Ethnic Conflicts

UNIVERSIDAD LATINOAMERICANA DE CIENCIA Y TECNOLOGIA
School of Education
Professor Carlos Tánchez Newspaper Contribution 8 II Quarter, 2010
Student: Laura Elizondo
Group: English VI

Ethnic Conflicts

In many countries and many periods a person’s ethnic identity has had profound consequences for his or her physical safety, political status, and economic prospects. Violent confrontation along ethnic lines is the most apparent form of ethnic conflict, and it recently has claimed lives in such diverse places throughout the world. The three most terrible ethnic conflicts have been the conflict in Rwanda, the Arab-Israeli crisis, and The Holocaust during World War II.
One important ethnic conflict was the Hutu and the Tutsi conflict in Rwanda. There are two major ethnic groups in this African country: the Hutu and the Tutsi. When the country was colonized by the Belgians in 1916 they claimed that the Tutsi were superior to the Hutu based on the idea that their skins were lighter and their features more European. As a result, the Hutus suffered years of repression by the Tutsi. In 1994, the Hutus took revenge. Tutsi people were slaughtered, hunted out of their homes, killed with guns or machetes and left to die on the road by unofficial military group called the Interahamwe (“those who attack together”) and Hutu civilians were forced to murder their neighbors and children were not spared in an insane effort to wipe out the next Tutsi generation. Over 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days.
Moreover the Arab-Israeli crisis is a conflict that has several reasons such as: territory, religious and political views. Since World War II, the Jewish People lived in different countries of the world, especially in Europe. The Jewish relationship with the rest of the world was not always easy, since their clamming their own territory, so they tried to convert Palestine into their territory to expand their culture and their religion, but this territory was already Christian’s and Muslim’s territory. Even thought at the beginning it was only a small community of Jewish in Palestine, they increase rapidly their community, their religion, culture and power.
Another terrible conflict was The Holocaust, during World War II, when Adolf Hitler took over the German Control, and he was a dictator. This was when the Nazis tried to put an end to the Jewish race. They tried to eliminate the Jews living in Europe, and they killed six millions of Jews. The Germans exterminated the Jews because they thought that they had “purity of blood” and the Jews hadn’t. They prohibit marriage between Jews and Germans to protect German’s blood and honor. In the concentration and labor camps the Nazis killed millions of Jews. It was a massive murder of Jews.
Ethnic conflicts such as in Rwanda, The Arab-Israeli crisis, and The Holocaust during World War II triggered the worst feelings as a human being can have. Any country or society can trough such terrors. Different religion, race, and beliefs are not good reasons to kill each other. It depends on new generations not to repeat the terrible crimes against humanity committed in different times and places.

Works Cited:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust