Fight to the death; the Rwandan, Serbian and Nazi genocides

Similarities:

• They all focused on one group of people and made them scapegoats for all of the countries problems.
• The persecutors saw themselves as the victims of previous injustices at the hands of the group they were now targeting: Nazis blaming Jews for the 'stab in the back' of 1918; Serbians blaming Muslims for the destruction of the medieval Serb kingdom; Hutus blaming Tutsis raised above them by colonial rulers.
• The victims were displayed as sub or even non human.
• There was a lot of propaganda and media involved.



Nazi flag

Rwandan refugee camp

Differences:

• The Rwandan genocide was much quicker than the others. 8000 people were killed on average every day.
• Rwanda didn't create camps for people to be held in.
• Rwanda used machetes to hack people to death whereas in the other genocides shooting was the main method.
• The Nazi's were the only ones to use gas chambers.
• In Serbia and Rwanda there were UN troops overseeing and trying to keep peace.



A memorial to the victims of the Serbian genocide

Srebrenica was the biggest massacre in Europe since the end of the second World War. The town was declared safe by the UN so a lot of Muslims settled there  to avoid being persecuted by the Serbians . The town was being watched by some Dutch troops to keep the peace, but when the Serbian forces started to approach they had to make a choice: they could either stand their ground and die trying to save people that would be killed anyway or they could oversee people getting onto the buses and try to decrease the level of brutality used. The chose the latter. When the Serbian forces stormed the town they loaded the women, children, old men and the Dutch troops onto to buses and drove them away. They then put all of the boys over the age of ten or eleven and all of the men under sixty onto different buses. They were then taken into the woods and shot. About 7000 boys and men were killed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3582139.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13431486
Source - Professor J. C. Williams