Genocide. What's That?

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

FOREWORD BY STEPHEN FRY

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

A BOOK WRITTEN BY YOUNG PEOPLE FOR EVERYONE 1

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

About the authors ______________________

Hello. We’re a group of young people from four different schools: Hampton School, Lady Eleanor Holles School, Turing House School and Westminster Academy. We’ve all worked in our spare time to write the book in an effort to raise awareness of a subject that is both difficult and little known.

Thank you so much for buying our book—every single penny will be donated to genocide education charities who work tirelessly in our communities to teach more people about the events that we write about.

We hope that you find our book meaningful and that it will inspire you to take action. It is our belief that knowing about genocide means that you are more likely to work to prevent it from happening again.

Thank you.

Ben, Izzy, Yousef, Jack, Sam, Nat, Zainab, Maxi, Harry, Matthew, Anisha, Freddie, Nayaaz, Grace, Ozge, Jasper, Will, Amy, Yassin, Finlo, Ben, Haris, Chris, Ben, Louis and Fedaa

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.

It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

Primo Levi

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Contents ____________________

Foreword

5

Introduction

8

Raphael Lemkin

11

Before

15

Bea

25

During

27

Eric

34

After

35

Kadefa

38

Today

41

Debay

44

Five things you can do to help prevent genocide

48

Acknowledgements

49

Endnotes

50

Warning: some readers may find the material discussed in the pages that follow distressing.

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Foreword ____________________

By Stephen Fry

H

ello there.

Gosh. there’s a question. Why remember the Holocaust? Why be reminded of genocide?

Well let’s have a thought experiment, which is to say, let’s close our eyes and imagine a scene.

Picture it in our minds. It’s like being the writer and director of your own movie inside your head.

This is your movie, try and see the pictures and hear the noises and special effects as clearly as you can.

Right. Ready?

Imagine that tonight, this very night, at four in the morning you are suddenly woken up by a loud knocking at the front door downstairs. Before your parents have a chance to answer it, the door is broken down and six armed soldiers burst in. They are dressed in dark uniforms, belts and black leather boots, they have machine guns in their hands. They grab your parents, roughly pull you and your brothers and sisters down the stairs by the hair. Without explanation you are pushed into the back of a lorry, where there are other families, all as shocked and bewildered as you are. You ask your parents what’s going on, but they aren’t quite sure. It might be because you are black. Or because you are white. Or because you are Asian. Or Arabic. Or Jewish. Or because one of your family has political opinions that the people who sent the soldiers don’t like. It might be because one of your grandparents was a gypsy. Or because you have Spanish blood in you. Or because you’re part Swedish. Or because you’re Scottish. Or Welsh. Or because you have ginger hair. Or because you have blue eyes. Or because your father is shorter than 5’ 9” tall. The reasons seem ridiculous. Absurd. Laughable. But there you are being transported through the night. It’s really happening and you can’t make it stop.

I won’t go into too much detail about what happens to you, because it’s frightening and upsetting. But without any appeal, any mercy, the soldiers – most of them uninterested or even openly laughing at your unhappiness and fear – take you to a camp where there are thousands of others like you, all huddled around as full of fear and dread and panic as a human being can be. Thousands and thousands of families. Your father and older brother are taken away. They aren’t even allowed time to say goodbye to you. You don’t know this, but the fact is they are being separated because they are considered strong enough to work.

You and your mother and younger brothers and sisters are … there is no other way of putting this … you are stripped of all your possession and all your clothing and killed. Shot perhaps. Or crowded into a gas chamber and choked to death by poisonous gas. Your bodies are burned. It is the end of you. In one horrible and incomprehensible nightmare you and thousands like you have had your lives snuffed out without mercy, appeal or hope. After you’re gone your father and brother are worked until they are thin, weak and unable to work any more and therefore no longer of any use to those in charge. Then they too are killed and burned as you were. Every day for years this happens until the thousands of dead number hundreds of thousands and then millions. So many that the human mind can’t picture it. Which is why it is easier to picture just you and your family in the film you are playing inside your head. Your family and maybe three or four families like you that you know well.

But you know what? It’s worse than you have already imagined. Worse than your violent, terrible, undeserved and helpless murder. it’s worse because …

You will be forgotten. Completely forgotten. No one will care or remember. No stone will mark where you died.

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It’s possible that in a year or so a foreign army will invade your country and arrest those responsible for killing you. They might even put them on trial for “crimes against humanity”. But in the end people will forget you and the whole business. And worse than forgetting, some people – people who also, for some twisted reason, hate blacks, or whites, or Jews, or Asians, or gypsies, or gay people, or immigrants, or epileptics, or people with learning difficulties, or people with different political ideas – these people will say that it never happened. You were never killed like that. It’s all at best an exaggerations at worst it’s a lie.

All dreamt up. The footage and the memories of survivors are not real. Fake news.

It’s like a second murder. First your body was killed and now any meaning or hope that such an outrage might have is killed too. In your film your dead self, and the dead souls of your parents and brothers and sisters are screaming out to be remembered, but no one can hear you. No one is listening.

It’s a nightmare film I’ve asked you to direct and star in, but it’s as much a documentary as a fictional film.

Because it all did happen, just as I’ve said.

We remember those who died firstly because they were us. They could so easily have been you, or me.

By a lucky accident of history we came into the world in a period where we aren’t killed or hurt or insulted because of the way you were born. Or were we? Every time someone is taunted because they are black, or gay, or in some way different we owe it to the dead victims of the Holocaust to remember where such mean, stupid cruelty can lead.

Let me put it another way by telling a story about when I was very young.

I was about 7 or 8 years old when I remember happening across a black and white photograph of about twenty people. It was in a drawer in my parent’s bedroom that I was rather naughtily looking through. Half of the people in the photograph were children. They looked at the camera with large solemn eyes. I took the photograph to my mother and said, “Who are all those people?” She sat me down, obviously thinking I was ready to know a little of our family history.

“These are all members of our family,” she told me. “Unfortunately most of them were killed.”

“Killed? Who by?”

“Well, by Hitler.”

Immediately I pictured Hitler, with his little toothbrush moustache holding a knife and stabbing all those men, women and children who were members of my family that I would never know. It all seemed a bit strange to my eyes, but I knew Hitler was a Bad Man so it made a kind of sense. That’s what Bad People do. Later of course, as I grew up, I found out that they had not been personally murdered by that one man, but were part of a systematic policy of human slaughter that is called the Shoah by Jewish people, the Holocaust by many and was called by the Nazis responsible “The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem in Europe.” The “Jewish Problem” to them was that that were millions of Jewish people in the Europe they were conquering and they regarded Jewish people as unworthy to be part of their greater German empire.

Not just Jewish people of course, but we’ll come to that.

But that’s all history, isn’t it? The people in the photograph were black and white and so they weren’t real.

The people in the films and archive footage were black and white. They weren’t colour or HD, or 4K so remembering their deaths is no more worthwhile than remembering the deaths of people massacred by the Romans two thousand years ago.

Well, yes. But first remember that actually one of those children was YOU. In the film that I asked you to play in your mind, the thought experiment where you and your family were snatched from your home and taken to a death camp. They were just as alive as you are. Just as hopeful of getting into the football team, or the cast of the school musical show, or to be popular and successful and happy.

Also, it’s worth understanding that the Holocaust was a modern event. The death camps where the victims were murdered had computer rooms. It’s true. Special huts where IBM punched card computers were housed. The same IBM that advertises today on TV and in magazines. These ‘Hollerith’ computers as are they were called stored, sorted, indexed and filed the details of all the people the Nazis thought were enemies ripe for extermination – what they would call 'sub-humans.’

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Sub-humans to them were people of different races, Jews were the worst, and gypsies too, but Slavic people (Russians, East Europeans) and Poles were next. Gay people, people with learning difficulties or physical disabilities also counted. Didn’t matter what age they were, a four-year-old girl was as easily killed as a forty-year-old man. Blacks and Asians weren’t much considered because there was no really significant population of them in Europe in those days 80 or so years ago, but those that were there were also in the sub-human category. The Holocaust was industrial killing and used all the aspects of the modern world we take for granted: transportation systems, computers, bureaucracy and logistics. And it’s modern enough for there to be survivors of its horrors who are still alive today. I have met a few in my life.

These monstrous crimes should be remembered because you and I have the imagination to picture us being the victims and we know that we would demand that our murders should be remembered so that the kind of behaviour and poisoned thinking that leads to such horror could not be allowed to happen again.

There are still those in the world who value people differently not according to their character and actions, but according to their race, or religion, or lack of religion, or their sexual preference, or gender or how long they have lived in the country, or some other category. There are people who will throw stones at you or attack you because you are different. There are people who do not believe that all human beings are really brothers and sisters, all part of the human family. These people will join marches and vote for politicians who promise to “deal with” the minorities they don’t like.

We remember the Holocaust so it cannot happen again. We remember it because we believe in the value of all human lives. We remember it because, in the film we played in our heads, we know what it felt like to be herded and slaughtered.

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Introduction ______________________

Our letter to Raphael Lemkin

D

ear Mr Lemkin, Zero percent. None. Nobody. That is how many young people in our school knew your name when we asked them. Many told us that they knew about the word that you coined, ‘genocide’, but not many could tell us what it meant.

So, that is why we wrote this book. It is our attempt to help other people, particularly those our age, to understand your life’s work, to get what genocide is all about…and to know that when the world said ‘Never Again’ after the Holocaust it didn’t fulfil that promise.

To try and raise awareness we’ve researched your life and your work. We’ve traced your journey – the one that you made from your home in eastern Europe, fleeing from the Nazis to Sweden, across the Soviet Union to the USA. We’ve also tried to describe the journey that you made in your mind from reading about the plight of the Christians in Roman times, to the Armenians and then to your family in the Second World War. You couldn’t understand why a person might be prosecuted for killing an individual but the perpetrators of a million deaths could walk free. That is why you worked tirelessly to have ‘genocide’ recognised as a crime.

Not even the memory of the Holocaust persuaded the leaders of the world to prevent genocide from happening again. We thought that it would be important to raise awareness of the times since 1945 when the promises made were broken.

We’ve had the honour of speaking to and learning from remarkable survivors of genocide. Bea Green came to Britain as part of the Kindertransport in the late 1930s. She had grown up in Munich, Germany and witnessed the horrors of Hitler’s regime. Eric Murangwa was a footballer who had a professional career cruelly cut short because extremists wanted him dead simply because he belonged to the ‘wrong’ group of people in Rwanda. Kadefa Rizvanović was able to escape the genocide in Srebrenica as a teenager but would never see her father and countless family members again. It was also a privilege to speak to Debay Manees who was forced to flee from Darfur in Sudan because of the attempt by the government of the country to wipe out the group of people that he was born into.

What have all the survivors got in common? They were all born in different countries at different times… but they have all survived dreadful experiences and had their lives turned upside down simply because of their identity. More than that, they have all had the bravery to teach us about what they went through, how genocide in their countries happened and how it needs to be prevented in the future.

Our book focuses on the survivors of genocide more than the perpetrators. We think that the voices of those who survived need to be heard…and that they speak for all those who now have no voice. We didn’t think that it would be right to focus on the stories of those who planned or took part in the killings of innocent men, women and children.

In between the experiences of the survivors who we have learned from, we thought that it would be important to explain how genocides begin with words, how it is not inevitable and that it can be stopped. We go on to outline what happens during the horrific times of extermination. Each genocide is unique and there are many more differences than similarities…but if everyone knew what the warning signs were then maybe genocide could be stopped before it starts.

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Lastly, we’ve explained what is happening in the world today. We’ve written about how ‘Never Again’ has become ‘Yet Again’, again. The Yazidi people are still to receive justice, the Rohingya in Myanmar are having their existence destroyed by their own government and the genocidal campaign against the Uighur in China continues. The world watches on. Again.

We don’t think that it has to be this way. You committed yourself to righting a wrong and achieved amazing things in your work to have genocide recognised as a crime. You worked against huge odds in a one person struggle to make the world a better place. We’d like to emulate your commitment to help those who suffer from the terrible persecution and racism that you witnessed…and hope that anyone who reads our book can do the same.

Everything in our book is true. It happened. We’re researched each story and have delved into court records, documents, books and articles to make sure that what we have written is accurate. We’ve tried to be as precise as we can with the terminology that we have used because we know that words matter. Of course, we haven’t been able to include everything that happened in the events that we describe but we hope that we have written enough for everyone to learn something new about genocide. You were a scholar – we hope that our book doesn’t offend your critical eye. …and if anyone buys our book they’ll know that any money that we receive will go to charities who help genocide survivors rebuild their lives and gives them a voice to educate others about their experiences.

Thank you for everything that you did and please consider this as our contribution to your cause. We hope that it makes a difference…

Yours sincerely,

Ben, Izzy, Yousef, Jack, Sam, Nat, Zainab, Maxi, Harry, Matthew, Anisha, Freddie, Calim, Nayaaz, Grace, Ozge, Jasper, Will, Amy, Yassin, Finlo, Ben, Haris, Chris, Ben, Louis and Fedaa

London 2020

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Explaining ‘Genocide’ On December 9th 1948, in the aftermath of the horror of the Holocaust the United Nations made ‘genocide’ a crime. The word ‘genocide’ had been thought up by a lawyer called Raphael Lemkin. He was a Polish Jew who had lost many members of his immediate family in the Holocaust. Lemkin combined the Greek word ‘genos’ (meaning ‘race’ or ‘people’) with the Latin word ‘cide’ (meaning ‘act of killing’). The United Nations voted in 1948 to define genocide as being committed when someone intends to destroy , in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.

The Holocaust

Bosnia 1995

Cambodia 1975-79

The Nazi regime and their collaborators murdered six million Jewish men, women and children. At the same time the Nazis persecuted other groups (like the Roma, and those with disabilities) because they thought they were inferior.

Under the cover of the civil war in Bosnia in the 1990s Bosnian Serb troops were ordered by their political leaders to force Bosnian Muslims out of areas they wanted. This culminated in genocide with the murder of 8,372 men and boys at Srebrenica.

In 1975 a radical leader called Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge followers seized power in Cambodia. They launched a brutal attack on ethnic minorities and religious people as well as other civilians. Around 2 million people were murdered.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Darfur 2003—Present

Rwanda 1994

Genocide today

Darfur is a part of Sudan with a mixed population of black Africans & Arabs.

The Sudanese government has used an Arab militia group called the Janjaweed to launch a genocidal campaign that has killed thousands.

In 1994 an extreme ’Hutu power’ government sought to wipe out the minroty Tutsi group in Rwanda. In 100 days more than a million people were murdered.

Over the last few years the attacks on the Yazidis in Iraq and the Rohingya in Myanmar have been recognised by some relevant institutions as genocide. Crimes against the Uighur people in China have also been described as genocide.

How does Genocide happen?

Genocide doesn’t happen overnight. The analyst Professor Gregory Stanton studied genocides and discovered that there is a process by which genocide happens. Stanton says that the group who is targeted in a society are marked out, abused, isolated and discriminated against before extermination. The final stage of genocide is denial where the perpetrators refuse to admit that anything happened.

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Raphael Lemkin __________________

G

enocide, what’s that? That was Lemkin’s joke to people he met at parties in 1948.1 It was funny because everyone knew that this ‘sad, witty, middle-aged man’ spoke of just about nothing else. ‘Genocide’ the word that he had created to describe the intent to destroy a group of people was his life. Having the crime recognised throughout the world was all he thought about.

Sometimes people would avoid Raphael Lemkin. Some thought that he was obsessed, others believed him to be completely unrealistic in his goal. In the end, though, Lemkin achieved what just about everyone thought was impossible. He persuaded the world to adopt the term ‘genocide’.

Raphael Lemkin was born on 24th June 1900, into a Polish-speaking Jewish family on a farm on the outskirts of Wolkowysk in what is now Belarus in eastern Europe. He lived on the farm with a big family of brothers, uncles, aunts and cousins. Lemkin’s mother, Bella, initially taught her sons at home, and was a big influence on Raphael emerging fascination with learning, with language, poetry and songs. He also became fascinated with the books he read which told of horrible slaughter of peoples of the past. Lemkin later remembered that he was ‘appalled by the frequency of the evil…’2 Yet Lemkin’s life on the farm and in the city of Wolkowysk where his family moved to was not completely care free. In 1913 he became aware of the anti-Jewish racism that was all around. Jewish people were unfairly blamed for crimes that they did not commit…and when this happens other Jews were often attacked in brutal ‘pogroms’. Just two years later came news of other atrocities that would shape Lemkin’s life.

Lemkin was a teenager in 1915 when news of the Turkish slaughter of Armenians reached his city. 3 He was suddenly exposed to the idea of intentional mass murder of a population and began thinking more deeply about what this meant.

At Lwow University, where Lemkin later studied, he asked the professors that taught him about the problem of the murder of innocent people simply because of the group they belonged to. The professors said that countries had the right to treat their citizens how they wished. Lemkin refused to believe that was right. He began to think of creating a law that would protect innocent people who were attacked because of the colour of their skin or the god they worshipped.

Lemkin moved on to become a prosecutor in Warsaw after completing his PhD in 1929. Lemkin spent a long time thinking about the law that he wanted to create. In 1933, just as Hitler came to power in Germany, he developed the concept of a crime of ‘barbarity’ by which he meant ‘destroying a national of religious’ group of people and the crime of ‘vandalism’ which, in his view, meant ‘destroying works of culture’.

He was to present his ideas at a Conference in Madrid but the Polish government, seemingly keen not to offend their new Nazi neighbours, prevented Lemkin from attending.

It was when those Nazi neighbours invaded Poland in September 1939 that Raphael Lemkin became a refugee. He promptly left Warsaw after the city was attacked but his escape on a train was interrupted by the bombing of his train, leading him to resume his journey through rural Poland on foot and by horse and cart. Lemkin went east, towards his parents. By misleading Soviet soldiers and managing to avoid Nazi bombing runs, Lemkin was able to find his way home. After a short stay Lemkin decided to move on. His parents would not accompany him. They felt safe where they were. Lemkin’s mother told him “You realise, Raphael, that it is you, not we, who needs protection now.”

Lemkin would never see his parents again. They were to be murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

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Lemkin knew that he had to leave Poland, and probably Europe, to escape from the Nazis. One option he considered was to try to get to the USA via Belgium, Norway or Sweden. It was very difficult for Jews to travel to other countries in those times but Lemkin had well-connected friends who he could call upon.

With the help of the lawyer and politician Karl Schlyter, Lemkin was able to get permission to travel to Sweden. As Schlyter was a judge and previously Minister of Justice he was able to have Lemkin admitted to the country. Schlyter had to guarantee that Lemkin’s living expenses would be covered the first six months and thus Lemkin was granted a visa to enter Sweden.4 Whilst he was in Sweden, Lemkin started to collect information on the atrocities that the Nazis were committing back in Poland. Again, he used his contacts – Swedish businessmen who he had got to know in the 1930s and who could travel quite freely around Poland at the time. We don’t know the names of the businessmen who helped Lemkin but he describes ‘friends in a Swedish corporation’ who had their offices in Nazi-occupied Poland and who would send him copies of official announcements and rules that the invaders imposed in Warsaw and beyond.

Lemkin makes it plain in his autobiography that he thought he would have been killed had he stayed in Poland. He was aware of atrocities being committed, but we cannot be sure if Lemkin was certain at the time that the Nazis wanted to destroy the Jewish people. However, there was enough information available at the time for Lemkin to work out what might be happening. He knew that the Jews were being forced into ghettos and to live in conditions that would be hard to survive. Lemkin probably understood what was about to happen when he wrote in his autobiography ‘as for the Jews, ominous signs pointed to their complete destruction in gradual steps.’5 Fortunately for Lemkin he knew people in the United States who could help with his escape from the Nazis. In 1936, while still working as a lawyer in Warsaw, Lemkin met Prof. Malcolm McDermott, who was a member of the law faculty at Duke University. Lemkin and McDermott became friends and they worked together on a book about law which was published by the professor’s university. So, when Lemkin was trying to flee Europe he got in touch with Professor McDermott who was able to quickly organized a shortterm job Duke University. This allowed Lemkin, by now a refugee, to get the necessary paperwork to emigrate to the United States. After travelling right across the Soviet Union from Sweden and then by boat to Japan and across the Pacific Ocean, Lemkin arrived in Seattle in the USA on 18th April 1941.

He quickly became accustomed to US life as he took up his post at the University, captivating many audiences with stories of his first-hand experience of wartime Europe. Shortly after arriving, Lemkin received a final letter from his parents. It read ‘We are well. We hope you are happy. We are thinking of you’.6 They were murdered at the end of 1942, alongside at least another 49 of Lemkin’s family who perished in the Holocaust.

In 1942 Lemkin moved to Washington DC, joining a part of the US government as an analyst and then working as an international law expert. Whilst doing his job he tried to tell those in higher positions in the government about the atrocities being perpetrated in Europe by the Nazis. Lemkin even wrote to the President, Franklin Roosevelt to suggest that the USA create an international treaty banning ‘barbarity’. Lemkin’s request was rejected.

Lemkin’s campaign now took a new turn. He wrote a book called ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’, which was published in 1944. The seven hundred and twelve pages were full of legal arguments and documents…but the book also contained a new word in Chapter 7: ‘Genocide’. It was the first time that anyone would ever have read the term in print.

Keen to further his cause, Lemkin soon took up position as an advisor to the American legal team that was preparing for the trial of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. Nevertheless, Lemkin was to be disappointed again:

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‘genocide’ was not listed on the list of crimes included in the ‘Nuremberg Charter’. Undaunted, Lemkin battled on. Showing the tenacity and stubbornness that had been the hallmarks of his life, Raphael got himself to Europe from America, spoke to anyone who would listen to him and spoke to the press without the permission of his employers – the US government.7 All this managed to alienate his colleagues but it did advance his goal. On October 6 1945 ‘genocide’ was included on one of the indictments (an official accusation that says that a person will be tried for a crime) against the twenty four Nazi leaders.

During this period, Lemkin learnt that tragically, 49 members of his family had died. They lost their lives in ghettos, concentration camps and death marches. This great loss perhaps fuelled his determination to have the term recognised in international law.

The judgements against the Nazi leaders came on 30 September and 1 October 1946. Lemkin was not in Nuremberg to hear them – he was ill in hospital in Paris and had to listen to what was going on in the court room on a radio next to his bed. He waited for a sign that the accused would be convicted of ‘genocide’.

And he waited. There was no mention of the crime that Lemkin had worked so hard to have included in the trial. Lemkin was devastated by the silence and, later, admitted that that day was ‘the blackest day’ of his life.8 But Lemkin would not give up.

He lobbied relentlessly: he wrote articles, gave speeches, penned countless letters and telephoned everyone he could think of with the aim of getting the UN to agree to a document outlining the suitable recognition, prevention and punishment of genocide. This goal was achieved on the 9th of December 1948, when the UN adopted the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’, as drafted and initiated by Lemkin himself.

Lemkin was so pleased that the United Nations had adopted the Genocide Convention. His words in his autobiography and the photographs of him after his triumph show how elated he was. Nevertheless, Lemkin probably knew that the Convention would not rid the world of the atrocities that he had campaigned against. Instead, he saw it as a warning to governments that might think about trying to destroy a particular group in their country: if you do commit the crime of genocide you will be punished.

Lemkin may also have wanted the Genocide Convention to cover more forms of ‘destruction’ and ‘groups’ than it actually did. He was interested in protecting a greater variety of groups from physical and cultural destruction (as he had shown with his ideas of crimes of ‘barbarity’ and ‘vandalism’ in the 1930s)…but politics got in the way. Not every country adopted the Genocide Convention and promised to obey it: Britain did not sign the Convention until 1970 and the USA only ratified it in 1988.

Lemkin did not stop here, but instead continued to urge other countries and nations to adopt similar legislation supporting the Convention.

The final chapter of Lemkin’s autobiography tells a sad story.9 The constant struggle had taken its toll on Lemkin: he was weak and living in desperate poverty. But still he worked to have more countries listen to his message and sign up to the Genocide Convention. As he writes of his constant lobbying of ambassadors and senators Lemkin also details how he has to borrow money from friends, how his landlord hammers on his door at midnight because he can’t pay the rent…and even how his clothes are confiscated because of unpaid bills.

Raphael Lemkin died of a heart attack in 1959. He left behind an immense legacy.

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LOOKING FOR LEMKIN Lemkin in Poland

Lemkin in Sweden

Lemkin at Duke University, USA

When Lemkin was studying in Lviv he asked his professors why no one had been prosecuted for massacring Armenians in 1915. In the 1920s Lemkin thought about this more when was a lawyer in Warsaw. He came up with idea for laws banning the killing of human groups. He called this crime ‘barbarity’. When the Nazis invaded Lemkin had to flee.

Lemkin was able to escape to Sweden.

Whilst he was in Stockholm he began to collect information about what the Nazis were doing in the countries, like Poland, that they had occupied. Documents were smuggled out of Poland and given to Lemkin. He began to realise that the Nazis were intent on wiping out every single Jewish man, woman and child.

Lemkin continued his journey in 1941. He travelled from Sweden, through Russia, to Japan before eventually arriving at Duke University in North Carolina. Here he lectured and spoke to groups outside the university about his experiences in Europe. Whilst he may not have used the term "genocide" while at Duke, his stay helped him formulate his ideas.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Lemkin after Duke

Lemkin and The Genocide Convention

Lemkin’s later years

Lemkin used his legal expertise to work for the US government after his time at Duke. Most importantly, in 1944, he published a book called ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’ which mentioned the term ‘genocide’ for the first time.

Lemkin spoke to everyone powerful person he could find to persuade them to make ‘Genocide’ a crime. He finally succeeded and, on December 9th 1948, the United Nations passed the ‘Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’. It was a triumph for Lemkin.

Unfortunately Lemkin died of a heart attack in New York in 1959. He was only 59 years old. Right up until the end of his life Lemkin fought to make more countries take notice of the Genocide Convention.

Why was Lemkin important?

We think that without Lemkin there would not have been the word ‘genocide’. Without Lemkin’s work there would not be a way to prosecute the people who seek to wipe out a group and maybe deter those people who are thinking about it.

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Before

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F

irst of all, we’d like to try to explain something very, very important: Genocide is not inevitable.

It doesn’t have to happen. Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s, Tutsis who were born in Rwanda, Muslims who lived in Srebrenica in 1995 – none of these people were put on the earth to be victims of a monstrous crime. They had wonderful, worthwhile lives, they played football, they went to school, they painted pictures, they went to work, they wrote poems, sang and danced. They had hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares just we do today.

So, let’s travel back in time to learn more about the place that they grew up in and see them as the people they were rather than as the objects that their killers would want us to see them.

Jewish people had lived in Europe for hundreds of years before the 1930s. They had deep roots in each of the communities in which they lived alongside their neighbours who might have been Christians or Muslims or Sikhs or people of other faiths and none. Jewish people contributed so much to all aspects of life wherever they were.

The memories of survivors tell us about the meaningful lives that Jewish men, women and children led before the Holocaust occurred. Archives that store documents and photographs from before the Second World War show us scenes of happiness and love from places as far afield as North Africa, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Germany, France and Holland.

The same kind of images and warm feelings emerge from photographs and writings of people who lived in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and elsewhere before genocide occurred.

Similarly, the Tutsi people had been a part of Rwandan life for centuries before the 1990s. They were an integral part of life there and shared villages, schools and workplaces with their Hutu (and Twa) neighbours. All Rwandans, whether Tutsi, Hutu or Twa shared a common language, common traditions and they married each other.

Likewise, Bosnians, who happened to be Muslims, had lived in the country for hundreds of years. They shared a vibrant society with their Serb and Croat neighbours even if they did not share places of worship.

In Sudan, the land of Darfur has an ancient history. The rich and complex history of interaction the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, Rizeigat and so many other groups is one of give-and-take, a sophisticated sharing of land and resources for mutual benefit. The Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and Rizeigat groups all speak the same language (Arabic) and are all of the same faith.

Survivors who we have met all tell us the same thing. Bea Green, who was born in Germany and lived there in the 1930s, loved going to the park and the countryside with her family when she was little. Eric Murangwa, who lived in Rwanda in the 1970s, 80s and 1990s, loved playing football with his friends when he was young. Debay Manees, had a ‘beautiful life’ full of family and friends in Darfur (a part of Sudan) in the 1990s.

All the survivors who we have been fortunate enough to meet came from families who contributed to their communities and loved their homes. So, what we are saying is that there was no reason why genocide should have happened in Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. It was not inevitable. Something happened to make it happen.

So, it is clear that whilst there were tensions between groups in some cases there was nothing to suggest that genocide was just around the corner. What happened next in Europe, in Rwanda and in Bosnia and in Darfur that meant that one group of people would be singled out and an attempt would be made to destroy?

Simply put, people came to power who made it clear that the lives of some people who lived in a country were worth nothing. It would happen differently in Nazi Germany, in Bosnia and in Rwanda…but there were lots of similarities too.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

Creating ‘the other’ ________________________

G

enocide does not begin with killing. It starts a long time before that. It begins with words.

A group of people are singled out, abused, discriminated against, stripped of their rights and dehumanised begins years before the attempt to exterminate them happens. It takes a long time for a great majority of a population to be convinced that the lives of the minority are not worth anything.

In this section of our book we’d like to try to explain how that happens…

Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur have complicated histories that are all unique and different. One thing unites them though: it was not inevitable that there would be a genocide in those places. To find out why such atrocities took place we need to examine the years right before the killing started.

Those who plan and lead genocide know that they need to convince ordinary people that their neighbours, workmates and school friends are not worth caring about. That, far from being good people they are not really people at all…and so can be done away with without much thought.

For the genocidal plan to succeed as many people as possible need to be told that the neighbours who have been good people for such a long time aren’t anything of the sort. ‘They are enemies who wish ill on everyone else. In fact, they aren’t really part of ‘us’…and aren’t really people at all’. ‘They don’t deserve to live with us in our communities and we need to get rid of them’. Those are the slogans that the perpetrators – those who commit the crime of genocide – use to get people on their side. That is their ploy – they use the language of hate to persuade people that the lives of the ‘others’ are worthless. If people become convinced that a life is worthless then it is easier to persuade them to ‘get rid’ of the ‘other’. That might initially mean ‘getting rid’ of the ‘other’ out of a school or a gymnastics club. Then it will mean ‘getting rid’ of the ‘other’ from a court room or a doctor’s surgery. After that it could mean ‘getting rid’ of any books the ‘other’ rights, denying the ‘other’ of the rights they have, the houses they own and so on. Finally, it will always mean ‘getting rid’ of the ‘other’ by killing them.

Genocide doesn’t just happen, it is planned.

It takes planning and co-ordination on the part of the perpetrators. Campaigns of hate speech, dehumanisation and the isolation of the ‘other’ may take years and years to develop. At some point, however, a group of extremists will decide that the time has come to unleash a campaign of killing or destruction on the group that they wish to do away with. The circumstances of the plans and actions that develop and the characters involved are, of course, different but, nonetheless, there are similarities too.

So, as we can see, all genocides are planned. They might be planned to happen in different ways but they are planned nonetheless. They do not happen by chance or because of ‘old rivalries’. They happen because extreme leaders take decisions that they think will solve a problem that they have. That solution is intended to destroy an entire group of people.

The same hateful process can be seen in Nazi Germany and in the spiteful regimes of President Habyarimana in Rwanda, Radovan Karadžić in Bosnia and President Omar al-Bashir in Sudan.

Creating ‘the other’ in Germany The history of racism against Jewish people doesn’t start with Adolf Hitler in 1933.

Antisemitism (the word used to describe anti-Jewish racism) had been around Germany, and indeed the whole of Europe, for hundreds of years. England was not immune from such hatred. Jewish people were massacred in York in England in 1190 and a law in 1253 said that Jews had to wear badges to show who 17

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

they were. This was only a few years before Jews were banished from England by King Edward I in 1290.

Such antisemitism persisted all throughout Europe for hundreds of years – in the late 19th century there were terrible attacks on Jews in Russia – called pogroms.

However, that is not to say that the Holocaust was inevitable – it absolutely wasn’t. Whilst antisemites like Wilhelm Marr still screamed their racist hatred in the 1870s, Jewish Germans were more a part of the country than ever before. It would take the actions of Hitler and his henchmen to stir up in hatred and division as the 1930s progressed.

From the day that the Nazis came to power in Germany they launched a campaign of hate against German Jews. Their aim was to convince everyone in Germany that the Jews were not like them and did not deserve to be in the country. For that to happen the Nazis had to spread their untrue, racist rants as far and widely as possible.

There is a picture in the archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that shows seven men standing around a big board in the German town of Worms in August 1935.10 The group in the photograph is reading the pages of a newspaper that are pasted on the board. The newspaper is called Der Sturmer (‘The Attacker’). Written in big letters across the top of the board is a headline: ‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune’. It was a typically racist headline that Der Sturmer’s publisher, Julius Streicher, used throughout the 1930s right across Germany.

Every single day between November 1937 and January 1938 five thousand people visited an exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in the city of Munich in the south of Germany. The title of the exhibition was ‘The Eternal Jew’. It tried to convince visitors that Jewish people were involved in a conspiracy against Germany – it was all lies, of course, but the stereotypical, racist images of Jews attracted large audiences.

These are just two examples of the kind of hatred that filled Germany against the Jews in the 1930s. We could have mentioned the films that were made, the books written, the lessons in schools, the posters pasted on billboards…Thousands of examples of the racist propaganda that the Nazis used to make people hate the Jews.

The Nazis used propaganda to try to make non-Jewish Germans see Jews as ‘the other’. However, Hitler and his henchmen also created laws in an effort to force Jewish people to become isolated from their communities. From 1933-39 the Nazis passed more than four hundred decrees and regulations aimed at making the lives of Jewish people harder and harder. The laws and rules that were imposed slowly got more and more severe as the 1930s went on. Jewish people who worked for the government were sacked in 1933 and Jewish lawyers, actors, doctors and professors were forced from their professions soon after.

The 1935 Nuremburg Race Laws essentially stated that Jews were no longer Germans and later, Jews would not be allowed to visit cinemas, watch sports matches or go to the swimming pool or park. Throughout the 1930s the Nazis brought in laws and decrees that were ever more racist and designed to make it impossible for Jewish people to live in Germany. Nevertheless, for people who had lived in Germany for their whole lives…and who had done nothing at all wrong the desire to stay in their homes and towns was very strong. After Jewish people defeated every wave of anti-Jewish racism and refused to be driven out the Nazis launched ever more brutal ways to ‘solve the Jewish question’.11 Soon, the Nazis unleashed a night of terror. On 9 November 1938 hundreds of Nazi officials, the Stormtrooper thugs and even young people in the Hitler Youth terrorised Jewish families in their neighbourhoods. Homes were ransacked, shops smashed up, synagogues burned and nearly one hundred Jewish Germans were murdered. After the November Pogrom Nazi persecution of Jewish people got even worse and the responsibility for this racism shifted even more towards the most extreme Nazis – the SS. The stage for the attempt to exterminate every single Jewish person in Germany (and beyond) was being set.

This process quickened and became even more extreme when the Second World War broke out. Hitler had given a speech in January 1939 that indicated what he was planning. Speaking to the Reichstag (the German Parliament) the Nazi leader told the audience that if a world war were to break out then it would lead to the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”12 On a January morning in 1942 a group of fifteen men met at a large house by a lake in a part of Berlin called Wannsee. The men who met there weren’t stupid or ill-educated – in fact, nine of the fifteen had PhDs (the highest level of degree from a university).

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? On a January morning in 1942 a group of fifteen men met at a large house by a lake in a part of Berlin called Wannsee. The men who met there weren’t stupid or ill-educated – in fact, nine of the fifteen had PhDs (the highest level of degree from a university). The group represented the elements of the Nazi regime that would help put in place the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the leaders of the SS, had called the meeting and began by telling everyone that he had been given the job of making the arrangements for the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. All the men who attended the meeting knew that they were talking about how to organise the mass murder of millions of men, women and children.13

Creating the other in Rwanda Similarly, in Rwanda the history of the Tutsi people was complicated and sometimes difficult…but, like in Germany, there was no reason that a genocide would occur in 1994.

The people of Rwanda were largely divided into three groups: Hutu (the majority), Tutsi and Twa (the Twa made up about 3% of the population). The labels of Hutu and Tutsi had more to do with status than anything else in the beginning. A person with status – normally associated with the ownership of cattle - would be a Tutsi whereas those who farmed the land were Hutu. However, if a Hutu was able to enrich themselves then they were granted the status of Tutsi and vice versa. There was mixing and movement between the two levels of status. Hutu and Tutsi also shared the same traditions, spoke the same language and married each other.

Nevertheless, when Europeans arrived in Rwanda they did not understand this complex and sophisticated system.

They wanted to rule Rwanda in the easiest and most profitable ways possible. So, the Belgian imperialists made everyone in Rwanda carry an identity card. On the ID card was listed a person’s group: Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. From then on people in Rwanda were labelled as one of these groups…and their status could not change. The Belgians decided to use the Tutsi group to rule the country and set about discriminating against the Hutu majority. They even sent scientists to ‘prove’ that Tutsi were in fact naturally cleverer than Hutu and were descended from a more intelligent and ‘European-like’ people. It was all rubbish, of course, but it managed to divide Rwandan society and caused resentment. (Ironically, extremists in the 1990s would use this fake history to say that Tutsi were in fact foreigners who should disappear from Rwanda altogether).

So, when the Belgian imperialists left Rwanda a decade or so after the Second World War a Hutu government took charge. The European colonisers left behind a country that was divided – and can be blamed for much of the division that existed. Nevertheless, there was nothing to suggest that an attempt to exterminate the Tutsi people would happen. In Rwanda in the early 1990s the air was also filled with racist hate. Extremists who planned the genocide worked hard to fill the air with a language of hate against their Tutsi neighbours. In July 1993 a new radio station came on the air. It was called RTLM (Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines - French for Free Radio and Television of the Thousand Hills – derived from Rwanda’s nickname as ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’). Programmes on the station was broadcast with equipment owned by the government…and the words and ideas that came out of the mouths of the presenters and DJs was as extreme as those in the minds of their masters. RTLM, on air for twenty four hours a day, cleverly played lots of popular songs on their station so that many people would tune in and listen.

In between the songs DJs such as Habimana Kantano and George Ruggiu told their listeners that Tutsi men, women and children were the ‘enemy’ and ‘accomplices’ with the rebel army that the government was fighting. Tutsis were also called ‘inyenzi’ which meant ‘cockroaches’. Ordinary people were told to ‘go to work’…which many people understood meant to kill Tutsi.14 At a meeting at a place called Kabaya near the home of President Habyarimana, an academic-turned-politician called Leon Mugesera gave a speech. Like the men who attended the Wannsee Conference, Mugesera was very well educated and had taught at universities. The language that he used in November 1992 was hateful and left no one in the audience in any doubt about what his message was. He told his listeners ‘do not be invaded’. He used the word ‘Inyenzi’, which means ‘cockroach’, and said that the Tutsi ‘enemy’ wanted to exterminate all the Hutus in Rwanda. Mugesera asked the crowd to “rise up…really rise up” and to “exterminate this scum”. The speech was recorded and played on national radio as well as being published in a newspaper for everyone to read. Mugesera’s message of hate and his encouragement to kill reached a wide audience just under two years before the attempt to exterminate the Tutsi in Rwanda began.15 Not only were Tutsi people dehumanised by hate speech around Rwanda but they were also were forced out of jobs that they held in the government, the army or in parliament. Similarly, a very low quota was imposed in education which meant that most Tutsis were not able to go to university. Without the possibility of a university training it would be just about impossible for a Tutsi who wanted to be a doctor to achieve their dream. It was as if the Hutu 19

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? extremists had studied the history of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people in the 1930s.

Like the Nazis intensified the persecution of the Jews so the Hutu extremists made life increasingly horrific for Tutsi people in Rwanda. When a civil war began in 1990 President Habyarimana told the country that the Tutsi were ‘accomplices’ and thousands of innocent Tutsis were arrested. The next year an army report agreed with Habyarimana – the Tutsi people were the enemies.16 One of the tricks that the perpetrators use to persuade people to hate the ‘other’ is to claim that the minority they are targeting are, in fact, plotting to destroy everyone else. It is laughable and ludicrous but it is what the extremists do.

So, in Rwanda the Hutu extremists began to claim that every Tutsi man, woman and child in the country were really the enemy and that they were all in on a vast conspiracy to destroy every Hutu. That lie was pumped out in newspapers and on the radio time and time again in the early 1990s. The lie also justified the perpetrators in drawing up plans for ‘self-defence’. These plans included creating a force of young men and the training of that group…to kill. In Rwanda a man named Theoneste Bagosora, who was at the heart of the ‘Hutu Power’ racist ideology, was responsible for setting up ‘self defence’ units called the ‘Interahamwe’ (which means ‘those who work or fight together’). In the genocide that would come the ‘Interahamwe’ were responsible for murdering thousands upon thousands of Tutsi.

Bagosora, after the killing, was convicted of genocide.

Like in Nazi Germany there were attacks on Tutsi people before the extermination began. The Hutu Power extremists picked places where they knew that the President had strong support and where they did not expect any resistance. From 1990-93, up until a year before the genocide began, there were small but brutal attacks on groups of Tutsi civilians. Hundreds died in massacres that historians have seen as ‘practice’ and ‘rehearsals’ for the genocide that was to come.17 Jean Kambanda, who was the Prime Minister of the extremist Hutu power regime in Rwanda, was convicted of genocide. The court heard how the Rwandan army and some political parties recruited groups of young men, called the Interahamwe, trained them and planned to use them in the massacre of innocent Tutsi people that were to come.

Kambanda knew the groups of people which planned the extermination of the Tutsi in 1994. 18 It was not just in Rwanda that politicians used speeches and the media to stir up a hatred that would lead to genocide.

Creating the other in Bosnia Bosnia was, and still is, a beautiful country in south eastern Europe. It is no wonder that thousands of holiday makers from Britain visit the Una National Park, the Pliva Waterfall and the stunning capital city of Sarajevo amongst other places every year.

The history of Bosnia is, like every other country complicated and sometimes difficult. It was made a part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes at the end of the First World War in 1918. The kingdom, which was soon renamed Yugoslavia, brought together the ‘southern slavs’ and was formed out of the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There were differences between the different inhabitants of Bosnia whether that was religious or sometimes in the clothes that people wore. Nevertheless, in 1930, a journalist who visited from Britain remarked that ‘the oddest thing of all, though, seemed to me the way in which they all fitted in so perfectly happily with each other’.19 Similarly, an American in Bosnia mentioned the mix of religious buildings side by side like the people of different faiths doing business together in peace. The observer concluded that ‘I wondered if tolerance is not one of the greatest of virtues.’20 The Second World War brought great problems to Yugoslavia. The Nazis invaded in 1941 and, besides destroying the Jewish population who had lived there for hundreds of years, mercilessly persecuted some groups whilst trying to recruit others as collaborators in their killing. All this, caused by Nazi intervention, caused violence and tremendous suffering for thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children, no matter their ethnicity.

Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, was liberated from Nazi control on 6 April 1945 by Tito, the leader of the Communist Partisans. With Tito firmly in control of Yugoslavia after the Second World War the Communist leader worked hard to make sure that the different groups of people were able to live together. People born in Yugoslavia were told to see themselves as Yugoslavs as well as Croats, Serbs and Muslims.21 To an extent, Tito succeeded.

However, when the Yugoslav Communist leader, Tito, died in 1980 extremist politicians began to take control of areas of the country and decided to exploit the divisions within Yugoslavia for their own purposes.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? Slobodan Milošević had been a Communist leader in Serbia. He wanted to increase his power and so he began to encourage Serbs to believe that they were being discriminated against by others. He used his control of the media to encourage hatred of others in Yugoslavia. Reminding Serb people of atrocities that were committed against them during the Second World War newspapers backed Milošević’s agenda of stirring up hatred of others. A document written by the influential Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, known as the SANU Memorandum stated that Serbs were the victims of persecution from others in Yugoslavia…and that things needed to change.22 In Bosnia some important politicians spent years trying to convince people that their Muslim neighbours were not proper human beings who they should respect. Biljana Plavšić, an important member of the Serb Democratic Party, called Muslims ‘genetically deformed material’ who were inferior to Bosnian Serbs.23 Another Bosnian Serb politician publicly questioned the identity of Muslim people and thought that they were a fake people. So, if Bosnian Muslims were not even ‘proper’ Muslims then, according to Momčilo Krajišnik’s thinking, they did not deserve to live on the land that they did. Furthermore, Radoslav Brđanin, speaking at a political rally alongside Radovan Karadzic and Biljana Plavšić, portrayed Muslims as filth saying “it is the obligation of the Serbs over the next hundred years to wipe their feet from the foul non-Christians who have befouled this soil of ours.”24 Radio was used as a tool to divide people and instil hatred in Bosnia in the 1990s as well. The town of Prijedor was taken over on 29 April 1992 by local Bosnian Serb extremists. From then on Radio Prijedor played Serb songs – a clear sign to the non-Serb population of the town as to who was in charge. Along with the songs came broadcasts of propaganda that sought to breed hatred of the ‘other’. In this case the ‘other’ that the Serbs wanted to demonise was the Muslim population of the town. The broadcasts proclaimed that the non-Serb leaders in the area were criminals and extremists who should be punished.

The radio in Prijedor also spread lies about individuals who many in the town would know well. Non-Serb doctors, like Dr. Mirsad Mujadžić, was ridiculously accused of injecting drugs into Serb women to make them incapable of giving birth to male children. It was all untrue, of course, but the tactics of the Serb propaganda radio in Bosnia, like RTLM in Rwanda, was to make ordinary people hate those who they lived alongside. 25 Like the Nazis sought to mark out and humiliate the Jews by making them wear a yellow star, so the Bosnian Serbs did the same to the Muslims in territory that they had taken over. The trial of Milomir Stakić contained testimony from numerous witnesses who said that the Serbs forced Muslims to hang a white cloth or flag outside their house to mark them out.

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The racist plans that the Bosnian Serb extremists had were revealed not long after civil war had broken out in Bosnia. In the case of the Bosnian Genocide the ‘Six Strategic Objectives’ of the Bosnian Serbs have become infamous.

In May 1992 at a meeting of the Bosnian Serb Assembly the leader, Radovan Karadzic announced the Objectives to the other politicians who were there. In short, the objectives set out what the Bosnian Serb leaders wanted to achieve: an area of territory that consisted only of Serbs. Others were not welcome and would be removed. 27 The ways that the Bosnian Serb extremists like Karadzic planned to remove the ‘others’ was brutally clear. In another document set out in November 1992 the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic gave orders that Bosnian Muslims who lived in the areas that the Serbs wanted would be given the chance to surrender…but if they didn’t they should be destroyed. The Muslim population would be forced to abandon their homes, schools, places of work…or they would lose their lives. The aim of the Bosnian Serb forces would to ‘create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life’28 The Six Strategic Objectives show that there was a plan to get rid of the non-Serbs (the vast majority of whom were Muslims) who lived along the Drina Valley. In this way the meeting that discussed the plan can be seen as being like the Wannsee Conference held by the Nazis in 1942.

Creating the other in Darfur29 Darfur is a region in Sudan, a country in the north eastern part of Africa. It is home to an amazing mosaic of people and places: there are more than one hundred and fifty groups of people who share languages, religion and traditions but also have different culture, ways of living and histories. Darfur can, rather simplistically, be divided into two different areas based on the conditions that exist there. In the north of Darfur it is very dry – the people here live by roaming the area with camels. In the south the climate is not quite as arid as the far north, and more fertile, and the people typically move around with their cattle in search of pasture, or farmers grow crops. Going back centuries the nomads of the north have co-existed with the farmers who live in the south. For instance, in the dry season the nomads

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? often bring their animals into more fertile areas: the farmers benefit from the animals fertilising their fields and helping transport their crops to market. All this has meant that the different peoples from north and south of Darfur have developed close relationships. To be simplistic, the nomads in Darfur have been labelled as ‘Arabs’ (such as Baggara and Abbala peoples) whilst the famers in central Darfur have been labelled as ‘African’ (belonging to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people). Nevertheless, over time these groups have mixed, and drawing distinctions is hard – for instance the Zaghawa people can also be considered nomadic as they are traditionally camel-owning.

Like every place Darfur has a rich and complex history. Hundreds of years ago kings built dynasties that controlled the area and land beyond it. The Daju, Tunjur, and Masalit Empires, and then Fur Sultanate, established Darfur as a powerful and rich region that traded in ivory, ostrich feathers and slaves up to the 18th century. Other countries interfered in Darfur. First the Ottoman Empire took control of some of Darfur and then, in 1916, the British made Darfur part of their Empire, taking full control, including of Masalit areas, in 1917. The British neglected Darfur. After Sudan became an independent country Darfur continued to be neglected and other countries continued to interfere in Darfur for their own purposes.

Other countries continued to interfere in Darfur for their own purposes like the British had done decades ago. In the 1980s Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya (the country next to Darfur), wanted to increase his power in the area and began war with Chad. Gaddafi began to tell the ‘Arab’ peoples of Darfur that they were part of a superior race and that they should demand greater rights in Darfur than inferior ‘African’ people, who were seen to be land owners. The ‘Arab Awakening’ political coalition, formed in 1987, spread these racist ideas, and led to local wars between Fur and Arab tribes. Groups of men, secretly armed by Colonel Gaddafi and called the Janjaweed (‘devils on horseback’), began to try to empty Darfur of the ‘Africans’, as early as 2001. The government in Khartoum (Sudan’s capital city) did nothing to intervene and in fact sowed further division and hatred in Darfur.

In Sudan extremists, like those in Hitler’s Germany, Bosnia and Rwanda tried to use hateful words to dehumanise the Zaghawa, Fur, Masalit and other peoples who lived in the Darfur region.

Witnesses tell us that they were called ‘slaves’ and that they made their villages ‘dirty’ and that their enemies would soon ‘clean’ the area. The black Africans of Darfur were labelled as sub-human ‘donkeys’ and ‘dogs’ who didn’t deserve to live in the area. Touring the area in four-wheel drive car Musa Hilal, one of the perpetrators, was notorious for making speeches to Arab audiences in Darfur and telling them to ‘clear the land’ of black Africans. Children of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa often were discriminated against in school and forced to leave university.

Once hate speech had become almost normal in society it was easier for extremists who held power in government to create laws and take action to discriminate and isolate the ‘other’. Throughout the awful history of genocide there have are attempts, before the killing starts to force the intended victims out of their communities, rid them of their rights and even strip them of their citizenship.

Finally, in 2003, two ‘African’ groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement / Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) began to fight back. They attacked a government base in Darfur and killed government soldiers. In return the government decided to help the Janjaweed and armed and supported them as they moved around Darfur destroying villages belonging to the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people, among others, and killing hundreds of thousands. Millions more had to flee to avoid the violence.

After rebel attacks in 2003 the President of Sudan, Omar Al Bashir decided to exact his revenge on the people. In that same year, Ja’afar Abdul El Hakh, one of the government officials in charge of Darfur was witnessed saying that ‘Zaghawa, Fur and Masalit have become rebels. We will burn everything down and only leave behind the trees. They can destroy all Darfur…”30 According to a prosecutor in a court that is seeking to put Al Bashir on trial for genocide, the President planned to ‘end the history’ of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people. To end this history the Sudanese leaders decided to unleash the Janjaweed militia under the leadership of men such as Musa Hilal. It was Hilal who wrote in August 2004 ‘You are informed that directives have been issued…to change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes’.31 There is more evidence about the planning of the genocide in Darfur by the government in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Mukesh Kapila led the United Nations in Sudan at the time of the genocide. He remembers a meeting with a high-ranking official in the president’s office. In particular, one remark chilled Professor Kapila’s spine: ‘The government of Sudan will take all necessary measures to crush the rebels and bring peace. We will not tolerate any resistance. Ergo, a final solution will be found.’32

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The Holocaust

____________________ Ghettos. The first ghetto was established in Piotrków Trybunalski in Nazi-occupied Poland in October 1939.

The Nazis forced Jews to leave their homes and move into ghettos where thousands died from disease, lack of food or shooting. Those who survived were deported t obe murdered elsewhere. The Nazis set up 1,143 ghettos in the territory that they captured in eastern Europe. The largest ghetto, in Warsaw, held 400,000 people who were crammed into an area of 1.3 sq miles.

Jews were deported from countries all over Europe that the Germans controlled or had a big influence in. The victims were told that they were being sent to work...but instead they were murdered in death camps. For instance, in France more than sixty thousand Jews were deported from the Drancy to death camps from 194244.

As it became clear that the Nazis would lose the war they forced concentration camp inmates to march back towards Germany. In terrible conditions these ‘death marches’ killed thousands as the Nazis sought to hide their crimes.

Einsatzgruppen. Between June 1941 and November 1942 Nazi mobile killing squads followed the German army as it moved eastwards. With the help of the SS, German army, their allies and local collaborators the Einsatzgruppen carried out mass shootings of Jews in the Soviet Union. In September 1941 men from Einsatzgruppe C murdered more than 30,000 Jews in Babi Yar, a ravine just outside Kiev in Ukraine. In all around a third of the victims of the Holocaust were murdered in this way.

Allies of the Nazis carried out their own brutal campaign of murder against the Jews during the Holocaust.

For instance, in Romania the dictator Antonescu ordered the deportation or murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Roma people were also targeted.

The Nazis wanted to wipe out all Jewish communities wherever they existed. For instance the community in Greece that had existed for more than 1500 years had 80% of its population exterminated during the Holocaust by the Nazis.

Death camps. In Nazi occupied Poland the Germans set up extermination centres. These places had just one purpose: to murder. Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau were the sites where an estimated 3.5m Jews were murdered.

The Nazis also murdered Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

This map can only show a fraction of the important places and events that occurred during the Holocaust. For much more in-depth coverage please visit: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/the-holocaust-maps

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Bea __________________ Bea grew up in Munich in Germany surrounded by lots of trees, parks and sandpits. When she was six years old she went to her local primary school. Her dad walked with her on the thirty minute journey every day. School began at 8am for the youngest children and finished at 1pm when the Bea’s family would meet at home for their main mean of the day.

School in 1931 was a pleasant experience for Bea. She had a lovely form mistress who taught her to write on a slate with a chalk pen.

Things changed though.

Fraulein Felder, who taught Bea in her second year at school, was a Nazi.

Once, when Bea asked for a new pencil to replace her worn down one, the teacher told her ‘Don’t you Jew children have enough money to buy your own?’. Incredulous, Bea didn’t know to take it personally – she knew that she was Jewish but just wondered why the teacher wanted to know how much money she had? With thirty other kids in her class Bea simply thought that Fraulein Felder was horrible to all the children. Nevertheless, Bea went home and reported the curious remark to her mum…who got very angry.

That was Bea’s introduction to antisemitism – a year before Hitler came to power in Germany.

It was on 10 March 1933 that Bea realised the appalling nature of antisemitism under Hitler. Bea was at home, in bed, off school with a cold. She remembers her mum being out shopping and that there was nobody in the family flat except for herself.

Normally, when Bea’s father came home for lunch, at around a quarter past one, everyone would be sitting at the table waiting for him in the living / dining room at the end of the corridor. He would open the door, turning the key in the lock very firmly and would whistle the family whistle to announce his arrival. That was the signal for Bea and her brother to rush down the corridor to see who would get to their dad first – and much to Bea’s frustration she was always second in the race because her brother was four years older and had longer legs.

But Bea was lying in bed on that particular March 10th 1933. When the door was unlocked she thought that it might be her mother returning from her shopping. Bea waited for her to appear…but when she didn’t Bea got out of her bed and went out into the corridor which took her to opposite the bathroom.

There she saw her father’s clothes drenched in blood.

Bea tiptoed the length of the corridor to her parents’ bedroom which was opposite the main door and… knocked at her at the bedroom door.

There was no answer.

Gingerly, Bea opened the and saw her father pull up his bed clothes so that Bea couldn’t see his face. Only his eyes were visible. ‘Wait until your mother comes home’ Bea remembers her dad mumbling. She thought it all very strange – her dad never referred to Bea’s as ‘mother’. He always said ‘mum’. So, Bea crept out again and went back to bed.

Bea remembers lying on my back feeling not very good. Feeling kind of empty, feeling really scared. Soon, her mum came home and Bea heard a lot of talking. She realised that her parents didn’t want her to know what had happened. That upset Bea as she had seen what she had seen and needed to know.

The Siegel family had a house in the country – a little wooden house made of logs – which Bea remembered as being gorgeous. There were brown logs, white window frames, green shutters and a red roof. The house stood on the edge of a forest which was the foot of a mountain. Even decades afterwards Bea is able to describe the minute details of the house that gave her and her family so much joy. However, back in March 1933 the family travelled to their house in the country with a doctor and without the same joy. While her father tried to say that there was nothing wrong with him it was clear to Bea that that was far from the truth.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? The Nazis had knocked his teeth out and burst his ear drums. More than that they had tried to humiliate Bea’s dad.

They had cut off his trouser legs, ripped off his shoes and socks and made him walk around Munich with a placard around his neck saying ‘I am a Jew and I will never again complain about the Nazis’.

Bea eventually found out the full story of what happened on March 10 1933 some years later. Her dad, Dr Michael Siegel, was a lawyer. One of his clients, who owned quite a big department store, called him that morning to say that the Nazis had damaged the front of his shop. So, Bea dad had made his way to the police headquarters in Munich to make a complaint on behalf of Mr Uhlfelder, the owner of the store.

He went to the police HQ and went to the reception desk. Here a policeman directed Dr Siegel to a room in the basement of the station. There he was met by a group of Nazi Brownshirted thugs who attacked Bea’s father. Much later, her dad told Bea that the reason that there was so much damage caused to his face, head, teeth and ears was because he was worried that they would damage his kidneys. So Bea’s dad covered his kidneys with his arms.

Bea always thought that it was a miracle that her mother didn’t come across the awful sight of her father being led around Munich by his Nazi attackers. They led him around the city centre for an hour or so and then, when maybe they got bored, the Brownshirts let him go at the main railway station. Here, Dr Siegel was able to get in a taxi…but just before he was able to escape a man with a foreign accent appeared with a camera and asked if he could publish a photograph that he had just taken. Bea’s father told the man to ‘do what you like with it.’ – he was more worried about escaping from the Nazis and getting home. The photograph went on to appear in newspapers all around the world. If you search for ‘Dr Michael Siegel’ on Google images you can see the photographs that the man took to his day.

Years later Bea’s husband asked her father a question. He said ‘I’ve always wondered what went on in your head then, just then, when you were walking?’ Bea’s father replied ‘That’s easy, I had only one thought in my head and that was ‘I’m going to survive you all’’. He did. Bea’s father outlived every single one of those thugs who assaulted him.

Bea’s parents managed to get out of Germany in the 1940s – that’s another story – and went to South America where they both lived and died. Dr Michael Siegel died at the age of 96. So, he survived them all.

When Bea was ten years old she passed an exam to gain entry to a senior school for girls in Munich. The school only allowed a certain proportion of its pupils to be Jewish – Bea was one of five Jewish girls in her class of thirty.

There was no overt antisemitism that Bea can remember from the teachers…but it was noticeable that during breaktime when the class would go outside into a courtyard to play two circles would form. The class would form a one circle…but without the Jewish pupils. Out of those five Jewish girls only two would survive the Holocaust.

Antisemitism got worse and even more noticeable. In the village where Bea and her family went for their holidays a sign appeared which said ‘Jews not welcome here.’

Soon discrimination turned to violence during the infamous pogrom of November 1938, commonly known as ‘Kristallnacht’. Bea’s dad received a phone call saying that Nazi thugs were coming for him and so he had to flee so that he wasn’t attacked or sent to a concentration camp. Even though they were proud Germans Bea’s parents know realised that their family had to leave the country. So, when the opportunity arose to send Bea to England they took the chance.

Leaving Munich at midnight on June 27th 1939 was, at first, a real adventure for Bea. But when the steam train slowly pulled out of the station Bea saw her mother crying – even though she tried to hide her tears from Bea. It was at that point that Bea realised the enormity of what was happening. She travelled to Britain as part of the ‘Kindertransport’, which saw 10,000 children from Nazi Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia being given refuge in Britain just before the Second World War. As the train that Bea was on left Germany and rolled into Holland someone handed Bea some orange juice – she was really surprised to see a non-Jewish person being kind to her!

When Bea arrived in England she was taken in by a British family who were kind to her. She was determined to go to school and learn English which she did. Bea’s family were also able to escape Germany – her parents fled to Peru where Bea was reunited with them several years later and her older brother escaped to Britain. Bea went on to have a successful career and have three sons in south west London where she still lives today.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

During

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

W

e’ve described the importance of words in creating hate. Hate that, if left unchallenged, can build into genocide.

In this chapter we are going to try to describe something that words cannot fully describe: what happens during a genocide.

The personal and unique stories about Bea, Eric, Alma and Debay will be far more powerful that our narrative here. If you can take the words about them an imagine those kinds of stories being spoken by millions of people at the same time then you may get somewhere close to imagining the impact of genocide.

Nevertheless, we really need to outline what happened. If everyone knows about what happens during genocide then there is more of a chance that they will be prevented in the future.

Millions of words have been written about what happens during a genocide. We don’t have space here to detail everything but we hope that the outline below will encourage everyone to read more.

Genocide happens in many different ways, in many places. Each one is unique…but, as we have seen before in our book, there are certain similarities that we can pick out.

Intent to destroy. Killing. The stories and images of the murder of innocent men, women and children are the outcome of genocide, the intention of the perpetrators.

Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide also included the destruction of culture. He thought that one way that the perpetrators would seek to wipe a group off the face of the earth would be to obliterate everything that the ‘other’ valued in their lives. His prediction came true: during the Holocaust the Nazis destroyed Jewish synagogues and the genocide in Bosnia also saw the destruction of hundreds of mosques by the perpetrators. It was a deliberate attempt to make it seem that Jews and Muslims never existed and could never be remembered. Similarly, in the genocides in Rwanda and Darfur the killers also sought to wipe out any trace of the humanity of their victims. Homes were burned, photographs smashed, memories destroyed.

Nevertheless, we think that we should focus more on the lives of the victims rather than their deaths and not describe, in detail, the circumstances of how they perished.

Jews were killed in ditches in Poland, on a garage forecourt in Lithuania, in a river in Budapest, in vans in Yugoslavia, a ravine in Ukraine, in the gas chambers of Treblinka, in rivers and forests and towns and cities... And in thousands of other places and more.

Tutsi men, women and children were murdered in their homes, at roadblocks, in churches and schools. And in thousands of other places and more.

Bosniaks were executed in concentration camps like Omarska, in their houses in Zvornik, in farm buildings and on football pitches close to Srebrenica. And in thousands of other places and more.

Husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, son and daughters from the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa were massacred in their villages in places like Karnoi, Abu Gamra and in thousands of other places and more.

That is what happens during genocide.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? There were others too who took a role in the events that happened during the Holocaust and the genocides that occurred more recently. They weren’t perpetrators and they weren’t necessarily those who were targeted.

Rescuers On the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem there is a garden. The trees that grow in the Garden of the Righteous of the Nations each remembers a non-Jewish person who risked their life to save Jewish people from extermination by the Nazis. There are thousands of trees in the garden…and thousands of people who have been recognised as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. We’d like to tell you about one of them who you may not have heard of…and who was actually British.

June Ravenhall was an ordinary lady from Kenilworth in Warwickshire. She moved to Holland with her husband, who had a business importing British motorcycles, and was living there when the Nazis invaded in 1940. Soon the invaders had confiscated the Ravenhall’s house and business and June’s husband, Ron, had been sent to a prison camp in Poland. Despite all these hardships June took it upon herself to hide a young Jewish boy, Louis Velleman, from the Nazis. The consequences for June if she had been discovered harbouring a Jew would have been unthinkable but she did so from 1942 until Holland was liberated.33 Rescuers are present in every genocide. It involved a decision, a decision to step out from the crowd to save someone’s life. It’ll probably be someone that the rescuer has never met before…and it’ll be a decision that puts the life of the rescuer in danger.

Many people saved lives during the horrendous hundred days of killing during the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. One such person was Zura Karuhimbi. A traditional healer, Zura was around seventy years old and a widow at the time of the genocide. She saved close to a hundred Tutsis – hiding them in her house and in her fields – from the Hutu killers. Ingeniously, Zura, pretended to be a witch and possessed with evil spirits. She threatened the Interahamwe with this ‘witchcraft’ whenever they came to attack those hiding in her house. The frightened killers stayed away.

One of the United Nations officers, Mbaye Diagne - a Senegalese soldier, became a legend for roaring around Kigali in his jeep, rescuing Tutsi who were to be killed and them bluffing his way through roadblocks set up by the killers.

Tragically, during one of his rescue missions, Diagne was killed when a mortar bomb hit his vehicle.

In Bosnia, seemingly unremarkable people did remarkable things to save the lives of others. Fadila KapicMehmedbašić, who lived in Stolac, decided that she should save her Serb neighbours. So, she sheltered fourteen women and children in her basement as Croat soldiers roamed the streets of the town looking for Serbs to take away and execute. Fadila sat in her hall, waiting for the soldiers to come and determined not to let any of the people she was hiding die. They all survived.34

Resisters Some people might believe that the victims of genocide go to their deaths without a struggle. This is not true. Every genocide has seen brave resistance against the perpetrators. Resistance came in a variety of ways, though. Maybe the most obvious resistance came in the brave uprisings in the camps and ghettos in the Holocaust to the equally courageous struggle in the hills of Bisesero in Rwanda. Nevertheless, there was also brave resistance in just trying to survive and therefore defeating the aim of the perpetrators.

Historians have written entire books on the huge numbers of people who resisted. We’d like to tell you about a few of those in the next couple of pages of our book.

Between July 22 and September 12, 1942, the German authorities deported around 300,000 Jews in the Warsaw ghetto. During these deportation operations alone, more than 10,000 were murdered. However, at least 55,00060,000 Jews remained in the Warsaw ghetto, either having been granted permission by the authorities or, like more than 20,000, remaining in hiding.

In response to the deportations, several Jewish underground organisations created an armed self-defence unit, which they eventually linked to the Polish underground military movement called the Home Army. When, the ‘liquidation’ (a word that the Nazis used to hide the horrific action of getting rid of a ghetto and all of its inmates) of the Warsaw ghetto and mass deportations of the residents resumed in January 1943, the resisters acted. A group of Jewish fighters managed to hide themselves amongst a group of people being deported to their deaths, - they suddenly launched an attack on their German escorts. Because of this, the Nazis suspended further deportations and the Jewish residents, encouraged by this, began to construct underground bunkers and shelters in preparation for an uprising.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? The intended date for the final operation to ‘liquidate’ the ghetto was April 19, 1943. Upon entering the ghetto that morning, the SS and the police found the streets deserted: nearly all of the residents of the ghetto had gone into hiding, waiting for the uprising to be signalled. After Jewish resistance commander Mordecai Anielewicz gave the order, the Jewish fighters attacked, pushing back the Germans. Remarkably, the fighters held out for another month, making sporadic raids as the buildings around them were razed to the ground by the Nazis in order to force the remaining Jews out of hiding. In his final letter, towards the end of April 1943, Anielewicz revealed the extent of the heroism of the resisters: ‘It is impossible to put into words what we have been through. One thing is clear, what happened exceeded our boldest dreams. The Germans ran twice from the ghetto’.35 It is thought that Mordecai Anielewicz was murdered by the Nazis on May 8, 1943.

There is a huge number of unrecorded instances of Tutsi resistance during the Genocide against the Tutsi. 36 Despite this, many of them will have shared common elements: Tutsi (and in some cases mixed groups of Tutsi and Hutu) repelled the initial attack; the aggressors called for reinforcements from the army and police; the aggressors attacked repeatedly until they overcame the resistance. At some sites, those besieged formulated strategies for resistance using a tactic called ‘merging’, where they lay down until the assailants moved among the intended victims before rising up to face them in close combat. This tactic decreased the likelihood that assailants would shoot because they would fear being caught in fire from their own side. The best-known case of resistance took place in Bisesero, a mountainous ridge in Kibuye where Tutsi bravely resisted their assailants from April 8 until July 1, 1994. Tutsi had fled there due to its height and numerous hiding places in the woods and subsisted first on their supplies and then any food that they could forage for. However, the military pressures gradually reduced the number of resisters, with a survivor estimating that, of the thousands of Tutsi hidden in the woods on top of the Bisesero hills, fewer than 1,500 survived.

As the murderous Bosnian Serb soldiers under Ratko Mladic’s command swept into Srebrenica on July 11 1995 many of the men and women trapped in the town decided on a different form of resistance. With no chance of mounting a defence against the heavy weaponry of the Serb army escape and survival would be the best way to resist the genocidal intent that was engulfing them. Thousands of the men of Srebrenica joined the ‘column’ on the evening of July 11 – an attempt to break through Serb lines and get to friendly territory. The men believed that, even though the odds were stacked against them, they would have a better chance of survival than if they fell into the hands of the Serbs. Bravely the men marched and marched. They were ambushed along the way, very many were killed but some made it.37 The older people, women, children and those unable to run or who chose not to also resisted in their efforts to survive. They suffered terribly at the hands of the Serbs and many perished or were harmed horrifically.

Many of the same human instincts were seen during the same in the genocide in Darfur. The desire to defy the perpetrators by simply staying alive and continuing the way of life of the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit was a very real form of resistance against the Janjaweed and the soldiers from the Sudanese government. Besides that, physical, violent resistance was offered by two main Darfuri groups: the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement / Army (SLM/A). Both of these groups were formed to counter the marginalisation of Darfur and to improve conditions in the region.

Bystanders So, what did the world do when these horrendous things were happening. Surely, when people found out they stood up and acted to stop the killing from happening. Right? Wrong.

It is often thought that people in Britain didn’t know about the Holocaust until nearly the end of the war. That isn’t true. Reports about the terrible things that the Nazis were doing to Jewish people well before 1945. By 1941 the British government knew about Auschwitz and in August of the same year the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, referred to the atrocities that the Germans were committing when he said that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name’. However, at the Bermuda Conference, when British and American officials discussed the plight of the Jews in 1943, the only decision made was that the war against the Nazis needed to be won. Requests for Auschwitz be bombed were rejected by both American and British politicians.

After the Holocaust it might have been expected that the world would not allow genocide to happen to again…and if it did then surely the powerful countries would step in and take action as quickly as possible. Sadly, this has not been the case.

In Rwanda the United Nations actually had soldiers in the capital city, Kigali, and elsewhere around the country. The commander, a Canadian General named Romeo Dallaire, was able to find out that something dreadful was planned.

An informant told him that plans were being made to kill Tutsi…and Dallaire thought that he could take action by seizing some of the weapons that the killers were planning on using.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? So, Dallaire sent a message to his bosses at the United Nations asking them for permission to mount a raid and capture the arms. The reply from the UN headquarters was shocking: do nothing.

Elsewhere, world powers did not show the bravery or resolve that Dallaire, Diagne and their fellow UN soldiers in Rwanda did. After ten Belgian soldiers, who were protecting the moderate Rwandan Prime Minister were captured and killed by extremists, the Belgian government decided to pull all their soldiers out of Rwanda. In one dreadful incident Belgium troops who had been protecting around 2,000 Tutsi men, women and children at the ETO School in Kigali were told to leave. The people they left behind were murdered soon afterwards by the waiting Interahamwe.

In the USA documents made public afterwards show that the government was desperate not to get involved in the situation. An internal assessment stressed the importance of not using the word ‘genocide’ in press conferences, just in case people began to expect that the USA would actually need to ‘do something’ to stop the killing.38 Similarly, the big powers in the United Nations actually decided to reduce the number of soldiers that they had in Rwanda.

If the response of the world to the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda was woeful there may not be a word to describe what happened in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia. Here the United Nations had promised that the Bosnian Muslims who had taken refuge in the settlement from the advancing and murderous Bosnian Serb forces would be protected – the UN had, on April 16 1993, declared that Srebrenica was a ‘safe area’. Tragically, this promise was not kept.

The attack on Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb Army commanded by General Ratko Mladic started on 6 July 1995.

The Dutch peacekeepers guarding the ‘safe area’ were forced to retreat towards the town. Their commander asked for support from NATO aircraft. Not a single bomb was dropped by these aircraft on the approaching Bosnian Serb forces. As the perpetrators advanced so the desperate people of Srebrenica crowded towards the United Nations base a little way from the town in a place called Potocari. No help came from the United Nations as Mladic’s men began their murderous, genocidal, rampage.

Unfortunately, the story was not much different in Darfur. Whilst the United Nations (and the rest of the world) knew about the atrocities that were being committed in 2003 it took a long time for a UN soldiers to reach Darfur. Troops from the African Union and the UN only arrived in any great numbers in 2007. Hampered by a lack of resources, transport and money the soldiers were not able to stop the killing (most of which had happened in the years before they arrived in any case). At the height of the mission to Darfur there were around 25,000 troops to cover an area of about 190,000 square miles. So, every soldier has to watch over roughly seven square miles. It is perhaps not surprising that the help that the outside world gave in Darfur was too little and too late.

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi __________________________

Gisenyi By midday April 7 the killing had spread from Kigali. The Interahamwe trapped Tutsi in churches, where they had fled for protection, and murdered them. This process went on for weeks.

In late April, Tutsi gathered at a school in Murambi, were promised protection by French troops. However, the soldiers disappeared and, after a brave defence, the Interahamwe slaughtered the thousands of Tutsi men, women and children.

RWANDA Between May –June Tutsi fought for their lives on the hills of Bisesero.

They repeatedly pushed the attackers back but suffered hugely for their defiance.

RTLM radio broadcast encouragement to people to kill Tutsi after April 6. It told people to put up barriers to stop Tutsi escaping, named people to be killed and districts to be attacked.

Kigali 6 April 1994 President Habyarimana is assassinated. This is the spark for the genocide to begin. The moderate Prime Minister is murdered and the killing starts. The killers use lists to target their victims In Kaduha ordinary people, including secondary school students gathered to kill. Afterwards they would meet at Bar Mugema to drink and talk about their ‘work’.

This map can only show a fraction of the important places and events that occurred during the Genocide against the Tutsi. For much more in-depth coverage please visit: https://kgm.rw/

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Credit: HMDT

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Eric __________________ Eric had experienced prejudice from a young age. As a young child, he never realised how things really were; until one of his earliest memories, where he’d seen his class separated into two different lines: one for Tutsis and the other for Hutus. This made him question how things were run; it confused him, seeing the segregation between himself and his friends.

As he got older, he enrolled into a football club, which led him to later become a professional footballer on one of the Rwandan National teams called Rayon Sports. Eric was not involved in politics; he was a sportsman.

After the death of the Rwandan president, when the genocide started, Eric was attacked in his home with his roommate. There were about 6 men who came into the flat, they started throwing things around and trashing his flat, a photo album fell open and it had pictures of the Rayon Sport football team. This caught the head militia man’s eye, and he asked about it. Eric said that it was his teammates and that he played for one of the national teams, then the man asked the others to wait outside and he told Eric about how much he liked the team and how he had been at a match two weeks earlier. These men had planned to kill Eric. The fact that he played on the Rwandan national team essentially saved his life.

After this incident, Eric asked his teammates, many of whom were Hutu, for help, and they hid him until it was safe.

At that point, one of the teammates took Eric to one of the men who was head of the militia, and because that man was a fan of the team, he hid Eric. That man eventually brought Eric to the International Red Cross. Thus, Eric was able to get through the checkpoints because of this man. Eric was then put up in the Hotel Mille Collines and then eventually evacuated from Rwanda.

Many years later, Eric was working on a documentary and went to speak to the man who had hidden him, who was in jail, about why he had helped carry out the genocide. At first, he agreed to talk but as soon as he saw the cameras he refused to speak. Eric said that this was a tactic done by ex-influential figures in order to conceal the truth.

So what can we learn from Eric’s story and the genocide? While interviewing Eric, he was quick to point out the correct terminologies we should use; calling the historical event 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda instead of the ‘Rwandan genocide’. These corrections are out of respect for all who had their lives affected in genocide and also to overcome ignorance on sensitive matters as the language used to describe it ‘the Rwandan genocide’ would undermine the mistreatment of the different people groups which is unjust. Eric was also very keen on tolerance and unity. He encouraged us students to look for similarities instead of differences so that there would be less division and prejudice, stopping similar events from taking place again. While listening to Eric’s story we were astonished to hear about how much of his journey came down to unexpected luck and chance. We asked ourselves whether he would be in the meeting speaking to us, had the photo album not open on a picture of his football team. Would he be alive today if he didn’t have the few connections he did have? How much of his life would change without football?

This also shows how privileged we are to have our safety not come from luck but be guaranteed.

This genocide stems from long term suffering of the Rwandan people under colonial rule which left ideas of hatred and separatism. In order to move forward from these issues we must learn to be tolerant as Eric himself has demonstrated to us. Eric did not hold grudges to those who may have oppressed him in the past, instead he preached forming a strong brotherhood. Many of us found this particularly helpful because especially for those of us who come from a minority background, we understand how easy it is to accumulate hateful ideas. For this reason the first step for a better future must be the change within an individuals’ own perspective.

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After

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I

t isn’t all over when genocide ‘ends’. For the survivors the trauma of their experiences continues, day after day, night after night…and never ends.

Part of the pain that the survivors feel is not just the loss of loved ones and the destruction of everything that they help dear but also the denial that continues. Perpetrators and their supporters deny that a genocide ever took place.

Even before genocides are ‘over’ those that commit the atrocities go to great lengths to hide their crimes.

During the Holocaust the Nazis went to great trouble to hide the crimes that they knew that they were committing.

As early as September 1942 the man in charge of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1m Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others would be murdered, went to a place called Kulmhof. The commandant of Auschwtz, Rudolf Höss, visited Kulmhof so that he could see a demonstration of the equipment there. This machinery was used to burn bodies. Höss wanted to find a way to remove all trace of the people who he and his men were murdering in the gas chambers within their camp.

Later, in October 1943, the Nazis forced others to dig up the bodies of 40,000 Jews who they had murdered around the city of Minsk. The ‘Sonderkommando’ who they forced to do the job were made to burn the bodies they had dug up so that not a trace of the crime that the Nazis had committed remained.

Just a couple of days afterwards, Heinrich Himmler spoke to the leaders of the SS organisation that he commanded.

He openly admitted that the Nazis were exterminating the Jews but told his audience that what the Nazis had done ‘has not and will not be spoken of’.

Even before it was clear that the Nazis would definitely lose the Second World War they were trying to hide what they had done. They were denying that the Holocaust had happened.

This act of denial would be repeated in the genocides that followed. After the murder of 8,372 men and boys in the days after July 11th in 1995 the Bosnian Serbs made a big effort to hide the crime that they had committed. Bodies were buried. They were then dug up and taken to be reburied in other mass graves further away. The perpetrators used bulldozers to dig up the bodies. Unfortunately for the killers satellites were watching as they attempted to hide their crimes.

Even with the proof of what happened established and confirmed by international courts the genocide in Bosnia is still denied. Even the current mayor of Srebrenica, a Serb called Mladen Grujičić, denies that a genocide took place in the town. 39 Omar al-Bashir, the leader of Sudan who unleashed a genocide against people in Darfur, has spent years denying that anything of the sort took place. At the time his government threw aid agencies, who were trying to help the victims of the violence in Darfur, out of the region. He did so not only so that survivors might not receive help, but also to help cover up the crimes that had been, and were, being committed. As Mukesh Kapila recollects al-Bashir’s regime also took a lot of trouble to prevent the United Nations from finding out what was going on in Darfur. The President’s henchmen did everything in their power to make sure that observers were not allowed to get close to places where the Janjaweed and government forces had recently attacked…and made sure that ordinary people in Darfur could not speak freely to UN representatives.

It may seem ridiculous to think that genocide can be denied when there are so many facts, so much evidence and so many witnesses. Yet it happens…and when it does happen it insults those who perished. Denial also allows the hatred that brought genocides about to flourish once more and it excuses those who took no action to prevent genocide from taking place. That is why we must all fight against genocide denial, whether it is Holocaust denial or the denial of the Genocide against the Tutsi, the Bosnian Genocide or the genocide in Darfur.

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Credit: Remembering Srebrenica

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Kadefa __________________ Kadefa’s childhood was as peaceful, idyllic and tranquil as the countryside where she grew up in Voljavica, near Bratunac and Srebrenica in Bosnia. There was a river, rolling, green hills and good friends too. There was no difference between anyone who was a Serb, a Muslim or a Croat – everyone played together. Milada, Kadefa’s best friend at school, and afterwards, who she loved like a sister, just happened to be a Serb. It made no difference.

All that changed in April 1992. By this point Kadeha was expecting a baby, nine months pregnant. She was on her way home from work when she discovered that Bratunac was filled with armed people: soldiers, police and paramilitaries. Together with Milada, Kadefa decided to avoid the soldiers and get to Voljavica through the forests. They reached Kadefa’s home without a problem and Milada stayed for lunch that day before leaving for her own home.

This was, unbeknownst to them, the final time they would see each other.

A couple of weeks later, on 7th May, Kadefa went into labour. It was impossible for her to reach a hospital with all the armed men around and so Kadefa’s mother-in-law and grandmother delivered the baby themselves. What should have been a wonderful day was marred by the fact Kadefa knew that villages around them were burning, and that she and her new baby were under threat from men who were filled with hatred. After only a few days, on 12 th May, Kadefa and her family made the decision to flee. It was dangerous to go…but also too dangerous to stay. Kadefa begged her family to leave her – she could hardly walk because she had only just given birth and thought that she would endanger everyone else by slowing them down. Her husband refused to leave her and gallantly said that he would carry her if she couldn’t walk. So began the journey to what they hoped would be a safe place.

Twenty-two days later, after walking through the forests, Kadefa and her family arrived in Srebrenica. They had no where to stay when they arrived in the town which was thronging with refugees who had fled their homes in the surrounding area, just like Kadefa. Since she had a new-born baby Kadefa was allowed to stay with sixteen other people in a house in the town. The place where she stayed had no running water, no electricity, and food was very scarce. It was to be Kadefa’s home for the next three years.

It was a struggle to survive in Srebrenica; like other people, Kadefa searched incessantly for food, she tried to grow vegetables to give her child something to eat. Many of the women who were refugees in Srebrenica went looking for food in areas under the control of the Serbs – which was dangerous but necessary. These terrible conditions were made a little better when the United Nations declared that they would protect Srebrenica and that it would be a safe place to reside in. The United Nations did not live up to these promises.

The Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica began in July 1995. As soon as the weapons started firing Kadefa and the others in the village knew that it would be impossible to defend against. People began to stream out of Srebrenica towards Potočari, where the UN had their base in the area. No one had any real idea what was going on but they did know one thing: they had to try to get away from the Serbs- to safety. Kadefa, who by now had two small children with her, initially made her way to her brother’s place by the petrol station in Srebrenica. The scene there was desperate – an immense, confused, and frightened crowd. The men began to leave in a column, trying to escape from the advancing Serbs through the forests. Kadefa’s husband, suspecting what his fate would be if he stayed to be captured by the Serbs, joined them. He gave Kadefa a hug, asked her to look after the children, and left.

Kadefa knew that they had to keep moving, away from the Serbs and towards Potočari. Her daughter, who was three years old by now, walked without complaining about the blood in her shoes from painful blisters. When Kadefa arrived at Potočari she could already hear screams in the distance. The Serbs were there. They moved through the crowd, grabbing men and boys and taking them away. Men were being separated from women and small children.

Being torn away from their families. Trucks were there to take the women and children away…without the men. The journey was a terrible one. Moving through hostile territory, the women and children were abused by Serbs who spat at them and taunted them as they travelled. Eventually, the truck that Kadefa was on arrived in Tuzla. She was able to live with her brother – eleven people crammed into his flat.

Immediately, Kadefa began to ask anybody she could find if they had news of her husband. No one did. His fate was unknown. Kadefa waited… and hoped. It would be eight long years until Kadefa heard the news.

38

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? It was the worst.

Kadefa’s husband had been found miles away in a place called Pilica.

He had been killed by the Serbs there.

Today, Kadefa, still mourns the loss of her husband and the over twenty close relatives that were killed. In a way, she thinks that the genocide also destroyed her – the Bosnian Serb perpetrators took away her heart, her soul and her joy.

Nevertheless, Kadefa, urges everyone, particularly young people, to learn the lessons of the past. She still believes in the future and hopes that young people can talk together and build a future that is filled with harmony and love, rather than hatred.

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The Genocide in Bosnia ____________________ The people of Bijeljina witnessed the arrival of ‘Arkan’s Tigers’ in April 1992. The Muslim population was targeted, scores murdered, expelled or taken to camps. Mosques were destroyed as the Serbs attempted to wipe out any trace of Muslim life. Local Serb men were encouraged to take part in the socalled ‘liberation’ of the town.

Local Serbs took over Prijedor and began to discriminate against non-Serbs.

People were forced from their jobs and made to put white flags on their houses.

Soon murders began with 3,515 Bosnian Muslims going missing in this period.

Massacres by Serb paramilitary groups like Arkan’s Tigers in Zvornik killed nearly 4,000 Bosnian Muslims between 1992-95

BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA The Omarska camp was a concentration camp used to detain non-Serbs from the local area. Conditions in the camp were terrible and murder and torture were common. Hundreds were killed.

In April 1992 Foča was attacked by Serb military, police and paramilitary. The homes of Muslims were burned, mosques destroyed and men, women and children captured. Whilst the men were sent to concentration camps the women were often subjected to horrific sexual attacks. Hundreds were murdered.

In July 1995 8,372 men and boys were murdered in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs. It was the single worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.

In May 1992 Serbs took over the town of Višegrad and declared it a ‘Serb’ town. Muslims lost their jobs and, as paramilitaries such as the ‘White Eagles’ moved in, murders began. Many bodies were thrown into the Drina river. In all around 3,000 men, women and children were murdered.

This map can only show a fraction of the important places and events that occurred during the Bosnian Genocide.

For much more in-depth coverage please visit: https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/

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Today __________________ After the Holocaust, the world said ‘Never Again’. Literally. On memorials like the one in the Dachau concentration camp in Germany the words ‘Never Again’ appear for everyone to see. The same thing happened after the genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. And Darfur at the start of the 21st century.

So, after all that, might it be reasonable to think that the world would be able to live up to the promise of ‘Never Again’? Sadly, not. Sadly, the Yazidi people, the Rohingya people and the Uighur people have, and are, being subjected to atrocities that many people think are genocide. So, ‘never again’, all over again.

Ignorance is not an excuse. It might have been possible, in years gone by, for the world to say that it had no idea about what was happening...until it was too late. That excuse no longer applies today. Satellites and smart phones mean that atrocities cannot be hidden. Footage of alleged attacks on Rohingya villages in Myanmar, of Uighur people being held in centres in Xinjiang, China and of brutal IS treatment of Yazidi people in Iraq mean that the world knows full well what is occurring.

Doing something about it is the problem.

In the early hours of August 3rd 2014 the genocide of the Yazidi began. The Yazidi people are a religious minority who live in the Middle East. Fighters from ISIS, who wanted to destroy the Yazidi, their culture and religion, launched an attack on Yazidi villages around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq. Defenceless, those Yazidis who could, fled to the upper slopes of the mountain where they were besieged and attempted to survive in the sweltering heat without food and water. Most were unable to escape ISIS and were captured: men and older boys were executed, women and girls abducted to be enslaved and face relentless sexual violence and younger boys were taken to be indoctrinated and turned into child soldier cannon fodder for their attackers. Thousands were killed and thousands more are still missing. Absent too is the justice that Yazidis deserve.

The Rohingya come from Myanmar and are one of the many ethnic minorities who live there. Nevertheless, the authorities there, particularly the army, deny the Rohingya citizenship (much like the Nazis did to the Jews) and have discriminated against them for decades. In 2017 the Myanmar army started an horrific campaign of violence against the Rohingya people. Hundreds of thousands fled for their lives. Thousands of Rohingya have been killed. The Myanmar government has denied that anything approaching a genocide has taken place and the powerful countries of the world have been remarkably ineffective in their response. Indeed, the country that has tried to take action to stop the genocide and take Myanmar to a world court is Gambia. Not the USA or the UK. It is a lesson to us. So far the Rohingya have not received justice and their villages have been bulldozed by the Myanmar government. The genocide, from their point of view, has succeeded.

Many people believe that what is happening to the Uighur people in Xinjiang province in China is ‘...genocide, full stop.’40 The Uighur people are a Muslim minority who live within China and are being reportedly subjected to treatment that lots of informed observers say would fulfil Lemkin’s idea of genocide.

Satellite images have shown that mosques have been destroyed.41 Reports also tell of thousands of Uighur’s being put in prison camps and ’locked up, indoctrinated and punished.’42 The Chinese Ambassador to Britain has said that all these reports are ’fake news’. Just as worrying is research that some have suggested shows that the Chinese government was trying to reduce the birth rate of its Uighur population by forcing women to have abortions or be sterilised.43 The Chinese government have said that these measures have been entirely voluntary.

So, as everyone can see, genocide continues today. It appears that the ‘lessons’ from the Holocaust and more recent genocides have not been learned. ‘Never Again’...has been said again, again and again. Vulnerable people are left without protection and with no one to stand up for them.

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The Genocide in Darfur ____________________

August 27, 2003 Antonov bombers attacked Habila six times.

The settlement was full of people who had already fled from villages that had been assaulted by the Janjaweed and army.

October 9, 2003 soldiers and Janjaweed attacked twelve villages in the Murnei area – Dingo, Koroma, Warai, Hydra, Andru, Zabuni, Taranka, Surtunu, Narjiba, Dureysa, Langa and Fojo - killing eighty-two people including women, children, and worshippers in a mosque

SUDAN Darfur

March 5, 2004 In valleys and hills around Wadi Saleh 145 men were selected by Janjaweed and soldiers and executed.

Nov—Dec 2003 In two attacks, in Urum, the Janjaweed and army came in trucks, land cruisers and on camels and horses. They burned 300 huts and massacred more than one hundred people including the local Imam and his three-year old grandson.

This map can only show a fraction of the important places and events that occurred during the Darfur Genocide. For much more in-depth coverage please visit: https://wagingpeace.info/

Source: Human Rights Watch 42

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Debay __________________

I

t may be odd to start a story at the end. In 2020 Debay was a key worker during the COVID-19 pandemic, working to keep people in Britain safe and to keep vital services running. Very few of the people that Debay helped each day during the crisis would know about his background. Very few would be able to guess about the resilience, and spirit that he has shown in his life. Debay has survived the genocide in Darfur.

I hope that people all around the world will know about what happened in Darfur.

Before 1999, before the genocide in Darfur began, Debay lived what he described as a ‘beautiful’, happy and peaceful life in north west Darfur. His village is called Owi. There were no Arabs in his village, and when they did visit there was no trouble. Debay, when he was young, didn’t know what tribes meant. He didn’t know what tribe he belonged to – everyone seemed to be the same to him. Debay came into the world in 1990 – the second child of his mum, who was a primary school teacher in their village, and his dad. Debay’s dad was a doctor in the village and also spent a lot of his time looking after his camels and goats – signs of prosperity and value in Darfur. He was named El Sadiq by his dad – meaning ‘trust’ in Arabic – and ‘Debay’, which means treasure, by his mum.

It was in 1999 that Debay began to become aware of tension and trouble. He was seven years old. At this point people began to disappear and grown-ups were tense and troubled. Although Debay didn’t know it at the time, local men would be taken by the government to go and fight in a war in South Sudan. Although he didn’t know exactly what was happening, Debay knew enough to realise that something was wrong. That bad things could happen.

Many of those bad things began to visit Debay’s school. He remembers government soldiers coming and arresting his teachers. Of the four that were arrested and taken away none of them returned. Later still the soldiers returned and killed two men from the village in front of his eyes. Debay was horrified and confused – he asked what crime they had committed, what they could possibly have stolen to bring such a punishment on them. He was told that the teachers and the men had been accused of being American spies, Zionists and of being against Islam, the Arab people and the State. The leader in charge of the army in North Darfur was Awad Ibn Ouf, a man who would be feared in the area.

Often the government troops would accuse villagers of being American spies or Israeli spies or Zionists. For Debay it was ridiculous “I didn’t even know where America was”. “The first white person I saw was in 2003” It was all just an excuse to jail, to torture and to kill. It was a tactic which meant that anyone who belonged to the groups from which rebel leaders came from could be accused and arrested.

Soon the government closed Debay’s school. The teachers were forced to fight in South Sudan or were put in prison…a few lucky ones were able to escape to the bush. One of those who escaped was Minni Minnawi. Debay’s friends told him that he was the leader of the movement to free Darfur from the violence of the army and the Janjaweed. He broadcast on the radio that a revolution had begun. However, it wasn’t freedom that came to the villages that Debay knew in Darfur – it was terror.

Immediately before 2003 the close network of villages that typified the area of Darfur that Debay lived in began to shake with news of attacks by the Janjaweed and government troops. Relatives in other settlements began to visit and talk about the violence that was getting closer and closer.

As a teenager when the genocide began the overwhelming feeling that Debay felt was fear. He told us that it was “The fear that the next day it would be our village that would be attacked. Even us kids knew that something terrible would happen and that something awful was coming. We were so scared. It was so frightening”. It wasn’t just the children that felt it, the anticipation, it was mums and dads too and even the animals seemed to shudder with fear.

Debay and his friends knew that attacks had happened elsewhere and that other villages had been attacked. He knew that the Janjaweed and government soldiers with their bombs, machine guns and rifles would come to his village one day. Any day.

44

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? That day came in 2003. Not once. Twice.

The Janjaweed attacked Debay’s village once and then again. Houses were burned, schools destroyed, people murdered and animals butchered. Debay’s family fled with others to the mountains and forests to hide. After five months they cautiously returned to rebuild their village and live a normal life again. Then the Janjaweed came again. Debay remembers being woken at about five o’clock on the morning. Going outside he could see that other villages were being attacked and burned as government troops joined the Janjaweed in the attack. Everyone was running. Bodies fell to the ground and “blood was everywhere”, Debay remembers. Debay noticed his younger sister running away and managed to catch her up. He saw neighbours…but lost sight of his mum. “Terror”.

Debay and his sister walked for three days.

They were hungry and thirsty by the time that they were able to cross the border from Sudan into Chad and stopped at the village of Bahi. They searched for their mother and brother. It worried them when others said that everyone who stayed in the village had been killed by the Janjaweed. Apparently, all the animals had been taken and all the water sources had been buried. The Janjaweed had wanted to destroy the village and everyone and everything that lived there. They wanted to annihilate any trace of the people and their traditions and lives. In the minds of those men on horses who had attacked it would be best if the village had never existed. Debay hoped beyond hope that his mother and brother had been able to run. The people there were desperately poor but they were kind to Debay and his sister. In the middle of the horror, the midst of the evil attacks by the Janjaweed there were some good people who wanted to help. Debay and his family were given a tent to sleep in, a blanket to cover them, food to eat.

They were basic things but, to Debay, they were incredibly valuable. He was a refugee but the fact that someone had given him these things made him feel valued.

After three weeks Debay and his sister found their mother and their little brother. They had escaped and were well… but many of their relatives had perished in the attack.

Three years later. Debay found himself walking back into Darfur and Sudan. He was with a group of young people who were returning. Debay did so to fulfil his dream of becoming a doctor. He also felt that he wanted to fulfil a dream for his mother – to help remove some of the pain in her eyes that he had seen after the attack on their village in 2003. The car that he was in was stopped by government soldiers. The questions came quickly and accusingly: ‘Where are you going?’, ‘Who do you belong to?’, ‘Where are your fathers?’. Some were taken away but Debay was allowed to go on to El Daein, the biggest town in east Darfur. Here he stayed with his uncle who was a teacher there.

Although the discrimination against him as a member of a group that the government wanted to destroy was a barrier Debay worked and worked until he was accepted to study pharmacy at university in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan. But the situation for students from Darfur in Khartoum was impossible. No one would give Debay a part-time job so that he could pay his fees. Worse still was the work of the government secret police who constantly harassed those from Darfur and accused them of being a rebel or spies for America and Israel. He was given the choiceless choice of spying on his friends from Darfur or leaving. Debay refused and left. Debay returned to his family in the camp in Chad. Debay’s dream was crushed.

For Debay genocide was not just the horrific violence that he could see all around him. More than that he saw how a people were controlled, scared to tell the truth, frightened to talk to anyone and fearful of saying a word out of place.

The government had made ordinary people in Sudan believe that those who came from Darfur were a threat to them.

That the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa people wanted to kill them. For those from Darfur being accused by anyone of being a ‘rebel’ and being denounced to the police for any reason meant arrest, prison and worse.

Before Debay was born his village knew about the Janjaweed in the 1980s. They were a militia, they carried AK47s and rode horses. They would attack villages, steal animals and rape women if they found them outside of villages.

But back then they didn’t have the big guns that the government gave them after 2003. Before 2003 the Janjaweed didn’t destroy entire villages, didn’t burn all the houses down. They were not a big threat like the government troops.

That all changed.

For many survivors of genocide their trauma lives on. They can’t sleep and if they do they have nightmares. In the day there are headaches and migraines…and the horrible feelings of one day stretching into another day, another week, month and year. The suffering continues well after the events of genocide. Debay would rather not talk about how his experiences and memories still impact him today.

2014. The world turned away from Darfur when the TV cameras left not much past 2006. Nevertheless, the situation did not change. The fear and discrimination and lack of safety remained. Debay had gone back to Darfur with his father and worked as a teacher to help children from his village and others who were hiding from government soldiers in the hills. Soon, though, violence returned. An attack drove Debay and his father to a city where he was soon arrested. The accusations that justified the arrest?

45

GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT? Debay was told that he was a ‘rebel’, an ‘American spy’ and a ‘Zionist’. The allegations would have been laughable had they not meant that Debay was at risk of execution because of them. Debay would only spend about fifteen days in the prison. For every minute of his time he was convinced that he would never leave alive. Sleep was impossible – there were eight people to the bed that he was supposed to rest on and there was no place to close his eyes without another’s head or elbow knocking him awake again. It was a miracle that Debay’s relatives came for him. They were able to bribe the guards to let him go: the commander drove Debay for hours out into the desert and left him…but not before telling him that if Debay returned he would be killed. Debay walked. He walked on with no food, no water and no phone. His only chance for life was to find someone who could help him. After several hours in the desert and as hope seemed as far away as the horizon there came a truck.

The truck had animals in the back…and the driver agreed to let Debay ride with them. If they were stopped by soldiers they would explain Debay’s presence more easily if it looked like he was helping with the animals.

Debay describes his time in Libya as ‘another tragedy’. His story of working but not being paid, being cheated and exploited because he had no rights. He was losing hope. One of his friends in Libya said that life in Italy was safe and there were chances to study. Debay decided to drop himself into the Mediterranean. He had decided to live in peace or die. He lived.

Today, Debay has a plan for the future. He has a burning desire to go back to Darfur to help the people rebuild their villages and their lives. Debay knows plenty of people who can’t study, who lack the confidence to train in new skills.

He wants to help change that. More than that Debay wants to return to Darfur to rebuild hospitals and schools so that life for young people will be something for them to cherish.

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“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” Elie Wiesel

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Five things you can do to help prevent Genocide 1. Stay informed Try to keep up to date with the news in your country and around the world. Look out for any of the warning signs of genocide or human rights abuses. On social media, follow accounts that warn about possible genocides or human rights abuses, such as Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch. Share what you have learnt with those around you or on social media. The more we understand about current affairs, the more likely we are to spot the warning signs for genocide.

2. Stand up against hatred Hatred towards certain groups always builds up before a genocide.

Throughout the media, the Internet, or even when talking to people you know, you will sometimes notice hateful messages being spread. Stand up against this hatred whenever you can. Remind people that we are all human, that everyone deserves to be treated with respect, and that we should promote understanding and peace instead of hatred and violence.

3. Don’t fall for polarisation Before a genocide happens, you will often see perpetrators try and convince people that the victims are their enemies, in order to polarise a society. You can resist this narrative. Never assume something about a person just because they have a certain colour of skin, or have a certain religion, or speak a certain language. Treat everyone around you with respect, and be open-minded and tolerant towards everyone. Try and build bridges across society - meet with people from different communities or backgrounds and learn more about them. The more that different groups of people live together in harmony, the less likely it is that genocide will take place.

4. Use your voice Everybody has a voice that can lead to meaningful change. Use your voice to stand up to genocide. If you learn about genocide or a policy that might lead to genocide, raise awareness about it. Post about it on social media, sign petitions, attend protest marches, or write to your local politicians, the government, or ambassadors of a country. If you can vote, vote for politicians that will ensure everyone’s human rights are respected.

5. Be mindful with your money Some companies profit from genocides. During the Holocaust, many Nazi-backed businesses such as car manufacturers used prisoners (mostly Soviets or Jews) as slaves. They profited from the forced labour of victims of a genocide. Today, there are reports that many clothes companies (such as Nike and Uniqlo) are using forced labourers to harvest cotton in Xinjiang, where the Chinese Government is accused of committing a genocide against the Uighur people. Be aware of where your money goes when you purchase new items. You can also use your money to help potential victims of genocides - donate to charities that are trying to prevent genocides.

Conclusion The most important message is that each and every one of us has the power to stop genocides.

By using our voices and electing politicians who feel the same way, we can ensure that perpetrators of genocides do not have the resources or environments to divide societies and carry out their crimes. By promoting love and building bridges between communities, we can combat division and polarisation. So many lives have been lost to the evils of genocide. Whilst it may seem like genocide is inevitable, since it has happened so many times, we believe that genocide is preventable. By understanding what it is, and how it happens, we can work together to ensure genocide never happens again.

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Acknowledgements We’d like to thank lots of people who helped us write our book. Without their time, expertise and generosity none of it would have been possible.

First of all we’d like to thank the remarkable survivors who told us about their lives. We know that it was incredibly difficult for them to recount the events they experienced and we are so grateful to them for educating us and everyone who reads our book.

Bea Green MBE and her family Eric Murangwa Eugene MBE Kadefa Rizvanović Debay Manees

Stephen Fry’s words in the Foreword are absolutely amazing. We are so grateful to Mr Fry for giving up his precious time to help us.

We also received help from some brilliant genocide commemoration and education charities who supported our project, gave us advice on our book and helped us connect with the survivors.

Dr Rachel Century and her colleagues at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Sonja Miley and Maddy Crowther, Waging Peace Kate Williams, Remembering Srebrenica

Lastly we’d like to thank our teachers who worked to support us during the researching and writing of our book. In particular we’d like to thank Ms Matlis and Mr Nicholson for their tireless help.

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Endnotes 1 Frieze, Donna-Lee, editor. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, Yale University Press, New Haven; London, 2013, pp.xvii 2 Quoted in Power, Samantha, A Problem From Hell, Harper Perennial, London, 2007 p20 3 In July 1915 American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau wrote from Constantinople that ‘It appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress…’

4 Klamberg, Mark, Raphaël Lemkin in Stockholm – Significance for His Work on 'Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (April 30, 2019).

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, volume 13(1), 2019, pp64-87 5 Frieze, Donna-Lee, editor. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, Yale University Press, New Haven; London, 2013, pp.77 6 Quoted in Power, Samantha, A Problem From Hell, Harper Perennial, London, 2007 p27 7 Sands, Philippe East West Street, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 2016 p187 8 Ibid p372 9 Frieze, Donna-Lee, editor. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin, Yale University Press, New Haven; London, 2013, pp.219-222 10 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum https://www.ushmm.org/propaganda/archive/der-sturmer-article/ accessed October 20 2020 11 Adolf Hitler first wrote about the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ in September 1919. In the same racist document he commented that his ‘ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether’.

12 Hitler speaking to the Reichstag, January 30 1933 13 Evans, Richard J, The Third Reich At War, Penguin Books, London, 2008 pp263-267 14 Information taken from documents of trial of George Ruggiu https://unictr.irmct.org/en/cases/ictr-97-32

15 Des Forges, Alison, Leave None to Tell the Story, Human Rights Watch, 1999 p68-69 16 Straus, Scot, The Order of Genocide, Cornell University Press, New York, 2006 p25 17 Des Forges, Alison, Leave None to Tell the Story, Human Rights Watch, 1999 p70 18 Information taken from documents of trial of Jean Kambanda https://unictr.irmct.org/en/cases/ictr-97-23 Kambanda has recently published a book denying the genocide.

19 Gibbons, London to Sarajevo, p180 quoted in Noel Malcolm, Bosnia A Short History pp168 20 Hornby, Balkan Sketches, pp153 quoted in Noel Malcolm, Bosnia A Short History pp168 21 The 1963 Bosnian Constitution wrote about ‘Serbs, Croats and Muslims allied in the past by a common life’ 22 Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, "Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) Memorandum, 1986," Making the History of 1989, Item #674, https://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/674 (accessed October 20 2020, 2:45 pm).

23 Biljana Plavšić pleaded guilty to a crime against humanity in 2002. https://www.icty.org/en/content/statement-guilt-biljana -plav%C5%A1i%C4%87

24 ICTY transcript https://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/trans/en/091027IT.htm 25 Final judgement from trial of Milomir Stakic https://www.icty.org/x/cases/stakic/tjug/en/stak-tj030731e.pdf 26 Ibid p44 27 Final judgement from trial of Zdravko Tolimir https://www.icty.org/x/cases/tolimir/tjug/en/121212.pdf 28 March 1995 Directive from Radovan Karadžić to the Bosnian Serb Army quoted in trial of Radislav Krstic p33 https:// www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/acjug/en/krs-aj040419e.pdf#page=33 50

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Endnotes (continued) 29 We’d like to thank Bushra Rahama, expert in Sudanese history for his help with this section 30 Human Rights Watch, Entrenching Impunity, 2005 p32 31 Flint, Julie, De Waal, Alex Darfur: A New History of a Long War, 2005 p106 32 Kapila, Mukesh, Against A Tide Of Evil, Sharpe Books, 2013, p71 33 There are 22 British ‘Righteous Among the Nations https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous/statistics.html 34 You can read more about Fadila’s bravery on the Remembering Srebrenica website https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/survivor -stories/the-courage-to-risk-your-life-for-neighbours-fadila-kapic-mehmedbasic/ 35 Quoted from Anielewicz’s last surviving letter dated April 23 1943 https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft% 20Word%20-%20582.pdf 36 Des Forges, Alison, Leave None to Tell the Story, Human Rights Watch, 1999 p310

37 The trial of Vidoje Blagojevic and Dragan Jokic heard from witnesses who had been in the column https://www.icty.org/x/ cases/blagojevic_jokic/tjug/en/bla-050117e.pdf 38 To see this document and others relating to the USA’s response to the genocide in Rwanda see https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/ NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/index.html 39 In an interview with The Guardian newspaper in July 2020 Grujičić said “No Serb would deny that Bosniaks were killed here in horrible crimes … but a genocide means the deliberate destruction of a people. There was no deliberate attempt to do that here,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/10/genocide-denial-gains-ground-25-years-after-srebrenica-massacre

40 Dr Jo Smith Finley, an expert researcher at Newcastle University, recently told Sky News that what was happening in Xinjiang is ‘genocide, full stop’ https://news.sky.com/story/china-forcing-birth-control-on-uighur-women-to-curb-muslimpopulation-major-report-finds-12017287

41 ‘Thousands of Xinjiang mosques destroyed or damaged, report finds’ Headline in article in The Guardian, 25 September 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/25/thousands-of-xinjiang-mosques-destroyed-damaged-china-reportfinds 42 A BBC report is one amongst dozens that we have seen talking about the prison camps. The claims in the report are backed up by official documents that have leaked out of China. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-50511063 43 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-muslim-population-forced-sterilisation-xinjiang-genocidewomen-b512409.html

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GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?

A remarkable number of young people haven’t heard of the word ‘genocide’.

Fewer still know exactly what it means or could name the man who coined the term at the height of the Holocaust. This book, written by young people from four schools, seeks to change that lack of awareness.

Drawing on personal testimonies of genocide survivors, the authors explain what genocide is and how it happens. A wealth of research informs in-depth explanations of how societies are divided, how minorities are targeted and how genocide occurs...before it is denied.

This powerful book is a must read for everyone.

All profits from our book will go to a range of charities that do marvellous work to raises awareness of the Holocaust and other genocides.

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