PROF. SAULIUS SUžIEELIS: “CRUEL HISTORY OF GENOCIDE STILL PLAGUES US IN 2011”
Baltic Review
May 16 2011
Kaunas, May 16, 2011 — From 23 March to 12 May, Millersville
University (Pennsylvania, USA) Professor Emeritus Saulius SužiedÄ-lis
held a series of public lectures at VMU on genocide and mass murder
in the 20th century. His last lecture focused on genocide from the
perspective of global history and politics, the concept of genocide
today and in the context of Communism and Nazism.
The professor began the final lecture by reminding the definition of
genocide coined by Raphael Lemkin, who claimed that it is destruction
of a national pattern. Attempts to define genocide and its role in
history became louder in 1995, when the greatest genocide researchers
gathered at a conference in Yerevan (Armenia), commemorating the
80th anniversary since the mass murder of Armenians carried out by
the Ottoman Empire. One of conference’s participants, Steven Katz,
opposed such a broad definition of genocide and claimed only the
Holocaust can be described by that term.
Prof. SužiedÄ-lis talked about the distinctions and similarities
between genocide and the Holocaust pointed out by various researchers
and the discussions they sparked. For instance, some theorists
said the mass murder of Jews was global, purely ideological and
bureaucratically organised, as opposed to all other genocides. Broader
definitions approach genocide as any repression a nation is subjected
to; Lithuanian author Izidorius IgnataviÄ~Mius has used the word
to describe the mass murder and other oppressive acts committed to
Lithuanians by the Communist and Nazi regimes.
Many other examples were remembered in the professor’s lecture. David
E. Stannard, Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii
System, criticised Katz’s theory by saying that the exclusion of all
other cases but the Jews from the definition of genocide is akin to
the denial of the Holocaust by anti-Semites, as all other genocides
and massacres are trivialized in such a way.
Horrors of Genocide – All Over the World
Prof. Stannard has researched the massacres of Native Americans,
in which entire tribes were wiped out and some 20 million natives died.
What was controversial, according to Prof. SužiedÄ-lis, is that many
of the American Indians died from diseases they caught, e.g. from the
colonists’ bed sheets, due to lack of immunity to fight the bacteria
with antibodies. Nevertheless, it was murder on a massive scale;
in 1851, the Governor of the then recently founded California signed
a document that said all American Indians must be fought until they
are completely extinct. In ten years that followed, more than two
thirds of all Native Americans in California were murdered or died,
which was typical of those times.
Later on, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis demonstrated Yale University’s world map
showing cases of colonial and indigenous genocide, and highlighted
the more interesting cases. Congo, which is one of the rare countries
in Africa with an abundance of various resources, was the place where
some 2 million slaves died, mostly from work in mines. In Southeast
Africa (currently Namibia), German soldiers killed 100 to 200 thousand
Africans; some of those shooters became Nazi generals later on. The
professor also talked of similar horrific acts in Eastern Timor,
the Caribbean islands and Guatemala. The latter case involved a 1950s
conflict between Spanish-born people, which were higher on the racial
hierarchy at the time, and native Indians of Guatemala, which were
placed at the bottom but were the majority; their revolts ended with
hundreds of thousands of casualties. “This is just one example showing
how the concept of genocide is semi-politicized, used to represent
a certain point of view, i.e. colonial genocide”, explained Prof.
SužiedÄ-lis.
The professor then took a closer look at the Genocide Studies Program
offered at Yale and the particular cases this university offers to
analyse, remarking that it uses expanded definition of genocide and
includes not just racial but social and political cases of mass murder
as well. While the program was complimented for focusing on varied
examples, such as the especially cruel social-based genocide carried
out by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis noted
the absence of the USSR in the program’s syllabus.
Still No United Assessment of History
Turning to recent realities, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis spoke of the Prague
Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, signed in 2008,
which attracted attention to the issue of “double genocide” and sought
to make the past horrors of Communism and Nazism equally recognized
in Europe. The declaration caused an opposition among politicians
and scientists in Israel and Western Europe, accusations were made
against Ukraine, Lithuania and other countries for trivializing the
significance of the Holocaust by comparing it to Communist crimes.
There were plans to hold Nuremberg-like trials and sentence the
leaders of the Communist regime, but they did not materialize.
“Many people in the West have a certain image of the Soviet Union
in their heads because it contributed in a major way to the fight
against fascism, thus somehow in their eyes the USSR is not as evil
as Nazi Germany”, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis said. “It is 2011 now, but this
cruel history, all these genocides and -isms are still plaguing us,
because, it seems, we cannot settle for a united assessment of history,
which is the root of all conflicts”, he concluded.
Thanking the audience for coming to his lectures, Prof. SužiedÄ-lis
expressed hope that his outline of general, historical facts and
background related to genocide will have provided enough understanding
to more easily grasp these issues and find reliable material without
getting lost in the bottomless pile of information on the Internet.
Prof. Saulius SužiedÄ-lis, born in 1945 in Gotha, Germany, spent his
early years in the Brockton’s Lithuanian community in Massachusetts,
served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Ethiopia in 1967-1969. He acquired
Ph.D. in Russian and Eastern European history at the University of
Kansas in 1977. SužiedÄ-lis has worked at the U.S. Department of
Justice (1982-1987), he has also published many scientific books and
articles on Lithuanian history. Since 1998 he has been a member of
the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the
Soviet and the Nazi Regimes in Lithuania. From 2006 to 2010 he chaired
the Annual Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide at Millersville
University, in which he also was a history professor.