ABSTRACT
The twentieth century was an era of great atrocity, and unprecedented awareness of distant acts of violence, around the world. The century witnessed two global wars. It saw the Armenian massacre during the First World War, the Holocaust during the Second, the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, the more than 20 years of violence in northern Uganda, the incredibly quick slaughter of at least 500,000 innocents in Rwanda over 100 days in 1994. It witnessed the indiscriminate use of force against civilian populations during the violent conflict in the former Yugoslavia and ethnic strife and civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Sudan. The twentieth century also saw many, many other acts of brutal and unwarranted violence and gross human rights violations throughout the world. In the twentieth century lived Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Miloševic´, Joseph Kony, Charles Taylor, Saddam Hussein and many other architects of atrocity. The twentieth century also tolerated ‘unexceptional political mass murderers’, otherwise normal individuals whose deplorable actions contributed to the atrocity of which they found themselves to be a part (Simpson 2007: 75).
