As a Christian minority seeking autonomy in the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were considered to be enemies from within of the ethnic unification project to create a Turkish empire. The Young Turks government planned and carried out the genocide: 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians were assassinated through deportations and sweeping massacres.

Deportation of Armenians
Photo: Armin T. Wegner © Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen

Six million Jews living in Europe and North Africa were systematically killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, who believed in a racist ideology by which the Jews constituted a threat to the survival of the Aryan “race”. Ghettos, mobile killing units, imprisonment, and murder in concentration and death camps were employed.

Deportation of Jews to death camps.
Photo: MHMC

Under the communist dictatorship of Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge pitted the “ancient people” against the “new people”, who had ties to the previous regime and were to be destroyed, along with the ethnic and religious minorities. Between 1.7 and 2.2 million Cambodians were executed or worked to death or died of hunger or illness.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh.
Photo: Christian Haugen, Flickr

Some 800 000 Rwandans of the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus were killed—mainly by machete—by the Hutu majority, which perceived them as a threat to its authority. The genocide was orchestrated by Hutu Power extremists and carried out by local officials and the Hutu population.

Three waves of violence against Tutsis: 1959, 1973 and 1994.
Source: PAGE-RWANDA