GENOCIDE BECOMES TOPIC OF STUDY IN UMA CLASSROOM
By Matthew Stone

Kennebec Journal
Dec 11 2008
ME

AUGUSTA — Common threads unite each genocidal act, be it the Armenian
genocide, the Holocaust or the genocide in Darfur.

There are perpetrators, victims and bystanders. And each genocide
involves key stages, including classification of people by their
differences, dehumanization of the victims, organization of the
campaign against the victims, and a denial of wrongdoing.

Students in Abraham Peck’s "Genocide in Our Time" class at the
University of Maine at Augusta have examined genocidal acts throughout
the semester, in a first-of-its-kind course offering at the college.

The course is one of a handful UMA students wishing to study genocide
in depth will be able to take as part of a new academic concentration
in Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Studies at the college. The
new concentration is likely to begin next September.

Students in Peck’s class Wednesday devoted their final session of the
semester to discussing the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which militia
members from the Hutu ethnic group killed 800,000 to 1 million members
of the Tutsi ethnic group.

Approximately 200,000 Hutus took part in the murders, according to
Peck, director of the Academic Council for Jewish, Christian and
Islamic Studies at the University of Southern Maine.

By comparison, nearly 1 million Germans took part in the 6 million
killings of Jews and others during the Holocaust, according to Peck,
the son of Holocaust survivors.

"It’s a groupthink kind of thing," Peck said of genocidal acts.

Peck set a lofty goal for the students in his UMA class.

"I want to change you. I want to change your life and I want you to
go out and change other people’s lives," he said.

Janet Martucci said she enrolled in Peck’s class in an attempt to
better understand history. "Genocides continue and I keep trying to
understand why," she said.

After taking the course, Martucci said, she has a better understanding
of the syndrome.

"We’ll now be cognizant of these threats in ourselves so they don’t
take advantage of us," said Martucci, of Washington.

Karyn Dickey, of Richmond, said the class led her to take a different
view of community service, which she said can be a way of preventing
oneself from becoming a guilty bystander.

"I never thought of the fact that being a bystander is actually making
you be a guilty part in genocide," Dickey said.

Gayle Holden, a pastor at West Cumberland United Methodist Church,
said a desire to better understand religion’s role in genocide led
her to enroll in Peck’s course.

Holden said she is now more conscious about American citizens’ part
even in faraway conflicts.

"Now that we know all this information, we can’t be bystanders,"
she said.