Boston Herald, MA
April 29 2006
Genocide’s lesson timeless
By Adam Strom/ As You Were Saying
Saturday, April 29, 2006
To prevent mass violence and genocide, we will need to summon the
commitments of new generations around the world. Here, education in
schools and in broad public venues holds the best promise.
On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Turk government began rounding up
Armenian intellectuals and community leaders and executing them. It
was the first phase of what soon became a full-fledged genocide –
more than a million Armenians would eventually die and nearly every
Armenian would be driven from Turkey.
In the United States and Europe, journalists, politicians and
ordinary people who knew of the horrors and outrages in Turkey’s
Anatolian desert wrestled with how to respond. Most simply averted
their eyes. Others, unable to remain silent in the face of the
growing atrocities, challenged tradition by boldly proclaiming that
responsibility for human life does not stop at national borders.
Their solutions set important precedents for international law. In
fact, the phrase `crime against humanity,’ made famous as one of the
counts at the post-Holocaust Nuremberg trials, was first used to
describe the massacres of Armenian civilians in the spring of 1915.
To many who had followed the bloody history of Turkey’s campaign
against its ethnic minorities, the impunity enjoyed by those who had
ordered and carried out the killings was unbearable.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and a law student, was one of them.
Lemkin confronted one of his law school professors, `Why is the
killing of a million people a lesser crime than the killing of a
single individual?’ His professor used a metaphor to explain that
courts did not have any jurisdiction: `Consider the case of a farmer
who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business.
If you interfere, you are trespassing.’ But, replied an incensed
Lemkin, `the Armenians are not chickens.’
Lemkin dedicated the rest of his life to finding a way to make
sure that the law would recognize the difference. In 1944 Lemkin
coined the word `genocide’ and later he drafted the United Nations
Convention on Genocide. The convention was ratified on Dec. 9, 1948,
one day before the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights. The ratification was too late for Lemkin’s own family, many
of whom were murdered in the Holocaust.
In the 20th century more people died through genocidal violence and
state-sanctioned murder than in wartime combat. The 21st century is
not looking much better. The violence now taking hundreds of
thousands of lives in Darfur is a vivid reminder of how little we
learned from the last 100 years.
To prevent mass violence and genocide, we will need to summon the
commitments of new generations around the world. Here, education in
schools and in broad public venues holds the best promise. Students
can learn about the failures of democratic accountability that so
often precede atrocity. Communities can learn about the dangers of
blind obedience and about the power of bystanders to become what
author Samantha Power calls `upstanders,’ speaking out against hatred
and violence.
Even today, 91 years after the start of the Armenian genocide,
the Turkish government and others seek to deny that the crimes ever
occurred and some argue that teachers need to `tell both sides of the
story.’ These denials just deepen the effects of the crime; they
allow today’s generation – and generations going forward – to ignore
the truth and, in so doing, learn nothing from it.
They pave the way for new genocides by disarming all of us, by
not providing us with the knowledge we need to recognize the
conditions that might create genocidal behavior and to see clearly
when genocide begins.
In April our calendar is stained with the memory of the
anniversaries of four genocides – the Armenian Genocide, the
Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide and the Rwandan Genocide.
Facing History and Ourselves believes that by facing history
honestly, without distortions or denial, we can educate a new
generation to realize Lemkin’s vision.
Adam Strom is director of research and development for Facing History
and Ourselves, an international nonprofit organization that was
founded in Brookline 30 years ago. As You Were Saying is a Herald
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