Organised bands of killers have not engaged in large scale massacres of the opposing groups.
With growing tension between communities, the chances increase that violent clashes such as those in the capital Bangui and other cities may escalate into large scale massacres.
The attack was the second large-scale massacre of civilians attributed to Boko Haram in less than two weeks.
"No longer will it go down in history that such a large-scale massacre happened and nobody paid a price.
The reported exodus came after activists yesterday accused President Bashar al-Assad's regime of committing a "large-scale massacre" in nearby Bayda.
It wasn't until the 1960s, for example, that the term "holocaust," which used to mean any large-scale massacre, took on the specific connotations it has today.
Tensions over Japan's wartime atrocities were revived last week when nationalist groups held a conference in Osaka at which revisionist historians and others gave speeches denying that there had been any large-scale massacre at Nanjing and disparaging Japan's critics.
In modernity, after all, even those wars that seem necessary and good involve the large-scale massacre of helpless civilians, often by the good guys (as with the Allied bombings of German cities, not to mention Hiroshima).
Few Indian groups survived into the 19th century; the last large-scale massacre of Indian peoples occurred at Salsipuedes in 1831, and by mid century scant vestiges of indigenous culture remained.
"I feel the horror and the shame of the crime which the law is about to commit against justice" — this at a time when the overwhelming majority of Americans thought of the anarchists exactly as they think of terrorists now, as aliens with large-scale massacre on their minds.
The initial air strikes ordered by President Obama more than a hundred and fifty were intended solely to aid the Kurdish forces and the government in Baghdad, and to rescue the Yazidis, a religious minority that fled en masse to Mt. Sinjar when ISIS's fighters threatened a large-scale massacre.
