Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Call for Applications

The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights solicits applications for its AnneMerie Donoghue Human Rights Fellowship, which supports summer internships and research in the field of human rights. In 2008, up to five fellowships of $3,500 will be awarded. Only CMC students may apply. Graduating seniors are not eligible.

The fellowships are intended to cover a wide range of activities. These may include working for organizations that promote human rights or raise awareness about related issues, undertaking research for a scholarly project (including senior theses), or developing an independent program in a relevant field. The Center is particularly interested in proposals for projects that deal specifically with women and/or children.

An application requires the following items:

1. A project description (800-1,000 words) that clearly identifies the work to be done, its significance for human rights and for the applicant's personal goals, and, if relevant, its focus on women and/or children.
2. A curriculum vitae.
3. A project budget.
4. One letter of recommendation from a CMC faculty member with whom the applicant has studied. Additional documentation, such as a letter of acceptance for an internship, may also be appended.

Applications are due no later than 5:00 PM on Friday, February 15, 2008. They should be directed to Norine Zapata, the Center's administrative assistant. Her office is at 528 N. Mills Avenue, #105. Applications should be submitted in hard copy.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Memo From Berlin: Germany Confronts Holocaust Legacy Anew

From NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/29/world/europe/29nazi.html?em&ex=1201755600&en=5f1375d842e016bd&ei=5087%0A)

January 29, 2008

By NICHOLAS KULISH

BERLIN — Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated.
On Monday, Germany’s minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma; and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.

In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor center is set to open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.

Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.

“Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?” asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. “Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility.”

It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms with this history marches on. The Federal Crime Office last year began investigating itself, trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders after the end of the war. And this month Germany’s federal prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict of Marinus van der Lubbe, the Communist Dutchman executed on charges of setting the Reichstag fire; that event’s 75th anniversary is Feb. 27.

The experience of Nazism is alive in contemporary public debates over subjects as varied as German troops in Afghanistan, the nation’s low birthrate and the country’s dealings with foreigners. Why Germany seems unendingly obsessed with Nazism is itself a subject of perpetual debate here, ranging from the nation’s philosophical temperament, to simple awe at the unprecedented combination of organization and brutality, to the sense that the crime was so great that it spread like a blot over the entire culture.

Whatever the reasons, as the events become more remote, less personal, this society is forced to confront the question of how it should enshrine its crimes and transgressions over the longer term.

In the decades after the war, the central question was how Hitler ever came to power, Horst Möller, director of the Institute of Contemporary History, said in an interview. Even an American television mini-series called “Holocaust” in the 1970s affected the debate in what was then West Germany, shifting the focus more onto the suffering of the victims themselves, Mr. Möller recalled.

Rüdiger Nemitz first began welcoming back Berlin’s exiled victims of Nazi tyranny, an overwhelming majority of them Jews, in 1969. Berlin flies its former citizens back for a week of visits, all expenses paid and complete with a reception by the mayor.

The Invitation Program for Former Persecuted Citizens of Berlin, which has brought roughly 33,000 people for visits to the city, once had 12 full-time staff members. Now it is just Mr. Nemitz and a half-time employee.

The program is not, however, winding down because of waning support. At a time when the Berlin city government has had to make deep cutbacks in other areas, Mr. Nemitz said, the program’s $800,000 budget has not been pared since at least 2000.

“When it started, they were grown-ups,” said Mr. Nemitz from his office on the ground floor of City Hall. “Now, it’s people with hardly any memory of Berlin. Those who come today were children then.” The visits will end in 2010 or 2011, Mr. Nemitz estimated, because there are so few victims left.

Overlooked next to the fact of the survivors’ dying out is that Mr. Nemitz’s generation, those who fought to break the silence of their parents and teachers, is starting to retire. When the last tour group leaves Berlin, Mr. Nemitz, 61, who says he is afraid to take vacations and treats his position more like a mission than a job, will shut the door to his office and retire.

Some say that young Germans, who are required to study the Nazi era and the Holocaust intensively, have shown little indication of letting the theme drop, despite their distance from the events. They say that the younger generation has tackled it as a source not of guilt, but of responsibility on the world stage for social justice and pacifism, including opposition to the war in Iraq.

Others say that the crimes are dealt with only superficially, and that the young will eventually, and perhaps in carefully guarded ways, express their exhaustion with the topic. “I can’t help but feeling that some of the continued, ‘Let’s build monuments; let’s build Jewish museums,’ is a fairly ritualized behavior," Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, an international public research group, said by telephone. “I worry terribly that it’s going to backfire."

Germany’s relationship with its Nazi history still regularly generates controversy, as in the case of the dueling train exhibits. The first, Train of Commemoration, is a locomotive carrying displays detailing the way Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.

The train is making its way through German cities, open for visitors along the way, ultimately bound for the site of the Auschwitz camp, in Poland. Organizers complain that rather than embrace the project, the national railway, Deutsche Bahn, has hindered it, requiring payment for use of the tracks.

The second exhibition, sponsored by Deutsche Bahn itself, opened in Berlin at the Potsdamer Platz train station last week. Critics have derided “Special Trains to Death” as a response to the first exhibition. But Deutsche Bahn’s exhibition does lay out how the company’s predecessor, the Reichsbahn, carried some three million passengers to their deaths; it is filled with painful statistics, photographs and powerful stories of some of the people who perished.

Any failure to handle the history with care grabs national attention. In Munich this past weekend, a traditional carnival season parade overlapped with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed every year on Jan. 27. The result was a flood of negative publicity for the city.

Stefan Hauf, a spokesman for the city, said, “There was no conscious affront,” adding that the city would have changed the date of the parade, but that too many participants were flying in from other countries to make the change on short notice.

Munich played a special role in Nazi history. It is where the National Socialist party rose to prominence and was the location of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the failed coup attempt enshrined in Nazi lore. Hitler eventually declared it the Capital of the Movement. Unlike Berlin, which has developed a reputation as a city with a memorial on practically every street corner, Munich has often been criticized for playing down its history.

“Munich was the Capital of the Movement; since 1945 it’s been the capital of forgetting,” said Wolfram P. Kastner, an artist who said he had fought the city over the years for permission to use performance art to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive there.

Munich’s government believes it has been very active in preserving the history of that time. A short walk from the city’s historic Marienplatz, an entire complex of new buildings is devoted to both the city’s Jewish history and the present. The synagogue there opened in November 2006 on the anniversary of the Nazi-led Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish people, businesses and places of worship. The Jewish Museum and a new community center opened in Munich last year.

The city is working on a new museum to be built where the Nazi party headquarters once stood. Called the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, it is expected to open in 2011. The stated goal, according to the museum Web site, “is to create a place of learning for the future.”

To that end, Angelika Baumann of the city’s Department of Arts and Culture has run workshops for schoolchildren 14 to 18 years old. “We’re planning for people who aren’t even born yet,” she said.

Nicholas Kulish reported from Berlin and Munich. Victor Homola contributed reporting from Berlin.

Opposition Politician Is Killed in Kenya

From the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/world/africa/30kenya.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin)

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — Melitus Mugabe Were, a freshman parliamentarian, could have been one of the keys to unlocking Kenya’s crisis, but he never got the chance.
On Tuesday morning, as he pulled up to the gate of his home, Mr. Were was dragged out of his car and shot to death.

“Whoever did this,” said Elizabeth Mwangi, a friend, “has killed the dreams of many.”
Mr. Were was an opposition politician who grew up in a slum, became a businessman and then gave back. He sponsored teenage mothers to go to college, married a woman of another ethnic group and resisted his party’s often belligerent talk. As Kenya slid into chaos this past month after a disputed election, he shuttled between leaders of different ethnic groups and tried to organize a peace march.

The details are still sketchy, but the shooting appears not to have been a robbery but a hit. Word spread fast and violently, with opposition supporters rioting across Nairobi, the capital. The unrest seems to be escalating, and Kenyans are now literally ripping their country apart, uprooting miles of railroad tracks, chopping down telephone poles, burning government offices and looting schools. Militias from opposing ethnic groups are battling in several towns and Kenyan army helicopters fired warning shots on Tuesday to disperse them. There have been reports of forced circumcisions and beheadings.

The economy is paralyzed. More than 800 people have been killed since the election on Dec. 27. United Nations officials are saying that the government has failed to protect civilians, including girls who are getting raped at displaced persons camps.

Many Kenyans fear their country is tumbling toward disaster.

“The police are not in control,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. “ Actually, nobody is in control.”

Mr. Kiai said he was especially concerned about Mr. Were’s killing because he and other prominent Kenyans have recently received death threats.

“None of us are safe,” Mr. Kiai said.

According to Mr. Were’s guard and family members, Mr. Were had just pulled up to his gate after midnight and was waiting in his Mercedes for the gate to open when another car drew along side him.

“I heard a beep,” said Mr. Were’s wife, Agnes. “And then two loud shots. I ran out and saw my husband bleeding and people were yelling to me, ‘he’s still breathing, he’s still breathing’ but when I got him to the hospital he was dead.”

Mr. Were, 39, whose campaign posters show him smiling with street children, had been shot in the heart and in the eye.

The guard at his house, who was unarmed, said two men yanked Mr. Were out of the car, shot him and drove off, without taking a thing. Family members said he had been followed by suspicious cars several weeks before.

Opposition supporters immediately labeled the killing a political assassination, intended to intimidate Kenya’s opposition movement, which is challenging the election in December that Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, narrowly won, over top opposition leader Raila Odinga.
“We suspect the foul hand of our adversaries in this,” Mr. Odinga said Tuesday.

Police officials say they are investigating closely and ruling nothing out. Some of Mr. Were’s friends said the culprits might have been connected to the other contenders for his parliament seat, who recently filed a petition to challenge the results.

On Tuesday morning, a huge crowd formed in front of Mr. Were’s ranch house and built roadblocks of burning tires and heavy stones. It was the first time that rioters had reached an affluent neighborhood in Nairobi, and it was not just rowdy unemployed youth from the slums who were wreaking havoc.

“This is how we express our outrage,” explained Evans Muremi, a social worker, who stacked burning tires while wearing a jacket and tie.

The election controversy seems to have brought out the worst in Kenya. While the country has been considered one of the most stable and promising in Africa, it is still a very violent place, with carjackings and muggings all too common and mobs routinely stoning to death suspected criminals. Likewise, ethnic tensions have always existed in Kenya, but have never exploded as widely as they have in the past few weeks. Ethnically-driven clashes, fueled by grievances over land and power, have flared in just about every corner of the country.

The problems have laid bare the shortcomings of Kenya’s poorly-paid security forces, who often respond either too harshly or too feebly. Nearly two weeks ago, they shot an unarmed protester at point-blank range in front of rolling TV cameras. On Tuesday, they drove past a crowd of young men pulling down a telephone pole in front of Mr. Were’s house and did nothing.
There is also a crisis of leadership. Kenya’s top politicians have been arguing about who is to blame for the violence more than they have been working together to stop it. Mr. Kibaki, who was considered aloof even before the election, has made few public appearances since his country began to unravel. Western diplomats say he is surrounded by hardliners bent on staying in power.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kibaki began formal negotiations with Mr. Odinga. Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, has been in Kenya for a week trying to bring the two sides together. So far, neither has budged. Both Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga claim to have won the election, Mr. Odinga, who says the election was rigged, is demanding a new election. Mr. Kibaki has refused and despite talk of a power-sharing arrangement, Mr. Kibaki has already moved ahead and given the most important cabinet positions to political allies. Western observers have said the election was so flawed there is no telling who really won.

Mr. Annan has laid out a framework for the negotiations that are expected to take several weeks and focus on several issues, starting with the violence. In speeches on Tuesday, Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga urged their followers to stay calm and they both deplored the killing of Mr. Were.
According to friends and family, Mr. Were grew up in a Nairobi slum called Dandora. He was friendly and sharp and caught the eye of some Italian missionaries, who helped put him through school. He lived in Italy for a time and then came back to Kenya to start a home-building company. Five years ago he became a councilman for Dandora. He used his own money to build a footbridge and a small soccer stadium in the slum.

Mr. Were was from the Luhya ethnic group and his wife is Kikuyu. But that didn’t seem to matter.

“He was one of the least tribal people I knew,” said Wycliffe McKenzie, a friend.

He seemed to be more moderate than other opposition leaders and avoided their often belligerent talk. He told supporters not to join protests, which have often become violent and destructive.

Friends described him as a bright spot in a gritty place. Ms. Mwangi said she came to him when she was 19 and the mother of two and needed money to finish high school. He stayed in touch with her through the ups and downs of single motherhood and the pressures of school.

“He told me to hang in there. He said one day you’ll be my personal doctor,” Ms. Mwangi said, as she stared blankly at the metal gate where he was shot. “He told me never to give up.”

Reuben Kyama contributed to this report.

Monday, January 28, 2008

Elie Wiesel's Night


This was published in the New York Times last week, but since yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day, I thought it was fitting to post it.

The Story of ‘Night’

By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: January 20, 2008

This fall, Elie Wiesel’s “Night” was removed from the New York Times best-seller list, where it had spent an impressive 80 weeks after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club. The Times’s news survey department, which compiles the list, decided the Holocaust memoir wasn’t a new best seller but a classic like “Animal Farm” or “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year largely through course adoptions. Indeed, since it appeared in 1960, “Night” has sold an estimated 10 million copies — three million of them since Winfrey chose the book in January 2006 (and traveled with Wiesel to Auschwitz).

But “Night” had taken a long route to the best-seller list. In the late 1950s, long before the advent of Holocaust memoirs and Holocaust studies, Wiesel’s account of his time at Auschwitz and Buchenwald was turned down by more than 15 publishers before the small firm Hill & Wang finally accepted it. How “Night” became an evergreen is more than a publishing phenomenon. It is also a case study in how a book helped created a genre, how a writer became an icon and how the Holocaust was absorbed into the American experience.

Raised in an Orthodox family in Sighet, Transylvania, Wiesel was liberated from Buchenwald at age 16. In unsentimental detail, “Night” recounts daily life in the camps — the never-ending hunger, the sadistic doctors who pulled gold teeth, the Kapos who beat fellow Jews. On his first day in the camps, Wiesel was separated forever from his mother and sister. At Auschwitz, he watched his father slowly succumb to dysentery before the SS beat him to within an inch of his life. Wiesel writes honestly about his guilty relief at his father’s death. In the camps, the formerly observant boy underwent a profound crisis of faith; “Night” was one of the first books to raise the question: where was God at Auschwitz?

Working as a journalist in his mid-20s, Wiesel wrote the first version of “Night” in Yiddish as “Und di Velt Hot Geshvign” (“And the World Remained Silent”) while on assignment in Brazil. But it wasn’t until he returned to Paris and met François Mauriac, a noted Catholic novelist and journalist, that “Night” took the shape we know today. Mauriac urged Wiesel to rewrite the book in French and promised to write a preface. Still, “it was rejected by the major publishers,” Wiesel recalled in a recent interview, “although it was brought to them by François Mauriac, the greatest, greatest writer and journalist in France, a Catholic, a Nobel Prize-winner with all the credentials.” Les Éditions de Minuit brought it out in 1958, but it sold poorly.

The American response was similarly tepid. Georges Borchardt, Wiesel’s longtime literary agent and himself a Holocaust survivor, sent the French manuscript to New York publishers in 1958 and 1959, to little effect. “Nobody really wanted to talk about the Holocaust in those days,” Borchardt said. “The Diary of Anne Frank,” published in the United States in 1952, had been a huge success, but it did not take readers into the horror of the camps. Although “Night” had sophisticated literary motifs and a quiet elegance, American publishers worried it was more a testimonial than a work of literature. “It is, as you say, a horrifying and extremely moving document, and I wish I could say this was something for Scribner’s,” an editor there wrote to Borchardt. “However, we have certain misgivings as to the size of the American market for what remains, despite Mauriac’s brilliant introduction, a document.” Kurt Wolff, the head of Pantheon, also turned “Night” down. Although it had qualities “not brought out in any other book,” Pantheon had “always refrained from doing books of this kind,” meaning books about the Holocaust, he wrote to Borchardt.

Finally, in 1959, Arthur Wang of Hill & Wang agreed to take on “Night.” The first reviews were positive. Gertrude Samuels, writing in the Book Review, called it a “slim volume of terrifying power.” Alfred Kazin, writing in The Reporter, said Wiesel’s account of his loss of faith had a “particular poignancy.” After the Kazin review, the book “got great reviews all over America, but it didn’t influence the sales,” Wiesel said.

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 brought the Holocaust into the mainstream of American consciousness. Other survivors began writing their stories — but with higher visibility came the first glimmerings of criticism. In a roundup of Holocaust literature in Commentary in 1964, the critic A. Alvarez said “Night” was “beyond criticism” as a “human document,” but called it “a failure as a work of art.” Wiesel, he argued, had failed to “create a coherent artistic world out of one which was the deliberate negation of all values.”

By the early ’70s, the Holocaust had become a topic of study in universities, spurred in part by the rise of “ethnic studies” more generally and a surge of interest in Jewish history after Israel’s dramatic military victory in the Israeli-Arab wars of 1967 and 1973. Wiesel, who had moved to New York in the mid-’50s, began lecturing regularly at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan and teaching at the City University of New York. (Since 1976 he has taught at Boston University.)

Although his books were all reviewed respectfully, some critics questioned Wiesel’s role as a self-appointed witness. “His personal project has been to keep the wounds of Auschwitz open by repeatedly pouring the salt of new literary reconstructions upon them, and thus to prevent the collective Jewish memory — and his own — from quietly letting the wounds heal,” Leon Wieseltier, now the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote in Commentary in 1974. Reviewing Wiesel’s novel “The Oath,” about a pogrom, Wieseltier criticized Wiesel for “turning history into legend.” His characters were “archetypes of the varieties of Jewish pain,” Wieseltier wrote, so “what remains is ... a kind of elaborate superficiality which does justice neither to the author’s intentions nor to his terrible subject matter.”

In 1978, President Carter appointed Wiesel to a commission that eventually created the Holocaust Museum. In Wiesel’s mind, the “real breakthrough” that brought “Night” into wide view came in 1985, when he spoke out against President Reagan’s planned visit to the Bitburg military cemetery in Germany, where SS members were buried. While Reagan was awarding him a Congressional Gold Medal at the White House, Wiesel told him: “That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.” The next day, Wiesel’s words were on front pages worldwide. (Reagan still made the trip.)

Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The Nobel committee called Wiesel “a messenger to mankind,” teaching “peace, atonement and human dignity.” Wiesel’s “commitment, which originated in the sufferings of the Jewish people, has been widened to embrace all repressed peoples and races.” By the late ’90s, “Night” was a standard high school and college text, selling around 400,000 copies a year.

Yet some critics have homed in on the very qualities that have helped “Night” find a broad readership. Some have criticized Wiesel for universalizing — and even Christianizing — Jewish suffering. In “The Holocaust in American Life” (1999), the historian Peter Novick cites crucifixion imagery in “Night” as evidence of the “un-Jewish” or Christian tenor to much Holocaust commemoration. Others have suggested Wiesel may have revised the book to appeal to non-Jewish readers. In a 1996 essay, Naomi Seidman, a Jewish studies professor at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, detected strong notes of vengeance in the Yiddish version. In the final scene, after the camp has been liberated, Wiesel writes of young men going into Weimar “to rape German girls.” But there’s no mention of rape in the subsequent French or English translations. Wiesel said his thinking had changed between versions. “It would have been a disgrace to reduce such an event to simple vengeance.”

To Lawrence L. Langer, an eminent scholar of Holocaust literature and a friend of Wiesel’s, what sets “Night” apart is a moral honesty that “helps undermine the sentimental responses to the Holocaust.” To Langer, “Night” remains an essential companion — or antidote — to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” That book, with its ringing declaration that “I still believe that people are really good at heart,” is “easy for teachers to teach,” Langer said, but “from the text you don’t know what happened when she died of typhus, half-starved at Bergen-Belsen.” Wiesel takes a similar view. “Where Anne Frank’s book ends,” he said, “mine begins.”

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Impunity in Sudan

The U.N. must either stand up to the Sudanese thugs now or pack up its peacekeepers and go home.

From the LA Times
January 23, 2008

It's a bleak day for humanity when one of the architects of the genocide in Darfur gets a promotion. In a gesture of supreme defiance of decency and international law, the Sudanese government announced Monday that it had appointed Musa Hilal, a militia leader who recruited and mobilized the janjaweed militias responsible for the carnage in Darfur, to be a special advisor to the president on ethnic affairs.

It gets worse. Hilal is the third alleged war criminal to be elevated to a government post. He is under United Nations and U.S. State Department sanctions; the other two have been indicted by the International Criminal Court. In an especially cynical move, one of the indicted has been put in charge of humanitarian aid to Darfur. Sudan also has been doing everything possible to obstruct the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers, including shooting at a clearly marked U.N. convoy this month.

Appeasement and negotiation from a position of weakness have not and will not stop the thuggery of the oil-rich Sudanese regime. Only muscle will do. But the "civilized" world has done next to nothing to enforce meaningful economic sanctions, hasn't even moved to arrest the indicted war criminals and, disgracefully, has yet to provide even one of the helicopters that U.N. peacekeepers need. It's time to face facts: Unless the U.N. gets far more political, economic and military support from its posturing but so-far feckless members, it may as well pack up its blue helmets and go home.

Monday's announcement appears calculated to send yet another message of contempt for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is scheduled to fly to Sudan at the end of the month to meet with President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir. Ban should cancel that trip and instead fly to Beijing, which persuaded Sudan to accept the peacekeepers in the first place, and ask again for Chinese help in pressuring Bashir. While there, he should announce that the mission cannot go forward until the United Nations receives the helicopters. Ban has been too diplomatic to note publicly that the U.S. military has plenty of spare choppers but does not want to send its pilots to a Muslim nation. Instead, Washington has shamefully suggested that the U.N. accept an offer of outdated Jordanian helicopters that cannot be flown at night -- which is precisely when the Sudanese fly their nefarious missions. But the U.S. could easily lend or lease its helicopters to the U.N., which could then recruit pilots from other nations.

Either the world is willing to help the Darfurians, or it isn't. If the latter, it's even more cruel to promise help that will never arrive.

China’s Genocide Olympics

From The New York Times

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 24, 2008

The Beijing Olympics this summer were supposed to be China’s coming-out party, celebrating the end of nearly two centuries of weakness, poverty and humiliation. Instead, China’s leaders are tarnishing their own Olympiad by abetting genocide in Darfur and in effect undermining the U.N. military deployment there. The result is a growing international campaign to brand these “The Genocide Olympics.”

This is not a boycott of the Olympics. But expect Darfur-related protests at Chinese Embassies, as well as banners and armbands among both athletes and spectators. There’s a growing recognition that perhaps the best way of averting hundreds of thousands more deaths in Sudan is to use the leverage of the Olympics to shame China into more responsible behavior.

The central problem is that in exchange for access to Sudanese oil, Beijing is financing, diplomatically protecting and supplying the arms for the first genocide of the 21st century. China is the largest arms supplier to Sudan, officially selling $83 million in weapons, aircraft and spare parts to Sudan in 2005, according to Amnesty International USA. That is the latest year for which figures are available.

China provided Sudan with A-5 Fantan bomber aircraft, helicopter gunships, K-8 military training/attack aircraft and light weapons used in Sudan’s proxy invasion of Chad last year. China also uses the threat of its veto on the Security Council to block U.N. action against Sudan so that there is a growing risk of a catastrophic humiliation for the U.N. itself.

Sudan feels confident enough with Chinese backing that on Jan. 7, the Sudanese military ambushed a clearly marked U.N. convoy of peacekeepers in Darfur. Sudan claimed the attack was a mistake, but diplomats and U.N. professionals are confident that this was a deliberate attack ordered by the Sudanese leaders to put the U.N. in its place.

Sudan has already barred units from Sweden, Norway, Nepal, Thailand and other countries from joining the U.N. force. It has banned night flights, dithered on a status-of-forces agreement, held up communications equipment and refused to allow the U.N. to bring in foreign helicopters. The growing fear is that the U.N. force will be humiliated in Sudan as it was in Rwanda and Bosnia, causing enormous damage to international peacekeeping.

Another possible sign of Sudan’s confidence: an American diplomat, John Granville, was ambushed and murdered in Khartoum early this month. Many in the diplomatic and intelligence community believe that such an assassination could not happen in Khartoum unless elements of the government were involved.

Chinese officials argue that they are engaging in quiet diplomacy with Sudan’s leaders and that this is the best way to seek a solution in Darfur. They note that Sudan has other backers, and that China’s influence is limited.

It is true that since the start of the “Genocide Olympics” campaign (www.dreamfordarfur.org) a year ago, China has been more helpful, and it’s only because of Chinese pressure on Khartoum that U.N. peacekeepers were admitted to Darfur at all. But the basic reality is that China continues to side with Sudan — it backed Sudan again after it ambushed the U.N. peacekeepers — and Sudan feels protected enough that it goes on thumbing its nose at the international community.

Just a few days ago, Sudan appointed Musa Hilal, a founding leader of the Arab militia known as the janjaweed, to a position in the central government. This is the man who was once quoted as having expressed gratitude for “the necessary weapons and ammunition to exterminate the African tribes in Darfur.”

Other countries also must do much more, but China is crucial. If Beijing were to suspend all transfers of arms and spare parts to Sudan until a peace deal is reached in Darfur, then that would change the dynamic. President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan would be terrified — especially since he is now preparing to resume war with South Sudan — and would realize that China is no longer willing to let its Olympics be stained by Darfuri blood.

Without his Chinese shield, Mr. Bashir would be more likely to make concessions to Darfur rebels and negotiate seriously with them, and he would no longer have political cover to resume war against South Sudan. That would make long-term peace more likely in Darfur and also in South Sudan.

I’m a great fan of China’s achievements, and I’ve often defended Beijing from unfair protectionist rhetoric spouted by American politicians. But those of us who admire China’s accomplishments find it difficult to give credit when Beijing simultaneously underwrites the ultimate crime of genocide.

China deserves an international celebration to mark its historic re-emergence as a major power. But so long as China insists on providing arms to sustain a slaughter based on tribe and skin color, this will remain, sadly, The Genocide Olympics.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Anti-Semitism Book Could Land Historian in Jail

SPIEGEL ONLINE - January 18, 2008, 12:32 PM
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,529320,00.html
FEAR AND SLANDER IN POLAND

By Siobhán Dowling in Berlin

A new book probing the murder of Jews in Poland after the end of World War II has not only unleashed a storm of controversy, it may land its author in jail. The Krakow Prosecutors Office is considering bringing charges against the Polish-American historian Jan Tomasz Gross for his book "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz." The charge? Slandering the Polish nation.

The book has stirred a huge debate in the country since the Polish language version went on sale last Friday. While some academics, clerics and politicians have slammed the book for what they see as generalizations about the attacks that were carried out on Jews in post-war Poland, others have defended it for its contribution to the debate about Poland's past.

Gross' book focuses on the 1946 Kielce pogrom in which 40 Jews were killed. He claims that such cases demonstrate a widespread wish in Polish society to rid the country of Jews. He argues that this was motivated by anti-Semitism and by people wishing to avoid disputes with returning Jewish neighbors over property.

According to the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, which investigates both Nazi and Communist crimes, between 600 and 3,000 of the approximately 300,000 Jews who survived the Holocaust were subsequently killed in Poland. Gross, a professor at Princeton University, says around 200,000 Jews decided to leave the country after anti-Semitic attacks.

The author is now under investigation by the public prosecutors in Krakow, home to his publishers Znak. They are looking into whether the book broke a law that makes slandering the Polish nation a crime. Statute 132 was passed by the government of former Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski in 2006 and provides a three-year prison term for anyone "publicly accusing the Polish nation of participating in, organizing or being responsible for Nazi or Communist crimes."

Gross says he is shocked at the investigation. "I find it so inappropriate to put books on trial or burn them," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "They should be discussed in a completely different forum."

The prosecutors have 30 days to make a decision but they are expected to make an announcement sooner than that. Gross is pretty confident things won't go as far as a prosection. After all, the law itself is soon to be reviewed by the country's constitutional court after human rights activists complained about it.

Even if Gross does not end up in court, the book has unleashed a storm of controversy in Poland, with many right-wing commentators lashing out at its conclusions. Gross suspects that such criticism comes mostly from those who haven't yet read the book. "I think the discussion will slowly develop in a more substantive direction once people read it," he said hopefully.

The uproar isn't doing sales any harm. According to the publishers, 20,000 copies have already been sold since the book was published on Jan. 11, with the books flying off the shelves so fast that they had to rush to get another batch printed.

Right-Wing Backlash

One of Gross' fiercest critics is Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, an historian based at the Institute of World Politics in Washington. In his "After the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Conflict in the Wake of World War II," Chodakiewicz sees the murder of Jews within the context of the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship. He wrote an editorial in the daily Rzeczpospolita, published last Friday, which accused Gross of picking out the facts to back up his theory. But Gross dismisses Chodakiewicz as "not much of an historian" and a "right-wing apologist."


The book has likewise ruffled feathers in Poland's conservative establishment. The Archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz, who has been described as the late Pope John Paul II's right-hand man, wrote a letter to the chairman of the Polish publishers to complain about the book. He said that they should propagate historical truth and not "awake anti-Polish and anti-Semitic demons." The archbishop said that the book had not taken into account the political realities in Poland of the time and he has also said that he does not want to meet with Gross who is currently in Poland promoting the book.

Meanwhile, the ultra-conservative League of Polish Families, which had been a junior coalition partner in the last Polish government, could not resist putting in its two cents' worth and called for Gross to be made a "persona non-grata" in the country.

The publishers have dismissed these complaints. "We should talk about these difficult issues," Znak spokesman Tomasz Miedzik told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "We have the freedom to ask difficult questions about our history and we should do that."

Gross, who was born in Warsaw in 1947, emigrated to the United States with his family in 1968. His previous book "Neighbors" likewise sparked controversy when it was published in Poland in 2001. It dealt with the massacre of Jews by Polish inhabitants of the town of Jedwabne in 1941. Gross concluded that the Jews in the town had perished at the hands of their own Polish neighbors rather than the Nazis, as had been previously assumed.

A Welcome Debate

Many journalists and academics have rushed to defend Gross' book, even if some have disagreed with its central thesis, because they welcome the debate it has ignited about Poland's past. "The book has attacked the Polish myths, and for this reason it should be read and discussed," Miedzink says.

Marcin Zaremba, a historian at Warsaw University, said that he agreed with the argument that Poles had their share in the Holocaust. "Anti-Semitism was a kind of cultural code which Poles used at the time," he told Polish Radio.

Poland's chief rabbi, Burt Schuman, said that he welcomed the debate, although he felt it was unfair to depict the country as anti-Semitic. He told Bloomberg that what was happening now was "harming our goal of reconciliation."

Writing in the left-liberal daily Gazeta Wyborcza on Monday, the influential Polish columnist Marek Beylin called for a "sincere debate about the dark secrets of the Polish past." While he criticizes Gross' book for not stressing the differences between the Nazi anti-Semitism of the Holocaust and Polish anti-Semitism, he praises the "challenge that Gross mounts to our efforts to come to terms with our past."

Beylin argues that the book's "blistering arguments and confrontational language" have done more to ignite a debate than all the well-measured historical tomes have managed to do in the past.

And he questions whether the criticism of the book isn't a sign of increased Polish nationalism. "Has the (former Kaczynski government's) propaganda that there are enemies trying to destroy Poland and the Polish identity made the public indifferent to Poles' past trespasses?" he asks.


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Monday, January 14, 2008

The 6th International Conference on the Holocaust and Education

Yad Vashem has announced the dates and a tentative program for this conference. Registration is open now and scholarships are available!

See more details here.

Tentative schedule:

Monday, July 7, 2008

Afternoon:
The Association of Holocaust Organizations will hold a special meeting to discuss:
Topic: Teaching the Holocaust to Non-Traditional Audiences: Results and Applications

Evening:
The Opening Ceremony at Yad Vashem will take place at the Monument to the Jewish Soldiers and Partisans who Fought Against Nazi Germany

Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Morning Topic: Racism and Antisemitism in the 19th and 20th Centuries – the Prelude to Destruction


Professor Yehuda Bauer - Academic Advisor, Yad Vashem, Israel
Professor Omer Bartov - John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and Professor of History
and German Studies, Brown University USA

Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Morning Topic: Teaching the Holocaust in a Multi-Cultural Society – Combating the Phenomena of Racism and Prejudice in the Classroom

Dr. Stephen Smith - Founding Director, Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre, Nottingham, England
Dr. William Meinecke - Historian, Education Department, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USA
Dr. Mary Johnson - Senior Historian, Facing History and Ourselves, USA
Hon. Daniel Rafecas Esq. - Federal Judge, Argentina
Professor Bodo von Borries - Professor of Education, University of Hamburg, Germany

Thursday, July 10, 2008
Morning Topic: Building a Better World – The Legacy of the Survivors and Celebrating Israel in its 60th Year

Professor Hanna Yablonka - Historian, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Aharon Appelfeld - Author, Israel
Samuel Bak - Artist ,USA
General Ido Nechushtan - Head of the Plans and Policy Directorate, Israeli Defense Forces, Israel

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Shirin Ebadi

First and foremostly, I hope everyone had a really spectacular break. As a warmup to the upcoming semester I'd like to point out a recent post by Charles Johnson about a movie he recently saw titled Persepolis. Nominated for the Golden Globes and Independent Spirit Award, Persepolis documents the Islamic Revolution through the eyes of a young Iranian girl.

Not only should readers of the blog watch the movie for its excellence and documentation of a humanitarian struggle, but we should all strive to see Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel laureate (2003) coming to the Athenaeum in April--or we can atleast get excited.

Thus, again, I am very excited for next week to come. Lets make this a wonderfully active, party-line crossing, action-making, objective and effective semester!