genocide

Personally I did not share some of the emphases of the press conferences. The use of the word "genocide", which came up very often, I thought was quite misplaced because I do not think Mr Milosevic, whatever else he was doing, was engaged in genocide, he was just trying to kick people out. He used very unpleasant methods to do it but he was not actually trying to exterminate them all. That was unfortunate.

The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing even food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day. Due to the electricity shortage, at least 40 percent of Gazans have not had access to running water (which is channeled through electric pumps) for several days and the sewage system has broken down. The raw sewage that has not spilled onto the streets is now being poured into the sea at a daily rate of 30 million liters. Hospitals have been forced to rely on emergency generators leading them to cut back, yet again, on the already limited services offered to the Palestinian population. The World Food Programme has reported critical shortages of food and declared that it is unable to provide 10,000 of the poorest Gazans with three out of the five foodstuffs they normally receive.

[Genocide inflation] occurred before and during NATO’s 78-day bombing war on Yugoslavia and takeover of Kosovo. The pre-bombing propaganda barrage claiming Serb misbehavior was massive, and then during the war itself there was a stream of hysterical claims of indiscriminate killing, official U.S. claims of Bosnian Muslim deaths reaching 500,000, with a very profuse use of the word “genocide.” After the war, the claimed deaths quickly fell to 11,000, and one of the greatest forensic body searches in history produced only 4,000 bodies (with some 2,000 still reportedly missing).

The East India Company's 'CEO' was Robert Clive. 'Clive of India' looted, literally, Bengal's treasury of all its gold and silver and loaded it onto a fleet of more than a hundred boats. The 'profit' to the company was £2.5 million (more than £200 million today), of which Clive's cut was £234,000 (£20 million). The 'multinational' was born, conceived by a breed known as speculators, who in 1784 drove up the price of food beyond the reach of India's poor. 'Estimates vary', wrote Robins, 'but up to ten million people may have died of starvation'. In a country which, in the seventeenth century, was the 'agricultural mother of Asia and the industrial workshop of the world.', where the weavers of cotton enjoyed a higher standard of living than their counterparts in England, life under British rule became a lesser commodity.

In 1990, the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) wrote a report warning about the potential health and environmental catastrophe from the use of depleted uranium weapons. The health effects had been known for a long time. The report sent to the UK government warned "in their estimation, if 50 tonnes of residual DU dust remained ‘in the region’ there could be half a million extra cancers by the end of the century [2000]." Estimates of depleted uranium weapons used in 1991, now range from the Pentagon’s admitted 325 tons, to other scientific bodies who put the figure as high as 900 tons. That would make the number of estimated cancers as high as 9,000,000, depending on the amount used in the 1991 Gulf War. In the 2003 Gulf War, estimates of 2200 tons have been given — causing about 22,000,000 new cancer cases. Altogether the total number of cancer patients estimated using the UKAEA data would be 25,250,000. In July of 1998, the CIA estimated the population of Iraq to be approximately 24,683,313.