Infamous Genocides

Genocide is "the deliberate and systematic destruction of, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars.While a precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

1. The Rwandan Genocide was a genocidal mass killing that took place in 1994 in Rwanda. Over the course of approximately 100 days over 500,000 people were killed, according to a estimate. Estimates of the death toll have ranged from 500,000–1,000,000, or as much as 20% of the country's total population. It was the end result of a long fight between the minority Tutsi,  who had controlled power for centuries, and the majority Hutu peoples, who had come to power in the rebellion of 1959–62.

2. Pol Pot's devastation of Cambodia. Under the leadership of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge government they caused the deaths of around a Quarter of the entire countries population in an "effort" to bring the country back to what he called "Ground Zero". Ground Zero' was his idea of what a utopian society should be. In order to reach this perfect society, all the citizens would have to be peasants who lived life on a subsistence level.

3.The Armenian Genocide is the intentional destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I. Through massacres the Ottomans killed around 1-1.5 million Armenians because they considered them to be second class citizens and undeserving of life. Modern Turkey refuses to acknowledge the genocide and denies it to this day. 

4.The Nanking Massacre was a genocide that took place in Nanjing, China during the Second World War. After the invasion of Nanjing, tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were raped and murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army.There were mass executions by machine gun fire, and also other more gruesome methods. The number of poeple killed is estimated at around 200-300 thousand people. Some of the Japanese soldiers were executed after World War II by the Allies for their war crimes. Even today, many Japanese people naively believe that the Nanking Massacre was faked.