20 Ongoing Genocides You Should Know About

Many people are beginning to open their eyes to the atrocities happening around the world, while some remain blind or silent. There are 20 genocides happening right now, and some of them have been happening since the 1950s–they have not ended because nobody has stepped in.

There have been more than 50 genocides since the 1948 Genocide Convention was created, and only three have been declared a genocide. Certain member states of the UN and international organizations can certainly call a conflict, war, or ethnic cleansing operation a genocide, but unless all member states of the UN agree, it will not be formally recognized worldwide.

Following is a list of the current genocides, their location, the approximate year they began, and the death toll estimates.

• Tibet, 1953-present: 400,000-1.2 million+ Tibetans killed under the occupation of the People’s Republic of China.
  • It was the People’s Liberation Army of China which invaded in the 1950s and began the killings, deportations, cultural and religious suppression, and military occupation. The Chinese communist government has committed many acts of genocide, intentional famine, and ethnic cleansing over the last eight decades. Do not be fooled by their military’s name, the People’s Liberation Army, they are a communist country and use the military and the state to commit genocides and massacres.
• Sri Lanka, 1956-present: 154,000-253,818+ Tamils killed. The UN and US have been called complicit in this genocide, which had particularly violent years during their civil war which began in 1983.
• North Korean prison camps, 1959-present: Unknown thousands, perhaps millions, have passed through the vast network of prison and “reeducation” camps, with an unknown number of deaths.
  • Conditions are so deplorable that an estimated 40% of prisoners die of malnutrition/starvation, and unknown thousands die at the hands of the guards. As of 2019, an estimated 80,000-200,000 prisoners were imprisoned in the camp network.
• Papua New Guinea, 1962-present: 100,000-500,000 killed.
• Colombia, 1964-present: 220,000-800,000 killed and at least 7 million displaced.
• Hmong people in Southeast Asia, 1975-present: 100,000-300,000 Hmong and other minorities killed.
• Tigray, Ethiopia
  EditSignEditOpening…
  , 1990-present: 2-6 million people are “missing” and over 2 million are displaced.
  • A discrepancy of 4 million people is quite large, one might question the validity of estimates like this. There are many things preventing accurate death tolls and missing tolls, but most importantly is that the crisis is not over so proper investigations cannot be completed so information is often reported by the citizens. Most often, the people committing the genocide will underestimate the deaths or disappearances, and sometimes those suffering will inflate the numbers. Sometimes people have no birth records, often there are no death records, some people could escape and disappear themselves, and many are likely dead but there is no evidence, so they become part of the “missing” statistic.
• Afghanistan, 1996-present: An unknown amount of ethnic minorities, especially the Hazara people, killed in dozens of massacres, including the Mazar-i-Sharif massacre, when 2,000-20,000 people were killed.
  • In rural and impoverished areas such as in Afghanistan, people often cannot get birth certificates for their babies, thus making it harder to determine an accurate census and death toll for massacres. A study done in 2017 found that only 42% of Afghan children over age five had a birth certificate, and prior to the 21^st century most adults would not have had one. Therefore, when the Taliban or ISIS/ISIL massacres a secluded village, killing undocumented people, and burning the evidence, those people did not have a birth record or a death record, and nobody was able to investigate. Victims are killed and buried in mass graves, drowned, or buried in wells, and these crimes are not often investigated by outside agencies.
• Democratic Republic of the Congo, early 2000s-present, an unknown number of deaths (they are not often counted) due to “artisanal mining” in slave-like conditions, and over 5.5 million people are displaced.
  • Some do not consider the crisis to be a genocide because it is forced labor, child labor, and human trafficking. And the history of slavery, generally, is not often thought of as a genocide, but slavery is in fact genocide. What is happening to the Congolese is a genocide if one only considers part of the definition from Article II of the Convention, “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” and, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” regardless of mass killings or not.
• Darfur, Sudan, 2003-present: 98,000-500,000 killed and at least 10.7 million people are displaced.
• Libya, 2011-present: 15,000-30,000 killed in 2011 alone, hundreds more are killed each year, however there is strong media censorship in Libya.
• Mali, 2012-present; 10,800+ killed and over 5 million displaced.
• Syria, 2013-present; 116,000+ killed and over 11 million displaced.
• Yemen, 2014-present; 233,000+ killed and 4.5 million displaced.
• China, 2014-present; at least 2 million ethnic minorities (primarily the Uyghur ethnic group) have been detained in “re-education camps” with an unknown death toll.
• Burkina Faso, 2016-present; 1,850+ killed and at least 1 million displaced.
• Cameroon, 2016-present; 6,000+ killed and 600,000+ displaced.
• Myanmar, 2016-present; 25,000-43,000+ killed and over 1 million displaced.
• Ukraine, 2022-present; 10,000+ killed, over 12 million displaced, and between 900,000 and 1.6 million people forcibly deported to Russia, including unaccompanied abducted children.
  • The Former Soviet Union has a long history of forcibly displacing and relocating civilians, and those who support the Soviet brand of communism will deny this as well as the current genocide of Ukrainians. Forced deportations and removing children from families is part of the definition of genocide, as well.
• Gaza (occupied Palestine), 2023-present; 41,788+ killed, 21,000+ missing, and 2 million displaced.
  • Estimates of deaths rise up to 180,000+ based on historical data of genocides and a lack of data from the Gaza health ministry which collapsed a few months into the genocide.

Note: All of these death tolls are as of September 2024.

Whenever there is a genocide, war, or conflict of any kind, people may lose their homes, their jobs and businesses, they face starvation, and the aggressor inflicts sexual violence on them as well. All of these factors contribute to the overall devastation and trauma they are forced to endure.

There are many people who believe that genocides have happened, but they have a blind-spot and will deny that a certain genocide happened or is happening. Communists who fawn over the Soviets, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and/or North Korean systems (which did not practice true communism) will deny the genocides committed in each. Zionists will believe in every other genocide, except in the Nakba and the current Palestinian genocide because that is the narrative they have been taught. Antisemites will believe in the genocides in the USSR and in Palestine, but they will deny the Shoah.

If somebody denies that any genocide happened, they are a genocide denier. If they refuse to learn when presented with information because it changes the propaganda they have been fed, they are a genocide denier. People can emerge from ignorance if they try.

Of course, there are more atrocities happening worldwide; terrorist groups and settler-colonial projects target individuals in more countries than the aforementioned list, but human rights organizations do not label every apparently genocidal act as a genocide.

All 20 genocides that are currently happening have been called a genocide by at least one country or reputable organization based on the legal definition of genocide that the UN uses. Each has an estimated death toll, but it is extremely difficult for investigations to determine death tolls for an ongoing genocide, especially in a war zone.

The low end of the estimates are how many deaths can be verified with reasonable assurance, usually with the physical evidence of the bodies. Often, after a genocide has been completed, people who cannot find their loved ones will give the names of people who are missing and suspected dead to the government or whichever organizations are handling the aftermath and if they cannot be located as a displaced person then they will be counted in the death toll range. In almost every case in which people are killed in a genocide, the perpetrators try to hide the evidence by burning, drowning, and/or burying the bodies. 

When archeologists and research teams uncover a mass grave and find destroyed evidence such as the ash of bones instead of whole identifiable skulls, they cannot determine the exact number of people there, so it is usually a range.

Another way for governments and investigative agencies to determine the death toll in the case of missing evidence is by looking at census data and birth records, when that data is available. For example, if a country has a population of 10 million before a genocide, and only 9 million directly afterwards, the reasonable conclusion is that about 1 million died or fled the country. If hundreds of people who have a record of birth cannot be located after a genocide, it is reasonable to assume that they died, but on rare occasion they changed their names and fled, never to be seen again.

Since the 1948 United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide was signed, genocides have only continued to happen, and it seems they increased in frequency.