Ecumenical group wants to mobilize Christians to abolish genocide

Posted: 11/23/07

Ecumenical group wants to mobilize
Christians to abolish genocide

By Hannah Elliott

Associated Baptist Press

NEW YORK (ABP)—Leaders from a number of Christian traditions met in New York recently in an attempt to mobilize Christians to “reflect on their responsibility in the face of genocide.”

Armenian, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian representatives met on the 69th anniversary of Krystalnacht, the 1938 attack on Jews and their property in Nazi Germany. The Nov. 9 panel was designed to be a “point of departure” on which other Christian groups could model similar meetings, organizers said.

image_pdfimage_print

Posted: 11/23/07

Ecumenical group wants to mobilize
Christians to abolish genocide

By Hannah Elliott

Associated Baptist Press

NEW YORK (ABP)—Leaders from a number of Christian traditions met in New York recently in an attempt to mobilize Christians to “reflect on their responsibility in the face of genocide.”

Armenian, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian representatives met on the 69th anniversary of Krystalnacht, the 1938 attack on Jews and their property in Nazi Germany. The Nov. 9 panel was designed to be a “point of departure” on which other Christian groups could model similar meetings, organizers said.

Calling the remembrance a “heavy burden from which we must find the will and the determination to bring about a future without genocide,” Vicken Aykazian, president of the National Council of Churches USA, said the united front encouraged him.

“The new alliance to abolish genocide will serve as a bright light in the defense of human rights and as a defense of the truth,” he said in his opening remarks.

“Together we stand united and speak with one voice. Together we will defeat the scourge of genocide and the ongoing consequences of genocide denial. Together we will create a genocide-free future.”

First coined in 1943 by the Polish-Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin, the term “genocide” means the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted its legal definition in 1948.

Lemkin had first published the word in 1933 to refer to the Assyrian massacres in Iraq and the slaughter of Armenians during World War I. He later used the term in 1944 with reference to countries occupied by the Nazis during World War II.

Since 1948, there have been at least 45 major genocides around the world, according to Gregory Stanton, founder and president of Genocide Watch.

“This problem really goes back to the beginning of human history,” he said. “It’s part of all our heritage. Americans have committed genocide against our own people, against our Native American population and also against African-Americans during the slave trade. We all are part of this problem.”

“The anti-slavery movement is really the model” for eliminating genocide, he continued. That effort took a century to accomplish, he said, “and it may take that long to abolish genocide in the world. But we must start, and we must start now.”

Juan Mendez, president of the International Center for Transitional Justice, said the United Nations uses four strategies when working in cases of genocide—protection from harm, humanitarian assistance, accountability for the crimes and peace negotiations.

Darfur—the site of conflict since 2003—has posed such an international conundrum because each of those four factors is viewed as a precondition for accomplishing the other three, when they should be acted upon simultaneously, Mendez said. Countries shouldn’t wait to send humanitarian aid until peace negotiations begin, he noted.

“You can’t always say peace trumps justice,” said Mendez, a human-rights lawyer who was tortured in an Argentinean prison for his work. “We owe it to ourselves to look for arrangements that may be more difficult because of the justice paradigm but may have (lasting results) for peace.

“Justice is punitive but it can always be restorative. It is what everybody in every culture understands to be the righting of wrongs.”

Although not the focal point of the discussion, Darfur was mentioned by several speakers. The region in western Sudan has been plagued by ethnic cleansing, political instability, famine and a murderous ideology of Arab supremacy.

Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2004, Colin Powell, the former U.S. Secretary of State, used the term “genocide” to refer to the situation in Darfur. But since then, no other permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has done the same.

“If we saw Darfur not in isolation but as a continuation of something that has been going since independence (in Africa) …, if we had focused on that to see Darfur in the proper context … and put the energy into finding a proper solution, we might have made some progress,” said Francis Deng, the U.N. special advisor for the prevention of genocide and mass atrocities.

Deng said in extreme cases of genocide, international bodies should “develop the capacities to intervene in a meaningful way.”

“I’m still inclined to build on the concept that these issues are in the first place the responsibilities of the (nations),” Deng said. But he later added that if people start dying in large numbers and local governments don’t do anything about it, the “world is not going to sit and just watch. They will find one way or another of intervening.”

Born and raised in traditional African religions, Deng attended a Catholic school in southern Sudan, but his siblings attended a Muslim school in the north. He later attended Khartoum University and Yale University, so he saw “from within (each of) those institutions how the other religions were perceived.”

Deng said religion can have a negative impact when religious identities become “conflictual.”

“If genocide has to do with the conflict of identities, we become zero-sum … because it becomes either you or me when it becomes extreme,” he said. “And, yet, religion has values that are truly universal across different religions.”

Milan Sturgis, a Serbian Orthodox priest and former officer for the U.S. Foreign Service in the Balkans, also spoke about the important role churches should play in combating genocide. Like in Sudan, religious identity was central to the conflict in Bosnia, he said.

During the Bosnian War in the 1990s, identity in Bosnia was derived from religion. Serbs were Orthodox. Croats were Roman Catholics. Bosnians were Muslim. And religion became a new dimension of statecraft, he said.

“Religion was perverted into identity, into political identity,” Sturgis said. “There’s no other way to say it. It was an absolute perversion of what religion is.”

He spoke from firsthand knowledge of genocide’s toll: Twelve of his Bosnian relatives were murdered during the conflict in 1991, he said.

At this point, Sturgis said he isn’t interested in laying blame. The fact is, many Serbian priests looked the other way while militias killed hundreds of people, he said.

“I think we need to be more focused on forecasting and prevention than on the laying of blame right now,” he said. “The facts speak for themselves. Some people did things that they probably regret. Some people were heroes.”

It’s easy for observers to point fingers and ask why members of the clergy didn’t do anything to stop the killing in Bosnia, but judgmental outsiders don’t have armed gangs barging in on them like those Serbian priests did, he said.

“On the national level, yes, there were some bishops in the Serbian Orthodox Church that did not speak out. And there were some bishops that did,” he said. “It’s a hard mirror to look in. To say, ‘Did we do enough? Did we do enough? Did we do the right thing?’”

Michael Kinnamon, for one, said the National Council of Churches has “not been sufficiently prophetic” and “too reactive to the world’s evil.” Genocide will continue to be a living concern for the organization, he said.

“We are called to love all those whom God the universal Creator loves, and therefore to hate all those things which threaten all those whom God loves, especially the ultimate crime of genocide,” he said.

The panel was organized by the National Council of Churches USA, Genocide Watch, the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, and the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University.



News of religion, faith, missions, Bible study and Christian ministry among Baptist churches, in Texas, the BGCT, the nation and around the world.


We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.

Send comments and feedback to Eric Black, our editor. For comments to be published, please specify “letter to the editor.” Maximum length for publication is 300 words.

More from Baptist Standard