April is Genocide Awareness Month:
In the Face of Ongoing and Unacknowledged Genocides, What Does this April Mean?

Listen to Dr. Watenpaugh talk about Genocide Awareness Month on CapRadio.

It’s a tough juxtaposition.

April in Northern California is our most beautiful month. The poppies are in bloom. The vineyards are turning green. Students spread blankets on the Quad and study and sleep under a warming Sun. We experience Aprils, especially this April, as a time of renewal and rebirth.

Etched into this month’s calendar, though, are three official and internationally recognized days of remembrance for the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide and the Rwandan Genocide.  April is associated as well, with critical moments in the history other genocides, including those in Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and against the Kurds of Iraq.

This is why April has been set aside by survivor communities, scholars and state legislatures, including California’s, as the month when we remember past genocides and recommit to preventing genocide in the future.  It is a time for remembering and a time to consider what ongoing genocides in China and Burma mean for us now. It is a time of reckoning as the as-yet fully recognized genocides against the native peoples of North America demand our continued attention.

Days of Remembrance

This year, the first of these was the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Rwandan Genocide (April 7.) In Rwanda, it is also called, Kwibuka, the day to “remember,” and is followed by a period of official mourning.  The day recalls the aftermath of the assassination of Rwanda’s president in 1994, which set in motion a pre-planned effort by radicalized members of the Hutu majority to destroy the Tutsi minoritized ethnic group.  Over the next 100 days, nearly a million Rwandans would be murdered and half a million women subjected to rape. 

The second is Yom HaShoah (April 9 or 27 Nishan in the Hebrew calendar.) In part, the day recalls the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (April 19, 1943), when Polish Jews fought back against Nazi efforts to transport them to concentration camps. It was the most significant act of Jewish resistance during World War II. “We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths,” Mark Edelman (1919-2009), one of the few surviving leaders of the uprising recalled.  In Israel the day is marked by a two-minute moment of silence and the later in the evening, the recitation of the mourners Kaddish to remember the six million murdered.

The third is Armenian Genocide Memorial Day (April 24.) The day remembers the night when the Ottoman Empire, rounded up and, to borrow a word from the history of Human Rights in Latin America, “disappeared” over 250 Armenian journalists, lawyers, politicians, priests, and poets.  It was an act calculated to destroy the Armenian community’s leadership and to make the deportations and mass slaughter that would follow easier.  By 1922 1.5 million Armenians had been killed and those who had survived were living in refugee camps or dispersed across the globe. On that day, Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, comes to a halt, and its people solemnly proceed to a memorial called Tsitsernakaberd atop a nearby hill to place flowers within.  Armenians around the world attend church services and gather with family. 

UC Davis and Genocide Scholarship

UC Davis is home to several leading scholars of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, including (but certainly not limited to), David Biale, Susan Miller, Diane Wolf, Sven Erik-Rose, Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh and myself.  H. Watenpaugh’s most recent book The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript, from Genocide to Justice (2019) has won several prizes and has pioneered the study of the role of the destruction of art and culture during genocide.  My own work in the multiple-award-winning, Bread from Stone: The Middle East and Making of Modern Humanitarianism examines the origins of modern humanitarianism in the international humanitarian response to the Armenian Genocide.

UC Davis is also committed to excellence in undergraduate teaching and learning about genocide. Several hundred students a year study the Holocaust in courses offered by History, Sociology, German and Jewish Studies.  Most students minoring in Human Rights Studies take “Genocide,” a course I teach, and at over 100 students a year,  it is the largest genocide course in California.

I began to teach that course about 20 years ago and in the aftermath of what I thought would be the last genocides, those in Bosnia and Rwanda.  It was a time of great optimism. Those who had committed genocide were being brought to justice at the International Criminal Court, and the US, which had refused to ratify the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, had finally done so. 

I was wrong: the genocides in Darfur, and of the Rohingya, the Neur, Christians, Yazidis and Kurds in Iraq and Syria, and Muslim Uyghurs followed.

Yet there has been important changes in scholarship on genocide over that time. In the last two decades  sexual and gender-based violence became an element of study of genocide, both as a historical phenomenon and a basis for criminal prosecutions — a major contribution to which was made by UC Davis Law Professor Lisa Pruitt,  Equally, the destruction of indigenous communities by European colonialism, especially in settler colonial states like the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia has come into focus as genocide and not the benign after effects of disease or "virgin soil." I find that my students increasingly want to learn more about genocide in California.

Genocide as a Challenge in the Now

The US Department of State has found that genocide is occurring in China, and is directed against an ethnic and religious minority people, the Uyghurs.  As Nicholas Kristoff wrote recently in a column exploring how, short of boycott, the world community could use the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics to call China to account, notes “repression in Xinjiang doesn’t qualify as genocide as the term is normally used, but it does meet the definition in the international convention.”  He wants athletes and companies to use the platform of the Olympics to call out China’s human rights abuses.

It's the fact of Genocide in China that poses a question for us at UC Davis.  In the past, the UC regents have agreed to divest from companies doing business in states, like Sudan, found to be committing genocide by the US Department of State.

How is this different? How can we leverage our engagement with China? Our university has broad and important academic and agricultural links to that country. Is it ethical for the university to continue to do business as usual with China when we know what the full measure of the genocide there is?

What kinds of sacrifices are we prepared to make in the face of that certainty?

On June 3, 2021 UC Davis Human Rights Studies will host the first annual Dr. Shant and Robin Garabedian Lecture on Genocide and Mass Atrocity and feature noted writer and journalist Mark Arax.