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Which historical events are often cited as examples of genocide in the 20th century?
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Genocide
Freight train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi Germany's largest concentration camp, near Oświęcim, Poland.
In the context of international law, genocide is defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group based on its ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. Several 20th-century events are widely cited as instances of this crime:1
- Armenian Massacre (1915): The deportation and mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.12
- The Holocaust: The systematic, state-sponsored extermination of European Jews, Roma, and other groups by Nazi Germany during World War II.13
- Cambodian Genocide (1970s): The killing of approximately three million people by the Khmer Rouge regime.1
- Rwanda Genocide (1994): A campaign of mass murder in which extremist Hutu elements targeted the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutu, resulting in more than 800,000 deaths.14
- Srebrenica Genocide (1995): The massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak boys and men by Bosnian Serb forces, which was formally classified as genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.5
These events underscore the critical importance of the Genocide Convention, which establishes the legal framework for preventing and punishing such atrocities.6