NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CHURCHES GATHERS FAITH LEADERS TO ABOLISH GENOCIDE
By Hannah Elliott
Associated Baptist Press, FL
Nov 14 2007
NEW YORK (ABP) — Leaders from a number of Christian traditions met
in New York Nov. 9 in an attempt to mobilize Christians to "reflect
on their responsibility in the face of genocide."
Armenian, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist and
Presbyterian representatives met on the 69th anniversary of
Krystalnacht, the 1938 attack on Jews and their property in Nazi
Germany. The Nov. 9 panel was designed to be a "point of departure"
on which other Christian groups could model similar meetings,
organizers said.
Calling the remembrance a "heavy burden from which we must find the
will and the determination to bring about a future without genocide,"
Vicken Aykazian, president of the National Council of Churches USA,
said the united front encouraged him.
"The new alliance to abolish genocide will serve as a bright light in
the defense of human rights and as a defense of the truth," he said
in his opening remarks. "Together we stand united and speak with
one voice. Together we will defeat the scourge of genocide and the
ongoing consequences of genocide denial. Together we will create a
genocide-free future."
First coined in 1943 by the Polish-Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin, the
term "genocide" means the deliberate and systematic destruction of an
ethnic, religious or national group. The United Nations Convention
on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted
its legal definition in 1948.
Lemkin had first published the word in 1933 to refer to the Assyrian
massacres in Iraq and the slaughter of Armenians during World War I.
He later used the term in 1944 with reference to countries occupied
by the Nazis during World War II.
Since 1948, there have been at least 45 major genocides around
the world, according to Gregory Stanton, founder and president of
Genocide Watch.
"This problem really goes back to the beginning of human history,"
he said. "It’s part of all our heritage. Americans have committed
genocide against our own people, against our Native American population
and also against African-Americans during the slave trade.
We all are part of this problem."
"The anti-slavery movement is really the model" for eliminating
genocide, he continued. That effort took a century to accomplish,
he said, "and it may take that long to abolish genocide in the world.
But we must start, and we must start now."
Juan Mendez, president of the International Center for Transitional
Justice, said the United Nations uses four strategies when working in
cases of genocide — protection from harm, humanitarian assistance,
accountability for the crimes; and peace negotiations.
Darfur, which has been the site of conflict since 2003, has posed
such an international conundrum because each of those four factors is
viewed as a precondition for accomplishing the other three, when they
should be acted upon simultaneously, Mendez said. Countries shouldn’t
wait to send humanitarian aid until peace negotiations begin, he noted.
"You can’t always say peace trumps justice," said Mendez, a
human-rights lawyer who was tortured in an Argentinean prison for
his work. "We owe it to ourselves to look for arrangements that
may be more difficult because of the justice paradigm but may have
[lasting results] for peace.
"Justice is punitive but it can always be restorative. It is what
everybody in every culture understands to be the righting of wrongs."
Though not the focal point of the discussion, Darfur was mentioned
by several of the speakers. Darfur is a region in western Sudan that
has been plagued by ethnic cleansing, political instability, famine
and a murderous ideology of Arab supremacy.
Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2004, Colin Powell,
the former U.S. Secretary of State, used the term "genocide" to refer
to the situation in Darfur. But since then, no other permanent member
of the United Nations Security Council has done the same.
"If we saw Darfur not in isolation but as a continuation of something
that has been going since independence [in Africa] …, if we had
focused on that to see Darfur in the proper context … and put
the energy into finding a proper solution, we might have made some
progress," said Francis Deng, the U.N. special advisor for the
prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.
Deng said in extreme cases of genocide, international bodies should
"develop the capacities to intervene in a meaningful way."
"I’m still inclined to build on the concept that these issues are in
the first place the responsibilities of the [nations]," Deng said.
But he later added that if people start dying in large numbers and
local governments don’t do anything about it, the "world is not
going to sit and just watch — they will find one way or another
of intervening."
Born and raised in traditional African religions, Deng attended a
Catholic school in southern Sudan, but his siblings attended a Muslim
school in the north. He later attended Khartoum University and Yale
University, so he saw "from within [each of] those institutions how
the other religions were perceived."
Deng said religion can have a negative impact when religious identities
become "conflictual."
"If genocide has to do with the conflict of identities, we become
zero-sum … because it becomes either you or me when it becomes
extreme," he said. "And, yet, religion has values that are truly
universal across different religions."
Milan Sturgis, a Serbian Orthodox priest and former officer for the
U.S. Foreign Service in the Balkans, also spoke about the important
role churches should play in combating genocide. Like in Sudan,
religious identity was central to the conflict in Bosnia, he said.
During the Bosnian War in the 1990s, identity in Bosnia was derived
from religion. Serbs were Orthodox. Croats were Roman Catholics.
Bosnians were Muslim. And religion became a new dimension of
statecraft, he said.
"Religion was perverted into identity, into political identity,"
Sturgis said. "There’s no other way to say it. It was an absolute
perversion of what religion is."
He spoke from firsthand knowledge of genocide’s toll: Twelve of his
Bosnian relatives were murdered during the conflict in 1991, he said.
At this point, Sturgis said he isn’t interested in laying blame. The
fact is, many Serbian priests looked the other way while militias
killed hundreds of people, he said.
"I think we need to be more focused on forecasting and prevention
than on the laying of blame right now," he said. "The facts speak for
themselves. Some people did things that they probably regret. Some
people were heroes."
It’s easy for observers to point fingers and ask why members of
the clergy didn’t do anything to stop the killing in Bosnia, but
judgmental outsiders don’t have armed gangs barging in on them like
those Serbian priests did, he said.
"On the national level, yes, there were some bishops in the Serbian
Orthodox Church that did not speak out. And there were some bishops
that did," he said. "It’s a hard mirror to look in. To say, ‘Did we
do enough? Did we do enough? Did we do the right thing?’"
Michael Kinnamon, for one, said the National Council of Churches
has "not been sufficiently prophetic" and "too reactive to the
world’s evil." Genocide will continue to be a living concern for the
organization, he said.
"We are called to love all those whom God the universal Creator loves,
and therefore to hate all those things which threaten all those whom
God loves, especially the ultimate crime of genocide," he said.
The panel was organized by the National Council of Churches USA,
Genocide Watch, the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
at George Mason University, and the Center for International Conflict
Resolution at Columbia University.