Concordia’s Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies relies on past lessons to prevent future atrocities.
Professors Erica Lehrer and Frank Chalk are among Concordia’s genocide studies experts. Chalk says that the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies workshop series regularly brings up-and-coming and established scholars to speak at Concordia. “The workshops attract many students. They motivate, inspire and provide examples of the important jobs that can be found in our area.”
Philosopher George Santayana’s oft-cited words, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” undoubtedly resonate for those who study the brutal history of genocide and human rights abuses. But scholars at Concordia’s Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) take that counsel one step further by aspiring not only to remember the past but also to forge ahead and resolve conflicts before they degenerate into large-scale atrocities.
Leadership, energy and vision are needed to reach such lofty goals, and MIGS Director and Concordia Professor of History Frank Chalk fits the bill. In 1980, Chalk and Concordia Emeritus Professor of Sociology Kurt Jonassohn taught the world’s first university course at Concordia on the study of genocide from ancient times to the present. In 1986, they co-founded MIGS, and four years later, published the landmark textbook The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (Yale University Press).
Today, Chalk teaches graduate seminars and two undergraduate courses on the history and sociology of genocide, supervises graduate students and lends his expertise to authorities around the world. For example, Chalk recently advised the U.S. State Department and Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs on genocide prevention strategies in Kenya.
“The primary means of disseminating news in rural Kenya, where most of the people live, is by radio, and within the radio audience, the vernacular-language listenership is as big as—or bigger than— the English one,” he says. “Local radio stations broadcasting in their own African languages, like Kikuyu, Kalenjin and Luo, are inciting people in various regions to engage in ethnic cleansing, retaliatory killings and killings designed to take land from so-called intruding groups in several parts of Kenya.”
Chalk says there are concrete ways for foreign governments to help. “The very popular call-in radio shows are sitting ducks for the dissemination of hate speech because they have no tape-delay systems, unlike in North America. The result is that call-in radio hosts are in no position to monitor what goes to air, even if they want to. I’m encouraging the Canadian and U.S. governments to subsidize the acquisition of tape-delay systems,” he cites as an example, adding that “another thing that can be done is to buy spot ads on commercial radio stations in Kenya, allowing the elders of the affected communities to calm down young people in commercials, saying, ‘don’t do this, and here’s why you shouldn’t do this.’ ”
Where there’s a will…
Many students associated with MIGS who have earned a BA, MA or PhD in History with a concentration in Genocide Studies have applied their knowledge to the prevention of human rights abuses.
Notable graduates include Jocelyne A. L. Serveau, MA 02, who works with European non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that deal with human rights violations, Michael Innes, BA 00, MA 03, an information analyst at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in Brussels, Belgium, Patrick Reed, MA 96, associate producer and researcher for the award-winning documentary Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire, and Marc Drouin, MA 06, who’s now pursuing a PhD at the Université de Montréal.
“Marc’s MA thesis was on the mass killing of native highlanders in Guatemala in the early 1980s,” Chalk reports. “I never thought there was genocide but Marc has demonstrated there was, and his thesis is now in the hands of the Department of Justice in Ottawa and the Human Rights division of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They will use his findings when they throw the book at some of the guys living in Canada and the States who were torturers— or worse—in Guatemala.”
As a Faculty of Arts and Science research centre, MIGS mounts several significant projects, such as the Will to Intervene (W2I). “W2I is research with a practical outcome, which is to teach advocates and opinion makers—NGOs, the media, faith communities, business, trade unions and legislatures—how to mobilize the top Canadian and U.S. political leaders to help prevent the next Rwanda,” Chalk explains. “The results of our research should teach us how best to mobilize them to react to situations like Darfur, the Congo or Kenya, to make ‘Never again!’ more than a slogan. Kenya is not a genocide yet, but Darfur and the Congo are major human rights catastrophes. If Kenya isn’t pushed back into the mainstream, it can become an even bigger tragedy over the next two to three years.”
James Stanford, L BSc 58, LLD 00
W2I has been given a significant boost by a $1.3-million gift in March from James Stanford, L BSc 58, LLD 00, President of Stanford Resource Management in Calgary and retired president and chief executive officer of Petro-Canada. Stanford says he personally endorses W2I and hopes that his donation will not only spur the program’s initiatives but also elicit similar support from other philanthropists. “The important work of MIGS and the W2I program on genocide prevention, research and education has never been more relevant,” Stanford says. “Mr. Stanford’s generous donations, this recognition by a business leader of the importance of our kind of work in the social sciences and humanities, will fund the W2I initiative, along with various MIGS activities that are part of our five-year strategic plan when W2I is completed 16 months from now,” Chalk points out.
In 2006, MIGS jointly developed W2I with Senator Lieutenant-General (Ret.) Roméo Dallaire, who, as the Force Commander for United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda from 1993 to 1994, witnessed genocide’s horrors first-hand. Senator Dallaire has since become Canada’s leading peace advocate, and was named MIGS Senior Fellow in 2006. That same year, Senator Dallaire was awarded the Loyola Medal, a tribute to an exceptional citizen distinguished by his character, life philosophy and significant contribution to Canada.
“The involvement of Lieutenant- General Dallaire, our country’s foremost peace ambassador, is a testament to the calibre, integrity and significance of these initiatives,” Stanford adds. “General Dallaire is a full partner in the Will to Intervene project,” Chalk says. “He’s helped us with his strategic vision, ideas and contacts. Through his agency, we’re cooperating with the All- Party Parliamentary Committee for the Prevention of Genocide and other Crimes against Humanity in Ottawa, and the United Nations Advisory Committee on the Prevention of Genocide. We couldn’t ask for a better collaborator. He recognizes the utility and the long-term value of what we’re doing.” Another major MIGS co-initiative is Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and other Human Rights Violations, a five-year research project led by Department of History Associate Professor Steven High, who also holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Public History. The project’s researchers will interview 600 genocide survivors living in Montreal and examine their experiences and memories of trauma and displacement. Life Stories recently was awarded a $1-million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
In fall 2007, the Department of History recruited scholar Erica Lehrer, whose work focuses on the aftermath of violence. Lehrer, who was awarded a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Post-Conflict Memory, Ethnography and Museology in December 2007, currently teaches an undergraduate course on the Holocaust and a graduate course on documenting mass violence. “I’m interested in how the legacy of violence carries us into the future. What effect does the experience of violence have on the descendants of people who lived it, and on their communities?” Lehrer replies, when asked about her research. “My mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe, and I grew up thinking a lot about memory and what gets inherited, and about identity and group allegiance.”
Man of action
When Frank Chalk spoke to Concordia University Magazine in February, he was set to leave for Rwanda to meet with PhD student Erin Jessee. “Erin is in Rwanda right now and on her way to Bosnia in May,” Chalk explains. “She’s a trained forensic anthropologist-archaeologist and is working on new types of evidence from mass-grave exhumation and crime-scene reports. We believe that by carefully monitoring the kinds of wounds inflicted on victims of genocide, as in Rwanda and Bosnia, we will find patterns of cultural inscription of the intent to commit genocide literally on the bodies of many of the victims. In Rwanda that was done, we think, by killers who cut off the feet, the noses and the breasts of Tutsi victims as a way of saying, ‘You are no longer the beautiful people we were taught to revere in colonial schools.’ With this information, we can go into court and demonstrate the genocidal mindset and intent of the perpetrators.”
Chalk’s schedule is chock full of activities. “In March, I lecture at the University of London on Canada’s role in enforcing the responsibility to protect, and in April, I will be in Madrid at a closed workshop, mapping strategies to cope with the new developments in Darfur,” he says. “In May, I’m going to be the faculty resource person—accompanying the March of Remembrance and Hope to Berlin and Auschwitz and other sites—for university students. Last spring, I spoke at a conference organized by Interpol and the RCMP on crimes against humanity and war crimes. I recently spoke to intelligence analysts, police and diplomats at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, at a very important workshop on why interrogation under torture does not work. I made a 30-minute documentary film on hate propaganda, from the Holocaust to Rwanda, which I showed in October at the global conference on genocide at McGill University and which I’ll be showing next November in Vancouver to hundreds of high school students.”
While genocide is still a vivid reality in today’s world, Frank Chalk, Roméo Dallaire and MIGS hope to make it a thing of the past.
If you have any comments about this article, contact
Howard Bokser, (514) 848-2424 ext. 3826, Howard.Bokser@concordia.ca
