Crimes against humanity under communist regimes

Skulls of victims of the Khmer Rouge Killing Fields in Cambodia

There is a scholarly consensus that the Cambodian genocide which was carried out by the Khmer Rouge under the leadership of Pol Pot in what became known as the Killing Fields was a crime against humanity.[7] Over the course of 4 years, the Pol Pot regime was responsible for the deaths of approximately 2 million people through starvation, exhaustion, execution, lack of medical care as a result of the communist utopia experiment.[8] Legal scholars Antoine Garapon and David Boyle, sociologist Michael Mann and professor of political science Jacques Sémelin all believe that the actions of the Communist Party of Kampuchea can best be described as a crime against humanity rather than a genocide.[9] In 2018, the Khmer Rouge was declared guilty of committing genocide against the minority Muslim Cham and Vietnamese.[10] Conviction appeal against court decision was rejected in 2022.[11] It reaffirms the ECCC's recognition of the Khmer Rouge's racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing against non-Cambodian (Khmer) minorities. The naming of the Cambodian Genocide is an overlooked problem because it downplays the overwhelming sufferings among targeted minority groups and the important roles of racism in understanding how the genocide was perpetrated.[12][13][14] Historian Eric D. Weitz calls the Khmer Rouge's ethnic policy "racial communism."[15]

In 1997, the co-prime ministers of Cambodia sought help from the United Nations in seeking justice for the crimes which were perpetrated by the communists during the years from 1975 to 1979. In June 1997, Pol Pot was taken prisoner during an internal power struggle within the Khmer Rouge and offered up to the international community. However, no country was willing to seek his extradition.[16] The policies enacted by the Khmer Rouge led to the deaths of one quarter of the population in just four years.[17]

Sketch showing civilian torture by the Derg police officers

Following the overthrow of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the Derg gained control over Ethiopia and established a Marxist–Leninist state. They enacted the Red Terror against political opponents, killing an estimated 10,000 to 750,000 people.[24][25][26][27] Derg chairman Mengistu Haile Mariam said "We are doing what Lenin did. You cannot build socialism without Red Terror."[28][29] The Save the Children Fund reported that the victims of the Red Terror included not only adults but 1,000 or more children, mostly aged between eleven and thirteen, whose corpses were left in the streets of Addis Ababa.[29]

On 13 August 2004, 33 top former Derg officials were presented in trial for genocide and other human rights violations during the Red Terror. The officials appealed for a pardon to the Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in a forum to "beg the Ethiopian public for their pardon for the mistakes done knowingly or unknowingly" during the Derg regime.[30] No official response made by the government to the date. The Red Terror trial included grave human rights violations, comprising genocide, crime against humanity, torture, rape and forced disappearances which be would punishable under Article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as article 3 of the African Charter on Human and People's Rights, all of which made part of the Ethiopian law.[31]

Three victims of the prison camp system in North Korea unsuccessfully attempted to bring Kim Jong-il to justice with the aid of the Citizens Coalition for Human Rights of abductees and North Korean Refugees. In December 2010, they filed charges in The Hague.[32] The NGO group Christian Solidarity Worldwide has stated that the gulag system appears to be specifically designed to kill a large number of people who are labelled enemies or have a differing political belief.[33]

In a speech before the Parliament of Romania, President Traian Băsescu stated that "the criminal and illegitimate former communist regime committed massive human rights violations and crimes against humanity, killing and persecuting as many as two million people between 1945 and 1989".[34][35] The speech was based on the 660-page report of a Presidential Commission headed by Vladimir Tismăneanu, a professor at the University of Maryland. The report also stated that "the regime exterminated people by assassination and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people" and it also highlighted the Pitești Experiment.[36]

Engineer and former political prisoner Gheorghe Boldur-Lățescu has also stated that the Pitești Experiment was a crime against humanity,[37] while Dennis Deletant has described it as "[a]n experiment of a grotesque originality ... [which] employed techniques of psychiatric abuse which were not only designed to inculcate terror into opponents of the regime but also to destroy the personality of the individual. The nature and enormity of the experiment ... set Romania apart from the other Eastern European regimes."[38]

Some scholars (such as Robert Conquest, Norman Naimark, Timothy Snyder and Michael Ellman) consider the Holodomor, a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians, as an act of genocide or a crime against humanity, although others, such as R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, argue that the famine was man-made but unintentional. Stalin's "Great Purge" of 1937 is often considered a crime against humanity, with deaths of 700,000[39][40] to 1.2 million.[41]

The war crimes which were perpetrated by the Soviet Union's armed forces from 1919 to 1991 include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country's secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the orders of the Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet government's policy of Red Terror. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.[42]

A significant number of these incidents occurred in Northern, Central, and Eastern Europe recently before, and during, the aftermath of World War II, involving summary executions and the mass murder of prisoners of war, such as in the Katyn massacre and mass rape by troops of the Red Army in territories they occupied.

When the Allies of World War II founded the post-war International Military Tribunal to examine war crimes committed during the conflict by Nazi Germany, with officials from the Soviet Union taking an active part in the judicial processes, there was no examination of the Allied forces' actions and no charges were ever brought against their troops, because they were undefeated powers which then held Europe under military occupation, marring the historical authority of the Tribunal's activity as being, in part, victor's justice.[43]

In the 1990s and 2000s, war crimes trials held in the Baltic states led to the prosecution of some Russians and Ukrainians, mostly in absentia, and some Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, for crimes against humanity committed during or shortly after World War II, including killings or deportations of civilians.[6]

Dominic McGoldrick writes that as the head of a "highly centralized and oppressive" dictatorship, Josip Broz Tito wielded tremendous power in Yugoslavia, with his dictatorial rule administered through an elaborate bureaucracy which routinely suppressed human rights.[44] First repressions included reprisal killings against World War II POWs, most prominent being Bleiburg repatriations and Foibe massacres.[45][46][47][48] Near the end of the Second World War, Banat Swabians who were suspected to have been involved with the Nazi administration were placed into internment camps. Many were tortured, and at least 5,800 were killed. Others were subject to forced labor.[49] In March 1945, the surviving Swabians were ghettoized in "village camps", later described as "extermination camps" by the survivors, where the death rate ranged as high as 50%.[49] The most notorious camp was at Knićanin (formerly Rudolfsgnad), where an estimated 11,000 to 12,500 Swabians died.[50]

Some 120,000 Macedonian Serbs were forced to emigrate to Serbia by the Yugoslav Communists after they had opted for Serbian citizenship in 1944.[51] Those who stayed were subject to increasing Macedonian efforts, such as forcibly changing their surnames, substituting "ić" with "ski " (Jovanović - Jovanovski). In the whole period after the Second World War the Serbs in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia were kept from freely developing their national and cultural identity. The Serbs were treated like second-class citizens.[52]

The Tito–Stalin split initiated a repression against known and alleged Stalinists, which included even some of the most prominent among Tito's collaborators, most of which were taken to a labor camp on Goli otok. On 19 November 1956, Milovan Đilas, perhaps the closest of Tito's collaborators and widely regarded as Tito's possible successor, was arrested and jailed for four years because of his criticism against certain actions of the Yugoslav regime. The repression did not exclude intellectuals and writers such as Venko Markovski, who was arrested and sent to jail in January 1956 for writing poems considered anti-Titoist.

Tito's Yugoslavia had been described as a tightly controlled police state.[53] According to David Matas, outside the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia had more political prisoners than all of the rest of Eastern Europe combined.[54] Tito's secret police was modeled on the Soviet KGB. Its members were ever-present and often acted extrajudicially,[55] with victims including middle-class intellectuals, liberals and democrats.[56] Yugoslavia was a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but scant regard was paid to some of its provisions.[57]

• "Global Museum on Communism". The Global Museum on Communism. Archived from the original on 13 December 2010. Retrieved 8 September 2020.