Other twentieth century collective atrocities had similar trigger events. In Cambodia, genocide began when the Khmer Rouge suffered several military defeats against Vietnam (Kiernan, 2002). The Armenian genocide got underway when the Ottoman Empire was humiliated by Russia during the First World War (Akçam, 2004). The trigger event in the genocide of the Rwandan Tutsis was rather paradoxically the 1993 Arusha (Tanzania) peace talks when the extremists in power realised that the agreements would force them to make major concessions. They began planning genocide as a means of reasserting their absolutism by attacking defenceless victims (Human Rights Watch, 1999).