A MILLION RAMSEYS: GROUPS ON MISSION TO STOP GENOCIDE
By Ben Ready

Longmont Daily Times-Call, CO
Aug. 24, 2006

Armenians’ journey reaches Longmont

LONGMONT – Imagine JonBenet Ramsey had a sister and both were murdered
10 years ago. Would the international media and billions of people
worldwide care twice as much with two victims instead of one?

And imagine that the killers were thousands armed to the teeth and
committed to killing all little white girls in America. Might you
see this on the front page for a few weeks?

So why is it that when you hear about not one or two but thousands
of murder victims in Darfur today, so few seem to care?

Two groups committed to stopping genocide asked these questions in
Longmont on Wednesday.

"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic," said Kim
Christianian, chairwoman of the Armenian Genocide Commemoration
Committee.

Six Armenian students left Los Angeles on foot June 27 and arrived
in Longmont on Wednesday during their Journey for Humanity genocide
awareness and prevention campaign.

For the students’ stops in Denver, Boulder, Longmont, Loveland, Fort
Collins and Greeley, they were joined by the Colorado Coalition for
Genocide Awareness and Action.

Together the groups hope to remind Americans of the slaughter of
millions of human beings – each as unique and precious as JonBenet
Ramsey, the loss of each individual worthy of the same public outrage
shown after the loss of Ramsey’s life, the group said.

A photo exhibit of starved bodies, rape victims and mass graves
along Main Street in front of Longmont Free University said it with
numbers too:

1895-1923 – 1.5 million Armenians massacred

1932-1933 – 7 million Ukrainians killed from manmade famine

1938-1945 – 11 million massacred in the Nazi Holocaust

1970-1980 – 3.3 million Cambodians massacred

1994 – 1 million Rwandans massacred

2003-present – 400,000 and counting killed and 2.5 million displaced
in Darfur.

"This is the thing we have on our hearts. We are survivors," said
Levon Sayadyan, whose Armenian great-grandparents were forced
to watch Turkish soldiers behead their daughter. "We cannot be
bystanders. … We need to take action."

Sayadyan and 12 others joined for a discussion after their walk from
Boulder. The students will walk to Loveland today, Fort Collins on
Friday and Greeley on Saturday. Their 3,200-mile Journey for Life
will end in Washington, D.C., before November.

Not only do the students in "Stop Genocide Now" T-shirts want to
remind people along their path of past atrocities, but they also hope
their discussion circles will reduce American complacency about the
killings in Darfur today. Seeing U.S. humanitarian efforts following
9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Indonesia, students said
they have no doubt Americans are generous.

But after being ignored or rebuffed by throngs of reporters in Boulder
on Tuesday, who were gathered under a tent and doing little but waiting
for a breaking bit of information in the Ramsey murder case saga,
the students said, walker Edward S. Majian wondered how the press and
public could be so indifferent to the genocide of an African people.

"When we have a genocide, political actors and their allies become
complicit for tolerating it. We ignore certain things because it’s
not politically comfortable to talk about," Majian said.

According to the groups, understanding genocide – defined as "the
systematic destruction by a government of a racial, religious or
ethnic group" – is the first step in fighting it.

When people then familiarize themselves with the world’s recent
history of genocides and grasp the combination of social complacency
and hatred that fuels them, taking action to stop today’s genocide
is the easy part, said Hasmig Tatiossian.

"You donate time, talk to friends, donate money to coalitions, contact
the media, call your congressmen, talk to your kids, encourage your
teachers to teach students about this," she said. "You don’t have
to be Armenian or Jewish to take action. … Just realize that we’re
all human and all interconnected."

For more information about stopping genocides, go to
, www .journeyforhumanity.com or