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Remembrance is the most powerful weapon against genocide

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  • Remembrance is the most powerful weapon against genocide

    The Conversation, Australia
    Jan 27 2012


    Remembrance is the most powerful weapon against genocide

    It's hard to imagine that a whole race of people can be forgotten. But
    if no one chooses to remember them, genocide can mean just that,
    leaving a large hole in our history and dooming future minorities to
    be treated in the same way.

    Before the invasion of Poland, Hitler is quoted as saying, `Who still
    talks nowadays about the Armenians?' He was referring to the
    annihilation of over one million Christian Armenians by the Ottoman
    Government in Turkey in the early 20th century.

    It is a solemn lesson that the failure to account for atrocity
    inflicted on a people, let alone remember it, is harmful to more than
    the affected communities. It is a message to future dictators and
    tyrants that they may be free to do the same.

    It is perhaps one reason why Hitler felt unconstrained in subjecting
    the Jews and Gypsies of Europe to one of the darkest episodes in
    modern history.

    Holocaust Remembrance Day, on 27 January, marks the anniversary of the
    liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. It serves to remind us of the
    horrors that were inflicted by Nazi Germany, but its meaning is deeper
    and broader still.

    The Holocaust shocked the world and contributed significantly to the
    development of complex, if not always - or often - respected systems
    of international human rights and criminal justice.

    Reference to the term genocide first appeared in the work of the
    scholar, Raphael Lemkin, in 1944. It so succinctly and comprehensively
    described the concept of the physical or biological destruction of
    entire human groups that by the end of that decade it was the subject
    of an international treaty expressing universal condemnation of any
    state or person engaging in its practice.

    The Holocaust was not the first atrocity we would now describe as
    genocide; such crimes are really as old as humanity itself. Even in
    modern history predating the Second World War, many episodes of mass
    violence against human groups come to mind: Armenia, the extermination
    of the Tasmanian Aborigines, the forced removal and extermination of
    American Indians, the German extermination of the Herero in Namibia to
    name but a few.

    Neither was the Holocaust the last such atrocity. Despite the fierce
    commitment of the international community following the Second World
    War to develop international human rights and to seek to maintain -
    under the umbrella of the United Nations - an international peace and
    security, such mass atrocity has been occurring with disturbing
    regularity.

    The killing fields of Cambodia, the inter-ethnic wars in the former
    Yugoslavia, the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur, are mere examples of
    why remembering and taking action against such atrocities remain so
    important.

    Marking the Holocaust with a formal remembrance day has not been
    without controversy. When it was introduced in the United Kingdom a
    decade ago, it was criticised as focusing too much on one event as
    reflecting the sum of such inhumanity. Why not mark the Armenian or
    Rwandan genocides, or other atrocities and mass abuse?

    It is true that there is a danger in singling out the Holocaust for
    remembrance when so many other atrocities, genocides, mark the
    landscape of modern history and the present. Rather, Holocaust
    Remembrance Day should stand as a symbol of all such atrocities.

    This is in fact what the United Nations General Assembly had in mind
    when it adopted its resolution that all manifestations of religious
    intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or
    communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, whenever they
    occur, should be condemned `without reserve'. The Assembly called for
    a remembrance of past crimes with an eye towards preventing them in
    the future.

    This is the key to such commemorative activities. Of course, they
    should serve as remembrance for what has passed - we must never
    forget. They should also serve to raise consciousness, to inform
    policy and legal developments that can contribute to fighting the
    impunity with which such horrific crimes are still committed.

    In this way, Holocaust Remembrance Day belongs to the victims of the
    Holocaust and to all victims of atrocity.

    http://theconversation.edu.au/remembrance-is-the-most-powerful-weapon-against-genocide-5049



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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