Situation in Sudan's Nuba Mountains worsens

Nuba: The Right to Life in the Face of Ethnic Cleansing

Namibia genocide-victims remains to be returned

Namibia: Genocide Remembered At Swakopmund

Global Memory of the Holocaust and the Politics of Never Again

Alejandro Baer, Visiting Chair of Qualitative Methods of Social Research, Ludwig Maximilians-Universität-München

Tuesday, March 27
4:00 p.m.
1114 Social Sciences


Recent research on social or collective memory points to the universalization of Holocaust consciousness. According to this research the Holocaust is now also remembered beyond the ethnic boundaries of the Jewish communities or the nations that were responsible for perpetrating it, due in part to the shift in focus from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. However, such theses pose many open questions in terms of the interpretation of the genocide of the Jews, its actualization as well as contextualization in the history of oppression and crimes against human rights in different countries.
This lecture will present material from a study on Holocaust commemoration ceremonies in Spain, a country still facing the ghosts of its own past. The Spanish case study will lead to a more general reflection on the ongoing tension between particular and universal readings of past violence, the cross-fertilization of memory cultures and the important challenges faced by any individual or institution intending to implement prevention oriented Holocaust and genocide education.
Alejandro Baer is on the sociology faculty of the Ludwig Maximilians-Universität-München, where he holds the position of Visiting Chair of Qualitative Methods of Social Research. His areas of research expertise include Social Memory Studies, Sociology of Culture and Religion, Sociology of Modern Judaism, Empirical Research on Anti-Semitism, Qualitative Research Methodologies, and Sociology of Media and Communication.
His publications include, in addition to numerous articles and chapters in English and German, the books Holocausto. Recuerdo y Representación., Madrid: Editorial Losada, 2006, and El testimonio audiovisual. Imagen y memoria del Holocausto, Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), 2005.
He directed the Spanish part of the Shoah Visual Archives project. His recent research includes the uses and abuses of Holocaust history and memory in the Spanish-speaking world as well as the transnationalization of memory. He organizes an annual international scholar's conference on Anti-Semitism, fostering international academic collaborations.
Presented by: The Department of Sociology and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Shoah Foundation adding testimonies from other genocides

The Shoah Foundation Widens Scope

Ghost Stories: Five Writers Read Works on Historical Trauma

Tuesday, Nov 8, 2011
7:00 p.m.
Homewood Studios, 2400 Plymouth Ave N, Minneapolis 55411

African- American, Hmong, Japanese-American, Jewish and White Earth Anishinabe writers explore how the stories of their parents, grandparents and historical communities impact the writers' own lives. From the ridiculous to the tragic, the writers examine the legacies of the Holocaust, war, racism and genocide.
The Readers: Carolyn Holbrook, Mai Neng Moua, Margie Newman, Marcie Rendon, Joan Maeda Trygg.
Admission: Five dollars includes a chapbook containing work by the five writers. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.
This project was made possible, in part, with the support of Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council, an initiative of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, and with the support of the St. Paul JCC.
This project is funded, in part, by the Minnesota State Arts Board through the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund as appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature with money from the Legacy Amendment vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.
For further information contact: Mai Neng Moua, mainengmoua@comcast.net, 612 226 6046.

Workshop Explores Childhood Memory as part of the Art Survives: Expressions from the Holocaust Exhibition

Seeing The World Through Art: Creating a Symbol from Your Childhood Memory
Workshop with David Feinberg
Sunday, October 30, 1-4:00 p.m.
Tychman Shapiro Gallery
Sabes JCC


Art is a way to investigate the world. During this workshop, create an artistic symbol from your childhood, using inspiration from the exhibit. Your symbol becomes your story and is expanded when shared and explored in a larger context. No artistic experience necessary, just an open mind!
For more information visit the Sabes JCC website.
Art Survives: Expressions from the Holocaust is on display through December 22, 2011.
This extraordinary exhibit showcases the work of five Holocaust survivors who use art as a means to approach all they witnessed. These artists created work during and following the Holocaust, and some still create art today. The colorful artwork created on the walls of the barracks and shreds of paper using coal and pieces of colored pencils are a testament to the human spirit, enduring against insurmountable odds.
Artist Biographies (PDF)
In loving memory of Stephen Feinstein by Susan Feinstein
For Artistic Responses to the Holocaust visit the CHGS Virtual Museum.
Art Survives Expressions from the Holocaust by Jodi Elowitz. Article TCJewfolk.com

Conference My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights Featuring a Lecture by Philip Gourevitch

Monday, October 10, 2011
Coffman Theater, Coffman Memorial Union

Conference 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Esther Freier Lecture by Philip Gourevitch 7:30 p.m.



"My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights" will be held on Monday, October 10, 2011, at the University of Minnesota to bring together a diverse group of writers, scholars, journalists, field workers, psychologists and others concerned with telling the stories of human rights abuses, genocide and atrocity across a historical and contemporary range of cultures and circumstances. In broad terms, the conference links literary work (specifically, memoir and the first person voice) with human rights testimony, scholarship and field work.
Co-hosted by the Human Rights Program, and the Creative Writing Program of the University of Minnesota.
"Salvage: Writing About Aftermaths from Rwanda to Abu Ghraib and Beyond"
Philip Gourevitch's harrowing nonfiction account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, won the 1998 National Book Critics' Circle Award. The long-time staff writer for The New Yorker has also published The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008) and A Cold Case (2001). Gourevitch edited The Paris Review from 2005 to 2010.
Free & open to the public. Sponsored by the Esther Freier Endowed Lectures in Literature and the one-day conference "My Letter to the World: Narrating Human Rights."
Sponsored by the Human rights Program and the Department of English
Co-sponsored by the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
For more information and the complete schedule please click here.

Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities

On August 4, President Obama announced two important steps to prevent mass atrocities: the creation of a standing inter-agency Atrocities Prevention Board and a proclamation barring serious human rights violators from entering the United States.

PRESIDENTIAL STUDY DIRECTIVE/PSD-10

Watch free online world premiere of Raindrops Over Rwanda

Monday, July 18, 2011
SnagFilms

The genocide against Tutsi, during which more than one million people were killed in three months, happened less than a generation ago. The country still struggles to come to grips with the legacy of ethnic cleansing as both victims and perpetrators work towards unity and reconciliation.
Please contribute to these heroic efforts by watching the FREE online world premiere of RAINDROPS OVER RWANDA, a short film about the genocide and work of the Kigali Memorial Centre in Rwanda. Help RAINDROPS OVER RWANDA get 50,000 views on July 18, 2011 and Explore.org will donate up to $50,000 to the Kigali Memorial Centre to fund crucial education programs.
Watch the film by clicking here.

Ghost Stories: Five Writers Read Works on Historical Trauma

Thursday, July 14, 2011, 6 PM
Amherst H. Wilder Center
451 Lexington Pkwy N, St. Paul


African- American, Hmong, Japanese-American, Jewish and White Earth Anishinabe writers explore how the stories of their parents, grandparents and historical communities impact the writers' own lives. From the ridiculous to the tragic, the writers examine the legacies of the Holocaust, war, racism and genocide.
A facilitated discussion will follow.
The Readers: Carolyn Holbrook, Mai Neng Moua, Margie Newman, Marcie Rendon, Joan Maeda Trygg.
Admission: Five dollars includes a chapbook containing work by the five writers. Refreshments will be served.
For further information contact Margie Newman at 612-532-7238, margienewman@comcast.net

Will there be Justice? The complexities of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal

At Opening of Cambodia War Crimes Trial, Anger, Doubt and Suspicion Linger
Time Magazine article on the trial.

The truth about the Khmer Rouge is too big for one court case
Opinion piece written by Cambodian journalist and genocide survivor, Thet Sambath filmmaker of Enemies of the People.

Khmer Rouge Defendant Challenges Genocide Tribunal
Defendants claim they have already been convicted and pardoned.

Clinton says K.Rouge court vital for peace in Cambodia

Yahoo News
by Lachlan CarmichaelMon Nov 1, 8:39 am ET

PHNOM PENH (AFP) - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday hailed the work of a Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal as "painful but necessary", despite Cambodian opposition to pursuing more regime leaders.

Clinton praised the nation for confronting its dark past after an emotional visit to Phnom Penh's genocide museum, where she saw photos of gaunt-faced prisoners, dozens of skulls of victims and paintings of people being tortured.

The court "is bringing some of the people who caused so much suffering to justice... The work of the tribunal is painful but it is necessary to ensure a lasting peace," Clinton told young Cambodians at a town hall-style meeting.


In a landmark verdict in July, former Khmer Rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Duch, was sentenced to 30 years in jail for overseeing the deaths of 15,000 men, women and children in the late 1970s.
Last month the court indicted four top regime leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in connection with the deaths of up to two million people from starvation, overwork and execution between 1975 and 1979.
But Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen told visiting United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon last week that a third case was "not allowed" because it could plunge the country back into civil war.
Hun Sen was himself once a mid-level Khmer Rouge member before turning against the movement.
The tribunal is currently investigating whether to open further cases against lower level cadres.
Clinton, on a two-week tour of Asia, stopped short of expressing support for new trials, saying there was a need for the international community to "consult closely" with the Cambodian government about its concerns.
She said her "highest priority" was to ensure the cash-strapped court had enough funds to proceed with the second trial, due to begin in early 2011.
After a tour of the genocide museum, the main Khmer Rouge torture centre run by Duch in the late 1970s, Clinton appeared to suggest a harder line towards future prosecutions.
"In memory of the tragic suffering of the people of Cambodia and in hope that there will be a future of peace, prosperity and greater awareness of all that needs to be done to move the country forward, including trials, accountability and reconciliation," she wrote in the museum guest book.
She later described the tour of the prison as a "very disturbing experience".
"Countries that are held prisoner to their past never break those chains and build the kind of future your children deserve," she told the town hall-style meeting.
"I was very proud to see firsthand the willingness of your country to face that past bravely and honestly."
Thousands of inmates were taken from the jail for execution in a nearby orchard that served as a "killing field".
Led by "Brother Number One" Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for one of the worst horrors of the 20th century, wiping out nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population.
Clinton, on the first visit to Cambodia by a US secretary of state since 2003, also used her trip to urge Cambodians not to rely too heavily on China.
"You look for balance. You don't want to get too dependent on any one country," Clinton told young Cambodians when asked about China's growing influence in the impoverished southeast Asian nation.
China -- a former patron of the Khmer Rouge regime -- is the country's top donor, with billions of dollars of investment.
Clinton also met with Hun Sen and some of his political opponents, with the notable exception of fugitive opposition leader Sam Rainsy, who faces 12 years in prison if he returns to Cambodia after being convicted in absentia of uprooting border markings and publishing a false border map.

Rwanda: Former Businessman Sentenced to 30 Years By UN Genocide Tribunal

A former businessman accused of supervising the massacre of some 2,000 Rwandan Tutsi civilians taking shelter in a church was today convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison by the United Nations tribunal set up to deal with the 1994 genocide.

Gaspard Kanyarukiga, who was arrested in South Africa in July 2004, was found guilty of genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity, according to a press release by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).


Handing down the sentence, the court's Trial Chamber II announced it was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Kanyarukiga was criminally responsible for planning thAt least 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were murdered in the 1994 violencee killing of the Tutsis who took refuge in the Nyange Church.
According to the indictment presented to the Arusha-based court, which in 2008 decided not to turn over Mr. Kanyarukiga's case to Rwanda, in 1994 he transported police and members of the notorious Interahamwe militia to the church, in western Rwanda.
The police and militia poured fuel through the church's roof, set it on fire and then used guns and grenades to kill those seeking shelter inside. The defendant was accused of having supervised these events and then ordered the corpses to be removed and the church destroyed.
The indictment further alleged that the businessman held several meetings with local political and religious leaders where they discussed how to kill Tutsis.
Having found Mr. Kanyarukiga guilty of genocide, the Chamber dismissed the alternative charge of complicity in genocide.
At least 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, were murdered in the 1994 violence in the tiny east African country.
allafrica.com

A genocide survivor's last wish

The Armenian Reporterby Tom Vartabedian
Published: Tuesday November 02, 2010

Haverhill, Mass. - Like many Armenian Genocide survivors, my mother would stand erect at April 24th commemorations with a red carnation in hand, recite her prayers and sing her songs with conviction.

The fact she was into her mid-90s paid little consequence.

As the years rolled by, she watched her coterie dwindle from 70 to a precious few. In her home town of Haverhill, she remained the sole survivor. Her Armenian name was Ojen --- an unusual one at that --- and her very last observance in 2008 had fate written all over it.


Only one other survivor from Merrimack Valley showed up that year and her name was Ojen. They could have rehashed the tragedy that befell their people during the genocidal years of 1915-1923 when 1.5 million Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turk.
But how many times must you hear the same diatribe, shed the same tears, before growing weary? Instead, they spoke of being the last of a vanishing breed. One Ojen said to the other, "You'll outlive me. I'm in a nursing home. You're living independently."
The other replied, "Yes, but you seem to be stronger than an ox. You'll go on living forever."
My mother passed away Oct. 19 in a blaze of glory with her family by her side. Even the nurses at Hannah Duston Nursing Home marveled at how she was able to defy death so persistently, unaware that she was able to evade the Turkish gendarmes as a child by hiding in a well for days.
The last sensible thing she said to me occurred about four days prior to her demise. She grabbed my attention out of the clear blue and this is what she offered in a voice that crackled with sentiment.
"Continue being true to your faith and your heritage. But that is not enough. Make sure your children and grandchildren practice their culture and worship God. If we don't have our church and our heritage, we have nothing. The responsibility is in your hands now."
Although it may have been premature, I do believe it was a sense of closue on her part, knowing that her wishes were revealed and how the ethnic baton was being passed from one generation to another.
This past Sunday, I gathered my Armenian School students together and told them her wish. Those who knew expressed their condolences. We used her life as an example of resiliency.
For what it was worth amidst a class of adolescences, I told them, "We owe it to these remaining survivors and those who died for their cause to lobby for recognition and get a genocide bill passed in Congress. We need an admission of guilt from Turkey and the restoration of our land and churches."
Jennie was laid to rest with a funeral fit for a queen. She may have been humbled by all the attention and probably never realized the true legacy she had left behind. Inside the casket with rosary beads in hand was a miniature Tricolor flag that rested on her heart.
A hand-carved wooden cross stood erect, prepared by a Russian immigrant who arrived here in the 1940s as a 21-year cousin she and her sister sponsored. On the day of her burial, a dear friend who had just returned from a pilgrimage to Syria handed me a plastic bag containing some sand. It was from the desert of Der Zor where thousands perished during a death march.
The sand was sprinkled in the form of a cross during the burial service, sending Jennie back to her roots.
I look back upon it all with no remorse. You tend to dwell upon the good times, even while being institutionalized the last four years. You see the smile, not the tears. You remember happy thoughts, not the tragic moments. Every new day was a gift.
She used to grin at the thought of how she ever wound up inside a nursing home. It was just for a visit, I told her. She had broken a hip and needed rehabilitation.
"Four years. Oh my! This was the longest visit I ever had anywhere," she often reminded me.
The woman was feisty. At the ripe age of 90, I took her car keys away after some erratic driving. She balked at such insolence. How would she transport herself to the gym anymore?
A few days later, I got a call from a neighbor. "Come quickly," she urged. "Jennie's in the garage and she's got the hood up in her car with wires in her hands." I sped the whole way and there she was, trying to jump start the vehicle.
But that was Jennie -- always in the driver's seat!
(c) 2010 Armenian Reporter

A genocide survivor's last wish

The Armenian Reporter
by Tom Vartabedian
Published: Tuesday November 02, 2010

Haverhill, Mass. - Like many Armenian Genocide survivors, my mother would stand erect at April 24th commemorations with a red carnation in hand, recite her prayers and sing her songs with conviction.

The fact she was into her mid-90s paid little consequence.

As the years rolled by, she watched her coterie dwindle from 70 to a precious few. In her home town of Haverhill, she remained the sole survivor. Her Armenian name was Ojen --- an unusual one at that --- and her very last observance in 2008 had fate written all over it.


Only one other survivor from Merrimack Valley showed up that year and her name was Ojen. They could have rehashed the tragedy that befell their people during the genocidal years of 1915-1923 when 1.5 million Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman Turk.
But how many times must you hear the same diatribe, shed the same tears, before growing weary? Instead, they spoke of being the last of a vanishing breed. One Ojen said to the other, "You'll outlive me. I'm in a nursing home. You're living independently."
The other replied, "Yes, but you seem to be stronger than an ox. You'll go on living forever."
My mother passed away Oct. 19 in a blaze of glory with her family by her side. Even the nurses at Hannah Duston Nursing Home marveled at how she was able to defy death so persistently, unaware that she was able to evade the Turkish gendarmes as a child by hiding in a well for days.
The last sensible thing she said to me occurred about four days prior to her demise. She grabbed my attention out of the clear blue and this is what she offered in a voice that crackled with sentiment.
"Continue being true to your faith and your heritage. But that is not enough. Make sure your children and grandchildren practice their culture and worship God. If we don't have our church and our heritage, we have nothing. The responsibility is in your hands now."
Although it may have been premature, I do believe it was a sense of closue on her part, knowing that her wishes were revealed and how the ethnic baton was being passed from one generation to another.
This past Sunday, I gathered my Armenian School students together and told them her wish. Those who knew expressed their condolences. We used her life as an example of resiliency.
For what it was worth amidst a class of adolescences, I told them, "We owe it to these remaining survivors and those who died for their cause to lobby for recognition and get a genocide bill passed in Congress. We need an admission of guilt from Turkey and the restoration of our land and churches."
Jennie was laid to rest with a funeral fit for a queen. She may have been humbled by all the attention and probably never realized the true legacy she had left behind. Inside the casket with rosary beads in hand was a miniature Tricolor flag that rested on her heart.
A hand-carved wooden cross stood erect, prepared by a Russian immigrant who arrived here in the 1940s as a 21-year cousin she and her sister sponsored. On the day of her burial, a dear friend who had just returned from a pilgrimage to Syria handed me a plastic bag containing some sand. It was from the desert of Der Zor where thousands perished during a death march.
The sand was sprinkled in the form of a cross during the burial service, sending Jennie back to her roots.
I look back upon it all with no remorse. You tend to dwell upon the good times, even while being institutionalized the last four years. You see the smile, not the tears. You remember happy thoughts, not the tragic moments. Every new day was a gift.
She used to grin at the thought of how she ever wound up inside a nursing home. It was just for a visit, I told her. She had broken a hip and needed rehabilitation.
"Four years. Oh my! This was the longest visit I ever had anywhere," she often reminded me.
The woman was feisty. At the ripe age of 90, I took her car keys away after some erratic driving. She balked at such insolence. How would she transport herself to the gym anymore?
A few days later, I got a call from a neighbor. "Come quickly," she urged. "Jennie's in the garage and she's got the hood up in her car with wires in her hands." I sped the whole way and there she was, trying to jump start the vehicle.
But that was Jennie -- always in the driver's seat!
(c) 2010 Armenian Reporter

"Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-18" by Grigoris Balakian

Review of new important work about the Armenian Genocide
Copies available for loan at CHGS

Chigago Tribune Book Review

Carlin Romano
Special to the Tribune

"Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-18"
By Grigoris Balakian
Translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag
Alfred A. Knopf. 509 pp. $35

Armenian Golgotha is the astonishing memoir of Father Grigoris Balakian (1876-1934), a work from the 1920s shepherded into English by his great nephew Peter Balakian, the leading American expert on the ARMENIAN genocide. Grigoris Balakian witnessed the genocide from many angles and swore to document it if he survived. According to his great-nephew, Grigoris Balakian at times "lived like an animal" in order to do so.

With the approach of Armenian Remembrance Day, a commemoration held worldwide on April 24, Americans would be well-advised to read this memoir, which recognizes the Ottoman Empire's targeted killing of its Armenian citizens from 1915 to 1918 as genocide. Turkish soldiers, government-organized death squads and ordinary Turks, acting under orders and incitements from Ottoman Minister of the Interior Mehmet Talaat, massacred -- indeed, sometimes literally hacked to pieces -- up to 1.5 million Armenians.


Over nine decades, many wriers have tried to bring attention to what happened in Ottoman Anatolia between 1915 and 1918. Studies of the topic have included Peter Balakian's The Burning Tigris and Black Dog of Fate, Vakahn Dadrian's The History of the Armenian Genocide, the great historian Merrill Peterson's Starving Armenians, and Michael Bobelian's Children of Armenia. Most important of all is Turkish historian Taner Akcam's courageous A Shameful Act, a book that no less than Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, defying legal threats, called "the definitive account of the organized destruction of the Ottoman Armenians."
From the moment Turkish forces arrested Father Balakian, a vartabed or celibate priest, along with approximately 250 other Armenian intellectuals in Constantinople on April 24, 1915, he disciplined himself over four years of forced marches, occasional starvation, infestation by lice and multiple last-minute escapes, to record what he was seeing and hearing, to articulate it to himself even when he lacked pen or paper, so that he could report the atrocities later.
This book thus honors the commitment made by Father Balakian to a number of fellow deportees who eventually died. They implored him: Write about this if you live. Tell people what happened. Over hundreds of pages we witness, through Balakian's eyes, Turkish police and soldiers deport and later, with the help of ordinary villagers and chetes (killing squads of prisoners released precisely to kill Armenians), ferociously behead, disembowl and mutilate countless Armenians with hatchets, axes, cleavers, knives, shovels and pitchforks as the prisoners trudge eastward on forced marches, at times accompanying the mayhem with shouts of "Allah! Allah!"
That savagery came on top of the rape of many young Armenian women, and at times their forced conversion to Islam, as well as expropriation of almost all Armenian property and wealth. Some scenes in Armenian Golgotha are unbearable. A small group that includes an American teacher and two Germans comes across a field WITH "pools of blood." It contains hundreds of naked Armenian corpses, most "with their heads and limbs cut off," and their entrails spilled out.
One of the Germans, a nurse, "jumped from her horse and ran to hug the decapitated body of a six-month-old girl. She kissed the baby and wailed, saying she wanted to take her, that she was her daughter."
Unable to stop the nurse, "who had gone mad," as she lept from one dismembered child's body to another, hugging and kissing them, the others had to forcibly restrain her. She was "tied to her horse" and eventually placed in a German hospital.
What she'd seen, Grigoris Balakian explains, wasn't unusual. After a massacre, Turkish village women would slit open Armenian corpses, especially the intestines, seeking swallowed jewelry. (They found a fair amount of it.) Sometimes, he writes, Armenian women abandoned their emaciated infants on death piles, still alive, deeming it a better death than being hacked to pieces. One witness reported that she saw starving Armenian "mothers gone mad who had thrown their newly deceased little children into the fire" and then eaten them, "half cooked or half raw."
Alongside such grisly tales, Grigor Balakian provides background, woven into his personal narrative, on Ottoman history. He analyzes with great subtlety not only the geopolitical assumptions and strategies of all groups involved, but also the psychology of individual players, including Talaat and his "goal of annihilating the Armenian race."
With its long overdue publication in English, Armenian Golgotha joins Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz and other stellar works on the Holocaust as a classic of genocide literature. Just as Levi's classic guarantees that any reader who finishes it will shudder at questioning of the Holocaust, those who make it through Armenian Golgotha should feel moral fury at Turkey for how it has, over almost nine decades, denied and falsified its predecessor's massive crimes against its own citizens, never apologized for them, and never paid a lira of reparations.
Read Grigoris Balakian and weep.
Carlin Romano, Critic-at-Large of The Chronicle of Higher Education, teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
For more on the Armanian Genocide visit our web page

Germany charges ex-Rwandan mayor with genocide

(AP) - 4 hours ago

BERLIN -- German prosecutors say they have filed charges against a former Rwandan mayor for his alleged involvement in the African country's 1994 genocide.
Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that they charged the 53-year-old ethnic Hutu -- identified only as Onesphore R. -- with genocide and murder as well as incitement to those crimes. They said he was a mayor of an unspecified district in northern Rwanda at the time of the killings.

They say the man called for a pogrom against the Tutsi ethnic minority on three occasions in early April 1994 and forced a local official to throw out Tutsis who had taken refuge in his house.
Prosecutors say the man ordered and coordinated three massacres between April 11 and 15, 1994, in which at least 3,730 Tutsis were killed.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.