Paris: 19th Anniversary Ceremony in Memory of the Rwandan Genocide
April 15, 2013
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Dr. Shimon Samuels
Genocide Avenue is marked with many chronological signposts and should provide a solidarity platform for all massacred peoples. Each signpost exposes the emptiness of such expressions as “Never Again”. But solidarity among the victims of genocides can act as a lever against the identity theft of the narratives of victim peoples’, in other words, to contain the subsequent denial, banalization and trivialization common to all victimologies. Simon Wiesenthal, in 1998 – the UN “Year of Tolerance” – was Austria’s representative at the 50th General Assembly. There, he spoke out on Srebenica and Rwanda, calling for the prosecution of the perpetrators In Kigali, in 1996, I sat among an intergenerational gathering of Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian and Tutsi survivors in a shared circle of communion. Last week marked the 25th anniversary of Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds of Halabja – over 5,000 dead and 27,000 wounded in one day. Speaking to Kurdish television on a preparatory visit, I said, “As a Jew, once exiled from the Land of Israel to Babylon, here, a few kilometers from the border of today’s Iran, we wrote a book called the Talmud, which states, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be? But if I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, then when?’” We are here for you, just as I believe you will be there for us. I can never forget the Tutsi hecatomb of over 20,000 corpses of aged, adults and children in the open air at Morombi. Halabja, Morombi, or a twenty-minute drive from here, Drancy, a way station to Auschwitz for French Jews. These today are monuments, signposts on the Avenue of Genocide that must serve as warnings, not as precedents. |
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