CHAPTER 16: Genocide Education

In 1945, as World War II came to an end, newspapers and newsreels carried stark and shocking photographs of what Allied soldiers confronted as they liberated one Nazi death camp and concentration center after another. The emaciated bodies of the survivors, the bulldozers creating huge mounds of the dead, and the gas chambers and crematoria (some with bodies still in them) shocked the world. In large part, it was the horror over the Holocaust that moved the international community to support and ratify the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG). The international community believed that with the passage of the UNCG and the world’s commitment to fight against genocide that such a crime would become a thing of the past. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. Far from it. Since 1945 there have been close to a dozen genocides perpetrated in such far-flung places as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Guatemala, Iraq, Rwanda, Srebrenica (in the former Yugoslavia), and Darfur, Sudan.