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Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda: A list of acts considered genocide

Jun 4, 2019 | 3:00 PM

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he accepts a finding that Canada’s treatment of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls amounts to genocide.

The term is used numerous times in the final report of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, who are  believed to number in the thousands in Canada.

The report says that despite the commission’s best efforts to quantify the extent of the problem, “no one knows an exact number.”

The United Nations defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy ethnic, racial or religious groups. 

Here are some atrocities accepted as genocide:

Armenian genocide: Historians estimate up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of the First World War.

Holodomor: Millions of Ukrainians perished during a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1932-33 in an attempt to force peasants to join collective farms.

The Holocaust: Six million Jews and many others considered by the Nazis as “undesirable” were murdered during the Second World War.

Cambodia: The ultra-communist group Khmer Rouge is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people while it held power from 1975 to 1979 through execution, starvation and inadequate medical care.

Rwanda: Almost one million Tutsis were murdered within the span of 100 days in 1994 by Hutu extremists.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: Nearly 8,000 Muslims were killed when Serbs overran the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.

 

 

The Canadian Press