Ethnic Cleansing Essay, Research Paper

The first and most important human right is the right to live, but sometimes others bend the rules, and this is when genocide begins. Crimes against humanity have been around for many generations, including ours. The genocide against the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks in 1915 was because the Turkish authorities wanted to eliminate the Armenian presence in the country. This genocide and the genocide against the Jews in Nazi Germany in which Hitler and the Nazi party had tried to exterminate the Jews during the years of WWII, are the early acts of genocide that has occurred in the twentieth century. This war was one in which was a murder on the greatest scale known in this century . Acts committed to exterminate an ethnical, religious, or racial group is what we have come to call genocide. Nazi Germany had caused the U.N to declare the Convention on the

Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was declared on Dec.11.1946 in which 106 countries had ratified. It stated that genocide was: a) Killing the members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children on the group to another group . This convention stated that genocide is a crime under international law. In 1997 Pol Pot who created the genocide of almost two million Cambodians during his reign of terror (1975-1979) was captured by his former Khemer Rouge comrades after being free in the northern jungle of Cambodia for almost 20 years. He was being held near the Khemer Rouge jungle stronghold of Anlong Veng, which was guarded by rebels who had rebelled against him.