Answer:
There is no common cause of genocide; it all depends on the different historical background of each country and how perpetrators define the group and how they determine who is a member (Karen 1996:6). On the Asian continent, communism as a socio-political and economic doctrine was the context in which genocide occurred, notably in Cambodia and China (Destexhe 1996:19). The Khmer Rouge communist leaders in Cambodia combined extremist ideology with ethnic animosity and disregarded human life to repress and murder and cause misery on a massive scale (Chalk and Jonassohn 1990:270). In Africa genocide and the strategy of dividing people in colonies were used to conquer and exploit people and gain economic and political power (Mann 2005:428). In the case of Rwanda, genocide was a carefully planned and executed exercise to annihilate Rwanda’s Tutsi and Hutu populations who disagreed with extremist politics. Here, genocide had much more complex roots than just deep ethnic hatred (Keane 1995:8; Melvern 2000:11). Its main causes were socio-political. They were rooted in the manipulation of the history of Rwanda by both colonial and post-colonial leaders and can therefore be attributed to both internal and external factors. The history of Rwanda was manipulated before independence by Western colonisers (Germany and Belgium) and after independence by inefficient local leadership (Turshen 2001:57) and the failure of democracy (Mann 2005:4). International indifference and the involvement of some Western countries who are accomplices made it possible for genocide to occur (Barnett 2005:551).
