Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

enhance the infrastructure of Darfur (i.e., the development of roads and schools). They also
called for better treatment of black Africans at the hands of the police and court system.
When the black Africans felt that their complaints were falling on deaf ears, a rebel
group, the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA), formed and, in early 2003, began carrying
out attacks against government and military installations. Shorthanded due to the war in
the south, al-Bashir hired nomadic Arabs to join forces with government of Sudan (GOS)
troops to fight the rebels. However, instead of focusing their attacks solely on the
rebels, the GOS and the Arab militia (referred to as the Janjaweed, or horsemen with
guns) carried out a scorched-earth policy against all black Africans in the three-state
region of Darfur. Supporting the desire of the al-Bashir’s government to allow only Arabs
to reside in Sudan, the GOS troops and the Janjaweed were bent on either forcing the
black Africans to flee Sudan or killing them. Within a short period of time, hundreds of
villages had been utterly destroyed by the GOS and the Janjaweed, thousands of black
Africans had been killed and raped, and hundreds of thousands had fled, seeking sanctuary
elsewhere. By late 2004, it was estimated that close to 2 million refugees had sought
sanctuary in internally displaced camps (IDP) within Sudan and almost 200,000 others
had fled to refugee camps just over the border in Chad. Estimates of the dead ranged from
250,000 to 400,000. By mid-2007, it was estimated that up to 2.5 million black Africans
were in IDP camps and over 250,000 were in refugee camps in Chad. Beginning in late
2006 and continuing into 2007, GOS troops and the Janjaweed began carrying out attacks
on the IDP camps and even on the refugee camps in Chad, where the two groups continued
to kill people and rape girls and women at will.
Albigensian Crusade. Between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries CE, a situation
arose in southern France whereby the Cathars, or Albigensians, were accused by the
Roman Catholic Church of heresy. In its drive to wipe out all traces of dissent, the French
Church fell upon the freethinking people of the Languedoc region, destroying them
utterly. The campaign to crush the Cathars was considered by the Church to be a Crusade
in that the Cathars were not held to be Christian in the accepted sense but rather a race of
apostates. This Crusade was directed by the French monarchy and executed by the French
nobility, particularly from the northern parts of the country; the campaign had an added
political character in that the northerners were able to conquer the south, thereby assisting
the process of French unification. The means employed to suppress the Cathars were
denunciations, torture, and, frequently, mass execution through burning at the stake or in
open pits. Although some have questioned the applicability of the term genocide to
describe the fate of the Cathars—religious persecution being a preferred expression—there
can be little doubt that the Cathars formed an identifiable group (which would have been
recognized as such [e.g., a religious group] under the terms of the 1948 UN Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [UNCG]) and that the
measures instituted against them by the Church fit under the terms laid down by the
UNCG. When all was said and done, cities with populations numbering in the tens of
thousands were wiped out; areas were depopulated, and the crusaders took literally the
command attributed to the Cistercian bishop who led the Crusade, Arnold Amaury
(d. 1225), during the final assault on the city of Beziers, to “Kill them all; God will know
His own!” By the end of the process, at the beginning of the fourteenth century,
Catharism was no more, its existence as a major alternative Christian movement in
France snuffed out by sword and fire.
ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE
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