'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Religions and genocide prevention: the discussion

I am still  reflecting on the rich experience I had yesterday, at the lengthy panel discussion on "Religious Contribution to Genocide Prevention" that my dear friend Andrea Bartoli organized as part of the International Prayer for Peace.  Andrea, who teaches in the international-relations program at Columbia University, is also the US representative of the Catholic lay organization Sant' Egidio, which organized the whole event.  I came to know Andrea because of the role that he (and Sant' Egidio) had played in helping broker the Mozambique peace accord of 1992.

Highlights of yesterday's panel, for me, included:

-- hearing Qamar-ul Huda, a Muslim staff member of the US Institute of Peace, talking about the role that Rwanda's very small population of Muslims played in helping to save lives during the genocide there in 1994; hearing him reflect deeply and honestly on the phenomenon of seeing Muslims kill Muslims in Darfur-- and Muslims kill Christians and other non-Muslims, earlier, in Southern Sudan; and seeing al-Qaeda leaders and others exploiting Muslim teachings to incite violence and hatred; and listening to him talking about the continuing need to engage in internal debate within Muslim religious circles over interpretations of texts and the requirements of "correct" Muslim practice...

-- hearing him talk, to, about a decision he'd learned about that was made recently by the heads of different religious organizations in the Iraqi city of Samarra, to jointly rebuild the Askariya Mosque, that was largely destroyed in the terrible sabotage attack of late February  (why have I not heard about that elsewhere?)...

-- hearing Andrea Bartoli reflect with parallel anguish and honesty on the pain of having seen Catholics kill Catholics in Rwanda, and on having come to understand the role the Catholic hierarchy played at a certain time in buttressing colonial rule and colonial attitudes in Mozambique; and also, talking about the need for continued efforts to engage in debate and work inside one's own religious tradition...

-- hearing Vicken Aykazian, an Armenian Bishop fresh back in DC after a visit to Yerevan, talking about having participated for the first time in the annual Armenain Genocide remembrance there on April 24-- and how he saw two million people, out of the country's total population of 3.5 million, also coming to Yerevan to participate in it... hearing his description of how he moved he was when recently he wandered by chance into the offices, at VOA, of their Kurdish-language broadcasting team-- and of how the director there, on learning who he was, had invited him in, gathered colleagues in for a sit-down discussion, and told Bishop Vicken there and then that he wanted to apologize to him "for what our Kurdish people did to your people during the Armenian genocide of 1915"...

-- hearing Bishop Vicken also speak passionately about the need for as many people as possible to participate in the "Save Darfur" rally scheduled for DC this Sunday...

-- hearing Oded Wiener, the Director-general of the Grand Rabbinate of Israel, talk about the dialogue process the Rabbinate has been involved in for a number of years, with the Vatican, which has dealt with interpretations of the Holocaust and many other strands of Catholic-Jewish relations... and hearing him talk about the value of  pluralism and diversity and its rootedness in traditional Jewish teachings; he also, importantly, noted the link between a consumerist culture and people's increased readiness to engage in anti-humane violence in order to win or protect material gains; and he urged the central need to educate people about the whole human family, not just one's own little portion of it...

-- hearing Sunday Mbang, a Methodist minister from Nigeria talking about the centrality of ideas of racial superiority to the gross violence that western countries had inflicted on Africa during the slave trade and the whole era of colonialism; and his pain that many of those who had engaged in such practices had professed themselves to be "Christians" despite the fact that they clearly transgressed against key teachings of the New testament...  he also pointed to the terrible role that international arms suppliers had played in greatly increasing the lethality of inter-group conflicts in Africa; and talked with regret about the fact that a key Christian-Muslim dialogue process that used to exist in Nigeria had stopped operating a few years ago, but should certainly be revived to prevent the repetition of communal violence such as that that erupted there earlier this year...

What an incredible gathering-- and I haven't told you about the half of it here!  There were numerous other really wise contributors, including Monica Anderson, a Swedish woman who works full-time in her country's Foreign Ministry on issues of genocide prevention-- the only government official anywhere in the world who has a mandate to do so.  She made an impassioned plea (that I fully endorse) for the continued importance of engagement with formal politics, pointing out that peace agreements could never be reached and implemented, and decent, life-protecting institutions and structures put in place, without the involvement of governments and their diplomats.

She also argued-- fairly persuasively, in my view-- that "the politicians" have actually been able to register some significant gains in genocide prevention in recent years, including putting into the charters of both the AU and the EU some important language about the "responsibility to protect" vilnerable populations.

Andrea, I should tell you, is the kind of friend a person really can't say "No" to... He had asked me beforehand to be ready with a few key interventions to help bring together what he feared might be some very diffuse and disparate contributions.  (Actually, they weren't.)  At the beginning of the panel he asked me to do something along these lines and I did a common Quaker "thing" and came up with a few Queries I had on the upcoming topic. They included: "Is genocide actually different from other forms of anti-humane atrocity, including from the viewpoint of the victim-- and if so, how?"  and "Is there a nexus between genocide and war, and if so, what is it?"

During the discussion that followed, these two threads, and another Query that I'd raised, about the need to really see each human being, regardless of race, religion, or other characteristics, as equally a carrier of the Divine Light, were all certainly addressed or referred to by numerous speakers.   At the end of the panel, I had a very brief conversation with Monica Anderson about the first Query that I's raised, which I would really love to follow up some more on.

At the end of the very long morning, Andrea once again threw the ball to me.  I picked up on the important question of the value of dialogue, which a number of speakers had strssed; on the important role that religions should play in imparting hope and combating the tendencies to despair and feelings of isolation and divisiveness in which genocidal ideologies can too easily take root; and-- perhaps more controversial this-- the need to refuse to dehumanize anyone, including those accused of participating in genocide... but rather to stick to the traditional Christian teaching of "hating the sin while loving the sinner", and to continue to engage in dialogue and efforts at rehabilitation even with people who have committed the most terrible acts.

Of course, if I'd had two weeks to spend in a retreat with this group of people-- imagine how much more I could have learned from and with them!  I was deeply struck by the passion with which Bishop Vicken spoke of the longing that he and other Armenians have for some real acknowledgement of the facts of the Armenian genocide-- how moved he'd been by the acknowledgement (and apology) he got from the Kurdish radio producers, and how he longed for some equivalent acknowledgement from, most crucially of all, the Turkish authorities.  

I certainly heard the view that both Vicken and Monica Anderson expressed about the importance that they attach to the need to punish perpetrators of genocide... H'mm.  I can certainly understand where that comes from; but I'd love to probe it much more deeply with both of them, and have them define more precisely such things as exactly which levels of perpetrators they'd like to see punished, and what broad social goals they would see such punishments as meeting.  (I'd also like to really share with them the results of my own studies in Mozambique and South Africa, where the amnestying of former perpetrators-- including those at the highest level-- had actually helped to usher in an era of significantly greater rights protection ...  I guess I'll wait till my book on that subject comes out this fall, and then send them all copies... )

I heard what the Japanese participant, Tokio Kanakogi of the Oomoto Foundation said about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki having constituted an act of genocide that should never be repeated; and the need to bring an end to all war and the establishment of a world federalist government.  (I agree with nearly all the goals he articulated, but I think the question of whether the atomic bombs of 1945 were, technically speaking, "genocidal"is far less clear-- though of course they were exrtemely atrocious, and massively violated the basic humanitarian-law principle regarding the need to discriminate clearly between military and non-military targets.)

I also heard what Rev. Sunday was saying when he argued that he saw many portions of the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament") as being very permissive or even encouraging of genocide, whereas he saw the message of the New Testament as being much more universalistic and respecting of "others".  I would love to be a fly on a wall in a really good discussion of this issue between him and Oded Wiener or another Jewish theologian.

... So okay, Andrea, now it's back to you:  When are you going to organize the one- or two-week-long retreat as a follow-up to yesterday's discussion?