Sure, Mao, Stalin and Hitler would likely top anyone’s list of top genocidal machines. By one calculation, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward together wasted over 22,000 lives a day. In his 25 years ruling the Soviet Union, Stalin killed somewhere between 800,000 and 60 million, depending on whether you call famine intentional or the by-product of a broken system. Hitler… well, maybe the less we say, the better.

But for efficiency, Rwanda’s Hutu slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus is unmatched, with official counts from 100 horrific days in 1994 at 937,000 dead. For sheer brutality, votes go to the “Rape of Nanking” perpetrated by the Japanese military on the Chinese mainland in late 1937, in which as many as 300,000 civilians were slaughtered in the span of six weeks. For gruesome innovation, Indonesia earns points for using starvation (i.e., intentional famine) as a weapon against the East Timorese. And by being the first in our most murderous century, Turkey set a high standard with the extermination of 2 million Armenians, and for denying it ever since.

Still, we think it’s the bottom of the list that often gets overlooked: the truly worst genocides in history. After all, if you’re going to kill an entire population, do it right, right? Really, does three a day even outpace regular old-age mortality? At that rate, your genocidal activities will have to last longer than you. Here’s our list of the types who just couldn’t get the job done:

Is Osama Bin Laden genocidal? Only if “infidels” are a genus, but for the sake of argument, if he were, he’d be incredibly inefficient in his last 13 years: now down to three-quarters of a person a day, and, thankfully, dropping every minute.

Syria’s Hafez Al-Assad turned his attention to the “Arabization” of his country through his presidency from 1971 to 2000, which was bad news for the non-Arab populations, roughly 25,000 Kurds and Assyrians. Still, that’s a paltry 2.38 a day.

The southern cone of South America tried in the 1970s to join the big leagues, but Chile’s Augusto Pinochet managed just over 3,000 “disappearances” in 17 years in power, preferring torture to extermination, while Argentina’s Jorge Rafael Videla probably managed to extinguish a good 10,000. Luckily, the two dictators hated each other, nearly going to war over some islands down there, which may have helped prevent a cooperative effort to eliminate left-wing opposition.

Johnny Paul Koroma ruled Sierra Leone for eight months as the chairman of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, and the violent aftermath of his coup was enough to churn through 6,000 civilians. Like some of the Khmer Rouge leaders, Koroma managed to get himself declared officially dead (or to have actually been killed, it’s not clear) before he could be convicted by the U.N. Special Court set up to judge him.

A dozen others, though thoroughly murderous and even over long periods, never managed to break the 100,000 mark; still, they deserve a quick review. Guatemala’s Efrain Rios Montt (70,000 in two years), Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier (60,000 in 14 years), as well as Chad’s Hissène Habré (40,000 in eight years) are often overlooked. Major leaders Lenin, Franco, Chiang Kai-Shek and Americans Johnson and Nixon are usually mentioned, and disputed, in genocide circles, but genocidal or not, none of them made it to six figures. Losers.

So, where does Cambodia’s “Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique” rank? Top ten finisher in total numbers (1.7 million), 13th in deaths-per-day averages, but a No. 1 contender when it comes to per-capita percentage—by some estimates nearly a quarter of the population was wiped out. Uh, congratulations?

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Matthew Fishbane is a New York–based freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and Salon.com. He lived in Phnom Penh for three years.