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A Million Ramseys: Groups On Mission To Stop Genocide

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  • A Million Ramseys: Groups On Mission To Stop Genocide

    A MILLION RAMSEYS: GROUPS ON MISSION TO STOP GENOCIDE
    By Ben Ready

    Longmont Daily Times-Call, CO
    Aug. 24, 2006

    Armenians' journey reaches Longmont

    LONGMONT - Imagine JonBenet Ramsey had a sister and both were murdered
    10 years ago. Would the international media and billions of people
    worldwide care twice as much with two victims instead of one?

    And imagine that the killers were thousands armed to the teeth and
    committed to killing all little white girls in America. Might you
    see this on the front page for a few weeks?

    So why is it that when you hear about not one or two but thousands
    of murder victims in Darfur today, so few seem to care?

    Two groups committed to stopping genocide asked these questions in
    Longmont on Wednesday.

    "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic," said Kim
    Christianian, chairwoman of the Armenian Genocide Commemoration
    Committee.

    Six Armenian students left Los Angeles on foot June 27 and arrived
    in Longmont on Wednesday during their Journey for Humanity genocide
    awareness and prevention campaign.

    For the students' stops in Denver, Boulder, Longmont, Loveland, Fort
    Collins and Greeley, they were joined by the Colorado Coalition for
    Genocide Awareness and Action.

    Together the groups hope to remind Americans of the slaughter of
    millions of human beings - each as unique and precious as JonBenet
    Ramsey, the loss of each individual worthy of the same public outrage
    shown after the loss of Ramsey's life, the group said.

    A photo exhibit of starved bodies, rape victims and mass graves
    along Main Street in front of Longmont Free University said it with
    numbers too:

    1895-1923 - 1.5 million Armenians massacred

    1932-1933 - 7 million Ukrainians killed from manmade famine

    1938-1945 - 11 million massacred in the Nazi Holocaust

    1970-1980 - 3.3 million Cambodians massacred

    1994 - 1 million Rwandans massacred

    2003-present - 400,000 and counting killed and 2.5 million displaced
    in Darfur.

    "This is the thing we have on our hearts. We are survivors," said
    Levon Sayadyan, whose Armenian great-grandparents were forced
    to watch Turkish soldiers behead their daughter. "We cannot be
    bystanders. ... We need to take action."

    Sayadyan and 12 others joined for a discussion after their walk from
    Boulder. The students will walk to Loveland today, Fort Collins on
    Friday and Greeley on Saturday. Their 3,200-mile Journey for Life
    will end in Washington, D.C., before November.

    Not only do the students in "Stop Genocide Now" T-shirts want to
    remind people along their path of past atrocities, but they also hope
    their discussion circles will reduce American complacency about the
    killings in Darfur today. Seeing U.S. humanitarian efforts following
    9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Indonesia, students said
    they have no doubt Americans are generous.

    But after being ignored or rebuffed by throngs of reporters in Boulder
    on Tuesday, who were gathered under a tent and doing little but waiting
    for a breaking bit of information in the Ramsey murder case saga,
    the students said, walker Edward S. Majian wondered how the press and
    public could be so indifferent to the genocide of an African people.

    "When we have a genocide, political actors and their allies become
    complicit for tolerating it. We ignore certain things because it's
    not politically comfortable to talk about," Majian said.

    According to the groups, understanding genocide - defined as "the
    systematic destruction by a government of a racial, religious or
    ethnic group" - is the first step in fighting it.

    When people then familiarize themselves with the world's recent
    history of genocides and grasp the combination of social complacency
    and hatred that fuels them, taking action to stop today's genocide
    is the easy part, said Hasmig Tatiossian.

    "You donate time, talk to friends, donate money to coalitions, contact
    the media, call your congressmen, talk to your kids, encourage your
    teachers to teach students about this," she said. "You don't have
    to be Armenian or Jewish to take action. ... Just realize that we're
    all human and all interconnected."

    For more information about stopping genocides, go to
    www.savedarfur.org, www .journeyforhumanity.com or www.ccgaa.org.
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