GENOCIDE. WHAT’S THAT?
Introduction ______________________
Our letter to Raphael Lemkin
D
ear Mr Lemkin, Zero percent. None. Nobody. That is how many young people in our school knew your name when we asked them. Many told us that they knew about the word that you coined, ‘genocide’, but not many could tell us what it meant.
So, that is why we wrote this book. It is our attempt to help other people, particularly those our age, to understand your life’s work, to get what genocide is all about…and to know that when the world said ‘Never Again’ after the Holocaust it didn’t fulfil that promise. To try and raise awareness we’ve researched your life and your work. We’ve traced your journey – the one that you made from your home in eastern Europe, fleeing from the Nazis to Sweden, across the Soviet Union to the USA. We’ve also tried to describe the journey that you made in your mind from reading about the plight of the Christians in Roman times, to the Armenians and then to your family in the Second World War. You couldn’t understand why a person might be prosecuted for killing an individual but the perpetrators of a million deaths could walk free. That is why you worked tirelessly to have ‘genocide’ recognised as a crime. Not even the memory of the Holocaust persuaded the leaders of the world to prevent genocide from happening again. We thought that it would be important to raise awareness of the times since 1945 when the promises made were broken. We’ve had the honour of speaking to and learning from remarkable survivors of genocide. Bea Green came to Britain as part of the Kindertransport in the late 1930s. She had grown up in Munich, Germany and witnessed the horrors of Hitler’s regime. Eric Murangwa was a footballer who had a professional career cruelly cut short because extremists wanted him dead simply because he belonged to the ‘wrong’ group of people in Rwanda. Kadefa Rizvanović was able to escape the genocide in Srebrenica as a teenager but would never see her father and countless family members again. It was also a privilege to speak to Debay Manees who was forced to flee from Darfur in Sudan because of the attempt by the government of the country to wipe out the group of people that he was born into. What have all the survivors got in common? They were all born in different countries at different times… but they have all survived dreadful experiences and had their lives turned upside down simply because of their identity. More than that, they have all had the bravery to teach us about what they went through, how genocide in their countries happened and how it needs to be prevented in the future. Our book focuses on the survivors of genocide more than the perpetrators. We think that the voices of those who survived need to be heard…and that they speak for all those who now have no voice. We didn’t think that it would be right to focus on the stories of those who planned or took part in the killings of innocent men, women and children. In between the experiences of the survivors who we have learned from, we thought that it would be important to explain how genocides begin with words, how it is not inevitable and that it can be stopped. We go on to outline what happens during the horrific times of extermination. Each genocide is unique and there are many more differences than similarities…but if everyone knew what the warning signs were then maybe genocide could be stopped before it starts. 8
