Genocide Denial - Notable Genocide Denials By Governments

Notable Genocide Denials By Governments

  • The government of the Republic of Turkey has long disputed that the mass killings of Armenians was a genocide. This was exemplified by their objections in April 2007 to the wording in a United Nations exhibition, entitled "Lessons from Rwanda", about the 1994 Rwanda genocide, that forced a delay to the opening of the exhibition. The sentence disputed by Turkey was "Following World War 1, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes". As a diplomatic compromise, the wording was changed to "In 1933, the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew, urged the League of Nations to recognize mass atrocities against a particular group as an international crime. He cited mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman empire in World War I and other mass killings in history. He was ignored." The exhibition opened on 1 May 2007 three weeks later than planned.
  • The Soviet famine of 1932-1933 that affected Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and some densely populated regions of Russia, has a special connotation in Ukraine where it is called the Holodomor. The famine was caused by the confiscation of the whole 1933 harvest in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the North Caucasus, and other parts of Russia, leaving the peasants too little to feed themselves. As a result an estimated seven million died Soviet-wide, including five million in Ukraine, one million in the North Caucasus, and one million elsewhere. Under Yushchenko's administration, Ukraine was attempting to have the Holodomor recognised as an act of genocide against Ukrainians. This move is opposed by current President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych and the Russian government, since a lot of non-Ukrainians also died.
  • According to Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and Edina Becirevic, the faculty of criminology and security studies of the University of Sarajevo:
Denial of the Srebrenica genocide takes many forms . The methods range from the brutal to the deceitful. Denial is present most strongly in political discourse, in the media, in the sphere of law, and in the educational system.
  • The government of Pakistan continues to deny that the 1971 Bangladesh atrocities took place under Pakistan's rule of Bangladesh (East Pakistan) during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. They typically accuse Pakistani reporters (such as Anthony Mascarenhas) who reported on the genocide of being "enemy agents". According to Donald W. Beachler, professor of political science at Ithaca College:
The government of Pakistan explicitly denied that there was genocide. By their refusal to characterise the mass-killings as genocide or to condemn and restrain the Pakistani government, the US and Chinese governments implied that they did not consider it so.

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