as well as about 25 armed groups. Nearly 5 million people have died.^[103][104] A U.N. human rights expert reported in July 2007 that sexual atrocities against Congolese women go 'far beyond rape' and include sexual slavery, forced incest, and cannibalism.^[105]

Al-Anfal Campaign Armenian Genocide Assyrian Genocide Babi Yar Bosnian Genocide Cap Arcona Chios massacre Collateral damage Command responsibility Crow Creek Massacre Cyprus massacre Darfur conflict Deerfield massacre Ethnic cleansing Genocide Granada massacre Great Purge Holocaust

Jamestown Massacre Jasenovac Khatyn Massacre Khmer Rouge List of massacres 1971 Bangladesh atrocities Mass deaths and atrocities of the 20th century Massacre of Elphinstone's army Massacre Murder Massacre of Delhi My Lai Massacre Massacre at Huế Massacres of Poles in Volhynia Native American massacres NKVD prisoner massacres Pontic Greek Genocide Rape of Nanking

Rwandan Genocide Sack of Antwerp September 11, 2001 attacks Serial killing Slavery Sook Ching massacre Srebrenica massacre St. Bartholomew's Day massacre St. Brice's Day massacre Terrorist incidents The Third of May 1808 Tiananmen Square Massacre The Logic of Violence in Civil War Thuggee Torture War crimes of the Wehrmacht Witch Hunt Zanzibar Revolution

1. ^ Leaders mourn Soviet wartime dead
2. ^ Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in Eastern Europe
3. ^ Julius Caesar The Conquest of Gaul
4. ^ Helvetti
5. ^ Boudica
6. ^ Jason Burke, "Dig uncovers Boudicca's brutal streak", The Observer , 3 December 2000
7. ^ Jones References, p.4 note 12 Eric s. Margolis War at the top of the World, the struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet (New York, Routledge, 2001) p.155
8. ^ Battuta's Travels: Part Three - Persia and Iraq
9. ^ Ping-ti Ho, "An Estimate of the Total Population of Sung-Chin China", in Études Song, Series 1, No 1, (1970) pp. 33-53.
10. ^ History of Russia, Early Slavs history, Kievan Rus, Mongol invasion
11. ^ Welcome to Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to History
12. ^ The Destruction of Kiev
13. ^ Timur's history
14. ^ The Seven Years Campaign
15. ^ Battle of Damascus
16. ^ New Book Looks at Old-Style Central Asian Despotism
17. ^ Nestorian Church
18. ^ Timur Lenk (1369-1405)
19. ^ Hassig, Ross (2003). "El sacrificio y las guerras floridas". Arqueología mexicana, p. 46-51.
20. ^ The Enigma of Aztec Sacrifice
21. ^ The Historical Dracula
22. ^ History of Central Europe
23. ^ Vlad the Impaler
24. ^ The Real Prince Dracula
25. ^ Germany - The Thirty Years' War - The Peace of Westphalia
26. ^ Population
27. ^ The Thirty Years' War
28. ^ The curse of Cromwell - BBC
29. ^ About Poland
30. ^ Judaism Timeline 1618-1770
31. ^ The Heart of Darkness: How Visceral Hatred of Catholicism Turns Into Genocide
32. ^ Wars Of The Vendee
33. ^ Jones, Adam Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction p.7 (Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishers Forthcoming 2006)
34. ^ [1] Masson, Sophie Remembering the Vendee (Godspy 2004. First published in "Quadrant" magazine Australia, 1996)
35. ^ Three State and Counterrevolution in France by Charles Tilly
36. ^ Vive la Contre-Revolution!
37. ^ McPhee, Peter Review of Reynald Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée H-France Review Vol. 4 (March 2004), No. 26
38. ^ Taiping Rebellion: The destruction of the Chinese culture
39. ^ Chinese Cultural Studies: Concise Political History of China
40. ^ The Great War: A Review of the Explanations
41. ^ Nineteenth Century Death Tolls
42. ^ War of the Triple Alliance
43. ^ Paraguay - The War of the Triple Alliance
44. ^ The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During The American-Indian War
45. ^ Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War
46. ^ Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order, p. 250
47. ^ Australian War Memorial
48. ^ Cossacks history
49. ^ Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7
50. ^ Soviet order to exterminate Cossacks is unearthed
51. ^ Kort, Michael (2001). The Soviet Colosus: History and Aftermath, p. 133. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 0-7656-0396-9.
52. ^ Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (2001), pp. xviii & 899–901, inclusive.
53. ^ Spain: Repression under Franco after the Civil War
54. ^ Spain poised to seek the graves of Franco's disappeared
55. ^ Spain torn on tribute to victims of Franco
56. ^ A revelatory account of the Spanish civil war
57. ^ Spanish Civil War: Casualties
58. ^ "Men of La Mancha". Rev. of Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. The Economist (June 22, 2006).
59. ^ A Week in Books
60. ^ Julius Ruiz, "Defending the Republic: The García Atadell Brigade in Madrid, 1936". Journal of Contemporary History 42.1 (2007):97.
61. ^ International justice begins at home by Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami Herald, August 4, 2003
62. ^ Leaders mourn Soviet wartime dead
63. ^ Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in Eastern Europe
64. ^ Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II
65. ^ Rummel, R.J. Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 Chapter 3. LIT Verlag Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Wien-London-Zürich (1999)
66. ^ Nuclear Power: The End of the War Against Japan
67. ^ Remember role in ending fascist war
68. ^ Chinese city remembers Japanese 'Rape of Nanjing'
69. ^ Johnson, Looting of Asia, [2]
70. ^ Norman M. Naimark Cambridge: Belknap, 1995 ISBN 0-674-78405-7
71. ^ Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Penguin Books, 2002, ISBN 0-670-88695-5
72. ^ Richard Overy, Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), ISBN 1-57500-051-2
73. ^ 'They raped every German female from eight to 80'
74. ^ Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they freed them from camps
75. ^ China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality by Steven W. Mosher, pp 72, 73
76. ^ Deaths in China Due to Communism by Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, pg 24
77. ^ Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, pg 337: "Mao claimed that the total number executed was 700,000, but this did not include those beaten or tortured to death in the post-1949 land reform, which would at the very least be as many again. Then there were suicides, which, based on several local inquiries, were very probably about equal to the number of those killed." Also cited in Mao Zedong, by Jonathan Spence, as cited here.
78. ^ Twitchett, Denis; John K. Fairbank. The Cambridge history of China. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052124336X. Retrieved on 2007-03-25. 
79. ^ The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois, et al; China: A Long March into Night by Jean-Louis Margolin, pg 479
80. ^ Estimates, sources and calculations from R.J. Rummel’s China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (See lines 1 through 90)
81. ^ Short, Philip (2001). Mao: A Life. Owl Books, 436. ISBN 0805066381. “At least a million-and-a-half more disappeared into the newly established 'reform through labour' camps, purpose-built to accommodate them.” 
82. ^ Commentary transferred to Huang Jing regarding the supplementary plan to suppress counterrevolutionaries in Tianjin
83. ^ Mao's "Killing Quotas" by Li Changyu. Human Rights in China (HRIC). September 26, 2005, at Shandong University
84. ^ Terrible Honeymoon: Struggling with the Problem of Terror in Early 1950s China by Jeremy Brown
85. ^ Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm. Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
86. ^ MacFarquhar, Roderick and Schoenhals, Michael. Mao's Last Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2006. p. 110 ISBN 0674023323
87. ^ Francisco Macias Nguema
88. ^ Coup plotter faces life in Africa's most notorious jail
89. ^ True hell on earth: Simon Mann faces imprisonment in the cruellest jail on the planet
90. ^ If you think this one's bad you should have seen his uncle
91. ^ 2003: 'War criminal' Idi Amin dies
92. ^ Idi Amin
93. ^ Idi Amin killer file
94. ^ Idi Amin: 'Butcher of Uganda', CNN, August 16, 2003
95. ^ Guilty of genocide: the leader who unleashed a 'Red Terror' on Africa by Jonathan Clayton, The Times Online, December 13, 2006
96. ^ 'Butcher of Addis Ababa' is guilty of genocide with torture regime
97. ^ Zimbabwe won't extradite former Ethiopian dictator
98. ^ Ethiopian Dictator Sentenced to Prison by Les Neuhaus, The Associated Press, January 11, 2007
99. ^ Report claims secret genocide in Indonesia - University of Sydney
100. ^ West Papua Support
101. ^ Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control (PDF)
102. ^ Inside Congo, An Unspeakable Toll
103. ^ Conflict in Congo has killed 4.7m, charity says
104. ^ Congo crisis is deadliest since Second World War
105. ^ Congo's Sexual Violence Goes 'Far Beyond Rape', July 31, 2007. The Washington Post.