"Most wars, after all, present themselves as humanitarian endeavors to help people." - Howard Zinn.
CANUDOS MASSACRE IN OCTOBER 1897: Brazil was an agricultural country whose strength was in supplying Europe and North America with coffee, rubber, sugar, tobacco, and many natural resources. The conflict had its origins in the settlement of Canudos (named by its inhabitants Belo Monte meaning "Beautiful Hill" in Portuguese) in the northeast tip of the state (then province) of Bahia. Bahia at this time was a desperately poor zone, with a depressed economy based on subsistence agriculture and cattle raising, no large cities, and a disenfranchised population composed largely of former black slaves (freedom from slavery was granted in 1888), impoverished and uprooted Indians and mestizos. It was a likely background for the appearance of religious fanaticism, messianic movements and dissatisfaction with the recently installed Republican regime. (The republic was declared on November 15, 1889 after a military coup against the ruling Emperor, Dom Pedro II, who was still loved by the common people.) Into this scenario appeared one of the many mystic spiritual preachers, Antônio Vicente Mendes Maciel, also known as Antonio Conselheiro ("the Counselor"), who went from village to village with his fanatic followers, doing small jobs and demanding support from small farmers. He claimed to be a prophet and said that the legendary return of Portuguese king Sebastian was to come. After wandering through the provinces of Ceará, Pernambuco, Sergipe and Bahia, he decided in 1893 to settle permanently with his followers, of which there were now a great number, in the farm of Canudos, near the city of Monte Santo, Bahia, by the Vaza-Barris River. Soon his preaching and the promises of a better world attracted almost 8,000 new residents, who started to cause trouble in the region. Fearing an invasion of the city of Juazeiro by the "Conselhistas", who had a dispute with a lumber merchant, its mayor appealed hysterically to the provincial government. A visit by two Capuchin friars to Canudos was not enough to calm the population; one of them mistakenly accused Antônio Conselheiro of trying to raise a monarchist sedition. Canudos affected the political scene immediately when a returning soldier, the foil in a high-level Jacobin conspiracy, attempted to assassinate President Prudente de Morais but killed the minister of war instead, thereby acting as a catalyst for rallying support for the government. The abortive assassination made possible the election of Manuel Ferraz de Campos Sales (president, 1898-1902). In the army, the attempt consolidated the hold of generals who opposed Floriano Peixoto and were interested in professionalizing the institution. The War of Canudos (1893–1897) was a conflict between the state of Brazil and a group of some 30,000 settlers who had founded their own community in the northeastern state of Bahia, named Canudos. After a number of unsuccessful attempts at military suppression, it came to a brutal end in October 1897, when a large Brazilian army force overran the village and killed most of the inhabitants. This was the deadliest civil war in Brazilian history. HERERO AND NAMAQUA GENOCIDE IN GERMAN SOUTH WEST AFRICA IN 1904: During the scramble for Africa, the British made it clear that they were not interested in the territory, so, in August 1884, it was declared a German protectorate; at that time, it was the only overseas territory deemed suitable for white settlement that had been acquired by Germany. From the outset, there was resistance by the Khoikhoi to the German occupation, although a tenuous peace was worked out in 1894. In that year, Theodor Leutwein became governor of the territory and it underwent a period of rapid development, while Germany sent the Schutztruppe, or imperial colonial troops, to pacify the region. European settlers were encouraged to settle on land taken from the natives, which caused a great deal of discontent. Over the next decade the land and the cattle that were essential to Herero and Nama lifestyles passed into the hands of Germans arriving in South-West Africa. German colonial rule was far from egalitarian; natives were used as slave labourers and their lands were frequently seized and given to colonists. The Herero were originally a tribe of cattle herders living in a region of German South West Africa, presently modern Namibia. The area occupied by the Herero was known as Damaraland. In 1897 South West Africa is reached by a previously unknown cattle plague, the rinderpest. Deriving originally from an outbreak in 1889 in distant Somaliland, the plague is not carried across the Zambezi until 1896. Now it devastates the flocks of the Herero, exclusively a cattle-raising people. In desperation they sell for very little, to the German settlers, much of their pasture and half their surviving cattle. The catastrophe seems to have benefited the Europeans. The Herero and Namaqua Genocide occurred in German South-West Africa (modern day Namibia) from 1904 until 1907, during the scramble for Africa. It is thought to be the first genocide of the 20th century. On January 12, 1904, the Herero people under Samuel Maharero rose in rebellion against German colonial rule. In August, German general Lothar von Trotha defeated the Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and drove them into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of thirst. In October, the Nama also took up arms against the Germans and were dealt with in a similar fashion. In total, between 24,000 and 65,000 Herero (all values are estimated as being 50% to 70% of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Nama (50% of the total Nama population) perished. Two characteristics of the genocide were death by starvation and the poisoning of wells used by the Herero and Nama populations that were trapped in the Namib Desert. (A as with many African nations, the most severe crisis of the 1990s is AIDS. By the end of the decade some 10% of the population is HIV-positive.) MORO CRATER MASSACRE: The Moro Crater massacre is a name given to the final phase of the First Battle of Bud Dajo, a military counter insurgency action fought by American soldiers against native Moros, during the Moro Rebellion phase of the Philippine-American War which took place March 10, 1906, on the isle of Jolo in the southern Philippines. Forces of the U.S. Army under the command of Major General Leonard Wood, a naval detachment comprising 540 soldiers, along with a detachment of native constabulary, armed with artillery and small firearms, attacked a village hidden in the crater of the dormant volcano Bud Dajo. Fifteen American soldiers were killed, and thirty-two were wounded; more than 600 mostly unarmed Muslim Moro villagers (including many women and children) were killed but none were wounded. The description of the engagement as a battle is disputed because of both the overwhelming firepower of the attackers and the lopsided casualties. WW1 At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War 1. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was falling apart in 1914. The assassination of the Austrian crown prince in 1914 by a Serb nationalist gave Austrian hard-liners an opportunity to crack down on Slav dissidents in the Balkans. But this meant threatening war in the Balkans. That could bring in the Russians. Cooler heads suggested that Germany be consulted. The Germans told the Austrians to do what they thought best, and that Germany would back them up. This was a popular decision in Germany, where there was sympathy for the Austrians (who, while Germanic, were a minority in their own empire). The Austrian bluff didn't work, the Serbs fought, and the Russians came to the aid of the Serbs. The French honored their treaty with Russia and went to war as well. What began as an assassination turned into World War I. That, in turn, led to World War II. All because Germany would not say "no" to Austria's desire to start a war over an assassination. Once in the war, Germany slowly, but irresistibly, began to win. One minor problem was its submarine war against British shipping from North America. The United States was neutral in the war, and American popular opinion was very much against getting involved. Germany, aware of American public opinion tried to avoid torpedoing ships carrying Americans. This was difficult so in 1917 Germany decided to make things a little easier for German submarine captains by allowing them to sink anything they came across. This led to German subs sinking ships with a lot of Americans on board. That was enough to get America into the war, and prevented Germany from winning World War I. ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN TURKEY [1915-1918]: It was the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. It was characterised by the use of massacres, and the use of deportations involving forced marches under conditions designed to lead to the death of the deportees, with the total number of Armenian deaths generally held to have been between one and one-and-a-half million. For three thousand years, a thriving Armenian community had existed inside the vast region of the Middle East bordered by the Black, Mediterranean and Caspian Seas. The area, known as Asia Minor, stands at the crossroads of three continents; Europe, Asia and Africa. Great powers rose and fell over the many centuries and the Armenian homeland was at various times ruled by Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Mongols. Despite the repeated invasions and occupations, Armenian pride and cultural identity never wavered. The snow-capped peak of Mount Ararat became its focal point and by 600 BC Armenia as a nation sprang into being. Following the advent of Christianity, Armenia became the very first nation to accept it as the state religion. A golden era of peace and prosperity followed which saw the invention of a distinct alphabet, a flourishing of literature, art, commerce, and a unique style of architecture. By the 10th century, Armenians had established a new capital at Ani, affectionately called the 'city of a thousand and one churches.' In the eleventh century, the first Turkish invasion of the Armenian homeland occurred. Thus began several hundred years of rule by Muslim Turks. By the sixteenth century, Armenia had been absorbed into the vast and mighty Ottoman Empire. By the late 1870s, Greece, along with several countries of the Balkans, frustrated with conditions, had, often with the help of the Powers, broken free of Ottoman rule. Armenians, for the most part, remained passive during these years, earning them the title of millet-i sadıka or the "loyal millet." This changed in the 19th century, as the forces of nationalism swept both the Ottoman realm and Armenians themselves, and as the Ottoman Empire -- "the sick man of Europe" -- began to crumble in the face of regional revolts. (Kurds and Armenians became increasingly distinct, both culturally and politically, as Armenians chose Christianity as their official religion while Kurds chose Islam. This difference in religion also signified in a difference of mentality, with Armenians adopting Occidental values instead of the Oriental values and lifestyle adopted by Kurds. However, because of the quasi non-existence of Kurdish nationalism and the fact that Kurds and Turks were both Muslim, Kurds found some degree of friendship in these new immigrants from Central Asia. Encouraged by the central Ottoman government, Kurds took advantage of the peaceful mentality of the Armenians by imposing taxes on them, robbing their goods, and assaulting their women. ) In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the Muslim dhimmi system, Armenians, as Christians, were guaranteed limited freedoms (such as the right to worship), but were treated as second-class citizens. Christians and Jews were not considered equals to Muslims: testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses, their houses could not overlook those of Muslims, and their religious practices would have to defer to those of Muslims, in addition to various other legal limitations. Violation of these statutes could result in punishments ranging from the levying of fines to execution. The three major European powers, Great Britain, France and Russia (known as the Great Powers), took issue with the Empire's treatment of its Christian minorities and increasingly pressured the Ottoman government (also known as the Sublime Porte) to extend equal rights to all its citizens. Beginning in 1839, the Ottoman government implemented the Tanzimat reforms to improve the situation of minorities, although these would prove largely ineffective. Calls by European powers for protection of the Armenian population had the opposite effect. In 1909 the Ottoman Sultan was overthrown by a new political group: the 'Young Turks', eager for a modern, westernised style of government. After a group of “Young Turks” seized full control of the Turkish government in 1913, Christian Armenians, representing about 10% of the population were branded as infidels (non-believers in Islam). When the First World War broke out, the Young Turks supported Germany, which brought the country into conflict with Russia once again. It was easy for the Young Turks to expect Turkish Armenians to conspire with pro-Christian Russians against them (though many Turkish Armenians denied any such intention). As far as the Young Turks were concerned, what had long been 'the Armenian Question' had to be answered, now. It is widely acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides, as many Western sources point to the systematic, organized manner the killings were carried out to eliminate the Armenians. The date of the onset of the genocide is conventionally held to be April 24, 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities arrested some 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. The Turks first disarmed the entire Armenian population and issued orders to provincial governors to arrest and kill the Armenian leaders and intellectuals, and then proceeded to round up all Armenians and deport them. During long overland marches deportees were killed, or died. An estimated 2 million Armenians were killed, while as few as 500,000 survived the deportation to Syria and Iraq. Massacres were indiscriminate of age or gender, with rape and other sexual abuse commonplace. By 1918, an Armenian resistance emerged that resulted in establishing an the independent Republic of Armenia. Today, the region remains a focus for conflict involving Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Nagorno-Karabakh. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was granted the right to draw up the boundaries of a new Armenian nation, formalized at the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920. However, the Turkish government, under nationalist leader Kemal Ataturk, rapidly renounced the Treaty. In collusion with the newly-created Soviet Union, the Turks invaded Armenia and reconquered six of the former western Ottoman provinces granted to Armenia under the Treaty, along with the Armenian provinces of Kars and Ardahan. What remained of Armenia was swallowed up by the invading Soviet armies. After a brief period of cooperation with Armenian nationalist forces, the Soviets took complete control in 1921, and Armenia was incorporated into the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (SFSR) in 1922. (A separate Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was created in 1936. The Armenian Communist Party was the only political party permitted to function under Soviet rule, which remained in place until 1991, when Armenians overwhelmingly voted for secession from the collapsing USSR.) The Armenian Genocide is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust. Today, the government of Turkey denies the Armenian Genocide and claims that Armenians just were resettled from eastern regions which were war zone and in the case of the murdered, it claims that they were killed in the course of the war and in tribal fights by placing the figures of those murdered at an insignificant number. The half-hearted reaction of the world's great powers to the plight of the Armenians was duly noted by the young German politician Adolf Hitler. After achieving total power in Germany, Hitler decided to conquer Poland in 1939 and told his generals: "Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my 'Death's Head Units' with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays about the Armenians?" SECOND ITALO–ABYSSINIAN/ETHIOPIAN WAR IN THE 1930S: The Second Italo–Abyssinian War (also referred to as the Second Italo-Ethiopian War) was a brief colonial war that started in October 1935 and ended in May 1936. The war was fought between the armed forces of the Kingdom of Italy (Regno d'Italia) and the armed forces of the Ethiopian Empire (also known as Abyssinia). Italian dictator Benito Mussolini had long held a desire for a new Italian Empire. Reminiscent of the Roman Empire, Mussolini's new empire was to rule over the Mediterranean and North Africa. His new empire would also avenge past Italian defeats. Chief among these defeats was the Battle of Adowa which took place in Abyssinia on March 1, 1896. Mussolini promised the Italian people "a place in the sun", matching the extensive colonial empires of Britain and France. The war resulted in the military occupation of Ethiopia and its annexation into the newly created colony of Italian East Africa (Africa Orientale Italiana, or AOI). However, Ethiopia never capitulated or surrendered. In December 1934, an incident took place at Welwel in the Ogaden, a site of wells used by Somali nomads regularly traversing the borders between Ethiopia and British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland. The Italians had built fortified positions in Welwel in 1930 and, because there had been no protests, assumed that the international community had recognized their rights over this area. However, an Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission challenged the Italian position when it visited Welwel in late November 1934 on its way to set territorial boundary markers. On encountering Italian belligerence, the commission's members withdrew but left behind their Ethiopian military escort, which eventually fought a battle with Italian units. Politically, the war is often seen as one of the episodes that prepared the way for World War II, and is best remembered for exposing the inherent weakness of the League of Nations. In September 1935, the League of Nations exonerated both parties for the Walwal (Ualval) incident. Great Britain and France, keen to keep Italy as an ally against Germany, did not take strong steps to discourage an Italian military buildup. Like the Mukden Incident in 1931 (the Japanese annexation of three Chinese provinces), the Abyssinia Crisis in 1934 is often seen as a clear example of the ineffectiveness of the League. Both Italy and Ethiopia were member nations and yet the League was unable to control Italy or to protect Ethiopia when Italy clearly violated the League's own Article X. The war is also remembered for the illegal use of mustard gas and phosgene by the Italian armed forces. Italy’s overwhelming military superiority, notably its air power, left little doubt about the outcome. After a failed assassination attempt against Graziani on February 19, 1937, the colonial authorities executed 30,000 persons, including about half of the younger, educated Ethiopian population. This harsh policy, however, did not pacify the country. The positive outcome of the war for the Italians coincided with the zenith of the international popularity of dictator Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime, in a phase called "the age of consensus". (October 1935 Indian doctors and nurses sent to Ethiopia to help provide medical assistance. September 1935 Mayor of Bombay had a public meeting and the result was to make a committee that would handle the collection of money for the Ethiopian Red Cross. Calcutta 15,000 rupees and a lot of medicine was sent to the fallen Ethiopia from here) THE MASSACRE AT THE QISSA KHANI BAZAAR (THE ROMANTIC 'STREET OF STORYTELLERS'): The massacre at the Qissa Khani Bazaar (the Romantic 'Street of Storytellers') in Peshawar, British India (modern day Pakistan) on April 23, 1930 was a defining moment in the non-violent struggle to drive the British out of India. It was the first major confrontation between British troops and non-violent demonstrators in the then peaceful city—some estimates at the time put the death toll from the shooting at nearly 400 dead. The gunning down of unarmed people triggered protests across the subcontinent and catapulted the newly formed Khudai Khidmatgar movement onto the National scene. The Khudai Khidmatgar (literally Servants of God), led by Ghaffar Khan, were a group of Pashtuns committed to the removal of British rule through non-violent methods. On April 23, 1930, Ghaffar Khan was arrested after giving a speech in Utmanzai urging resistance to the British occupation. Ghaffar Khan's reputation for uncompromising integrity and commitment to non-violence inspired most of the local townspeople to take the oath of membership and join the Khudai Khidmatgar in protest. After other Khudai Khidmatgar leaders were arrested, a large crowd of the group gathered at the Qissa Khwani bazaar. As British troops moved into the bazaar, the crowd was loud, though completely non-violent. British armored cars drove into the square at high speed, killing several people. The crowd continued their commitment to non-violence, offering to disperse if they could gather their dead and injured, and if British troops left the square. The British troops refused to leave, so the protesters remained with the dead and injured. At that point, the British ordered troops to open fire with machine guns on the unarmed crowd. The Khudai Khidmatgar members willingly faced bullets, responding without violence. Instead, many members repeated 'God is Great' and clutched the Qur'an as they went to their death. The exact number of deaths remains controversial—several hundred were killed, with many more wounded. The troops continued hunting the Peshawarites indiscriminately for six hours. When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their chests bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as twenty-one bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic. . . . The Anglo-Indian paper of Lahore, which represents the official view, itself wrote to the effect that the people came forward one after another to face the firing and when they fell wounded they were dragged back and others came forward to be shot at. This state of things continued from 11 till 5 o'clock in the evening. When the number of corpses became too many, the ambulance cars of the government took them away. One British Indian Army regiment, troops of the renowned Royal Garhwal Rifles (the most reknown Indian Army regiment during World War I) , refused to fire at the crowds. The entire platoon was arrested and many received heavy penalties, including life imprisonment. The British action against the local Pathan, Punjabi, and Indian population created unrest throughout the British Colony of India. This resulted in King George VI (Emperor of India) launching a legal investigation into this matter. The British Commission bought the case forward to Chief Justice Naimatullah Chaudhry, a distinguished Judge of the Lucknow protectorate. Llike many previous incidents, the British Government decided to mask the Qissa Khawani Bazaar Massacre by bribing the Judge. In addition, King George VI also passed a resolution to Knight Naimatullah Chaudhry with the title of "Sir" and "Lord" to gain his favour. In return it was expected that Naimatullah would issue a report supporting the British Troops. However, Naimatullah turned down the offers and he personally surveyed the area of massacre and published a 200-page report criticizing the British on their heinous act and passed a resolution in favour of the local people of Peshawar and N.W.F.P Area. This massacre set off a chain of demonstrations across India that culminated in the Civil Disobedience Movement and famous Dandi March and Salt Satyagraha of 1930. One of the key conditions of the Gandhi-Irwin pact that followed was Ghaffar Khan's release. Ghani Khan described in the text of the interview how this forged a lasting bond between the two men. THE GREAT "TERROR-FAMINE IN SOVIET UKRAINE" (HOLODOMOR) [1932-1938]: The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 affected most major grain-producing agricultural areas of the Soviet Union, including Northern Caucasus, Volga Region, South Urals, West Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. The Communist governments of the Soviet Republics siezed grains from the peasantry and exported most of their Republic's agricultural output to the West in order to sustain the rapid economic transformation - "Industrialization" and "Collectivization" - policy designed by Joseph Stalin. What American diplomat George F. Kennan termed the "romance of economic development" captivated a wide range of foreign observers of all political persuasions. Even indispensable seed grain was forcibly confiscated from peasant households. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a collective farm could be, and often was, executed or deported. Those who did not appear to be starving were often suspected of hoarding grain. Peasants were prevented from leaving their villages by the NKVD and a system of internal passports. Scholars estimate about 6-8 million peasants deaths during the famine of 1932-1933: Central Russia - 2 million Kazhastan - 1.7 million Ukraine - 1.3 million North Caucasus - 1 million During Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror in Russia and the Soviet Republics his regime killed or starved an estimated 15 million peasants, 5 million Ukrainians, 200,000 Jews; and as many as 3 million enemies of the state. Stalin used mass annihilation as a tactic to control dissent, force cooperation with state policies and to unify an incredibly diverse population people by targeting specific scapegoat groups. Soviet Jews were killed as scapegoats, Ukrainian peasants were killed as part of Stalin’s collectivization pogrom and political opponents and intellectuals were killed as enemies of the state. The combined tragedy of the Soviet’s political genocide exceeds even the scope of the Nazi Holocaust. During the period of Stalinist ethnic cleansing in 1937, the Kurds of Armenia became victims of forced migrations. Today’s revolts in Chechnya, Georgia and other former republics of the U.S.S.R., have deep roots in the atrocities of the Stalin era. The term 'Golodomor' means the «mass hunger» or the «great hunger» that caused million of victims throughout the Soviet Union in 1932-1933. (Since Viktor Yuschenko assumed power over Ukraine back in 2004 in the revote. In order to keep his electorate under control and alleviate social tensions, the political populist Yuschenko decided to unite the frustrating Ukrainian nation against the common enemy , Soviet Union (and Russia). In order to politicize the issue of 'golodomor' and attract as much world's attention as possible, the word 'golodomor' have been transformed into 'holodomor' making it looks and sounds like 'holocaust', and therefore, could be considered as a genocide. ) Jallianwala Bagh massacre of December 1937 KATYN FOREST MASSACRE: On 17 September, 1939, in violation of the Polish-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the Red Army invaded the territory of Poland from the east. This invasion took place while Poland had already sustained serious defeats in the wake of the German attack on the country that started on 1 September, 1939. Meanwhile, Great Britain and France, pledged by the Polish-British Common Defence Pact and Franco-Polish Military Alliance to attack Germany in the case of such an invasion, did not take any military action. This is referred to as the Western betrayal; at the same time the Red Army moved to invade Polish areas annexed by the Soviet Union in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The NKVD took custody of Polish prisoners from the Red Army, and proceeded to organise a network of transit camps and arrange rail transport to prisoner-of-war camps in the western USSR. The prisoners were later declared as "hardened and uncompromising enemies of Soviet authority" and there was an order to execute these Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries". Katyn Forest is a wooded area near Gneizdovo village, a short distance from Smolensk in Russia where, in 1940 on Stalin's orders, the NKVD shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel that had been taken prisoner when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 in WW2 in support of the Nazis. It was a mass murder of thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, intellectuals and civilian prisoners of war by Soviet internal security services NKVD, based on a proposal from Lavrentiy Beria to execute all members of the Polish Officer Corps. Dated March 5, 1940, this official document was then approved (signed) by the entire Soviet Politburo including Joseph Stalin and Beria. About 8,000 were officers taken prisoner during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, the rest being Poles arrested for allegedly being "intelligence agents, gendarmes, saboteurs, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, priests, and officials." Since Poland's conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer, the Soviets were able to round up much of the Polish intelligentsia, and the Jewish, Ukrainian, Georgian and Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish citizenship. Stalin intended to keep the eastern portion of the country in any case, Stalin could be certain that any revived Poland would be unfriendly. Under those circumstances, depriving it of a large proportion of its military and technical elite would make it weaker. The Soviet Union continued to deny the massacres until 1990, when it finally acknowledged the perpetration of the massacre by the internal security services NKVD, as well as the subsequent cover-up. An investigation by the Prosecutor's General Office of the Russian Federation has confirmed Soviet responsibility for the massacres, yet does not classify this action as a war crime or an act of genocide. This acknowledgement would have necessitated the prosecution of surviving perpetrators, which is what the Polish government had requested. The fate of the Polish prisoners was raised soon after the Nazi Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, when the Polish government-in-exile and the Soviet government signed the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement to fight Nazi Germany and form a Polish army on Soviet territory. When the Polish general Władysław Anders began organising this army, he requested information about Polish officers. During a personal meeting, Stalin assured him and Władysław Sikorski, the Polish Prime Minister, that all the Poles were freed, and that not all could be accounted because the Soviets "lost track" of them in Manchuria. In 1942, Polish railroad workers found a mass grave at Katyn, and reported it to the Polish Secret State; the news was ignored, as people refused to believe the mass graves contained so many dead. The fate of the missing prisoners remained unknown until April 1943 when the German Wehrmacht soldiers under Rudolf Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff discovered the mass grave of 4,243 Polish military reserve officers in the forest on Goat Hill near Katyn. Joseph Goebbels saw this discovery as an excellent tool to drive a wedge between Poland, Western Allies, and the Soviet Union. The Soviet government immediately denied the German charges and claimed that the Polish prisoners of war had been engaged in construction work west of Smolensk and consequently were captured and executed by invading German units in August 1941. BABI YAR: Kiev was the capital of the Soviet Ukraine when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, they pushed east. By September 19, they had reached Kiev. It was a confusing time for the inhabitants of Kiev. Though a large portion of the population had family either in the Red Army or had evacuated into the interior of the Soviet Union, many inhabitants welcomed the German Army's takeover of Kiev. Many believed the Germans would free them from Stalin's oppressive regime. On 19/20 September 1941 Kyiv (Kiew) was occupied by the XXIXth German Army Corps and the 6th Army. 875,000 people lived in the city, of whom 20% were Jews (175,000). Some factories important for military purposes and their workers, among them approximately 20,000-30,000 Jews were evacuated by the Soviets. During the first days of the German occupation, two major explosions, apparently set off by Soviet military engineers, destroyed the German headquarters and part of the city center. The Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder the remaining Jews of Kiev. Babi Yar is a ravine outside the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of the most notorious massacre of Jews in the Soviet Union, where approximately 33,771 (100,000 including non-Jews like Roma (Gypsies), Communists, and Soviet prisoners of war) Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29–30, 1941. The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor, Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by combined forces of SS, SD and SiPo. THE CEPHALONIA MASSACRE OF THE ACQUI DIVISION: 33. Infantry Division Acqui was mobilized in October 1939 and took part in the attack against France. It was later sent to Albania to take part in the invasion of Greece and later as an occupation force on the islands of Corfy, Santa-Maura, Zante and Cefalonia. Following the Italian surrender in September 1943 thousands of soldiers from the Italian 33rd Acqui Infantry Division unit were executed by Germans from the XXII Gebirgs-Armeekorpsin the island of Kefalonia, Greece, following the Italian armistice during the Second World War. The incident is known as theMassacre of the Acqui Division, also known as the Cephalonia Massacre. About 5000 soldiers were massacred and others drowned or otherwise exterminated. The massacre provided the historical background to the novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which later became a Hollywood film. (Compared to the work of Charles Dickens and hailed as ``absolutely brilliant'', the book became a publishing phenomenon of the late '90s.) It was one of the largest prisoner of war massacres of the war, along with the Katyn massacre, and one of the largest-scale German atrocities to be committed by Wehrmacht troops (specifically, the 1. Gebirgs-Division) instead of the SS. THE NAZI HOLOCAUST [1938-1945]: Estimated Death Toll: 6 million Jews, 5 million others including 500,000 Gypsies, 6 million Poles, 5,000 to 15,000 homosexuals Adolf Hitler came to power after Germany’s defeat in World War I, and blamed the Jews for Germany’s failures. He launched a sophisticated propaganda campaign demonizing the Jewish scapegoats and glorifying the Germanic Aryan race. The Nazis expelled Jews and imposed pogroms of forced migration, but as World War II demanded more decisive action, Hitler adopted his Final Solution. State-sanctioned anti-Semitism and persecution gave way to liquidation squads and concentration camps. The Nazi leaders developed intricate programs to capture and kill Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and homosexuals in factories of mass destruction. While the estimate that the Holocaust claimed the lives of 6 million Jews is well known, historians also estimate that, the Nazis exterminated an additional 5-6 million non-Jews. OPERATION BARBAROSSA: {The Schlieffen Plan was the German General Staff's early 20th century overall strategic plan for victory in a possible future war where it might find itself fighting on two fronts: France to the west and Russia to the east. The First World War later became such a war with both a Western Front and an Eastern Front. The plan took advantage of expected differences in the three countries' speed in preparing for war. In short, it was the German plan to avoid a two-front war by concentrating their troops in the west, quickly defeating the French and then, if necessary, rushing those troops by rail to the east to face the Russians before they had time to mobilize fully. Schlieffen himself had considered the likelyhood of success to be slim, with three main problems unsolved - how to neutralise the very strong fortifications and garrison of Paris, the inability of the transport network to take the number of troops his plan required, and an unsolvable shortage of troops even after full mobilisation. In 1904 France and Britain signed the Entente Cordiale (friendly understanding). The objective of the alliance was to encourage co-operation against the perceived threat of Germany. Negotiations also began to add Russia to this alliance. As a result of these moves the German military began to fear the possibility of a combined attack from France, Britain and Russia. In 1914, Germany believed war with Russia was extremely likely. If war broke out, Germany assumed France would also attack as she was both an ally of Russia and keen for revenge for her defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. If this happened, Germany would face a war on two fronts. Germany wanted to avoid this at all costs. The Schlieffen Plan was created by Count Alfred von Schlieffen and modified by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger after Schlieffen's retirement. The Germans were held up by the Belgium army, backed up by the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) which arrived extremely quickly. Russia mobilised in just 10 days and Germany was forced to withdraw troops from the Schlieffen Plan to defend her eastern border. Germany did not take the chance to take Paris, instead decided to attack east of the capital. They were met by French at the battle of the Marne (5-11 Sept) which halted the German advance. The Manstein Plan was the primary war plan of the German Army during the Battle of France in 1940. It was developed by German Lieutenant-General Erich von Manstein, the plan greatly modified the original 1939 versions by Franz Halder of the invasion plan known as Fall Gelb. One way to look at the Manstein Plan was that it was the German Army's answer to the French Army's Dyle Plan. Originally, in Aufmarschanweisung N°1, Fall Gelb, the German Army planned to push the Allied forces back through central Belgium to the Somme river, in northern France, not unlike the first phase of the famous Schlieffen Plan of the First World War. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had been signed shortly before the German and Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. It was ostensibly a non-aggression pact but secret protocols outlined an agreement between the Third Reich and the Soviet Union on the division of the border states between them. The pact surprised the world because of the parties' mutual hostility and their opposed ideologies. As a result of the pact, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had reasonably strong diplomatic relations and an important economic relationship. The countries entered a trade pact in 1940, in which the Soviets received German military and industrial equipment in exchange for raw materials, such as oil, to help Germany circumvent a British blockade. Stalin's idea was to fuel Hitler's aggressive plans against Europe, and only after the capitalists had exhausted themselves fighting each other, would the USSR make their strike. But despite the parties' ongoing relations, both sides were strongly suspicious of each others' intentions. After Germany entered the Axis Pact with Japan and Italy, it began negotiations about a potential Soviet entry into the pact. After two days of negotiations in Berlin from November 12-14, Germany presented a proposed written agreement for Soviet entry into the Axis. The Soviet Union offered a written counterproposal agreement on 25 November 1940, to which Germany did not respond.} Operation Barbarossa was the most ambitious campaign of WW II, planned and prepared to achieve by combat a strategic objective within a single theatre of war and a set time frame. Plans for the attack on Russia had been around since 1940. Joseph Stalin believed that Germany would not invade the Soviet Union until Britain and France had been conquered. From Stalin's own calculations, this would not be until the summer of 1942. Some of his closest advisers began to argue that 1941 would be a much more likely date. The surrender of France in June, 1940, cast doubts on Stalin's calculations. It is now thought that German Barbarossa actually was a pre-emptive strike that capitalized on the Soviet troop concentrations immediately on the 1941 borders. Also Hitler was especially interested in the Ukraine where he planned to develop a German colony. The system would be based on the British occupation of India. General Friedrich Paulus was asked to carry out a strategic survey on the Soviet Union for the proposed invasion. The main advice given by Paulus to Adolf Hitler was to make sure that after the invasion the Red Army did not retreat into the interior. For the campaign to be successful he argued for battles of encirclement. He also suggested that the main thrust should be made north of the Pripyat Marshes in order to capture Moscow. The first version of the plan was done by Marcks in August 1940. He envisaged a massive attack on Moscow – his primary target. He also wanted a secondary attack on Kiev and two masking attacks in the Baltic towards Leningrad and in Moldavia in the south. After Moscow had fallen, Marcks wanted a drive south to link up with the attack on Kiev. The attack on Leningrad was also a secondary issue. The next version of the plan was completed in December 1940 by Halder. He changed Marcks plan by having three thrusts; a major one against Moscow, a smaller attack on Kiev and a major attack on Leningrad. After taking Moscow and Leningrad, Halder wanted a move north to Archangel. After Kiev had fallen, he envisaged a drive into the Don/Volga region. The third and final variant was Hitler’s plan which he codenamed Barbarossa. The operation was named after the medieval Holy Roman emperor Frederick Barbarossa, whom legend claimed would return to restore Germany's greatness. This plan was constructed in December 1940. For Hitler, the primary military activity would take place in the north. Hence Leningrad became a vital target as did Moscow. His drive in the south was confined to the occupation of the Ukraine to the west of Kiev. Adolf Hitler had expected the Yugoslavs to surrender immediately but because of stubborn resistance, Hitler had to postpone Operation Barbarossa for a few weeks. On 18 December 1940, Hitler had issued Directive No. 21: ‘to crush Soviet Russia in one rapid campaign even before the conclusion of the war with England’. The essence of the initial phase of operations was to destroy the bulk of the Red Army in a series of sweeping encirclements west of the rivers Dnieper and Dvina and to prevent the withdrawal of Soviet forces capable of combat into the expanse of Russian space. Then, by means of rapid pursuit, the final Soviet defeat was to be accomplished and the general line Volga-Archangel to be reached within three months. Thus, no preparations were made for winter fighting. The air force's task was both interdiction near the front and direct support of the army on the battlefield. Attacks on the Soviet arms industry in the Urals area were to be left until after the conclusion of mobile warfare. The navy's mission was to prevent Soviet forces from breaking out of the Baltic Sea. By the end of July 1940 Hitler had decided to ‘finish off’ the USSR in the spring of 1941. The attack started at 03.00, Sunday morning June 22nd 1941. The first few months of the war was disastrous for the Soviet Union. By Day 17 of the attack, 300,000 Russians had been captured, 2,500 tanks, 1,400 artillery guns and 250 aircraft captured or destroyed. This was only in the territory attacked by Army Group Centre. To any military observer, the Russian Army was on the verge of a total collapse and Moscow seemed destined to fall. In fact, the German advance had been so fast that it had compromised the whole army’s supply and communication lines. The Army Group Centre paused on the Desna but it was still thought that it was only catching its breath before moving inexorably on. However, it was now that the German army was compromised by its own leader – Hitler. He ordered that the Army Group Centre’s Panzer Group led by Guderian should move south-east on to Kiev. 1 Panzer Group was also ordered north. This took away from the Centre group two of its most potent fighting forces. Guderian was very angered by this order but Hitler had always proved himself right in the war, so why argue with the Führer? Who, in fact, had the courage to oppose Hitler? Hitler had recognised that his most difficult decision was what to do after his forces had broken through the Stalin Line – move north, south or continue east? The mechanised sweeps north and south had the same massive success as the initial assault on June 22nd. Masses of Russian prisoners were captured and vast quantities of Russian equipment was destroyed. But the orders of Hitler had one dire effect – loss of time. The delay was such that the impact of the winter occurred before the Germans had reached the objectives set by Hitler. Very few in the German Army were equipped to cope with the cold and the army, so used to advancing, found itself very much affected by the freezing temperatures. A war of movement as seen so much in June/July 1941 became an attack blighted by freezing weather that would hinder any army let alone one so ill-prepared for such weather conditions. Stalin's military strategy was basically fairly simple. He believed it was vitally important to attack the enemy as often as possible. He was particularly keen to use new, fresh troops for these offensives. Stalin argued that countries in western Europe had been beaten by their own fear of German superiority. His main objective in using new troops in this way was to convince them that the German forces were not invincible. By pushing the German Army back at Moscow, Stalin proved to the Soviet troops that Blizkrieg could be counteracted; it also provided an important example to all troops throughout the world fighting the German war-machine. Soviet resistance stiffened as the Red Army deployed new tanks (T-34 and KV-1) and artillery (Katyusha rockets) that were technically much better than their German counterparts. Soviet reinforcements also poured in from the Far East after the Soviet spy Richard Sorge reported that Japan planned to move south against the United States and Great Britain rather than attack Siberia. After the battle for Stalingrad was over 91,000 men were captured and a further 150,000 had died during the siege. The German prisoners were forced marched to Siberia. About 45,000 died during the march to the prisoner of war camps and only about 7,000 survived the war. TERROR BOMBING OF DRESDEN IN WORLD WAR II: {At the start of World War II, Coventry was an industrial city of about 320,000 people which, like much of the industrial West Midlands, contained metal working industries. In Coventry's case, these included cars, bicycles, aeroplane engines and, since 1900, munitions factories. Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands which had been industrialised during the Industrial Revolution, industrial development had occurred before zoning regulations had come into existence and many of the small and medium-sized factories were woven into the same streets as the workers' houses and the shops of the city centre. The Coventry blitz/"lightning war" was a series of bombing raids that took place in the English city of Coventry. The city was bombed many times during World War II by the Nazi German Air Force (Luftwaffe). The most devastating of these blitzes occurred on the evening of 14 November 1940. On the night of November 14, 1940, German bombers dropped 500 tons of explosives, 33,000 incendiary bombs and dozens of parachute mines on Coventry. Its alleged that Winston Churchill knew of the attack several days in advance but held back the information to protect the most important secret of the war: the breaking of the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park.} In 1941 Charles Portal of the British Air Staff advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. Air Marshall Arthur Harris agreed and when he became head of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing (known in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted. Incidentally also to show the Russians when they arrive what Bomber Command can do. One tactic used by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force was the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), in clusters over a specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire. The Bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Force (USAAF) between 13 February and 15 February 1945 remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of the Second World War. In four raids, 1,300 heavy bombers dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city, the Baroque capital of the German state of Saxony. The resulting firestorm destroyed 39 square kilometres (15 sq mi) of the city centre. Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000. After the raid had finished, SS guards brought in from a nearby camp, burnt the bodies in the city's Old Square (the Altmarkt). There were so many bodies that this took two weeks to complete. A 1953 United States Air Force report written by Joseph W. Angell defended the operation as the justified bombing of a military and industrial target, which was a major rail transportation and communication centre, housing 110 factories and 50,000 workers in support of the German war effort. Against this, several researchers have argued that not all of the communications infrastructure, such as the bridges, were in fact targeted, nor were the extensive industrial areas outside the city centre. It has been argued that Dresden was a cultural landmark of little or no military significance, a "Florence on the Elbe," as it was known, and the attacks were indiscriminate area bombing and not proportional for the commensurate military gains. George Bell, the most astute and morally courageous of the English bishops, rose in the House of Lords to brand the mass killing of civilians a war crime. A lonely voice, yes, but not the only voice. SECOND CHINO-JAPANESE WAR [1937-38]: The war was the result of a decades-long Japanese imperialist policy aiming to dominate China politically and militarily to secure its vast raw material reserves and other resources. The weak state of the Republic of China and its tenuous control over Manchuria, the growing threat of totalitarian communism from the Soviet Union to the north, and the highly politicized and militaristic outlook of the semi-autonomous Kwantung Army of Japan were all factors driving the desire of Japanese junior officers to detach Manchuria from China and add it to the Empire of Japan. At the same time, the rising tide of Chinese nationalism and notions of self determination stoked the coals of war. The Japanese economic presence and political interest in Manchuria had been growing ever since the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The resulting Treaty of Portsmouth had granted Japan the lease of the South Manchuria Railway branch (from Changchun to Lüshun) of the China Far East Railway. By the end of 1932, the Japanese Army invaded Rehe Province (Jehol) and annexed it to Manchukuo in 1933. Per the He-Umezu Agreement on 9 June 1935, China recognized the Japanese occupation of eastern Hebei and Chahar provinces. Later that year, Japan established the East Hebei Autonomous Council. As a result, at the start of 1937 all the areas north, east and west of Beijing were controlled by Japan. Under the terms of the Boxer Protocol of 7 September 1901. On September 18, 1931, near Mukden (now Shenyang) in southern Manchuria, a section of railroad owned by Japan's South Manchuria Railway was dynamited. The Imperial Japanese Army, accusing Chinese dissidents of the act, responded with the invasion of Manchuria, leading to the establishment of Manchukuo the following year. While the responsibility for this act of sabotage remains a subject of controversy, the prevailing view is that Japanese militarists staged the explosion in order to provide a pretext for war. This event is known by various names. The Mukden Incident represented an early event in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Marco Polo Bridge, located outside of the walled town of Wanping to the southwest of Beijing was the choke point on the Pinghan Railway (Beijing-Wuhan), and guarded the only passage linking Beijing to Kuomintang-controlled areas in the south. Prior to July 1937, the Japanese military had repeatedly demanded the withdrawal of the Chinese forces stationed in this area, and had attempted to purchase land to build an airfield. The Chinese refused, as Japanese control of the bridge and Wanping town would completely isolate Beijing. The heightened tensions of the Marco Polo bridge Incident led directly into full scale war with the Battle of Beiping-Tianjin at the end of July. There are some disputes among historians over the incident, with some historians believing that this was an unintentional accident while others believing that the entire incident was fabricated by the Japanese Army in order to provide a pretext for the invasion of China. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident; also known as or the Lugouqiao Incident was a battle between the Republic of China's National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army, marking the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Between 1939 and 1940, the Japanese occupiers launched more than 109 small campaigns involving around 1,000 combatants each and 10 large campaigns of 10,000 men each to wipe out Communist guerrillas in the Hebei and Shandong plains. In addition, Wang Jingwei's anti-Communist puppet government had its offensive against the CCP guerrillas. Also, there was a general sentiment among the anti-Japanese resistance forces, particularly in the Kuomintang, that the CCP was not contributing enough to the war effort, and that they were only interested in expanding their power base. It was out of these circumstances that the CCP planned to stage a great offensive, called The Hundred Regiments Offensive (August 20 – December 5, 1940) against the Imperial Japanese Army in Central China to prove that they were helping the war effort and to amend KMT-CCP relations. The Second Sino-Japanese War (July 7, 1937 – September 9, 1945) was a military conflict fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany (until 1938) and the Soviet Union (1937-1940). After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the war merged into the greater conflict of World War II as a major front in the Pacific Theatre. The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the twentieth century. (A massacres during Second Sino-Japanese War) When General Yasuji Okamura took command of the North China Area Army in the summer, the new approach was "Three All" meaning 'kill all, burn all, and destroy all' in those areas containing Anti-Japanese forces. In Japanese documents, the policy was originally referred to as "The Burn to Ash Strategy". This policy was designed as a retaliation against Chinese Communists following the Hundred Regiments Offensive. Initiated in 1940 by Major General Ryūkichi Tanaka, the Sankō Sakusen was implemented in full scale in 1942 in north China by General Yasuji Okamura who divided the territory of five provinces (Hebei, Shandong, Shensi, Shanhsi, Chahaer) into "pacified", "semi-pacified" and "unpacified" areas. The approval of the policy was given by Imperial General Headquarters Order Number 575 on 3 December 1941. Okamura's strategy involved burning down villages, confiscating grain and mobilizing peasants to construct collective hamlets. It also centered on the digging of vast trench lines and the building of thousands of miles of containment walls and moats, watchtowers and roads. These operations targeted for destruction "enemies pretending to be local people" and "all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies." It has been alleged that Chinese soldiers would destroy the homes and fields of their own civilians in order to wipe out any possible supplies or shelter that could be utilised by the over-extended Japanese troops. In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls Policy, sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito himself, was responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians. In some places, the use of chemical warfare against civilian populations in contravention of international agreements was also alleged. (Another massacres during Second Sino-Japanese War) Bombing of Chongqing: The bombing of Chongqing (from 18 February 1938 to 23 August 1943) was part of an Imperial Japanese Army Air Service and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service terror bombing operation on the Chinese provisional capital of Chongqing authorized by the Imperial General Headquarters. In March 2006, 40 Chinese who were wounded or lost family members during the bombings sued the Japanese government asking 10 million yen each and asked for apologies. BOMBING OF JAPAN: The absolute peak of these air raids apart from the Atomic bomb over Hiroshima was to hit Tokyo on the nights of the 9th and 10th of March 1945. Even if the raids against the German city of Dresden is more known this was the worst bomb attack the world had ever seen, apart from the atomic bombs on the 6th and 9th of August the same year. Because high-altitude precision bombing was viewed as not effective enough, the Army Air Force began using incendiary attacks against Japanese cities. After months of studies, planning, and several incendiary bombing test runs, Tokyo was firebombed on the night of March 9, 1945, by low-flying B-29’s with increased bomb loads. Seventeen hundred tons of bombs were dropped in a densely populated area (an average of 103,000 people per square mile) of twelve square miles. The result was just what one would expect: as many as 100,000 dead, over 40,000 wounded, over 1,000,000 made homeless, over 267,000 buildings destroyed. This was much due to large portions of Tokyo at the time was built by wood and paper and further attack on Tokyo and other Japanese cities such as Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka were carried out throughout the rest of the war. The water boiled in some small canals because of the intense heat. This was the most destructive air attack in history. Not even the atomic bombs five month later caused as much material damage. It should not be forgotten that the word "surrender" is not in the Japanese vocabulary. However, General Curtis LeMay notified Bomber Command and Gen. Norstad that every Japanese City was severely damaged, that Japan had no supplies, no fuel, no aircraft defense system, and it would be only a matter of time if the firebombing continued before Japan would surrender. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson felt the choice of using the atomic bomb against Japan would be the "least abhorrent choice." Truman warned that if Japan still refused to surrender unconditionally, as demanded by the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, the United States would attack additional targets with equally devastating results (the atom bomb was not mentioned). Two days later, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and attacked Japanese forces in Manchuria, ending American hopes that the war would end before Russian entry into the Pacific theater. The atomic bomb was weighed against sacrificing the lives of thousands of soldiers. Because of the topography of the Japanese islands themselves, an amphibious assault would have taken a heavy toll on U.S. forces. Military advisers had told Truman that a potential loss of about 500,000 American soldiers was at stake. Truman may also have wanted to intimidate his potential rival Stalin with the United States' new destructive capability. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks near the end of World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States at the executive order of U.S. President Harry S. Truman on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively. After six months of intense fire-bombing of 67 other Japanese cities, followed by an ultimatum which was ignored by the Shōwa regime, the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed on August 9 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over Nagasaki. These are the only attacks with nuclear weapons in the history of warfare. It had more than thousands of times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare. Amongst these, 15–20% died from injuries or the combined effects of flash burns, trauma, and radiation burns, compounded by illness, malnutrition and radiation sickness. Since then, more have died from leukemia (231 observed) and solid cancers (334 observed) attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs. In both cities, most of the dead were civilians. More than three million leaflets were dropped over the country from American airplanes warning the Japanese people that more atomic weapons would be used "again and again" to destroy the country unless they ended the war forthwith. On August 14, 1945, after the two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, and after Emperor Hirohito had agreed to surrender because “the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage,” General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, to boost his already over-inflated ego (he was made a five-star general in 1944), undertook a completely unnecessary act of terror from the skies over Japan that had never before been seen. ps- Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942, however, it was known that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. The Germans got the V-1's and the V-2's late and in limited quantities and they did not get the atomic bomb at all. The United States, in collaboration with the United Kingdom and Canada, with their respective secret projects Tube Alloys and Chalk River Laboratories, designed and built the first atomic bombs under what was called the Manhattan Project. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The Hiroshima bomb, a gun-type bomb called "Little Boy", was made with uranium-235, a rare isotope of uranium. The atomic bomb was first tested at Trinity Site, on July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The test weapon, "the gadget," and the Nagasaki bomb, "Fat Man," were both implosion-type devices made primarily of plutonium-239, a synthetic element. GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION & THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD (Zhen Fan, Shu Fan, "Cleansing the Class Ranks" movements): "For the reactionaries, there is no thought more nightmarish than that of millions of their former victims daring to rise up and take control of every sphere of society, no idea more "strange" than that ordinary workers and peasants can help run universities or transform the ballet, no vision more "utopian" than moving in the direction of a classless society." Mao Tse-tung also used the start of the Korean war as a opportunity to carry on the large scale of suppression of counter-revolutionary (often means mass execution). In 1950, the Chinese Communist central committee ordered a “severe suppression” of “counter-revolutionary activities.” The shortened term for this order is “Zhen Fan.” Instruction on the severe suppression of counter-revolutionary activities. Those targeted for persecution included former KMT officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies, intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect, and significant numbers of rural gentry. It has been estimated that between 712,000 and 2 million people were put to death during the Zhen Fan Campaign. When the killings of landlords that occurred during the land reform campaign, which overlapped Zhen Fan, are included, the range balloons to between 3 million and 5 million for the years 1949-1953, along with at least 1.5 million people sent to "reform through labour" camps. In 1955, the purge of counter-revolutionaries was on again, this time known as the Shu Fan movement. There were several targets to purge: Ex-Kuomintang personnel regardless of war captive or surrender, anyone with landlord or wealthy families, and students and literati. This purge ended in 1956, with over to 200,000 people arrested, more than 20,000 executed and another 25,000 plus dead of unnatural causes. In 1957, after China’s first Five-Year Plan, Mao Zedong called for an increase in the speed of the growth of “actual socialism” in China (as opposed to “dictatorial socialism”), as the first step in making the country into a self-sufficient Communist society. To accomplish this goal, Mao began the Great Leap Forward, establishing special communes (Cultural nexus of power) in the countryside through the usage of collective labour and mass mobilization. Mao believed that both had to grow to allow the other to grow. Industry could only prosper if the work force was well fed, while the agricultural workers needed industry to produce the modern tools needed for modernisation. Mao Zedong based this program on the Theory of Productive Forces. The Great Leap Forward was intended to increase the production of steel and to raise agricultural production to twice the 1957 levels. However, industries went into turmoil because peasants were producing too much low-quality steel while other areas were neglected. Furthermore, the peasantry, as agriculturalists, were poorly equipped and ill-trained to produce steel, partially relying on such mechanisms as backyard furnaces to achieve production goals, which had been mandated by the local cadres. Meanwhile, farming implements like rakes were melted down for steel, impeding agricultural production. This led to a decline in the production of most goods other than steel. To make matters worse, in order to avoid punishment, local authorities frequently reported grossly unrealistic production numbers, which hid the problem for years, intensifying it. Having barely recovered from decades of war, the Chinese economy was again in shambles. Steel production did show significant growth, to over 14 million tons of steel a year, from the previous 5.2 million. The original goal was to produce an overly optimistic and, in hindsight, unrealistic 30 million tons of steel, though that was later revised down to twenty million. However, much of the steel produced was impure and useless. In the meantime, chaos in the collectives and unfortunate climatic conditions resulted in widespread famine, while Mao continued to export grain to “save face” with the outside world. According to various sources, the death toll due to famine may have been as high as 20 to 30 million. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution armed the Communists of Nepal with Maoism, and contributed to their success in the struggle against three mountains--imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic capitalism. In 1966, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, aimed at removing the “liberal bourgeois” who wanted to restore capitalism. He enlisted the youth of China, who in turn organized into groups called Red Guards. During this time, millions of Chinese lived with the luxury of their basic human rights. The young were forced from the city to the countryside for reeducation. Hundreds of civilian protestors were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989. THE NIGHT OF TLATELOLCO: In 1958, labor leader Demetrio Vallejo attempted to organize independent railroad unions, which the Mexican government quickly ended and arrested Vallejo under a violation of Article 143 of the Penal Code that made “social dissolution” a crime. From this general dissatisfaction with President Díaz Ordaz, the student movement was born. In 1968, student movements were breaking out all over the world — including in France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Argentina, Japan and the United States. Mexico, like many countries in the prosperous 1960s, had spawned a vibrant middle class that enjoyed a quality of life unimaginable in previous decades. These children of the Mexican Revolution that now lived in comfort were, for the first time, able to send their own children to university in unprecedented numbers. In the summer of 1968, Mexico was experiencing the birth of a new student movement. But that movement was short-lived. The Night of Tlatelolc, was a government massacre of student and civilian protesters and bystanders that took place during the afternoon and night of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. Mexico City hosted the Games of the XIX Olympiad in 1968, the first developing nation and Latin American country ever to host the Olympics. Since 1968, no other Latin America country had subsequently hosted the Olympic Games, until Rio 2016. The Mexican government invested a massive $150 million in preparations for the Olympics, an ostentatious amount considering the poverty that existed in Mexico. The Tlatelolco massacre happened ten days before the 1968 Summer Olympics celebrations in Mexico City. It is Mexico's Tiananmen Square, Mexico's Kent State For months preceding the incident, protesters, most of them students, had been taking to the streets to bring the attention of the world to the repressive government, led by President Gustavo Diáz Ordaz. Some of their demands were autonomy for universities, the firing of the police chief, the release of political prisoners, and demanding democracy in a country where the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had been in power since 1929. The demonstrations were in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco, Mexico City. Its the same place where a lieutenant of Zapata taught Villa how to read during the time they shared the same jail cell (1912); in the same place where Cuauhtemoc was defeated by Cortes (1521); in the same place where the children of the valley of Mexico held their market for centuries before and after the arrival of the Europeans. The massacre began at sunset when police and military forces—equipped with armored cars and tanks—surrounded the square and began firing live rounds into the crowd, hitting not only the protestors, but also other people who were present for reasons unrelated to the demonstration. Demonstrators and passersby alike, including children, were hit by bullets and mounds of bodies soon lay on the ground. The killing continued throughout the night, with soldiers operating on a house-to-house basis in the apartment buildings adjacent to the square. Witnesses to the event claim that the bodies were later removed in garbage trucks. The official government explanation of the incident was that armed provocateurs among the demonstrators, stationed in buildings overlooking the crowd, had begun the firefight. Suddenly finding themselves sniper targets, the security forces had simply returned the shooting in self-defense. new information has come to light through the release of official documents. They reveal that the Presidential Guard — a branch of the military — had posted snipers in the buildings surrounding Tlatelolco Plaza on the day of the massacre. The idea was that the snipers would shoot at the troops posted around the square, and the troops would think student snipers were shooting at them — and then they would open fire. Just 10 days after the killings, Mexico City hosted the 1968 summer Olympics, which came off without a hitch. (p.s. According to documents recently declassified by the United States government, obtained and examined by Kate Doyle at the National Security Archive, in 1956 the CIA began a programme to recruit senior officials of the Mexican government, and in Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría Álvarez, it had two very high value agents. Díaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverría and Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios were recruited by Winston Scott, who was chief of station in Mexico between 1956 and 1969, as part of a programme called Litempo, which was so hugely successful that it was considered to be a model for other CIA stations. the CIA in Mexico informed the US government that the Mexican government reported that the student movement was led by communists and that it was under foreign influence (coming from the Soviet Union) but that the reports were a bit exaggerated. The reports that came out of the embassy throughout the crisis were often confused, possibly because the CIA officials had much closer relations with Mexican politicians than did members of other agencies and were more inclined to believe their political propaganda. There is a telegram sent by Winston Scott, CIA Chief of Station in Mexico, on 19 July 1965, with an invitation to Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios to select two agents from the Federal Security Agency so that on "September 15th" they might travel to the United States to "receive four months of training". It is also interesting to note that a box found in the Second Gallery of the National General Archive dated 23 October 1968, from Buenos Aires; its message brief: "Please transmit our adhesion to México is achieved." ) VIETNAM WAR President Johnson sends U.S. combat units to Vietnam in 1965. Despite the experience of the French and President Eisenhower's refusal to get involved, Johnson ignored dire reports from the CIA and instead reacted to possible charges of being "soft on communism." As a result, 58,000 Americans died, (as well as over a million Asians), the economy was damaged for more than a decade and the U. S. lost a potential ally in Southeast Asia. Johnson also failed to note that Vietnam had never got along with the Chinese and four years after conquering South Vietnam in 1975, was a war with China. That conflict was brief, but relations with China have been frosty ever since, as they had been for centuries before. THE KILLING FIELDS- KHMER ROUGE & CHOEUNG EK [1975-1979]: Cambodia was the centre of the ancient kingdom of the Khmer, and its capital was Angkor, famous for its 12th century temples. The present day capital is Phnom Penh. In 1953 Cambodia gained independence after nearly 100 years of French rule. In the 1960s the population was over 7m, almost all Buddhists, under the rule of a monarch, Prince Sihanouk. In 1970 Prince Sihanouk was deposed in a military coup. The leader of the new right-wing government was lieutenant-general Lon Nol, who was made president of the 'Khmer Republic'. Prince Sihanouk and his followers joined forces with a communist guerrilla organisation founded in 1960 and known as the Khmer Rouge. They attacked Lon Nol's army and civil war began. Cambodia was also caught up in another country's war. Cambodia's neighbour to the east is Vietnam, which had also fought against the French to gain independence. When the French were defeated in 1954, Vietnam was divided in two: communist North Vietnam and pro-Western South Vietnam (backed by the USA). Civil war immediately broke out. Cambodia had become part of the Vietnam battlefield. During the next four years, American B-52 bombers, using napalm and dart cluster-bombs, killed up to 750,000 Cambodians in their effort to destroy suspected North Vietnamese supply lines. The Khmer Rouge was the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, the totalitarian ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, led by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphan. After taking power the Khmer Rouge leadership renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea. The Khmer Rouge subjected Cambodia to a radical social reform process that was aimed at creating a purely agrarian-based Communist society. The students, including future party leader Saloth Sar (Pol Pot after 1976), had been heavily influenced by the example of the French Communist Party (PCF). It became more Stalinist and anti-intellectual when groups of students who had been studying in France returned to Cambodia. The city-dwellers were deported to the countryside, where they were combined with the local population and subjected to forced labor. The Khmer Rouge believed parents were tainted with capitalism. Consequently, children were separated from parents and brainwashed to socialism as well as taught torture methods with animals. The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Vietnam War. In 1976, the Khmer Rouge took it over, renamed the school Security Prison 21 (S-21) and turned it into a torture, interrogation and execution centre. Fifteen kilometres from the centre of Phnom Penh is the Choeung Ek extermination centre, the final destination of some 20,000 adults and children who had been imprisoned and interrogated at S-21 Prison. Well over a hundred burial pits lie in what was once an orchard. About eighty were exhumed – the total number of bodies was around 9,000. Guns were seldom used – ammunition was valuable. Most had been battered or hacked to death with iron bars, pickaxes, machetes and many other makeshift murder weapons. It is said that small children and babies were swung against trees to smash their heads before throwing their bodies into the pits. About 1.5 million to 2.2 million out of a population of around 7 million Cambodians are estimated to have died in waves of murder, torture, and starvation, aimed particularly at the educated and intellectual elite. At least 200,000 people were executed by the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge bases were funded by diamond and timber smuggling, military assistance from China channeled by means of the Thai military, and food from markets across the border in Thailand. By December 1978, because of several years of border conflict and the flood of refugees fleeing Cambodia, relations between Cambodia and Vietnam collapsed. Pol Pot, fearing a Vietnamese attack, ordered a pre-emptive invasion of Vietnam. In 1979, Vietnam invaded and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime, which was officially called Democratic Kampuchea. INDONESIAN MASSACRES [1965-66; 1972 & 1999]: The Indonesian economy is a model of bankruptcy. At one time, Indonesia was a rice-surplus area; now it has to import 150,000 tons of rice every year. The once flourishing tin and rubber export industries have dwindled away. Only oil remains as an-imported earner of dollars. The Indonesian economy is heavily in debt to the world banking community, especially to US bankers. During the Indonesian Confrontation (1963-1966), unrest within Indonesia probably accounted for the spasmodic involvement of Indonesian Forces against the Federated States of Malaysia. America remained aloft from the conflict although having been willingly supported by British Commonwealth countries in Korea, as she (US) was attempting to introduce democracy within Indonesia and more importantly, negotiating for long term sales of oil from Indonesia at the time. The Indonesian killings of 1965–66 were a violent anti-Communist purge following an abortive coup in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta. One of history's biggest massacres ever took place in Indonesia in 1965/66, when around half a million people were killed in the suppression of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI). In Indonesia 35 years ago, a military dictator took over, a million people were killed and a red carpet was rolled out for western capital. The purge was a pivotal event in the transition to the "New Order"; the Indonesian Communist Party was eliminated as a political force, and the upheavals led to the downfall of president Sukarno, and to the commencement of Suharto's thirty-year presidency. It was the start of globalisation in Asia, a model for the rest of the world, leaving a legacy of sweatshops and corruption. By 1965, the PKI had three million members and was said to be the largest Communist party in the world outside of the Soviet Union and China. In addition to its large membership, about 15 million people had indirect connections to the party through their membership of peasant associations, labour unions and other social movement organisations led by PKI members. Western support for this terror campaign, seriously weakened Indonesian political life and set the scene for the emergence of Islamic terrorism in the region. Sukarno's balancing act of "Nasakom" (nationalism, religion, communism) had been unraveled. His most significant pillar of support, the PKI, had been effectively eliminated by the other two pillars—the army and political Islam; and the army was on the way to unchallenged power. On August 1, 1958, after the failure of the CIA-sponsored PRRI-Permesta regional rebellions against Sukarno, the U.S. began an upgraded military assistance program to Indonesia in the order of twenty million dollars a year.35 A U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff memo of 1958 makes it clear this aid was given to the Indonesian Army ("the only non-Communist force ... with the capability of obstructing the ... PKI") as "encouragement" to Nasution to "carry out his 'plan' for the control of Communism." In March 1967 Sukarno was stripped of his remaining power by Indonesia's provisional Parliament, and Suharto named Acting President and in March 1968 Suharto was formally elected president. The killings started in October 1965 in Jakarta, spread to Central and East Java and later to Bali, and smaller outbreaks occurred in parts of other islands, notably Sumatra. Within the time World Bank's declared Indonesia to be a "model pupil of globalisation", short-term global capital had fled the country, the stock market and currency had crashed, and the number of people living in absolute poverty had reached almost 70 million. (The next year, General Suharto was forced to resign after 30 years as dictator, taking with him severance pay estimated at $15 billion, the equivalent of almost 13% of his country's foreign debt, much of it owed to the World Bank.) (Another Indonesian massacres) East Timor owes its territorial distinctiveness from the rest of Timor, and the Indonesian archipelago as a whole, to the fact that it was colonized by the Portuguese, not the Dutch, beginning in the mid-17th century. (An agreement dividing the island between the two powers was signed in 1915.) In alliance with local chieftains, the Portuguese established an increasingly harsh regime of exploitation and corvée (forced) labour that, by the turn of the twentieth century, swept up the entire able-bodied male population. The colonial regime was replaced by the Japanese during World War II, whose occupation spawned a resistance movement that resulted in the deaths of 60,000 Timorese, or 13 percent of the entire population. On August 31, 1999, East Timorese went to the polls to vote for autonomy within Indonesia or fully-fledged independence. East Timorese voted almost en bloc, with more than 98 percent of those eligible casting a ballot, and 78.5 percent voting for independence. When the results of the plebiscite were made public, the Indonesian military and its allies implemented a well-prepared and systematic policy of murder and destruction ("Operation Global Clean-Sweep") aimed at preserving Indonesian control over the territory, or at least a substantial portion of it. As part of a new crackdown, Indonesia began to rely more and more on locally-raised paramilitary forces (ninjas) to terrorize the population. At all levels, those who commanded and conducted the killing were men; Timorese males, mostly youths, were recruited for militia service with promises of good pay and other "benefits" (including a free rein when it came to raping and sexually abusing Timorese women). A number were also former detainees who had been released from brutal treatment in Indonesian custody after pledging to collaborate with the occupying forces. These were supplied and overseen by Kopassus, the elite Indonesian army force that would play a critical role in the atrocities of September 1999. The US, Britain and Australia co-operated closely in the propaganda effort. On November 12, 1991, Indonesian military, armed with US M16s, gunned down more than 270 271 East Timorese were killed that day at the Santa Cruz cemetery or in hospitals soon after. (It was a peaceful memorial procession to a cemetery in Dili, East Timor which had turned into a pro-independence demonstration.) An equal number were disappeared and are believed dead. This massacre, unlike many others which occurred during the course of Indonesia's U.S.-backed occupation, was filmed and photographed by international journalists. Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn, two U.S. reporters, were beaten during the massacre. Of all the data to emerge from East Timor since the Indonesian onslaught of September 1999, estimates of the missing are the most disturbing.Of all the data to emerge from East Timor since the Indonesian onslaught of September 1999, estimates of the missing are the most disturbing. East Timor formal attained independence in 2001. (ps- despite clear signals that the Indonesian military and its Timorese militia allies would respond with violence to a vote for full independence, the U.N. assigned responsibility for "security" to the Indonesian armed forces. When widespread violence and destruction broke out on September 2, the U.N. and the international community were therefore unable (and initially unwilling) to address the consequences of the plebiscite that they themselves had overseen.) MY LAI MASSACRE IN VIETNAM 1969: Word of the atrocities did not reach the American public until November 1969, when journalist Seymour Hersh published a story detailing his conversations with a Vietnam veteran, Ron Ridenhour. Ridenhour learned of the events at My Lai from members of Charlie Company who had been there. Before speaking with Hersh, he had appealed to Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon to investigate the matter. The military investigation resulted in Calley's being charged with murder in September 1969 -- a full two months before the Hersh story hit the streets. Charlie Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division (the Americal Division), arrived in South Vietnam in December 1967. The unit was trained in Hawaii and had been in South Vietnam for three months. They averaged 20 years old and were considered to be one of the U.S. Army's best. At the least, many of the men had become frustrated over civilians harboring Vietcong operatives. There was a constant fear of ambush and a feeling that the war was being lost, which added to the day's tensions. During the Tet Offensive of January 1968, attacks were carried out in Quảng Ngãi by the 48th Battalion of the NLF (National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, commonly referred to by the Americans as the Viet Cong or Victor Charlie). U.S. military intelligence postulated that the 48th NLF Battalion, having retreated, was taking refuge in the village of Sơn Mỹ, in Quang Ngai Province. A number of specific hamlets within that village — designated My Lai 1, 2, 3, and 4 — were suspected of harboring the 48th. According to intelligence, most of the villagers headed to their local markets at 7 a.m. With the attack scheduled for 8 a.m., solders were told to assume that any persons remaining were, in all likelihood, either VC or VC sympathizers. They were ordered to destroy the village. The My Lai Massacre was the mass murder conducted by a unit of the U.S. Army on March 16, 1968 of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens in South Vietnam, all of whom were civilians and a majority of whom were women, children, and elderly people. The soldiers were led into My Lai by Lieutenant William Calley. They failed to find any insurgents, just ordinary villagers. Nevertheless, having been psychologically braced for a major fight, the soldiers opened fire on the villagers. Many of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, and some of the bodies were found mutilated. Some victims were mutilated with the signature "C Company" carved into the chest. While 26 US soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at My Lai, only William Calley was convicted. He served only three years of an original life sentence, while on house arrest. General Westmoreland had issued a special commendation to the 11th Infantry Brigade based on the claims of 128 enemy killed in My Lai. ETHIOPIAN RED TERROR OR QEY SHIBIR (1977–1978): Ethiopia is credited with being the origin of mankind. Bones discovered in eastern Ethiopia date back 3.2 million years. Ethiopia is the oldest independent country in Africa and one of the oldest in the world. Missionaries from Egypt and Syria introduced Christianity in the fourth century A.D. Following the rise of Islam in the seventh century, Ethiopia was gradually cut off from European Christendom. The Portuguese established contact with Ethiopia in 1493, primarily to strengthen their influence over the Indian Ocean and to convert Ethiopia to Roman Catholicism. There followed a century of conflict between pro- and anti-Catholic factions, resulting in the expulsion of all foreign missionaries in the 1630s. This period of bitter religious conflict contributed to hostility toward foreign Christians and Europeans, which persisted into the 20th century and was a factor in Ethiopia's isolation until the mid-19th century. Lt. Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam assumed power as head of state and Derg ("committee") chairman, after having his two predecessors killed. Mengistu's years in office were marked by a totalitarian-style government and the country's massive militarization, financed by the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, and assisted by Cuba. Since the deposition of Emperor Haile Selassie 12 September 1974, the Derg had been faced with a number of civilian groups competing for control of Ethiopia, most notably being the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP). In February 1977, the EPRP initiated terrorist attacks--known as the White Terror-- against Derg members and their supporters. This violence immediately claimed at least eight Derg members, plus numerous Derg supporters, and soon provoked a government counteraction--the Red Terror. From 1977 through early 1978 thousands of suspected enemies of the Derg were tortured and/or killed in a purge called the "red terror." During September 1976, EPRP militants were arrested and executed, in tandem with the EPRP's assassination campaign against ideologues and supporters of the Derg. The Ethiopian Red Terror, or Qey Shibir (1977–1978), was a violent political campaign in Ethiopia that most visibly took place once Mengistu Haile Mariam achieved control of the Derg, the military junta, 3 February 1977. Mengistu was found guilty of genocide and was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007. After his conviction, Zimbabwe, where he received sanctuary due to friendship with Robert Mugabe, said it would not extradite him. On 2008-05-26, the Ethiopian Supreme Court sentenced Mengistu in absentia to death. Saur Revolution: In 1978 a prominent member of Parcham, Mir Akbar Khyber (or "Kaibar"), was killed by the government and its' associates. Although the government issued a statement deploring the assassination, PDPA leaders apparently feared that Mohammed Daoud Khan was planning to exterminate them all. Shortly after a protest against the government during the funeral ceremonies of Mir Akbar Khaibar most of the leaders of PDPA were arrested by the government. Amin and a number of military wing officers of the PDPA Khalq wing stayed out of prison. This gave a chance to the group to organize an uprising. The government with the help of PDPA military members fell and the PDPA leadership was out of jail. Nur Mohammad Taraki, Babrak Karmal, and Hafizullah Amin overthrew the regime of Mohammad Daoud, and brutally assassinated him and his family, dumping them in an unmarked mass grave. They renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). The word 'Saur' is the Dari name of the second month of the Persian calendar. On the eve of the coup, the police did not send Hafizullah Amin to immediate imprisonment, as it did with Politburo members of the PDPA on April 25, 1978. His imprisonment was postponed for five hours, during which Amin, without having the authority, instructed the Khalqi army officers to overthrow the government. The regime of President Mohammad Daoud Khan came to a violent end in the early morning hours of April 28, 1978, when military units loyal to the Khalq faction of the PDPA stormed the Arg Palace in the heart of Kabul. The coup was also strategically planned for this date because it was the day before Friday, the Muslim day of worship, and most military commanders and government workers were off duty. With the help of Afghanistan's military air force which were mainly Soviet made MiG-21 and SU-7's, the insurgent troops overcame the stubborn resistance of the Presidential Guard and killed Daoud and most members of his family. The divided PDPA succeeded the Daoud regime with a new government under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki of the Khalq faction. In Kabul, the initial cabinet appeared to be carefully constructed to alternate ranking positions between Khalqis and Parchamis. Taraki was Prime Minister, Karmal was senior Deputy Prime Minister, and Hafizullah Amin of Khalq was foreign minister. Once in power, the party moved to permit freedom of religion and place agricultural resources under state control. They also made a number of ambitious statements on women's rights and waived the farmers debts countrywide. The majority of people in the cities including Kabul either welcomed it or were ambivalent to these policies. However, the secular nature of the government made it unpopular with religiously conservative Afghans in the villages and the countryside, who favored traditional Islamic restrictions on women's rights and in daily life. Their opposition became particularly pronounced after the Soviet Union occupied the country in late December 1979, fearing it was in danger of being toppled by mujahideen forces. The U.S. saw the situation as a prime opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union, and the move essentially signaled the end of the détente era initiated by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. In 1978 the United States began training insurgents in,and directing propaganda broadcasts into Afghanistan from Pakistan. Then, in early 1979, U.S. foreign service officers began meeting insurgent leaders to determine their needs. According to the then US Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski, CIA aid to the insurgents within Afghanistan was approved in July 1979, six months before the Soviet Invasion. According to Brzezinski, aid to the insurgents was begun under the Carter administration, with the intention of provoking Soviet intervention and was significantly boosted under the Reagan administration, which was committed to actively rolling back Soviet influence in the Third World. The Mujahideen belonged to various different factions, but all shared a similarly conservative Islamic ideology, to varying degrees. AIR INDIA FLIGHT 182: Air India Flight 182 was an Air India flight operating on the Montréal-London-Delhi-Bombay route. On 23 June 1985, the airplane operating on the route was blown up in midair by a bomb in Irish airspace in the single deadliest terrorist attack involving an aircraft to that date. The incident represents the largest mass murder in modern Canadian history. The explosion and downing of the carrier occurred within an hour of the related Narita Airport Bombing. At 07:14:01 GMT, the Boeing 747, "squawked 2005" (a routine activation of its aviation transponder), disappeared, and the aircraft started to disintegrate in mid-air. No 'mayday' call was received by Shannon International Airport Air Traffic Control (ATC). ATC asked aircraft in the area to try to contact Air India, but to no avail. By 07:30:00 GMT hrs ATC declared an emergency and requested nearby cargo ships and the Irish Naval Service vessel LÉ Aisling to look out for the aircraft. The main suspects in the bombing were the members of a Sikh separatist group called the Babbar Khalsa (banned in Europe and the United States as a proscribed terrorist group) and other related groups who were at the time agitating for a separate Sikh state called Khalistan in Punjab, India. Their anger had been sparked by an attack on the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine in Amritsar in June 1984. Investigation and prosecution took almost 20 years and was the most expensive trial in Canadian history, costing nearly CAD $130 million. Of the 210 wiretaps that were recorded during the months before and after the bombing, 156 were erased. These tapes continued to be erased even after the terrorists had become the primary suspects in the bombing. A special Commission found the accused perpetrators not guilty and they were released. The only person convicted of involvement in the bombing was Inderjit Singh Reyat, who pleaded guilty in 2003 to manslaughter in constructing the bomb used on Flight 182 and received a five-year sentence. Reyat previously had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for helping to build a bomb that killed two baggage handlers at Japan’s Narita Airport on the same day as the Flight 182 disaster. He was refused parole in July 2007. In September 2007, the Commission investigated reports, initially disclosed in the Indian investigative news magazine Tehelka that an hitherto unnamed person, Lakhbir Singh Brar Rode, had masterminded the explosions. This report appears to be inconsistent with other evidence known to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The Canadian government launched a Commission of Inquiry in 2006. Nuremberg War Crimes: BOSNIAN-CROATIAN-SERBIAN CIVIL WAR IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA IN THE 1990S [1992-1995]: The wars were characterized by bitter ethnic conflicts between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, mostly between Serbs on the one side and Croats, Bosniaks and Albanians on the other; but also between Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia and Macedonians and Albanians in Macedonia. The wars ended with massive economic disruption to Yugoslavia. Fundamental to the tensions were the different concepts of the new state; the Croats envisaged a federal model where they would enjoy greater autonomy than they had as a separate crown land under Austria-Hungary. Under Austria-Hungary, Croats enjoyed autonomy with free hands only in education, law, religion and 45% of taxes. The Serbs tended to view the territories as a just reward for their support of the allies in World War I and the new state as an extension of the Serbian Kingdom. The Serbs sacrificed their own state (which was in that time a little bit larger than today's Serbia, including much of Kosovo and Macedonia) in order to realize the ideal of a "South Slav state". Tensions between the two ethnic groups often erupted into open conflict, with the Serb dominated security structure exercising oppression during elections and the assassination in federal parliament of Croat political leaders, including Stjepan Radić, who opposed the Serbian monarch's absolutism. The assassination and human rights abuses were subject of concern for the Human Rights League and precipitated voices of protest from intellectuals, including Albert Einstein. It was in this environment of oppression that the radical insurgent group (later fascist dictatorship), the Ustaše were formed. The violence witnessed occurred because of the desire of the fascist Ustase to create an ethnically pure Croat state, which in turn called for the elimination of Serbian and Muslim minorities in Croatia. The country's tensions were exploited by the occupying Axis forces in World War II, which established a puppet-state spanning much of present day Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Axis powers installed the Ustasha in charge of this "Independent State of Croatia", which having resolved that the Serbian minority were a fifth column of Serbian expansionism, pursued a genocidal policy against them. One third were to be killed, one third expelled, and one third converted to Catholicism and assimilated as Croats. The same policy was applied in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Both Croats and Muslims were recruited as soldiers by the SS (primarily in the 13th Waffen Mountain Division). At the same time, former Royalist General Milan Nedić was installed by the Axis as head of the Serb puppet state. Both quislings were confronted and eventually defeated by the communist-led anti-fascist Partisan movement composed of members of all ethnic groups in the area, leading to the formation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, consisting of Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia, was proclaimed in 1945. Under authoritarian communist leader Josip Broz Tito the lid was kept on ethnic tensions. The federation lasted for over 10 years after his death in 1980 but under Serbian nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic it fell apart in bloodshed through the 1990s. One of Milosevic's first acts was to change Serbia's constitution and void the autonomy of Kosovo. He began a campaign of repression against the ethnic Albanian Kosovars, making him a hero in the eyes of Serb nationalists throughout the former Yugoslavia. The secession of Slovenia and Macedonia came relatively peacefully but there were devastating wars in Croatia and Bosnia. With the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991 and 1992, Serbia and Montenegro together formed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 200, and they established a new constitution for a new Yugoslavia in 1992. With the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe, the new state followed the wave of change, and did not revive Communist party structure (which had already been dissolved in 1990). In 1998 violence flared in the autonomous province of Kosovo in Serbia. The Kosovo Liberation Army, supported by the majority ethnic Albanians, came out in open rebellion against Serbian rule. THE SREBRENICA MASSACRE/GENOCIDE, refers to the July 1995 killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, as well as the ethnic cleansing of 25,000-30,000 refugees in the area of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by units of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of General Ratko Mladić during the Bosnian War. In addition to the VRS, a paramilitary unit from Serbia known as the Scorpions, that officially operated as part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, also participated in the massacre. The United Nations had declared Srebrenica a UN-protected "safe area" but that did not prevent the massacre, even though 400 armed Dutch peacekeepers were present at the time. The Srebrenica massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II. Over a period of five days, the Bosnian Serb soldiers separated Muslim families and systematically murdered over 7,000 men and boys in fields, schools, and warehouses. Today, Kosovo is de facto an international protectorate but legally is part of Serbia. Its status remains the subject of a bitter dispute between the Albanian majority, who seek independence, and the minority Serbs. Much of Kosovo had been destroyed as well as important Serbina civilian infrastructure including bridges and oil refineries. Much of rural Kosovo is without adequate shelter, and the country is littered with landmines laid by both sides during the war. HAMA MASSACRE: Hama is a Sunni Muslim town with about 180000 inhabitants. It is a centre of Sunni conservative puritanism. Hama was also the Ikhwanul Muslimin/Muslim Brotherhood stronghold. Its driven largely by the merchant community's of Hama. Ikhwanul Muslimin/Muslim Brotherhood, is a transnational Sunni movement and the largest political opposition organization in many Arab nations. The Alawite are a sect of Shî'ah Islam that makes up less than 15% of the population. As we know, Sunni-Shia relations ussualy have been marked by conflict. Thats why,Ikhwanul Muslimin/Muslim Brotherhood instituted activities against Alawite and their Baath Party. Syria had been deeply involved in Lebanon's Civil War since 1976. Disputes also arose with Turkey which accused Syria of supporting and training the Kurdish PKK, and Turkey mobilized troops on its borders with Syria to deal with Kurdish rebels . The Jihadist splinter group from the Ikhwanul Muslimin/Muslim Brotherhood took advantage of this situation to start an armed rebellion against the government of Hafez al-Assad. Throughout the first years of the 1980s the Muslim Brotherhood and various other Islamist factions staged hit-and-run and bomb attacks against the government and its officials, including a nearly successful attempt to assassinate president Hafez al-Assad on June 26, 1980, during an official state reception for the president of Mali. Surviving with only light injuries, al-Assad's revenge was swift and merciless: only hours later a large number of imprisoned Islamists were murdered in their cells in Tadmor Prison (near Palmyra), by units loyal to the president's brother Rifaat al-Assad. The Hama Massacre was Syria's regime brutally massacres to it's own people. The government of Syria attacked the town of Hama and killed thousands of people on February 2, 1982. The Syrian Baath Regime responded fast and surrounded the town of about 350.000 citizens with tanks, artillery and special units under the command of Rifaat al-Assad, the brother of the President Hafez al-Assad. The goal of the attack on Hama was to halt the rebellious activities of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwanul Muslimin). The Hama Massacre in 03/1982 put an end to any Islamic terror activity in Syria for more than 20 years. After the Hama uprising, the Islamist insurrection was broken, and the Brotherhood has since operated in exile while other factions surrendered or slipped into hiding. SABRA AND SHATILA MASSACRE OR SABRA AND CHATILA MASSACRE: From 1975 to 1990, groups in competing alliances with neighboring countries fought against each other in the Lebanese Civil War. Infighting and massacres between these groups claimed several thousands of victims; notable massacres in this period included the Syrian-backed Karantina Massacre (January 1976) by the Phalangists against Palestinian refugees, Damour massacre (January 1976) by the PLO against Maronites and the Tel al-Zaatar Massacre (August 1976) by Phalangists against Palestinian refugees. The total death toll in Lebanon for the whole civil war period was around 20,000-300,000 victims. The Sabra and Shatila massacre was a massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians carried out between September 16 and 18, 1982 by the Lebanese Forces Christian militia group, following the assassination of Phalangist leader and president-elect Bachir Gemayel. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, and Israel had been bombing PLO positions in southern Lebanon. The attempted assassination of Israeli Ambassador Shlomo Argov in London on June 4 by Abu Nidal's organization became a casus belli for a full-scale Israeli invasion of Lebanon. On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with 60,000 troops in an act condemned by the UN Security Council. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF), in control of Beirut, surrounded Beirut's Palestinian refugee camps, then allowed the Lebanese Forces Christian militia to enter two of these refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. "there were women lying in houses with their skirts torn torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies - blackened babies babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24-hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition" Elie Hobeika, the (Lebanese Christian militia) Phalangist commander at the time of the massacre never stood trial and held a post of a minister in Lebanese government in the 1990s. He was assassinated by a car bomb in Beirut on January 24, 2002; some speculated he was preparing to testify in the Belgian war-crimes tribunal investigating the massacre, though others doubted he intended to testify at all. RWANDAN CIVIL WAR (HUTU & TUTSI GENOCIDE) [1994]: The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's Tutsis and Hutu political moderates by Hutus under the Hutu Power ideology. In 1990 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group, composed mostly of Tutsi refugees, invaded northern Rwanda from Uganda. The Rwandan Civil War, fought between the Hutu regime, with support from Francophone nations of Africa and France itself, and the RPF, with support from Uganda, vastly increased the ethnic tensions in the country and led to the rise of Hutu Power, an ideology that stressed that the Tutsi intended to enslave Hutus and thus must be resisted at all costs. Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Rwanda has been called 'a tropical Switzerland in the heart of Africa'. It's about a third the size of Belgium, who administered it from 1919 under a League of Nations mandate (by which it ceased to be part of German East Africa) until independence in 1962. Rwanda is a very poor country with a market economy; over 90 percent of the population earns its living through subsistence agriculture. The principal export crops are coffee and tea. The main religions are Roman Catholic (65%), Protestant (9%), and Muslim (1%). The official languages are French and Kinyardwanda with Kiswahili spoken in commercial centers. The shorter Hutu people were earlier inhabitants of the area now known as Rwanda and Burundi. Most of the Rwandan population belong to the Hutu ethnic group, traditionally crop-growers. In the 1300s, a tall, thin Cushite people migrated into the area from the southern highlands of Ethiopia, coming as conquerors. The Cushite descendants are known today by the name Tutsi. For many centuries Rwanda attracted Tutsis - traditionally herdsmen - from northern Africa. The Tutsis were cattle-herding warriors, similar in culture to the famous Maasai, but from a different racial stock. They brought with them humpless cattle, new to the area. The name Hima is also associated with the Tutsis, and with regions in Western Tanzania and Southern. The Bantu people were farmers and fishers, though they also kept the Zebu cattle popular all over Africa, and common among the Bantu peoples. About 1% of each country are Twa pygmies, possibly descendants of Khoisan peoples who originally spoke a "click language" related to the Bushman languages of Southern Africa. For 600 years the two groups shared the business of farming, essential for survival, between them. Because of the nature of their historical pastoral or agricultural roles, Tutsis tended to be landowners and Hutus the people who worked the land; and this division of labour perpetuated a population balance in which Hutus naturally outnumbered Tutsis. A wedge was driven between them when the European colonists moved in. It was the practice of colonial administrators to select a group to be privileged and educated 'intermediaries' between governor and governed. The Belgians chose the Tutsis: landowners, tall, and to European eyes the more aristocratic in appearance. Some Tutsis began to behave like aristocrats, and the Hutu to feel treated like peasants. Missionaries, too, came from Europe, bringing a new political twist: the church taught the Hutu to see themselves as oppressed, and so helped to inspire revolution. With the European example before them, and European backing behind them, it was armed resistance that the Hutus chose. In 1956 their rebellion began (it would cost over 100,000 lives). By 1959 they had seized power and were stripping Tutsi communities of their lands. After their first delight in gaining power - and, in 1962, independence for Rwanda - a politically inexperienced Hutu government began to face internal conflicts as well. Tutsi resistance was continually nurtured by repressive measures against them (in 1973, for example, they were excluded from secondary schools and the university). On April 6 1994 the plane carrying Rwanda's president was shot down, almost certainly the work of an extremist. This was the trigger needed for the Hutus' planned 'Final Solution' to go into operation. The Tutsis were accused of killing the president, and Hutu civilians were told, by radio and word of mouth, that it was their duty to wipe the Tutsis out. The print media in Rwanda is believed to have started hate speech against Tutsis which was later continued by radio stations. According to commentators anti-Tutsi hate speech "became so systemic as to seem the norm." Unlike the instigators of the killings of Armenians in 1915, and of Jews and Roma in 1941-5, no-one tried to keep the genocide in Rwanda a secret. Journalists and television cameras reported what they saw, or what they found when the genocide was over. There was even a UN force (UNAMIR) in place, monitoring the ceasefire and now obliged to watch as people were killed in the street by grenades, guns and machetes. ('We have no mandate to intervene.' UNAMIR did their best to protect trapped foreigners, until they were pulled out of Rwanda altogether.) Although on a large scale, this genocide was carried out entirely by hand, often using machetes and clubs. The victims, in their last moments alive, were also faced by another appalling fact: their cold-blooded killers were people they knew - neighbours, work-mates, former friends, sometimes even relatives through marriage. There'd been at least 10 clear warnings to the UN of the 'Hutu power' action, including an anxious telegram from the UNAMIR commander to the then UN Secretary- General (Boutros Boutros Ghali) three months before the event. The UN Security Council met in secret after the start of the violence. At this meeting Britain urged that UNAMIR should pull out (and later blocked an American proposal to send in a fact-finding mission when the death toll had reached six figures). Council members resisted admitting 'that the mass murder being pursued in front of the global media was in fact genocide': genocide involved action no-one wanted to take. Once it was inescapably clear that genocide was indeed going on, it was too late. (The USA had actually banned its officials from using the term. Finally, in June, Secretary of State Warren Christopher grumpily conceded 'If there's any particular magic in calling it genocide, I've no hesitancy in saying that'.) An International War Crimes Tribunal has been set up in Arusha, Tanzania, to try leaders of the genocide. At this tribunal the former prime minister of Rwanda confessed to genocide and conspiracy to commit it, and by 2001 a few more people had been tried and convicted (no death sentences can be given). Nearly 50 high ranking Hutu men still await trial. The court has also established that rape is a tool of genocide. In Rwanda itself local courts have tried several thousand cases; there have been 400 death sentences (intended as 'a lesson'. At the end of 2001 around 125,000 prisoners, crammed into desperately overcrowded jails, still remained to be tried. The carnage never ended it just shifted sides. Tutsis went from victims to perpetrators and are killing Hutus by the millions. Subsequently, many refugees (mostly Hutus) have fled Rwanda to neighboring Zaire (~2 million), Tanzania (~480,000), Burundi (~200,000) and Uganda (~10,000). In addition, another 1 million refugees were believed to be within Rwanda. These refugees have concentrated in huge numbers at barren places with no sanitation, polluted water and little food. These conditions have caused great suffering and mass death. YAZIDI COMMUNITIES BOMBINGS (2007): The 2007 Mosul massacre was a mass killing that took place on April 23, 2007 in Mosul, in northern Iraq. The murders were allegedly a reprisal against the stoning of a Yazidi girl two weeks earlier. The girl, Du’a Khalil Aswad, aged 17 from the village of Bashika, was stoned to death by a large crowd of men - allegedly including some Iraqi police - while authorities and a large crowd stood by. This murder was determined to be an honour killing, punishment for her forbidden relationship with a Muslim man (and it is claimed, although unconfirmed, that she had converted to Islam). The incident was recorded on mobile phones, but such recordings were not seen by the world until they were distributed over the internet a few weeks after the event. The 2007 Yazidi communities bombings occurred when 400 members of an obscure Iraqi religious minority were killed by four co-ordinated suicide bomb attacks detonated in the remote Yazidi towns of Qahtaniya and Jazeera (Siba Sheikh Khidir), near Mosul in northwestern Iraq. DARFUR, Sudan [1983- present]: Estimated Death Toll: Approx. 2 million killed, 4-5 million displaced Sudan is the largest state in Africa geographically and has a population of 41 million people, of which 70 percent are Sunni Muslim by religion. Khartoum is the capital city of Sudan and is located in the northeastern part of the country. In the greater Khartoum province, an area nicknamed the “Arab triangle” has become a developed and industrialized part of the country.4 This economic growth has been driven by Sudan’s oil exports. The remaining parts of the country, namely in the south and Darfur in the west, have historically been underdeveloped and neglected by the central government. Sudan is surrounded by many states–its neighbors are Chad, Central African Republic (CAR), and Libya in the west, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Uganda, and Kenya in the south, Ethiopia and Eritrea in the east, and Egypt in the north. The nation has been plagued by civil war for most of its history since independence. During British rule, the north and south was administered primarily as two distinct colonies. In 1948, Britain granted independence to Sudan, a divided country dominated by Arab Muslims in the North and Christians, or native animists in the South. Upon independence, conflicts arose between the Muslim north and the non-Muslim south. The issues underlying the conflict and preventing resolution are complex. Here are some aspects to consider: Land – Since the 1930s, settled tribes that need land for farming have been in conflict with nomads that need land for their livestock to graze. This conflict flared up in the 1980s and the arming of rebel groups and janjaweed has escalated the violence. Future resettlement of displaced persons to the lands may cause further conflict. Civil war – The central government in Khartoum has historically neglected the peripheral parts of the country. Rebel groups have organized to combat the government for their interests. The Zaghawa activity is a separatist movement and was encouraged by the successes of southern Sudan against the central government in Khartoum. Oil – In 2005, the discovery of oil was announced in Darfur. It remains uncertain whether the potential resources motivate the parties to negotiate a deal similar to the CPA, or represent a contributing factor to complication of the conflict. Genocide – Janjaweed are Arab militias who are undertaking a campaign of ethnic cleansing of African tribes. UN satellite photos taken earlier in the crisis suggest such a pattern of attack. Accounts have been reported in which janjaweed claim ethnic cleansing as a rationale for killing of men and rape of women. "Egypt in 1882, in fact, furnishes some quite uncanny parallels with Iraq in 2003. Britain was going in to rescue the country from tyranny and mismanagement. She had a 'coalition' along with her: initially, at any rate. She was acting on behalf of the international community (what Gladstone called the 'Concert of Europe'), not--perish the thought!--her own narrow interests. She had no desire for territory, and would withdraw as soon as a 'reformed' government had been set up. She was foiled in that, however, by nationalist and Muslim fundamentalist opposition, and had to continue in Egypt for years thereafter, ruling through puppets." Operation Mockingbird: Begun in the 1950s, it was initially organized by Cord Meyer and Allen W. Dulles, and was later led by Frank Wisner after Dulles became the head of the CIA. In 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards, OSP was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), which became the CIA's covert action branch. The Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) was funded by siphoning off funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world". Operation Mockingbird was a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. After 1953, the network was overseen by CIA Director Allen Dulles, by which time Operation Mockingbird had major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns, in addition to activities by other operating units of the CIA. In addition to earlier exposés of CIA activities in foreign affairs, in 1966, Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National Student Association was funded by the CIA. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post. First Gulf War: Most countries condemned Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But the truth — that it was the culmination of a series of tangled economic and historical conflicts between two Arab oil states — wasn’t likely to sell the US public on the idea of sending our troops halfway around the world to do something about it. Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait was just as illegal as the US invasion that would ultimately oust him 13 years later — it was neither an act of self-defense, nor did the UN Security Council authorize it. But it can be argued that Iraq had significantly more justification for its attack. Kuwait had been a close ally of Iraq, and a top financier of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980. Saddam Hussein felt that Kuwait should forgive part of his regime’s war debt because he had halted the “expansionist plans of Iranian interests” not only on behalf of his own country, but in defense of the other Gulf Arab states as well. After an oil glut knocked out about two-thirds of the value of a barrel of crude oil between 1980 and 1986, Iraq appealed to OPEC to limit crude oil production in order to raise prices — with oil as low as $10 per barrel, the government was struggling to pay its debts. But Kuwait not only resisted those efforts — and asked OPEC to increase its quotas by 50 percent instead — for much of the 1980s it also had maintained its own production well above OPEC’s mandatory quota. “Kuwait’s refusal to decrease its oil production was viewed by Iraq as an act of aggression against it.” There were additional disputes between the two countries centering on Kuwait’s exploitation of the Rumaila oil fields, which straddled the border between the two countries. Kuwait was accused of using a technique known as “slant-drilling” to siphon off oil from the Iraqi side. None of this justifies Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. But a longstanding and complex dispute between two undemocratic petrostates wasn’t likely to inspire Americans to accept the loss of their sons and daughters in a distant fight. The first Gulf War was sold on a mountain of war propaganda. It took a campaign worthy of George Orwell to convince Americans that our erstwhile ally Saddam Hussein — whom the US had aided in his war with Iran as late as 1988 — had become an irrational monster by 1990.
The vast majority of the military related violence and deaths in the world comes from many small wars, insurrections and other lethal conflicts that get little media attention outside where they take place. One of the bloodiest of these irregular conflicts is the one going on in Mexico, where drug gangs battle over who shall control the lucrative drug smuggling routes into the United States. Most of the killings are done by drug gang gunmen in civilian clothes. The death toll is over 90,000 since 2007. https://www.wusf.org/2023-09-23/poland-border-tension
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