Confronted with mass popular protest, Deng Xiaoping imposes martial law in China

More than 2000 peaceful demonstrators die after troops open fire in Beijing's Tiananmen Square

Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic encourages ethnic cleansing by paramilitaries in Bosnia

The Hutu government in Rwanda preaches genocide against Tutsis

The assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana sparks the outbreak of genocide

As many as 800,000 people die, most of them slashed to death with machetes, in three months of genocide in Rwanda

Bosnian Serbs massacre thousands of Bosnian Muslims after laying siege to the town of Srebrenica

Brutal reprisals by Serb troops against Albanians in Kosovo include systematic ethnic cleansing

Civil war breaks out in the Darfur region of the Sudan, resulting in large numbers of civilian deaths and accusations of government-sponsored genocide

Abuses in the US military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq are revealed on US television

Hamas militants take hostage an Israeli corporal, provoking a new Israeli military campaign against Gaza