Question

Explain two factors that can motivate a nation to carry out genocide

Answer 1

In my view, the following two have been proven to occur:

Vengeance of a majority population, which is oppressed and brutalized by a wealthy minority. Eventually, the majority population manages to somehow break free, and retaliates by killing all members of the former dominant minority. Two examples have been confirmed to occur:

• The genocide of white Haitians in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution. The black slaves in Haiti were oppressed for centuries by the French slave masters. At the end of the 17th century, ion the wake of the French Revolution, they were able to rebel and seize power. France sent an army that committed several atrocities and was ultimately defeated. The black leaders decided to annihilate the French white population and killed all 5,000 of them, effectively wiping them out.

• The Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994.  Indeed, the Tutsi minority had been the dominant ethnic group in Rwanda since the 18th century; and when the country was colonized by the French and the Belgian, the Tutsis remained the dominant elite. The Hutu majority resented this and hen the country became independent in the early sixties they removed the Tutsis from power. They had several civil wars and conflicts until 1994 when the airplane of the Hutu president was blown up in the air. The Hutus blamed Tutsi guerrillas and then went on to exterminate one million Tutsis in the course of two months.

The second factor would be the invasion of a country whose majority opposes it. Two examples have been proven to occur:

• Islamic Invasion of India by the medieval Muslim invaders. Muslim warlords started raiding and invading India from the 8th century onwards. One of the worst was Timur Lang who once killed 100,000 people in a single campaign. The number of death between the beginning of the invasions and their end, around the 16th century has been estimated to be between 80 to 400 million.

• Another example is Armenia. The country was invaded in the Middle Ages by Muslim Turks and they were colonized and occupied for centuries by them. In 1915 over a million and a half Armenians were exterminated by the Ottoman Turks.