Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

nant and offered them water, food, shelter, and protection from their abusers. To this day,
bones of the Armenian victims can be found in the desert sands of Deir ez Zor. And to
this day, the relatives of those Bedouins who reached out to help the Armenians are recognized
for their altruism each year by the Armenian community of Syria, Lebanon, and
those from further afield during the commemoration of the Armenian genocide.
Dekulakization. Applied to independent, landowning peasants (who were commonly
referred to as kulaks) by the Bolsheviks, dekulakization referred to the stripping of economic
power from such peasants. From the start of the Bolshevik regime in October–November
1917, the government of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) signaled its intention to
destroy the kulaks as a class and to replace their independent status with a collectivized,
communist structure. Kulak populations in several parts of central Russia were reduced
substantially in the years that followed, but it was only after December 1927 that a wholesale
state program of kulak destruction was launched by Lenin’s successor, Josef Stalin
(1879–1953). In the drive to collectivize agriculture, the independence of agricultural
producers—even of smallholders who made a modest profit from their harvests—was to
be totally destroyed. The systematic nature of this destruction was massive. The kulaks
were targeted in two major campaigns: one in 1930, the other in 1931. These saw the
rounding up of about 1.8 million kulaks, and, by the end of 1933 another four hundred
thousand had been apprehended. The key aspect of the communist strategy was the resettlement
of the kulaks; by removing them from the land and placing them on communal
farms at a substantial distance from their original districts, a transformation could be
effected both in agricultural practices and demography. Privation, cold, disease, and violent
treatment by the communists during these forced population transfers produced a
death toll in the hundreds of thousands, but at no time did this cause the government to
waver from their dekulakization program, even when it caused a massive disruption in
agricultural production. Perhaps up to 6 million peasants starved to death due to Stalin’s
forced collectivization campaigns. By the middle of the 1930s the full collectivization of
agriculture had taken place throughout the Soviet Union, and the rural peasantry was no
longer identifiable in the form it had been just two decades earlier.
Del Ponte, Carla (b. 1947). An international criminal lawyer, best known for her role
as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Born in Lugano,
Switzerland, Del Ponte studied law in Bern, Geneva, and the United Kingdom. In 1981
she was appointed as a public prosecutor in Lugano, prosecuting cases of fraud, drug trafficking,
arms dealing, terrorism, and espionage. She also pursued, and thus antagonized,
the Italian mafia, which attempted to assassinate her in 1992. In 1994 Del Ponte became
attorney general for Switzerland.
In 1999, Del Ponte was appointed chief prosecutor at the ICTY in The Hague, and the
ICTR in Arusha, replacing Louise Arbour (b. 1947). In 2003 she was relieved of her
responsibility as prosecutor for the ICTR, in order to focus exclusively on prosecutions
involving the former Yugoslavia. Renowned for her intensity in pursuing justice, she does
not favor one side or the other when bringing cases to the ICTY; it matters not whether
an alleged criminal is Serb, Croatian, Bosnian, or Kosovar Albanian. (Because of her
dogged determination and concern with the victims of such genocides and other illegal
criminal activities, her detractors have labeled her “the whore,” “the new Gestapo,” “the
unguided missile,” and “the personification of stubbornness.”) That said, the majority of
DEL PONTE, CARLA
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