South Africa - Cape Town - 19 November 2020 - Alfredo Jaar: The Rwanda Project, a captivating and critical exhibition that turns attention to the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Alfredo Jaar is a Chilean-born and New York based artist. He is known for his multidisciplinary practice that explores socio-political stratifications, power relations, migration, and discrimination. The exhibition includes a selection of work from Jaar’s six-year project that honours the more than 800 000 victims of the mass slaughter in the African country between April and July 1994. Picture Courtney Africa/African News Agency(ANA)
In my November 13 column, under the title “When we hesitate to say the word ‘genocide’, we are complicit”, I dealt with an issue that tripped up three United States university presidents this week.
Professor Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, Professor Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, and Professor Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, all appeared to stick to scripted answers in their comments at the Congressional hearings into anti-Semitism on US campuses last Tuesday. On Saturday, the University of Pennsylvania announced that Magill had resigned.
The three were slammed for their convoluted replies to Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik's question about how they and their institutions viewed calls for the genocide of Jews. All three responded in ways that generally stated: “It's context-dependent.”
With their lawyerly “context-dependent” replies they have failed the victims of genocide across the world. Fascist governments and their army generals can now openly call for genocide because it's “context-dependent”. The world will now sit back and listen to speeches laced with genocidal content”.
Who will now become the moral arbiters to decide how far is too far? The free speech groups that are dependent on donor dictates? The lobbied and paid-for lawmakers? The UN, which is stacked against interests that do not serve rich and powerful nations? Africa has seen the foot-dragging by powerful nations when it comes to genocide.
In a 2003 research paper, titled “US
Policy Choices during the Rwandan Genocide“, for the US-based Defense Technical Information Centre, it is stated that “President Clinton at first excused American inaction by claiming that the true scope and scale of the killing was not known and that the speed of the genocide precluded an effective response.
Subsequent reporting revealed conclusively, however, that the killings continued for more than three months, and that the administration knew in detail that a systematic programme of mass murder was not only in progress but had been planned in advance. US inaction did not result from bad information or inadequate resources. Rather, it was a conscious act of policy.”
Ethnicity-based dehumanisation of people is on the rise globally. The calls for the total annihilation of people and groups continue as bizarrely unremarkable to global governments. Genocide Watch, the global body that exists to predict, prevent and stop genocide in terms of the Genocide Convention, state in their “Ten Phases of Genocide” that the first indication of potential genocide is the “classification” of people or groups, and the last is “denial” of intention or action.
The rise in Islamophobia and the utterances of anti-Semitism should both be condemned in the strongest terms. My Muslim brothers and my Jewish neighbours are both humans and should be treated as such. Any statement that calls for their extermination because of ethnicity or religion should be condemned immediately and publicly. As a society, we should not be morally ambiguous about supporting justice for the Palestinian people, and nor should we be morally ambiguous about condemning calls for the genocide of the Jewish people.
As is said in my previous column, “it was Polish Jew and lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, who came up with the term genocide to describe the horrors he had seen in the massacre of Christian Armenian people in 1915 in the Ottoman Empire. He helped the world understand mass killings and spent his life petitioning the UN to recognise the term “genocide”. Lemkin defined genocide as the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, race or religion”.
Calls for justice for the Palestinian people are right. Condemning calls for the genocide of the Jews is also right. To do the right thing might be difficult, but it should never be ambiguous. The three university presidents failed their students and the world.
* Lorenzo Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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