New Jersey Jewish Standard, NJ
June 2 2006

Course teaches lessons in genocide prevention

Josh Lipowsky

View all articles by Josh Lipowsky A group of scholars has been
dissecting the root-causes of genocide so that future violence
against whole peoples, like the current slaughter in the Sudan, might
be avoided.

In February, two professors and an activist incorporated the
International Academy for Genocide Prevention, building on a
graduate-level course at Columbia University’s Center for
International Conflict Resolution, the City College of New York, and
a slew of European universities.

The course, which will be taught for the third time in the spring of
2007, teaches students how to recognize genocide rather than
superficially studying genocides.

“The focus of our organization is to act before there’s violence,”
said Henry Huttenbach, a participating distinguished professor at the
CCNY and one of the IACGP founders and directors. “When there’s
[already] violence, you don’t prevent. The best you can do is stop,
and [then] it becomes too late.”

The academy was the brainchild of Huttenbach, Andrea Bartoli, the
director of Columbia’s Center for International Conflict Resolution,
and Wayne resident Eric Mayer, a social activist with a history of
championing human rights. While it is housed at Columbia, it is a
collaboration that goes beyond the campus. Mayer had been working on
the project for three years, meeting with high-level international
leaders, including Mikail Gorbachev, the former president of Poland,
and representatives of the Vatican. Then he met Bartoli and
Huttenbach. They designed the graduate course as a way to reach the
most people.

“The credit must go to Bartoli and Huttenbach,” said Mayer, a
Holocaust survivor. “It’s a way to repay a debt for the gentile
people who at the risk of their lives, saved mine during World War
II.”

But the Holocaust will not be the focus of the course or the
academy’s mission. Hitler’s rise to power and the Holocaust will
certainly be used as examples but within the context of
deconstructing how a genocide can occur.

“Hitler didn’t have the masses [in the beginning],” Mayer said. “He
started one at a time and then got the masses. The only vaccination
is education.”

In Germany, Mayer said, it became acceptable to be anti-Semitic. So
the first goal of the academy is “to immunize people against
prejudice.” People need to understand that there are other societies
with different views, cultures, and religions, Mayer said.

The next step will be to increase the interaction between people of
different backgrounds who can put aside their differences. This is
not to take away from ethnic pride, Mayer stressed, but to increase
pride in our common connection as human beings.

The course uses four genocides as its base: the Holocaust, the
Armenian genocide, Rwanda, and Cambodia. The more the students
understand the background, the better position they will be in to
prevent a crisis, Huttenbach said.

Bartoli likened genocide prevention to fire prevention. There did not
used to be fire brigades and fire prevention regimens, but these have
helped to save lives. He hopes the academy’s genocide education will
have the same effect.
In November, the academy will sponsor a symposium at Columbia for
state representatives and other government officials. Genocide,
Bartoli said, is not possible without “the collusion or the active
participation” of government, so the conference will aim to create an
effective collective response within government, and will feature
speakers from across the globe, including, Mayer hopes, the president
of Rwanda.

“We have to learn many lessons from the past,” Bartoli said. “It is,
unfortunately, way too easy for a relatively small number of people
to kill an extraordinarily large number of people. The possibility of
genocide increases when bystanders do not feel responsible for what
happens in the system.”

A German corporation, which Mayer would not identify, has also
approached the academy about teaching its course to the international
staffs of corporations.

“The seed of genocide is economic,” Mayer said. “It is very
significant because they’re willing to take the lead in this.”

Mayer recalled a memory from his boyhood in Germany. In 1937, his
father, who fought in the German cavalry in World War I, went to a
veterans meeting where he told his compatriots to get rid of “that
clown,” Hitler. Mayer’s father, who was arrested three times and
later killed in one of the camps, is the inspiration for his work in
teaching about genocide and the dangers of hate.

“It is important to [teach] rather than to build memorials,” he said.
“My father would be happy if [donors] spent money on teaching people
rather than putting up another stone.”

For more information on the academy, its class, or the upcoming
symposium, visit

eaches-lessons-in-genocide-prevention