On December 15^th, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its final report. It documents the treatment of indigenous children in Canadian residential schools over the course of more than twelve decades. More 150,000 youth were sent to the schools. The report estimates that more than 3,200 never came home. In June, Beverly McLachlin, chair of the TRC commission, labelled the residential schools cultural genocide.

To many, the report and its finding are an astounding admission to the culpable role the Canadian government played in the destruction of several generations of indigenous culture. The release of the report raises an interesting question: can this be a positive sign of Canada coming to grips with its troubling past?

When I’ve asked Canadian scholars why the perception of how Canada has treated its indigenous communities is so much better than the United States I’m generally met with a laugh. “Only because the relationship in your country is so much worse,” is the usual response. While on the surface, the Canadian TRC process appears to be a positive sign its origins give less cause for optimism.

In the years preceding the Commission, it was estimated that more nearly half of Canadians had little to no understanding of the residential school system.  The TRC process was only initiated after survivors of the residential school system successfully organized the largest class action lawsuit in Canadian history when they sued the government and the churches that operated the schools. The truth and reconciliation process was something the survivors pushed to include in the settlement. Its inclusion likely staved off further litigation. Stephen Harper, the former Prime Minister ousted after this fall’s election, has had a long history of troubling interactions with Canada’s indigenous peoples. While the TRC process was initiated under his premiership, his lack of leadership to address the challenges facing First Nations people was seen by many as a contributing factor to the Conservatives heavy losses in the recent election. Clearly, the TRC process is not the product of a benevolent approach to reconciling Canada’s troubling past we might think of it being.

Troubles aside, how can Canada move forward? A report can only go far to address the injustices of the past. It remains to be seen what effect the TRC will have on the relationship between the government and its indigenous people. The report issued 94 calls to action that address issues in the report, targeted at a number of continuing challenges, including access to healthcare, education and the legal system.  These solutions will take years to have an impact.  However, with its focus on the residential school system the report does not fully explore the other abuses committed against Canada’s indigenous people.  Allegations of forced sterilization of indigenous women continue to come out, despite forcible sterilization being explicitly outlawed in the Genocide Convention.

The Canadian government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is making a concerted effort to change the country’s relationship with its indigenous communities. Forming the most diverse cabinet in Canadian history, promising to address the issues of missing indigenous women and releasing the full Truth and Reconciliation Report are positive moves. With these actions, the path to Canada’s reconciliation may be a clearer one.

Joe Eggers is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, focusing his research on cultural genocide and indigenous communities. His thesis project explores discrepancies between the legal definition and Lemkin’s concept of genocide through analysis of American government assimilation policies towards Native Nations.

This year, the University of Minnesota will be hosting Sam Grey, a Fulbright Scholar from Canada. Sam comes to campus to continue her research in the field of reconciliation, specifically in settler-colonial states. While in Minnesota, Sam will be exploring the resistance to reconciliation in Minnesota a century and a half after the Dakota conflict of 1862.

Coming from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Sam is well suited to exploring Minnesota’s relationship with its indigenous communities. Her doctoral research focuses on political theory and comparative politics, primarily from a non-western political perspective. Sam’s research interests have included, in addition to indigenous rights, gender equality, food politics and solidarity politics.  As a Canadian scholar in Minnesota, Sam is in a unique position to compare Canada’s recently completed Truth and Reconciliation process with the United States’ own attempts to understand its own relationship with its indigenous population.

For context, the CanadianTruth & Reconciliation Commission issued its final findings in June after seven years of examining the legacy of the country’s residential school programs. Unlike other Truth & Reconciliation Commissions, Canada’s held no legal power, which meant that it couldn’t offer amnesty for alleged perpetrators of abuse at the residential schools in exchange for testimony. The result was a commission that primarily focused on recording victim experiences.  Following the conclusion of hearings, the commission published an extensive report of its findings. The report outlined many of the challenges that indigenous people continue to face in Canada as a result of the residential schools and outlined a plan for reconciliation. Most famously, commissioner chair and Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin labelled the residential schoolsystem cultural genocide .

When asked why Canada has been so forthcoming about its troubling history with indigenous people, Sam is honest. In her assessment, Canada’s relationship with its indigenous communities isn’t actually that positive, though it’s likely that it’s perceived as good when compared to the United States’ relationship its indigenous population. She says the Truth & Reconciliation commission and subsequent report are a positive step, but fall short of addressing many of the systemic issues in Canada. She points to several troubling incidents, including the current epidemic of missing indigenous women in central Canada that demonstrate the amount of work that needs to continue.

When asked about Minnesota, the idea of local reconciliation seems especially difficult to Sam. There are a number of factors that she says make attempts at reconciliation challenging, including that the resentment amongst descendants of the Minnesota settlers who took part in the 1862 conflict and members of the Dakota community is still present. Memories of the conflict represent just one of the hurdles to reconciliation in Minnesota that Sam hopes to explore during her nine months here.

Sam sees the issue of residential schools as the best approach for building a greater understanding of the legacy of colonialism in the United States and Canada. To her, and other scholars, boarding and residential schools represent “philanthropy gone off the rails,” which makes the issue easier to understand and contextualize. As more people gain an understanding the schools as a place of abuse, Sam explains, scholars can build on that awareness to promote a greater understanding of the issues affecting indigenous people today.

Much of Sam’s work can be found on her Academia webpage.

Joe Eggers is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, focusing his research on cultural genocide and indigenous communities. His thesis project explores discrepancies between the legal definition and Lemkin’s concept of genocide through analysis of American government assimilation policies towards Native Nations.

On Saturday, October 17th, 2015, the Minneapolis Film Society screened Pretty Village at St. Anthony Main theater, a documentary depicting the experience of Kemal Pevranic and his village during the war in Bosnia (1992-95). Pevranic, the main subject of the film, is also the producer and a human rights activist who works to raise awareness and to rebuild his community in Bosnia by working on reconciliation efforts, particularly with young people of all three ethnicities in Bosnia. The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies co-sponsored the film screening event, in which I participated as the moderator of the post-screening discussion.

Pretty Village is a powerful documentary centered on Pevranic’s home village of Kevljani located in Northern Bosnia in the municipality of Prijedor. The Muslim village became a target during the war by the surrounding Serb villages. Most of the men in the village were either killed or taken into the nearby Omarska concentration camp. Labeled an “investigation center,” Omarska was only revealed as a concentration camp by the media after serious denial on the part of the Serb forces. In the film, we see Pevranic return to Omarska to face the horrific memories, as well as his torturer, who just so happened to have been his high school teacher. In the scene where Kemal directly asks the teacher about the camp, we see a kind of denial on the part of the perpetrator that just makes us cringe as we watch the hypocrisy in the interaction. It makes us wonder if facing one’s torturer cannot bring closure, what can? As one of the village residents and torture victim states in the film, hating one’s torturers can also become a kind of torture in itself, as it is exhausting to hate someone with such intensity.

“Those who didn’t live through war don’t know anything,” says an elderly woman at the beginning of Pretty Village, making us think about what atrocity, fear, and trauma do to us. There is a kind of wisdom that comes from enduring and surviving war that is not comparable with other wisdom we have. At the very least, it makes us question where we belong. After being asked what home means to him now during the Q & A, Pevranic, educated in London after leaving Bosnia, says that his idea of home has changed. While Kevljani will never be the same again, he has rebuilt his home and has returned to live there. However, as those featured in his film mentioned, young people educated outside of Bosnia have no reason to return since they have lives away from their original home.

Above all, this is a film that questions and collapses the dichotomies inherent in human relations, particularly when genocide takes place. It is no longer clear what is good and what is evil, who is a foreigner and who is at home, as a student and teacher relationship turns into that of the torturer and the tortured, arguably both equally as intimate. Ultimately, this film shows us just how quickly the status quo can change, and one has to change his definition of what normal life is when the circumstances suddenly change, and they can do so at any given moment.

N.B.: For those who have not had the opportunity to see the film, CHGS is working to bring a screening to campus in Spring 2016.

Erma Nezirevic is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. She specializes in 20th and 21st century Iberian literatures and cultures. Her dissertation studies the way Spain evokes the Balkan Wars of the 1990s in literature and other cultural production such as photography, and how in turn that provides a political, social and cultural understanding of Spain itself. Erma currently works in affiliation with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where she coordinates the HGMV Workshop.

A few things have been happening in Burundi this year. The president, Pierre Nkuruzinza circumvented the constitution and ran for a third term. The result of this has been on-going conflict from April. Burundi was not a surprise though. Journalists I spoke to earlier this year all stated that regional coverage of Burundi had pointed to something being afoot as early as last year. None-the-less, here we are, with yet another unfolding atrocity, several deaths, an ever growing numbers of displaced and plenty of hand-wringing by the international community.

There are reports of massive numbers of refugees already running to Rwanda in anticipation of violence at a massive scale. A Kenyan journalist I spoke to in March painted a really grim picture of politicians getting ready to cause havoc. These concerns have now been confirmed by reports emanating from Burundi. The police are engaging in a campaign of brutal suppression of protesters. Several dissenting voices have been thrown in jail accused with the ever nefarious charge of “endangering internal and external state security.”Protesters have been charged, by the state prosecution, with the offence of“participation in an insurrectionary movement.” Not to forget the continual assassinations and assassination attempts by both sides of this unfolding atrocity.

Despite all of this though what is happening in Burundi is not genocide nor is Burundi going to be another Rwanda. Sometimes it feels as though every atrocity in Africa is often seen as the next Rwanda. This does not mean that the government in Burundi is not heinous nor is it in any way excusable. Indeed in May, the International Criminal Court saw it necessary to warn the Burundi’s leaders of possible prosecution should the court deem it necessary. While the word genocide is emotive and seen as necessary whenever world opinion needs to be influenced, it complicates the situation on the ground as well. In Burundi, this complication is been based on how to define the perpetrators and victims; if it’s a genocide, who is the targeted group and who exactly is the perpetrator of said genocide?

There is also an implication (whenever we are quick to label a conflict genocide) that the international community only cares about genocide. Must atrocities in African countries be called genocide for the world to care?

What is happening in Burundi is a power grab by a cabal of politicians who decided to go against the spirit of the Arusha peace agreement of 2000, which was meant to end years of civil conflict. This implies, therefore, that one way to solve it would be through a political process and dialogue. A process that should include targeted sanctions by the international community and a cessation of foreign aid. Another troubling issue has been the inertia by regional bodies, such as the African Union and the East African Community, both of which have been largely peripheral at best. The world needs to pay attention to Burundi, not because it could be the ‘next Rwanda’ or that there is a ‘genocide’ unfolding there. It needs to pay attention because what happens in Burundi and to Burundians also affects its neighboring countries. If there is anything we should know by now, it is that conflicts in this region have historically tended to spill over national boundaries with disastrous effects. Additionally, we should care because of our shared humanity, which is what binds us.

Wahutu Siguru is Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa. 

The Twitter account @HistOpinion recently reminded us of the prevailing opinion on raising the immigrant quota for refugees who were fleeing Nazi Germany. Two-thirds of the respondents polled by Gallup’s American Institute of Public Opinion in July 1938 agreed with the proposition that “with conditions as they are we should try to keep them out.”

Comparisons to the Holocaust and the events that led to it have become commonplace when we examine our current events. Although historical events and contexts always have distinct features that make them unique and thus hard to compare, analogies can indeed provide valuable insight into and perspective on the reality in which we are immersed. This is clearly the case for present-day attitudes toward refugees, particularly in the United States. The number of resettled refugees whom the United States has pledged to receive is dismal in comparison with Canada and most European countries. In terms of percentages, the situation is even worse. And immigration restrictions may get even tighter in response to a state of public opinion shaped by the xenophobic language of presidential candidates in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Here, denigration of an entire group – defined by ethnicity or religion – and identification of the group as a threat also echo the discourses of the historical period we often consider in this newsletter (both in Europe and in the United States, with the wave of racism, prejudice, and ignorance surrounding Japanese Americans during World War II).

Analogies that bridge past and present are also pertinent to the discussion of the long inaction vis-à-vis the atrocities perpetrated by the Islamic State. For more than two years, ISIS has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity with respect to civilians, and genocide against religious minorities in the territories under ISIS control. The international community has a moral and legal responsibility to protect the victims of these crimes – and the upcoming 67th anniversary, on December 9, of the UN Genocide Convention is an explicit reminder. However, it seems that plans for a coordinated operation against ISIS, involving the possible elimination of its stronghold in Syria and Iraq, are taking shape only now, after its terror has struck the heart of Europe.

Refusal to admit more refugees and passivity in the face of genocide seem to be recurring themes across historical periods. What the past teaches the present will always be a disputed matter. But we will certainly draw a correct lesson from the past if we now endeavor to “keep out” the incendiary language of hatred, fear, and suspicion.

Alejandro Baer is the Stephen Feinstein Chair and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He joined the University of Minnesota in 2012 and is an Associate Professor of Sociology.

The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide 

Taner Akçam and Umit Kurt, Translated by Aram Arkun

Pertinent to contemporary demands for reparations from Turkey is the relationship between law and property in connection with the Armenian Genocide. This book examines the confiscation of Armenian properties during the genocide and subsequent attempts to retain seized Armenian wealth. Through the close analysis of laws and treaties, it reveals that decrees issued during the genocide constitute central pillars of the Turkish system of property rights, retaining their legal validity, and although Turkey has acceded through international agreements to return Armenian properties, it continues to refuse to do so. The book demonstrates that genocides do not depend on the abolition of the legal system and elimination of rights, but that, on the contrary, the perpetrators of genocide manipulate the legal system to facilitate their plans.

Taner Akçam holds the Kaloosdian and Mugar Chair of Armenian Genocide Studies at Clark University. He is the author of many books, including: The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton University Press, 2012), which received the Middle East Studies Association’s Hourani Book Prize and was listed by Foreign Affairs as “Best International Relations Books of 2012.”

Umit Kurt is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department of Clark University. He is the author of The Great, Hopeless Turkish Race: Fundamentals of Turkish Nationalism in the Turkish Homeland 1911-1916 (Iletisim Publishing House, 2012).

The Great Fire: One American’s Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century’s First Genocide

By Lou Ureneck

The harrowing story of a Methodist Minister and a principled American naval officer who helped rescue more than 250,000 refugees during the genocide of Armenian and Greek Christians-a tale of bravery, morality, and politics, published to coincide with the genocide’s centennial.

Professor Ureneck (Journalism, Boston University) conducted much of his research in writing the book in the U of M Library’s extensive Kautz Family YMCA Archives, highlighting the University’s unique ability to place historic events in context, and provide primary sources for study and scholarship. 

Recently I laid over at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, at which the Delta Airlines security agent checked my U.S. passport prior to boarding the plane to Minneapolis. Upon seeing my name and place of birth (Bosnia and Herzegovina), he asked in Serbian if I spoke “our language.” I responded with a “yes, of course,” and he completed the rest of the security procedure in ‘our language,’ revealing that he is a Serb who escaped to the Netherlands in 1991 because he did not want to have to fight the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) or the Croats, as they are all “my people, our people.”

Coincidentally, this random interaction occurred only two days after the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, which took place on July 11, 1995. It made me ponder the use of the word ‘our’ in this brief conversation. We all clearly still have a lot in common: the primary, and perhaps strongest, connection being the language. ‘Our’ language, as the security agent used it, refers to Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. However, in ‘our’ language, there is still a contention over what happened in Srebrenica. Recently, Russia, Serbia’s ally, had vetoed the UN Security Council measure that labeled Srebrenica a genocide. Killing people based on their identity is a very basic definition of genocide, and denying that is to politicize it once again, and take away from the core of what this event should represent 20 years later, which is healing and hope for the future.

Leading up to the anniversary itself, much of the world media had been referring to the genocide as the worst case of mass violence on the European continent since World War II. The systematic killing of over eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and young boys in what was considered a UN safe haven shows nothing short of failure on the part of Europe for not holding up the ‘never again’ promise. What remains at stake now is the way we remember this horrific event based on the language used to label it. Srebrenica has been labeled a crime, and a massacre, but why not genocide?

During the 20th anniversary commemoration ceremony, President Bill Clinton begged the international community to not treat this as a mere monument, but as a sacred trust for healing, implying that Srebrenica shouldn’t be a place of forgetting but of active remembering. Therefore, education is crucial to its memory. The members of various refugee communities scattered around the world have already done a lot in this respect, but education must continue for the sake of future generations of not only Bosniaks, but also Serbs and Croats. After all, it is something that marked all of “us.” We also shouldn’t forget that Bosnia is made up of many ‘little Srebrenicas’ that amount to many more victims and their grieving families. Ultimately, what Srebrenica must remind us of is our common humanity, and that conflicts rooted in identity continue to be a struggle for the world.

In April of this year, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies hosted an international conference on the 100 years of the Armenian Genocide, bringing the struggle over its acknowledgement to the forefront. For many like myself, this served as a reminder of the politicization around Srebrenica as well. The question is then, are we going to treat Srebrenica the same way in the upcoming century?

Erma Nezirevic is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. She specializes in 20th and 21st century Iberian literatures and cultures. Her dissertation studies the way Spain evokes the Balkan Wars of the 1990s in literature and other cultural production such as photography, and how in turn that provides a political, social and cultural understanding of Spain itself. Erma currently works in affiliation with the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where she coordinates the HGMV Workshop.

Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur

By Joachim Salvesberg

 How do interventions by the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court influence representations of mass violence? What images arise instead from the humanitarianism and diplomacy fields? How are these competing perspectives communicated to the public via mass media? Zooming in on the case of Darfur, Joachim J. Savelsberg analyzes more than three thousand news reports and opinion pieces and interviews leading newspaper correspondents, NGO experts, and foreign ministry officials from eight countries to show the dramatic differences in the framing of mass violence around the world and across social fields.

The book is hot off the presses and is also available in its entirety online.

Professor Joachim Savelsberg is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair, and affiliate faculty to the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

Wahutu Siguru sat down with Dr. Joachim Salvesberg from the University’s Sociology Department to discuss his new book, Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur for the September edition of “Eye on Africa.” 

Wahutu: What was the main motivation behind this current book, Representing Mass Violence: Conflicting Responses to Human Rights Violations in Darfur?

Prof. Savelsberg: You know that I have a longstanding interest in the way in which institutions of justice, and currently transitional justice, affect collective representations or collective memories of events, especially mass atrocities. And so, the motivation for this book on Darfur was to understand how interventions by the UN Security Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC) affect how global civil society thinks about such events, the way people imagine such events. And, part of the original design was to do a comparative study of eight countries. Even though the ICC is a global institution, the kinds of messages that it sends out, the kinds of representation of events that it offers are filtered by national institutions, they are reinforced by carrier groups in one country, but less so in another country. They find more receptive audiences in a country that has maybe dealt with mass atrocities in the past than in another country that hasn’t. So that was the main motivation, to understand how interventions, in this case by the UN Security Council and the ICC, affect the representation of Darfur in the public sphere. Initially I only thought of news media, that’s why we did a comparative analysis of newspapers in eight countries. And then, in the course of the research, I became aware that representations do not just differ by country but also by social fields. I was interested from the beginning in how human rights activists, and I selected Amnesty International as an example, talk about Darfur. How they reflect on the interventions by the ICC and the UN Security Council. But in my interviews I also ended up targeting a humanitarian aid NGO , for which I picked Doctors without Borders. I additionally interviewed diplomats from foreign ministries, or state departments if you want, and I saw that different fields talk in quite different terms about the violence in Darfur. Just as I was interested in the country-specific conditions that lead to a selective communication of ICC representations, so I became interested in the field-specific conditions that affect communication about Darfur.

Wahutu: Previous work has not done this much data collection or analysis.  From what you have said, the data collection and analysis seems like a really important part of how you wanted to do this project.  Why was it important for you to do the interviews, to do the content analysis of news reports and travel to all of these countries?

Prof. Savelsberg: It was important for a number of reasons. The first reason is that we know that global institutions of justice like the ICC are extremely modern. Human history hasn’t really known them. We’ve known ad hoc courts in the twentieth century, but not a permanent international criminal court. We have very little systematic knowledge about the effects of these institutions. It would be desirable of course to measure the effect of ICC interventions on the future likelihood of genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes. That would be a very tall order, and we will have to tackle this at some point. I wasn’t able to go that far, but one interim step is to think about how these interventions affect the way the world thinks about mass atrocities. It is not at all for granted that people in different countries take note of what is going on. Even if institutions like the ICC intervene, there is a long history of denial, of closing one’s eyes, especially if atrocities occur in a far-away place in the world. So it was very important to me to begin to systematically measure the effects of these sorts of interventions in a cautious way, by first looking at the impact they have on the degree to which and the way in which mass atrocities are represented and perceived.

Wahutu: What would you say was one of the most surprising findings that jumped out at you?

Prof. Savelsberg: There are a number of surprising findings. One of the things that really impressed me was when I conducted my interviews among diplomats who were interested in negotiating deals with the Sudanese government to establish peace; with humanitarian aid people who were interested in getting their aid on the ground and collaborating, say, with the Sudanese ministry of health; and with human rights activists. To see the seriousness with which all of these actors, many of whom impressed me deeply, pursued what they were doing. How at the same time their views of the violence differed depending on the role that especially the Sudanese state played in their respective fields. Diplomats need to negotiate with the Sudanese state, humanitarian aid workers need to collaborate with administrative units of the Sudanese state, and human rights activists don’t do that.  But many of these people had been to Darfur, they had worked on the ground, they had also – the same is true for Africa correspondents – left the comfort of their homes in Philadelphia or Berlin or London only to spend years in rather tough settings, to witness situations that are not easy for people to bear. So many of these people impressed me profoundly. At the same time, I took note that each of them had a different view of the violence on the ground. So this is, if you want, a kind of sociology of knowledge exercise. You see how the world and events in the world take different shape, appear in a different light, when seen through different lenses, through different frames. So that’s one thing that surprised me and then there were many little observations pertaining to national particularities. For example we found in our media analysis that the term genocide was used relatively rarely in German news reports, which to me was counter intuitive, given Germany’s history of the Holocaust. But, in the interviews I conducted, I got a number of suggestions as to how to interpret such a finding. One Africa correspondent for a prominent German newspaper said that when he thought of genocide, he categorised the Holocaust under that label, and while knowing how horrific things were in Darfur, he had a hard time placing Darfur under the same category where in his mind the Holocaust was already placed. Or, the director of a major national Holocaust memorial institution in Germany said that the Americans could draw parallels between the Holocaust and Darfur – and this is a man who is a Rabbi and a son of an Auschwitz survivor – but as Germans, he said, we could not do that because as soon Germans drew a parallel between the Holocaust and events such as Darfur people would accuse them of trying to relativize what happened during the Holocaust. So there are cultural sensitivities in specific countries — and this is just one example from the German part of the study — that  filter and generate caution towards the use of certain terms. Clearly Germany differs from the United States, for example, where the use of the term genocide and metaphorical bridging to the Holocaust was used very generously, and the explanation is relatively simple. It has to do with the strength of the Save Darfur movement in the US, and this strength had to do with the fact that there were a number of, in Weberian or Mannheimian terms, carrier groups that identified with the cause of Darfur. So there were African Americans who identified with the victims who were defined as ‘black Africans’. There were American Jews who, after the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington issued a genocide alert, identified with this cause, and there were evangelical Christians on the conservative side of the political spectrum who had done a lot of missionary work, not in Darfur but in South Sudan, but who therefore were quite sensitive to human rights violations in that country. So you have Germany and the United States as two examples where country specific sensitivities and carrier groups contribute to a different reception of the events in Darfur. At the same time both the United States and Germany were the two countries that stood out in terms of the intensity of reporting. German cultural sensitivities thus do not mean that German journalists didn’t take note, quite the opposite, despite their cautious use of the term genocide. The other noteworthy result is that indeed certain interventions by institutions like the ICC revived, every time they occurred, global interest in Darfur. The flattening of the pattern of attention that normally occurs soon after instances of mass violence was thus delayed by three or four years in the case of Darfur.  The other noteworthy finding is that definitions by the criminal justice system are more strongly reflected in  media reporting than the representation of events by diplomats or humanitarian aid organizations. Why this is the case is a separate question, and I have some ideas about this that I explore in the book. I have found similar patterns, by the way, on previous occasions like in my study on the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.

Wahutu: What message do you hope a reader of your book gets from it when they read it?

Prof. Savelsberg: I think that the book would help people understand how mass violence that occurs in the global south, for example in Darfur, goes through a number of processes and filters before news about it reach us as member of civil society; understand the cultural and structural processes and the institutions that are embedded in different fields and that are associated with different countries; understand how that which happens on the ground, which almost none of us, very few people, will observe with our own eyes, reaches us as members of civil society, or maybe of global society; understand the process through which those events are filtered, or constructed if you want. So this helps us understand what it is that we learn about through public information about mass violence in the global south.

Wahutu: So what you are saying is that for a reader you hope that the message is that by the time they watch, read or hear about on going atrocities such as Darfur, they remember that it goes through several filtering processes to get to them. As such, is it then upon the reader to be a bit more active in seeking more information and seeking more diverse voices?

Prof. Savelsberg:  Yes, I think the book provides us with the critical tools that we need in order to be mature consumers of these kinds of news. We read the news and, having read this book about Representing Mass Violence, we are in better position to understand what processes the events as they were written about and described have gone through before they reach us.

Wahutu: What are some of the challenges in writing such a book? You talk to professionals and practitioners form such diverse walks of life who, as much as they are dealing with getting the message out, have different constituencies. So what are some of the challenges in trying to navigate that terrain?

Prof. Savelsberg: Well, the main challenge was the huge effort at data collection. The media analysis had five research assistants who analysed  more than 3000 news articles. To conduct the interview meant travelling to Berlin, Paris, London, Dublin, Zurich, Geneva, Vienna, Washington, New York, and so many other places. So it was a major effort just to collect the data. In the interview situations, it was important to capture the voices of these different actors that operate in distinct fields, not to impose of them my understanding of the situation, but to minimise the interviewer effect and to get their perception as clearly as possible. I think I succeeded in this, especially since people are so embedded in their fields; the way they see the world thus is so matter of course to them, and is reinforced by the institutions and educational process they have been exposed to.

Wahutu: So onto my last question. You book is available to download for free, what was the thinking behind that?

Prof. Savelsberg: For the publisher, the University of California Press, the thinking behind this was that books used to sell many copies to university libraries, which brought in their expenses, on the average anyway, so they didn’t run a deficit. University libraries have change their purchasing practices. They have smaller budgets now, they can’t buy as many books, and they buy more electronic sources than paper products. So the presses are really under pressure to come up with new models of funding publications. In my case they offered me either to go the traditional way or to use this innovative model, and I chose the innovative way for a number of reasons. An important reason is that I think this mechanism will allow for a better distribution of the book, and especially a book dealing with mass violence in the global south, in which many people who’d be interested in the subject don’t have an easy time to just write somewhere and order a paper copy and pay for it. So this model will increase availability particularly in those parts of the world that I would like to reach with my book but that may not as easily get a hold of the paper copy. Do I pay a price for it? Yes I had to waive any royalties, but that was easy for me to do.

Wahutu: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this.

Prof. Savelsberg: You are welcome, Wahutu.

Wahutu Siguru is Badzin Fellow in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and PhD candidate in the Sociology department at the University of Minnesota. Siguru’s research interests are in the Sociology of Media, Genocide, Mass Violence and Atrocities (specifically on issues of representation of conflicts in Africa such as Darfur and Rwanda), Collective Memory, and perhaps somewhat tangentially Democracy and Development in Africa.