Atlantic Slave Trade

Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterized the mass death of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as a genocide due to the fact that it was "one of the worst holocausts in human history" because it resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths according to one estimate, and he contradicts arguments such as the one which states that "it was in slave owners' interest to keep slaves alive, not exterminate them" by stating that they are "mostly sophistry" by stating: "the killing and destruction were intentional, whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labor exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?"^[67]

Congo

From 1885 to 1908, the Congo Free State in central Africa was privately controlled by Leopold II of Belgium, who extracted a fortune from the land by the use of forced labour of natives. Under his regime, there were 2 to 15 million deaths among the Congolese people.^{[68][69][70][71]} Deliberate killings, abusive punishments, and general exploitation were major causes of the deaths. As in the colonization of the Americas, European diseases, hitherto unknown in the region, also led to a considerable number of deaths. Because the main motive for the killings was financial gain, it has been debated whether the term genocide describes these atrocities well. However, Robert Weisbord wrote in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2003 that attempting to eliminate a portion of the population is enough to qualify as genocide under the UN convention.^[71] Reports of the atrocities led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced in 1908 by the Belgian government to relinquish control of the colony to the civil administration.^[72][73]

Ethiopia under Menelik II (1889–1913)

During its military conquests, its centralization of its power and its incorporation of territories into Ethiopia as decreed by Menelik II, his army committed genocidal^[74][75] atrocities against civilians and combatants which included torture, mass killings and the imposition of large scale slavery.^[76][75] Large scale atrocities were also committed against the Dizi people and the people of the Kaficho kingdom.^[77][78] Some estimates of the number of people who were killed in the atrocities that were committed during the war and the famine which coincided with it go into the millions.^{[76][79][80][81]} According to Alexander Bulatovich, Menelik's Russian military aide, Menelik's armies "dreadfully annihilated more than half" of the Oromo (Galla) population down to 5 million people, which "took away from the Galla all possibility of thinking about any sort of uprising."^[82] Eshete Gemeda put the death toll even higher at 6 million.^[80]

These deaths may have also been caused by the great famine, which lasted from 1888 to 1892 and was the worst famine in the region's history; a third of Ethiopia's total population of 12 million was killed according to some estimates.^[83] The famine was caused by rinderpest, an infectious viral cattle disease which wiped out most of the national livestock, killing over 90% of the cattle. The population of native cattle had no prior exposure to the disease and as a result, it was unable to fight it off.^[84] Despite the violence of the conquest, some historians stress the fact that before the centralization process was completed, Ethiopia was devastated by numerous wars which started in the 16th century. In the intervening period, military tactics had not changed much. In the 16th century, the Portuguese Bermudes documented depopulation and widespread atrocities against civilians and combatants (atrocities which included torture, mass killings and the imposition of large scale slavery) during several successive Aba Gedas' Gadaa conquests of territories which were located north of the Genale river (Bali, Amhara, Gafat, Damot, Adal).^[85][86] Warfare in the region essentially involved acquiring cattle and slaves, winning additional territories, gaining control of trade routes and carrying out ritual requirements or securing trophies to prove masculinity.^{[87][88][89][90][91]} Wars were fought between people who might be members of the same linguistic group, religion and culture, or between unrelated tribes. Centralization greatly reduced these continuous wars; minimizing the loss of lives, raids, destruction and slavery that had previously been the norm.^{[91][92][93][94][95]}

French conquest of Algeria

Pacification of Algeria

Ben Kiernan wrote in his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur on the French conquest of Algeria, that within three decades of the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, war, famine and disease had reduced the original population from 3 million by a figure ranging from 500,000 to 1,000,000.^[96]

By 1875, the French conquest was complete. The war had killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830. A long shadow of genocidal hatred persisted, provoking the French author to protest in 1882 that in Algeria, "we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him." As a French statistical journal urged five years later, "the system of extermination must give way to a policy of penetration."^[97]

In response to France's recognition of Armenian genocide, Turkey accused France of committing genocide against 15% of Algeria's population.^[98][99]

German South West Africa

The Herero and Namaqua peoples of present-day Namibia endured a genocidal persecution between 1904 and 1907 while their homeland was under colonial rule as German South West Africa.^[100] Large percentages of their populations perished in a brutal scorched earth campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha. An estimated 10,000 Namaqua were killed,^[101] with estimates for the Herero ranging from 60,000 and 100,000.^[102]

A copy of Trotha's Extermination Order survives in the Botswana National Archives. The order states "every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women or children, I will drive them back to their people [to die in the desert] or let them be shot at."^[103] Olusoga and Erichsen write: "It is an almost unique document: an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide."^[104]

Zulu Kingdom under Shaka Zulu

Between 1810 and 1828, the Zulu kingdom under Shaka Zulu laid waste to large parts of present-day South Africa and Zimbabwe. Frequently, Zulu armies not only aimed to defeat their enemies, they aimed to totally destroy them. Those who were exterminated included prisoners of war, women, children and even dogs.^[105] Estimates of the death toll range from 1 million to 2 million.^{[106][107][108][109]}

Argentina

The Conquest of the Desert was a military campaign mainly directed by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s, which established Argentine dominance over Patagonia, then inhabited by indigenous peoples, killing more than 1,300.^[130]

Contemporary sources indicate that it was a deliberate genocide by the Argentine government.^[131] Others perceived the campaign as intending to suppress only groups of aboriginals that refused to submit to the government and carried out attacks on European settlements.^[132][133]

Canada

Haiti

Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of an independent Haiti, ordered the killing of the white population of French creoles on Haiti, which culminated in the 1804 Haiti massacre. According to Philippe Girard, "when the genocide was over, Haiti's white population was virtually non-existent."^[141]

Mexico

Yucatán

Graph of population decline in central Mexico caused by successive epidemics

The Caste War of Yucatán (approx. 1847–1901) against the population of European descent, known locally as Yucatecos, who held political and economic control of the region. Adam Jones wrote: "Genocidal atrocities on both sides cost up to 200,000 killed."^[142]

Peru

"The indigenous rebellions of Túpac Amaru II and Túpac Katari against the Spanish between 1780 and 1782, cost over 100,000 mestizos, native peruvians and Spanish settlers' lives in Peru and Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia)."^[148]

United States

According to Native American Studies professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, US history, as well as inherited Indigenous trauma, cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. Ortiz states that from the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.^[149]

The leader of this battle, British High Commander Jeffery Amherst authorized the intentional use of disease as a biological weapon, notably during the 1763 Siege of Fort Pitt against indigenous populations, saying, "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blanketts, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race", and instructing his subordinates, "I need only Add, I Wish to Hear of no prisoners should any of the villains be met with arms."^[150][151] British militia's William Trent and Simeon Ecuyer gave smallpox-exposed blankets to Native American emissaries as gifts during the Siege of Fort Pitt, "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians", in one of the most famously documented cases of germ warfare. While it is uncertain how successful such attempts were against the target population,^[152] historians have noted that, "history records numerous instances of the French, the Spanish, the British, and later on the American, using smallpox as an ignoble means to an end. For smallpox was more feared by the Indian than the bullet: he could be exterminated and subjugated more easily and quickly by the death-bringing virus than by the weapons of the white man."^[153]

President Abraham Lincoln approved the mass execution of 38 Dakota Native Americans convicted in Minnesota following the Dakota War of 1862

During the American Indian Wars, the United States Army carried out a number of massacres and forced relocations of Indigenous peoples, acts that some scholars say constitute genocide. The Sand Creek massacre, which caused outrage in its own time, has been called genocide. General John Chivington led a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia in a massacre of 70–163 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho, about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants. Chivington and his men took scalps and other body parts as trophies, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia.^[154] In defense of his actions Chivington stated,

Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! ... I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God's heaven to kill Indians. ... Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.

— Col. John Milton Chivington, U.S. Army^[155]

A study by Gregory Michno concluded that of 21,586 tabulated casualties (killed, wounded or captured) in a selected 672 battles and skirmishes, military personnel and settlers accounted for 6,596 (31%), while indigenous casualties totaled about 14,990 (69%) for the period 1850–90. Michno's study almost exclusively uses Army estimates. His follow-up book "Forgotten Battles and Skirmishes" covers over 300 additional fights not included in these statistics.^[156]

According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894), between 1789 and 1891, "The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the given... Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate..."^[157] In the same 1894 report, the Census Bureau dismissed assertions that millions of Native Americans once inhabited what is now the United States, insisting instead that North America in 1492 was an almost empty continent, and "guesstimating" that aboriginal populations "could not have exceeded much over 500,000", whereas modern scholarship now estimates from 2.1 million to more than 10 million.^[158][159]

Chalk and Jonassohn argued that the deportation of the Cherokee tribe along the Trail of Tears would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today.^[160] The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the exodus. About 17,000 Cherokees—along with approximately 2,000 Cherokee-owned black slaves—were removed from their homes.^[161] The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with one party, estimated 4,000 deaths.^[162] Historians David Stannard^[163] and Barbara Mann^[164] have noted that the army deliberately routed the march of the Cherokee to pass through areas of known cholera epidemic, such as Vicksburg. Stannard estimates that during the forced removal from their homelands, following the Indian Removal Act signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, 8,000 Cherokee died, about half the total population.^[163]

A smallpox epidemic struck the Great Plains in 1836–1840, resulting in the deaths of many, including 90% of the Mandan who previously numbered 1,600. While specific responsibility for the epidemic remains in question, scholars have asserted that the Great Plains epidemic was "started among the tribes of the upper Missouri River by failure to quarantine steam boats on the river",^[153] and Captain Pratt of the St. Peter "was guilty of contributing to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The law calls his offense criminal negligence. Yet in light of all the deaths, the almost complete annihilation of the Mandans, and the terrible suffering the region endured, the label criminal negligence is benign, hardly befitting an action that had such horrendous consequences."^[165] Archaeologist and anthropologist Ann F. Ramenofsky writes, "Variola Major can be transmitted through contaminated articles such as clothing or blankets. In the nineteenth century, the U. S. Army sent contaminated blankets to Native Americans, especially Plains groups, to control the Indian problem."^[166] According to Alexander Hinton, "the genocide of many Native American tribes" including the Mandans, was caused by "governmental assimilationist policies that coexisted with officially or unofficially sanctioned campaigns of war to eradicate, diminish, or forcibly evict the 'savages'".^[167] When smallpox swept the northern plains of the US in 1837, Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered that the Mandan (along with the Arikara, the Cree, and the Blackfeet) not be given smallpox vaccinations, which had been provided to other tribes in other areas. Some have posited that some tribes weren't given vaccines because they were hostile or because their land wasn't important for trading.^{[168][169][170]}

The U.S. colonization of California started in earnest in 1849, and it resulted in a large number of state-subsidized massacres of Native Americans by colonists in the territory, causing several ethnic groups to be entirely wiped out. In one such series of conflicts, the so-called Mendocino War and the subsequent Round Valley War, the entirety of the Yuki people were brought to the brink of extinction, from a previous population of some 3,500 people to fewer than 100. According to Russell Thornton, estimates of the pre-Columbian Indigenous population of California were at least 310,000, and perhaps as high as 705,000, but by 1849, due to Spanish and Mexican colonization and epidemics this number had decreased to 100,000, and from 1849 to 1890, the indigenous population of California had fallen below 20,000, primarily because of the killings.^[171] In An American Genocide, The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846–1873, Historian Benjamin Madley recorded the number of killings of California Indians that occurred between 1846 and 1873. He found evidence that during this period, at least 9,400 to 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Indians. Most of these killings occurred in more than 370 massacres (defined as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise").^[172] 10,000 Indians were also kidnapped and sold as slaves.^[173] In a speech before representatives of Native American peoples in June, 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom apologized for the genocide. Newsom said, "That's what it was, a genocide. No other way to describe it. And that's the way it needs to be described in the history books."^[174]

Indeed, noted children's book author of "The Wizard of Oz", L. Frank Baum, contemporaneously and freely admitted to the definition of genocide—annihilation of a people—as being deliberately intended, in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre and slaughter of the Lakota and their leader Sitting Bull:

"The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are."^[175]

Afghanistan

Abdur Rahman's subjugation of the Hazara ethnic group in the late nineteenth century due to its fierce rebellion against the Afghan king gave birth to an intense feeling of hatred between the Pashtun and the Hazara that would last for years to come. Massive forced displacements, especially in Oruzgan and Daychopan, continued as lands were confiscated and populations were expelled or fled. Some 35,000 families fled to northern Afghanistan, Mashhad (Iran) and Quetta (Pakistan). It is estimated that more than 60%^[176] of the Hazara were either massacred or displaced during Abdur Rahman's campaign against them. Hazara farmers were often forced to give up their property to Pashtuns^[176] and as a result many Hazara families had to move seasonally to the major cities in Afghanistan, Iran, or Pakistan to find jobs and sources of income. Quetta in Pakistan is home to the third largest settlements of Hazara outside Afghanistan.

British rule of India

Mike Davis argues in his book Late Victorian Holocausts that quote; "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered...by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham, and Mill."^[177]

Famine stricken people during the famine of 1876–78 in Bengal

Davis characterizes the Indian famines under the British Raj, such as the Great Bengal famine of 1770 or the Great Famine of 1876-78 which took over 15 million lives as "colonial genocide". Some scholars, including Niall Ferguson, have disputed this judgement, while others, including Adam Jones, have affirmed it.^[178][179] An estimated 165 million people may have died as a result of British colonial policies from 1880 to 1920. The number surpasses the deaths from both World War I and World War II, including The holocaust.^[180][181]

Dutch East Indies

The 1740 Batavia massacre (Dutch: Chinezenmoord; French: Meurtre des Chinois, literally the "Murder of the Chinese"; Indonesian: Geger Pacinan, or the "Chinatown Tumult") was a pogrom in which Dutch East Indies soldiers and native collaborators killed ethnic Chinese residents of the port city of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies. The violence which occurred in the city lasted from 9 October until 22 October 1740, with minor skirmishes continuing to occur outside the city walls into late November. Historians have estimated that at least 10,000 ethnic Chinese were massacred; just 600 to 3,000 are believed to have survived.

Dzungar genocide

The Dzungar (or known as Zunghar), Oirat Mongols who lived in an area that stretched from the west end of the Great Wall of China to present-day eastern Kazakhstan and from present-day northern Kyrgyzstan to southern Siberia (most of which is located in present-day Xinjiang), were the last nomadic empire to threaten China, which they did from the early 17th century through the middle of the 18th century.^[182] After a series of inconclusive military conflicts that started in the 1680s, the Dzungars were subjugated by the Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in the late 1750s. According to Qing scholar Wei Yuan, 40 percent of the 600,000 Zunghar people were killed by smallpox, 20 percent fled to Russia or sought refuge among the Kazakh tribes and 30 percent were killed by the Qing army of Manchu Bannermen and Khalkha Mongols.^[183][184]

Historian Michael Edmund Clarke has argued that the Qing campaign in 1757–58 "amounted to the complete destruction of not only the Zunghar state but of the Zunghars as a people".^[185] Historian Peter Perdue has attributed the decimation of the Dzungars to a "deliberate use of massacre" and has described it as an "ethnic genocide".^[186] Mark Levene, a historian of genocide,^[187] has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was "arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence".^[188]

Taiping Rebellion

The Taiping Rebellion was a massive rebellion which was launched by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka (a Han subgroup) and the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus, who sought to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and replace it with a Chinese Christian theocratic absolute monarchy which he named the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. One of the bloodiest wars in history and the bloodiest civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion was marked by genocidal atrocities which were perpetrated by both of the sides which fought in the conflict.

In every area which they captured, the Taiping immediately exterminated the entire Manchu population. In the province of Hunan one Qing loyalist who observed the genocidal massacres which the Taiping forces committed against the Manchus wrote that the "pitiful Manchus", the Manchu men, women and children were executed by the Taiping forces. The Taiping rebels were seen chanting while slaughtering the Manchus in Hefei.^[189] After capturing Nanjing, Taiping forces killed about 40,000 Manchu civilians.^[190] On 27 October 1853, they crossed the Yellow River in T'sang-chou and murdered 10,000 Manchus.^[191]

Since the rebellion began in Guangxi, Qing forces allowed no rebels who spoke its dialect to surrender.^[192] Reportedly in the province of Guangdong, it is written that 1,000,000 were executed because after the collapse of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing dynasty launched waves of massacres against the Hakkas, that at their height killed up to 30,000 each day.^[193][194] These policies of mass murder of civilians occurred elsewhere in China, including Anhui,^[195][196] and Nanjing.^[197] This resulted in a massive civilian flight and death toll with some 600 towns destroyed^[198] and other bloody policies resulting.

Japanese colonization of Hokkaido

The Ainu are an indigenous people in Japan (Hokkaidō).^[199] In a 2009 news story, Japan Today reported, "Many Ainu were forced to work, essentially as slaves, for Wajin (ethnic Japanese), resulting in the breakup of families and the introduction of smallpox, measles, cholera and tuberculosis into their communities. In 1869, after the Battle of Hakodate during the Boshin War, the new Meiji government renamed the Republic of Ezo Hokkaido, whose boundaries were formed by former members of the Tokugawa shogunate, and together with lands where the Ainu lived, they were unilaterally incorporated into Japan. It banned the Ainu language, took Ainu lands away, and prohibited the Ainu from engaging in salmon fishing and deer hunting."^[200] Roy Thomas wrote: "Ill treatment of native peoples is common to all colonial powers, and, at its worst, leads to genocide. Japan's native people, the Ainu, have, however, been the object of a particularly cruel hoax, because the Japanese have refused to accept them officially as a separate minority people."^[201] In 2004, the small Ainu community which lives in Russia wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to recognize Japanese mistreatment of the Ainu people as a genocide, something which Putin declined to do.^[202]

Armenians, Assyrians, Bulgarians, Greeks

The Hamidian massacres were massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during the mid-1890s, with estimates of the dead ranging from 80,000 to 300,000.

The Massacres of Badr Khan were conducted by Kurdish and Ottoman forces against the Assyrian Christian population of the Ottoman Empire between 1843 and 1847, resulting in the slaughter of more than 10,000 indigenous Assyrian civilians of the Hakkari region, with many thousands more being sold into slavery.^[203][204]

During the suppression of the April uprising in Bulgaria in May–June 1876, 30,000 Bulgarians died and 5,000 Bulgarians were killed in Batak – according to modern researchers, the Batak massacre was the starting point of genocide in the modern era.^[205]

Between 1894 and 1896, a series of ethnically-religiously motivated Anti-Christian pogroms which are known as the Hamidian massacres were conducted against the ancient Armenian and Assyrian Christian populations by the forces of the Ottoman Empire.^[206] The massacres mainly took place in what is modern-day south eastern Turkey, north eastern Syria and northern Iraq. The death toll is estimated to have been as high as 325,000 people,^[207][208] with a further 546,000 Armenians and Assyrians made destitute by the forcible deportation of survivors from cities, and the destruction or the theft of almost 2500 of their farmsteads, towns and villages. Hundreds of churches and monasteries were either destroyed or forcibly converted into mosques.^[209]

The Adana massacre occurred in the Adana Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire in April 1909. A massacre of Armenian and Assyrian Christians in the city of Adana and its surroundings amidst the Ottoman countercoup of 1909 triggered a series of anti-Christian pogroms throughout the province.^[210] Reports estimated that the Adana Province massacres resulted in the death of as many as 30,000 Armenians and the death of as many as 1,500 Assyrians.^{[211][212][213]}

From 1913 to 1923, the Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian genocides took place in the Ottoman Empire. Some historians consider these genocides to be a single event and they refer to them as the late Ottoman genocides.^{[214][215][216]}

Philippines

Persecution of Yazidis

In the year 1832, about 70,000 Yazidis were killed by the Sunni Kurdish princes Bedir Khan Beg and Muhammad Pasha of Rawanduz.^[222] During his research trips in 1843, the Russian traveller and orientalist Ilya Berezin mentioned that 7,000 Yazidis were killed by Kurds of Rawandiz on the hills of Nineveh near Mosul, shortly before his arrival.^[223] According to many historical reports, the Bedir Khan massacres can be classified as a genocide.^[224]

Congress Poland

Siberia

Circassians

The Russian Tsarist Empire waged war against Circassia in the Northwest Caucasus for more than one hundred years, trying to secure its hold on Circassia's Black Sea coast. After a century of insurgency and war and failure to end the conflict, the Russian military executed the systematic mass murder,^{[225][226][227][228]} ethnic cleansing,^{[229][226][227][228]} forced migration,^{[230][226][227][228]} and expulsion^{[231][226][227][228]} of 800,000–1,500,000 Circassians.^{[232][233][226][227][228]} The Georgian government has officially recognized the events as a genocide,^[234] as have Circassian advocacy organizations,^[235] a stance also held by a plethora of scholars of genocide and other historians,^{[236][237][238][239][240]} with Oliver Bullough crediting the Russian Empire with "the first modern genocide on European soil",^[241] and Anssi Kullberg arguing that the Russian state thus invented "the strategy of modern ethnic cleansing and genocide".^[242] Antero Leitzinger flagged the affair the 19th century's largest genocide.^[243]

Calculations including those which take the Russian government's own archival figures into account have estimated a loss of 80%–97%^{[244][245][246][247]} of the Circassian nation in the process.

In May 1994, the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted that resistance to the tsarist forces was legitimate, but he did not recognize "the guilt of the tsarist government for the genocide".^[248] On 5 July 2005, the Circassian Congress, an organisation that unites representatives of the various Circassian peoples in the Russian Federation, called on Moscow to acknowledge and apologize for the genocide.^[249] There is concern by the Russian government that acknowledging the events as genocide would entail possible claims of financial compensation in addition to efforts toward repatriating diaspora Circassians back to Circassia.^[250] A presidential commission in Russia has been set up "to counter the attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia".^[251]

Anti-Romani sentiment (Attempted extirpations of Romani/Gypsies)

There have been several attempts to extirpate the Romani (Gypsies) throughout the history of Europe:

In 1545, the Diet of Augsburg declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy (Romani), will be guilty of no murder".^[252] The subsequent massive killing spree which took place across the empire later prompted the government to step in to "forbid the drowning of Romani women and children".^[253]

In England, the Egyptians Act 1530 banned Romani from entering the country and it also required those Romani who were already living in the country to leave it within 16 days. Failure to do so could result in the confiscation of their property, their imprisonment and deportation. The act was amended with the Egyptians Act 1554, which directed that they abandon their "naughty, idle and ungodly life and company" and adopt a settled lifestyle. For those Romani who failed to adhere to a sedentary existence, the Privy council interpreted the act in a way that permitted the execution of non-complying Romani "as a warning to others".^[254]

In 1710, Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor, issued an edict against the Romani, ordering "that all adult males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever."^[255] Additionally, in the kingdom of Bohemia, the right ears of Romani men were to be cut off; in the March of Moravia, their left ears were to be cut off. In other parts of Austria, they would be branded on the back with a branding iron, representing the gallows. These mutilations enabled the authorities to identify the individuals as Romani on their second arrest.^[255] The edict encouraged local officials to hunt down Romani in their areas by levying a fine of 100 Reichsthaler on those who failed to do so.^[255] Anyone who helped Romani was to be punished by doing forced labor for half a year.^[255] The result was mass killings of Romani across the Holy Roman empire.^[255] In 1721, Charles VI amended the decree to include the execution of adult female Romani, while children were "to be put in hospitals for education".^[255]

In 1774, Maria Theresa of Austria issued an edict which forbade marriages between Romani. When a Romani woman married a non-Romani man, she had to produce proof of "industrious household service and familiarity with Catholic tenets", a male Rom "had to prove his ability to support a wife and children", and "Gypsy children over the age of five were to be taken away and brought up in non-Romani families."^[256]

France

Persecution of Huguenots

Main article: St. Bartholomew's Day massacre

One morning at the gates of the Louvre, 19th-century painting by Édouard Debat-Ponsan.

The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (French: Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy) in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence, directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) during the French Wars of Religion. Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Queen Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX,^[257] the massacre started a few days after the marriage of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant Henry of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France) on 18 August. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.

The massacre began in the night of 23–24 August 1572, the eve of the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle, two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the military and political leader of the Huguenots. King Charles IX ordered the killing of a group of Huguenot leaders, including Coligny, and the slaughter spread throughout Paris. Lasting several weeks in all, the massacre expanded outward to the countryside and other urban centres. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 5,000 to 30,000.

The massacre marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of many of its prominent aristocratic leaders, and many rank-and-file members subsequently converted. Those who remained became increasingly radicalized. Though by no means unique, the blood-letting "was the worst of the century's religious massacres".^[258] Throughout Europe, it "printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion".^[259]

Vendee

Main article: War in the Vendée

"There were poor girls, completely naked, hanging from tree branches, hands tied behind their backs, after having been raped. It was fortunate that, with the Blues [Republicans] gone, some charitable passersby delivered them from this shameful torment. Elsewhere, in a refinement of barbarism, perhaps without precedent, pregnant women were stretched out and crushed beneath wine presses....Bloody limbs and nursing infants were carried in triumph on the points of bayonets." – Account of the war by a Vendean abbé^[260]

In 1986, Reynald Secher argued that the actions of the French republican government during the revolt in the Vendée (1793–1796), a popular mostly Catholic uprising against the anti-clerical Republican government during the French Revolution, was the first modern genocide.^[261] Secher's claims caused a minor uproar in France and mainstream authorities rejected Secher's claims.^[262][263]

Timothy Tackett countered that "the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides—initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves. The Vendeans were no more blameless than were the republicans. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate."^[264] However, historians Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn consider the Vendée a case of genocide.^[265] Historian Pierre Chaunu called the Vendée the first ideological genocide.^[266] Adam Jones estimates that 150,000 Vendeans died in what he also considers a genocide.^[267]

Mass shootings at Nantes, 1793

Ireland

Ireland's Holocaust a nationalist mural on the Ballymurphy Road, Belfast. "An Gorta Mór, Britain's genocide by starvation, Ireland's holocaust 1845–1849, over 1,500,000 deaths".

British Empire

Great Irish Famine

Main article: Great Famine (Ireland)

Great Irish Famine

A small number of historians believe that the Great Famine of Ireland (1845–1852) was a genocide. During the famine, approximately 1 million people died and a million more people emigrated from Ireland,^[280] causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25% and leading to the formation of the Irish diaspora.^[281] The proximate cause of the famine was a potato disease which is commonly known as potato blight.^[282] Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland – where one-third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food – was exacerbated by a host of political, social, and economic factors that remain the subject of historical debate.^[283][284]

According to Liam Kennedy, "virtually all historians of Ireland" reject the genocide allegations.^[285] Historian Donald Akenson, who has written twenty-four books about Ireland, has said the following about the use of the word 'Holocaust' in relation to Ireland: "When you see it, you know that you are encountering famine-porn. It is inevitably part of a presentation that is historically unbalanced and, like other kinds of pornography, is distinguished by a covert (and sometimes overt) appeal to misanthropy and almost always an incitement to hatred."^[286]

Oceania

Australia

Further information: Australian genocide debate, Genocide of indigenous peoples § Colonization of Australia and Tasmania, History of Indigenous Australians, and Tasmania § Removal of Aborigines

Australian frontier wars

According to one report published in 2009, in 1789 the British deliberately spread smallpox from the First Fleet to counter overwhelming native tribes near Sydney in New South Wales. In his book An Indelible Stain, Henry Reynolds described this act as genocide.^[287] However the majority of scholars disagree that the initial smallpox was the result of deliberate biological warfare and have suggested other causes.^{[288][289][290]}

The Black War was a period of conflict between British colonists and aboriginal Tasmanians in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the early 19th century. The conflict, in combination with introduced diseases and other factors, had such devastating impacts on the aboriginal Tasmanian population that it was reported that they had been exterminated.^[291][292] Historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that by 1830, "Disease had killed most of them but warfare and private violence had also been devastating."^[293] Smallpox was the principal cause of aboriginal deaths in the 19th century.^[294]

Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars present the extinction of the Tasmanian aborigines as a textbook example of a genocide, while the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect.^[295][296] Detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction have raised questions about some of the details and interpretations in earlier histories.^[295][297] Curthoys concluded, "It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania."^[298]

On the Australian continent during the colonial period (1788–1901), the population of 500,000–750,000 Australian aborigines was reduced to fewer than 50,000.^[299][300] Most were devastated by the introduction of alien diseases after contact with Europeans, while perhaps 20,000 were killed by massacres and fighting with colonists.^[299]

Balkan Wars

The Ottoman Muslim genocide during the Balkan Wars refers to the expulsion and systematic extermination of Ottoman Muslim civilians during the Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913 committed by members of the Balkan League.^{[307][308][309]} In 1912, the Kingdom of Serbia, Kingdom of Greece, Tsardom of Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Montenegro declared war on the Ottomans. The Ottomans quickly lost territory. According to Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, "the invading armies and Christian insurgents committed a wide range of atrocities upon the Muslim population."^[310] In Kosovo, Albania, and parts of Macedonia, most of the victims were Albanians while in other areas the victims were mostly Turks and Pomaks. A large number of Pomaks in the Rhodopes were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy but later allowed to reconvert, which most of them did.^[311] Jews were also targeted in the ensuing violence.^[312]

During this war hundreds of thousands of the Turks and Pomaks fled their villages and became refugees.^[313] The total number of refugees is estimated to be between 400,000 to 813,000.^[314][315] The death toll is estimated to be anywhere between 732,000 and 1,500,000 Ottoman civilians were killed.