WPTV, FL
June 6 2005

FAU hosts discussion on Holocaust’s role in study of global
atrocities

By TAL ABBADY, Sun-Sentinel
June 6, 2005

BOCA RATON — “I have long wrestled with the same nagging question,
which I try to brush aside but which keeps returning, insistent,
insolent, and harsh. Why me? Why did I survive when so many loved
ones around me perished? The answer emerged from the depths of my
being. I was spared so that I could be a witness.”

Those words preface artist Rupert Bazambanza’s illustrated storybook
account of the Rwandan genocide, Smile Through the Tears. The small
African nation is often evoked as the most glaring example of late
20th-century atrocities that rendered meaningless the dictum “Never
Again” that emerged from the Holocaust.

Yet the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis remains the
backdrop for the understanding and evaluation of modern genocide,
including Rwanda’s story. That sparked vigorous debate Sunday when
Bazambanza, who survived the Hutu-led massacres in his country, and
dozens of scholars and writers from around the world gathered to
discuss the Holocaust’s impact on genocide scholarship.

Michael Berenbaum, of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles,
raised the question of the Holocaust’s legacy in a lecture Sunday
that was part of the sixth biennial conference of the International
Association of Genocide Scholars, “Ninety Years after the Armenian
Genocide and Sixty Years after the Holocaust: The Continuing Threat
and Legacy of Genocide.” Florida Atlantic University hosts the event,
which runs through Tuesday.

Universalized as “the paradigmatic manifestation of evil,” Berenbaum
argued the Holocaust’s usefulness as a way to “particularize” the
Jewish community, a process that led to the creation of Israel, has
regrettably waned. Today the Holocaust is considered the prevailing
reference in all discourse on genocide from Bosnia to Rwanda to
discussions of potential nuclear warfare. For some, that raises
troubling questions about whether the Holocaust should be preserved
as an example of the uniqueness of Jewish suffering that is not
comparable to any other event.

“The Holocaust has taken up so much time and so much space in the
20th century. … How do we furnish time, space, attention, affection
and empathy for others?” asked Robert Melson, a professor of
political science at Purdue University.

It is through exhaustive Holocaust inquiry and identification with
it, Berenbaum responded, that other atrocities have been acknowledged
as genocide.

“You can use the depth of understanding of one pain to speak to
another pain,” Berenbaum said.

The lecture sparked a few heated exchanges on the politics of
competitive suffering. It then turned to what for some is the most
bruising subject in Holocaust discourse: that genocides continue to
take place before a chorus of passive spectators around the world.

“Never Again,” Berenbaum said in his closing remarks, has long been a
moot point.

“The most that we can ask for now is `Not this time. Not on my
watch,'” he said.

With his art, Bazambanza, 30, hopes to remind the international
community that Rwanda did happen on its watch.

“I want to pass on my experiences to the world,” said Bazambanza, who
lost his father, cousins and dozens of friends in Rwanda in 1994.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress