NEVER AGAIN, AGAIN, AGAIN …GENOCIDE: ARMENIA, THE HOLOCAUST, CAMBODIA, (VERSION ANGLAISE SEULEMENT)
Tolerance.ca
August 12, 2008
Canada
Communiqués
Lane H. Montgomery’s haunting and beautiful book NEVER AGAIN, AGAIN,
AGAIN…Genocide: Armenia, The Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Darfur is as educational as it is unnerving. Montgomery
asserts that it’s not that the average reader doesn’t know about
genocide — digital cameras, cell phones, the internet and the
immediacy of the media have taken care of that; most simply are unaware
of the scope of genocide over the last century. More than 70 million
people have been systematically murdered in the past 100 years. Most
of the perpetrators responsible for these horrific killings have
never been, and never will be, brought to justice.
Montgomery is on the advisory board of the Harvard Humanitarian
Initiative and is a member of the Center of the National Cathedral
for Peace and Global Reconciliation in Washington DC. As an author
and photographer, she’s traveled worldwide in such places as Liberia,
Rwanda, Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia, Ethiopia, the Congo- where, humanitarian
groups such as Americares, the International Rescue Committee (the
IRC) and SIM (a Christian advocacy sponsor for children with AIDS)
have taken her.
In a particularly revealing moment, the characteristically stoic
Montgomery admits that she was unprepared for the horrors of genocide
in Rwanda. Upon entering a church full of clothed skeletons – Christian
worshippers looking for sanctuary, only to be turned in to the Hutu
machetes by their own pastor, Montgomery told her driver, a Tutsi,
"I don’t think I can do this".
Interspersed among Montgomery’s own steely narrative are deeply
disturbing first-hand accounts of survival, reprints of interviews
with war criminals, and editorials by ambassadors, academicians,
human rights activists, and journalists. She has enlisted a handful
of prestigious contributors: Chuck Sudetic, reporter for The New York
Times from 1990 to 1996 on the collapse of Yugoslavia and other Balkan
countries; Terry George, co-producer of the movie "Hotel Rwanda";
Ambassador James Rosenthal, former Director of Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia Affairs at the Indochine Desk of the State Department;
Richard G. Hovannisian, American Educational Foundation Professor
of Modern Armenian History at UCLA; Ruth Messinger, president of
American Jewish World Service; and Rabbi Arthur Schneier, President,
Appeal of Conscience Foundation.
As for the photographs, Montgomery took over 40 of them. They range
from archival black-and-whites to beautifully crisp full-color images
worthy of the finest travel magazine. Divided into six sections by
genocide, each includes a dramatic timeline separating fact from
possible denial.
By including such a cross section of contributors and a detailed
photographic and written records of major genocides, Montgomery avoids
making a political statement; she makes a human one, inviting us all
to be affronted by the details of the tyranny and slaughter hidden
from so many.
Never Again, Again, Again…
Genocide: Armenia, The Holocaust, Cambodia,
Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Darfur, 2008.
–Boundary_(ID_ei9xi1FNc+noaH/Op8tFkQ)–