Last Friday, January 27, was designated by the United Nations General Assembly as International Holocaust
Remembrance Day (IHRD). Since 2005, the UN and its member states have held commemoration ceremonies to mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and to honour the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of other victims of Nazism.
The purpose of International Holocaust Remembrance Day is two-fold: to serve as a date for the official commemoration of the victims of the Nazi regime and to promote Holocaust education throughout the world. Since 2010, the UN has designated specific themes for the annual commemorations that focus on topics such as collective experiences and universal human rights. In addition to Holocaust Day, many countries hold national commemoration ceremonies on other dates connected to the Holocaust.
Resolution 60/7 not only establishes January 27 as “International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust”, but it also rejects any form of Holocaust denial. Drawing from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the resolution condemns all forms of “religious intolerance, incitement, harassment, or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief” throughout the world.
The first commemoration ceremony was held on January 27, 2006, at the UN Headquarters in New York City. Each celebration has a specific theme. The 2022 theme was “Memory, Dignity, and Justice.” It explored how preserving the historical record and challenging distortion are elements of claiming justice. However, the theme of 2023 is “Home and Belonging.” It reflects on what these concepts meant to persecuted individuals during the Holocaust and in its aftermath.
Holocaust,  like genocide, is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. Genocide has been practised throughout history. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the conflict between the three main ethnic groups – the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims – resulted in genocide committed by the Serbs against Bosnian Muslims. In the late 1980s, a Serbian named Slobodan Milosevic came to power. In 1992 acts of “ethnic cleansing” started in Bosnia, a mostly Muslim country where the Serb minority made up only 32% of the population.
In 2003, violence and destruction raged in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Government-sponsored militias known as the Janjaweed conducted a calculated campaign of slaughter, rape, starvation, and displacement in Darfur. It is estimated that 400,000 people died following violence, starvation, and disease. More than 2.5 million people were displaced from their homes and over 200,000 fled across the border to Chad. The then United States Congress and former President George W. Bush of the United States recognised the situation in Darfur as “genocide.”
Beginning on April 6, 1994, groups of ethnic Hutu, armed mostly with machetes, began a campaign of terror and bloodshed that embroiled the Central African country of Rwanda. For about 100 days, the Hutu militias followed a premeditated attempt to exterminate the country’s ethnic Tutsi population. The killings only ended after armed Tutsi rebels, invading from neighbouring countries, managed to defeat the Hutu and halted the genocide in July 1994. By then, over one-tenth of the population, an estimated 800,000 persons, had been killed.
Between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot led the Khmer Rouge political party in a reign of violence, fear, and brutality in Cambodia. An attempt to form a Communist peasant farming society resulted in the deaths of 25% of the population from starvation, overwork, and executions.  By 1975, the U.S. had withdrawn its troops from Vietnam, and Cambodia lost its American military support.  Taking advantage of this opportunity, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia and murdered intellectuals, former government officials, and Buddhist monks.
There have been a series of dastardly acts that suggest ethnic cleansing in Nigeria. Kaduna is increasingly the epicentre of violence, rivalling Borno State, the home turf of Boko Haram. Kaduna has long been a place of political, ethnic, and religious violence. The city has undergone ethnic “cleansing,” with Christians now concentrated in the south and Muslims in the north. Since the end of military rule, Kaduna has seen election-related violence that turned into bloodshed along ethnic and religious lines.
The growing attacks reportedly by armed Fulani herdsmen in Nigeria have left villages previously occupied by Christian farmers desolate. The attacks propose “an Ethnic cleansing agenda” in the country. They have become so frequent that some families have suffered multiple displacements. The Fulani herders are systematically killing the local population and occupying their territories. The killings have a motive of religion behind them. The Fulani killers are Muslims, and the conquering of the territory is paramount to large Muslim populations in the country.
Many other states in Nigeria, especially in the country’s South East region, Makurdi, Gboko, Otukpo, and Katsina-Ala in Benue State including Ogun State, Cross River, Ebonyi, Imo and Anambra continue to experience attacks by Fulani militants. Thousands of lives have been lost, property destroyed, and communities left in disarray, with the population of internally displaced individuals totalling over a million in Benue State alone, to say the least.
President Muhammadu Buhari must personally lead the peace resolution efforts based on a bilateral and multinational approaches to end needless ethnic and religious-based killings and armed violence in many parts of the country. If the violence continues unchecked, Nigeria may slip into a killing field where the government and security agencies will become increasingly helpless.
Though the responsibility to protect populations against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity lies primarily with individual States, the principle also underlines the responsibility of the international community to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, to protect populations from those crimes when States manifestly fail in their responsibilities. There is a need for a collective response that would protect populations by either stopping the escalation of ongoing atrocities or accelerating or prompting their termination.
Being able to recognise the signs of genocide is only the first part of how to end the crime. It is also important to act when any of these steps are underway to prevent the progression to full-blown mass killing. Genocide usually takes place during wartime, so to prevent a massacre, it is essential to find the causes. Many conflicts stem from racism, intolerance, discrimination, dehumanisation, and hatred of others. Addressing these issues should be a primary goal because it can prevent armed conflicts.