UCL Discovery

Abstract

Surveying the catalogue of 20 th century mass crimes, from the Turkish killings of the Armenians in 1915, through the massacres in Bali in 1965, the thirty six year long campaign against the Mayans in Guatemala, to the horrors of Darfur today, we can discern a clear enough pattern: every genocide at the moment it takes place appears to outsiders to be ambiguous and inherently implausible. This article examines the disctinctively “disorderly” and “uncoordinated” persecution and genocide of the Romany peoples and links the ad hoc, locally driven nature of their persecution to the post-war failure to acknowledge this catastrophe.