One thing that immediatly comes to mind when walking these halls is the question of "how could this happen?" "Who could possibly perpetrate such horrific acts against other human beings and be able to look at themselves in the mirror the next day?" These and many other questions inevitably arise in any visit to a genocide museum, death camp, killing field, or mass gravesite. We asked these questions after World War II, Rwanda, Yugoslave, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, East Timor, and many other locations. There are always answers that one can find specific to the circumstances of these horrors but inevitably I suspect we always arrive at the overall common idea that human beings in all cultures carry with them the seeds for great achievment... as well as horrific depravity. I think its all too easy and lazy of us to simply dismiss war crimes, human rights violations, and genocidal campaigns to the unique byproducts of these horrible regimes but I think we do greater justice to genocide studies and international legal institutions if we devoted not only our efforts to the post-campaign, post-conflict application of justice.. but also to strategies and tools for prevention. The first step in doing this perhaps is coming to the realization that acts of genocide, war crimes, and human rights abuses are not anomalies of our contemporary era or byproducts of contemporary ideological movements but a human condition that must be addressed and dealt with both in terms of retributive victims' justice as well as preventative measures for denying regimes the ability to sacrifice human life for utopian dreams.
No comments:
Post a Comment