Genocide of the 20th and 21st Century: By Akashic Archangel

                                      Genocide of the 20th Century:
                                          What We’ve Learned

                                          By L (Ellie) Tibbitts

          What are the most horrific events during the 20th Century we have witnessed as a country? Acts of genocide; but how has the world responded to such ghastly events? We’ve all taken a World History class at one time or another, but it’s amazing how few people know about what’s happened during the Holocaust or about the genocide in Rwanda, or even earlier, when the Armenians were killed an annexed in their home country. In this essay, I will talk about the Holocaust, the Rwandan and Armenian genocides, and what we—--as a world, as a community—--have done in response and learned from these turning points in history.

          Before I start, I want you, the reader, to know the definition of the term ‘genocide’, because it will be used a lot. The definition of the term ‘genocide’ from www.dictionary.com is: “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group.” This means that genocide is a mass murder of a specific people brought on by hate of their race, politics or culture.  As you read the rest of the essay, remember this definition.

          In World War II, Hitler and his Nazi party wanted to ‘liquidate’ all Jews. The Jewish people were thought of ‘lesser creatures’ and ‘not worthy of life’. A lot of people had decided that Jews were evil and bad, that they were controlling and oppressing the German peoples through business and enterprise. Propaganda showed the Jews as Germany’s “number one enemy” (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ jsource/Holocaust/hitler.html “Adolph Hitler”). To combat this, Hitler ordered these innocent people to be collected, shipped across countries to concentration camps like cattle, where upon arriving they were branded as such. Miso “Michael” Volgel, of Jacovce, Czechoslovakia, shares his experience of the mandatory tattooing done at the initial arrival at a concentration camp. “So they marched us through the gate with whips and beatings and dogs jumping on us. We came to a huge brick building. They shoved us...shoved us into the huge brick building, and there were prisoners and SS telling us what to do next. It was tables, long tables. The first area, where we had to undress, strip our clothing. There were hooks behind us. You put the clothing through a piece of wire, hang the clothing up, take our shoes off, put the shoes on the floor. Next table were the barbers, the camp barbers, where they shaved our head, they cut our hair, shaved the entire body. They said it's for hygiene. Then we moved to another table where the tattooing was done. So, the tattoo was done on the left forearm. There was one person who would rub the...a little piece of dirty alcohol on your arm, and the other one had the...had the needle with the inkwell, and he would do the numbering. So my number is 65,316. That means there were 65,315 people numbered before me, tattooed before me. After the tattoo...tattooing was done, they put us where they gave us the clothing, but not what we came with. They gave us, issued us a striped brown cap, a jacket, striped jacket, a pair of striped trousers, a pair of wooden clogs, and a shirt. No socks or underwear. Then the last area, when they gave us the uniform, they gave us two strips of cloth. The cloth, I would say, was about six inches long, maybe inch-and-a-half wide. And it [was] star...starred with the Star of David, corresponding with the number on your left forearm, sewn on your left breast and on the right pant leg. And then the last item, which was the most important item that we received, was a round bowl. And this bowl was the lifeblood of your being. First of all, without it you couldn't get the meager rations that we got. And second, the bathroom facilities were almost non-existent.”  When Jews were immigrating into the United States to avoid being killed, did we welcome them with open arms? No. Fliers had been printed, articles written, linking Judaism to communism, just like anti-Jewish propaganda in Germany did. Like other anti-immigrant propaganda, these fliers blamed Jews for the unemployment and economic downfall of the Great Depression. In the end, close to three million people—about sixty-six percent of Europe’s Jewish population at that time, plus another three million made up of various groups of gypsies, homosexuals, Slavic peoples—were killed.

          The genocide in Rwanda, in 1994, is something that not many people know about; it’s not always taught in our schools. A tribe called the Hutus wanted to kill the Tutsis, another nearby tribe. Tutsis were portrayed as snakes and cockroaches, people who wanted to overturn the current government to remake Rwanda into an anti-Hutu country again. Radio stations, television broadcasts, even the newspapers and schools said that it was all right to kill the Tutsi people, said that they were evil and bad. Sound familiar? These hate speeches went on for months, years, before the actual slaughtering of innocent men, women, and children. Eight hundred thousand people died; of these victims, it’s estimated that three hundred thousand were children—nearly half of the total amount of people killed. To think that these people’s, these children’s rights to life were taken away just because of what someone thinks. It’s not fair, is it? The genocide lasted about one hundred days, meaning that on average one eight hundred innocent people were put to death. Where were the troops? “The UN Security Council rejected the plan. The United States even refused to acknowledge the genocide to avoid any legal obligations to help.” (http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/dallaire/ , CBC Indepth: Romeo Dallaire, quote by Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire) Does that make much sense? No! The United Nations Security Committee was urged by Belgium and the United States to withdraw the few peacekeepers in the country, and they actually complied! Only four hundred fifty troops stayed in Rwanda to combat the slaughtering.

          On a personal view, retired general Romeo Dallaire has written a book of his experiences in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil – The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. In it he relates the horrors of what he saw. “They were devils. And I couldn't see them as human," he says. "Just as I know there was a presence of a superior being on a couple of occasions, present as a physical vibrating sense to help me through very, very difficult moments. That same reality came through with those people. I was not discussing with humans. They had erased themselves." (http://www.cbc.ca/news/ background/dallaire/, “CBC Indepth: Romeo Dallaire,” quote by Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire) Since his tour of Rwanda the retired military man has been prescribed anti-depressants; attempted suicide by drinking alcohol when on the pills; sank down into a fugue he stayed in for a long time. Soon after he got out of a coma from mixing the drugs and drink, he began writing his book, reliving every horrible moment of the country’s horrific war. He had to; you can’t write about the seeing people captured, tortured, murdered in their beds without feeling as if you were there again, the images once burnt under the eyelids popping painfully to the forefront of your mind, burning at your skull once again.  Still to this day his anger burns; he cannot forget, for example, that President Clinton stopped for a few hours in Kigali in 1998, after it was all over, and with the engines of Air Force One running, said he was sorry; he didn't know.

          The Armenian genocide: Who knows about it? It started with a simple boycott of Armenian businesses by the Turks in late February of 1914. In August, over one thousand Armenian owned shops were burned to the ground. Later that month the men aged twenty to forty-five were drafted to the Turkish army. Over the course of the year Armenian leaders were murdered; mass executions took place in town squares to terrorize the Armenian population; the Turkish government leveled false accusations against the people, saying they revolted and joined up with the Russians. Houses, schools, places previously undisturbed were used as barracks for Turkish soldiers; traveling equipment were confiscated from the villagers. (http://www.armenian-genocide.org/chronology.html “A Chronology of the Armenian Genocide”)  People were ousted from ancestral homes, into the deserts. Battles were fought, the Turkish army had thought to be defeated before more assassinations of Armenian leaders. This deadly game of hide and seek, or rather cat-and-mouse, lasts for years, nearly eight long, bloody years.

          In the end, over one and a half million people were killed, and two million more were forcefully deported from their home country. This event is hidden under the guise of World War I, and isn’t classified in any country as ‘genocide’. The United States doesn’t classify it as such; earlier this year I sent a letter to Representative Don Young and to President Bush about signing the House Bill Resolution 106, to which I refer to as “The Act to Recognize the Armenian Genocide of 1914”; I received a reply; in both of the letters was basically, “We cannot begin thinking to sign this bill because currently, Turkey is our ally and we don’t want to jeopardize the uncertain relationship.” From two of the people of authority said to represent their people, I got that lame response. Go figure.

          What have we done since the end of World War II to combat this evil? At the end of World War II, the International Community created the Geneva Convention and gave an exact definition of genocide. They created this Convention so that it made them legally obligated to intercede and help cease genocide anywhere they see it happening; yet they did nothing for Rwanda. We did nothing to help the people of Armenia when we, as a country, heard news of the atrocity overseas; we haven’t even publicly recognized that Armenia was indeed a genocide, 92 years after the fact. President Bush hasn’t even been consistent with his February 2000 promise to “speak with moral clarity and historical accuracy about the Armenian Genocide”, seven years since he uttered those words.

          After the Rwandan genocide, the United Nations decided to investigate the Rwandan genocide and their roles in it in a period of self-reflection. United Nation’s Secretary General Kofi Annan says in 1998: “The world must deeply repent this failure. Rwanda’s tragedy was the world’s tragedy. All of us who cared about Rwanda, all of us who witnessed its suffering, fervently wish that we could have prevented the genocide. Looking back now, we see the signs which then were not recognized. Now we know that what we did was not nearly enough—not enough to save Rwanda from itself, not enough to honor the ideals for which the United Nations exists. We will not deny that, in their greatest hour of need, the world failed the people of Rwanda…” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/etc/slaughter.html, “Triumph of Evil: 100 Days of Slaughter”) President Clinton is also quoted to have said, again in 1998: “The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after the killing began….We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope…” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/evil/etc/slaughter.html, “Triumph of Evil: 100 Days of Slaughter”). 

          These men of power have acknowledged that we, as a world, did nothing. What else have we done or let happen? People just think, “Well, it isn’t us, it’s not our problem,” and we just watch and not really react. The public is becoming jaded; massive amounts of deaths seen on television have become so routine that they seem normal and inconsequential. These events are being forgotten or covered up. Ever since the Holocaust, different people, ranging from the average joe-shmoe to professors have been claiming the Holocaust just a conspiracy the governments have created, scare tactics. People out there actually believe it! The public has become lazy and ignorant of the history of our world. It’s not always that the Holocaust is discussed in school, and when it is it’s usually just ‘glanced over’, not required knowledge; Rwanda, or Armenia? A lot of people in our school don’t know what it is or haven’t learned before taking a World History class this year. It’s sad, no one believes that genocide, that killings of this caliber could happen in our lifetimes, and they are amazed and stunned when the dates of the Rwandan genocide occurred.

          If our schools won’t teach us these things, what are they teaching and who will? Amnesty International made a film about the Rwandan genocide, called Forgotten Cries, which included actual clips and photos and looks at documents of the Rwandan killings. This organization has done its damnedest to make the world see the light, and people just ignore it. Another organization, STAND Now, is a student anti-genocide coalition focused today on Darfur and the genocide there. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives us access to memoirs and interviews of people who witnessed and were victims of the World War II Holocaust. The Armenian National Institute provides information on the killings of the Armenians during World War I. Movies and television shows depict the events, but it’s more often that people world-wide watch them not for the truth, but for the “Hollywoodization”, for the special effects, for the actors, anything but the truth.

          So, what have we learned? We learned that six million ‘undesired’ people were killed by the Nazis before the end of the war and the liberation of the death camps; we learned that eight hundred thousand women, men, and children were mercilessly slaughtered in Rwanda’s hundred days of genocide; three million Armenians were killed or deported. We’ve learned that we haven’t done much as a nation, as the International Committee, as a world. If we aren’t taught this in schools, where will we learn it? When will we learn it?

          Take a stand against genocide, whether it be in the past, present or future. Genocide is murder, and murder is illegal in any country.