Nations with the Highest Civilian Casualties in the 20th Century

Special Report

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Published: January 6, 2024 11:46 am

Genocide was recognized as a crime in 1946 under international law by the United Nations General Assembly. The intention of outlawing genocide was to prohibit atrocities, like the Holocaust and Nanking, from ever happening again, However, this has not halted the brutalities of genocide, and it has still occurred fairly recently in many regions, like Darfur, Chechnya, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka.

According to the multinational nonprofit alliance Genocide Watch, there are currently genocidal acts being carried out in at least 10 countries, including Yemen, Myanmar, Syria, and Sudan. While some of these horrific acts of violence against particular ethnic, national, or religious groups are being committed by armed insurgents or warring factions, others are the direct actions of the governments of these nations.

The late political scientist Rudolph Rummel coined the term “democide” to describe the intentional killings of unarmed civilians by a government. Democide can include genocide, politicide, and mass murder. Democide also includes deaths by forced labor or in concentration camps, the purposeful killing of civilians, of the acting government’s country or another, during war, massacres, extrajudicial executions, forced deportations that lead to death, and starvation brought on by deliberate famines.

According to Rummel, 262 million people were killed by democides in the 20th century, which is six times more than the total killed in combat worldwide, including foreign and internal wars. (Also read: these are the rifles World War II was fought with.)

24/7 Wall St. reviewed the study “Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War” by Prof. Rummel, maintained by the University of Hawaii to find the countries that killed the most civilians in the 20th century. Each country was ranked by us based on the total number of people killed in democide, according to the study. There are some instances where a country is mentioned more than once because the democides took place at different times, often under different regimes.

Many of the deaths counted in the list took place during war and include not only the deaths of the country’s own civilian population but also civilians of other nations who were intentionally targeted. A large part of these deaths were the result of the actions of authoritarian and totalitarian governments. These include communist regimes in the Soviet Union, China, Yugoslavia, Poland, Cambodia, Vietnam, and North Korea, as well as fascist and right-wing regimes in Germany, China, and Japan. (Also read: this is the death toll in each state from America’s post 9/11 wars.)

Here are the nations with the highest civilian casualties in the 20th century