It is often remarked how the separatist war in and of itself caused the least of the casualties during the period. Other factors were responsible for the astronomic death toll: republican repression, famine, evacuations, and isolated natural disasters, just to name a few.
The long genocide stands apart, however, as that great historian Reno said "The long genocide wasn't a military endeavor to tilt the tide of war. It wasn't a political move that would destabilize the five houses, the gods know the republic did many of those. The long genocide was a bloody response to deadly incompetence."
The months before the genocide were horrible, even comparable to the brutality of the event.
Deaths of starvation were equal to military casualties in the third quadrant, malnutrition affected all age groups, all secret prisons owned by the military police were up to capacity, and yet, with all this, revolts amongst the republican populace were at their lowest level.
Why? Why were the people not revolting? Why did they allow their government to do these things?
Here, dear reader is a list of names: Nadia, Yoden, Matheus, Rivaer, Ardenne. Anyone who's had any education would know these names and their history, they are, today, military planet provinces, blocked off from any civilian interaction.
However, anyone who's had to study the trials of Military Police officers after the war notices something other than the name: the order.
A letter recovered from an MP outpost and read aloud during the trials read this:
"Operations, overt and clandestine, shall now, by official ordnance of Darius Saude, Director Official of the United Intelligence Operations, and Matthew Horrick, Commander of the Military Police, be concentrated in the following Planetary outposts: Nadia, Yoden, Matheus, Rivaer, Ardenne…"
This letter was found in most MP offices, but most damning, it was found in a jail where 10,000 "state suspects for treason" were found dead with signs of torture.
The letter led to the conviction of more than 5,000 MP officials, including both the director of the UIO and the MP commander.
The letter also proved something Republican officers had long denied, the occurrence of a genocide that spanned months and most of the third quadrant. It was a targeted operation as one official said when asked about the nature of the operation, the official said:
"Was it targeted? Yes. Was it an order from the highest of places? Yes. Did it work? No…"
Later on he specifies who were the targets,
"... The operation was targeted at members and the families of the members, who belonged to Brothers of the 5, the Provincial Council, and the Separatists…. Just in Nadia? About 100,000 members…. No, 100,000 in BO5 only. There were, I think, five times that in the P.C and less than 50,000 in the Separatists…. Yes, sir, only in Nadia…. Overall? Well, just in the third quadrant, excluding individual actors and minor organizations, I think there were around 20 or 30 million members…. Well, this was a very different war, sir. A war like this would've been an extinction event in the time of our ancestors, so I do think those numbers are justified considering how many people we lost in actual combat"
And indeed it was a different kind of war, and yet the atrocities of that war have been unmatched even as many more wars were waged after the event.
The genocide was a silent one, and it was only once the bodies kept piling up, with the war coming to a close, and with no apparent killer behind them that the people began to suspect, and soon they revolted, upping the anti and the death toll
The casualties of the event are well documented by human rights investigators and by the state reparations department. Later evidence revealed that the genocide lasted 110 years, going from isolated clandestine operations to calcified policy
Killed: 54,061,123 in 110 years (including victims from spontaneous revolt)
Missing: 451,798 in 110 years (including victims from spontaneous revolt)
Displaced: 3,450,403
# of people affected: 57,963,324