August 20th, 2010
BY MIMI WHITEFIELD
Samuel Dusengiyumva, the son of a pastor and a nurse, was 13 years old in the spring of 1994, when more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in a 100-day killing spree of unthinkable proportions. His family — mother, father, siblings — was wiped out by the Rwandan genocide.
Dusengiyumva recalls being stopped with a younger brother at one of the roadblocks set up around the country.
“I tried to run with my brother but he couldn’t make it,” he says. “And they took him and killed him. I had aunties and grandfathers and they were all killed.”
Afterward, he spent a long time thinking about whether he would be “a useless person,” kill himself or “try to lead a real life.”
Dusengiyumva chose to put his life back together through education — finishing school and studying to become a lawyer — and that decision led him to his current role: country manager for a computer program that aims to put a laptop in the hands of every school-age child in Rwanda.
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Posted in AFRICA, GENOCIDE, Genocide survivors, Rwanda | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
July 31, 2010
An Aboriginal elder is to be honoured for his unique role in opposing Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jews, with a memorial to be unveiled at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.
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Posted in In Memoriam, Israel, Museums and Memorials, Righteous People of All Faiths | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
By Chris Bowlby
BBC News
The small Polish town of Oswiecim (Auschwitz in German) has long felt that it suffered from association with the horror of the nearby Nazi death camp, but some residents hope the town can begin to be seen in a more positive light.
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Posted in Interfaith relations, Museums and Memorials, The Holocaust | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
ROBERT GERWARTH
HISTORY: The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism By David Olusoga and CasperW Erichsen Faber and Faber, 379pp. £20
IN AUGUST 2004, the German Minister for Development Aid, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, travelled to Namibia to apologise on behalf of the German government for a genocidal massacre that had been committed 100 years earlier.
Following the 1904 Herero uprising against colonial rule in what was then German South-West Africa, the local military commander, General Lothar von Trotha, defeated the rebellious Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and forced the several thousand survivors into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of starvation or thirst. A few months later, a second indigenous people, the Nama, suffered a similar fate. Over the following three years, “suspicious” Herero and Nama were interned in a concentration camp on Shark Island, where conscious neglect led to horrific death figures among the inmates. In total, up to 75,000 men and women, roughly half of the Herero and Nama populations, perished in what some historians consider the first genocide of the 20th century.
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Posted in AFRICA, BOOKS, GENOCIDE, War Crimes | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
The Associated Press
Saturday, July 31, 2010 | 12:22 a.m.
The world’s third most wanted Nazi suspect was involved in the entire process of killing Jews at the Belzec death camp: from taking victims from trains to pushing them into gas chambers to throwing corpses into mass graves, a German court said Thursday.
Samuel Kunz, an 88-year-old who has lived undisturbed for decades, was indicted last week on charges of involvement in the killing of 430,000 Jews _ after a career as an employee in a government ministry and obscurity in a quiet village just outside the former West German capital of Bonn.
On Thursday the court in Bonn that indicted him revealed more details of the charges against him, describing in gruesome detail some of the crimes the suspected former death camp guard allegedly committed in occupied Poland from January 1942 to July 1943.
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Posted in Nazis and Neo-Nazis, The Holocaust, War Crimes, War Crimes Trials | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
The United Nations Security Council has extended its peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s western Darfur region for another year [until July 31, 2011].
The 15-nation council agreed unanimously on Friday to the mission’s extension, telling Unamid, the joint African Union/UN peacekeeping force, to focus primarily on protecting civilians and aid deliveries.
It also condemned a recent surge of violence in Darfur and called on the Sudanese government to stop hindering the work of Unamid.
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Posted in AFRICA, Darfur, GENOCIDE, Human Rights Abuses, Preventing Genocide, Sudan, United Nations | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
By REUTERS
Published: July 30, 2010
A South African court ordered four white former students on Friday to pay a fine of $2,720 each for a video they made humiliating black university employees. The case has prompted bitter protests that racism remains entrenched in South Africa more than a decade after the end of apartheid-era rule. The court also imposed a six-month jail term suspended on the condition of good behavior for five years. The men had pleaded guilty to charges of illegally and deliberately injuring another person’s dignity.
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Posted in AFRICA, Hate Crimes, Hate Speech, Racism, words that wound | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
By LINDA DEUTSCH (AP) – Jul 29, 2010
LOS ANGELES — Armenian-American lawyers filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the Turkish government and two banks seeking compensation for the heirs of Armenians whose property was allegedly seized nearly a century ago as they were driven from the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
Lawyers were seeking class-action status for the suit, a process that attorney Brian Kabateck said could take as long as three years.
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Posted in Armenian Genocide, Genocide Denial, Restitution | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
By Lawrence Rubin, Ph.D. on July 29, 2010
Imagine Jay Leno, during one of his ‘Jaywalking” adventures asking people on the street “Who was Kitty Genovese?” Would they know? Would You? Maybe, maybe not; but rest assured that most Intro and Social Psych students are well aware that on March 13, 1964, Catherine Susan Genovese, aka Kitty, was brutally murdered in a Queens, New York…in either plain sight or earshot of numerous neighbors and residents of the aprtment building in which she lived. While Kitty is no doubt remembered by friends and family, her legacy has seen fruition in decades of psychological research into what has come to be called ‘the bystander effect’ and ‘diffusion of responsibility. Simply stated, these phenomena refer to the likliehood that bystanders to a crime or wrongdoing, are likely to resist taking action if they believe others will do so.
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Posted in Doing the Right Thing, ETHICS, the by-stander effect | No Comments »
August 20th, 2010
By Marshall Saufley
Doesn’t it bother you sometimes that people you disagree with politically listen to that awful propaganda put out by their side? So how can those people, and you and those who agree with you, avoid being propagandized?
Seek the truth; be well-informed, not misled. To be well-informed, we need access to information that is accurate (factual), fair (unbiased) and balanced (presents all views supported by the evidence).
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Posted in Propaganda | No Comments »