Times-Union, Albany, NY
April 24 2005
Who can stop the genocide that’s occurring today?
By WILLIAM S. PARSONS
First published: Sunday, April 24, 2005
Editor’s note: This article is based on a speech William S. Parsons
delivered April 14 at the Armenian Lecture Series at Russell Sage
College in Troy. Parsons is chief of staff at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and editor of “Century of
Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts.”
Each generation has great accomplishments — and yet it seems like
we’re still in the Stone Age when it comes to how we treat one
another and how we behave toward one another, especially when it
becomes massacres and genocide and hate. Each generation, I think,
witnesses innocent people being slaughtered and yet each generation
is inept in preventing genocide.
The agony of this history is really looking at the fact that you have
individuals, groups and nations who make decisions on a daily basis
to let mass murder, crimes against humanity and genocide occur.
Genocide is not accidental. It doesn’t just come out of anywhere.
Genocide is purposeful. Genocide is planned in secrecy, but it often
is carried out publicly. That’s really been the history of 20th
century genocide.
Back in 1915, when the young Turk government took power, their slogan
was brotherhood, their slogan was humanity, their slogan was
something else aside from what they ended up doing. They ended up
creating a new order in Turkey and the new order was not going to
include Greeks. It was not going to include Christians. It was not
going to include Christian Armenians. It was definitely not going to
include Armenians. It was definitely not going to include a lot of
other folks. And this new order got put in place and the world
watched as that genocide took place.
It wasn’t called a genocide back then. The word genocide didn’t
evolve until Raphael Lempkin in 1948 who had survived the Holocaust
and lost his whole family struggled to find a word to talk about mass
slaughter on a scale that is perpetuated and perpetrated by a
government. There was no word called genocide in 1915.
Winston Churchill has a great quote where he calls the 20th century
the century of common man. And when he got asked “what do you mean
the century of common man,” his response was because common man has
suffered the most in the 20th century.
This is agonizing for those of us who have lost brothers and fathers
and daughters and mothers in war as soldiers, especially in Iraq
today. And that’s painful. But look at the records, folks. It is
safer to be a soldier in the 20th century than it is to be a
civilian.
Civilians are massacred on wholesale sizes throughout the world. Just
look at our own life spans; take my own life span.
In 1964, I went to college. I was away from home finally, having a
great time — and the Ache Indians in Paraguay are almost obliterated
from the face of the earth.
The next year, I’m a sophomore and Indonesia slaughters 500,000
people.
Almost to the day that I graduated in June 1967, President Nasser of
Egypt made his famous statement — we will annihilate the Jews of
Israel and we will annihilate the state of Israel.
I ended up teaching history and social studies in the public school
systems and as I’m teaching kids about World War II and World War I,
the slogan “never again” keeps coming up in the classroom. Never
again what?
In 1971, here I am teaching this history, 1 million to 3 million
Bengalis are slaughtered in Pakistan. A few years later, you get
Indonesia again. A few years after that, 200,000 Hutus are rounded up
and slaughtered by Tutsis in Burundi. What’s Burundi next door to?
Rwanda.
Do you think Rwanda in 1994 came out of nowhere? It came out of
revenge. The Tutsis killed the Hutus in Burundi. In 1994, the Hutus
turned on the Tutsis and wiped out 800,000 of them within three
months. A million to 3 million Cambodians in 1975-79 and I’m still
teaching, never again what. What does that mean?
Never again Armenians in the Middle East. Never again Jews in Europe.
Never again Cambodians in Cambodia. What is the word never again? Is
it just something we aspire to? Is it just something we hope for?
Just in my lifetime, we’ve lived through genocide after genocide,
after mass murder after mass murder.
And today we’re faced with Sudan. In the last 10 years, a little more
than 2 million people in southern Sudan were killed. We watched it.
It was in the news, we saw it and it continued.
And today we face another genocide in Darfur in western Sudan. There
are 700,000-800,000 people there and 400,000 have already gone across
the border in refugee camps and are dying from diseases. And the
Sudanese government today says it’s not genocide. It’s those groups
out there that we don’t have control of in the desert who are killing
them.
What was the Turkish government’s response after the Armenian
genocide? It wasn’t planned. It was just out in that desert there.
There were Kurds. There were people who were killing them. We
couldn’t control them.
Every government down through history has all the excuses in the
world. We’re so good at excuses — and we’re so good at the
memorials.
When our staff went over to the State Department next door to us in
Washington to argue with them this past month about Darfur, they
said: I don’t know. I don’t know if you can call it genocide now. If
you call it genocide, there’s this implication and this implication
and this implication.
And we’re sitting there saying if you’re waiting to call it genocide,
forget it. Just go build your memorial, it’s done. Call it imminent
genocide. Call it a threat to genocide. Call it a crime against
humanity. Call it anything you want on that scale, but do something
to stop it now.
And the tragedy is we’ve got the tools to stop genocide. The tragedy
is we choose not to do it. That’s the tragedy of this history.
So what are the facts, what are the answers to this, where does it
come from, what perpetuates it? One way you can start to look at it
is that you automatically think to stop genocide you need a
government … you need a nation. You can’t stop it. I can’t stop it.
Right? Wrong, I think. Governments don’t stop it because we don’t
force our governments to stop it and that’s true of every single
genocide that’s ever taken place.
The Ottoman government labeled the Armenians minorities, a minority
that is a vermin. The next generation, 20 years later in the
Holocaust, the Nazis are going to use the word vermin. Who’s working
with the young Turks in Turkey to kill the Armenians? Many of them
were German soldiers and German officials. … The people who
perpetrate genocide learn from each other and they learn they can get
away with it.
When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993, all
the people were up at the Congress at the top of the hill, there in
the rotunda — never again must this history happen. And almost the
very next week, ethnic cleansing began in Bosnia by the Serbs.
The next year, all the congressmen, all the dignitaries, were all up
at the hill again. And almost to the day, a Rwandan plane was shot
down with the president and within three months, 800,000 Tutsis were
slaughtered.
The very next year … up at the rotunda … remembering —
remembering is the key — and the Serbs moved in on Bosnian Muslims
and 7,500 Muslim men and boys who were in a U.N. camp, a protection
zone camp to keep them protected from being slaughtered. The Serbs
negotiated with the U.N, and the United Nations turned them over to
the Serbs and 7,500 boys and men were slaughtered.
In six months, you will be reading on the front page of every
newspaper in this country about the Congo. Three million people have
already been killed there; seven armies are crisscrossing the Congo.
Nobody is stepping in; nobody is helping, except for Oxfam, except
for all these private groups that go in to try to make a difference
and put their names and their places on the line to try to save
people, just like those two Pakistani guards.
It all comes down to us, each of us … to just the fact that we have
to take some part of our life to care beyond ourselves, beyond our
group. Because if we don’t, we’re still going to be in the Stone Age
when it comes to human beings.