Every year in April, the international community recalls the genocide in Rwanda and the failure to intervene. This year, on the 20th anniversary of the genocide, we did the same in several sites and countries around the world. Here at the University of Minnesota, we held a three day-long event that brought together practitioners, scholars, activists and K-12 educators. We asked ourselves what we learned from the Rwandan experience and how these lessons can be used to prevent and intervene in future atrocities. I personally think the world has learned very little from the genocide in Rwanda and that we have failed to efficiently put to use our limited knowledge to prevent other atrocities.

Over the last several months, I have highlighted the on-going atrocities in the Central Africa Republic (CAR) and South Sudan and the abject failure of the UN, African Union (AU), French and other foreign troops in stopping these two atrocities. In that time things have only gotten worse in both countries. Instead of recognizing these failures we have been accosted by reporting that seems hell bent on reminding us of the fact that lessons have been learned. This can be seen in online news organizations such as Think Progress, who thought it more important to remind us that the U.S. had prevented “another Rwanda” and the New York Times reminding us that we are allowing ‘another Rwanda’ in CAR.

The on-going atrocities in South Sudan presents more damning evidence against the assertion that the international community has learned from Rwanda. Last week in Bentiu town the atrocities reached a new low. Rebels stormed the town, killing and pillaging as they went through it. The target group appeared to be anyone that was not from the Nuer community. As the government and rebels trade accusation as to who is responsible, the U.S. government again seems to be twiddling its thumbs and merely called the atrocity in Bentiu an abomination.

The UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), like the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), has strongly condemned “the use of Radio Bentiu FM by some individuals associated with the opposition to broadcast hate speech,” and tried to evacuate as many civilian as it could. What started as a rebellion against the government is now taking a more ghastly turn as the AU and UN debate what to do and how to do it. Perhaps what is even more instructive about this particular atrocity is the fact that the rebels used FM Radio to order the attacks. This in itself should send chills down our spines but also perhaps push the UN and AU to act more decisively.

So have we learned anything from Rwanda? Unfortunately there is no clear answer to this question. From where I sit though, I believe we have learned nothing at all. If we had, I strongly believe we would stop calling every other atrocity ‘another Rwanda’ and instead work on nipping them in the bud. For the dead in the town of Bentiu it will be hard to convince their families that Rwanda has taught us anything, seeing as the order to attack was given on the radio. For the Muslims being evacuated from CAR and for all those who have died and been maimed there, how do we look them in the eye and say “yes, Rwanda did teach us some useful lessons that we have applied in CAR.”

The genocide in Rwanda happened, we let it happen, we need to stop focusing on trying to correct that mistake and focus instead on the current atrocities. This does not mean that the similarities in how the international community and the UN have behaved can be ignored, nor should they. We should think, however, very critically about the effect this has for the conflict. Lest we forget, for most people, Rwanda was a conflict that was particularly based on ethnicity and not political machinations or the fall of commodity prices in the global market. What we have in CAR and South Sudan is not and never was based on ethnicity. Both were a struggle for political power between the government and rebels groups that have now coalesced around religion and ethnicity respectively. These conflicts and related massacres are in no way “another Rwanda” and talking about them as such misses the point of the atrocities.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 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. 

No nos une el amor, sino el espanto.
(We are not united by love, but by horror)

Jorge Luis Borges
(Argentinean poet)

Since Auschwitz it has indeed been possible to speak of a
German-Jewish symbiosis-but of a negative one. For both
Germans and for Jews the result of mass extermination has
become the basis of how they see themselves, a kind of
opposed reciprocity they have in common, willy-nilly.

Dan Diner
(Historian)

The above-cited quotes reveal a tragic irony. The Holocaust has bound forever “Germans” and “Jews” to the past. It has also opened an insurmountable gap that conditions the mutual relationship, as well as the passing on of group identity – of victims and of perpetrators stuck in a permanent position of culpability – to the next generations. Moreover, it perpetuates in time a binary division constructed by the Nazi ideologues: Germans vs. Jews.

Dan Diner’s “negative symbiosis” – this communality of opposites – is not only an appalling legacy of the Holocaust, it represents a fundamental dilemma in post-genocide contexts.

This month of April we commemorate Yom Ha Shoah and also the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. Between April and July 1994, approximately 800,000 people defined as Tutsi were brutally slaughtered by members of the Hutu majority. Today’s Rwandan Tutsi-led Government condemns and even outlaws the use of the vicious ethnic markers of Hutus and Tutsis. “We are all Rwandans” is the watchword. At the same time it insists on naming the events, in ceremonies, memorials and museums, the “Genocide against the Tutsi”.

We often hear that memory helps societies that have suffered large-scale political violence come to terms with and overcome their past. But is remembrance of genocide always a unifying and healing force? By remembering the genocide, Rwandans may well be trapped in the paradox of perpetuating the divisions that they are trying to overcome.

Genocide memory is thus entangled in a problematic logic of questionable group identities and boundaries. According to the UN convention of 1948, genocides are “acts committed withintent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (my emphasis). In other words, without defining a specific group that is targeted for destruction the crimes would not qualify as genocide. Rafael Lemkin coined the term with the objective to set international standards to prevent and punish these type of mass atrocities. But its public remembrance can be a mixed blessing.

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. 

War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice

by David M. Crowe

In this sweeping, definitive work, leading human rights scholar David M. Crowe offers an unflinching look at the long and troubled history of genocide and war crimes. From atrocities in the ancient world to more recent horrors in Nazi Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda, Crowe reveals not only the disturbing consistency they have shown over time, but also the often heroic efforts that nations and individuals have made to break seemingly intractable patterns of violence and retribution – in particular, the struggle to create a universally accepted body of international humanitarian law. He traces the emergence of the idea of ‘just war,’ early laws of war, the first Geneva Conventions, the Hague peace conferences, and the efforts following World Wars I and II to bring to justice those who violated international law.

He also provides incisive accounts of some of the darkest episodes in recent world history, covering violations of human rights law in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, Guatemala, the Iran-Iraq war, Korea, Tibet, and many other contexts. With valuable insights into some of the most vexing issues of today – including controversial US efforts to bring alleged terrorists to justice at Guantánamo Bay, and the challenges facing the International Criminal Court – this is an essential work for understanding humankind’s long and often troubled history.

Standing on Polish soil is to stand upon the fertile ground of memory. Poles see themselves as a people who have struggled to maintain their national identity amidst occupation and oppression. The Polish past is negotiated on a daily basis between the generations of Poles who lived (or grew up) during World War II, those who lived during the Soviet regime, and those who have come of age after the fall of Communism. All three of these groups have grown up with the narrative of Poles as rescuers, resisters and martyrs. This idea was shaped during the Soviet years and reinforced through Polish popular culture.

Immediately after World War II Polish cinema began this narrative with the first film to deal with Auschwitz, Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stop (Ostani etap), 1948. Jakubowska, who wrote and directed the film, was a former inmate of the camp. Filmed in Auschwitz, the narrative was crafted to be a story of resistance and solidarity of the inmates against Fascism. Jews were folded into a national victimhood. Jakubowska highlights this by equating the Jewish prisoners and the Polish prisoners in the struggle against the Nazis – the Jews are not singled out as the intended targets of mass extermination. Communism, with Stalin at its helm, is the hero of the film and reinforces the Soviet – created narrative about Poles as victims and martyrs during World War II.

The Polish film Aftermath (Pokłosie) fundamentally challenges this narrative. And the reaction to the film is a prime example of the fragility of Holocaust memory in Poland. Aftermath is based on Jan Gross’s book Neighbors. Neighbors received much attention in Poland when it was released in 2001, as it exposed a horrible truth about the actions of the Poles against their Jewish neighbors in the town of Jedwabne. After years of believing the Nazis were responsible for the murder of the town’s Jews it was brought to light by Gross that, in fact, it was the Polish neighbors who committed the murder. Gross’s revelation caused much pain amongst the Polish people, as it forced them to take a closer look at their historic narrative and understand their role in the destruction of Polish Jewry.

Aftermath continues what Gross started. Over seven years in the making, it is not a Holocaust film; it is a film about the paving over of history, of hiding an uncomfortable truth about a past in anarrative that absolves the witnesses of the crime they helped to commit or of choosing to remain silent in the face of this crime.

This film touched a nerve with Polish nationalists and right-wing political factions, as well as the general public, who labeled the film anti-Polish. They prompted a media barrage of anti-semitic rhetoric and propaganda against it’s director, Wladyslaw Pasikowoki, and one of the lead actors, Maciej Stuhr, equating his role of one of the brothers trying to uncover the past to betraying Polish nationalistic honor. Immediately after the release of the film mainstream Polish weeklies ran covers of Stuhr, including one with a Star of David scrawled across his face, calling him “a Jew.”

This is not the first time a film has angered the Polish populace. In 1985, Claude Lanzmann’s SHOAH was televised on Polish TV to scathing reviews, as it was criticized for making Poles look ignorant, cruel and willing accomplices to the Nazis. While it is not uncommon in European Holocaust film history that locals resent outside filmmakers telling them how to remember their past, Aftermath is a Polish film made about Poles for Poles. There are no Jews in the film; instead the film focuses on two Polish brothers who unwittingly discover the truth of what happened to the Jews that lived in their town, which causes much discontent among their fellow Polish neighbors.

No film about the Holocaust or the actions of Poles towards Jews during the war will bring about a change in the memories that have been crafted over time. More careful and deliberate dialogues will need to take place, but, as has been shown many times over, it is often popular culture that directs the discussion towards exploring history and its unfolding through memory narratives. If Aftermath is allowed to be seen by Poles once the initial reaction has played out, it could be used as a catalyst for examination and opening a productive and process of self-awareness and responsibility.

The European Studies Consortium, the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Institute for Global Studies, the Center for Jewish Studies, the Department of French & Italian, the Center for Austrian Studies and the Film Society of Mpls/St. Paul will present the Twin Cities premiere of Aftermath at the International Film Festival on April 10 & 16, 2014.

Jodi Elowitz is the Outreach Coordinator for CHGS and the Program Coordinator for the European Studies Consortium. Elowitz is currently working on Holocaust memory in Poland and artistic representation of the Holocaust in animated short films.  

Last week CHGS and several other centers and departments at the University of Minnesota voiced their concern and condemnation regarding a Nazi-themed dinner that took place in the Minneapolis restaurant Gasthof zur Gemütlichkeit. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC) and the Minnesota Rabbinical Association (MRA), also responded to this disturbing event and sent a public letter to the restaurant’s owner.

The news and photographs of the gathering – Nazi flags and men clad in SS and Wehrmacht uniforms – were shocking. But even more worrying was to discover how many people, who posted their comments on the Star Tribune website or emailed and voice-mailed the Center, were ready to defend the Nazi re-enactors and the restaurant that hosted the party. Their response reveals an astounding lack of common sense and a failure to understand the gravity of the case.

How “innocent” was this re-enactment? Were the participants and the restaurant owner really unaware of the implications and effects of the symbols they were displaying? One hopes that all of Gasthof’s cards will soon be on the table.

• Star Tribune Commentary: Minneapolis group ‘plays’ Nazi: Sorry, it’s no trifle

• Jewish Community Relations Council: Letter to owner of Gasthof

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. 

Genocide: A Reader

By Jens Meierhenrich

Genocide is a phenomenon that continues to confound scholars, practitioners, and general readers. Notwithstanding the carnage of the twentieth century, our understanding of genocide remains partial. Disciplinary boundaries have inhibited integrative studies and popular, moralizing accounts have hindered comprehension by advancing simple truths in an area where none are to be had.

Genocide: A Reader lays the foundations for an improved understanding of genocide. With the help of 150 essential contributions, Jens Meierhenrich provides a unique introduction to the myriad dimensions of genocide and to the breadth and range of critical thinking that exists concerning it. This innovative anthology offers genre-defining as well as genre-bending selections from diverse disciplines in law, the social sciences, and the humanities as well as from other fields. A wide-ranging introductory chapter on the study and history of genocide accompanies the carefully curated and annotated collection.

In the past month two significant events occurred in two of Africa’s on-going conflicts. The National Transitional council members in Central Africa Republic elected former Bangui (the nation’s capital) mayor, Catherine Samba-Panza as its new interim president and South Sudan signed a ceasefire between Kiir and Machar. Kiir is the president of South Sudan and Machar is his immediate former vice-president and the de facto rebel leader.

Ordinarily this would be good news, not this time however. What we have instead seen in CAR is an increase in hostilities between the Muslim and Christian Militias , the killing of a politician who spoke out against the violence, and the threatening of Catherine Samba-Panza by self-proclaimed anti balaka leader Richard Bejouane. Peter Bouckart, of Human Rights Watch, has done a wonderful job of highlighting the ever-shifting loyalties of the Chadian troops, a lynching by CAR military and claims of a failure by the French military to carry out its mandate to protect the civilian population.

In south Sudan, barely 24 hours after the peace agreement was signed clashes across South Sudan with both government and rebel leaders accusing the other of breaking the truce. The sticking point appears to be the refusal by the Kiir government to release political prisoners. The situation is complicated by the claims that rebel forces have committed atrocities against some of the populace.  As if all this is not complex enough, Uganda has refused to withdraw its troops sent to help the Kiir government.

One would have assumed that the election of a new interim president in CAR and the signing of a peace deal in South Sudan would do the trick. Unfortunately, both of these are often a means to an end and not an end in and of themselves. Foreign intervention has been shown to not be the panacea for ending intrastate conflict not just in South Sudan and CAR but also other conflicts like the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Assumptions that power-sharing deals (like the one crafted by Koffi Annan in Kenya) are the best solution have also been shown to be a mixed bag. If Rwanda, Darfur, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe and Mozambique tell us anything, it’s that power sharing agreements are fragile at best and catalysts for future violence at worst. Peace talks need to be understood as stopgap measures and the international community has to  exert more pressure on the leaders to ensure a resolution occurs in a timely fashion; instead of assuming that the parties at conflict are altruistic and wish to maximize the welfare of the nation as a whole. As CAR and South Sudancontinue to show us leaders sometimes do not have the political and institutional capabilities to maximize the nation’s welfare.

So how do conflicts end? Unfortunately there is not clear-cut answer to this question. The case of CAR provides a counter narrative to the assumption that all we need is the presence of peacekeepers and South Sudan highlights the dangers of weak and non-existent political institutions that are inclusionary and transparent. There is no magic drug in the pursuit to end these conflicts. In my previous post I called for a rolling of sleeves by the international community. What we have mostly received is moral outrage instead of actual proposals to solve the long-term problems in both these countries. It is within this context, one of multiple actors and issues and of near lack of functioning institutions that the setbacks in CAR and South Sudan should be understood. Any proposals must contain processes for structural changes and be cognizant these changes have to remedy the situation while also chart a way forward.

Wahutu Siguru is the 2013 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.

Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy

by Rebecca Clifford

Commemorating the Holocaust: The Dilemmas of Remembrance in France and Italy reveals how and why the Holocaust came to play a prominent role in French and Italian political culture in the period after the end of the Cold War. By charting the development of official, national Holocaust commemorations in France and Italy, Rebecca Clifford explains why the wartime persecution of Jews, a topic ignored or marginalized in political discourse through much of the Cold War period, came to be a subject of intense and often controversial debate in the 1990s and 2000s.
How and why were official Holocaust commemorations created? Why did the drive for states to “remember” their roles in the persecution of Jewish populations accelerate only after the collapse of the Cold War? Who pressed for these commemorations, and what motivated their activism? To what extent was the discourse surrounding national Holocaust commemorations really about the genocide at all?

Commemorating the Holocaust explores these key questions, challenging commonly-held assumptions about the origins of and players involved in the creation of Holocaust memorial days. Clifford draws conclusions that shed light both on the state of Holocaust memory in France and Italy, and more broadly on the collective memory of World War II in contemporary Europe.

Noemi Schory, a documentary film director and producer, was the Schusterman Visiting Artist in Residence at the Center for Jewish Studies 2013 Fall Semester. Schory taught The Holocaust in Film: Recent Israeli and German Documentaries Compared and spoke at various film screenings and events on campus and in the community. Schory produced the award-winning documentary film “A Film Unfinished” about the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, which was screened by CHGS on November 12th, 2013 at the St. Anthony Main Theatre.

How does film play a role in shaping Holocaust memory?
Film, fiction or documentary, has become the most important building block of memory-of historic knowledge. The images remain etched in our minds regardless of their veracity, their origins. The little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto, the emaciated prisoners near the barbed wire in Buchenwald (Margaret Bourke White) are iconic representations universally known.  Fifty percent of all West German citizens watched the NBC mini series “Holocaust” in 1979 that was criticized by Elie Wiesel for being a soap opera. Today, the broadcast is still considered to have marked an absolute watershed in coping with Holocaust memory in Germany. We are now entering a phase without witnesses, where all that will be left are the images, and our common memory will be shaped exclusively by them and by the films, which will withstand the erosion induced by time. 

Are there still limits of representation in Holocaust film?
The limits to representation start from what doesn’t exist. There are no visual documents of the mass, industrialized extermination. It seems that the visual archives are endless; there are only two films, which show the deportation trains and none that show the reality of inside the trains. “The Auschwitz Album,” shot by SS photographers, captures the arrival of deportees from Hungary and some images of the selection, but there are no known images of the daily life of the prisoners in the camps. There is or ought to be self-imposed limit on the use and repeated use of atrocity images(mostly shot after the liberation of the camps), which run the risk of desensitizing the viewer and humiliating the victims (exposing them once more). Repeated use also has the potential of turning the viewers off from dealing with the Holocaust.

How can (especially documentary) films be used for teaching the Holocaust? At what age would you recommend that?
Documentary films are not synonymous with factual representation; they often deal with memory, with the aftermath. Recognizable, three-dimensional accounts of daily life, of coping and the struggle to survive, can contribute to the emotional understanding. One of the neglected fields (partly because of scarcity of visual material) is the life before the Holocaust. I regard understanding the rich fabric of Jewish life in Europe (which was almost entirely wiped out), as of utmost importance but too little touched upon. We are used to see very old survivors telling their memories and are not aware that the experiences they talk about happened to them when they were young, sometimes very young. In a series of short films, which I recently directed, based on diaries, wills and other writings of victims, I insisted on finding voices of the same age as the writers of those documents. I think this brings home, on an emotional level, the enormity of dilemmas, fears and choices. The issue of age is one of the toughest ones to which I have no answer. In Israel since Holocaust Remembrance Day is a national day of commemoration marked by sirens and silence, children are exposed to it from a very young age, often leaving deep scars on their psyches or turning them off from dealing with it.I think that the teaching and for that matter Holocaust remembrance ought to lead to universal, humanistic values and not be its own aim.

How would you define the new/third generation of Israeli films about the Holocaust?
I think that in Israel (as elsewhere) the third generation moves in a more reflective and interpretative direction. The realistic testimonies have been recorded-the survivors are passing away. Emotionally, the third generation moves further away, towards more philosophical interpretations. “A Film Unfinished,”directed by a young director, Yael Hersonski, and produced by me, is an example for that, and so is “Numbered.” Animated films, video art probing the limit of true and false memory – I believe that this is the direction for the future.

Verena Stern is the 2013/2014 BMWF Doctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Austrian Studies/University of Minnesota and a doctoral candidate at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. She is writing her dissertation on migration of asylum seekers from Somalia to the European Union. Stern´s research interests include Human Rights and transnational migration.