Opinion - have the lessons been learned from the holocaust?

The massacre of the Yazidi people in Iraq by ISIS should remind us all of the lesson we learned the hard way. No more.

Uriel Levy

This week marks the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II. At the end of this terrible war, after the extermination camps were exposed; A man-made hell on the face of enlightened European soil The whole world cried: "Never again!" Indeed, three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations Assembly. But since then almost no actions have been avoided Genocide, and many leaders who committed genocide were not punished. Also the genocide that has been going on for a decade in Darfur that Sudan receives little condemnation. just recently Revealed Because the Central Bank of France secretly transferred billions of dollars to Sudan, contrary to the sanctions imposed on it after the genocide in Darfur came to the attention of the West. Why is it that so many leaders and statesmen ignore the worst crime known to humanity?

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in a village near Bialystok in Poland, the Jew Raphael Lemkin was born. As a child he heard about the Chisinau pogrom and innocently asked his mother: "How is it possible that the police don't stop the killers?" His mother replied that it was the Tsar who commanded the police who encouraged the masses to murder Jews. Lemkin refused to accept this answer: "The regime is supposed to protect citizens, not murder!" While being a law student at the University of Lviv in 1921, Lemkin read in a newspaper about the trial of the Armenian Sogumon Talerian who murdered the Turk Tlat Pasha. Pasha, the former Minister of the Interior in the Ottoman Empire, was the one who ordered the Armenian Genocide. Lemkin asked his teacher: "How is it possible that Sogumon who murdered only one person is accused of a crime while Tlat who murdered a million is not accused?" Lemkin, a Jew who pursues justice, protested with all his might against the malicious government that allows the blood of persecuted minorities.

At the conference for the establishment of international law in Madrid in 1933, he presented a proposal for a law prohibiting the extermination of peoples, tribes and nations. According to his opinion, a regime planning the extermination of a people cannot do it secretly, and therefore it can be prevented from doing so with the help of sanctions and international intervention. Lemkin believed that it was necessary to act strongly against the Hitler government in Germany, which was inciting against the Jews. The ears of the jurists in Madrid were deaf, they rejected Lamkin's claims and refused to promote his law. Their refusal will be remembered forever. Lemkin realized that the lack of understanding stems from the fact that the phenomenon he is trying to prevent is nameless. Or then demonstrated a wonderful philological talent and coined a multilingual concept: Genocide. Unfortunately, it was only after forty-nine members of his family and six million of his people were destroyed in the Holocaust that the leaders of the nations of the world listened to his advice and signed the law prohibiting the killing of nations in the UN General Assembly. But even after that, for decades, no one dared to use the concept of genocide, except in reference to the Holocaust of the Jews. Only in the 800,000s, after the Bosnian genocide by the Serbs in the Yugoslavian war, after the savage genocide in Rwanda in which 1 people lost their lives in one hundred days, and after the declaration of independence of the Armenian nation, which demanded recognition of the genocide that took place during World War I, only Then the concept of genocide came back to live in the mouths of statesmen, judges, researchers and diplomats. too little and too late. According to Rudolf Rommel's comprehensive research, in the twentieth century more than 150 million people were murdered in genocides and atrocities that the authorities inflicted on citizens. This epidemic caused more deaths than any other disease, but was much less studied and treated.

In 2009, a sitting president was charged with a crime for the first time Genocide. It was the Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir who, since 2003, led the systematic extermination of several tribes in Darfur by the Sudanese army and the Jinjaweed militias, who were armed by his government. It took the international institutions six years, during which half a million Darfurians were murdered, to submit the indictment. The worst part is that even today, four years after the arrest warrant was submitted to the Security Council, the dictator al-Bashir is still the head of the Sudanese government and continues to exterminate tribes in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile. reports Air raids on villages and systematic acts of rape and murder by militias supported by the regime arrive every day. As the days pass and the bodies continue to pile up in the graves, the people of the Western nations cease to be interested in the genocide in Darfur. In May 2013, it became known that Obama had invited a delegation of criminals, members of the al-Bashir government, to a meeting in Washington, DC, including Nafi Ali Nafi, a close adviser to the dictator al-Bashir, who is accused of genocide in Darfur. Nafi headed the Sudanese security service at the outbreak of the genocide and is accused of being one of the architects of the genocide in Darfur. This is an extreme move by Obama, which immediately received harsh reactions from the struggle organizations and members of Congress, and finally the meeting was canceled. Obama pursued a conciliatory policy with Sudan long before that and the 'Special Office for the Prevention of Genocide' that he established in the White House was actually used as a 'spin' to remove his hands from real involvement in the prevention of genocide: in the annual reports produced by this office, Sudan was not mentioned at all. Precisely while the violence is increasing and the Security Council report from June 2013 revealed that systematic and organized genocide continues in Darfur, it is precisely in such terrible times that Obama tries again and again to regulate US-Sudan relations.

In the last two months, the conquest campaign of the "Islamic State" organization (ISIS) has turned from a slandered terrorist campaign into the persecution of minorities as well as Genocide of literally against members of the Yazidi religion. President Obama responded quickly and in a speech he gave on August 7, just three days after the campaign to exterminate the Yazidis in Sinjar, noted the intention of ISIS to exterminate the Yazidis and used the word genocide for the first time before the genocide began (George Bush Jr. was The first president to use this word in the current genocide in Darfur). But even here Obama's speech and the few aerial bombardments of the US Army in the Sinjar area were far from enough. on August 15 The US announced that it will limit and reduce its military action in Iraq, and this because, according to it, the danger of the Yazidi genocide has passed. On the same day, 312 Yazidis were massacred in the village of Kucho in the Sinjar district, and more than 300 women were kidnapped by ISIS. According to my writings The Washington Post  ISIS fighters waited for the US army to move away from the area and only then carried out the massacre. The poor victims were once again used as a platform to improve the public relations of worn-out politicians.

Time and time again we learn that the blood of the masses is worthless in the eyes of world leaders. The only way for us the masses to ensure the existence of humanity without its limbs destroying each other is by a valid demand from our leaders not to close our eyes, not to lie, not to deny and also to fight mass murderers with all the necessary force.

* Uriel Levy is active in the organization The Committee to Combat Genocide and writes in a blog May 8st

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• Genocide
• Reflections - Medicine in the Holocaust
• Aborigines in Tasmania - a sad end to a long tradition