Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 19 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 18 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week as well. Originally this week was going to cover the currently ongoing genocide in Ukraine, but I need to do some more research before I’m ready to record that episode so instead today’s episode is going to be an interlude and we’re going to be talking aboutone of my favorite women in history. Olga of Kiev, a woman who is the very definition of fuck around and find out.

But first! The Alchemist’s Table! Today’s libation is called Kissed by Summer. It’s 2 oz of bourbon, 1 oz each of amaretto and francelico. .75 oz of vanilla simple syrup, 3 dashes of angostura bitters. Shake well and pour over ice. Top with equal parts lemonade and ginger beer and enjoy!

So, now onto Ola of Kiev, the Saint of Slaughter. Olga’s exact year of birth is unknown, but we know she was born somewhere between 890 and 925 CE in Pleskov. She was of Varangian origin, which was an ethnic group descended from Swedish vikingr invaders that eventually settled in the area of the Kievan Rus. She was 15 years old when she was married to Prince Igor I of the Rurik Dynasty. Igor was the son of Rurik, making him only the second ruler of this particular dynasty. During Igor’s reign and owing to a great deal of military aid from his guardian Oleg the Wise the Kievan Rus, and the many tribes of people living in it all came under Rurik control.

Tragedy would strike the Rurik Dynasty in the form of a neighboring tribe known as the Drevelians, a tribe of Eastern Slavic peoples. The Drevelians were not part of the Kievan Rus, though they had joined them in military campaigns against the Byzantine Empire previously and paid a yearly tribute to Igor’s predecessors in the Rurik Dynasty. After Oleg the Wise died in 912 CE the Drevelians stopped paying their tribute to Igor, instead paying it to a local warlord. 

In 945 CE Igor set out with his army to bring the Drevelians into line. No longer would he allow them to deny him what he saw as his rightful tribute. He marched his army to the traditional Drevelian capital, Iskorosten, today known as Korosten in the Zhytomyr Oblast in northern Ukraine. Now, Igor’s army was much larger than any the Drevelians could field, so they backed down and agreed to resume their payments to Igor. However, Igor became greedy and after leaving to return home he turned around and went back to Iskorosten to demand even MORE tribute, at which point he Drevelians captured him alone and killed him.

According to the Byzantine chronicler Leo the Deacon, Igor's death was caused by a gruesome act of torture in which he was "captured by them, tied to tree trunks, and torn in two." They allegedly tied one leg each to two bent over birch trees and then let them catapult up in opposing directions, tearing him in half. Though it is possible that this exact story is apocryphal, the fact that Igor was killed by the Drevelians cannot be denied.

Upon learning of the death of her husband Olga ascended to the throne to rule as regent in the name of her son Sviatoslav. Olga was the first woman to rule over the Kievan Rus. Now, there isn’t a great deal of information in the historical record regarding what Olga’s reign was like. But there is A LOT of information detailing the bloody revenge she got on those who stole her love from her.

The Drevelians, now firmly in the Fuck Around stage and emboldened by their successful murder of Igor sent a missive to Olga. They proposed that Olga should marry the Drevelian prince Mal. The man directly responsible for killing her husband. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, a document formerly thought to have been written by Nestor the Chronicler, although now it is considered to be of unknown authorship, Olga responded to their bold pronouncement thusly:

“Your proposal is pleasing to me, indeed, my husband cannot rise again from the dead. But I desire to honor you tomorrow in the presence of my people. Return now to your boat, and remain there with an aspect of arrogance. I shall send for you on the morrow, and you shall say, "We will not ride on horses nor go on foot, carry us in our boat." And you shall be carried in your boat.”

When they returned the next day the Drevelians repeated the words Olga had bade them and the people of the Kievan Rus lifted their boat upon their shoulders and carried them into the courtyard of Olga’s castle. The Drevelians were thrilled by this, feeling as though they were carried in great honor upon a palanquin. Once they were brought into the courtyard their porters dropped them, boat and all, into a trench that Olga had ordered dug the day before and were buried alive. It is written that Olga bent down to watch them as they were buried and "inquired whether they found the honor to their taste."

The Drevelins were now squarely in the middle of the Find Out stage, although they didn’t know it yet as all 20 of the men from the initial retinue they had sent were now buried in the courtyard of Olga’s home. So Olga wrote to the Drevelians and asked them to send “their distinguished men to her in Kiev, so that she might go to their Prince with due honor.” The Drevelian, completely unaware of the fate of the previous retinue sent others to Olga, who ordered a bath be drawn so that they might wash off the dust of the road. Once the bath was drawn and the Drevelians were comfortably in the bathhouse, Olga set the damnthing on fire. No one escaped alive.

But Olga’s revenge was not complete. The Drevelians, still unaware that Olga was engaged in acts of genocidal revenge over the death of her husband, received another missive from her. She was on her way to Iskotorsten and asked that they prepare great quantities of mead so that she might mourn and feast her husband as is proper. And the Drevelians compiled and a funeral feast was held by Igor’s tomb. When the Drevelians were good and drunk on mead, Olga ordered her followers to fall upon them and slaughter them all. According to the Primary Chronicle some 5000 Drevelians were killed in a single night.

Olga would then return to Kiev, her capital city, and prepare her armies to march back to Iskotorsten. She swept across Drevelian land like an avenging angel until she reached, once again, their capital. Here is where things stalled and Olga entered into a year long siege. Eventually she sent another missive to the Drevelians asking them why their capital refused to surrender. “All of your other cities have surrendered and now pay tribute to me, why would you rather die of hunger than pay tribute.”

The Drevelians, as you might expect, responded that they were worried that Olga ws still dead set on revenge, but Olga told them that the boat, bathhouse, and feast massacres had satisfied her. She instead asked them for 3 pigeons and three sparrows from each house and the Drevelians rejoiced that the price they were asked to pay was so low. Oh those poor fools.

Olga then instructed her army to attach a piece of sulphur bound with small pieces of cloth to each bird. At nightfall, Olga told her soldiers to set the pieces aflame and release the birds. They returned to their nests within the city, which subsequently set the city ablaze. As the Primary Chronicle tells it: "There was not a house that was not consumed, and it was impossible to extinguish the flames, because all the houses caught fire at once." As the people fled the burning city, Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them, killing some of them and giving the others as slaves to her followers.

Olga would go on to become a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Not because of the genocide she committed. Mostly because of her efforts to Christianize the Kievan Rus, a mission that she did not succeed in, but that was carried to fruition by her grandson Vladimir.

Well… that’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 18 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 17 2 weeks ago, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week as well. This week we’re going to be diving back into learning about historic genocides as we learn about the Congolese genocide committed by King Leopold II of Belgium. We’ve talked about the Congolese Genocide previously on Day 11, Free Congo. But for today’s episode we’re going to go into much greater detail about this particular genocide and not just discuss it within the context of a current conflict.

Now, before we get to The Alchemist’s Table I wanted to apologize that there wasn’t a new episode last week. Sometimes you just don’t have the energy, the motivation, the spoons or the spell slots. So, I took a week off. It might happen again. And now on to the booze! Today’s libation is called Cherries Jubilee. It’s 2 oz of Islay scotch. I'd recommend a Bowmore if you’re not a huge fan of the peat. Then 1 oz of creme de cacao. 1 oz of frangelico. Add .75 oz of cherry syrup. Shake and pour overice. Top with ginger beer or a hard cider. Garnish with luxardo cherries and enjoy.

Now, with that out of the way let’s get into the Congolese Rubber Genocide.

In order to understand this genocide we first need to understand European colonialism during this time. Colonialism has taken many forms over the years and in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century it transitioned from the classic form of American colonialism into what we would consider New Colonialism. New Colonialism would rely less on direct military control of an area and would rely more on having governmental institutions in power that would directly benefit those pre existing colonial power structures.

So, near the end of the 19th century there was very little European colonial and mercantile presence in Africa. There were some port towns, to be sure, and there was trade, but very little of the African continent was under the control of European powers at this time. But, European greed for gold and, especially, ivory wouldn’t allow them to ignore African riches for much longer. The Berlin Conference was organized between November 1884 and February 1885 at the request of King Leopold II of Belgium and was organized by Otto von Bismarck of Germany.  

The primary purpose of the Berlin Conference was regulating European colonization and trade during the New Imperialism period. It might seem strange to need to differentiate New Imperialism from the forms of empire building that came before. Afterall, the methodology was largely the same. Conquest. And the reasoning was, mostly the same. Resources and land acquisition. But New Imperialism also came with a good deal of “civilizing” flavor. You might be familiar with the poem White Man’s Burden by Rudyard Kipling. If you’re not. You can fully understand the entire mindset of 19th and 20th century colonialism simply by reading that poem.

Now, Leopold had been using the explorations of Henry Morgan Stanley, and his own organization, the International African Association to quietly try and create his own private colony in central Africa that would be called the Congo Free State, but France found out and started making moves, and then Britain and Portugal found out and began trying to grab land which led Germany to do the same. War was brewing quickly as these various European powerhouses all sought as much land, wealth, and power as they could grab. This, ultimately, would be why the Berlin Conference was called and why it was so successful. These European powers decided, instead of going to war and killing each other over Africa they’d just all meet and carve it up like a pecan pie and settle it all peaceful like.

There were 14 nations/empires in attendance at the Berlin Conference, Germany, Austria Hungary, the International Congo Society (this really means King Leopold II of Belgium), Spain, Denmark, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. And while all 14 of those countries were in attendance at the Berlin Conference and had a say in the final decisions that were made, only 7 countries were actually going to colonize Africa once it was over.

Those countries were Belgium (really just King Leopold II, this would be his own private colony), Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Portugal, and Italy. At the time of the Berlin Conference, in 1885, less than 10% of the African continent was under European control, but by the time World War 1 broke out only Liberia and Ethiopia were still independent. Although, Liberia certainly only existed because of US colonial power, and so doesn’t REALLY count as independent. 

Wanna know one of the most buckwild things about the Berlin Conference? I ask knowing that there is no way for you to answer or to stop me from telling you short of skipping forward by about 30 seconds. Part of the General Act, the document that was signed and ratified at the conclusion of the Berlin Conference was a commitment from the European powers involved to END AFRICAN AND ISLAMIC SLAVERY. Most of those European powers would go on to enslave the populations they conquered and colonized.

This period of New Imperialism is what we tend to call The Scramble for Africa. So far we’ve been talking about this all in fairly clinical terms, as if these European countries simply sat around a table and calmly decided who would get what land in the second largest continent on the planet and then it just happened, with no additional muss or fuss. Anyone who has studied even the barest amount of human history knows that nothing happens without muss or fuss. There were wars, and battles, and massacres that led to Europe gaining control of African territory.

We now need to talk a bit about the Congo Free State, and how King Leopold of Belgium, a frail weakling (compared to the other European powers) managed to worm his way into the conference and into one of the most lucrative colonies in Africa. The Congo Free State was a truly massive colony that was owned personally by Leopold. It was NOT, at least between the years 1885 and 1908, part of the Belgian Empire, it was not owned by the Belgian government and was ruled entirely separately, it just happened to be ruled by the King of Belgium. Leopold was able to gain this massive colony by convincing the monarchs of Europe that he was engaged in humanitarian and philanthropic work, and that the Congo Free State would be an area of free trade in Africa. He also then proceeded to lie to the leaders of Britain, Germany, France, and the US telling them all that he would give them special trade status.

Leopold maintained a guise that he was not trying to use the Congo Basin to increase his own wealth and economic and political power. He maintained that his presence in the region was, as was a huge part of the ethos of New Imperialism, to civilize the savages of the Congo Basin and to bring them closer to God and good European cultural supremacy. 

Leopold pledged to suppress the east African slave trade; promote humanitarian policies; guarantee free trade within the colony; impose no import duties for twenty years; and encourage philanthropic and scientific enterprises. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Leopold first decreed that the state asserted rights of proprietorship over all vacant lands throughout the Congo territory. In three successive decrees, Leopold promised the rights of the Congolese in their land to native villages and farms, essentially making nearly all of the CFS terres domaniales (state-owned land). Leopold further decreed that merchants should limit their commercial operations in rubber trade with the natives. Additionally, the colonial administration liberated thousands of slaves.

Four main problems presented themselves over the next few years. Leopold II ran up huge debts to finance his colonial endeavour and risked losing his colony to Belgium. Much of the Free State was unmapped jungle, which offered little fiscal and commercial return. Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony (part of modern South Africa), was expanding his British South Africa Company's charter lands from the south and threatened to occupy Katanga (southern Congo) by exploiting the "Principle of Effectivity" loophole in the Berlin Treaty. In this he was supported by Harry Johnston, the British Commissioner for Central Africa, who was London's representative in the region. The Congolese interior was ruled by Arab Zanzibari slavers and sultans, powerful kings and warlords who had to be coerced or defeated by use of force. For example, the slaving gangs of Zanzibar trader Tippu Tip had a strong presence in the eastern part of the territory in the modern-day Maniema, Tanganyika and Ituri regions. They were linked to the Swahili coast via Uganda and Tanzania and had established independent slave states.

So very quickly Leopold began to renege on his promises. The first concession he made to his greed and desire for power was to establish a policy of terres vacantes. Vacant land, which was defined as any land that did not have a house or cultivated garden plot. This was, of course, most of the country. Any terres vacantes was now automatically property of the state to be portioned out to Leopold’s cronies and supporters. Next Leopold would decree that any locals harvesting rubber or ivory were only allowed to sell to the state. This was doubly enforced because most of the rubber or ivory harvesting was happening on “state owned land” and so it “mae sense” that they could only sell to the state, which now had a monopoly on those products and could set the prices at whatever they wanted. Trading companies were, obviously, pissed by this as part of the General Act of the Berlin Conference was a promise of Free Trade in Belgium.

Now, what made The Congo so special in the history of capitalist exploitation was that it was home to something that would become one of the most important natural resources in the entire world, rubber. There are only two sources of natural rubber in the world. The sap of the Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber tree that grows in the Amazon River Basin, and the sap of Landolphia owariensis, a species of woody vines that grow in the Congo. I mean, technically there are 2500 species of plants that produce natural latex and rubber, but those two are the big ones. Today 99% of natural latex and rubber comes from the Amazon, but Leopold was able to make massive profit off of his colony.

By the final decade of the 19th century, John Boyd Dunlop's 1887 invention of inflatable, rubber bicycle tubes and the growing usage of the automobile dramatically increased global demand for rubber. Now, as mentioned previously the rubber in the Congo came from vines. So while the trees in the Amazon basin could be tapped much in the same way we get Maple syrup, the Congolese workers would slash the vines and lather their bodies with the rubber latex. When the latex hardened, it would be scraped off the skin in a quite painful manner, ripping off the workers hair.

The economic system in the Congo Free State was known as the red rubber system. It was a slave economy that Leopold enforced through the use of his armed forces known as the Force Publique. The officer corp of the Force Publique was made up entirely of White Europeans, and much of their rank and file was made up of slaves captured by Arabic slavers in the Upper Congo. Many of the other soldiers were children who had been kidnapped from their villages and raised in Roman Catholic missions in conditions very similar to slavery. Each slave in the Congo Free State was required to harvest a regular quota of rubber sap. What that quota was was often arbitrarily decided based purely on profit based concerns.

Workers who refused to supply their labour were coerced with "constraint and repression". Dissenters were beaten or whipped with the chicotte, a bullship made of hippo hide, hostages were taken to ensure prompt collection and punitive expeditions were sent to destroy villages which refused. The policy led to a collapse of Congolese economic and cultural life, as well as farming in some areas.

One refugee from these horrors described the process:

We were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating the fields and gardens. Then we starved ... When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and taken away.

Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting or to stockpile them for mutiny. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in cut-off hands.

A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 300 mi north of Stanley Pool:

“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator ... From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets ... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river ... Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.”

One junior officer in the Force Publique had this to say about the quota system:

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber ... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace ... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

Within the Congo Free State there was also rampant famine and disease that killed hundreds of thousands of people, a type of residential school where children were sent to learn to be either workers or soldiers. About 50% of the children who entered these schools died. There were also several reputable reports of Congolese people turning to cannibalism in the face of their lack of food resources. With everyone being forced to harvest rubber there was no one to farm or gather or hunt for food. It is generally accepted that over the course of Leopold’s rule in the Congo Free State, between 1885 and 1908 that at least 10 million Congolese people were killed.

The peak year for the cost of rubber was 1903, with rubber fetching the highest price and concessionary companies raking in the highest profits.

However, the boom sparked efforts to find lower-cost producers. Congolese concessionary companies started facing competition from rubber cultivation in Southeast Asia and Latin America. As plantations were begun in other tropical regions around the world, the global price of rubber started to dip. Competition heightened the drive to exploit forced labour in the Congo in order to lower production costs. Meanwhile, the cost of enforcement was eating away at profit margins, along with the toll taken by the increasingly unsustainable harvesting methods. As competition from other areas of rubber cultivation mounted, Leopold's private rule was left increasingly vulnerable to international scrutiny.

Missionaries carefully and meticulously documented the many abuses of the Congolese Red Rubber system. This would finally be noted by the international community and by the Belgian government itself as a violation of the 1885 Berlin Act which gave Leopold authority and control of the Congo as long as he: "care[d] for the improvements of their conditions of their moral and material well-being" and "help[ed] in suppressing slavery."

After 2 years of international pressure the Belgian government agreed to annex the Congo Free State and make it an official part of the Belgian Empire. The reason the debate lasted 2 years was that no one wanted to take on the responsibility of fixing everything Leopold had fucked up so royally (pun intended).

But what happened to Leopold you ask? Did he go to jail? Did he get a slap on the wrist? Was he deposed as king and sent into exile on a small island in the Pacific where he eventually died of stomach cancer? Nah, he did die though, but he died as King of Belgium. He had surgery on December 17, 1909. He had a coronary bridging performed, aiming at correcting insufficient irrigation of the myocardium. ''A few hours after the operation, a failure of the myocardium occurred leading to death the same day’’. Leopold had ruled Belgium for 44 years, which makes him, to this day, the longest reigning Belgian monarch. You also might be please to know that his funeral procession was booed by every crowd he passed. His people fucking hated him.

Exciting news y’all! We actually DO have some reviews this week! So let’s read em!

And now for the outro!

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 17 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 16 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. We’re going to do something different this week. We’ve been learning about some, frankly depressing things. War, genocide, slaughter, ethnic tensions and cleansings. These are all important things to be learning about. Especially the ones that are happening in the world right now. But it is always important to remember to take care of ourselves. We need to take some time to breathe and remember that we are human beings with thoughts and feelings and that we require rest or we will, quite simply, die.

So today, after our visit to the Alchemist’s Table, we are going to learn about the history of juggling!

Today’s libation is called Herb Garden. It’s 1 oz each of gin, elderflower liquor, and jagermeister. 2 splashes each of Orleans and Cardamom bitters, and a splash of lavender simple syrup. Shake well and strain into a glass with muddled mint. Top with lemonade and enjoy!

So! Now onto the juggling. First let’s get the obvious out of the way. What is juggling? Juggle is a verb and it is defined as to continuously toss into the air and catch (a number of objects) so as to keep at least one in the air while handling the others, typically for the entertainment of others.

Though it also bears mentioning that what we will be discussing in this episode is more specifically referred to as toss juggling. Bounce juggling and contact juggling also exist as distinct disciplines. Moving forward I’ll be using the general term juggling, but know that we are discussing toss juggling.

The classic tool for juggling is, obviously, balls but you can juggle anything that you can throw. I’ve seen people juggle knives, flaming torches, chainsaws, music stands, bowling balls. Anything you can throw. Although, the three most basic juggling props are balls, clubs, and rings.

The oldest archeological depiction that we have of juggling comes from ancient Egypt from around the 21st century BCE. There was some wall art in the Beni Hasan cemetery complex that appears to show 4 young women juggling balls. We say appears to be because without text based evidence describing the scene or the ability to talk to someone who made the art it’s just a guess. But you can look up the wall art, and it looks like juggling to me.

The next big piece of juggling in the historical record comes from the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history and it is not only my favorite story from the history of juggling, but it is also one of my favorite historical stories to exist, full stop.

Xiong Yiliao was a Chu warrior who fought under King Zhuang of Chu during the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history. Ancient Chinese annals state that he practiced nòngwán, "throwing multiple objects up and down without dropping". During a battle in about 603 BC between the states of Chu and Song, Xiong Yiliao stepped out between the armies and juggled nine balls, which so amazed the Song troops that all five hundred of them turned and fled, allowing the Chu army to win a complete victory.

Dude just walked in between two armies about to fight and pulled one of the biggest bluffs since the Empty Fort Strategy. But also, NINE BALLS!??!?! That’s amazingly impressive. The world record for most balls juggled at a single time TODAY is only 11. The record was set by Alex Barron on the 3rd of April, 2012. Juggling 9 balls is still considered a massive achievement. I’ve never really been able to progress beyond 3.

There’s another story from the Spring and Autumn period of a man named Lanzi who was known to walk around on stilts that were “twice as long as his body” while juggling 7 jian swords. Let’s put aside, for a moment, that jian swords are not weighted even remotely close to how modern juggling clubs or knives are and that they are far longer. The current record for most clubs juggled is only 8. It was set in 2023 by Moritz Rosner who managed a bare 18 tosses and catches before losing the pattern. Lanzi, by the way, was probably not the guy's actual name. Lanzi was often used as a general term for itinerant entertainers during this time.

The Ancient Greek historian Manetho once described jugglers and acrobats thusly:  “birds of the country, the foulest brood of the city.” Male and female jugglers jumped forward and backward over swords or tables; girls threw up and caught again a number of balls or hoops to the accompaniment of a musical instrument; others displayed an astounding skill with their feet and toes while standing on their hands.

And the Greek historian Xenophon once had this to say about the performance of a dancing girl at a party hosted by Socrates: And at the instant her fellow with the flute commenced a tune to keep her company, whilst someone posted at her side kept handing her the hoops till she had twelve in all. With these in her hands she fell to dancing, and the while she danced she flung the hoops into the air - overhead she sent them twirling - judging the height they must be thrown to catch them as they fell in perfect time.

The record for ring juggling, by the way, is only 13 rings and was set in 2002 by Albert Lucas who managed exactly 13 throws and catches.

Now, many of these ancient historians were known to exaggerate, so it's unclear if these historic records are real, or if they were just picking numbers they assumed were impressive. If the former, it’s wild that the records have increased by so little. If the latter, they were correct.

Ancient Roman sources make mention of jugglers and juggling fairly frequently. They mention contact juggling with glass spheres a number of times and Sidonius Apollinaris, a Roman officer leading a legion in the French province of Niemen, allegedly wrote in his letters that he enjoyed juggling three or four balls as a hobby for his own satisfaction and to entertain his companions in the legions.

The Boke of Saint Albans, published in England in 1486, contains one of my very favorite  juggling fun facts. It mentions a “Neverthriving of Jugglers” as part of a list of collective nouns. This is hilarious and painful and it is nearly impossible to make a thriving wage as a juggler.

Stewart Culin in Games of the North American Indians, a book that was written in 2012 lists examples of juggling among the Naskapi, Eskimo, Achomawi, Bannock, Shoshone, Ute, and Zuni tribes of North America. One example, quoted from George Dorsey, describes a game played by Shoshone women who juggled up to four balls made of mud, cut gypsum, or rounded water-worn stones. Dorsey describes betting contests in which the women raced toward an objective such as a tree or tipi while juggling. This is very similar to a modern day sport called joggling where participants juggle while jogging.

From 1768 onwards, when Phillip Astley opened the first modern circus he included jugglers along with his equestrian acts, acrobatics, and clowns. And in 1793 when John Bill Rickets brought the idea of the circus to the United States and performed for George Washington he juggled while on horseback. So largely from the 18th century forward juggling has been heavily associated with the circus. There have been man firsts and exciting advancements made in the field of juggling over the years. From Jim Harrigan creating the concept of comedic juggling to Dewitt Cook inventing the modern concept of club juggling when he performed a routine using Indian Clubs. Indian clubs are a heavy wooden club that was and still are used as a strengthening and conditioning tool. They are much heavier and not weighted quite the same as modern plastic clubs.

There have also been more weird stories, such as Enrico Rastelli who was born in Siberia in 1896. Widely hailed as one of the greatest jugglers of all time he was the first recorded person to juggle 10 balls, though he was never able to juggle 9.

There was also Charles Hoey who was the first to juggle 4 clubs, though he could not stop juggling without dropping. When performing on stage the curtain had to be closed while he was still juggling so the audience wouldn't see him drop.

Juggling has a long and delightfully quirky history. It’s one of my favorite party trick, though one that I don’t practice as often as I used to or as often as I should. Still, it’s fun to do and fun to learn about. I hope you enjoyed learning about it, because next week it’s right back into the breach.

That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.

Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 16 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 15 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 7th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan, episode 13 was on Xinjiang, episode 14 was on Rakhine State, episode 15 was on Tigray, and today’s episode will focus on the current situation in Haiti.

Today’s trip to the Alchemist’s Table will look somewhat similar to last weeks. This drink is called Persephone’s Wedding. It starts with muddled mint before adding some lavender simple syrup and 2 oz of gin. Strain all that over ice and stir for about 30 seconds before topping with lemonade and garnishing with mint.

Starting in 1492 Haiti became one of the first European colonies following Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean with the settlement at La Navidad. Haiti would remain under European control until their revolution that ended in 1804. We’re glossing pretty heavily over the Haitian Revolution in today’s episode because the Haitian Revolution and the subsequent Haitian Massacre will be a later episode on this podcast.

Now, just because Haiti was now an independent nation and no longer a French colony didn’t mean that the country was free of European influence or control. Spain, Germany, and Britain still had large amounts of economic and political sway in the island nation. This would especially be the case when US President Woodrow Wilson, that racist movie loving fuck, sent the Marines to occupy Port au-Prince. Germany was also heavily invested in the island nation, and while the US wasn’t in World War 1 yet, they had severe anxieties over an anti-American, and pro-German, president being installed so they took over the nation, overthrew Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, the then president of Haiti. The Marines declared martial law and severely censored the press. Within weeks, a new pro-U.S. Haitian president, Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, was installed and a new constitution written that was favorable to the interests of the United States. The constitution (written by future US President Franklin D. Roosevelt) included a clause that allowed, for the first time, foreign ownership of land in Haiti, which was bitterly opposed by the Haitian legislature and citizenry.

The US would keep a firm grip on Haitian politics, even after their occupation ended in 1934. Haiti would now enter an even greater period of political instability (which is not to say that US occupation was a good thing, an end of colonial occupation often sees old ethnic tensions flare up and massive violence enacted to dismantle colonial power structures).

The president at the end of the occupation, Sténio Vincent was forced to step down under US pressure in 1941 and was replaced by Élie Lescot who served until 1946 when he was overthrown in a military coup d'etat and replaced by Dumarsais Estimé until 1950 when HE was overthrown in a military coup and replaced by the staunchly anti-communist Paul Magloire who was strongly supported by the US.

Now despite the massive amounts of political instability that we just discussed, it is about to get worse with the Duvalier dynasty. 

In 1956–57 Haiti underwent severe political turmoil; Magloire was forced to resign and leave the country in 1956 and he was followed by four short-lived presidencies. In the September 1957 election François Duvalier was elected President of Haiti. Known as 'Papa Doc' and initially popular, Duvalier remained President until his death in 1971. He advanced black interests in the public sector, where over time, people of color had predominated as the educated urban elite. Not trusting the army, despite his frequent purges of officers deemed disloyal, Duvalier created a private militia known as Tontons Macoutes ("Bogeymen"), which maintained order by terrorizing the populace and political opponents. In 1964 Duvalier proclaimed himself 'President for Life'; an uprising against his rule that year in Jérémie was violently suppressed, with the ringleaders publicly executed and hundreds of mixed-raced citizens in the town killed. The bulk of the educated and professional class began leaving the country, and corruption became widespread. Duvalier sought to create a personality cult, identifying himself with Baron Samedi, one of the loa (or lwa), or spirits, of Haitian Vodou. Despite the well-publicized abuses under his rule, Duvalier's firm anti-Communism earned him the support of the Americans, who furnished the country with aid.

This is something you will find about the United States. While they style themselves the land of the free and the home of the brave they’re more than willing to finance and support dictators as long as they 1. Oppose communism and 2. Give the US a free hand to control their economy. So it didn’t matter to the “Greatest Country on Earth” is Papa Doc was killing mixed race people and all of his political opponents. He was anti-communist and that was good enough.

Now there WAS a coup attempt against Duvalier in the first year of his reign (the first of many) led by some of the military officials he had fired. Those men thought that they could come riding back in and that the people, fed up of Papa Doc’s growing autocratic tendencies, would rally to them and they would quickly restore the old social order. But Haiti had gone through 4 presidents the year before Papa Doc came into office and while he wasn’t the best loved president, he was considered competent (having previous served as Minister of Health) and he was bringing order and stability to the country. So the coup attempters.. There’s got to be a better way of saying that, were all killed and their bodies dragged through the streets of Port au-Prince, as if each citizen was a little Achilles dragging Hector around the walls of Troy.

Papa Doc, despite the multiple coup attempts, did reign as president for life. He was still President when he died in 1971 and was immediately replaced by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed Baby Doc. Baby Doc assumed the “presidency” at the age of 19, making him the youngest president in world history.

Jean-Claude tried to reign back some of the harsher policies of his father, but was still deposed in a popular uprising in 1986 and forced to step down and flee the country.

Haiti would then fall under the rule of its military for a brief time and then had a series of bad elections and even more coups. There was a coup in June of 1988, another in September of 1988, and a third one in September of 1991. The US would send troops in under Operation Uphold Democracy to try and bring some stability to Haiti. Though, as is always the case when the US tries to bring free market reforms and “democracy” to a country they did a shitty job of it. 

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had been elected president in 1990 and had been deposed in the 1991 coup returned to finish out his term, lost in 1995, but was reelected again in the year 2000. He would then be deposed AGAIN in 2004 in another coup d’etat. 

One of Aristide’s worst decisions while in office was when he outlawed pro-Duvalier militias like the Macoute, but he also ordered the disbandment of the Haitian Army. So the Army disbanded, but never disarmed and just would up forming or joining various militia groups. From 1994 to 2004, a de facto anti-Arisitide insurgency took place in Port-au-Prince, as ex-soldiers attacked the government. In response to the chaos, youth set up self-defense groups, called chimères, which were supported by the police and the government to shore up its position. Receiving de facto state support from Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party, the youth gangs took control of entire communes and became increasingly independent-minded. U.S. diplomat Daniel Lewis Foote argued, "Aristide started [the gangs] on purpose in the early 1980s, as a voice, as a way to get some power [for ordinary Hatians], [...] and they morphed over the years."

Now, the precise nature of the events of the 2004 coup are disputed; some, including Aristide and his bodyguard, Franz Gabriel, stated that he was the victim of a "new coup d'état or modern kidnapping" by U.S. forces. These charges were denied by the US government. As political violence and crime continued to grow, a United Nations Stabilisation Mission (MINUSTAH) was brought in to maintain order. However, MINUSTAH proved controversial, since their periodically heavy-handed approach to maintaining law and order and several instances of abuses, including the alleged sexual abuse of civilians, provoked resentment and distrust among ordinary Haitians.

So now Haiti has no standing army, armed militias and gangs fighting on and off in the streets, an UN peacekeeping mission sexually abusing civilians and they’re about to be hit with a Magnitude 7 earthquake.

On 12 January 2010, at 4:53 pm local time, Haiti was struck by a magnitude-7.0 earthquake. This was the country's most severe earthquake in over 200 years. The earthquake was reported to have left between 160,000 and 300,000 people dead and up to 1.6 million homeless, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded. It is also one of the deadliest earthquakes ever recorded. The situation was exacerbated by a subsequent massive cholera outbreak that was triggered when cholera-infected waste from a United Nations peacekeeping station contaminated the country's main river, the Artibonite. In 2017, it was reported that roughly 10,000 Haitians had died and nearly a million had been made ill. After years of denial, the United Nations apologized in 2016, but as of 2017, they have refused to acknowledge fault, thus avoiding financial responsibility.

And now, we’re at the Haitian Gang War. The Vox journalist Ellen Ioanes summarized the beginnings of the situation quite well: "Haiti has faced serious and compounding crises, including a devastating 2010 earthquake, floods, cholera outbreaks, hurricanes, and corrupt, dictatorial, and incompetent leaders". Gangs stepped into the power vacuum, seizing political power through co-operative politicians and economic control through protection rackets, kidnappings and murders.

As of 2022 researchers form the NGO Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime have estimated that there are some 200 gangs in Haiti and that most of them are set up somewhere in Port au-Prince. Sexual violence from members of these gangs is a common crime being committed nearly daily against people from rival gang territories. Rape only became a crime in Haiti in 2005 and abortion is still illegal, so rape victims are legally required to keep those children. Though as we know, making abortion illegal doesn’t stop abortions, it just stops safe ones.

One of the most powerful gangs in Haiti at this time is, technically, an alliance of gangs, called the G9 alliance is lead by a former police officer named Jimmy Chérizier, nicknamed Barbecue. G9 is based in the capital's communes of Delmas, Pétion-Ville and parts of Carrefour. The G9 alliance includes many former soldiers and policemen in its ranks and was long connected to the PHTK party (which is a Center-Right political party) until distancing itself after Ariel Henry became president. The G9 now portrays itself as a revolutionary organization, and has begun to create a nation-wide alliance network dubbed "G20".

Since the coalition was founded, it has been responsible for multiple massacres against civilians and clashes with other rival gangs. From 2020 to 2021, the G9 was responsible for a dozen massacres, in which at least 200 people were killed. The G9 was believed to have had close ties to the government of Moïse, which was accused of large-scale corruption. The coalition members frequently evaded prosecution after the massacres and the clashes. Chérizier stood out in that regard because despite the arrest warrants against him, he continued to move freely and to maintain an active presence on social media with no effective attempts by Haitian government forces to arrest him. The G9 also began attacking neighborhoods in which civilians protested against the president and started clashes against rival gangs with the support of the police.

Now, in 2021 Jovenel Moïse, the 43rd president of Haiti was assassinated and then Ariel Henry (who some suspect to be involved in the assassination) served as acting Prime Minister of the country until he stepped down this past April.

Henry’s removal from power was long sought by the G9 gang alliance. Cherizier had this to say on the issue in March 2024 "If Ariel Henry doesn't resign, if the international community continues to support him, we'll be heading straight for a civil war that will lead to genocide" 

"Either Haiti becomes a paradise or a hell for all of us. It's out of the question for a small group of rich people living in big hotels to decide the fate of people living in working-class neighborhoods," he added.

Now, while there are over 200 gangs in Haiti at the moment most of them have allied themselves with the G9 alliance, or with the gang alliance that popped up to oppose the G9, known as G-Pep. But also, as of late 2022 an anti-gang bwa kale vigilante movement emerged to attack and kill any gang members. The vigilantes often burned captured gang members alive. Of course, the gangs responded with counter attacks against both the vigilantes and anyone who expressed support of the vigilanties.

By mid-2023, the gang war between G9 and G-Pep continued unabated, and the resistance by anti-gang vigilantes also grew in scope. Thousands of people were displaced by the clashes. The severity of the ongoing gang war in Haiti has led to the United Nations Security Council authorizing a one-year deployment of an international force led by Kenya to help the Haitian government deal with the crisis. Chérizier declared that G9 would resist if an international intervention force committed "human rights abuses" and claimed that it would "be a fight of the Haitian people to save the dignity of our country."

Despite the horrors he is committing against his own people Cherizier really and truly believes that he is fighting on behalf of a free Haiti. There isn’t a genocide in Haiti, as of yet, but there is a massive civil war between militias and gangs with human rights abuses on all sides of this conflict.

On 18 June 2024, the International Organization for Migration reported that more than 580,000 people have been displaced by the increased violence in Haiti since March of 2024. The report also warned that since most of the people displaced have been from communities already struggling with poor social conditions, there may be more tension and violence in the coming days.

An international policing force, known as Multinational Security Support Mission in Haiti was authorized under UN Resolution 2699 on October 2, 2023 to assist the Haitian National Police in stopping this gang war. Nations who will be taking place in this mission include Antigua and Barbuda, Bangladesh, Barbados, Benin, Chad, Guyana, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Dominica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Jamaica, Kenya, Suriname, and the Bahamas. The first deployment of 400 troops from Kenya has officially put boots on the ground as of June 25, 2024. 

This ongoing gang war will not be resolved anytime soon and it can, and will, get worse before it gets better. Haiti has never had a chance to build a stable society or government. A long and ongoing history of foreign interference, ceaseless coups and natural disasters mean that Haiti has always been on the back foot.

We also have to take into account Haiti’s natural resources, because that’s the only reason any imperial power would ever care about Haiti. According to WorldAtlas.com, recent findings suggest that Haiti might have some of the largest oil reserves in the world, potentially larger than those of Venezuela. The country is estimated to be sitting on about 159 billion cubic feet of natural gas and 142 million barrels of oil, with undiscovered reserves possibly holding up to 941 million barrels of crude oil and about 1.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

According the the State Department the US doesn’t currently have plans to send troops to Haiti. I’m sure that will change.

That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Haiti.

Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 15 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 14 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 6th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan, episode 13 was on Xinjiang, episode 14 was on Rakhine State, and today’s episode will cover the genocide that is ongoing in Tigray in Ethiopia.

Let’s see what the Alchemist’s Table has in store for us this time. Today’s libation is called Memories of Summer. Muddle some mint and strawberries in the bottom of your shaker, add .5 oz of simple syrup, 2 oz of gunpowder gin, stir well for about 30 seconds before double straining over ice and topping with lemonade. Garnish with a sprig of fresh mint and enjoy.

Now it’s time for everyone’s favorite part, it’s time for the historical context. Tigray is both the northernmost regional state in Ethiopia, as well as an ethnicity. Tigray is known as the birthplace of Ethiopian civilization and their motto is “There is no mountain we would not climb.” That’s fucking badass.

When the Scramble for Africa began at the end of the 19th century CE barely 10% of africa was under EUropean colonial control, and by the time World War 1 broke out more than 90% of the country had been colonized, with only Liberia and Ethiopia remaining free states. While Ethiopia remained under its own sovereign control, this was in large part because they willingly allied themselves with Great Britain. In fact many Ethiopian troops fought on the side of Britain during the Mahdist War in Sudan that we discussed on Day 12.

Part of Ethiopia’s independence also came from their alliances with Italy. King Menelik II of Ethiopia signed the Treaty of Wuchale with Italy in 1889. This treaty guaranteed Ethiopian sovereignty as long as Italy could control areas north of Ethiopia’s currently held territory (in areas that are now the nation of Eritrea) and in return Ethiopia would receive arms and munitions and Menelik would have Italian support as emperor. Menelik would remain emperor from 1889 until his death in 1913. Though, it is worth noting that Etiopia was only able to maintain its sovereignty because of their victory during the Italo-Ethiopian War that ran from January 1895 until October 1896.

The beginning of Menelik’s rule was marked by severe tragedy though as it coincided with the 1890s African rinderpest epizootic. Which is a very fancy way of saying that disease killed 90% of Ethiopia’s cattle and that this, combined with a drought caused by reduced rainfall killed about 1/3rd of the country’s population. The virus, known as Rinderpest, is potentially thought to have been introduced into Eritrea in 1887 by Indian cattle brought by the Italians for their campaign against Somalia. Lack of rainfall from as early as 16 November 1888 led to famine in all but southernmost provinces; locusts and caterpillar infestations destroy crops in Akele Guzay, Begemder, Shewa, and around Harar. Conditions worsened with a typhus epidemic, a major smallpox epidemic (1889–90), and cholera outbreaks (1889–92). Making the beginning of Melenik’s rule really fucking bad.

Near the end of his life Melenik was filled with with concern over issues of succession. He hadn’t yet picked an heir and if he died without one his nation would descend into civil war and would become ripe for the picking for European colonial powers. He would eventually settle on one of his grandchildren Lij Iyasu, as his heir. Iyasu would only reign for about 3 years before being deposed on charges of converting to Islam. Ethiopia had been a Christian kingdom since King Ezana of the Aksumite Empire adopted Christianity as the official religion in the 4th century CE. There’s no definitive proof that Iyasu converted to Islam at any point in his life, but there was enough “proof” that everyone felt comfortable stipping him of authority and giving it to Haile Selassie. He served as the Regent for Empress Zedwditu from 1916 until her death in 1930, and after her death served as Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 until he was deposed in 1974 by the Derg following the 1973 oil crisis.

Derg or Dergue is Amharic (a Semitic language descended from Ge’ez, which is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It translates as committee or council.

Now, Ethiopia would fall under partial Italian control during the 1930s as part of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War between Fascist Italy and Ethiopia, and while Italy would have some successes during this war, they’d never attain full control over Ethiopia, making Ethiopia the only African nation to not ever fall under colonial control. Some would argue that Liberia would fall under that umbrella as well, but considering that Liberia, as a nation, was artificially created by the US as a place for freed slaves to return to, I don’t think it qualifies.

Haile Selassie as the emperor of Ethiopia would be one of the founding members of the United Nations. Haile Selassie's rule ended on 12 September 1974, when he was deposed by the Derg, a committee made up of military and police officers. After the execution of 60 former government and military officials, the new Provisional Military Administrative Council abolished the monarchy in March 1975 and established Ethiopia as a Marxist-Leninist state. The abolition of feudalism, increased literacy, nationalization, and sweeping land reform including the resettlement and villagization from the Ethiopian Highlands became priorities.

Mengistu Haile Mariam would become the ruler of Ethiopia following the fall of Haile Selassie until in May 1991, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) forces advanced on Addis Ababa from all sides, and Mengistu fled the country with 50 family and Derg members. He was granted asylum in Zimbabwe as an official guest of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.

Now the period of Derg rule is also known as the Ethiopian Civil War. It lasted from 1974 until 1991. The Derg in its attempt to introduce full-fledged socialist ideals, fulfilled its main slogan of "Land to the Tiller", by redistributing land in Ethiopia that once belonged to landlords to the peasants tilling the land. Although this was made to seem like a fair and just redistribution, the mismanagement, corruption, and general hostility to the Derg's violent and harsh rule coupled with the draining effects of constant warfare, separatist guerrilla movements in Eritrea and Tigray, resulted in a drastic decline in general productivity of food and cash crops. Although Ethiopia is often prone to chronic droughts, no one was prepared for the scale of drought and the 1983–1985 famine that struck the country in the mid-1980s, in which 400,000–590,000 people are estimated to have died.  Hundreds of thousands fled economic misery, conscription and political repression, and went to live in neighboring countries and all over the Western world, creating an Ethiopian diaspora community for the first time in its history. Insurrections against the Derg's rule sprang up with ferocity, particularly in the northern regions of Tigray and Eritrea which sought independence and in some regions in the Ogaden.

The Ethiopian Civil War left at least 1.4 million people dead, with 1 million related to famine and the remainder from violence and conflicts, which is one third of population. 

In July 1991, the EPRDF convened a National Conference to establish the Transitional Government of Ethiopia composed of an 87-member Council of Representatives and guided by a national charter that functioned as a transitional constitution. In 1994, a new constitution was written that established a parliamentary republic with a bicameral legislature and a judicial system.

Mengistu's authoritarian military regime faced organized opposition for all of its fourteen years of rule. Opposition groups including the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Party (EPRP), a rival Marxist–Leninist group, and the Tigray-based Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, a coalition of ethnic democratic forces, led armed resistance to the Derg in a conflict known as the Ethiopian Civil War. The Derg used violence, commonly enacted through military campaigns, to suppress dissidents. In 1976, the Derg instigated the Qey Shibir (Ethiopian Red Terror), a violent political repression campaign targeting the EPRP.  Under Mengistu's leadership, the Derg did not only rely on state personnel to carry out the Qey Shibir; it also armed militias and civilian supporters and granted "genuine revolutionaries and patriots" impunity, further localizing state violence.  The Qey Shibir resulted in 50,000 fatalities.  In addition, many victims of the Qey Shibir were subjected to torture, exile, and sexual assault. The Qey Shibir and the 1983-1985 famine, an event partly created and exacerbated by the government's military policies, increased popular support for the EPRDF, which successfully overthrew Mengistu's regime in 1991.

As we entered the 21st century ethnic tensions began to increase between the people of northern Ethiopia, specifically in the Tigray region and the rest of the nation. 

Data from the Minorities at Risk (MAR) project were used by Charles E. Riddle to study the degrees of discrimination by the dominant Amharas against the non-dominant ethnic groups in Ethiopia from 1950 to 1992, during the later reign of Emperor Haile Selassie and that of Mengistu Haile Mariam of the Derg. Amharas dominated during the Haile Selassie epoch.  Systematic discrimination against Afars occurred throughout the period. Tigrayans were initially culturally assimilated with the Amharas, speaking Amharic, and suffered little discrimination. Under the Haile Selassie government, the Oromo language was legally banned from education, public speaking and use in administration. During the Haile Selassie regime, the Harari people were persecuted. The imperial forces ordered the confiscation of Harari property and mass arrests of Harari men, as a result an estimated 10,000 Hararis fled their homeland in 1948.

The Derg culturally rejected the Tigrayans, who decreased their usage of Amharic, reverting to Tigrinya, and discrimination against the Tigrayans became strong. Eritreans, treated by MAR and Riddle as an ethnic group, and Somalis were strongly discriminated against throughout the period. The Oromos were initially strongly discriminated against, but adopted Amharic as their official language when the Derg came to power, and discrimination against them dropped. Both the Haile Selassie and the Derg governments relocated numerous Amharas into southern Ethiopia where they served in government administration, courts, church and even in school, where Oromo texts were eliminated and replaced by Amharic. In the aftermath of the Ogaden War during the 70s, Hararis, Somalis and Oromo Muslims were targeted by the Derg Government.

This leads us to needing to talk about the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. The Tigray People's Liberation Front, also called the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, is a left-wing ethnic nationalist, paramilitary group, and the former ruling party of Ethiopia. The TPLF was in charge of Ethiopia from the time the Derg was overthrown in 1991 until 2018.

Now it’s finally time to get to the beginnings of the Tigray Wart and the Tigray genocide. To do that we need to discuss the 2020 Tigray regional election. As we stated previously, Tigray is a regional state of Ethiopia, and in 2020 Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia postponed the 2020 general election over concerns of COVID 19. Tigray decided to hold their elections anyway, regardless of the proclamation made by Ahmed. Their election was considered illegal by the Ethiopian federal government. The TPLF won 98.2 percent of the vote.

After years of increased tensions and hostilities between the TPLF and the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea, fighting began when TPLF forces attacked the Northern Command headquarters of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), alongside a number of other bases in Tigray. The ENDF counterattacked from the south – while Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) began launching attacks from the north – which Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed described as a "law enforcement operation".

The war officially ended in November 2022. On 2 November 2022, the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan leaders signed a peace accord, with the African Union as a mediator, and agreed on "orderly, smooth and coordinated disarmament". The agreement was made effective the next day on 3 November, marking the two-year anniversary of the war.

As part of this process, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appointed TPLF's Getachew Reda as head of the Interim Regional Administration of Tigray, and the Ethiopian parliament removed the TPLF from its terrorism list.

But where does the Tigray Genocide come into play? Why are we talking about this civil war in this podcast? Let’s get into it.

Issued on Tuesday, June 4th  by the United States-based New Lines Institute, aa 120-page draft quotes multiple, widespread and credible independent reports that Ethiopian forces and their allies carried out “acts constituting the crime of genocide” during the conflict, which ran between 2020-22. The authors call for Ethiopia to be brought before the International Court of Justice.

In a report issued in September 2023, the United Nations said war crimes and crimes against humanity were still being committed nearly a year after government and Tigrayan regional forces agreed to end the fighting.

It says the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), alongside the allied Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) and assorted regional militia “possessed the intent to destroy Tigrayans as an ethnic group”.

At least four acts constituting the crime of genocide are noted in the report: killing Tigrayans, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life upon Tigrayans calculated to bring about their destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births among Tigrayans.

Additionally, the finger is pointed at social media posts made by “certain individuals” that constitute public incitement to genocide.

Ethiopia, which has been accused of seeking to prevent international scrutiny, has repeatedly denied that its forces carried out war crimes during the conflict. Eritrea has claimed such accusations against it are defamatory.

However, the new report, which took two years to compile and features the contribution of dozens of legal experts, backs up the findings of the UN by stating that there is “reasonable basis to believe” that the countries are responsible for war crimes and/or crimes against humanity.

In conclusion, the authors call on the international community to put pressure on Ethiopia via bilateral relations, as well as bringing the country before the ICJ. The war had a devastating impact on the healthcare system of Tigray; of the 853 health facilities in the region, 86% were at least partially damaged; 232 of them were left "completely unusable", and 28 were destroyed entirely.

It also led to a higher rate of maternal and infant mortality in the Tigray Region. In a study funded by UNFPA Ethiopia and UNICEF Ethiopia, it was estimated that maternal mortality rates had increased from 186 deaths per 100,000 people pre-war to 840 deaths per 100,000 people post-war.

According to Tigrayan health official Tsegay Gidey, 81% of mothers in the Seharti Samre woreda had birth defects, and 32 newborn infants had died between January–June 2023.

Although the war largely came to a halt after the peace agreement was signed, Eritrea continues to occupy parts of Tigray as of mid-2023. The EDF has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in northern Ethiopia since November 2022; from 17 to 25 November alone, Eritrea was reported to have destroyed 241 houses and killed at least 111 people. by 30 December, it was estimated that Eritrean and Amhara forces killed 3,700 since the signing of the peace deal.

The Tigray Health Bureau noted that 852 cases of rape and sexual assault were reported between November and December 2022; according to aid workers and interviews with survivors, most of these were committed by Eritrean forces.

As of January 2023, over half of Irob district was occupied by Eritrea. Irob advocacy groups and former residents have described it as a "de-facto annexation" of the area. A religious Irob leader told The Guardian in August 2023 that Eritrea was blocking off international aid to the area, and lamented that "there has been no improvement for us since the peace."

 In January 2024, Human Rights Watch reported that authorities and regional forces were still forcibly expelling Tigrayans from their homes in the Western Tigray Zone, which is largely inaccessible to humanitarian agencies. Additionally, nearly 40% of the Tigrayan population is suffering from extreme food shortages, a situation made worse by the World Food Program's suspension of aid deliveries in May 2023.

All the available evidence points to a continued genocide against the Tigray people from the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea as they as systematically denied food, water and access to medical care. 

The Tigray Genocide is often described as “The War The World Forgot”, and based on the West’s general attitude towards Africa this feels right. Especially when I account for the fact that I, a genocide studies scholar didn’t even know about the Tigray Genocide until 2024. I account this a failure on my part, but also on the part of the global mainstream media that this never even came across any of the news websites I frequent, nor the social media websites I, more often, get reputable news from. That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Tigray.

Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 14 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 13 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 5th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan, episode 13 was on Xinjiang, and today’s episode will talk about the genocide of the Rohingya people of Myanmar.

It’s officially the end of week 2! We made it. Congratulations one and all on surviving 2 weeks worth of weeks. As a gift for you all we’re going to visit the Alchemist’s Table. Today;s libation is called Prohibition Sweet Tooth. It’s 1.5 ounces each of Redemption Bourbon and Creme de Cacao, followed by .75 oz of Frangelico. Shake well and pour over ice.

Officially the Rohingya genocide began around 2016 and continues to this day, but as we know from every other episode we’ve had so far, genocide’s don’t just pop up out of nowhere all of the sudden. There is context, there is a roadmap of hindsight that we can follow back to, if not a starting point at least a starting line.

So, first, let’s talk about Myanmar. There have been homonid species living on Myanmar for about 750,000 years, first in the form of Homo erectus and then Homo sapiens starting around 25,000 years ago. Then a whole lot of history happened that, while fascinating and important, isn’t strictly relevant to what we’re going to discuss today.

Starting on January 1, 1886 Myanmar (then called Burma) was officially annexed by the British Empire under the control of the British East India Company. Burma would remain under British rule until 1948. Burma was officially declared an independent state by an act of Parliament, specifically the Burma Independence Act 1947. Burma then remained under a civilian government until 1962, at which point it was overthrown in a coup detat and Burma (which became Myanmar officially in 1989) has been under military rule since then.

Between 1962 and 1974, Myanmar was ruled by a revolutionary council headed by the general. Almost all aspects of society (business, media, production) were nationalised or brought under government control under the Burmese Way to Socialism, which combined Soviet-style nationalisation and central planning. A long series of anti-government protests resulted in a popular uprising in 1988, sometimes called the 8888 Uprising. This would lead directly to the renaming of the country from Burma to Myanmar and the country’s first free, multiparty elections in 30 years.

So, as you can see Myanmar has had an interesting and contentious history born of a desire for a strong sense of national unity, stability, and growth. It was the instability of the civilian government, the lack of growth, the skyrocketing crime rates, and the fear of the disintegration of Burma into several smaller nations that would lead to the 1962 coup after all. When your country has such a strong, almost rabid desire for unity and strength and national identity it always goes hand in hand with a desire for a homogenous society. The Germans in World War 2 felt it. The Ottomans in World War 1 felt it. It’s what nations who fear their own collapse DO. They look for the divisive elements, the ones who don’t fit the majority mold and they say “Hey, these people won’t fall in line. They’re dividing out country, threatening it with their different religion, culture, values, etc. We can solve all of our problems, save our country if we just… get rid of them”.

Myanmar is a Buddhist majority country, by an overwhelming margin. According to the 2014 Myanmar census 90% of the country's population (of about 56 million) is Buddhist. 6.3% is Christian and just over 2% is Muslim.

The Rohingya people, the subjects of our episode for today and Mulsim, so let’s dive back and take a look at the history of Muslim persecution in Myanmar. The first Muslim documented in Burmese history (recorded in the Glass Palace Chronicle) was Byat Wi during the reign of Mon, a Thaton king, circa 1050 AD. The two sons of Byat Wi's brother Byat Ta, known as Shwe Byin brothers, were executed as children either because of their Islamic faith, or because they refused forced labor.

Throughout the premodern era various restrictions were placed on Muslim communities in Burma. The Burmese king Bayinnaung banned Islamic ritual slaughter, thereby prohibiting Muslims from consuming halal meals of goats and chicken. He also banned Eid al-Adha and Qurbani, regarding killing animals in the name of religion as a cruel custom. Burma having largely adopted Buddhism by the 12th century CE.

Although, in a strange, cruel, and somewhat ironic twist King Bodawpaya from 1782–1819 arrested four prominent Burmese Muslim Imams from Myedu and killed them in Ava, the capital, after they refused to eat pork. According to the Myedu Muslim and Burma Muslim version, Bodawpaya later apologized for the killings and recognised the Imams as saints.

During the "Burma for Burmese" campaign in the late 1930s, a violent demonstration took place in Surti Bazaar, a Muslim area. When the police, who were ethnically Indian (there was a lot of anti-Indian sentiment in Burma in the 1930s, and because most Indian people living in Burma were Muslim, this also affected Muslim Burmese people), tried to break up the demonstration, three monks were injured. Images of monks being injured by ethnically Indian policemen were circulated by Burmese newspapers, provoking riots. Muslim properties, including shops and houses were looted. According to official sources, 204 Muslims were killed and over 1,000 were injured. 113 mosques were damaged.

Panglong, a Chinese Muslim town in British Burma, was entirely destroyed by the Japanese invaders in the Japanese invasion of Burma in World War 2. And, after the 1962 coup all Muslim troops were expelled from the Army. 

And, of course, we need to talk about the 1997 Mandalay Riots. Mandalay is the second largest city in Myanmar. a mob of 1,000–1,500 Buddhist monks and others shouted anti-Muslim slogans as they targeted mosques, shop-houses, and vehicles that were in the vicinity of mosques for destruction. Looting, the burning of religious books, acts of sacrilege, and vandalizing Muslim-owned establishments were also common. At least three people were killed and around 100 monks arrested. The unrest in Mandalay allegedly began after reports of an attempted rape of a girl by Muslim men, though there’s no way to know if that story is true or not.

In 2001, anti-Muslim pamphlets, most notably The Fear of Losing One's Race, were widely distributed by monks. Many Muslims feel that this exacerbated the anti-Muslim feelings that had been provoked by the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. (The Buddhas are two giant statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan that daye from about the 6th century CE, they have long been considered a holy site by Buddhists and they were destroyed by the Talbian in 2001). And that’s why on 15 May 2001, anti-Muslim riots broke out in Taungoo, Pegu division, resulting in the deaths of about 200 Muslims, in the destruction of 11 mosques and the setting ablaze of over 400 houses. On 15 May, the first day of the anti-Muslim uprisings, about 20 Muslims who were praying in the Han Tha mosque were killed and some were beaten to death by the pro-junta forces.

Now, something that we need to discuss before I forget to is that since 1982 the Rohingya have been denied voting rights and citizenship within Myanmar thanks to the 1982 Citizenship Law. The law created three categories of citizenship: the first category applied to ethnic Burmans and members of the Kachin, Kayah, Karen, Mon, Arakan Buddhists, Shan, and any other ethnic group present in Myanmar prior to 1823 (though they did not include Rohingya Muslims, rendering them stateless), granted them full citizenship.

The second category granted partial “associate” citizenship to the children of mixed marriages where one parents fell into the first category, as well as to individuals who had lived in Myanmar for five consecutive years, or to individuals who lived in Myanmar for eight out of the ten years prior to independence. Associate citizens could earn an income, but could not serve in political office. The third category applied to the offspring of immigrants who arrived in Myanmar during the period of British colonial rule.

When we look at the state of Myanmar during the 20th century we can very clearly see Levels 3 and 4 of the Pyramid of Hate. The Pyramid of Hate was created in the mid aughts and was based on the Alport Scale of Prejudice created by psychologist Gordon Alport in the 1950s. Simply put the five levels, going from bottom to top are thoughts, words, discriminatory policy, violence towards individuals because of their membership to the group and violence against the cultural markers of the group, and finally genocide. Myanmar, very obviously has and had discriminatory policy and violence towards individuals and their cultural markers. Massacres, riots, burning Qurans and mosques all fit under level 4.

But, of course, things can and did get worse. There was the 2012 Rakhine State riots. Sectarian violence erupted between the Rakhine ethnic group and the Rohingya and ended with most of the Rohingya population of Sittwe, the capital of the Rakhine State being expelled. Over the course of the riots that lasted most of June and erupted again in October a little over 160 people were killed and over 100,000 Rohingya were displaced.

We are now in our time of rapid escalation of violence as the next major anti Rohingya event would occur in March of 2013. But before we talk about the 2013 riots we need to talk about the 969 Movement. The 969 is a violently Islamophobic Buddhist Nationalist organization founded and run by Ashin Wirathu.

Time for a slight diversion for a fun fact: The three digits of 969 "symbolize the virtues of the Buddha, Buddhist practices and the Buddhist community". The first 9 stands for the nine special attributes of the Buddha and the 6 for the six special attributes of his Dharma, or Buddhist Teachings, and the last 9 represents the nine special attributes of Buddhist Sangha (monastic community). Those special attributes are the Three Jewels of the Buddha.

Wirathu claims that he does not advocate for violence against Muslims and that all he wants is peace, and yet in a Time magazine article he had this to say: "You can be full of kindness and love, but you cannot sleep next to a mad dog", Wirathu said, referring to Muslims. "If we are weak", he said, "our land will become Muslim".

The 2013 riots were particularly brutal. One incident involved several Muslim teenagers dragging a Buddhist man off of his bike and setting him on fire. As well as the deadliest incident of the riot which occurred when a Buddhist mob attacked and torched the Mingalar Zayone Islamic Boarding School. While outnumbered security forces stood by, rioters armed with machetes, metal pipes, chains, and stones killed 32 teenage students and four teachers.

Now, while 2016 would be the “official” start of the genocide we would be remiss if we skipped over the 2015 refugee crisis. In 2015, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas in Myanmar and Bangladesh fled from religious persecution and continued denial of basic rights in their home countries by means of boat travel, often through previously existing smuggling routes among the Southeast Asian waters. Many Rohingyas fled to Indonesia and Malaysia, which both adopted a stance open to acceptance of the Rohingya refugees still at sea in mid-May.

And now we’re at the genocide itself, though before we do that, let’s take a look at that the US State Department had to say about Myanmar and Rakhine shortly before the shit hit the fan.

The situation in Rakhine State is grim, in part due to a mix of long-term historical tensions between the Rakhine and Rohingya communities, socio-political conflict, socio-economic underdevelopment, and a long-standing marginalisation of both Rakhine and Rohingya by the Government of Burma. The World Bank estimates Rakhine State has the highest poverty rate in Burma (78 per cent) and is the poorest state in the country. The lack of investment by the central government has resulted in poor infrastructure and inferior social services, while lack of rule of law has led to inadequate security conditions. Members of the Rohingya community in particular reportedly face abuses by the Government of Burma, including those involving torture, unlawful arrest and detention, restricted movement, restrictions on religious practice, and discrimination in employment and access to social services. In 2012, the intercommunal conflict led to the death of nearly 200 Rohingya and the displacement of 140,000 people. Throughout 2013–2015 isolated incidents of violence against Rohingya individuals continued to take place.

In 2016 a Rohingya resistance group known as Harakah al-Yaqin formed and attacked several border police posts leaving 9 officers dead and looting as many munitions as they could. In response to this the government of Myanmar immediately began cracking down on all Rohingya people as quickly and viscously as they could.

In the initial operation, dozens of people were killed, and many were arrested. Casualties increased as the crackdown continued. Arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial killings, gang rapes, brutalities against civilians, and looting were carried out. Media reports stated hundreds of Rohingya people had been killed by December 2016, and many had fled Myanmar as refugees to take shelter in the nearby areas of Bangladesh.

Those who fled Myanmar to escape persecution reported that women had been gang raped, men were killed, houses were torched, and young children were thrown into burning houses. Boats carrying Rohingya refugees on the Naf River were often gunned down by the Burmese military.

In a report published in March 2024, the IIMM stated the military had in a "systematic and coordinated" manner "spread material designed to instil fear and hatred of the Rohingya minority". The report found military was used dozens of seemingly unrelated Facebook pages to spread hate speech against the Rohingya prior before the 2017 Rohingya genocide. This is similar in intent to the use of radio stations to spread constant anti Tutsi propaganda during the Rwandan genocide, though obviously as information technology advances methods get more sophisticated. Though I hesitate to call Facebook sophisticated..

In August 2018, a study estimated that more than 24,000 Rohingya people were killed by the Burmese military and local Buddhists since the "clearance operations" which had started on 25 August 2017. The study also estimated that over 18,000 Rohingya Muslim women and girls were raped, 116,000 Rohingyans were beaten, and 36,000 Rohingyans were thrown into fires. It was also reported that at least 6,700 to 7,000 Rohingya people including 730 children were killed in the first month alone since the crackdown started.

In September 2018, the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar released a report stating that at least 392 Rohingya villages in Rakhine State had been razed to the ground since 25 August 2017. Earlier, Human Rights Watch in December 2017 said it had found that 354 Rohingya villages in Rakhine state were burnt down and destroyed by the Myanmar military.

In November 2017, both the UN officials and the Human Rights Watch reported that the Armed Forces of Myanmar had committed widespread gang rapes and other forms of sexual violence against the Rohingya Muslim women and girls for the prior three months. HRW stated that the gang rapes and sexual violence were committed as part of the military's ethnic cleansing campaign while Pramila Patten, the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, said that the Rohingya women and girls were made the "systematic" target of rapes and sexual violence because of their ethnic identity and religion.

In February 2018, it was reported that the Burmese military bulldozed and flattened the burnt Rohingya villages and mass graves in order to destroy the evidence of atrocities committed. These villages were inhabited by the Rohingya people before they were burnt down by the Burmese military during the 2017 crackdown.

Since the 25 August incident, Myanmar blocked media access and the visits of international bodies to Rakhine State. Rakhine State has been called an information black hole.

According to the Mission report of OHCHR (released on 11 October 2017 by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights), the Burmenese military began a "systematic" process of driving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar in early August 2017. The report noted that "prior to the incidents and crackdown of 25 August, a strategy was pursued to":

Arrest and arbitrarily detain male Rohingyas between the ages of 15–40 years;

Arrest and arbitrarily detain Rohingya opinion-makers, leaders and cultural and religious personalities;

Initiate acts to deprive Rohingya villagers of access to food, livelihoods and other means of conducting daily activities and life;

Commit repeated acts of humiliation and violence prior to, during and after 25 August, to drive out Rohingya villagers en masse through incitement to hatred, violence, and killings, including by declaring the Rohingyas as Bengalis and illegal settlers in Myanmar;

Instill deep and widespread fear and trauma – physical, emotional and psychological, in the Rohingya victims via acts of brutality, namely killings, disappearances, torture, and rape and other forms of sexual violence.

In addition to the massive and horrific amounts of violence that are occuring, even now, inside Myanmar there is also the refugee crisis we mentioned earlier. There are over 700,000 Rohingya people who have been displaced from their homes and are living in refugee camps in surrounding countries. Most fled to Bangladesh while others escaped to India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other parts of South and Southeast Asia.

On 12 September 2018, the OHCHR Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar published its report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Following 875 interviews with victims and eyewitnesses since 2011, it concluded that "the [Burmese] military has consistently failed to respect international human rights law and the international humanitarian law principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution." Even before the most recent incident of mass Rohingya displacement began in 2011, the report found that the restrictions on travel, birth registration, and education resulting from Rohingya statelessness violated the Rohingya people's human rights. During the mass displacement of almost 725,000 Rohingya by August 2018 to neighbouring Bangladesh, as a result of persecution by the Tatmadaw, the report recorded "gross human rights violations and abuses" such as mass rape, murder, torture, and imprisonment. It also accused the Tatmadaw of crimes against humanity, genocide, and ethnic cleansing. The mission report recommended that six Burmese generals in the Tatmadaw stand trial in an international tribune for atrocities committed against the Rohingya.

Despite all this the UN refuses to do anything substantive. Instead they are still trying to cooperate with the Tatmadaw and convince them to stop committing genocide. The UN has always been a useless tool of appeasement, Western imperialism, and white supremacy that refuses to hold anyone accountable. Of course, if the UN held genocidal regimes accountable they’d have to arrest the entire permanent Security Council so, the lack of accountability isn’t surprising. It’s why cops don’t arrest other cops.

You may have noticed that the dates in this episode stop after 2018, you also might remember that Myanmar has been called an information black hole. The genocide is still ongoing, nothing has gotten better and it’s probably gotten worse, but getting verifiable information out of Myanmar is all but impossible at this point. Keep Myanmar in your sight.

That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Rakhine.  

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 13 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 12 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 4th part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, episode 12 was on Sudan and today’s will be on a very widely denied genocide, especially in left wing political circles. The Uyghur Genocide.

But first, let’s fortify ourselves with the waters of life and remember that part of our activism needs to always be finding joy in life and getting ourselves a little treat. It’s time for the Alchemist’s Table. Today’s libation is called a Rumsberry Breeze. In your shaker muddle some raspberries with half an ounce of simple syrup. Add two ounces of dark rum. Shake well and double strain over ice. Top with ginger beer and enjoy.

The genocide of the Uyghur people and the longer history of ethnic tensions between Han Chinese and the Uyghur peoples has centered around Xinjiang for as long as it’s been around. First thing’s first. Let’s dive a bit into the history of the Uyghur people. The Uyghur are an ethnically Turkic people living, mostly in the Tarim and Dzungarian Basins in East Turkestan (what is sometimes called Uyghurstan) today. Xinjiang, sometimes also called the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, has been under Chinese control since it was conquered from the Dzungar Khanate in around 1759.

Now, how long have the Uyghur people been living in the area? Well, that’s a matter of some contention and the answer you get will depend on what sources you go with. The history of the Uyghur people, including their ethnic origin, is an issue of contention between Uyghur nationalists and Chinese authorities. Uyghur historians view Uyghurs as the original inhabitants of Xinjiang, with a long history. Uyghur politician and historian Muhammad Amin Bughra wrote in his book A history of East Turkestan, stressing the Turkic aspects of his people, that the Turks have a 9,000-year history, while historian Turgun Almas incorporated discoveries of Tarim mummies to conclude that Uyghurs have over 6,400 years of history. The World Uyghur Congress has claimed a 4,000-year history. However, the official Chinese view, as documented in the white paper History and Development of Xinjiang, asserts that the Uyghurs in Xinjiang formed after the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate in ninth-century CE Mongolia, from the fusion of many different indigenous peoples of the Tarim Basin and the westward-migrating Old Uyghurs.

Regardless of which timeline we go with, the Uyghur people have certainly been living in the region for far longer than the Chinese Empires that have been dominating them for hundreds of years. And, make no mistake, modern day China is still very much imperial.

Something that we’ll cover in more detail later, as it is very relevant to the current genocide, is that the Uyghur people are, as a general rule, Muslim. The earliest records we have indicate that before this conversion to Islam around the 10th century CE the Old Uyghur people (Old Uyghur is meant to differentiate the Pre-Chinese Uyghur population from the modern one) followed the Tocharian religion. We don’t really have any details about what, exactly, that religion entailed, but today most of the Tocharian inscriptions are based on Buddhist monastic texts, which suggests that the Tocharians largely embraced Buddhism. The pre-Buddhist beliefs of the Tocharians are largely unknown, but several Chinese goddesses are similar to the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European sun goddess and the dawn goddess, which implies that the Chinese were influenced by the pre-Buddhist beliefs of the Tocharians when they traveled on trade routes which were located in Tocharian territories. 

The history of China’s abuses over the peoples they conquered is a long one, but details on the exact situation of the Uyghur people are somewhat few and far between. However two of the most important parts of Uyghur-Chinese history in the region come from the 19th century CE with the Dungan Revolt and the Dzungar genocide.

Something we need to note right now is that the modern Uyghur Ethnic group wasn’t called the Uyghur before the Soviet Union gave them that name in 1921, although the modern Ughurs are descended from the Old Uyghurs, at the time of the Dungan Revolt and the Dzungar Genocide they were known by the Chinese as Turki or Taranchi. So if you’re ever reading sources about these two events, you might not ever see the word Uyghur, despite them being involved in both events.

The Dungan Revolt lasted from 1862 until 1877 and saw a roughly 21 million people killed. According to research by modern historians, at least 4 million Hui were in Shaanxi before the revolt, but only 20,000 remained in the province afterwards, with most of the Hui either killed in massacres and reprisals by government and militia forces, or deported out of the province. It has its roots in the ongoing ethnic tensions between the Hui (Muslim) minorities of China and the ethnic Han peoples. It also stemmed from economic conflicts as Han merchants were known to greatly overcharge Hui peoples and there was massive corruption and fiscal instability resulting from the Taiping Rebellion that led to the peoples of Xinjiang being heavily burdened by unfair taxes. 

All of these tensions would explode into a riot in 1862 (some sources say over inflated pricing on bamboo stalks). As a result of this there was a massacre of Han people’s by the Hui and everything snowballed from there.

With the start of the revolt in Gansu and Shaanxi in 1862, rumors spread among the Hui (Dungans) of Xinjiang that the Qing authorities were preparing a wholesale preemptive slaughter of the Hui people in Xinjiang, or in a particular community. Opinions as to the veracity of these rumors vary: while the Tongzhi Emperor described them as "absurd" in his edict of September 25, 1864, Muslim historians generally believe that massacres were indeed planned, if not by the imperial government then by various local authorities. Thus it was the Dungans who usually revolted in most Xinjiang towns, although the local Turkic people—Taranchis, Kyrgyzs, and Kazakhs—would usually quickly join the fray. The revolt would rage for 15 years, with many Muslim people of Xinjiang and China been slaughtered or forced to convert away from Islam. Though these reprisal killings and forced conversions really only took place in areas that were in active revolt. There were many Chinese Muslims in the Qing armies during the pacification of the Revolt and many also received great acclaim and promotions once the war was over. 

Although, it needs to be stated that there were some cities that were actively committing genocide, such as the city of Kashgar which carried out a preemptive slaughter of their Hui population in 1864. So, there was a genocide of the Hui people, as genocide is defined as actions taken with intent to destroy in whole or in part a particular national, racial, ethnic or religious group.

Hell, the Taranchi Turkic peoples, our modern Uyghurs, originally aided the Hui, but wound up turning against them to join the Qing armies once they learned that the Hui wanted to put Xinjiang under their specific rule.

I technically did these events out of order, but I’m not going to fix that. We’ve got to dip 100 years into the past to find the Dzungar Genocide. This genocide happened at the end of Mongol Rule in Xinjiang and around the time the Qing initially came in. We’re going to talk about this very briefly, as we still have all our modern issues to discuss.

The main reason we even need to bring up the Dzungar genocide in a podcast episode on the Uyghur Genocide is that the Uyghurs participated in this genocide on the side of the Qing army as part of an uprising against the Dzungar Khanate. The Dzungar Genocide killed between 70 and 80% of their original population of about 600,000.

The Qianlong Emperor had this to say when ordering the extermination of the Dzungari people.

"Show no mercy at all to these rebels. Only the old and weak should be saved. Our previous military campaigns were too lenient. If we act as before, our troops will withdraw, and further trouble will occur. If a rebel is captured and his followers wish to surrender, he must personally come to the garrison, prostrate himself before the commander, and request surrender. If he only sends someone to request submission, it is undoubtedly a trick. Tell Tsengünjav to massacre these crafty Zunghars. Do not believe what they say."

So, Xinjiang was once again under Qing rule and would remain so until the Wuchang Uprising overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China (not to be confused with the modern day Republic of China, which is actually the nation of Taiwan under Chinese imperialist control. 

All of this context is to show that relations between the Chinese government and the various Muslim ethnicities within its borders have always been one of Master and Slave. The Chinese government has always treated non-Han peoples as lesser, and the presence of Muslim Chinese peoples was only tolerated for as long as they worked in lock step with Beijing. Once they didn’t, they were prime targets for reprisal massacres and forced conversion.

We would see this scenario play out again during the time of the Chinese Republic in 1931 with the Kumul Rebellion.  The Kumul Rebellion began because of the actions of Jin Shuren, the governor of Xinjiang from 1928 until 1933. Jin was notoriously intolerant of Turkic peoples and openly antagonized them. Such acts of discrimination included restrictions on travel, increased taxation, seizure of property without due process and frequent executions for suspected espionage or disloyalty. However, the event that would spark the rebellion would be the annexation of the Kumul Khanate, a semi autonomous region in northern Xinjiang.

At the end of the Rebellion Jin was dead and the First East Turkestan Republic was established around the city of Kashgar in the far west of Xinjiang. The First East Turkestan Republic would only last for a year before being conquered by a Chinese warlord named Shen Shicai, who had backing and support from the Soviet Union. In 1937, specifically to coincide with Stalin’s own Great Purge, Shicai planned and executed the elimination of "traitors", "pan-Turkists", "enemies of the people", "nationalists" and "imperialist spies". His purges swept the entire Uyghur and Hui political elite. The NKVD provided the support during the purges. In the later stages of the purge, Sheng turned against the "Trotskyites", mostly a group of Han Chinese sent to him by Moscow. It’s estimated that he killed between 50 and 100,000 people in these purges.

Shicai would eventually betray the Soviets to join with the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, which would lead to the Soviets backing the Uyghur people in the Ili Rebellion leading to the creation of the Second East Turkestan Republic, which would eventually get folded into Mao Zedong’s People’s Republic of China in 1949.

From the 1950s to the 1970s China enacted two main policies against the Uyghur people. They instituted mass migrations of Han Chinese people into Xinjiang as well as passing various laws designed to infringe and smother Uyghur ethnic and religious identity. Uyghurs are barred from freely practicing their religion, speaking their language, and expressing other fundamental elements of their identity. Restrictions apply to many aspects of life, including dress, language, diet, and education. The Chinese government closely monitors Uyghur religious institutions. Even ordinary acts such as praying or going to a mosque may be a basis for arrest or detention.

While repression of Uyghur cultural beliefs and identity had existed from day 1 on the PRC, it was in 1990 that everything started to go pear shaped. The Barin Uprising took place between the 4th and 10th of April, 1990. Violence began on the evening of 4 April, when a group of 200 to 300 Uyghur men attempted to breach the gates of the local government office in a protest against alleged forced abortions of Uyghur women and Chinese rule in Xinjiang. Following the uprising in an unprecedented move, Chinese authorities arrested 7,900 people, labelled "ethnic splittists" and "counter-revolutionaries", from April to July 1990.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s there were various terrorist attacks committed by Uyghur resistance groups and freedom fighters, leading to further crackdowns and tightening of police control in Xinjiang throughout the years.

Until 2001 Beijing spoke about these attacks as isolated incidents and made no broad statements of all Uyghur being terrorists, despite regularly arresting thousands of Uyghur people for no real reason. Many of those arrested Uyghur people wound up in Laogai (reform through labor) camps or in laojiao (re-education through labor) camps scattered throughout China. But, after the 9/11 attacks on the United States the tone shifted and more and more anti-Uyghur rhetoric started to become anti-terrorist rhetoric.

This type of shift in language always precedes an uptick in genocidal violence. Now that all Uyghur are being labeled as terrorists, all Uyghur can be arbitrarily arrested and put in camps or even merely killed and no one will really care because it’s not ethnic based discrimination. It’s an anti terrorism campaign designed to protect the people from violent thugs. 

After 2001 Beijing Sided with the U.S. in the new “global war against terrorism,” the Chinese government initiated an active diplomatic and propaganda campaign against “East Turkestan terrorist forces.” This label was henceforth to be applied indiscriminately to any Uighur suspected of separatist activities. There has been no sign of any attempt by the Chinese authorities to distinguish between peaceful political activists, peaceful separatists, and those advocating or using violence. Although, it needs to be said that violence is a perfectly valid political tool when resisting genocide and imperialism.

This leads us to China’s Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism and the creation of their “vocational education and training centers” (both laogai and laojiao allegedly closing down in around 2013, although satellite evidence says that’s bullshit).  

In early 2014, Chinese authorities in Xinjiang launched the renewed "strike hard" campaign around New Year. It included measures targeting mobile phones, computers, and religious materials belonging to Uyghurs. The government simultaneously announced a "people's war on terror" and local government introduced new restrictions that included the banning of long beards and the wearing of veils in public places.

Over the life of the camps it is estimated, by various sources that between a few hundred thousand and 1.8 million people have been arbitrarily detained in these camps and subjected to forced labor as a method of reformation. This is part of a Chinese government policy called hashar and includes many public works projects in Xinjiang.

Beyond the simple fact of these slave labor camps, the state also began imposing harsh penalties for violations of birth limits. It also implemented an aggressive campaign of mass sterilization and intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD) implantation programs. Chinese government officials justify this by equating high birth rates with religious extremism. Chinese academics have argued that ethnic minority population growth threatens social stability and national identity. 

Leaked government documents show that violations of birth limits are the most common reason Uyghur women are placed in a detention camp. Women have testified to being sterilized without their consent while in detention. Other women have testified that they were threatened with detention if they refused sterilization or IUD implantation procedures.

So, in summation, since the 1950s at least the Chinese government has been engaging in forcible assimilation practices. Something that the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (a legally non binding resolution passed in 2007) says Indigenous people have a right to not be subjected to. As well as forced sterilization and forced abortions for violating China’s family planning laws. And arbitrary detention and forced labor on invented charges of religious extremism and separatist activities. And then also having their children taken away from them and placed into something akin to the residential school system of the US, Canada, and Australia where they are forbidden from even speaking the Uyghur language.

Under the UN CPPCG China is guilty of genocide in the form of causing severe bodily or mental harm to the group, imposing measures designed to prevent births within the group, and transferring children of the group to another group.

The Uyghur Genocide is one of the more difficult ones to talk about online, especially if you frequent leftist political circles and spaces like I do as anything anti-China is seen often seen as Western propaganda and part of Cold War policies of anticommunism, as if China doesn’t have roughly 814 billionaires controlling the majority of their means of production. The wealthiest man in China is Zhong Shanshan. He privately owns a bottled water company and is worth over 60 billion dollars. China isn’t a communist country, it’s not even socialist. It’s just fascist and capitalist. But that’s a rant for a different day.

The Uyghur Genocide is real and verifiable, although it can be difficult to do so as there is a lot of misinformation and propaganda regarding it on both sides of the discussion. None of that changes the fact of the genocide or of the destruction of Uyghur culture in Xinjiang. 

That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Xinjiang.

Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 11 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 10 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week marks the 3rd part of our mini series of currently ongoing genocides and humanitarian crises. Episode 2 was on Palestine, Episode 11 was on Congo, today’s episode will be on Sudan. The nation of Sudan is currently dealing with, among other things we’ll cover in detail later in this episode, the largest deplacement campaign of anywhere on the planet with over 9 million people being displaced from their homes by war and genocide.

It always feels a little weird transitioning into this part of the episode, but it’s now time for the Alchemist’s Table. I’ve invented nearly 90 cocktails over the past 2 years and this one remains my very favorite. It’s called the No True Scotsman. Take 2 oz of your scotch whiskey of choice, though I’d recommend a light Islay scotch, something like a Bowmore, or maybe a Campbeltown like Glen Scotia. Then add .75 oz of Frangelico, 1 oz of Maple syrup. Shake this like your life depends on it and pour over ice. Top the drink with ginger beer and enjoy.

Now, fortified as we are by uisce beatha, the waters of life, let’s get into it. So, what is happening in Sudan, right now? A civil war officially started between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the the Rapid Support Forces that grew out of the Janjaweed militias that were so prevalent in the Darfur Genocide. The war officially began on 15 April 2023 and is still ongoing. But, in order to understand what is happening right now, we need to understand what was happening in the 19th century under British and Egyptian colonialism in the region.

So, let’s starts at as much of the beginning as we can. Let’s start at the Mahdist War. Following Muhammad Ali's invasion (no, a different Muhammad Ali)  in 1819, Sudan was governed by an Egyptian administration. Throughout the period of Egyptian rule, many segments of the Sudanese population suffered extreme hardship because of the system of taxation imposed by the central government. Under this system, a flat tax was imposed on farmers and small traders and collected by government-appointed tax collectors from the Sha'iqiyya tribe of northern Sudan. Throughout the century, and especially after Egypt was floundering to pay the costs of the Suez Canal, Britain got more and more involved. In the late 19th century a war broke out between the Mahdist Sudanese, led by Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah, who had proclaimed himself the "Mahdi" of Islam (the "Guided One"), and the forces of the Khedivate of Egypt, initially, and later the forces of Britain. Eighteen years of war resulted in the creation of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899–1956), a de jure condominium of the British Empire, and the Kingdom of Egypt, in which Britain had de facto control over Sudan.

Sudan officially voted for independence in 1956 and became its own independent republic. Although it achieved independence without conflict, Sudan inherited many problems from the condominium. Chief among these was the status of the civil service. The government placed Sudanese in the administration and provided compensation and pensions for British officers of Sudan Political Service who left the country; it retained those who could not be replaced, mostly technicians and teachers. Khartoum achieved this transformation quickly and with a minimum of turbulence, although southerners resented the replacement of British administrators in the south with northern Sudanese. To advance their interests, many southern leaders concentrated their efforts in Khartoum, where they hoped to win constitutional concessions. Although determined to resist what they perceived to be Arab imperialism, they were opposed to violence. Most southern representatives supported provincial autonomy and warned that failure to win legal concessions would drive the south to rebellion.

To understand the issues in Sudan we need to understand that, ultimately, this is a religious and ethnic conflict between the mostly Islamic North and the largely Christian and animist South regions in the nation of Sudan. On November 17, 1958, the day parliament was to convene, a military coup occurred. Khalil, himself a retired army general, planned the preemptive coup in conjunction with leading Umma members and the army's two senior generals, Ibrahim Abboud and Ahmad Abd al Wahab, who became leaders of the military regime. Abboud immediately pledged to resolve all disputes with Egypt, including the long-standing problem of the status of the Nile River. Abboud abandoned the previous government's unrealistic policies regarding the sale of cotton. He also appointed a constitutional commission, headed by the chief justice, to draft a permanent constitution. Abboud maintained, however, that political parties only served as vehicles for personal ambitions and that they would not be reestablished when civilian rule was restored.

Despite the Abboud regime's early successes, opposition elements remained powerful. In 1959 dissident military officers made three attempts to displace Abboud with a "popular government." Although the courts sentenced the leaders of these attempted coups to life imprisonment, discontent in the military continued to hamper the government's performance. In particular, the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) gained a reputation as an effective anti-government organization. To compound its problems, the Abboud regime lacked dynamism and the ability to stabilize the country. Its failure to place capable civilian advisers in positions of authority, or to launch a credible economic and social development program, and gain the army's support, created an atmosphere that encouraged political turbulence.

A revolution in 1964 returned the nation to civilian rule, but did little to remove the preceding issues that plagued Sudan. This all brings us within the context of the First Sudanese Civil War. This war was a conflict from 1955 to 1972 between the northern part of Sudan and the southern Sudan region that demanded representation and more regional autonomy. The war was divided into four major stages: initial guerrilla warfare, the creation of the Anyanya insurgency, political strife within the government and establishment of the South Sudan Liberation Movement. Around a million people died over the course of the nearly 17-year long war.

The war would end with the signing of the Addis Ababa Accord, which created two main things. A South Sudanese Autonomous Region, and relative peace, if only for about a decade. The Second Sudanese Civil War would break out in 1983. Some sources describe the conflict as an ethnoreligious one where the Arab-Muslim central government's pursuits to impose Sharia law on non-Muslim southerners led to violence, and eventually to the civil war. Historian Douglas Johnson has pointed to exploitative governance as the root cause.

This war lasted for some 22 years, making it one of the longest civil wars in recorded Human History. Roughly two million people died as a result of war, famine and disease caused by the conflict. Four million people in southern Sudan were displaced at least once, normally repeatedly during the war. The civilian death toll is one of the highest of any war since World War II and was marked by numerous human rights violations, including slavery and mass killings.

Perhaps one of the greatest horrors and tragedies of the Second Sudanese Civil War was the use of child soldiers. Armies from all sides enlisted children in their ranks. The 2005 agreement required that child soldiers be demobilized and sent home. The Sudan People’s Liberation Army (the SPLA, by the way, was founded in 1983 as a rebel group to reestablish the South as an autonomous region after president Nimeiry declared the South to officially be part of a fully reunited Sudan.) claimed to have let go 16,000 of its child soldiers between 2001 and 2004. However, international observers (UN and Global Report 2004) have found demobilized children have often been re-recruited by the SPLA. As of 2004, there were between 2,500 and 5,000 children serving in the SPLA. 

There was also a revival of slavery during the Second Civil War, it was largely directed at southern Christians, on the grounds that Islamic law allegedly allowed it, and also at women, many of whom were kept as sex slaves and repeatedly raped.

The Second Civil War ended officially in 2002 with the signing of the Naivasha Agreement. This guaranteed autonomy for the South for 6 years after which a referendum would be help to vote for official independence. This war ended with roughly 2 million people, mostly civilians, dead of drought and famine caused in large parts by the fighting. Still, while the Second Civil War ended in 2005, it overlapped with a crisis that my generation is very familiar with and that is still, technically, ongoing to this day.

I am speaking, of course, of the Darfur Genocide that began in 2003 and has not ended to this day.

The War in Darfur, which is also sometimes called the Land Cruiser War, because there were a LOT of Toyota Land Cruiser pick up trucks on both sides of the war, began in February 2003 when the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebel groups began fighting against the government of Sudan, which they accused of oppressing Darfur's non-Arab population. 

So first let’s talk real quick about the SLM and the JEM.

When General Omar al-Bashir and the National Islamic Front headed by Dr. Hassan al-Turabi overthrew the Sudanese government led by Ahmed al-Mirghani in 1989. A large section of the population in Darfur, particularly the non-Arab ethnicities in the region, became increasingly marginalized. These feelings were solidified in 2000 by the publication of The Black Book, which detailed the structural inequity in the Sudan that denies non-Arabs equal justice and power sharing. In 2002 Abdul Wahid al-Nur, a lawyer, Ahmad Abdel Shafi Bassey, an education student, and a third man founded the Darfur Liberation Front, which subsequently evolved into the Sudan Liberation Movement and claimed to represent all of the oppressed in the Sudan.

The Black Book, also known as The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan detailed how, despite the Arabic people of North Sudan making up 5.4% of the population they still held 79.5% of the wealth in the nation. So in this context, beyond being a war and genocide based on ethnicity and religion we can see economic reasons for the war. There was a massive disparity between the haves and the have nots, and Karl Marx would tell us that this is the foundation and origin of all of history’s great wars. 

Now, the Justice and Equality Movement trace their origin to the writers of The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in the Sudan, a manuscript published in 2000 that details what it views as the structural inequality in the country; the JEM's founder, Khalil Ibrahim, was one of the authors.

The JEM claims to number around 35,000 with an ethnically diverse membership. According to critics it is not the "rainbow of tribes" it claims to be, as most JEM members, including its leader, are from the Zaghawa tribe. The JEM is part of the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), an alliance of groups opposed to the Government of Sudan.

The Darfur Genocide has it’s roots in the same places as all geocides. One group, who feels themselves superior to all others, decided that the best way to deal with these divisive elements in their society is to try and kill them. We saw the same type of conflict in the Armenian genocide of the early 20th century. The Northern Sudanese government saw the non Arabic elements of South Sudan as threats to their power in the region and so decided to kill them.

The use of rape as a tool of genocide has been noted as well. This crime has been carried out by Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed ("evil men on horseback") paramilitary groups. The actions of the Janjaweed have been described as genocidal rape, with not just women, but children as well. There were also reports of infants being bludgeoned to death, and the sexual mutilation of victims being commonplace.

One thing I want to make sure we mention is that the President of Sudan during the Darfur genocide has had arrest warrants issued against him by the ICC.

He has been charged with five counts of crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, forcible transfer, torture, and rape; two counts of war crimes: intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population as such or against individual civilians not taking part in hostilities, and pillaging; three counts of genocide: by killing, by causing serious bodily or mental harm, and by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group's physical destruction, allegedly committed at least between 2003 and 2008 in Darfur, Sudan. To this day he remains at large and is not in custody.

I say remains at large. We, more or less, know where he is. As of 2019 al-Bashir was ousted from his political role by the RSF in a military coup and jailed in Khartoum. Tensions rose between the RSF and the SLM and in 2023 they erupted, once again, into a civil war in Sudan.

This brings us, more or less, up to modern day Sudan and the current conflict. To put it as simply as possible, ethnic and religious tensions between the Arabic north and the Christian south have exploded into a full scale war in a period of drought and famine. Roughly 9 million people have been displaced and pretty much everyone who lives in Sudan is without adequate food and water. The United Arab Emirates, among other nations are actively supporting the RSF in their continued subjugation of South Sudan and are actively contributing to the ongoing Darfur genocide.

Roughly 80% of Sudanese hospitals no longer exist, and the World Food Programe has indicated that some 95% of Sudanese people are in a state of massive food insecurity.

On 3 August 2023, Amnesty International released its report on the conflict. Titled Death Came To Our Home: War Crimes and Civilian Suffering In Sudan, it documented "mass civilian casualties in both deliberate and indiscriminate attacks" by both the SAF and the RSF, particularly in Khartoum and West Darfur. It also detailed sexual violence against women and girls as young as 12, targeted attacks on civilian facilities such as hospitals and churches, and looting.

Early March 2024, the UN Panel of Experts on Sudan, mandated by Resolution 2620 (2022) of the UN Security Council, published their latest report. It described the wide-ranging devastation and violence in the country, caused in many cases by the RSF and associated militias. With regard to war crimes in West Darfur, the report estimated the death rate through ethnic cleansing of the Masalit community in El Geneina between 10,000 and 15,000. In her speech before the Security Council Committee, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US Representative to the United Nations, commented: "It is my hope that the sobering report will at long last shake the world from its indifference to the horrors playing out before our eyes."

In April 2024, the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights released a report into breaches of the Genocide Convention in Darfur. The independent report found that there is "clear and convincing evidence" that the RSF and its allied militias "have committed and are committing genocide against the Masalit," a non-Arab ethnic group, and that all 153 states that have signed the Genocide Convention are "obligated to end complicity in and employ all means reasonably available to prevent and halt the genocide." It goes on to say that there is "clear and convincing evidence" that Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Chad, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Russia via the actions of the Wagner Group are "complicit in the genocide."

The ongoing genocide and refugee crisis in Sudan can, absolutely trace its roots to British imperialism, but beyond that it is part of an ongoing religious conflict between Islam and Christianity dating back all the way to the Crusades.

The conflict between the SAF and the RSF is ongoing and shows no signs of slowing down or stopping. While these two groups fight for control over Sudan millions of innocent civilians are dying due to lack of access to food and water.

Civil war and genocide is ongoing against the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups and against the general non-Arabic Muslim peoples of Sudan. This conflict has been going on for so long that we have all but forgotten about it. I was in high school and engaging in political activism to end the Darfur genocide. This was nearly 20 years ago. I’m old as hell. There are so many horrible crimes and genocides that exist in the world today. Please don’t forget about these suffering people. Genocide relies on existing for long enough that it becomes part of the background. None of this is normal. Never again is right now.

That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Sudan

Content warning for discussion of genocide, torture, mutilation, rape, and slavery

Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 11 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 10 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. This week we’re going to be talking about the currently ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the long history of capitalist exploitation, western imperialism, and systemic racism that led to it.

But first, as is tradition, let’s take a trip over to the Alchemists Table to see what potion we’ve got for today. Today’s libation has a lot going on in it, it’s called Underworld Vacation. It starts by adding some strawberries and blueberries to the bottom of your shaker with .75 of an ounce of rose simple syrup before muddling the fruit. Then add one ounce each of pomegranate and elderflower liquor followed by 2 oz of Hendricks Lunar gin, add ice to your shaker and then stir for about 30 seconds before straining into a highball glass and topping with about 4 oz of prosecco.

With that out of the way it’s time to talk, once again, about the most important part of history. The proverbial devil in the literal details, context. Because to understand what is happening in the DRC today you need to understand the Kivu Conflict, and to understand that you need to understand the Second Congo War, and to understand that you need to understand the First Congo War, and to understand that you need to understand the end of the Rwandan Genocide and the Congo Crisis of the 1960s, and to understand that you need to understand the Scramble for Africa, The Berlin Conference and King Leopold !! of Belgium.

So, we’ve got a lot to cover, and we’re going to be doing it in fairly broad strokes, but it might still take us a while, so let’s get started with the Berlin Conference.

Near the end of the 19th century there was very little European colonial and mercantile presence in Africa. There were some port towns, to be sure, and there was trade, but very little of the African continent was under the control of European powers at this time. But, European greed for gold and, especially, ivory wouldn’t allow them to ignore African riches for much longer. The Berlin Conference was organized in 1885 at the request of King Leopold II of Belgium and was organized by Otto von Bismarck of Germany.  

Leopold had been using the explorations of Henry Morgan Stanley, and his own organization, the International African Association to quietly try and create his own private colony in central Africa that would be called the Congo Free State, but France found out and started making moves, and then Britain and Portugal found out and began trying to grab land which led Germany to do the same. War was brewing quickly as these various European powerhouses all sought as much land, wealth, and power as they could grab. This, ultimately, would be why the Berlin Conference was called and why it was so successful. These European powers decided, instead of going to war and killing each other over Africa they’d just all meet and carve it up like a pecan pie and settle it all peaceful like.

There were 14 nations/empires in attendance at the Berlin Conference, Germany, Austria Hungary, the International Congo Society (this really means King Leopold II of Belgium), Spain, Denmark, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Sweden-Norway, and the Ottoman Empire. And while all 14 of those countries were in attendance at the Berlin Conference and had a say in the final decisions that were made, only 7 countries were actually going to colonize Africa once it was over.

Those countries were Belgium (really just King Leopold II, this would be his own private colony), Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Portugal, and Italy. At the time of the Berlin Conference less than 10% of the African continent was under European control, but by the time World War 1 broke out only Liberia and Ethiopia were still independent. Although, Liberia certainly only existed because of US colonial power, and so doesn’t REALLY count as independent. 

This period of New Imperialism is what we tend to call The Scramble for Africa. Sof ar we’ve been talking about this all in fairly clinical terms, as if these European countries simply sat around a table and calmly decided who would get what land in the second largest continent on the planet and then it just happened, with no additional muss or fuss. Anyone who has studied even the barest amount of human history knows that nothing happens without muss or fuss. There were wars, and battles, and massacres that led to Europe gaining control of African territory, but that’s not the topic of today’s podcast.

We now need to talk a bit about the Congo Free State, and how King Leopold of Belgium, a frail weakling (compared to the other European powers) managed to worm his way into the conference and into one of the most lucrative colonies in Africa. The Congo Free State was a truly massive colony that was owned personally by Leopold. It was NOT, at least between the years 1885 and 1908, part of the Belgian Empire, it was not owned by the Belgian government and was ruled entirely separately, it just happened to be ruled by the King of Belgium. Leopold was able to gain this massive colony by convincing the monarchs of Europe that he was engaged in humanitarian and philanthropic work, and that the Congo Free State would be an area of free trade in Africa. 

Leopold maintained a guise that he was not trying to use the Congo Basin to increase his own wealth and economic and political power. He maintained that his presence in the region was, as was a huge part of the ethos of New Imperialism, to civilize the savages of the Congo Basin and to bring them closer to God and good European cultural supremacy. 

Of course, all of that was a lie, and that lie would reveal itself over the intervening years. The Congo was home to something that would become one of the most important natural resources in the entire world, rubber. There are only two sources of natural rubber in the world. The sap of the Hevea brasiliensis, or rubber tree that grows in the Amazon River Basin, and the sap of Landolphia owariensis, a species of woody vines that grow in the Congo. I mean, technically there are 2500 species of plants that produce natural latex and rubber, but those two are the big ones. Today 99% of natural latex and rubber comes from the Amazon, but Leopold was able to make massive profit off of his colony.

The economic system in the Congo Free State was known as the red rubber system. It was a slave economy that Leopold enforced through the use of his armed forces known as the Force Publique. Each slave in the Congo Free State was required to harvest a regular quota of rubber sap. What that quota was was often arbitrarily decided based purely on profit based concerns.

Workers who refused to supply their labour were coerced with "constraint and repression". Dissenters were beaten or whipped with the chicotte, hostages were taken to ensure prompt collection and punitive expeditions were sent to destroy villages which refused. The policy led to a collapse of Congolese economic and cultural life, as well as farming in some areas.

Failure to meet the rubber collection quotas was punishable by death. Meanwhile, the Force Publique were required to provide the hand of their victims as proof when they had shot and killed someone, as it was believed that they would otherwise use the munitions (imported from Europe at considerable cost) for hunting or to stockpile them for mutiny. As a consequence, the rubber quotas were in part paid off in cut-off hands.

A Catholic priest quotes a man, Tswambe, speaking of the hated state official Léon Fiévez, who ran a district along the river 300 mi north of Stanley Pool:

“All blacks saw this man as the devil of the Equator ... From all the bodies killed in the field, you had to cut off the hands. He wanted to see the number of hands cut off by each soldier, who had to bring them in baskets ... A village which refused to provide rubber would be completely swept clean. As a young man, I saw [Fiévez's] soldier Molili, then guarding the village of Boyeka, take a net, put ten arrested natives in it, attach big stones to the net, and make it tumble into the river ... Rubber causes these torments; that's why we no longer want to hear its name spoken. Soldiers made young men kill or rape their own mothers and sisters.”

One junior officer in the Force Publique had this to say about the quota system:

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber ... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace ... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.

Within the Congo Free State there was also rampant famine and disease that killed hundreds of thousands of people, a type of residential school where children were sent to learn to be either workers or soldiers. About 50% of the children who entered these schools died. There were also several reputable reports of Congolese people turning to cannibalism in the face of their lack of food resources. With everyone being forced to harvest rubber there was no one to farm or gather or hunt for food. It is generally accepted that over the course of Leopold’s rule in the Congo Free State, between 1885 and 1908 that at least 10 million Congolese people were killed.

Eventually word got out of what was happening in the Congo Free State and a conclave of the European powers of the Berlin Conference was called as, even they, decided that Leopold was going too far. Leopold offered to reform his government and economic system in the Congo, but no one would give him the chance, but also, no one wanted to take on the responsibility of rebuilding the Congo. Eventually, after two years of debate, the Belgian Parliament took over control of the Congo. Leopold would die about a year later in 1909.

The Congo would remain under under Belgian control for another 50+ years, and while the abuses and overwhelming violence of King Leopold’s rule were curbed. They even added a clause to the new Colonial Charter to outlaw slavery. Article 3 of the new Colonial Charter of 18 October 1908 stated that: "Nobody can be forced to work on behalf of and for the profit of companies or privates", but this was not enforced, and the Belgian government continued to impose forced labour on the indigenous people of the area, albeit by less obvious methods. So, even without King Leopold, the Belgian Congo was still a European colony, which means it was still exploited for profit.

African independence movements existed throughout the entirety of European colonialism and imperialism in Africa, excepting Liberia the first country in Africa to gain independence from direct European control would be South Africa which would nominally gain its independence in 1910 after the creation of the Union of South Africa and would formally gain official independence when the last vestiges of British parliamentary control would leave the country in 1931 with the Statute of Westminster, and while there would be other successful independence movements after World War 1, such as Egypt, most African decolonization would come after World War 2, including the Congo’s.

 Nationalist movements popping up in various African nations and agitating for Independence is, generally speaking, what would eventually cause all of African independence, and this would be no different for the Congo. Though, something that is often also common in the case of independence movements that emerged between the end of World War 2 and the early 1990s is that they would become proxy wars for the US and the USSR during the Cold War. To make a long, complex story very short, the US came out on top in this war.

The nationalist movements within the Congo largely emerged amongst a class of people called the évolués, which is a term that was used in French and Belgian colonies for “evolved ones”, people of African descent who had become somewhat Europanized through education. 

One of the deciding moments in Congolese independence came in the form of the Leopoldville Riots of 1959. Joseph Kasa-Vubu, who would become the first President of an independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the leader of the ABAKO political party, the Alliance of Bakongo. The riots began because many young folks and members or sympathizers of the ABAKO party felt that the government was forbidding them from organizing and protesting.

The riots broke out on the 4th of January, 1959. The crowd began throwing rocks at police and attacking white motorists. The initial group of protesters were soon joined by 20,000 Congolese leaving a nearby soccer stadium. At the time press accounts estimated that 35,000 Africans were involved in the violence, which quickly spread as the rioters attempted to enter the European section of the capital. Rioters allegedly smashed and looted storefronts, burned Catholic missions and beat Catholic priests. Many demonstrators chanted "indépendance immédiate"

The Belgian Parliament established a commission of inquiry to investigate the cause of the riots. The commission found the disturbances to be the culmination of discontent with racial discrimination, overcrowding, and unemployment. It also concluded that external political events, such as France's decision to grant self-governance to the neighboring French Congo, to be a contributing factor, and criticized the colonial administration's response to the riot. On 13 January the administration went forward with its scheduled announcement of reforms, including new local elections in December, the institution of a new civil service statue that made no racial distinctions, and the appointment of more Africans to advisory bodies. The Belgian King, Baudouin, also declared for the first time that independence would be granted to the Congo in the future.

January 4th is still celebrated as an auspicious day in the DRC, it’s the Day of the Martyrs and denotes a turning point in the independence movement.

Congolese independence was officially declared, as planned, on the 30th of June, 1960, with Kasa-Vubu of the ABAKO elected as president and Patrice Lumumba of the Congolese National Movement appointed as the Prime Minister.

Now, despite the DRC formally being declared as independent at this day, they still relied heavily on Belgian colonial institutions that had been in place previously, like the Force Publique and various white technical experts who couldn’t be replaced in the face of a lack of ready replacements available amongst the Congolese people. The fact that this lack of available peoples being a result of European colonialism forbidding Congolese people from higher education wound up being somewhat irrelevant, but absolutely caused greater levels of resentment among the newly independent Congolese.

In the face of this lack of change and in the face of an address given by Lieutenant General of the Force Publique Émile Janssens, many of the Congolese troops mutinied.

The address went as follows:

"Independence brings changes to politicians and to civilians. But for you, nothing will be changed ... none of your new masters can change the structure of an army which, throughout its history, has been the most organized, the most victorious in Africa. The politicians have lied to you."

Instead of sending in Belgian troops to put down the mutiny, as Janssens wanted, Lumumba fired him and began to institute some reforms, including immediately remaining the Force Publique to the Armée Nationale Congolaise (ANC) and promoting all black soldier by at least one rank. While this had success in Leopoldville and Thysville, it failed in the rest of the country and the mutiny intensified.

The government attempted to stop the revolt—Lumumba and Kasa-Vubu intervened personally at Léopoldville and Thysville and persuaded the mutineers to lay down their arms—but in most of the country the mutiny intensified. White officers and civilians were attacked, white-owned properties were looted and white women were raped. The Belgian government became deeply concerned by the situation, particularly when white civilians began entering neighbouring countries as refugees. The international press expressed shock at the apparent sudden collapse of order in the Congo, as the world view of the Congolese situation prior to independence—due largely to Belgian propaganda—was one of peace, stability, and strong control by the authorities.

The Congo Crisis would run for 5 years and would end with the torture and assassination of Patrice Lumumba, with Joesph Kasa-Vubu dying while under house arrest, and with the military dictator Mobuto Sese Seko “elected” as the president of the Republic of Congo-Leopoldville. This would note just one in the long string of times that the US helped to install a military dictator in order to overthrow a democratically elected left wing government, just because they had support from the USSR and the US feared (and fears) any threat to their capitalist hegemony.

Between 1965 and 1971 Mobutu consolidated his hold on power as much as he could, removing all provincial control over anything and bringing every scrap of infrastructure he could under the control of himself and his central government. In 1971, with his hold on power relatively secure and as part of his policy of Africanization of the Congo’s culture and government Mobutu renamed the Republic of Congo Leopoldville to Zaire, a name that was derived from the Kikongo wore nzere, meaning “river that swallows all rivers”.

Mobutu would remain as “president” of Zaire all the way until 1997, but his hold on power would begin to crumble with the First Congo War that began in 1993. Now comes the time for more context. What started the First Congo War? Honestly, to a certain extent we can view the First Congo War as an extension of the Rwandan Genocide.

The Rwandan Genocide began in 1994 as a final culmination of ethnic tensions that were exacerbated by, first, German and the Belgian colonialism. See, Rwanda used to be a German colony, Rwanda was one of the nations that Germany got as part of the Scramble for Africa, but after World War 1, with the signing of the treaty of Versailles Germany was forced to give up all of its overseas colonies. Belgium gained control of Rwanda.

Belgium maintained many of the systems of power and oppression that Germany had put into place, most notably the fact that they put the Tutsi ethnic group in positions of authority and disenfranchised the Hutu and Twa ethnic group.

The Twa are the indigenous ethnic group of Rwanda, but by the time the Rwandan genocide occurred they were only about 1% of the population, about 85% were Hutu and the remaining 14% were Tutsi. Still, based on the indicators of European scientific racism and phrenology the Tutsi had more “European features” and so were considered superior to the Hutu ethnic group and placed, exclusively, in positions of authority. The sudden shift in power dynamics after Rwandan independence is what would lead to the Rwandan Genocide as Hutu supremacists decided to vent their fury on the Tutsi people.

We won’t go into any more detail than that for the Rwandan genocide. Suffice it to say that when it ended hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsi people had fled the nation of Rwanda to neighboring African countries, such as Zaire. Roughly 1.5 million ethnic Tutsi people wound up settling in Zaire. There were also about 1 million Hutu extremists in eastern Zaire who had fled the retaliation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front at the end of the Rwandan Civil War and the Rwandan Genocide.

As mentioned previously, the First Congo War, also known as Africa’s First World War can most simply be seen as an extension of the Rwandan Genocide. Zaire had been in decline since Mobutu gained power in 1965. He was a terrible leader and the average GDP of Zaire dropped by about 65% during his reign. Eastern Zaire was a region of massive instability that was only made worse by the number of Hutu extremists who fled to the region following the Rwandan Genocide.

Rwanda, just fully, invaded Zaire in 1996 in order to put down various Hutu rebel groups that were extant in the region. These rebel groups were actively funded and supported by Mobutu’s government leading to this war that lasted for some 6 months. It involved several African nations including Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Burundi, Zambia, ZImbabwe, South Sudan, Tanzania, South Africa, Ethiopia, Chad, China, Israel, and Kuwait.

Following the war Mobutu went into exile in the nation of Togo where he eventually died of prostate cancer in 1997. Zaire came under the rule of the communist aligned Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Kabila had heavy support from Rwandan, Burundian, and Ugandan forces during his rise to power in the form of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire.

Kabila also came to be seen as an instrument of the foreign regimes that put him in power. To counter this image and increase domestic support, he began to turn against his allies abroad. This culminated in the expulsion of all foreign forces from the DRC on 26 July 1998. The states with armed forces still in the DRC begrudgingly complied although some of them saw this as undermining their interests, particularly Rwanda, which had hoped to install a proxy-regime in Kinshasa.

Several factors that led to the First Congo War remained in place after Kabila's accession to power. Prominent among these were ethnic tensions in eastern DRC, where the government still had little control. There the historical animosities remained and the opinion that Banyamulenge, as well as all Tutsi, were foreigners was reinforced by the foreign occupation in their defence. Furthermore, Rwanda had not been able to satisfactorily address its security concerns. By forcibly repatriating refugees, Rwanda had imported the conflict.

This manifested itself in the form of a predominantly Hutu insurgency in Rwanda's western provinces that was supported by extremist elements in eastern DRC. Without troops in the DRC, Rwanda was unable to successfully combat the insurgents. In the first days of August 1998, two brigades of the new Congolese army rebelled against the government and formed rebel groups that worked closely with Kigali and Kampala. This marked the beginning of the Second Congo War.

The Second Congo War is generally considered to be the deadliest war since World War 2. Over the course of this war some 5.4 million excess deaths took place. 

Now comes the time where I need to define what an excess death is. In epidemiology, the excess deaths or excess mortality is a measure of the increase in the number deaths during a time period and/or in a certain group, as compared to the expected value or statistical trend during a reference period (typically of five years) or in a reference population. It may typically be measured in percentage points, or in number of deaths per time unit.

To put it more simply, disease, depravation, and starvation were so rampant during the Second Congo War that the overwhelming majority of deaths weren’t caused directly by the fighting, but were caused by the residual damage of the fighting.

The Second Congo War involved many of the same issues of the First Congo War. It would end with Laurent-Désiré Kabila assassinated in 2001 in his office by an 18 year old former child soldier. Laurent would be replaced as president by his son Joseph Kabila, who was elected unanimously by the Congolese parliament.

To further highlight the complexity of the Congolese Wars, In April 2001, a UN panel of experts investigated the illegal exploitation of diamonds, cobalt, coltan, gold and other lucrative resources in the Congo. The report accused Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe of systematically exploiting Congolese resources and recommended the Security Council impose sanctions.

All conflicts within Congolese territory will ultimately go back to economic exploitation and capitalist overreach. The Congo Basin is full of some of the most valuable natural resources that exist on the planet, and people will always be fighting over them.

This leads us into the Kivu conflict. The Kivu conflict is an umbrella term for a series of protracted armed conflicts in the North Kivu and South Kivu provinces in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo which have occurred since the end of the Second Congo War. This includes, but is not limited to Effacer le tableau, which was a genocidal extermination campaign against the Mbuti Pygmy ethnic group. The Bambuti were targeted specifically as the rebels considered them "subhuman", and it was believed by the rebels that the flesh of the Bambuti held "magical powers". There were also reports of cannibalism being widespread. It is estimated 60,000 to 70,000 Pygmy were killed in the campaign, and over 100,000 more were displaced.

There are more than 120 distinct rebel groups involved in the Kivu Conflict, including the March 23 Movement, which a UN report indicates was created by the Rwandan government in order to potentially take over the Congolese government.

Conflict began in 2004 in the eastern Congo as an armed conflict between the military of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) and the Hutu Power group Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) has played a large role in the conflict. With 21,000 soldiers in the force, the Kivu conflict constitutes the largest peacekeeping mission currently in operation. In total, 93 peacekeepers have died in the region, with 15 dying in a large-scale attack by the Allied Democratic Forces, in North Kivu in December 2017. The peacekeeping force seeks to prevent escalation of force in the conflict, and minimise human rights abuses like sexual assault and the use of child soldiers in the conflict.

In 2007 and 2008, in several news and TV reports, the BBC published own evidence about Pakistani MONUC peacekeepers in Mongbwalu had entered in a gold-for-guns trading relationship with Nationalist and Integrationist Front (FNI) militia leaders, eventually drawing Congolese army officers and Indian traders from Kenya into the deal. Following its own investigations, the UN concluded that there was no involvement of Pakistani peacekeeper in any such trade relationship. Namely Human Rights Watch harshly criticized the UN for the way it handled the investigation, providing detailed information from several UN documents, arguing that serious allegations of wrongdoing by Pakistani peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo were ignored, minimized or shelved by the UN’s Organization of Internal Oversight Services.

MONUC officials say nothing of substance about mining in Congo, which proceeds in parallel with the bloodletting, arms trading and extortion. For example, Anvil Mining has been involved in massacres in DRC. Anvil directors include former U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Brown, who served at U.S. embassies in Brussels, Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville and South Africa. Brown was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa (1987–1989) under George Shultz and George H.W. Bush and Director of Central African Affairs (1980–1981). Interestingly, Brown succeeded William Lacy Swing—head of MONUC in DRC—as Ambassador to the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). Meanwhile, the former top internal intelligence and security chief of the United Nations Observer's Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) has been worked for Anvil mining in Katanga since 2006.

There have been numerous cases of sexual misconduct by UN peacekeeping forces in the Congo. This has been acknowledged by the UN itself (such as the letter of 24 March 2005 from the Secretary-General to the President of the General Assembly).

So, basically foreign powers both within Africa and outside of it are actively fighting within the Congo Basin in order to secure control of the vast amount of natural resources that exist within the nation. The DRC currently produces about 70% of the world’s cobalt, and 80% of the cobalt mines in the DRC are owned by China.

The leading use of cobalt in modern technology is in rechargeable batteries. So your cell phone battery, your laptop batteries, any kind of rechargeable battery you have is likely created using Congolese cobalt, which is a direct cause of the millions of deaths and displacements that are occuring in the DRC. 

The DRC is, effectively, the site of a capitalist proxy war as the region is fought over by foreign governments and local rebel groups for control over Congolese natural resources. No one in Europe or the US would even begin to care about an African country if it wasn’t for the battery technology resources that are so abundant in the region. Between 1885 and today it is, very easy, to say that roughly 20 million people have been killed by capitalist excess and exploitation. 

We can, absolutely call what is happening in the DRC a genocide, though it can be difficult to always pinpoint who, exactly are the victims. Broadly speaking the victims are the Congolese people, all of them, who are being killed over a desire to control the cobalt mines. This has gone far beyond simple ethnic conflict between Hutu and Tutsi, though that conflict, which is still ongoing, definitely added to the fire. This is a genocide of the people of the DRC by capitalism itself.

Capitalism has always been, and will always be an inherently genocidal institution. It craves the acquisition of individual wealth at the expense of the working class. You cannot have a system predicated on infinite growth within a closed system. Capitalism will always require that resources and wealth be stolen from people who need them. And when so much of our wealth is tied up in food, water, and housing, the theft of those resources from the working class will lead to our deaths.

For the past century and a half the Congo Basin has been subjected to genocide after genocide in the name of capitalism. What is happening right now is only an extension of that, though made far more complicated by the literal hundreds of competing groups and the lack of any international will to see peace achieved.

That’s it for this week folks. No new reviews, so let’s get right into the outro.

Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day, and Free Congo.