Genocides in central Africa


In the 20th century, ten million people were murdered in various remote parts of Central Africa. It was not a single genocide but a collection of ethnic wars which raged from Sudan, the Congo, through to Uganda and Rwanda.

Details

In the southern region of the Sudan, two million people belonging to various Nilotic peoples including Dinka, Nuer and Shilluk were killed by Sudanese Arabs from the North.
Roughly five and a half million died in the Congo, mainly during the Second Congo War but also in relatively smaller holocausts such as the Ituri conflict and the mass murder of Pygmies known as "Effacer le tableau".
In Uganda, 300 thousand people were murdered during the regime of Idi Amin and 500 thousand during the rule of his successor, Milton Obote. Amin's genocides targeted the Acholi and Lango peoples; these two groups went on to kill other groups under Obote's regime.
In the early 1970s, over 150 thousand Hutu people were killed by Tutsi people in Burundi by order of General Michel Micombero. Twenty years later, one million Tutsi people were killed by Hutu people during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
In the Rwandan genocide, the people who had been the victims in Burundi killed the ethnic group that had killed them, and these new victims later played a role in the Congo genocide.
In all of these deaths, the victims were killed by people from a different ethnic group. Ten million deaths occurred in close proximity.