Mass murder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article deals with mass killings that are not considered genocide.
Mass murder (massacre) is the act of murdering a large number of people, typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations.
The term may refer to spree killers, who stage a single, horrific assault on their victims, or to serial killers, who may kill many people, but not necessarily all at the same time.
The largest mass killings in history have been attempts to exterminate entire groups or communities of people, often on the basis of ethnicity or religion. Some of these mass murders have been found to be genocides and others to be crimes against humanity, but often such crimes have led to few or no convictions of any type.
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[edit] Mass murder by individuals
Outside a political context, the term "mass murder" refers to the killing of several people. Examples would include shooting several people in the course of a robbery, or setting a crowded nightclub on fire. This is an ambiguous term, similar to serial killing and spree killing.
The USA Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a mass murder as "[involving] the murder of four or more victims at one location, within one event."[citation needed]
Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of family, of coworkers, of students, and of random strangers. Their motives may range from revenge to financial gain to religious fanaticism to mental illness.[1] Many other motivations are possible.
Workers who assault fellow employees are sometimes called "disgruntled workers," but this is often a misnomer, as many perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and kill their former colleagues. In the 1980s, when two fired postal workers carried out such massacres in separate incidents in the US, the term "going postal" became synonymous with employees snapping and setting out on murderous rampages. One of the 1980s most famous "disgruntled worker" cases involved computer programmer Richard Farley who, after being fired for stalking one of his co-workers, a woman by the name of Laura Black, returned to his former workplace and shot to death seven of his colleagues, although he failed in his attempt to kill Black herself.
Unlike serial killers, there is rarely a sexual motive to individual mass-murderers, with the possible exception of Sylvestre Matuschka, an Austrian man who apparently derived sexual pleasure from blowing up trains with dynamite, ideally with people in them. His lethal sexual fetish claimed 22 lives before he was caught in 1932.
According to Loren Coleman's book Copycat Effect, publicity about multiple deaths tends to provoke more,[2] whether workplace or school shootings or mass suicides.
[edit] Mass murder by terrorists
- See also: List of mass car bombings, List of terrorist incidents, and Suicide bombings in Iraq since 2003.
In recent years, terrorists have performed acts of mass murder to intimidate a society and draw attention to their causes. Examples of major terrorist incidents involving mass murder of more than 100 individual include:
- June 23, 1985 Air India Flight 182 bombing over the Atlantic Ocean - 329 killed
- December 21, 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Scotland - 270 killed
- March 12,1993 Bombay bombings - 257 killed
- April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in the United States - 168 killed
- August 7, 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania - 224 killed
- September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States - 2,973 killed
- October 12, 2002 Bali bombing in Indonesia - 202 killed
- March 2, 2004 Ashura massacre in Iraq - 170 killed
- 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings in Spain - 191 killed
- September 4, 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia - 344 killed
- February 28, 2005 Al Hillah bombing in Iraq - 127 killed
- 11 July 2006 Mumbai train bombings in India - 207 killed
- March 27, 2007 Tal Afar bombings and massacre in Iraq - 152 killed
[edit] Mass murder by a state
The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. Some people consider any deaths in combat to be mass murder by the state,[3][not in citation given] though this is not a generally held position. Clear examples of state-sponsored mass murder include:
- Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. While precise definition varies among genocide scholars, the legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Since the CPPCG went into effect in 1951 there have been two genocides found to be so in international courts these were the Srebrenica genocide and the Rwandan Genocide (see International prosecution of genocide. There have been a number of other convictions for genocide under municipal laws, and a number of genocides in history – such as the Holocaust – are widely seen as genocides, but occurred before the universal acceptance of international laws defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, so those criminals who were convicted of taking part in these historical genocides were found guilty of crimes against humanity and other more specific crimes like murder.
- Political mass murder or the killing of a particular political group within a country, such as Béla Kun's ethnic cleansing against Turkish and Crimean Tatars and other minorities in 1921-22, Lenin's "Red Terror," Stalin's Great Purge, Mao's "suppression of counterrevolutionaries," Pol Pot's Killing Fields, massacres at the partition of India, or the Hama, Jallianwala Bagh, and Tlatelolco massacres.
- Deliberate massacres of captives during wartime by a state's military forces, such as the Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish citizens in 1940 and the massacres of political prisoners after the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the Nanjing Massacre during World War II, the massacre of Soviet Jews at Babi Yar, the Wounded Knee Massacre by the U.S. 7th Cavalry.
More examples are:
- Mass killing of civilians during total war, especially via strategic bombing, such as the Blitz, the bombing of Dresden and Hamburg, or the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to the doctrine of total war, civilians are legitimate military targets because they contribute to the war effort.
- Actions in which the state caused the death of large numbers of people, which political scientist R. J. Rummel calls "democide," which, in addition to the cases above, may include man-made disasters caused by the state, such as the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, and the disastrous effects of the Great Leap Forward in China.
- Don Cossacks.
Following the defeat of the White Army in Russian Civil War, a policy of decossackization (Raskazachivaniye) took place on the surviving Cossacks and their homelands since they were viewed as potential threat to the new Soviet regime.[4] That was the first example when Soviet leaders decided to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory".[5][6] The Cossack homelands were often very fertile, and during the collectivisation campaign many Cossacks shared the fate of kulaks. The man-made Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 hit the Don and Kuban territory the hardest. According to historian Michael Kort, "During 1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million Don Cossacks, the Bolshevik regime killed or deported an estimated 300,000 to 500,000".[7]
- Mao Zedong. Mao’s first political campaigns after founding the People’s Republic were land reform and the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, which centered on mass executions, often before organized crowds. These campaigns of mass repression targeted former KMT officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies, intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect, and significant numbers of rural gentry.[8] The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000 killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign.[9] Mao himself claimed a total of 700,000 killed during these early years (1949–53).[10] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",[11] 1 million deaths seems to be an absolute minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million and 5 million dead.[12][13] In addition, at least 1.5 million people were sent to "reform through labour" camps (laogai).[14] Mao’s personal role in ordering mass executions is undeniable.[15][16] He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.[17]
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, perished in the violence of the Cultural Revolution.[18] When Mao was informed of such losses, particularly that people had been driven to suicide, he blithely commented: "People who try to commit suicide - don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people."[19]
- Equatorial Guinea. In September 1968, Francisco Macías Nguema was elected first president of Equatorial Guinea, and independence was granted in October.[20] In July 1970, Nguema created a single-party state. In 1972 Nguema took complete control of the government and assumed the title of President for Life. Nguema’s regime was characterized by abandonment of all government functions except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; he acted as chief judge who sentenced thousands to death. This led to the death or exile of up to 1/3 of the country's population. Out of a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 had been killed.[21][22] Uneasy around educated people, he had killed everyone who wore spectacles. All schools were ordered closed in 1975. The economy collapsed, and skilled citizens and foreigners left.[23]
- Idi Amin Dada. Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, is notorious for being one of the bloodiest dictators of the 20th century.[24] The exact number of people killed is unknown. The International Commission of Jurists estimated the death toll at no fewer than 80,000 and more likely around 300,000.[25] An estimate compiled by exile organizations with the help of Amnesty International puts the number killed at 500,000. The victims soon came to include members of other ethnic groups, religious leaders, journalists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students and intellectuals, criminal suspects, and foreign nationals. In some cases entire villages were wiped out.[26] Bodies were dumped into the River Nile, on at least one occasion in quantities sufficient to clog the Owen Falls Hydro-Electric Dam in Jinja.[27]
- Ethiopia. During Mengistu’s 17-year reign it was not uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning. Mengistu himself is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting them, saying that he was leading by example.[28] Some experts have estimated that 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed during Mengistu's rule.[29] Amnesty International estimates that up to 500,000 people were killed during the Red Terror of 1977 and 1978.[30] On 12 December 2006 Mengistu Haile Mariam was found guilty of genocide and other offences. He was sentenced to life in prison in January 2007.[31]
- Western New Guinea. Amnesty International has estimated that more than 100,000 Papuans, one-sixth of the population, have died as a result of government-sponsored violence against West Papuans,[32] while others had previously specified much higher death tolls.[33] In 2004 the Yale University Law School published "Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control",[34] a 75 page report detailing the applicability of Indonesian control to each of the genocide conventions.
[edit] Mass murder in warfare
During war, a military force commits mass murder when it unlawfully kills non-combatants. Depending on the circumstances such murders may constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide or a combination of two or all three.
- Caesar's campaigns. As many as 1 million people (probably 1 in 4 of the Gauls) died, another million were enslaved, 300 tribes were subjugated and 800 cities were destroyed during the Gallic Wars (present-day France). The entire population of city of Avaricum (Bourges) (40,000 in all) was slaughtered.[35] During Julius Caesar's campaign against the Helvetii (modern-day Switzerland) approximately 60% of the tribe was destroyed, and another 20% was taken into slavery.[36]
- Boudica's uprising. Boudica (d. 60/61AD) was a queen of the Celtic Iceni people of Norfolk in Roman-occupied Britain who led a major uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. They destroyed Camulodunum (Colchester, a settlement for discharged Roman soldiers), Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans). In the three cities destroyed, between 70,000 and 80,000 people are said to have been killed. Tacitus says the Britons had no interest in taking or selling prisoners, only in slaughter by gibbet, fire or cross. Cassius Dio's account gives more prurient detail: that the noblest women were impaled on spikes and had their breasts cut off and sewn to their mouths, "to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and wanton behaviour" in sacred places, particularly the groves of Andraste.[37][38]
- Albigensian Crusade. The Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate the heresy of the Cathars of Languedoc. Béziers was a Languedoc stronghold of Catharism and the first city to be sacked, on July 22, 1209. In the bloody massacre which followed, no one was spared, not even those who took refuge in the churches. The commander of the Crusade was the Papal Legate Arnaud-Amaury (or Arnald Amalaricus, Abbot of Citeaux). When asked by a Crusader how to distinguish between the Catholics and Cathars once they'd taken the city, the abbot famously replied, "Kill them all, God will know His own" - "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet".[39] In the end, the Albigensian Crusade killed an estimated 1,000,000 people, not only Cathars but much of the population of southern France.[40]
- Mongol Empire. Quoting Eric Margolis, Adam Jones observes, in his book Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, that in the 13th century the Mongol horsemen of Genghis Khan were genocidal killers (génocidaires) who were known to kill whole nations leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones.[41] Many ancient sources described Genghis Khan's conquests as wholesale destruction on an unprecedented scale in their certain geographical regions, and therefore probably causing great changes in the demographics of Asia. For example, over much of Central Asia speakers of Iranian languages were replaced by speakers of Turkic languages. The eastern part of the Islamic world experienced the terrifying holocaust of the Mongol invasions, which turned northern and eastern Iran into a desert. Between 1220 and 1260, the total population of Persia may had dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine.[42]
Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties reportedly had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million people.[43] About half of the Russian population died during the Mongol invasion of Rus.[44] Historians estimate that up to half of Hungary's two million population at that time were victims of the Mongol invasion of Europe.[45]
The Pope Innocent IV’s envoy to the Mongol Khan, who passed through Kiev in February 1246, wrote:
"They [the Mongols] attacked Russia, where they made great havoc, destroying cities and fortresses and slaughtering men; and they laid siege to Kiev, the capital of Russia; after they had besieged the city for a long time, they took it and put the inhabitants to death. When we were journeying through that land we came across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground. Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated town, but now it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses there and the inhabitants are kept in complete slavery."[46]
- Timur’s conquests. Timur Lenk was a 14th century conqueror of much of Middle East and Central Asia, and founder of the Timurid dynasty. He thought of himself as a ghazi, but his biggest wars were against Muslim states. In 1383 Timur started the military conquest of Persia. He captured Herat, Khorasan and all eastern Persia to 1385 and massacred almost all inhabitants of Neishapur and other Iranian cities. When revolts broke out in Persia, he ruthlessly suppressed them, massacring the populations of whole cities. When Timur entered Delhi (India), the city was sacked, destroyed, and left in ruins. When Timur conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, the civilian population was decimated. In the city of Isfahan he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000 human skulls, from those that his army had beheaded,[47] and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside the Aleppo.[48] Timur herded thousands of citizens of Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame,[49] and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and another 90,000 more in Baghdad.[50] After the capture of Bagdad, Timur ordered that every soldier should return with at least two severed human heads to show him (many warriors were so scared they killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign just to ensure they had heads to present to Timur). Nestorian Christians east of Iraq were almost entirely eliminated by Timur.[51] As many as 17 million people may have died from his conquests.[52]
- Thirty Years' War. The Thirty Years' War was fought between 1618 and 1648, primarily on the territory of Holy Roman Empire. Virtually all of the major European powers were involved. The Thirty Years' War was the most destructive conflict in Europe prior to World War I. Atrocities and massacres, such as Sack of Magdeburg, became standard methods of warfare. During the war, Germany's population was reduced by 30% on average; in the territory of Brandenburg, the losses had amounted to half, while in some areas an estimated two thirds of the population died. Germany’s male population was reduced by almost half. The population of the Czech lands declined by a third. The Swedish armies alone destroyed 2,000 castles, 18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German towns.[53][54][55]
- The Deluge. During the 1640s and 1650s the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the Commonwealth lost over a third of its populations (over 3 million people).[56] First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in the eastern and southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine). It is recorded that Khmelnytsky told the people that the Poles had sold them as slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews". It is estimated that 100,000 Jews were massacred and 300 of their communities destroyed. The precise number of dead may never be known, but the decrease of the Jewish population during that period (referred to in Polish history as The Deluge) is estimated at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from diseases and jasyr (captivity in the Ottoman Empire).[57]
- Revolt in the Vendée. Vendée is remembered as the place where the peasants revolted against the French Revolutionary government in 1793. They resented the changes imposed on the Roman Catholic Church by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (1790) and broke into open revolt in defiance of the Revolutionary government's military conscription. A guerrilla war, known as the Revolt in the Vendée, led at the outset by an underground faction called the Chouans.
Initially the Vendée rebels gained the upper hand, so on August 1 1793 the Committee of Public Safety ordered General Jean-Baptiste Carrier to carry out a pacification of the region. The Republican army was reinforced and the Vendéan army was eventually defeated. The Reign of Terror, seen elsewhere in France, was extraordinarily brutal in the Vendée. There was the massacre of 6,000 Vendée prisoners, many of them women, after the battle of Savenay. Then there was the drowning of 3,000 Vendée women at Pont-au-Baux. And 5,000 Vendée priests, old men, women, and children killed by drowning at the Loire River at Nantes in what was called the "national bath" - tied in groups in barges and then sunk into the Loire. Under orders from Committee of Public Safety in February 1794 the Republican forces launched their final "pacification" (the Vendée-Vengé or "'Vendée Avenged") - twelve columns, the colonnes infernales ("infernal columns") under Louis-Marie Turreau, were marched through the Vendée, indiscriminately targeting not only the remaining rebels and the people who had given them support, but the innocent as well.[58][59]
Beyond this massacre there were formal orders for forced evacuation and 'scorched earth' - farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned, villages razed. There were many reported atrocities and a campaign of mass killing universally targeted at residents of the Vendée regardless of combantant status, political affiliation, age or gender. Considered by some to be the first modern genocide, and only recently understood as such.[60][61] The campaign was ordered as such by the Comité de Salut public:
"The committee has prepared measures that tend to exterminate this rebellious race of Vendéeans, to make their abodes disappear, to torch their forests, to cut their crops."
The orders to Turreau were:
"Exterminate the brigands to the last man instead of burning the farms, punish the fleeing ones and the cowards, and crush that horrible Vendée. Combine the most assured means to exterminate all of this race of brigands."
When the campaign dragged to an end in March 1796 the estimated dead numbered between 117,000 and 500,000, out of a population of around 800,000.[62][63][64]
- Taiping Rebellion. During the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) that followed the secession of the Tàipíng Tiānguó (太平天國, Heavenly Kingdom of Perfect Peace) from the Qing empire both sides tried to deprive each other of the resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in general exact a brutal price from captured enemy lands in order to drastically weaken the opposition's war effort.[65] This war truly was total in that civilians on both sides participated to a significant extent in the war effort and in that armies on both sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military forces.[66] In total between 20 and 30 million died in the conflict making it bloodier than the World War I or Russian Civil War.[67][68]
- War of the Triple Alliance. War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870) was the bloodiest conflict in the history of South America, fought between Paraguay and the allied countries of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Paraguay’s prewar population of between one and one-half million was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which only about 28,000 were men.[69] Paraguay's dictator, Francisco Solano López, is widely regarded as being responsible for the war, which led to his death. "Conquer or die" became the order of the day. Lopez ordered thousands of executions in the military. In 1868, when the allies were pressing him hard, he convinced himself that his Paraguayan supporters had actually formed a conspiracy against his life. Thereupon several hundred prominent Paraguayan citizens were seized and executed by his order, including his brothers and brothers-in-law, cabinet ministers, judges, prefects, military officers, bishops and priests, and nine-tenths of the civil officers, together with 500 foreigners, among them several members of the diplomatic legations (the San Fernando massacres). The bodies were dumped into mass graves.[70][71]
- Indian Wars. In his book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, amateur historian William M. Osborn sought to tally every recorded atrocity in the area that would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact (1511) to the closing of the frontier (1890), and determined that 9,156 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans, and 7,193 people died from those perpetrated by settlers. Osborn defines an atrocity as the murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners.[72]
- Spanish Civil War. The number of casualties is disputed; estimates generally suggest that between 500,000 and 1 million people were killed in the Spanish Civil War. Over the years, historians kept lowering the death figures and modern research concludes that 500,000 deaths is the correct figure.[73] Atrocities during the war were committed on both sides.[74][75] At least 50,000 were executed during the civil war.[76] Franco's victory was followed by tens of thousands of summary executions.[77][78]
In his recent, updated history of the Spanish Civil War, Antony Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white terror' claimed 200,000 lives.[79] The 'red terror' had already killed 38,000."[80] Julius Ruiz concludes that "although the figures remain disputed, a minimum of 37,843 executions were carried out in the Republican zone with a maximum of 150,000 executions (including 50,000 after the war) in Nationalist Spain."[81] In Checas de Madrid, César Vidal comes to a nationwide total of 110,965 victims of Republican repression; 11,705 people being killed in Madrid alone.[82]
- During World War II.
-- Germany.
During World War II, the holocaust initiated by the German National Socialist party killed millions of people: Slavs, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Serbs, and especially Jews. After the end of World War II, this genocide came to be known as the Holocaust. Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and homosexuals and anybody considered a threat to the Nazi party were rounded up and sent to labour camps, death camps, or just killed in their homes.
The Nazi occupation of Poland resulted in the death of one-fifth of the population, some 6 million people, half of them Jewish. The Soviet Union lost an estimated 27 million people during the war, about half of all World War II casualties.[83][84] Of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while in German captivity by the end of the war. [85]
-- Japan.
Japanese soldiers rounded up and killed millions[86] of civilians and prisoners of wars from surrounding nations, especially from Korea, China, Philippines and US during World War II. At least 20 million Chinese died during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).[87][88]
Unit 731 was amongst one of the most notorious examples of wartime atrocities committed on a civilian population during World War II, where cruel and inhumane experiments were done to thousands of Chinese civilians and Allied prisoners of war. The Rape of Nanking is another example of atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers on a civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of men were slaughtered, while women of all ages were systematically raped and / or killed by Japanese soldiers.[89]
The Three Alls Policy (Sankō Sakusen) was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three alls being: "Kill All, Burn All and Loot All". Initiated in 1940 by Ryūkichi Tanaka, the Sankō Sakusen was implemented in full scale in 1942 in north China by Yasuji Okamura who divided the territory into pacified, semi-pacified and unpacified areas. The approval of the policy was given by Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 575 on 3 December 1941.
Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45. Much of the controversy regarding Japan's role in World War II revolves around the death rates of prisoners of war and civilians under Japanese occupation. The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:
- It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %.[90]
- Algerian Civil War. During the Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, a variety of massacres occurred. The massacres peaked in 1997 (with a smaller peak in 1994), and were particularly concentrated in the areas between Algiers and Oran, with very few occurring in the east or in the Sahara. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people lost their lives during the conflict.[91][92]
Starting around April 1997 (the Thalit massacre), Algeria was wracked by massacres of intense brutality and unprecedented size; previous massacres had occurred in the conflict, but always on a substantially smaller scale. Typically targeting entire villages or neighborhoods and disregarding the age and sex of victims, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) guerrillas killed tens, and sometimes hundreds, of civilians at a time. These massacres continued through the end of 1998, changing the nature of the political situation considerably. The areas south and east of Algiers were hit particularly hard; the Rais and Bentalha massacres in particular shocked worldwide observers. Pregnant women were sliced open, children were hacked to pieces or dashed against walls, men's limbs were hacked off one by one, and, as the attackers retreated, they would kidnap young women to keep as sex slaves. This quotation by Nesroullah Yous, a survivor of Bentalha, expresses the apparent mood of the attackers:
- "We have the whole night to rape your women and children, drink your blood. Even if you escape today, we'll come back tomorrow to finish you off! We're here to send you to your God!"[93]
The GIA's responsibility for these massacres is undisputed; it claimed credit for both Rais and Bentalha (calling the killings an "offering to God" and the victims "impious" supporters of tyrants in a press release), and its policy of massacring civilians was cited by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat as one of the main reasons it split off from the GIA. At this stage, it had apparently adopted a takfirist ideology, believing that practically all Algerians not actively fighting the government were corrupt to the point of being kafirs, and could be killed righteously with impunity; an unconfirmed communiqué by Zouabri had stated that "except for those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death."[94]
- Second Congo War. The Second Congo War, also known as Africa's World War, began in 1998.[95] The largest war in modern African history, one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II, it directly involved eight African nations, as well as about 25 armed groups. Nearly 5 million people have died.[96][97] A U.N. human rights expert reported in July 2007 that sexual atrocities against Congolese women go 'far beyond rape' and include sexual slavery, forced incest, and cannibalism.[98]
[edit] Mass murderers
- John D. Lee (Mountain Meadows Massacre, southern Utah, 1857)
- John Filip Nordlund (Mass murder on the ferry Prins Carl, Sweden, killing 5 wounding 8, 1900)
- Simone Pianetti (Camerata Cornello, Italy, 1915)
- Andrew Kehoe (Bath, Michigan, Blew up school, killing 45 (mostly children), 1927)
- Mutsuo Toi (killed 30, Tsuyama massacre, Okayama, Japan, 1938)
- Howard Unruh (Camden, New Jersey, 1949)
- Albert Guay (Canadian Pacific aircraft bombing, killing 23, Canada, 1949)
- Tore Hedin (Hurva, Sweden, killed 9, 1952)
- Jack Gilbert Graham (bombed an aircraft taking off from Denver, Colorado, 1955)
- Charles Starkweather (killed 11 during a road trip with his underage girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1957,1958)
- Edgar Ray Killen (Mississippi civil rights worker murders, June 21 1964)
- Charles Whitman (University of Texas Shootings, Austin, Texas, August 1 1966)
- Harry Roberts (police killer, London, 1966)
- Richard Speck (murdered eight student nurses, Chicago, 1966)
- Victor Ernest Hoffman (Shell Lake murders, Saskatchewan, Canada. August 15, 1967)
- John Linley Frazier (killed 5, including four members of a family, in Santa Cruz, CA, 1970)
- John List (Westfield, New Jersey, 1971)
- Mark Essex (Killed 10 people in a New Orleans hotel shooting, 1973)
- Edward Charles Allaway (killer of 7 people at the library of California State University-Fullerton on July 12 1976)
- Jim Jones (Jonestown, Guyana) (909 people drank or were injected with Flavor-aid laced with cyanide, 1978)
- Woo Bum-Kon (Gyeongsang-namdo, South Korea, killing 57, 1982)
- Denis Lortie (National Assembly of Quebec, May 8, 1984)
- James Oliver Huberty (McDonald's massacre, San Ysidro, California, 18 July 1984)
- Jeremy Bamber (farmhouse family murders, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England, 1985)
- Andrew Walker (killed 3 army colleagues, Scotland, 1985)
- Iñaki de Juana Chaos (Spain, 1985-1986)
- Patrick Sherrill (killed 14, then himself, Post Office, Edmond, Oklahoma 20 August,1986)
- David Burke, (PSA Flight 1771, San Luis Obispo, California, 1987)
- Michael Ryan (Hungerford massacre, Berkshire, UK, 1987)
- Ronald Gene Simmons (16 people Russellville, Arkansas), 1987)
- David Brom (Killed four family members with an axe, 1988)
- Patrick Edward Purdy (Cleveland Elementary School Shootings, Stockton, California, 17 January 1989)
- Jeffrey Don Lundgren (Kirtland Cult Killings, April 17th, 1989)[99]
- Marc Lépine (École Polytechnique Massacre, Montreal, Quebec, 1989)
- Julio González (87 people were killed, arsonist at Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, NY, March, 1990)
- David Gray (Aramoana massacre (Otago, New Zealand, 13 & 14 November 1990)
- George Jo Hennard (Luby's massacre, Killeen, Texas, 1991)
- Juan Luna (Brown's Chicken massacre, Palatine, Illinois, January 8, 1993)
- Kenneth French, Jr. (North Carolina, USA, 1993)
- Colin Ferguson (Long Island Railroad Massacre, Long Island, New York, USA, 1994)
- Mattias Flink (Falun, Sweden, killed 7, 1994)
- Baruch Goldstein (Hebron, West Bank 1994)
- Germain Nabeneza (Grande Montée, Réunion Island, France, killed 8, 1994)
- Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma, USA 1995)
- Thomas Hamilton (Dunblane massacre, Dunblane, Scotland, 1996)
- Martin Bryant, killed 35, (Port Arthur massacre, Australia, 1996)
- Michael Carneal (Heath High School shooting, West Paducah, Kentucky, USA, 1997)
- Mohammad Ahman al-Naziri (Sanaa massacre, Sanaa, Yemen, 1997)
- Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden (Jonesboro massacre, Jonesboro, Arkansas, 1998)
- Kip Kinkel (Thurston High School shooting, Springfield, Oregon, 1998)
- Matthew Beck (Newington, Connecticut, 1998) (killed five at Connecticut Lottery Headquarters, Newington, Connecticut, 1998)
- Larry Gene Ashbrook (Wedgewood Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas, 1999)
- Buford O. Furrow, Jr. (Los Angeles, California, 1999)
- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine High School Massacre, Littleton, Colorado), killed 13, April 20, 1999)
- Byran Uyesugi (Xerox murders, Honolulu, Hawaii, killed 7, November 2, 1999)
- Richard Baumhammers, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 28, 2000)
- Michael McDermott (Wakefield Massacre, Edgewater Technologies, Wakefield, Massachusetts, killed 7, December 26, 2000)
- John Taylor and Craig Godineaux (Wendy's massacre, New York City, May 24, 2000)
- Dipendra of Nepal (Nepal, Nepalese royal massacre, killed 9, June 1, 2001)
- Mamoru Takuma (Osaka school massacre, Osaka, Osaka, Japan, killed 8, June 8, 2001)
- Robert Steinhäuser (Erfurt massacre, Erfurt, Germany, killed 16, April 26, 2002)
- Richard Durn (Nanterre massacre, Nanterre, France, killed 8, March 26, 2002)
- Jeff Weise (Red Lake High School massacre, Red Lake, Minnesota, killed 9, March 21, 2005)
- Terry Ratzmann (Brookfield, Wisconsin, killed 7, March 12, 2005)
- Kyle Huff (Capitol Hill massacre, Seattle, Washington, killed 6, March 25, 2006)
- Charles Carl Roberts IV (Amish School Shooting, Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, killed 5, October 2, 2006)
- Sulejman Talović (Trolley Square shooting, Salt Lake City, Utah, killed 5, February 12, 2007)
- Cho Seung-hui (Virginia Tech Massacre, Blacksburg, Virginia, killed 32, April 16, 2007)
- Nikola Radosavljevic (Jabukovac massacre, Serbia, killed 9, July 27, 2007)
- Tyler Peterson (Crandon, Wisconsin shooting, Crandon, Wisconsin, killed 6, October 7, 2007)
- Asa Coon (SuccessTech Academy shooting, Cleveland, Ohio, injured 5 and killing himself, October 10, 2007)
- Pekka-Eric Auvinen (Jokela school shooting, Tuusula, Finland, killed 8, November 7, 2007)
- Robert A. Hawkins (Westroads Mall massacre, Omaha, Nebraska, killed 8, December 5, 2007)
- Matthew J. Murray (2007 Colorado YWAM and New Life shootings, Arvada and Colorado Springs, Colorado, killed 4, December 9, 2007)
[edit] Mass murder cases not yet closed
These are mass murder incidents where the perpetrator(s) have not been determined or arrested, where one or more suspects has been charged but not yet convicted.
- Wonderland Murders, 1981, Los Angeles 4 murdered
- Hamilton Avenue murders, Indianapolis, Indiana, 7 killed, June 1, 2006 (Two suspects charged, awaiting trial)
[edit] See also
- Atrocity
- Going postal
- List of massacres
- Mass deaths and atrocities of the 20th century
- Mass grave
- Murder
- Serial killer
- Spree killer
- Terrorism
- War crime
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1612368,00.html
- ^ http://hammernews.com/copycateffect.htm
- ^ http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
- ^ Cossacks history
- ^ Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0-674-07608-7
- ^ Soviet order to exterminate Cossacks is unearthed
- ^ Kort, Michael (2001). The Soviet Colosus: History and Aftermath, p. 133. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. ISBN 0-7656-0396-9.
- ^ China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese Reality by Steven W. Mosher, pp 72, 73
- ^ Deaths in China Due to Communism by Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, pg 24
- ^ Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, pg 337: "Mao claimed that the total number executed was 700,000, but this did not include those beaten or tortured to death in the post-1949 land reform, which would at the very least be as many again. Then there were suicides, which, based on several local inquiries, were very probably about equal to the number of those killed." Also cited in Mao Zedong, by Jonathan Spence, as cited here.
- ^ Twitchett, Denis; John K. Fairbank. The Cambridge history of China. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052124336X. Retrieved on 2007-03-25.
- ^ The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois, et al; China: A Long March into Night by Jean-Louis Margolin, pg 479
- ^ Estimates, sources and calculations from R.J. Rummel’s China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (See lines 1 through 90)
- ^ Short, Philip (2001). Mao: A Life. Owl Books, 436. ISBN 0805066381. “At least a million-and-a-half more disappeared into the newly established 'reform through labour' camps, purpose-built to accommodate them.”
- ^ Commentary transferred to Huang Jing regarding the supplementary plan to suppress counterrevolutionaries in Tianjin
- ^ Mao's "Killing Quotas" by Li Changyu. Human Rights in China (HRIC). September 26, 2005, at Shandong University
- ^ Terrible Honeymoon: Struggling with the Problem of Terror in Early 1950s China by Jeremy Brown
- ^ Source List and Detailed Death Tolls for the Twentieth Century Hemoclysm. Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century. Retrieved on 2007-02-27.
- ^ MacFarquhar, Roderick and Schoenhals, Michael. Mao's Last Revolution. Harvard University Press, 2006. p. 110 ISBN 0674023323
- ^ Francisco Macias Nguema
- ^ Coup plotter faces life in Africa's most notorious jail
- ^ True hell on earth: Simon Mann faces imprisonment in the cruellest jail on the planet
- ^ If you think this one's bad you should have seen his uncle
- ^ 2003: 'War criminal' Idi Amin dies
- ^ Idi Amin
- ^ Idi Amin killer file
- ^ Idi Amin: 'Butcher of Uganda', CNN, August 16, 2003
- ^ Guilty of genocide: the leader who unleashed a 'Red Terror' on Africa by Jonathan Clayton, The Times Online, December 13, 2006
- ^ 'Butcher of Addis Ababa' is guilty of genocide with torture regime
- ^ Zimbabwe won't extradite former Ethiopian dictator
- ^ Ethiopian Dictator Sentenced to Prison by Les Neuhaus, The Associated Press, January 11, 2007
- ^ Report claims secret genocide in Indonesia - University of Sydney
- ^ West Papua Support
- ^ Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua: Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian Control (PDF)
- ^ Julius Caesar The Conquest of Gaul
- ^ Helvetti
- ^ Boudica
- ^ Jason Burke, "Dig uncovers Boudicca's brutal streak", The Observer , 3 December 2000
- ^ Jewish History 1200 - 1299
- ^ Massacre of the Pure
- ^ Jones References, p.4 note 12 Eric s. Margolis War at the top of the World, the struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet (New York, Routledge, 2001) p.155
- ^ Battuta's Travels: Part Three - Persia and Iraq
- ^ Ping-ti Ho, "An Estimate of the Total Population of Sung-Chin China", in Études Song, Series 1, No 1, (1970) pp. 33-53.
- ^ History of Russia, Early Slavs history, Kievan Rus, Mongol invasion
- ^ Welcome to Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to History
- ^ The Destruction of Kiev
- ^ Timur's history
- ^ The Seven Years Campaign
- ^ Battle of Damascus
- ^ New Book Looks at Old-Style Central Asian Despotism
- ^ Nestorian Church
- ^ Timur Lenk (1369-1405)
- ^ Germany - The Thirty Years' War - The Peace of Westphalia
- ^ Population
- ^ The Thirty Years' War
- ^ About Poland
- ^ Judaism Timeline 1618-1770
- ^ The Heart of Darkness: How Visceral Hatred of Catholicism Turns Into Genocide
- ^ Wars Of The Vendee
- ^ Jones, Adam Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction p.7 (Routledge/Taylor & Francis Publishers Forthcoming 2006)
- ^ [1] Masson, Sophie Remembering the Vendee (Godspy 2004. First published in "Quadrant" magazine Australia, 1996)
- ^ Three State and Counterrevolution in France by Charles Tilly
- ^ Vive la Contre-Revolution!
- ^ McPhee, Peter Review of Reynald Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée H-France Review Vol. 4 (March 2004), No. 26
- ^ Ch'ing China: The Taiping Rebellion
- ^ Taiping Rebellion: The destruction of the Chinese culture
- ^ Chinese Cultural Studies: Concise Political History of China
- ^ The Great War: A Review of the Explanations
- ^ Nineteenth Century Death Tolls
- ^ War of the Triple Alliance
- ^ Paraguay - The War of the Triple Alliance
- ^ The Wild Frontier: Atrocities During The American-Indian War
- ^ Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (2001), pp. xviii & 899–901, inclusive.
- ^ Spain: Repression under Franco after the Civil War
- ^ Spain poised to seek the graves of Franco's disappeared
- ^ Spain torn on tribute to victims of Franco
- ^ A revelatory account of the Spanish civil war
- ^ Spanish Civil War: Casualties
- ^ "Men of La Mancha". Rev. of Antony Beevor, The Battle for Spain. The Economist (June 22, 2006).
- ^ A Week in Books
- ^ Julius Ruiz, "Defending the Republic: The García Atadell Brigade in Madrid, 1936". Journal of Contemporary History 42.1 (2007):97.
- ^ International justice begins at home by Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami Herald, August 4, 2003
- ^ Leaders mourn Soviet wartime dead
- ^ Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in Eastern Europe
- ^ Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of World War II
- ^ Rummel, R.J. Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 Chapter 3. LIT Verlag Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Wien-London-Zürich (1999)
- ^ Nuclear Power: The End of the War Against Japan
- ^ Remember role in ending fascist war
- ^ Chinese city remembers Japanese 'Rape of Nanjing'
- ^ Johnson, Looting of Asia, [2]
- ^ Attacks raise spectre of civil war
- ^ Journalists in Algeria are caught in middle
- ^ Nesroullah Yous & Salima Mellah (2000). Qui a tué a Bentalha?. La Découverte, Paris. ISBN 2-7071-3332-9.
- ^ El Watan, 21 January (quoted in Willis 1996)
- ^ Inside Congo, An Unspeakable Toll
- ^ Conflict in Congo has killed 4.7m, charity says
- ^ Congo crisis is deadliest since Second World War
- ^ Congo's Sexual Violence Goes 'Far Beyond Rape', July 31, 2007. The Washington Post.
- ^ http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/lundgren/index_1.html
[edit] External links
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