PETER BALAKIAN, EXPERT ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, LEADS GENOCIDE AWARENESS WEEK SCHEDULE
States News Service
March 29, 2010 Monday
The following information was released by Syracuse University:
The Syracuse University School of Education’s Regional Holocaust
and Genocide Education Initiative has teamed up with STAND, the
SU student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network, to
facilitate a series of events in recognition of Genocide Awareness
Week, April 12-16. All events will be held on the SU Campus and
are free and open to the public. The lectures, film screenings and
discussions during the week are designed to heighten awareness and
promote recognition of genocides that have taken place worldwide
throughout the 20th century and continuing today.
A lecture by Peter Balakian will kick off the week’s events. He
will present The Armenian Genocide and Modernity, on Monday, April
12, at 4 p.m. in the Winnick Hillel Center. Balakian is the Donald
M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the English
department and director of creative writing at Colgate University. His
book The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response
(HarperCollins, 2003) was winner of the Raphael Lemkin Prize, a New
York Times Notable Book and a New York Times and national best seller.
Continuing the series of events to evoke the message of genocide
awareness are:
a screening of the film Shake Hands with the Devil, about the 1994
genocide in Rwanda, April 12 at 6 p.m. in Room 207 of the Hall of
Languages;
a screening of Invisible Children, The Legacy Tour, April 13 at 8 p.m.
in Grant Auditorium);
a presentation from motivational speaker/poet/rapper Omekongo Dibinga,
who will speak about the situation in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, April 14 at 5 p.m. in the Life Sciences Auditorium; and
an awareness reception hosted by STAND, the African Student Union
(ASU), Student African American Society (SAS), Syracuse Real College
Radio and UNICEF, April 16 at 3 p.m. in the Jabberwocky Caf in the
Hildegarde and J. Myer Schine Student Center.
While we will pause on April 11 (Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance
Day) to remember the Holocaust, says Professor Emeritus Alan Goldberg,
director of the Regional Holocaust and Genocide Education Initiative,
we must also remember that the genocides in Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda,
Cambodia and Darfur also have their days of remembrance in Aprila
tragic testament to our inexcusable failure to stop genocide and
mass atrocities. Our hope is that the events during this week create
awareness within our community of the ongoing atrocities and the ways
we as a community can become active in standing against them.