New journal highlights international genocide research

He has answered over 900 e-mails. He has exchanged letters with a German scholar with no Internet access. He has read it cover to cover. Now, there is finally a stack of the new journal of Genocide Studies and Prevention on Herbert Hirsch’s desk.

Hirsch is managing co-editor of the newly created international journal. A professor in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, he began studying genocide after the mass suicide of Jim Jones’ People’s Temple Cult in 1978. Over 900 people killed themselves on Jones’ instructions in a compound in the jungle of Guyana.

“I started thinking about – if you can convince people to kill themselves and their children, how difficult would it be to convince them to kill other people different from themselves?” Hirsch said.

Last week, VCU celebrated the launch of the journal with a reception at the University Student Commons.

“It’s a great day to be able to have this journal,” said Robert Holsworth, dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences.

Hirsch began the event with a speech on the history of genocide. He told the audience that victims and perpetrators are not the only actors.

“You can’t forget about bystanders because bystanders allow it to happen,” Hirsch said, mentioning that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower made townspeople tour concentration camps after liberation.

Hirsch has studied the historic and present-day genocides around the globe. A founding member of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Hirsch said interest in genocide mushroomed in the 1990s.

“When the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda were getting public attention, and the United States government was not getting involved, a lot more people began to get interested in questions about political violence and genocide,” he said.

Three hundred people attended the group’s 2005 conference, which prompted members to find a new way to get the word out about the latest scholarship. Hirsch became one of four founding co-editors of the journal. VCU volunteered space and resources for the editorial offices. Three experts review every article for the publication, which the University of Toronto Press publishes three times a year.

The first issue focuses on the ongoing killings in Darfur, Sudan, while the second focuses on genocide in Armenia. The third will be a general issue including a look at international law and the media. Next year, the journal will cover Rwanda.

Hirsch said the 20th century was “the most violent century in human history” and that the 21st is “not looking as good as we’d like.”

Violence in Darfur has continued, while a million people may have been killed as a result of ongoing fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“The ultimate end of everybody who studies genocide is to stop it, to prevent it,” Hirsch said. “The ultimate end is to do anything you can to save lives.”

During the reception, Melanie B. Kerneklian, an Armenian community activist, said Hirsch gave a common voice to genocide victims.

“You are speaking for them,” she said. “When we of the same group speak, people don’t listen.”

Alor Kuol, a Sudanese refugee and caseworker for the Catholic Diocese of Richmond’s Refugee and Immigration Services, was pleased by public interest in Darfur. He told the crowd the current Sudanese leadership lacks sincerity about peace.

“What makes me happy is that there are people who care about what’s going on in other countries,” he said.

The 1994 slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutu majority of Rwanda, Hirsch said, was “the quickest extermination of people in human history.”

Mayor L. Douglas Wilder said favoritism of the Tutsis by Belgian colonists was at the root of the Rwandan genocide.

“Every nation practiced slavery. A different brand of it, different ways of pitting one group against another,” he said.

Wilder told students to “take that cudgel and cut away at the morass of ignorance and indifference of the past.”

Hirsch said positive steps have been taken to prevent atrocities, but not enough has been done.

He asked the audience, “Why is there a war on terrorism but not a war on genocide?”