Before

First of all, we’d like to try to explain something very, very important: Genocide is not inevitable. It doesn’t have to happen. Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s, Tutsis who were born in Rwanda, Muslims who lived in Srebrenica in 1995 – none of these people were put on the earth to be victims of a monstrous crime. They had wonderful, worthwhile lives, they played football, they went to school, they painted pictures, they went to work, they wrote poems, sang and danced. They had hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares just we do today. So, let’s travel back in time to learn more about the place that they grew up in and see them as the people they were rather than as the objects that their killers would want us to see them. Jewish people had lived in Europe for hundreds of years before the 1930s. They had deep roots in each of the communities in which they lived alongside their neighbours who might have been Christians or Muslims or Sikhs or people of other faiths and none. Jewish people contributed so much to all aspects of life wherever they were. The memories of survivors tell us about the meaningful lives that Jewish men, women and children led before the Holocaust occurred. Archives that store documents and photographs from before the Second World War show us scenes of happiness and love from places as far afield as North Africa, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France and Holland. The same kind of images and warm feelings emerge from photographs and writings of people who lived in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and elsewhere before genocide occurred. Similarly, the Tutsi people had been a part of Rwandan life for centuries before the 1990s. They were an integral part of life there and shared villages, schools and workplaces with their Hutu (and Twa) neighbours. All Rwandans, whether Tutsi, Hutu or Twa shared a common language, common traditions and they married each other. Likewise, Bosnians, who happened to be Muslims, had lived in the country for hundreds of years. They shared a vibrant society with their Serb and Croat neighbours even if they did not share places of worship. In Sudan, the land of Darfur has an ancient history. The rich and complex history of interaction the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, Rizeigat and so many other groups is one of give-and-take, a sophisticated sharing of land and resources for mutual benefit. The Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and Rizeigat groups all speak the same language (Arabic) and are all of the same faith. Survivors who we have met all tell us the same thing. Bea Green, who was born in Germany and lived there in the 1930s, loved going to the park and the countryside with her family when she was little. Eric Murangwa, who lived in Rwanda in the 1970s, 80s and 1990s, loved playing football with his friends when he was young. Debay Manees, had a ‘beautiful life’ full of family and friends in Darfur (a part of Sudan) in the 1990s.

All the survivors who we have been fortunate enough to meet came from families who contributed to their communities and loved their homes. So, what we are saying is that there was no reason why genocide should have happened in Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. It was not inevitable. Something happened to make it happen. So, it is clear that whilst there were tensions between groups in some cases there was nothing to suggest that genocide was just around the corner. What happened next in Europe, in Rwanda and in Bosnia and in Darfur that meant that one group of people would be singled out and an attempt would be made to destroy? Simply put, people came to power who made it clear that the lives of some people who lived in a country were worth nothing. It would happen differently in Nazi Germany, in Bosnia and in Rwanda…but there were lots of similarities too.

Creating ‘the other’

Genocide does not begin with killing. It starts a long time before that. It begins with words. A group of people are singled out, abused, discriminated against, stripped of their rights and dehumanised begins years before the attempt to exterminate them happens. It takes a long time for a great majority of a population to be convinced that the lives of the minority are not worth anything. In this section of our book we’d like to try to explain how that happens… Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur have complicated histories that are all unique and different. One thing unites them though: it was not inevitable that there would be a genocide in those places. To find out why such atrocities took place we need to examine the years right before the killing started. Those who plan and lead genocide know that they need to convince ordinary people that their neighbours, workmates and school friends are not worth caring about. That, far from being good people they are not really people at all…and so can be done away with without much thought. For the genocidal plan to succeed as many people as possible need to be told that the neighbours who have been good people for such a long time aren’t anything of the sort. ‘They are enemies who wish ill on everyone else. In fact, they aren’t really part of ‘us’…and aren’t really people at all’. ‘They don’t deserve to live with us in our communities and we need to get rid of them’. Those are the slogans that the perpetrators – those who commit the crime of genocide – use to get people on their side. That is their ploy – they use the language of hate to persuade people that the lives of the ‘others’ are worthless. If people become convinced that a life is worthless then it is easier to persuade them to ‘get rid’ of the ‘other’. That might initially mean ‘getting rid’ of the ‘other’ out of a school or a gymnastics club. Then it will mean ‘getting rid’ of the ‘other’ from a court room or a doctor’s surgery. After that it could mean ‘getting rid’ of any books the ‘other’ rights, denying the ‘other’ of the rights they have, the houses they own and so on. Finally, it will always mean ‘getting rid’ of the ‘other’ by killing them. Genocide doesn’t just happen, it is planned. It takes planning and co-ordination on the part of the perpetrators. Campaigns of hate speech, dehumanisation and the isolation of the ‘other’ may take years and years to develop. At some point, however, a group of extremists will decide that the time has come to unleash a campaign of killing or destruction on the group that they wish to do away with. The circumstances of the plans and actions that develop and the characters involved are, of course, different but, nonetheless, there are similarities too. So, as we can see, all genocides are planned. They might be planned to happen in different ways but they are planned nonetheless. They do not happen by chance or because of ‘old rivalries’. They happen because extreme leaders take decisions that they think will solve a problem that they have. That solution is intended to destroy an entire group of people. The same hateful process can be seen in Nazi Germany and in the spiteful regimes of President Habyarimana in Rwanda, Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia and President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

Creating ‘the other’ in Germany

The history of racism against Jewish people doesn’t start with Adolf Hitler in 1933. Antisemitism (the word used to describe anti-Jewish racism) had been around Germany, and indeed the whole of Europe, for hundreds of years. England was not immune from such hatred. Jewish people were massacred in York in England in 1190 and a law in 1253 said that Jews had to wear badges to show who

they were. This was only a few years before Jews were banished from England by King Edward I in 1290. Such antisemitism persisted all throughout Europe for hundreds of years – in the late 19th century there were terrible attacks on Jews in Russia – called pogroms.

However, that is not to say that the Holocaust was inevitable – it absolutely wasn’t. Whilst antisemites like Wilhelm Marr still screamed their racist hatred in the 1870s, Jewish Germans were more a part of the country than ever before. It would take the actions of Hitler and his henchmen to stir up in hatred and division as the 1930s progressed. From the day that the Nazis came to power in Germany they launched a campaign of hate against German Jews. Their aim was to convince everyone in Germany that the Jews were not like them and did not deserve to be in the country. For that to happen the Nazis had to spread their untrue, racist rants as far and widely as possible. There is a picture in the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that shows seven men standing around a big board in the German town of Worms in August 1935.10 The group in the photograph is reading the pages of a newspaper that are pasted on the board. The newspaper is called Der Sturmer (‘The Attacker’). Written in big letters across the top of the board is a headline: ‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune’. It was a typically racist headline that Der Sturmer’s publisher, Julius Streicher, used throughout the 1930s right across Germany. Every single day between November 1937 and January 1938 five thousand people visited an exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in the city of Munich in the south of Germany. The title of the exhibition was ‘The Eternal Jew’. It tried to convince visitors that Jewish people were involved in a conspiracy against Germany – it was all lies, of course, but the stereotypical, racist images of Jews attracted large audiences. These are just two examples of the kind of hatred that filled Germany against the Jews in the 1930s. We could have mentioned the films that were made, the books written, the lessons in schools, the posters pasted on billboards…Thousands of examples of the racist propaganda that the Nazis used to make people hate the Jews. The Nazis used propaganda to try to make non-Jewish Germans see Jews as ‘the other’. However, Hitler and his henchmen also created laws in an effort to force Jewish people to become isolated from their communities. From 1933-39 the Nazis passed more than four hundred decrees and regulations aimed at making the lives of Jewish people harder and harder. The laws and rules that were imposed slowly got more and more severe as the 1930s went on. Jewish people who worked for the government were sacked in 1933 and Jewish lawyers, actors, doctors and professors were forced from their professions soon after. The 1935 Nuremburg Race Laws essentially stated that Jews were no longer Germans and later, Jews would not be allowed to visit cinemas, watch sports matches or go to the swimming pool or park. Throughout the 1930s the Nazis brought in laws and decrees that were ever more racist and designed to make it impossible for Jewish people to live in Germany. Nevertheless, for people who had lived in Germany for their whole lives…and who had done nothing at all wrong the desire to stay in their homes and towns was very strong. After Jewish people defeated every wave of anti-Jewish racism and refused to be driven out the Nazis launched ever more brutal ways to ‘solve the Jewish question’.11

Soon, the Nazis unleashed a night of terror. On 9 November 1938 hundreds of Nazi officials, the Stormtrooper thugs and even young people in the Hitler Youth terrorised Jewish families in their neighbourhoods. Homes were ransacked, shops smashed up, synagogues burned and nearly one hundred Jewish Germans were murdered. After the November Pogrom Nazi persecution of Jewish people got even worse and the responsibility for this racism shifted even more towards the most extreme Nazis – the SS. The stage for the attempt to exterminate every single Jewish person in Germany (and beyond) was being set. This process quickened and became even more extreme when the Second World War broke out. Hitler had given a speech in January 1939 that indicated what he was planning. Speaking to the Reichstag (the German Parliament) the Nazi leader told the audience that if a world war were to break out then it would lead to the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”12

On a January morning in 1942 a group of fifteen men met at a large house by a lake in a part of Berlin called Wannsee. The men who met there weren’t stupid or ill-educated – in fact, nine of the fifteen had PhDs (the highest level of degree from a university). 18

On a January morning in 1942 a group of fifteen men met at a large house by a lake in a part of Berlin called Wannsee. The men who met there weren’t stupid or ill-educated – in fact, nine of the fifteen had PhDs (the highest level of degree from a university). The group represented the elements of the Nazi regime that would help put in place the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the leaders of the SS, had called the meeting and began by telling everyone that he had been given the job of making the arrangements for the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. All the men who attended the meeting knew that they were talking about how to organise the mass murder of millions of men, women and children.13

Creating the other in Rwanda

Similarly, in Rwanda the history of the Tutsi people was complicated and sometimes difficult…but, like in Germany, there was no reason that a genocide would occur in 1994.

The people of Rwanda were largely divided into three groups: Hutu (the majority), Tutsi and Twa (the Twa made up about 3% of the population). The labels of Hutu and Tutsi had more to do with status than anything else in the beginning. A person with status – normally associated with the ownership of cattle - would be a Tutsi whereas those who farmed the land were Hutu. However, if a Hutu was able to enrich themselves then they were granted the status of Tutsi and vice versa. There was mixing and movement between the two levels of status. Hutu and Tutsi also shared the same traditions, spoke the same language and married each other.

Nevertheless, when Europeans arrived in Rwanda they did not understand this complex and sophisticated system. They wanted to rule Rwanda in the easiest and most profitable ways possible. So, the Belgian imperialists made everyone in Rwanda carry an identity card. On the ID card was listed a person’s group: Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. From then on people in Rwanda were labelled as one of these groups…and their status could not change. The Belgians decided to use the Tutsi group to rule the country and set about discriminating against the Hutu majority. They even sent scientists to ‘prove’ that Tutsi were in fact naturally cleverer than Hutu and were descended from a more intelligent and ‘European-like’ people. It was all rubbish, of course, but it managed to divide Rwandan society and caused resentment. (Ironically, extremists in the 1990s would use this fake history to say that Tutsi were in fact foreigners who should disappear from Rwanda altogether).

So, when the Belgian imperialists left Rwanda a decade or so after the Second World War a Hutu government took charge. The European colonisers left behind a country that was divided – and can be blamed for much of the division that existed. Nevertheless, there was nothing to suggest that an attempt to exterminate the Tutsi people would happen. In Rwanda in the early 1990s the air was also filled with racist hate. Extremists who planned the genocide worked hard to fill the air with a language of hate against their Tutsi neighbours. In July 1993 a new radio station came on the air. It was called RTLM (Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines - French for Free Radio and Television of the Thousand Hills – derived from Rwanda’s nickname as ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’). Programmes on the station was broadcast with equipment owned by the government…and the words and ideas that came out of the mouths of the presenters and DJs was as extreme as those in the minds of their masters. RTLM, on air for twenty four hours a day, cleverly played lots of popular songs on their station so that many people would tune in and listen. In between the songs DJs such as Habimana Kantano and George Ruggiu told their listeners that Tutsi men, women and children were the ‘enemy’ and ‘accomplices’ with the rebel army that the government was fighting. Tutsis were also called ‘inyenzi’ which meant ‘cockroaches’. Ordinary people were told to ‘go to work’…which many people understood meant to kill Tutsi.14

At a meeting at a place called Kabaya near the home of President Habyarimana, an academic-turned-politician called Leon Mugesera gave a speech. Like the men who attended the Wannsee Conference, Mugesera was very well educated and had taught at universities. The language that he used in November 1992 was hateful and left no one in the audience in any doubt about what his message was. He told his listeners ‘do not be invaded’. He used the word ‘Inyenzi’, which means ‘cockroach’, and said that the Tutsi ‘enemy’ wanted to exterminate all the Hutus in Rwanda. Mugesera asked the crowd to “rise up…really rise up” and to “exterminate this scum”. The speech was recorded and played on national radio as well as being published in a newspaper for everyone to read. Mugesera’s message of hate and his encouragement to kill reached a wide audience just under two years before the attempt to exterminate the Tutsi in Rwanda began.15

Not only were Tutsi people dehumanised by hate speech around Rwanda but they were also were forced out of jobs that they held in the government, the army or in parliament. Similarly, a very low quota was imposed in education which meant that most Tutsis were not able to go to university. Without the possibility of a university training it would be just about impossible for a Tutsi who wanted to be a doctor to achieve their dream. It was as if the Hutu 19

Like the Nazis intensified the persecution of the Jews so the Hutu extremists made life increasingly horrific for Tutsi people in Rwanda. When a civil war began in 1990 President Habyarimana told the country that the Tutsi were ‘accomplices’ and thousands of innocent Tutsis were arrested. The next year an army report agreed with Habyarimana – the Tutsi people were the enemies.16

One of the tricks that the perpetrators use to persuade people to hate the ‘other’ is to claim that the minority they are targeting are, in fact, plotting to destroy everyone else. It is laughable and ludicrous but it is what the extremists do. So, in Rwanda the Hutu extremists began to claim that every Tutsi man, woman and child in the country were really the enemy and that they were all in on a vast conspiracy to destroy every Hutu. That lie was pumped out in newspapers and on the radio time and time again in the early 1990s. The lie also justified the perpetrators in drawing up plans for ‘self-defence’. These plans included creating a force of young men and the training of that group…to kill. In Rwanda a man named Theoneste Bagosora, who was at the heart of the ‘Hutu Power’ racist ideology, was responsible for setting up ‘self defence’ units called the ‘Interahamwe’ (which means ‘those who work or fight together’). In the genocide that would come the ‘Interahamwe’ were responsible for murdering thousands upon thousands of Tutsi. Bagosora, after the killing, was convicted of genocide. Like in Nazi Germany there were attacks on Tutsi people before the extermination began. The Hutu Power extremists picked places where they knew that the President had strong support and where they did not expect any resistance. From 1990-93, up until a year before the genocide began, there were small but brutal attacks on groups of Tutsi civilians. Hundreds died in massacres that historians have seen as ‘practice’ and ‘rehearsals’ for the genocide that was to come.17

Jean Kambanda, who was the Prime Minister of the extremist Hutu power regime in Rwanda, was convicted of genocide. The court heard how the Rwandan army and some political parties recruited groups of young men, called the Interahamwe, trained them and planned to use them in the massacre of innocent Tutsi people that were to come. Kambanda knew the groups of people which planned the extermination of the Tutsi in 1994.18

It was not just in Rwanda that politicians used speeches and the media to stir up a hatred that would lead to genocide.

Creating the other in Bosnia

Bosnia was, and still is, a beautiful country in south eastern Europe. It is no wonder that thousands of holiday makers from Britain visit the Una National Park, the Pliva Waterfall and the stunning capital city of Sarajevo amongst other places every year. The history of Bosnia is, like every other country complicated and sometimes difficult. It was made a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the end of the First World War in 1918. The kingdom, which was soon renamed Yugoslavia, brought together the ‘southern slavs’ and was formed out of the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were differences between the different inhabitants of Bosnia whether that was religious or sometimes in the clothes that people wore. Nevertheless, in 1930, a journalist who visited from Britain remarked that ‘the oddest thing of all, though, seemed to me the way in which they all fitted in so perfectly happily with each other’.19 Similarly, an American in Bosnia mentioned the mix of religious buildings side by side like the people of different faiths doing business together in peace. The observer concluded that ‘I wondered if tolerance is not one of the greatest of virtues.’20

The Second World War brought great problems to Yugoslavia. The Nazis invaded in 1941 and, besides destroying the Jewish population who had lived there for hundreds of years, mercilessly persecuted some groups whilst trying to recruit others as collaborators in their killing. All this, caused by Nazi intervention, caused violence and tremendous suffering for thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children, no matter their ethnicity. Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, was liberated from Nazi control on 6 April 1945 by Tito, the leader of the Communist Partisans. With Tito firmly in control of Yugoslavia after the Second World War the Communist leader worked hard to make sure that the different groups of people were able to live together. People born in Yugoslavia were told to see themselves as Yugoslavs as well as Croats, Serbs and Muslims.21 To an extent, Tito succeeded. However, when the Yugoslav Communist leader, Tito, died in 1980 extremist politicians began to take control of areas of the country and decided to exploit the divisions within Yugoslavia for their own purposes.

Slobodan Milošević had been a Communist leader in Serbia. He wanted to increase his power and so he began to encourage Serbs to believe that they were being discriminated against by others. He used his control of the media to encourage hatred of others in Yugoslavia. Reminding Serb people of atrocities that were committed against them during the Second World War newspapers backed Milošević’s agenda of stirring up hatred of others. A document written by the influential Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, known as the SANU Memorandum stated that Serbs were the victims of persecution from others in Yugoslavia…and that things needed to change.22

In Bosnia some important politicians spent years trying to convince people that their Muslim neighbours were not proper human beings who they should respect. Biljana Plavšić, an important member of the Serb Democratic Party, called Muslims ‘genetically deformed material’ who were inferior to Bosnian Serbs.23 Another Bosnian Serb politician publicly questioned the identity of Muslim people and thought that they were a fake people. So, if Bosnian Muslims were not even ‘proper’ Muslims then, according to Momčilo Krajišnik’s thinking, they did not deserve to live on the land that they did. Furthermore, Radoslav Brđanin, speaking at a political rally alongside Radovan Karadzic and Biljana Plavšić, portrayed Muslims as filth saying “it is the obligation of the Serbs over the next hundred years to wipe their feet from the foul non-Christians who have befouled this soil of ours.”24

Radio was used as a tool to divide people and instil hatred in Bosnia in the 1990s as well. The town of Prijedor was taken over on 29 April 1992 by local Bosnian Serb extremists. From then on Radio Prijedor played Serb songs – a clear sign to the non-Serb population of the town as to who was in charge. Along with the songs came broadcasts of propaganda that sought to breed hatred of the ‘other’. In this case the ‘other’ that the Serbs wanted to demonise was the Muslim population of the town. The broadcasts proclaimed that the non-Serb leaders in the area were criminals and extremists who should be punished. The radio in Prijedor also spread lies about individuals who many in the town would know well. Non-Serb doctors, like Dr. Mirsad Mujadžić, was ridiculously accused of injecting drugs into Serb women to make them incapable of giving birth to male children. It was all untrue, of course, but the tactics of the Serb propaganda radio in Bosnia, like RTLM in Rwanda, was to make ordinary people hate those who they lived alongside.25

Like the Nazis sought to mark out and humiliate the Jews by making them wear a yellow star, so the Bosnian Serbs did the same to the Muslims in territory that they had taken over. The trial of Milomir Stakić contained testimony from numerous witnesses who said that the Serbs forced Muslims to hang a white cloth or flag outside their house to mark them out.

26

The racist plans that the Bosnian Serb extremists had were revealed not long after civil war had broken out in Bosnia. In the case of the Bosnian Genocide the ‘Six Strategic Objectives’ of the Bosnian Serbs have become infamous. In May 1992 at a meeting of the Bosnian Serb Assembly the leader, Radovan Karadzic announced the Objectives to the other politicians who were there. In short, the objectives set out what the Bosnian Serb leaders wanted to achieve: an area of territory that consisted only of Serbs. Others were not welcome and would be removed.27

The ways that the Bosnian Serb extremists like Karadzic planned to remove the ‘others’ was brutally clear. In another document set out in November 1992 the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic gave orders that Bosnian Muslims who lived in the areas that the Serbs wanted would be given the chance to surrender…but if they didn’t they should be destroyed. The Muslim population would be forced to abandon their homes, schools, places of work…or they would lose their lives. The aim of the Bosnian Serb forces would to ‘create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life’28

The Six Strategic Objectives show that there was a plan to get rid of the non-Serbs (the vast majority of whom were Muslims) who lived along the Drina Valley. In this way the meeting that discussed the plan can be seen as being like the Wannsee Conference held by the Nazis in 1942.

Creating the other in Darfur29

Darfur is a region in Sudan, a country in the north eastern part of Africa. It is home to an amazing mosaic of people and places: there are more than one hundred and fifty groups of people who share languages, religion and traditions but also have different culture, ways of living and histories. Darfur can, rather simplistically, be divided into two different areas based on the conditions that exist there. In the north of Darfur it is very dry – the people here live by roaming the area with camels. In the south the climate is not quite as arid as the far north, and more fertile, and the people typically move around with their cattle in search of pasture, or farmers grow crops. Going back centuries the nomads of the north have co-existed with the farmers who live in the south. For instance, in the dry season the nomads

often bring their animals into more fertile areas: the farmers benefit from the animals fertilising their fields and helping transport their crops to market. All this has meant that the different peoples from north and south of Darfur have developed close relationships. To be simplistic, the nomads in Darfur have been labelled as ‘Arabs’ (such as Baggara and Abbala peoples) whilst the famers in central Darfur have been labelled as ‘African’ (belonging to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people). Nevertheless, over time these groups have mixed, and drawing distinctions is hard – for instance the Zaghawa people can also be considered nomadic as they are traditionally camel-owning. Like every place Darfur has a rich and complex history. Hundreds of years ago kings built dynasties that controlled the area and land beyond it. The Daju, Tunjur, and Masalit Empires, and then Fur Sultanate, established Darfur as a powerful and rich region that traded in ivory, ostrich feathers and slaves up to the 18th century. Other countries interfered in Darfur. First the Ottoman Empire took control of some of Darfur and then, in 1916, the British made Darfur part of their Empire, taking full control, including of Masalit areas, in 1917. The British neglected Darfur. After Sudan became an independent country Darfur continued to be neglected and other countries continued to interfere in Darfur for their own purposes. Other countries continued to interfere in Darfur for their own purposes like the British had done decades ago. In the 1980s Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya (the country next to Darfur), wanted to increase his power in the area and began war with Chad. Gaddafi began to tell the ‘Arab’ peoples of Darfur that they were part of a superior race and that they should demand greater rights in Darfur than inferior ‘African’ people, who were seen to be land owners. The ‘Arab Awakening’ political coalition, formed in 1987, spread these racist ideas, and led to local wars between Fur and Arab tribes. Groups of men, secretly armed by Colonel Gaddafi and called the Janjaweed (‘devils on horseback’), began to try to empty Darfur of the ‘Africans’, as early as 2001. The government in Khartoum (Sudan’s capital city) did nothing to intervene and in fact sowed further division and hatred in Darfur. In Sudan extremists, like those in Hitler’s Germany, Bosnia and Rwanda tried to use hateful words to dehumanise the Zaghawa, Fur, Masalit and other peoples who lived in the Darfur region. Witnesses tell us that they were called ‘slaves’ and that they made their villages ‘dirty’ and that their enemies would soon ‘clean’ the area. The black Africans of Darfur were labelled as sub-human ‘donkeys’ and ‘dogs’ who didn’t deserve to live in the area. Touring the area in four-wheel drive car Musa Hilal, one of the perpetrators, was notorious for making speeches to Arab audiences in Darfur and telling them to ‘clear the land’ of black Africans. Children of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa often were discriminated against in school and forced to leave university. Once hate speech had become almost normal in society it was easier for extremists who held power in government to create laws and take action to discriminate and isolate the ‘other’. Throughout the awful history of genocide there have are attempts, before the killing starts to force the intended victims out of their communities, rid them of their rights and even strip them of their citizenship. Finally, in 2003, two ‘African’ groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement / Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) began to fight back. They attacked a government base in Darfur and killed government soldiers. In return the government decided to help the Janjaweed and armed and supported them as they moved around Darfur destroying villages belonging to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people, among others, and killing hundreds of thousands. Millions more had to flee to avoid the violence.

After rebel attacks in 2003 the President of Sudan, Omar Al Bashir decided to exact his revenge on the people. In that same year, Ja’afar Abdul El Hakh, one of the government officials in charge of Darfur was witnessed saying that ‘Zaghawa, Fur and Masalit have become rebels. We will burn everything down and only leave behind the trees. They can destroy all Darfur…”30 According to a prosecutor in a court that is seeking to put Al Bashir on trial for genocide, the President planned to ‘end the history’ of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people. To end this history the Sudanese leaders decided to unleash the Janjaweed militia under the leadership of men such as Musa Hilal. It was Hilal who wrote in August 2004 ‘You are informed that directives have been issued…to change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes’.31

There is more evidence about the planning of the genocide in Darfur by the government in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Mukesh Kapila led the United Nations in Sudan at the time of the genocide. He remembers a meeting with a high-ranking official in the president’s office. In particular, one remark chilled Professor Kapila’s spine: ‘The government of Sudan will take all necessary measures to crush the rebels and bring peace. We will not tolerate any resistance. Ergo, a final solution will be found.’32

Ghettos. The first ghetto was established in Piotrków Trybunalski in Nazi-occupied Poland in October 1939. The Nazis forced Jews to leave their homes and move into ghettos where thousands died from disease, lack of food or shooting. Those who survived were deported t obe murdered elsewhere. The Nazis set up 1,143 ghettos in the territory that they captured in eastern Europe. The largest ghetto, in Warsaw, held 400,000 people who were crammed into an area of 1.3 sq miles. Einsatzgruppen. Between June 1941 and November 1942 Nazi mobile killing squads followed the German army as it moved eastwards. With the help of the SS, German army, their allies and local collaborators the Einsatzgruppen carried out mass shootings of Jews in the Soviet Union. In September 1941 men from Einsatzgruppe C murdered more than 30,000 Jews in Babi Yar, a ravine just outside Kiev in Ukraine. In all around a third of the victims of the Holocaust were murdered in this way.

Jews were deported from countries all over Europe that the Germans controlled or had a big influence in. The victims were told that they were being sent to work...but instead they were murdered in death camps. For instance, in France more than sixty thousand Jews were deported from the Drancy to death camps from 194244.

As it became clear that the Nazis would lose the war they forced concentration camp inmates to march back towards Germany. In terrible conditions these ‘death marches’ killed thousands as the Nazis sought to hide their crimes. The Nazis wanted to wipe out all Jewish communities wherever they existed. For instance the community in Greece that had existed for more than 1500 years had 80% of its population exterminated during the Holocaust by the Nazis. Allies of the Nazis carried out their own brutal campaign of murder against the Jews during the Holocaust. For instance, in Romania the dictator Antonescu ordered the deportation or murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Roma people were also targeted.

Death camps. In Nazi occupied Poland the Germans set up extermination centres. These places had just one purpose: to murder. Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau were the sites where an estimated 3.5m Jews were murdered. The Nazis also murdered Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

This map can only show a fraction of the important places and events that occurred during the Holocaust. For much more in-depth coverage please visit: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/the-holocaust-maps