With Over 500,000 Dead, Number of Victims of Covid
Classifying the Brazilian Covid-19 tragedy as genocide faces resistance, but there is no doubt that the scale is compatible with such events. The threshold of 500 thousand dead in the pandemic, achieved this Saturday (19), it is greater than that of at least eight genocides that have taken place since the beginning of the 20th century. The genocide committed by Serb forces in Bosnia, for example, in the 1990s resulted in an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 dead. The genocide committed against Kurds in northern Iraq by then-dictator Saddam Hussein left up to 150,000 dead in the late 1980s. Covid-19 in Brazil has already left more dead than the two largest genocides of the 21st century. The massacres of the Black population in Darfur, western Sudan, left between 100,000 and 400,000 since 2003, depending on the estimate. The persecution of the Rohingya ethnic group, a Muslim minority that lives in western Myanmar, has resulted in up to 30,000 deaths since its beginning in 2016. The definition of genocide is based on a 1948 UN convention, which establishes a series of criteria for this crime to be characterized. The aggression must be directed at an ethnic, national, racial or religious group, which is not the case with Covid-19, which affected the entire spectrum of the Brazilian population.