Why Do We Need a Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month?

[00:00:00] Never Again, Never Again, Never Again Never Again, Never Again Join Dr. Pius Kamal in the Coalition Against Global Genocide As we journey across the globe, taking a deep look at past, present in impending genocides and mass atrocities

[00:00:20] Listen to experts who discuss not only the history, but also the resiliency and mental health of people who are recovering from these heinous actions Learn how we can move from bystander to active involvement, calling out Genocidal Acts where you are

[00:00:36] Why Do We Need a Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month? Peter, Good Morning to you, Good Morning, Bias So we are very happy and honored to have you as our guests today And I would like to introduce you by saying that your PhD in Cultural and Applied Enthropology

[00:01:03] You are really retired professor from the University of Dendra, currently you are an affiliate faculty member at Regis University You are the co-founder of the Dendra Hospice and the Rocky Mountains of Iowa Center, you know, an author of all of the more than ten books

[00:01:23] You specialize in human rights and international development Now Peter, if in addition to what I just said this something you would like to add What do that be?

[00:01:35] Well, I'd like to add that it's been a privilege to be earlier a board member of the coalition against global genocide And then currently along with you and others, member of the advisory council of the coalition against global genocide's my privilege

[00:01:50] Absolutely, one thing I would like to take a moment to do is to give thanks to the President of the coalition against global genocide, Rose Duma, executive director, executive director Exactly, yeah, she has done a tremendous job and we all have a lot in sure

[00:02:12] So this is that you know, one hour for some kudos to her, kudos to Raj absolutely Exactly, so to continue, it probably is a genocide where we are in a month or three years

[00:02:25] As we know, can you say why you think it's April as opposed to the other months of the year? I sure can, Pious. Sadly, April has seen many of the worst genocides or portions of many of the worst genocides from the 20th And the 21st centuries

[00:02:46] If we go back to the earliest confirmed genocide of the 20th century, which is against the Herero and noma people of southern Africa, while it didn't start officially in April Things were well underway and becoming extraordinarily ominous by April of 1904.

[00:03:05] Of course that continued on through 1908 sadly, Germans against Herero and noma people If we look at the Armenian genocide, of course some people say there were two Armenian genocide in 1919-1922

[00:03:20] But if we look to the precursors of the Armenian genocide of 1922, those precursors were unfolding in April of that year If we go, of course to the Holocaust spanning 1941 through 1945, many of the most atrocious of had secured in April

[00:03:40] But another month or two as we know throughout that four year period If we go to the unfall campaign against the Kurds of 1987, many of the atrocities occurred in April of 1987

[00:03:56] If we go to the Rwanda genocide, of course of 1994, Tutsis and many moderate Hutus, hundreds of thousands were massacred in April of 1994 If we go pious to the Darfur genocide, which as you and I know, spend seemingly many years of officially beginning in 2003

[00:04:20] Some of the early atrocities in April in western Sudan And then I'll mention the Tigre, possible genocide in northern Ethiopia, dating back to 2021 and then on Many people feel that that was a genocide or ethnic cleansing and several, not all of the most ominous events there

[00:04:46] Also occurred in April. It's hard to say just why it's April, maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's spring and spring things kind of open up And maybe people are more bold and attacking other people as spring emerges. That's my speculation

[00:05:05] So two things we would like to point out too, which is what you just described a few minutes ago There's no real encompass of the genocide that, no, that are actually a very taken place or are attacking place

[00:05:23] That's right there others. I mean for example, what's happening in Ukraine for example right now I mean, I think we can classify it as the genocide. Some people are. Yeah, and it's something else describing what's happening in Gaza as a form of genocide

[00:05:41] Some people are Darfur. There are first two goes on by the way. It still goes on

[00:05:46] And I think also we can not forget what happened in South Sudan, more or more than two million people were working, working with the North or killing the Christians in the South Sudan

[00:05:57] That to me, but to me was a genocide. Clearly took many, many years, but the genocide that just kept on grinding on and on and on

[00:06:08] I don't know that you may you mentioned the hero in South Africa. This is something that many of us don't quite know. That's right. It should be remembered. It sure should pass. It should be remembered

[00:06:19] Yes, so many is 50,000 or more hero and not a people were killed in that period of four years. Not suddenly nobody talks about them. You know, now interesting

[00:06:31] The German government, I think did pay some money to the hero. They did for you. A nominal amount, but something or at least an acknowledgement That's correct and that was more recent. That's correct. Yeah

[00:06:47] So the question the question is, you're an anthropologist. I'm sure your studies and then for your mind Is getting such a way that you see more clearly why genocide is so hard or am I presenting too much?

[00:07:08] Well, I'm trying to understand. Let's put it that way. Like others of our friends were trying to understand we don't understand everything of course But let me share from an anthropological perspective. Some of the things I think they're important thanks for asking one would be of course

[00:07:22] Contemporary anthropologists are interested in various cultures in various societies and how the function or malfunction. So that's one reason that we get into the study of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

[00:07:34] Some of the things that I've wrestled with, which I don't have answers to easily bias, there's some common themes seemingly the intent to eliminate difference runs through genocide's various kinds of differences.

[00:07:47] The intent for political domination, one group of an over another and to put that ideology above the ideologies or viewpoints of others. Religious interplay sometimes I could even call it bias religious combat

[00:08:00] One group against another that plays out in many not all of them, but in many and then the final point at least for now I'd like to mention is what we anthropologists wrestle with others due to called structural violence.

[00:08:13] Let's not just the ominous violence that we see where one person kills another or one group kills another. It's also the insidious embedded violence in institutions which carry on and contribute to genocide's structural violence.

[00:08:32] Another thing which I think is worth remembering is that humanity has such long memories. It somehow we bear a grudge for long, long, long moments.

[00:08:47] I mean if we go sometimes for decades, sometimes for centuries, then the people who are raised up and revenge against another group, causing a new genocide.

[00:08:59] But that I mean for example among the Rwanda's, the Rwanda's, the Hutus and the Tutsis have fought each other time and time and time again. Each time they kill a large number of people. And this is two tribes that they live in the same small area.

[00:09:23] Yet cannot somehow make each other so be comfortable with each other. You're right, revenge and retribution seem to be sad, characteristic sometimes of human kind. They seem to be sadly. And I also think about their immediate example. And also the Serbian, the Serbian, the Bosnia and the Serbian.

[00:09:51] I mean that has a lot to do with the Muslims and the Christians or the Ottoman Empire, which is several centuries before. But somehow we're still cutting our genes or whatever. They're brains. They're someday we're going to avenge our rap.

[00:10:12] Well I don't think we carry men or genes, but I think we carry it in our brains and in our culture. We're going to have to fight with you. Yeah, you have studied Cambodia. Yes, you have. You know quite intensely and deeply.

[00:10:26] Would you like to say something about that? I'd like to say a lot about it. Please do. I'd like to feature that today if I might. Pious. Absolutely. And our idea was that this might be called. Faithful April. The killing fields of Cambodia.

[00:10:41] That's because my presentation will span. Ironically. April of 1975 through April of 1998. It'll span. I think up 22 or 23 years to give you the story that I'd like to share. I want to share it from the point of view of a particular person because these things always

[00:11:07] While talking about large groups, slaughtered groups, massacre groups, which we must do. We have to think about each individual and the story that they bring that that person here she has to share.

[00:11:20] And so I want to share the story of a gentleman named Hang Noir, H.A.I.N.G. N.G.O.R., a Cambodian gentleman who I had the privilege of meeting approximately 30 years ago. We met in Houston, Texas at a conference.

[00:11:37] Hang Noir had led a relatively privileged life. He was born in Cambodia in a small village in 1940. I've written about this and written about his life in my book, Pious, a global human rights, which was published in 2017.

[00:11:52] As a privileged Cambodian, he grew up in a family that was supportive. He excelled in school, but interestingly he also excelled at Gang Fighting. And Gang Fighting, as he later said, helped carry him through to survival. Interestingly.

[00:12:05] Nor entered medical school in the late 1960s, and while he was a student in medical school in Cambodia, he met a young woman named Chang Mi Hoi, they fell in love, and not so long after we're buried.

[00:12:18] But as the 1970s rolled around, and there was some turmoil in Cambodia, some underlying structural pressures. Suddenly on April 17, 1975, a broadcast radio, and then public bull horns out the square in Panampen, April 17, 1975. A day of great victory of tremendous historical significance for our Cambodian nation and people.

[00:12:44] Shouted to the leader of what was to become the ominous, comrade Rouge group. A new regime called Democratic Campachia was proclaimed. There'd be no rich and no poor. Everyone would be more or less equal, but all in favor of Ankha, a NGKA, an anonymous amorphous,

[00:13:08] Godlike, something that people were to give servitude to. Not a person, but an ideological, something. Well, the structural violence through Ankha had begun in April of 75. The one question, the Cambodians, whether Buddhist, yes, by the way, their Buddhist sensibilities allowed this to unfold without too much initial backlash

[00:13:36] because they were somewhat passive to what was being presented at that time. That's part of the deal. That's part of how it unfolded. Well, no surprise, people like Nor, educated people, doctors, others were seen to be enemies basically.

[00:13:51] They were elite and they were to be either eliminated or transformed into new types of people, either called new people or even new farmers and to be sent to the countryside. So Nor was sent to the countryside.

[00:14:05] In fact, because it was already unfolding that this was very ominous, he and his wife took on some alternate roles. Nor told everybody in the countryside that he was a simple taxi driver, just coming out to help with the farming under the new Ankha under the new liberation.

[00:14:23] People were marched, and organized ranks, and you could already see Pius, a kind of Stalinesque impetus to what was unfolding.

[00:14:33] People were regimented, and it was not long before Nor came to call himself and his later biography called the Cambodian Odyssey, a war slave, working in the fields, alongside his wife and many others.

[00:14:48] In fact, a survive they had to steal food because they weren't fed enough to do the work they were demanded to do. One day when he stole a little bit of extra food to survive and to help his wife, they cut off the tip of his finger.

[00:15:01] Another day he was beaten for being greedy, fear enables genocide, and fear was instilled in Cambodian people through this terrible regime. Ultimately, two million people are estimated to have died in a four-year period from about 1975 to 1979.

[00:15:24] I just want to share a few more things about his life and struggles, and ultimately survival.

[00:15:30] People near him were being murdered. If they didn't perform, they didn't dig enough trenches in the fields, didn't do enough irrigation work, didn't share enough food, and at least in one occasion he walked through a field of corpses.

[00:15:46] Scalls, bodies, the killing fields that he had many others saw and sometimes had to walk through.

[00:15:55] One day an informant who had been working with him tipped off the authorities that he was a doctor and not a taxi driver, they took him to a kangaroo court and they hung him on a cross, hoping that he'd perish.

[00:16:11] He stuck with it despite ants and other insects biting him halfway to death and somehow survived. Nor in his wife secretly then taken a different motive survival, took on the role of servants, and they worked to work for a more relatively well-to-do farmer,

[00:16:30] and as servants under the name, Sommong, which ironically means lucky he wasn't feeling very lucky at this time. He had his wife managed to survive a bit longer when she became pregnant and didn't have enough food.

[00:16:45] He was desperate, he tried to steal some food to help her, but she was deteriorating and sadly on June 2, 1978, she and her baby died in Chalperth.

[00:17:00] Well, this devastated Nor, no surprise, but he had to go on as a month went by, he continued to steal food to survive. In fact, he formed a bit of a stealing gang. I mentioned earlier how he'd been a pretty good gang fighter.

[00:17:17] He formed a kind of stealing gang which would secretly go to gardens and steal enough food. So he had a few of his buddies, including his buddy named Tah, his favorite stealing partner, could survive.

[00:17:30] I mean this is amazing stuff what people do, but as a month went by he realized that he needed to escape from Cambodia. This was going on and on about three, three and a half years had transpired.

[00:17:45] Ironically as he was formulating a plan, the Vietnamese who had been reviled by Americans, by many other people in Southeast Asia, proved to be in a way actual liberators, because they were very much against the Cambodian regime and against the Cameroos.

[00:18:04] So Vietnamese ironically opened things up a bit and enabled some routes for refugees or potential refugees to start moving through the jungles, and perhaps getting into a place where they could escape from Cambodia. Unbelievable.

[00:18:20] The Vietnamese, as it says, the Liberators, not the Americans, he formalized an escape plan with several of his buddies. They went through the so-called Danger Zone, which is the zone that led from Cambodia to Thailand. They hired no surprise. Coyotes, we call him coyotes here, right?

[00:18:40] The ones that transport people from pay and often desert the people they're trying to help. He hired for about $2,000 US dollars. The money he'd gotten by secret in a way some gold that he had saved for several years.

[00:18:55] He hired a coyote, no surprise the guy took him away, and then abandoned him. He still had to make it the rest of the way to the border on his own with a few his buddies through the jungle.

[00:19:06] And he did, and he made it to the Nong-Cham refugee camp at the Thai. And as 1979 rolled into 1980, and the Cambodian regime was collapsing. The Cameroos was collapsing by this time. The genocide had basically stopped. By 1980, he secured passport to the United States and moved to California.

[00:19:32] I mean, we would, you move to Hollywood, indeed he did. Not knowing that he was going to become a famous actor in one of the world's most famous movies. Because, as you know, bias, and about this time with the genocide unfolding people learning more about it.

[00:19:51] On Sydney Shomburg having written about it in his ominous New York Times magazine article about a man named Dith prawn, the movie producer, the director, Rolla Joffrey and his friends, came to hang nor and said,

[00:20:07] We'd like you to star in this film we're producing, called the killing fields. And he said, I've never been an actor. I'm not an actor. Here's what Joffrey said to him, Just be yourself. You were there.

[00:20:21] So he starred in the film, the Academy Award when he'd film the killing fields. And he won a Academy Award himself as best supporting actor. He played himself and the tragedies and survivors that he had gone through.

[00:20:40] Well, just four years, Pious, after we met in 1996, we met in 1992. He was confronted on a Los Angeles street not far from Hollywood. By three members of the Oriental Lazy Boys gang. Full circle now from gang to gang.

[00:21:00] The three Lazy Boys, Texan Tom, Jason Chin and Indrolim, demanded his money right there on the Los Angeles street. And he gave it to them. And then they demanded the locket that had a picture of his wife. He wouldn't give it to them and they murdered him.

[00:21:21] Hanged or survived Cambodia's genocide and was murdered on a Los Angeles street. And it comes full circles, Pious to the month of April because in April of 1998, those three boys, the three Lazy Boys were convicted of the murder. Yes, yes. What a story, yeah. Well, that's terrible.

[00:21:49] It's terrible and I think for a man who had suffered so much. And who survived to be accosted by some Lazy Dunes things on the street? Well, the streets of the most beautiful country in the world. Yes. And Ironic and said, but meaningful story. Yes.

[00:22:08] And as April to April from the announcement of Amca to April, the conviction of the man who murdered him. Yeah. Well, I'm sure there's a lot we can talk about in Cambodia. We can talk about what's happened between then and now. But the history, less than of course.

[00:22:30] It is. Yeah. I think the man who had the ruling Cambodia is a deep dictator essentially. And it has been in power. There are still problems in Cambodia. That's absolutely. When I traveled there three years ago, I met survivors of the genocide. Yeah. And they talked about still.

[00:22:51] Oh, it's not as bad now as it was. But there's still problems in Cambodia. You don't want to want to say too, Pius. And I know our time is short as we bring this full circle. And as we compliment the other podcasts you've done, which I greatly appreciate.

[00:23:05] Oh, what you and Julius inton of done is two words that keep coming back to many of us who work in this field. Justice and dignity. Justice making things right. Not just for a person but for a group of people. That's justice.

[00:23:22] And then dignity, the individual dignity that we must respect if a person's if any person's dignity or respected. There would never be genocide. Dignity goes with autonomy. If a person's autonomy was respected, there'd never be genocide. But sadly dignity and autonomy are not respected.

[00:23:46] Another question I think one would want to ask is, after the genocide and after you are talking to this great man, the script doctor, did he tell you what he thought should have been? Should have, should have happened. Now that genocide has gone.

[00:24:10] Yes, briefly we didn't talk in detail about that, Pius. But a Bolivalate Democratic leadership for a country, for any country to pursue democracy. Would you then say that what happened in Germany after the Holocaust was that was ideal? You mean the transformation in Germany after the Holocaust? Right.

[00:24:35] I wouldn't say it was an ideal but it was certainly an improvement. Because one of the things that Germany has done is to even make it illegal in the first or second denial that was the Holocaust. That's one thing.

[00:24:52] Because we got off to think a lot of the people who got me genocide, turned around and pretended to have no genocide. We've built on that point back to Cambodia. Thanks for asking. You're exactly right.

[00:25:05] Pol Pot, the ominous leader of Ankara and of the Cambodian genocide in the late 1970s, till his death which ironically was about the same time as those three fellows were convicted of murdering Heng Noir about to say month even until Pol Pot's death.

[00:25:24] He basically denied that he had done anything wrong and that what had happened was a transformation that failed of society, not a genocide. Total denial. Of course, I mean the Turks even up to this day do not teach to the fact that there was a meaning genocide.

[00:25:46] They continue to resist that notion. We have to label these things. We have to label them. It's the important that they've been named. They do. You need to be named. You have to name it. Some of my discussions on this podcast we've been doing.

[00:26:04] We have talked about the blocks slavery in this country for the 400 years that blocks have been what slaves. We believe essentially after logical discussion that what happened was a genocide.

[00:26:24] Now a lot of the, you know, academics means sort of well actually it does not sort of, but it doesn't have the following along the definitions of the genocide. But I think it is genocide. We need to name these things.

[00:26:42] We need to name them and discuss them including what happened to indigenous Americans, of course over the same 400 year period. Exactly exactly. I think it's easier to deny some of these things. Then you don't have to discuss them. And then you don't have to.

[00:27:02] I think a sense of guilt I think is important also. Which essentially I think the Germans, I mean, have sort of taken to heart quite well I think. I mean as a people they really have done extremely great job.

[00:27:18] So some, a few of the, a few of the genocides that we have not touched upon. The Japanese and in China. You know the, there's one particular incident in uncים. That's right. The rape, the so-called rape of the uncים.

[00:27:36] Which is just characterized by the, you know, the acronym, the rape of the uncים. Would you want to do, would you want to talk, see something about, about China? I would.

[00:27:49] Ironically I just returned from Japan and chatted with a number of very informative Japanese people all I was there just with my wife Kathy last month. We didn't get into details on this topic, but we certainly reflected upon it.

[00:28:02] I see a parallel in some ways with that and the genocide of Shrebinica in Bosnia. In other words, a targeted campaign against people. Did it eliminate all the people? No, it did not. Did it exterminate or extrapate all the people of that culture? It did not.

[00:28:24] But did it target abuse numbers, thousands of people in a general sign-up way? Eight thousand and one go in uncים and in Shrebinica? Yes. So those are the things I agree with us. We have to talk about and we have to label them.

[00:28:41] By the way, just as an aside and that's not the main theme today. The same way we have to talk about critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion. Those two important themes that we have to talk about and wrestle about across the board.

[00:28:58] They have to be named and they have to be discussed. We thank you very, very much. This is wonderful. The never-again podcast is presented by the coalition against global genocide and its mission to educate, motivate and empower individuals and communities to oppose genocide and crimes against humanity.