State terrorism

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State terrorism is a controversial term, used when arguing that there is a similarity between terrorism and certain acts done by states.

The concept of state terrorism and indeed of terrorism has its roots in the Reign of Terror in revolutionary France.

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Contents 1 Scope and definition 2 Historical examples of state terrorism 3 See also 4 Notes 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

[edit] Scope and definition

Like the definition of terrorism and the definition of state-sponsored terrorism, the definition of state terrorism remains controversial. There is no international consensus on what terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism, or state terrorism is. Nations also disagree on what distinguishes a "terrorist organisation" from a "liberation movement". There is no international agreement or treaty defining these terms.^[1]

The earliest use of the word "terrorism" identified by the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1795 reference to what the author described as the "reign of terrorism" in France.^[2] During that part of the French revolutionary period that is now known as the Reign of Terror, or simply The Terror, the Jacobins and other factions used the apparatus of the state to execute and cow political opponents.

According to the Britannica Concise terrorism is "systematic use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective".[4] According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, State terrorism, also known as Establishment Terrorism, is "employed by governments—or more often by factions within governments—against that government's citizens, against factions within the government, or against foreign governments or groups. This type of terrorism is very common but difficult to identify, mainly because the state's support is always clandestine."[5]

Linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky has stated that, "The U.S. is officially committed to what is called 'low-intensity warfare'.... If you read the definition of low-intensity conflict in army manuals and compare it with official definitions of 'terrorism' in army manuals, or the U.S. Code, you find they're almost the same."^[3] Chomsky and Edward S. Herman have argued that the distinction between state and non-state terror is morally relativist, and distracts from or justifies state terrorism perpetrated by favored states, typically those of wealthy and developed nations (Chomsky and Herman, 1979). Chomsky has in turn been criticized for allegedly ignoring or justifying terrorism by states such as Communist China, Vietnam, and Cambodia.[6] Herman responded to such accusations in Z Magazine.^[4]

There are several related terms: Democide, Genocide, State-sponsored terrorism, Crime against humanity, Crime against peace, and War crime. .

[edit] Historical examples of state terrorism

- 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.^[5] 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.^[6]

- 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".^[7] In the end, the Albigensian Crusade killed an estimated 1,000,000 people, not only Cathars but much of the population of southern France.^[8]

- 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.^[9] 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.^[10]

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.^[11] About half of the Russian population died during the Mongol invasion of Rus.^[12] Historians estimate that up to half of Hungary's two million population at that time were victims of the Mongol invasion of Europe.^[13]

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."^[14]

- Muslim invasions of India. The Muslim conquest in the Indian subcontinent mainly took place from the 13th to the 16th centuries, though earlier Muslim conquests made limited inroads into the region. An estimate of the number of people who died as a result of the Islamic invasion of India, based on the Muslim chronicles and demographic calculations, was done by K.S. Lal in his book Growth of Muslim Population in Medieval India, who claimed that between 1000 CE and 1500 CE, the population of Hindus decreased by 80 million. His work has come under criticism by historians such as Simon Digby (School of Oriental and African Studies) and Irfan Habib for its agenda and lack of accurate data in pre-census times. Lal has responded to these criticisms in later works. Historians such as Will Durant contend that Islam spread through violence.^[15][16] Sir Jadunath Sarkar contends that that several Muslim invaders were waging a systematic jihad against Hindus in India to the effect that "Every device short of massacre in cold blood was resorted to in order to convert heathen subjects." In particular the records kept by al-Utbi, Mahmud al-Ghazni's secretary, in the Tarikh-i-Yamini document several episodes of bloody military campaigns.^[17]

- 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,^[18] and a pyramid of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside the Aleppo.^[19] Timur herded thousands of citizens of Damascus into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame,^[20] and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit, and another 90,000 more in Baghdad.^[21] 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.^[22] As many as 17 million people may have died from his conquests.^[23]

- Aztec human sacrifice. The Aztec Empire sacrificed thousands of victims (often slaves or prisoners of war) annually to the sun god Huitzilopochtli; an offering to Huitzilopochtli would be made to restore the blood he lost, as the sun was engaged in a daily battle. Human sacrifices would prevent the end of the world that could happen on each cycle of 52 years. For the re-consecration of Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, the Aztecs reported that they sacrificed about 80,400 people over the course of four days. According to Ross Hassing, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.^[24][25]

- Vlad the Impaler. Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad Dracula, the 15th century ruler of Wallachia in present-day Romania, has been characterized as exceedingly cruel. Impalement was his preferred method of torture and execution. As expected, death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Impalement was Vlad's favourite method of torture but was by no means his only one. The list of tortures he is alleged to have employed is extensive: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to animals, and boiling alive. No one was immune to Vlad the Impaler's attentions. His victims included women and children, peasants and great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants.^[26] In 1459, he had 30,000 of the Saxon merchants and officials of the Transylvanian city of Brasov that were breaking his authority impaled.^[27][28] In 1462 Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, during his campaign against Wallachia, was “greeted” by the sight of veritable forest of stakes on which Vlad the Impaler has impaled 20,000 Turkish prisoners.^[29] Dracula was probably killed in battle against the Ottoman near Bucharest in December of 1476.

- 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.^[30][31][32]

- Reconquest of Ireland. It is estimated that as much as a third of the entire population of Ireland perished during the civil wars and subsequent Cromwellian conquest in the mid-17th century. Since the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Ireland had been mainly under the control of the Irish Confederate Catholics. The Cromwellian reconquest of Ireland was extremely brutal, and it has been alleged that many of the army's actions during the reconquest would today be called war crimes or even genocide. William Petty who conducted the first scientific land and demographic survey of Ireland in the 1650s (the Down Survey), concluded that at least 400,000 people and maybe as many as 620,000 had died in Ireland between 1641 and 1653 many as a result of famine and plague. And this in a country of only around 1.5 million inhabitants.^[33]

- 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.^[34][35]

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.^[36][37] 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.^[38][39][40]

- Wahhabist conquests. The rulers of the First Saudi State were convinced that it was theirs religious mission to wage holy war (jihad) against all other forms of Islam. In 1801 and 1802, the Saudi Wahhabists under Abdul Aziz ibn Muhammad ibn Saud attacked and captured the holy Shia cities of Karbala and Najaf in Iraq, massacred the Shiites and destroyed the tombs of the Shiite Imam Husayn and Ali bin Abu Talib. In 1802 they occupied Taif where they massacred the population. In 1803 and 1804 the Wahhabis captured Mecca and Medina. In Mecca and Medina they destroyed monuments and various holy Muslim sites and shrines, such as the shrine built over the tomb of Fatima Zahra, the daughter of Muhammad, and even intended to destroy the grave of the Prophet Muhammad.^{[41][42][43][44][45]}

- 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.^[46] 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.^[47] In total between 20 and 30 million died in the conflict making it bloodier than the World War I or Russian Civil War.^[48][49]

- 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.^[50] 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.^[51][52]

- 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 and U.S Government. Osborn defines an atrocity as the murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners.^[53]

- Second Boer War. The English term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

These had originally been set up as "refugee camps" by the Army for families whose farms had been destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy (sweeping the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children, and including destroying crops, burning down homesteads and farms, poisoning wells, and salting fields) and thousands of Boers had already been brought into them.

Kitchener succeeded Roberts as commander-in-chief in South Africa in November 29, 1900 and in an attempt to break the guerilla campaign, initiated plans to "flush out guerrillas in a series of sytematic drives, organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly 'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children. . . . It was the clearance of civilians -- uprooting a whole nation -- that would come to dominate the last phase of the war."^[54] Following Kitchener's new policy, more camps were built and converted to prisons and many tens of thousands more women and children were forcibly moved to prevent the Boers from resupplying at their homes.

By August 1901, 93,940 Boers were reported to be in "camps of refuge". A report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50% of the Boer child population] were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four (25%) of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died.^[55][56]

- Don Cossacks.

Main article: Red Terror

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.^[57] That was the first example when Soviet leaders decided to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a whole territory".^[58][59] 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".^[60]

- 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.^[61] Atrocities during the war were committed on both sides.^[62][63] At least 50,000 were executed during the civil war.^[64] Franco's victory was followed by tens of thousands of summary executions.^[65][66]

In his recent, updated history of the Spanish Civil War, Antony Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white terror' claimed 200,000 lives.^[67] The 'red terror' had already killed 38,000."^[68] 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."^[69] 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.^[70]

- During World War II.

-- Nazi Germany.

Main articles: Holocaust, German war crimes, and Consequences of German Nazism

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.^[71][72] 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. ^[73]

-- Japanese Empire.

Main article: Japanese war crimes

Japanese soldiers rounded up and killed millions^[74] 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).^[75][76]

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.^[77]

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 %.^[78]

-- Soviet Union.

Main article: Soviet war crimes

According to the historian Norman Naimark, the propaganda of Soviet troop newspapers and the orders of Soviet high command were jointly responsible for excesses by members of the Red Army. The general tenor in the writings was that the Red Army had come to Germany as an avenger and judge to punish the Germans. ^[79] On January 12, 1945 army General Cherniakhovsky turned to his troops with the words: There shall be no mercy - for nobody, as there had also been no mercy for us... The land of the fascists must become a desert …^[80]

On the German side, any organized evacuation of civilians was forbidden by the Nazi government to boost morale of the troops, now for the first time defending the "Fatherland", even when the Red Army entered German territory in the last months of 1944. It is estimated that Soviet soldiers raped at least 2,000,000 German women and girls, an estimated 200,000 of whom later died from injuries sustained, committed suicide, or were murdered outright.^[81][82][83]

- 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.^[84] 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.^[85] Mao himself claimed a total of 700,000 killed during these early years (1949–53).^[86] However, because there was a policy to select "at least one landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for public execution",^[87] 1 million deaths seems to be an absolute minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million and 5 million dead.^[88][89] In addition, at least 1.5 million people were sent to "reform through labour" camps (laogai).^[90] Mao’s personal role in ordering mass executions is undeniable.^[91][92] He defended these killings as necessary for the securing of power.^[93]

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, perished in the violence of the Cultural Revolution.^[94] 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."^[95]

- Equatorial Guinea. In September 1968, Francisco Macías Nguema was elected first president of Equatorial Guinea, and independence was granted in October.^[96] 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.^[97][98] 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.^[99]

- 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.^[100] 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.^[101] 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.^[102] 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.^[103]

- 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.^[104] Some experts have estimated that 150,000 university students, intellectuals and politicians were killed during Mengistu's rule.^[105] Amnesty International estimates that up to 500,000 people were killed during the Red Terror of 1977 and 1978.^[106] 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.^[107]

- 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,^[108] while others had previously specified much higher death tolls.^[109] 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",^[110] a 75 page report detailing the applicability of Indonesian control to each of the genocide conventions.

- Second Congo War. The Second Congo War, also known as Africa's World War, began in 1998.^[111] 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.^[112][113] 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.^[114]

[edit] See also

• Al-Anfal Campaign
• Allegations of state terrorism by Iran
• Allegations of state terrorism by Russia
• Allegations of state terrorism in Sri Lanka
• Allegations of state terrorism by the United States
• Armenian Genocide
• Color of law
• Consequences of German Nazism
• Crime against humanity
• False flag
• Gukurahundi
• Holocaust
• Human rights in the Soviet Union
• Khmer Rouge
• North Korean human experimentation
• Population transfer in the Soviet Union
• Selective assassination
• Terror bombing
• War crime

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Sluka, Jeffrey A. (Ed.) (2000). Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-1711-X.
• Chomsky, Noam and Herman, Edward S. (1979). The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Vol. 1. Boston: South End Press. ISBN 0-89608-090-0
• Alexander George (1991). Western State Terrorism. Polity Press. ISBN 0-7456-0931-7. 
• Mark Curtis (2004). Unpeople: Britain's Secret Human Rights Abuses. Vintage. ISBN 0-09-946972-3. 

[edit] Further reading

• Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth & K. Lee Lerner, eds. Terrorism : essential primary sources. Thomson Gale, 2006. ISBN 9781414406213 Library of Congress. Jefferson or Adams Bldg General or Area Studies Reading Rms LC Control Number: 2005024002.
• Tarpley, Webster G. 9/11 Synthetic Terror, Made in USA -Progressive Press. ISBN 0-93085-231-1
• Chomsky, Noam. The Culture of Terrorism ISBN 0-89608-334-9
• Chomsky, Noam. 9/11 ISBN 1-58322-489-0
• George, Alexander. Western State Terrorism, Polity Press. ISBN 0-7456-0931-7

[edit] External links

Prevention of terrorism

• The National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism
• Recognizing State Terror
• http://State Terrorism and Counterterrorismde:Staatsterrorismus

es:Terrorismo de Estado eo:Ŝtata terorismo eu:Estatu terrorismo fr:Terrorisme d'État gl:Terrorismo de Estado id:Terorisme negara it:Terrorismo di stato no:Statsterrorisme ru:Государственный терроризм sv:Statsterrorism zh:國家恐怖主義