By Matt RadlerThe Daily Northwestern
Telling stories of brutality, poverty and war that spanned a century and the globe, a panel of genocide survivors and activists spoke Tuesday night at the McCormick Tribune Center Forum.
About 200 people attended the speech, entitled “Silenced Voices: A Genocide Survivor Panel” and hosted by the Sheil Catholic Center, Hillel Cultural Life, the Northwestern University Darfur Action Committee and NUnite, which covered genocides from the extermination of Armenians in Turkey during World War I to the present-day bloodshed in Sudan.
The stories of personal loss and survival began with activist Greg Bedian’s account of his grandmother’s hardship during the Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians died under the persecution of the government of the Ottoman Empire. Bedian said his grandmother was forced to march across a section of what is now Turkey, losing relatives along the way.
“You can count the people and you can count the buildings, but you cannot quantify the loss,” Bedian said. “Even today the names of cities, the names of rivers have been changed. The ethnic cleansing is systematic and continuing and they’re still stealing my culture and my life.”
Leon Lim, co-founder of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, spoke of his years living under the campaign of terror conducted by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia beginning in 1975. Educated Cambodians were rounded up and shot to death by army officials, many of them boys as young as 12, he said.
“The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a country with no cities, no hospitals, no schools and no private property,” Lim said. “They killed students, doctors, teachers and professionals. They even killed people for wearing reading glasses.”
One panelist, Jacqueline Murekatete, discussed the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Most of her family was murdered during the attempt by the Hutu-led government to purge the country of Tutsis, Murekatete’s ethnic group. Propaganda and the legacy of colonial ethnic divisions made the bloodshed possible, she said.
“The radio said Tutsis were cockroaches, that Tutsis were snakes,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine that my Hutu neighbors, people who came over for food, people we considered friends, that they would kill my family.”
A fellow panelist who travels with Murekatete to speak at schools across the U.S., David Gewirtzman, told his stories from the Holocaust. Raised a Jew in the small Polish town of Losice, he watched as his community was brutalized by the invading Nazis. After surviving a labor camp at Treblinka, Gewirtzman said he returned there as an adult to face the genocide’s legacy.
“They had a tall monument and around it, 2,000 smaller stones,” he said. “Each stone was a town that sent people to the camp, and I found the one for Losice. Out of the 8,000 Jews in the ghetto there at the beginning, only 16 of us came back. Eight thousand people, and that stone is all that’s left.”
The final panelist, Darfur survivor Abrahim Adam, said his family was scattered by the vicious Arab militias backed by the Sudanese government, with his 15 siblings divided among six refugee camps. Not all genocides are the same, he said.
“Ten years ago, we heard about Rwanda and said ‘never again,'” Adam said. “In my experience, genocide in Africa takes a long time to get attention.”
Adam said all genocide deserves the same sense of urgency. As he described militias raping women and burning villages in Darfur, he said all genocide takes a universal human toll.
“We must stop this because everyone loves the peace,” he said. “Without peace, we are not human.”
Reach Matt Radler at [email protected].