Genocide - Will we learn from the mistakes of the past

By Mark Gudgel

I am in an airport in New Jersey, by accident. Accidents like that can happen in the United States, much more so than they can happen in other places, I am told. It’s called Newark, after the city it’s in, after the city the people came from hundreds of years ago, I’m guessing. It’s shiny; the floor squeaks under my feet as I approach the terminal, and there is enough neon lighting there to open a casino. I am flying to Seattle to coach basketball, and I am waiting for my flight. I acknowledge that I am very blessed. I sit down to have a beer in a dimly lit airport pub; it costs eight dollars, but that doesn’t improve its taste. The pale woman next to me, perched awkwardly on her stool, is from New Jersey, the first and, of yet, the only state to have mandated “Holocaust education” in the state school’s curriculum. I hear that Indiana is working on it. I have mixed feelings about that, but anyway, about the pale woman next to me. She has long, reddish hair, and her name is Michelle. Turning in her direction, I ask if she is familiar with “Darfur,” and before you know it, I have repeated the word four times, coupled it with “Sudan,” and finally “Africa” and “genocide.” No good. She is interested, and literally takes notes on her napkin as I explain. I tell her that Darfur is the western region of the African nation of Sudan. I tell her that since 2003, nearly half a million people have been murdered there and over two million have been displaced and forced to leave their homes and move to IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps in neighboring Chad. I tell her that those who terrorize and murder these people are a combination force of Janjaweed militias and strategic attacks by the government of Sudan in Khartoum, ruled by a military dictator, Omar Bashir, since 1989. I tell her that Janjaweed is a combination of Arab words and that it means “devil on horseback.” I tell her that these militias castrate and murder the men of Darfur, while choosing to rape the women. I tell her that the Janjaweed raze entire cities to the ground and that they poison the wells and scorch the earth, leaving the homeland of the people of Darfur uninhabitable. I tell her that the Janjaweed directly and clearly profess to being sponsored and paid by the government in Khartoum, by Omar Bashir and his people. I tell her that this is illegal under the Geneva conventions and the genocide acts passed after the Second World War and the Holocaust, and that we are obligated to act. I tell her that much of the world, including the United States, still does business with Sudan, though most notably China, where the world will gather soon to play silly games and ignore the needs of the world. Michelle asks what books I would recommend to her and I oblige her with a short list. Her flight is called; she goes away.

* * *

During the Great War, the First World War, while America and her allies were busy in the European theater defeating Germany first on the battlefield and later through brutal and vindictive legislation, the Ottomon Empire, now known as Turkey, was equally busy with the massacre of Armenian men, women and children. The Armenian genocide was the first such atrocity of the 20th century, and it went largely unnoticed due to the preoccupation of the world’s most advanced countries with successfully drawing the War to End All Wars to a satisfactory close. Surely that was the reason that nobody noticed, and nobody seemed to care.

Nearly a century later, a student at Lincoln High School picks up a copy of Adam Bagdasarian’s “Forgotten Fire,” a true account of the genocide in Armenia. At the same time, a Congressional committee in Washington passes a formal act of acknowledgment that the systematic massacre of 1.5 million human beings during the First World War does in fact meet the legal definition of genocide. As a result, Turkey pulls their ambassador from the United States, refusing even now to acknowledge this most shameful aspect of their great history. The student makes the connection between past and present, finishes the book, and in his written reaction asks the tormented question that has been itching him for weeks: “What the Hell is our problem?” He is referring to the world, and he is acknowledging, in some small way, his piece of responsibility. In this sense, he may be the most articulate person to have addressed the topic in decades.

* * *

The National Socialist German Worker’s Party fast pursued a rigorous “policy of emigration” in an attempt to purge their rapidly expanding living space of the “Jewish threat.” At Evian, nation after nation expressed great concern for Germany’s anti-Semitic pogroms and professed great sadness at their “lack of space” to take in Jewish refugees. The Saint Louis, a passenger ship, made the trans-Atlantic journey laden with Jewish refugees shortly thereafter. Refused by Cuba, then by the United States, it returned to German-occupied Europe where its passengers fled to Allied nations, all but one of which quickly became the property of the Third Reich. In the end, six million Jews and five and a half million more of their fellow human beings became the victims of the Nazi killing machine. The world soon learned, and officially expressed its remorse: “Never again.”

A student at Lincoln Northstar stares out the window at “the swamp,” and then across the road at the empty fields and the expansive, rolling plains that make up most of Nebraska. She remembers the family vacation to Yellowstone last summer, and the vast, virtually uninhabited expanses of land that compose the majority of the sparsely populated Midwest of America that she and her family drove through on the way there. She puts down her copy of “Voyage of the Damned,” the definitive work on the Saint Louis. Surely there was room for those poor people, somewhere out there on the plains? She writes in her journal that she’d gladly share her bedroom with any of those poor little girls on that ship, and that night, after practice, she cries herself to sleep.

* * *

Jeanne takes Michelle’s place at the eight-dollar-per-beer bar. She has bleached-blonde hair, puffy red lips and, behind them, a kind smile. She must be in her 50s. She is divorced after 35 years. The description she offers of her ex-husband and why she left him reminds me somewhat of myself, but I decide not to mention it. She orders a seltzer water, and says that she thinks I have “a cute nose.” I don’t. Jeanne is eager to talk about Darfur, and she is educated on the subject, though to be honest she would rather talk about this morning’s events, the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto. I watched the news all morning from the Staten Island Hotel, eating soggy eggs and trying to decide how much I thought that woman mattered in the proverbial big scheme of things. And I am sick of what people have to say about her death. The word “tragic” has lost its meaning at this point. Still, I oblige Jeanne, who carries on about Benazir Bhutto and what a setback this is for democracy in … where was it again? “One of those countries over there.” In time, we talk also about Darfur. We don’t really get anywhere, but at least she knows where it is.

* * *

“I hid in the woods and watched my uncle get skinned alive in front of me. I was six or seven at the time.” This was my first experience with a survivor from Bosnia. He was my student; I was supposed to be teaching him. What can a person like me teach someone who has already lived so many lives, who has already had and lost more than I may ever know? A panel of students from the former Yugoslavia graciously oblige me every term and speak to my Literature of the Holocaust classes. They are jokesters, and most of my students know them by face and reputation, if not personally. Together they sit in three green plastic chairs facing the class, speaking knowledgeably about the conflict that has left their homes and some of their families in shambles, the conflict that America refused for so long even to try to end. They acknowledge that their lives must not have been worth saving in the eyes of former President Clinton. They know that they are lucky now to be alive. And yet they love this country. They speak openly of their appreciation for their many freedoms, their civil rights, their safety. The fact that our streets and soccer fields are not riddled with mines. They tell my students about the five-year wait they spent in Germany and the ten more they spent becoming “citizens.” Most of my students and I were born that way; we didn’t have to fill out an application. They have cars, jobs, books, clothes. They lead normal lives. Very few of the people with whom they share the halls would ever suspect that behind their boyish smiles and playful gestures are souls that have experienced more want and pain and torment than most Americans ever will. So they sit there, bravely, and they tell us. We are humbled, and we appreciate their candor. The bell rings and off we go, back to our normal, everyday lives. Back to our safety. Back to our families and our homes.

* * *

Kathi’s son is in the United States Army. She is in her forties, I guess, with bobbed hair like my grandmother had. She replaced Jeanne, and she reminds me that I have been waiting in this airport entirely too long and that eight-dollar beers are a stupid way to pass the time. Kathi’s son is stationed in Alaska, and she visited him recently. She is proud of him, and she is on her way home.

Has she heard of Darfur? Again I find myself repeating the word over and over, as though the repetition will somehow trigger some deep-seated memory that is important yet buried. “Darfur,” I say with importance. “Dar-foor.” “Dar-four.” “Dar-4.” Darfur. No amount of repetition can assign importance to a word that you have never heard. She is mildly interested, but has to leave soon. I order another beer.

* * *

“You ever seen ‘Hotel Rwanda’?” a student at Lincoln Southeast High School asks his Holocaust Literature teacher.

“Yes,” responds the teacher solemnly.

“That stuff really happened?” asks the student, looking at the floor.

“Yes,” responds the teacher solemnly. “Yes, it did.”

“Man, I was like two,” replies the student, looking up into his teacher’s eyes.

“I was like 35,” says his teacher. They share a tear, and an understanding.

* * *

George is slightly overweight and speaks mostly in Spanish. He smells better than the airport, something like hair gel, and he has shaved within a couple of days, but his brown eyes are crossed at a peculiar angle and his sentences are incomplete, often completely unintelligible. His speech is slower than that of most Americans, as though he is choosing the words with which he composes his half-sentences with great care. He has wavy dark hair, thick-rimmed glasses and reminds me a little bit of Bill Richardson, a little bit of George Lopez. My more decent students would say that George “isn’t all there.” My more typical ones would say that he’s retarded, and then I would glare at them and give them detention. After school in room B201, I would speak to them at length about the power of language and how much words, even jokes, can damage and hurt people, all the while thinking to myself that courtesy may save feelings but it doesn’t seem to save very many lives. George is kneeling at my side as I wait in New Jersey to board Alaska Airlines. I’ve left the bar, the one with the eight-dollar beers, and found my way to the faux leather chairs in the waiting area. George had apparently been waiting for me there. He tells me that he loves me. I understand only enough Spanish to know that he is trying to speak it, and to tell him that I do not speak it myself. “No hablo Español,” I say. It probably doesn’t matter much; incoherence is a language unto itself. In the background, the Christian pop artist Matt Kearney is singing “it’s undeniable, how brilliant you are.” I think to myself that maybe this situation, in this airport in America with good-smelling, incoherent George who loves me, helps me to understand Darfur a little better. I tell George that God loves him, and he stares back at me through his thick-rimmed glasses with his eyes still crossed at that peculiar angle. He hugs me goodbye, and I board my flight. On my way, as the well-armed airport security guard spots George and starts pointedly in his direction, he calls to me one last time, “I love you”; and I realize with a deep sigh that he is as sincere as anyone who as ever spoken those words to me, and I wonder how many people have never heard those words at all.

* * *

Jen Marlowe arrived by plane, on her way from Chicago, headed back home to Seattle. Students at Lincoln Southwest had helped to author the curriculum for her book, “Darfur Diaries.” Students from Adams, from Lincoln Northstar, and from Lincoln Southeast joined in at the assembly, where she showed clips from her documentary film and fielded questions about the ongoing crises ravaging the western region of Sudan. There was no end to student inquiry.

“What did you see when you were there?”

“How many people have died?”

“When did this begin?”

“What does that stand for?”

“Who is killing who, and why?”

“What do you mean they use rape as a weapon?”

“How many millions displaced?”

“Why aren’t we doing anything?”

“What can we do to help?”

Ninety minutes isn’t nearly enough. Young people are angry. They are indignant. Some of them are disheartened. Others leave empowered, ready to take on anyone who stands between them and an end to the conflict in Darfur. They are ready to take the action that their parents refuse to take, and they are ready to do it now, at this very moment. They lack resources, finances, even the right to vote. They make up for it with vigor and youthful idealism, with ambition and compassion for their fellow human beings. They make up for it with an empathy seemingly unbeknownst to everyone who ever wielded power in this world. They make up for it by being the first generation to realize collectively that these are not “their problems,” “foreign problems,” “poor problems” or “African problems,” but human problems, in which each of us has a part, in which each of us bears great responsibility.

Across the plains of Nebraska, like in so many other places, haunting promises of “never again” still drift upon the winds. In Darfur, however, these empty promises cannot be heard above the cry of a mother who has lost her son, over the cries of those who have lost their homes and lives to senseless, government-sanctioned murder. They cry out to those who can help them, they cry out to the western world, as we turn our indifferent backs upon them yet again. In time, perhaps, an old man’s hearing can grow poor. But young people today hear these cries loud and clear. And maybe, just maybe, they are the first generation that will truly understand that unless they take the action that their predecessors have failed to take, then these tortured, haunting pleas for help will never go away.

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