Holocaust Remembrance Day in Lithuania, a day not long ago ostensibly of commemoration and atonement in the country where the highest rate of extermination was achieved in the whole of Nazi occupied Europe and yet not one word of remembrance or apology. Unsurprising perhaps in a country that has worked so hard to rehabilitate its wartime Quisling leader's memory and likely the only country in the European Union where its possible to see displays of Nazi collaborationist paramilitaries and militias that took part in the pogroms, in pride of place in the national war museum. But then Turkey still denies the Armenian Genocide, as the Kurds continue to deny their complicity in butchering Armenians, though they would later face genocide themselves under Saddam Hussein's tender mercies in Nothern Iraq. For the first time local commanders implicated in genocide in both Guatemala and Bangladesh are facing trial, but the Americans and Israelis who played a vital role in the butchery in Central America as military& intelligence advisers and arms suppliers or the Pakistanis who bear most of the blame for the butchery in then both West and East Pakistan, are not. Twenty years after Rwanda, not a single prosecution for the French and Israeli arms dealers who were supplying weapons to Kigali well after the killing started. Equally, the critical British, American and Australian, intelligence, military and material/logistical support for the Genocide in Indonesia in 1965/66 that left 500,000 to 2000,000 dead following Suharto's coup and later in the invasion of East Timor which claimed some 250,000 dead or one third of the population in 1975 has never been put on trial. If we look far earlier to the American subjugation of the Philippines, after the defeat of Spain, American schoolchildren are not taught that two million civilians were killed during the occupation. Italy has also never atoned for it's genocide during the conquest of Libya in the early 20th Century. Russia's modern war in the Caucasus, another genocide, has barely been acknowledged as such and the Kremlin will likely never be held accountable. Slow burning Genocides in South Kordofan and Darfur continue not just through violence, but also hunger, disease, neglect and political obfuscation. The UN, the AU, and the Arab League do little and say with a straight face peace has more or less returned. How many Amerindians have died in the Amazon basin due to encroaching modernity and all its kindnesses its hard to say, but its not difficult to correctly also call it a genocide in the making, the last gasp in the genocide against indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, since Columbus. Thus quickly listed here are genocides and genocidal crimes or assistance to genocide committed by Christians, Muslims, Jews and Buddhists in the last hundred years, more or less. Do we remember? Quite selectively it would seem. Serbia at long last has apologized for the genocidal liquidation of 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 and both Bosnian Serb Leader Radovan Karadzic and his top army general, Ratko Mladic are both in the dock at the International Criminal Court for the host of war crimes they perpetrated during the war in Former Yugoslavia, a war which introduced the term “ethnic cleansing" in the lexicon of warfare. And yet thousands demonstrated against Serbia's President Timoslav Nikolic's apology and many other Serbian Nationalists insist Srebrenica was a manufactured hoax. Neo-Nazis and Ultra-Nationalists are on the march across Europe with equal hatred for Jews, Muslims, Roma, people of color and foreigners in general. Do we imagine that because their clothes and their slogans have changed that they have changed their purpose? Buddhist violence against the Rohingya minority Muslim population in Myanmar looks just like a pogrom and now famine is closer too. How many will die befor the ethnic killing qualifies as genocide? No intervention to stop the killing in Myanmar is even remotely on the horizon. On trial for the Cambodian genocide, 30 years after the fact, three of its masterminds insist on their innocence. And though they fight a monstrous regime, when the predominantly Sunni rebels topple Bashar al Assad, will they unleash their vengeance on the Alawites as some are demanding and kill them en masse? More than half a century after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, it is all with us still, not only the denials, the obfuscation of the truth when humanity commits mass murder of whole peoples simply because they are the wrong people, different people, but also the homicidal intent and the deeds themselves, our capacity for barbarism, our appetite for slaughter remains. “The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread. When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!" When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer." –Bertol Brecht ** Chris Kline is the Deputy Editor for Dante Magazine BN
