Totten Visits Poland for Latest Genocide Education Effort
Posted on 10/14/2008
Samuel Totten travels all over the world in his efforts to educate people about genocide. Last month, an invitation took the University of Arkansas professor of curriculum and instruction to Warsaw to address fellow international genocide scholars.
The Polish Institute of International Affairs, a state-owned institute under the supervision of the Polish minister of foreign affairs, asked Totten to speak at a conference Sept. 18-19 honoring Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust, was a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent who coined the term genocide. He drafted a resolution for the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and pushed for its ratification.
In 1948, the United Nations adopted the resolution declaring genocide to be a crime under international law. It went into effect in 1951 with the ratification by one-third of member countries, and the number of countries that have ratified it to date is about 140.
Totten's topic was the genocide convention and, specifically, the United States' reluctance to ratify it. Lemkin had U.S. support in placing the resolution before the U.N., but the United States didn't become a signatory to the convention until 40 years later, in 1988. Fear that such an international covenant was a threat to U.S. sovereignty was a major source of opposition.
"Lemkin was basically a one-man ambassador for the resolution," Totten said. "The United States refused to ratify it year after year even though every president during that time period, except Eisenhower, supported its ratification."
"At this conference, people from all over the world, including Ireland, Canada, Norway and Japan, spoke about every a wide array of issues regarding Lemkin's life and efforts," he continued. "Many of those presenting at the conference commented how bitter Lemkin would likely be were he alive today, and that is true both because there have been so many genocides since the ratification as well as the fact that only in the 1990s did the international law on the crime of genocide begin to be enforced."
Totten has visited Africa several times as part of his research agenda on genocide and recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship at the National University in Rwanda. He helped to establish a genocide studies program there and interviewed survivors of the 1994 "machete genocide" in Rwanda. He expects to publish a book of the interviews in 2009.
Totten has conducted interviews with the survivors of the Darfur genocide in refugee camps in Chad, both independently and as a member of the U.S. State Department's Darfur Atrocities Documentation Project in 2004. He and a colleague have established an international scholarship fund for survivors of genocide to attend college. The fund can be found online at http://postgen.org.
In addition to serving as the co-editor of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal (University of Toronto Press), Totten has also written and edited several books and curriculum guidelines on teaching about genocide and the Holocaust in particular. Totten tailors his many efforts in genocide education to further two goals: raise awareness of genocide and prevent future occurrences of it.
He teaches in the middle-level studies program in the College of Education and Health Professions and established the Northwest Arkansas Writing Project, an affiliate of the National Writing Project based at the University of California, Berkeley.
Totten was recently invited to serve as an editor of the new Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies for the Centre of Conflict Management at the National University of Rwanda, which is the center he was affiliated with during his six-month Fulbright stint in Rwanda. In addition to accepting that invitation, he also agreed to serve on the editorial advisory board of Challenges, the new journal of the Zachor Society, which states as its mission the moral responsibility of educated people to help create moral awareness and support political initiatives to identify, inhibit and punish the perpetrators of genocide.
Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize Laureate for Peace, is honorary chairman of the Zachor Society. Challenges is designed to assist those who are "in the trenches" of Holocaust and genocide education with the publication of articles, book and film reviews, focusing on the pedagogy, techniques, resources, and research in Holocaust and genocide education at all academic levels.
What's next for Totten? He plans to return to the Chad/Sudan border in late December and early January to meet again with people affected by the genocide in Darfur.
"Not only am in the process of completing a book on the Darfur genocide, I also think it's important for the refugees and survivors of the genocide to know that there are people in the world who care about their plight and fate," Totten said.
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