07-01-2011, 07:54 PM
(This post was last modified: 07-01-2011, 08:28 PM by Peter Lemkin.)
Almost 90 years ago, a young student in Poland, Raphael Lemkin, became intrigued and deeply troubled about the case of an Armenian youth accused of murdering the Turkish official responsible for the 1915 genocide of the Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire.
He was perplexed by the question of why it is a crime for one person to murder another, but not a crime for a government to destroy more than a million people. Lemkin gave this sort of mass destruction a name: genocide.
What, Lemkin asked, are the economic, social, and cultural repercussions of genocide? How many ways are there to destroy a people? How can states be held to account for their actions?
He devoted most of his life to studying and writing about the issue. He also actively campaigned for international laws that would protect ethnic, racial, religious and national groups. His most intensive efforts focused on the drafting, adoption, and ratification of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.
When Lemkin died in 1959, he left an extensive trove of correspondence and papers documenting his work, as well as treatises on the meaning and impact of genocide. Today, many of those papers are held in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, from which most of the artifacts used in this exhibition are drawn. Additional collections are located at the New York Public Library and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.
Together, they provide an important resource and source of inspiration for new generations of scholars, human rights advocates, diplomats, and activists who continue to wrestle with the crime of genocide, which, sadly, continues to occur in the world today.
After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin escaped to Sweden, where he became a lecturer at the University of Stockholm. Invited to Duke University in North Carolina by law professor Malcolm McDermott, who had earlier met and worked with him in Poland, Lemkin made an arduous journey east through Russia, Siberia, and Japan, arriving on the East coast of the U.S. in 1941 as a refugee.
Soon after America entered the war, the U.S. Army recruited Lemkin to teach classes in military government, and the Board of Economic Warfare engaged him as a consultant.
In 1944, Lemkin published his most important work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, a legal analysis of Nazi-occupied Europe. In it he coined a new word, genocide, derived from the Greek word genos, meaning tribe, and the Latin word cide, meaning to kill.
Lemkin believed in the power of languagethat part of what enabled civilized nations to commit intentional group destruction and the world to ignore these atrocities was the lack of a specific word to differentiate this sort of crime from others. He viewed genocide as a unique crime because the ultimate goal of the perpetrator was the total destruction of an entire group of other human beingsthe genocide not only of people, but also the destruction of their culture and civilizations.
In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin noted that the harsh, racist decrees of the Nazis represented a perversion of the entire tradition of European jurisprudence. The Nazi edicts that, for instance, penalized the use of the Polish language or allotted food rations on the basis of "race" were both an expression of the intention to wipe out entire peoples and cultures and the framework that facilitated this annihilation.
Even as Lemkin was formulating his concept of genocide, intentional group destruction on an unprecedented scale was taking place in his homeland, Poland, and members of his own family were victims.
When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, it immediately instituted an anti-Semitic campaign, an expression of its racist ideology, which asserted that Germans were members of a "master race" and Jews, Blacks, Roma, Sinti, and Slavs were "subhuman." German Jews were stripped of their citizenship and other civil rights.
During WWII, as Jews in other countries fell under German occupation, they too, were persecuted and isolated from their fellow citizens. They were imprisoned in ghettos and camps, where they were subject to forced labor, random killings, starvation, and disease.
In 1941, when Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union and invaded eastern Poland, the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Russia, the Nazis inaugurated a more systematic program of mass murder, deploying special killing squads to shoot down entire Jewish communities.
But it was in January 1942 at the so-called Wannsee Conference that the Nazis formally enunciated a plan for genocide, "The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem," whose aim was the total extermination of Jews.
The Nazi state mobilized every branch of government to participate in intentional group annihilation. Genocide was carried out on an industrial scale.Jews from the ghettos in Poland and from other German-occupied territories in Western and Central Europe, as well as another targeted group, the Roma and Sinti, were shipped by rail to concentration camps in Poland, including 6 killing centers: Chelmo, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Maidanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. These were facilities established primarily and exclusively for the assembly-line style mass murder of human beings. In these killing centers, millions of men, women, and children were murdered upon arrival or soon died from starvation, torture, or disease.
An estimated 6 million Jews were killed in the Nazi genocide. Although Lemkin, and his brother Elias and his wife and two sons survived the Holocaust (as it came to be called), the brothers lost 49 other members of their family, including their parents.
When the war was over, Lemkin served as an advisor to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg Trial Judge, Robert Jackson. He fought to have the word genocide introduced into the trial record, but his efforts were unsuccessful.
"The Assembly was over. Delegates shook hands hastily with one another and disappeared into the winter mists of Paris. The same night I went to bed with fever. I was ill and bewildered. The following day I was in the hospital in Paris... Nobody had established my diagnosis. I defined it... as Genociditis: exhaustion from the work on the Genocide Convention."
In 1946, Lemkin turned to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly convened at Lake Success, NY in an effort to have the newly formed body condemn the act of genocide as an international standard. He presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to Cuba, India, and Panama, persuading them to sponsor the resolution. He also formed a committee to lobby 23 organizations around the world, which resulted in a joint petition supporting the adoption of a Genocide Convention, and which was presented to the delegates of the General Assembly.
The final draft of the resolution was approved by the General Assembly on December 11, 1946. It affirmed that genocide was a crime under international law and directed the Member States and the Social and Economic Council to draft a treaty to present to Member States for ratification.
From 1947-1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was hashed out with Lemkin's consultation. The draft was presented to the General Assembly from September to December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris and was unanimously adopted on December 9, 1948.
Though the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was officially adopted by the United Nations in 1948, it was still necessary for 20 nation-states to ratify the convention before its codification as international law.
Just as he had lobbied tirelessly for the Convention's adoption, Lemkin devoted himself to securing its ratification. His strategy was to try to obtain ratification status from countries on each continent, hoping to cause a "domino effect." For instance, he lobbied Mexico in the hope that the rest of Latin America would follow; and he looked to the Philippines as the key to success in Southeast Asia. He sent countless letters, and telegrams, made phone calls, and met with anyone who he thought could help further these goals.
By 1951, 25 nation-states had ratified the treaty, and the Convention was officially introduced into international law. Since then, the Convention has been ratified by a total of 140 countries.
Lemkin was disappointed that his adopted country, the U.S., was not among the first to ratify the Convention. In the intensifying atmosphere of the Cold War, anti-UN sentiment and concerns about loss of sovereignty played a strong role in the opposition. Some worried, for instance, that the law would permit the extradition of U.S. citizens to foreign countries or that discrimination and violence against African-Americans could be considered genocide under its provisions.
In fact, ratification by the U.S. did not occur during Lemkin's lifetime. It was only in 1988, under President Ronald Reagan, that the U.S. ratified the convention, largely through the efforts of Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who, over a 20-year period, gave over 3,000 speeches in the Senate lobbying for the passage of the Convention.
After the UN's adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, Lemkin became a celebrity. Many newspaper articles were written about him and he was even nominated twice for a Nobel Peace Prize. He received the Grand Cross of Cespedes from Cuba in 1950 and the Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress in 1951.
He became a lecturer at Yale, and also taught at Rutgers and Princeton, but he continued his work on genocide. He consulted for the UN, played a leading role in the U.S. Committee for a UN Genocide Convention, and drafted a manuscript, History of Genocide, which, however, was never published.
But Lemkin's celebrity was short-lived. By the time he died of a heart attack on August 28, 1959, he was poverty-stricken and alone. His funeral was attended by only a few people.
The headstone on his grave at Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Queens reads "The Father of the Genocide Convention."
But, despite Lemkin's unflagging efforts to outlaw genocide, the crime continues. In the last two decades, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has been implemented as a basis for prosecution and judgment in former Yugoslavia, against those responsible for genocidal acts against Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in Rwanda, where genocide was perpetrated against the Tutsi minority by members of the Hutu Interhamwe militia and collaborators.
http://www.preventgenocide.org/
Links for Genocide Research and Education Research Centers, Advocacy Organizations and Educational websites
Resources on 20th Century Genocides Including Resources on this website, Books and Articles, Reports, Survivor ad Eyewitness testimonies, Commemoration, Film and Video and Websites Hereros 1904 | Armenian 1915-1923 | Holodomor 1933 | Shoah 1941-1945 | Parajmos 1941-1945 | East Bengal 1971 | Burundi 1972 | Cambodia 1975-1979 | Guatemala 1982-1983 | Iraqi Kurds 1988 | Bosnia 1992-1995 | Rwanda 1994
Genocide Scholars to meet in June 2005 in Florida, USA
Sixth Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars will meet in Boca Raton, Florida, USA, June 4 - 7, 2005
Summer Courses in Copenhagen, Denmark and Toronto, Canada:
International Summer Course on Genocide at Copenhagen University Aug. 1-19, 2005 Deadline for applications: 15 April (for students requiring a visa) 15 May (for all others). Øresund Summer University (ØSU), in collaboration with Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, offers the course: This Time We Knew: The Failure of the International Community to Prevent Genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur
Genocide and Human Rights University Program, to be held in Toronto,Canada, August 2-12, 2005 The International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (A Division of the Zoryan Institute) is pleased to announce the fourth year of the program. Registration by May 31, 2005
New and Forthcoming Books for 2004 on Genocide and related topics Also Selected books 1999-2004 and bibliographies of books in French, German, Italian, Portugues , Spanish and other languages.
In Bayside, New York a free exhibit entitled "1900-2000: A Genocidal Century," is open to the public through December, 2004 at the Queensborough Community College's Holocaust Resource Center & Archives (established 1983). The exhibit features photographs, text and an accompanying catalogue detailing occurrences of the systematic extermination of millions of people by different nations and governments over the past 100 years. Included are the destruction of Hereros in German South West Africa (Namibia), Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, Ukrainians in the USSR, Jews and others in Nazi Germany, the Killing Fields in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, ethnic Muslims in Bosnia, and of Tutsi in Rwanda. [ See http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/NewsAndEvents/ PressReleases/Genocide.htm ] The center is in the Library Building on the Bayside campus, lower level, Room 30. Hours are: Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For information, call (718) 281-5770. http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/HRCA
The State of California Center for Excellence on the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights, and Tolerance (California State Univ., Chico) is devoted to the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides to elementary, junior, and high school students. Provides teachers with updated curricular materials, survivor testimony and other educational resources to support the 'Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide established 1988, revised 1998 http://www.csuchico.edu/mjs/center/
Holocaust and Genocide Studies: The Future Is Now by Dr. Steven L. Jacobs http://www.unr.edu/chgps/jacobsframe.html
" The following concrete suggestions are therefore offered not in the spirit of condemnation, but, rather, in strengthening not only this relationship between "Holocaust Studies" and "Genocide Studies" but to focus our work in both arenas:
#1: Serious scholarly work on both Holocaust and Genocide cannot only concern itself with the historical evidence of such tragedies but must append to its conclusions significant, practical suggestions which address the realities of the present and the unplanned-for realities of the future.
#2: Inside academia, departments of "Holocaust Studies" or clusters of courses within other department [e.g. History, Judaic Studies, etc.] must be consciously expanded to include courses in genocide.
. #3: We must stop the academic internecine warfare with regard to the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in contradistinction to all other practices of genocidal destruction, refocus our thinking, and accept Israel Charny's credo, "I believe that all cases of genocide are similar and different, special and unique, and appropriately subject to comparative analysis."
#4: Journals of both Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies must devote a portion of their publications to continuing to explore the interrelationship between the two. "
From Center News, Vol. 3, No. 2, (June 1998), the newsletter of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies, University of Nevada, Reno http://www.unr.edu/chgps/blank.htm
Genocide studies programs around the world: Genocide research and education programs at 32 colleges and universities in 9 countries and 13 U.S. States. Australia: University of New South Wales, Sydney: Canada: Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec; Germany: Universität Bremen ; Ruhr-Universität Bochum; Ireland: National University Galway: Italy: Università di Ferrara; Netherlands: Centrum voor Holocaust en Genocidestudies ; Sweden: Uppsala Universitet; Switzerland: Universität Zürich; United Kingdom: Bournemouth University, Dorset: USA: California: CSU Sacramento ; CSU Chico ; Claremont McKenna College; UC Berkeley; Connecticut: Yale University; Illinois:University of Illinois; District of Columbia: American University, Wash. College of Law; Maryland:University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Massachusetts:Clark University, Worcester, MA ; University of Massachusetts - Amherst ; Michigan: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Minnesota: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN ; St. Cloud University; Missouri: Webster University, St. Louis, MO; New Jersey: Brookdale Comm College, Lincroft, NJ ; Drew University -Madison, NJ: Rider Univ. - Lawrenceville, NJ : Ramapo College- Mahwan, NJ: William Patterson University - Wayne, NJ; New York: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY Institute for the Study of Genocide, Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY;Monroe Community College - Rochester, NY ; Nevada: University of Nevada, Reno, NV; Pennsylvania:West Chester University, West Chester, PA
Read the new short story Weight of Whispers by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. The story depicts the situation of Boniface Kuseremane, a Sorbonne-educated refugee from Rwanda, stranded in anglophone Kenya with his mother, sister and fiancee in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide. Kenyan writer Owuor, 35, won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for the story. The story's "great strength" say Zanzibari author Abd al-Razzaq Gurnah (Chair of the Caine Prize judges) "is the subtle and suggestive way it dramatises the condition of the refugee and also successfully incorporates so many large issues." In her story, Owuor writes "In exile we lower our heads so that we do not see in the mirror of another's eyes, what we suspect: that our precarious existence rests entirely on the whim of another's tolerance of our presence." Currently Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, Owuor comments, "I've always written as my way of untying knots . . . of untying things I don't understand. Drawing from a lot of experience in my own journeys, I keep wondering why it is necessary to humiliate and destroy just because one has the capacity to" [Sept, 22, 2003, Wash. Post ] Weight of Whispers (about 38 pages in length) can be read on the website of the new Kenyan literary journal Kwani http://www.kwani.org
Prevent Genocide International
info@preventgenocide.org
He was perplexed by the question of why it is a crime for one person to murder another, but not a crime for a government to destroy more than a million people. Lemkin gave this sort of mass destruction a name: genocide.
What, Lemkin asked, are the economic, social, and cultural repercussions of genocide? How many ways are there to destroy a people? How can states be held to account for their actions?
He devoted most of his life to studying and writing about the issue. He also actively campaigned for international laws that would protect ethnic, racial, religious and national groups. His most intensive efforts focused on the drafting, adoption, and ratification of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.
When Lemkin died in 1959, he left an extensive trove of correspondence and papers documenting his work, as well as treatises on the meaning and impact of genocide. Today, many of those papers are held in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, from which most of the artifacts used in this exhibition are drawn. Additional collections are located at the New York Public Library and the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.
Together, they provide an important resource and source of inspiration for new generations of scholars, human rights advocates, diplomats, and activists who continue to wrestle with the crime of genocide, which, sadly, continues to occur in the world today.
After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin escaped to Sweden, where he became a lecturer at the University of Stockholm. Invited to Duke University in North Carolina by law professor Malcolm McDermott, who had earlier met and worked with him in Poland, Lemkin made an arduous journey east through Russia, Siberia, and Japan, arriving on the East coast of the U.S. in 1941 as a refugee.
Soon after America entered the war, the U.S. Army recruited Lemkin to teach classes in military government, and the Board of Economic Warfare engaged him as a consultant.
In 1944, Lemkin published his most important work, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, a legal analysis of Nazi-occupied Europe. In it he coined a new word, genocide, derived from the Greek word genos, meaning tribe, and the Latin word cide, meaning to kill.
Lemkin believed in the power of languagethat part of what enabled civilized nations to commit intentional group destruction and the world to ignore these atrocities was the lack of a specific word to differentiate this sort of crime from others. He viewed genocide as a unique crime because the ultimate goal of the perpetrator was the total destruction of an entire group of other human beingsthe genocide not only of people, but also the destruction of their culture and civilizations.
In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin noted that the harsh, racist decrees of the Nazis represented a perversion of the entire tradition of European jurisprudence. The Nazi edicts that, for instance, penalized the use of the Polish language or allotted food rations on the basis of "race" were both an expression of the intention to wipe out entire peoples and cultures and the framework that facilitated this annihilation.
Even as Lemkin was formulating his concept of genocide, intentional group destruction on an unprecedented scale was taking place in his homeland, Poland, and members of his own family were victims.
When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933, it immediately instituted an anti-Semitic campaign, an expression of its racist ideology, which asserted that Germans were members of a "master race" and Jews, Blacks, Roma, Sinti, and Slavs were "subhuman." German Jews were stripped of their citizenship and other civil rights.
During WWII, as Jews in other countries fell under German occupation, they too, were persecuted and isolated from their fellow citizens. They were imprisoned in ghettos and camps, where they were subject to forced labor, random killings, starvation, and disease.
In 1941, when Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union and invaded eastern Poland, the Baltic countries, Ukraine, and Russia, the Nazis inaugurated a more systematic program of mass murder, deploying special killing squads to shoot down entire Jewish communities.
But it was in January 1942 at the so-called Wannsee Conference that the Nazis formally enunciated a plan for genocide, "The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem," whose aim was the total extermination of Jews.
The Nazi state mobilized every branch of government to participate in intentional group annihilation. Genocide was carried out on an industrial scale.Jews from the ghettos in Poland and from other German-occupied territories in Western and Central Europe, as well as another targeted group, the Roma and Sinti, were shipped by rail to concentration camps in Poland, including 6 killing centers: Chelmo, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Maidanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. These were facilities established primarily and exclusively for the assembly-line style mass murder of human beings. In these killing centers, millions of men, women, and children were murdered upon arrival or soon died from starvation, torture, or disease.
An estimated 6 million Jews were killed in the Nazi genocide. Although Lemkin, and his brother Elias and his wife and two sons survived the Holocaust (as it came to be called), the brothers lost 49 other members of their family, including their parents.
When the war was over, Lemkin served as an advisor to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg Trial Judge, Robert Jackson. He fought to have the word genocide introduced into the trial record, but his efforts were unsuccessful.
"The Assembly was over. Delegates shook hands hastily with one another and disappeared into the winter mists of Paris. The same night I went to bed with fever. I was ill and bewildered. The following day I was in the hospital in Paris... Nobody had established my diagnosis. I defined it... as Genociditis: exhaustion from the work on the Genocide Convention."
In 1946, Lemkin turned to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly convened at Lake Success, NY in an effort to have the newly formed body condemn the act of genocide as an international standard. He presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to Cuba, India, and Panama, persuading them to sponsor the resolution. He also formed a committee to lobby 23 organizations around the world, which resulted in a joint petition supporting the adoption of a Genocide Convention, and which was presented to the delegates of the General Assembly.
The final draft of the resolution was approved by the General Assembly on December 11, 1946. It affirmed that genocide was a crime under international law and directed the Member States and the Social and Economic Council to draft a treaty to present to Member States for ratification.
From 1947-1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was hashed out with Lemkin's consultation. The draft was presented to the General Assembly from September to December 1948 at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris and was unanimously adopted on December 9, 1948.
Though the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was officially adopted by the United Nations in 1948, it was still necessary for 20 nation-states to ratify the convention before its codification as international law.
Just as he had lobbied tirelessly for the Convention's adoption, Lemkin devoted himself to securing its ratification. His strategy was to try to obtain ratification status from countries on each continent, hoping to cause a "domino effect." For instance, he lobbied Mexico in the hope that the rest of Latin America would follow; and he looked to the Philippines as the key to success in Southeast Asia. He sent countless letters, and telegrams, made phone calls, and met with anyone who he thought could help further these goals.
By 1951, 25 nation-states had ratified the treaty, and the Convention was officially introduced into international law. Since then, the Convention has been ratified by a total of 140 countries.
Lemkin was disappointed that his adopted country, the U.S., was not among the first to ratify the Convention. In the intensifying atmosphere of the Cold War, anti-UN sentiment and concerns about loss of sovereignty played a strong role in the opposition. Some worried, for instance, that the law would permit the extradition of U.S. citizens to foreign countries or that discrimination and violence against African-Americans could be considered genocide under its provisions.
In fact, ratification by the U.S. did not occur during Lemkin's lifetime. It was only in 1988, under President Ronald Reagan, that the U.S. ratified the convention, largely through the efforts of Democratic Senator William Proxmire, who, over a 20-year period, gave over 3,000 speeches in the Senate lobbying for the passage of the Convention.
After the UN's adoption of the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, Lemkin became a celebrity. Many newspaper articles were written about him and he was even nominated twice for a Nobel Peace Prize. He received the Grand Cross of Cespedes from Cuba in 1950 and the Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress in 1951.
He became a lecturer at Yale, and also taught at Rutgers and Princeton, but he continued his work on genocide. He consulted for the UN, played a leading role in the U.S. Committee for a UN Genocide Convention, and drafted a manuscript, History of Genocide, which, however, was never published.
But Lemkin's celebrity was short-lived. By the time he died of a heart attack on August 28, 1959, he was poverty-stricken and alone. His funeral was attended by only a few people.
The headstone on his grave at Mt. Hebron Cemetery in Queens reads "The Father of the Genocide Convention."
But, despite Lemkin's unflagging efforts to outlaw genocide, the crime continues. In the last two decades, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has been implemented as a basis for prosecution and judgment in former Yugoslavia, against those responsible for genocidal acts against Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in Rwanda, where genocide was perpetrated against the Tutsi minority by members of the Hutu Interhamwe militia and collaborators.
http://www.preventgenocide.org/
Links for Genocide Research and Education Research Centers, Advocacy Organizations and Educational websites
Resources on 20th Century Genocides Including Resources on this website, Books and Articles, Reports, Survivor ad Eyewitness testimonies, Commemoration, Film and Video and Websites Hereros 1904 | Armenian 1915-1923 | Holodomor 1933 | Shoah 1941-1945 | Parajmos 1941-1945 | East Bengal 1971 | Burundi 1972 | Cambodia 1975-1979 | Guatemala 1982-1983 | Iraqi Kurds 1988 | Bosnia 1992-1995 | Rwanda 1994
Genocide Scholars to meet in June 2005 in Florida, USA
Sixth Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars will meet in Boca Raton, Florida, USA, June 4 - 7, 2005
Summer Courses in Copenhagen, Denmark and Toronto, Canada:
International Summer Course on Genocide at Copenhagen University Aug. 1-19, 2005 Deadline for applications: 15 April (for students requiring a visa) 15 May (for all others). Øresund Summer University (ØSU), in collaboration with Centre of African Studies, University of Copenhagen, offers the course: This Time We Knew: The Failure of the International Community to Prevent Genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur
Genocide and Human Rights University Program, to be held in Toronto,Canada, August 2-12, 2005 The International Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (A Division of the Zoryan Institute) is pleased to announce the fourth year of the program. Registration by May 31, 2005
New and Forthcoming Books for 2004 on Genocide and related topics Also Selected books 1999-2004 and bibliographies of books in French, German, Italian, Portugues , Spanish and other languages.
In Bayside, New York a free exhibit entitled "1900-2000: A Genocidal Century," is open to the public through December, 2004 at the Queensborough Community College's Holocaust Resource Center & Archives (established 1983). The exhibit features photographs, text and an accompanying catalogue detailing occurrences of the systematic extermination of millions of people by different nations and governments over the past 100 years. Included are the destruction of Hereros in German South West Africa (Namibia), Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, Ukrainians in the USSR, Jews and others in Nazi Germany, the Killing Fields in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, ethnic Muslims in Bosnia, and of Tutsi in Rwanda. [ See http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/NewsAndEvents/ PressReleases/Genocide.htm ] The center is in the Library Building on the Bayside campus, lower level, Room 30. Hours are: Monday to Thursday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. For information, call (718) 281-5770. http://www.qcc.cuny.edu/HRCA
The State of California Center for Excellence on the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, Human Rights, and Tolerance (California State Univ., Chico) is devoted to the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides to elementary, junior, and high school students. Provides teachers with updated curricular materials, survivor testimony and other educational resources to support the 'Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide established 1988, revised 1998 http://www.csuchico.edu/mjs/center/
Holocaust and Genocide Studies: The Future Is Now by Dr. Steven L. Jacobs http://www.unr.edu/chgps/jacobsframe.html
" The following concrete suggestions are therefore offered not in the spirit of condemnation, but, rather, in strengthening not only this relationship between "Holocaust Studies" and "Genocide Studies" but to focus our work in both arenas:
#1: Serious scholarly work on both Holocaust and Genocide cannot only concern itself with the historical evidence of such tragedies but must append to its conclusions significant, practical suggestions which address the realities of the present and the unplanned-for realities of the future.
#2: Inside academia, departments of "Holocaust Studies" or clusters of courses within other department [e.g. History, Judaic Studies, etc.] must be consciously expanded to include courses in genocide.
. #3: We must stop the academic internecine warfare with regard to the question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in contradistinction to all other practices of genocidal destruction, refocus our thinking, and accept Israel Charny's credo, "I believe that all cases of genocide are similar and different, special and unique, and appropriately subject to comparative analysis."
#4: Journals of both Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies must devote a portion of their publications to continuing to explore the interrelationship between the two. "
From Center News, Vol. 3, No. 2, (June 1998), the newsletter of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Peace Studies, University of Nevada, Reno http://www.unr.edu/chgps/blank.htm
Genocide studies programs around the world: Genocide research and education programs at 32 colleges and universities in 9 countries and 13 U.S. States. Australia: University of New South Wales, Sydney: Canada: Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec; Germany: Universität Bremen ; Ruhr-Universität Bochum; Ireland: National University Galway: Italy: Università di Ferrara; Netherlands: Centrum voor Holocaust en Genocidestudies ; Sweden: Uppsala Universitet; Switzerland: Universität Zürich; United Kingdom: Bournemouth University, Dorset: USA: California: CSU Sacramento ; CSU Chico ; Claremont McKenna College; UC Berkeley; Connecticut: Yale University; Illinois:University of Illinois; District of Columbia: American University, Wash. College of Law; Maryland:University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Massachusetts:Clark University, Worcester, MA ; University of Massachusetts - Amherst ; Michigan: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Minnesota: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN ; St. Cloud University; Missouri: Webster University, St. Louis, MO; New Jersey: Brookdale Comm College, Lincroft, NJ ; Drew University -Madison, NJ: Rider Univ. - Lawrenceville, NJ : Ramapo College- Mahwan, NJ: William Patterson University - Wayne, NJ; New York: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY Institute for the Study of Genocide, Nassau Community College, Garden City, NY;Monroe Community College - Rochester, NY ; Nevada: University of Nevada, Reno, NV; Pennsylvania:West Chester University, West Chester, PA
Read the new short story Weight of Whispers by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. The story depicts the situation of Boniface Kuseremane, a Sorbonne-educated refugee from Rwanda, stranded in anglophone Kenya with his mother, sister and fiancee in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide. Kenyan writer Owuor, 35, won the 2003 Caine Prize for African Writing for the story. The story's "great strength" say Zanzibari author Abd al-Razzaq Gurnah (Chair of the Caine Prize judges) "is the subtle and suggestive way it dramatises the condition of the refugee and also successfully incorporates so many large issues." In her story, Owuor writes "In exile we lower our heads so that we do not see in the mirror of another's eyes, what we suspect: that our precarious existence rests entirely on the whim of another's tolerance of our presence." Currently Executive Director of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, Owuor comments, "I've always written as my way of untying knots . . . of untying things I don't understand. Drawing from a lot of experience in my own journeys, I keep wondering why it is necessary to humiliate and destroy just because one has the capacity to" [Sept, 22, 2003, Wash. Post ] Weight of Whispers (about 38 pages in length) can be read on the website of the new Kenyan literary journal Kwani http://www.kwani.org
Prevent Genocide International
info@preventgenocide.org
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass