The century of genocide

From the early 1900s to the end of the 20th century, mass murder was all too common

The 21st century deserves to be remembered as the century when genocides stopped. Tom Stoddart / Getty Images

Of all the achievements of the 20th century, the modernisation of killing might be its most lasting and problematic legacy. The industrial revolution allowed for the development of sophisticated weaponry and associated infrastructure. This resulted in the proliferation across the globe of episodic mass killings based on creed or race.

In some cases, a coldly efficient bureaucracy using advanced technology enabled rapid killing. The philosopher Hannah Arendt described the Holocaust’s industrial-scale extermination, which was executed by bureaucrats simply following orders, as the “banality of evil”.

Yesterday, Pope Francis waded into the discussion with his comments on the 100th anniversary of the massacres that killed more than one million Armenians. He referred to the events as the first genocide of the 20th century, a label that Turkey firmly rejects despite substantial evidence to the contrary. The issue is so fraught that Turkey does not maintain diplomatic relations with Armenia.

But whatever the semantics of the tragic events that came to pass in 1915 as the Ottoman Empire was disintegrating, the sad reality is that the 20th century has had a long list of genocides. Not a single decade was free from some sort of horrific mass killing. Between 1904 and 1907, there was the racially motivated campaign of extermination of the Herero and Nama people in German South-West Africa, which is contemporary Namibia. It is often considered to be the first genocide of the 20th century. From that, to the ethnic massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s, which left millions dead, the last century is stained by bloodshed on an enormous scale.

The 2006 UN Security Council resolution, which compels the international community to intervene if a genocide is occurring, was both an acknowledgement of the brutal legacy of the 20th century and a way to make the 21st the one when genocides were consigned to history.