Historians are accustomed now to the idea of genocide. Cambodia was not the first occurrence of genocide and it will not be the last. There have been a myriad newer crimes since 1979. “Do we still need to worry about the old ones?” Sharp asks rhetorically. Why should we bother with numbers? One and a half million, two and a half million deaths in Cambodia: does it matter? There was once a time when these were not merely numbers. These numbers had names, and that is why it matters, he concludes.²-Ron Price with thanks to¹ “Where Are They Now?” 4 Corners, ABC1 TV, 27/6/’11, 8:30 p.m.,  ²the link: http://www.mekong.net/cambodia/bsharp.htm, and ³the internet site Cambodia, 1 April 2005.

GENOCIDE

Part 1:

Levon Chorbajian notes in the introduction to Studies in Comparative Genocide by Adam Jones¹ that "our current state of theorizing about genocide is the product of a recent, incomplete and evolving process as well as a contested one."  Chorbajian points out that the "systematic study of genocide is only 25 years old.  The relative newness of this field of inquiry lends the subject of comparative genocide studies much of its urgency and vigour.  It also accounts, as Chorbajian suggests, for continuing debates over core definitions and applications.-Ron Price with thanks to ¹Adam Jones, Studies in Comparative Genocide, edited by Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, Macmillan, 1999.

This book has its origins in a conference on genocide held in Yerevan, the capital of the Republic of Armenia, in 1995. The conference brought together many of the most prominent names in this young field, including Yehuda Bauer, Vahakn Dadrian, Helen Fein, Henry Huttenbach, the Cambodia specialist Ben Kiernan, and Ervin Staub, author of The Roots of Evil. The published papers from the conference, though predictably uneven, represent an exceptional contribution to the theorizing of genocide, and to the continuing search for markers and "early warning" signs that might allow outside forces to intervene more intelligently, and directly, in cases of genocide and other mass atrocities.

Part 2:

Studies in Comparative Genocide was published the year I took a sea-change and retired early after a 50 year student-working life: 1949-1999.  I have taken an interest in the subject of genocide due to my association with the Baha’i Faith for over 60 years. The literature on genocide in relation to the Bahá'í community of Iran is now extensive, and there is now an extensive documentation that can easily be accessed in cyberspace.  Baha’is, and the precursor religion with which it is intimately associated, Babism, have been officially persecuted since the 1840s. Some 200 Baha'is have been executed and hundreds of thousands forced to convert or be subjected to the most horrendous disabilities since the revolution in Iran in 1979.  Systematic targeting of the leadership of the Bahá'í community by killing or disappearance was focused on the Bahá'í National Spiritual Assembly and Local Spiritual Assemblies across Iran in the last 35 years.  Like most conservative Muslims, Khomeini believed Bahá'ís to be apostates and issued a fatwa stating:

It is not acceptable for a non-Muslim to change his religion to another religion not recognized by the followers of the previous religion. Jews who become Baha’is have a choice to accept Islam or be executed.

Part 3:

Khomeini emphasized that the Bahá'ís would not receive any religious rights, since he believed that the Bahá'ís were a political rather than religious movement. Allegations of Bahá'í involvement with other political powers have long been repeated in many venues with resulting denunciations from the president.  Conversion from Judaism and Zoroastrianism to the Baha’i Faith is well documented since the 1850s; such a change of status removed any legal and social protections.

More recently, documentation has been provided that shows governmental intent to destroy the Bahá'í community. The government has intensified propaganda and hate speech against Bahá'ís through the Iranian media; Bahá'ís are often attacked and dehumanized on political, religious, and social grounds to separate Bahá'ís from the rest of society.  Of all non-Muslim religious minorities the persecution of the Baha’is has been the most widespread, systematic, and uninterrupted. In contrast to other non-Muslim minorities, the Baha’is are spread throughout the country in villages, small towns, and various cities, fuelling a social-paranoia throughout Iran.

Since the 1979 revolution, the authorities have destroyed most or all of the Baha'i holy places in Iran, including the House of the Bab in Shiraz, a house in Tehran where Bahá'u'lláh was brought up, and other sites connected to aspects of Babi and Baha'i history. These demolitions have sometimes been followed by other crimes like the desecration of cemetaries in a deliberate act of triumphalism.  In addition the Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education(BIHE), "an elaborate act of communal self-preservation", has been systematically raided. Between 1987 and 2005 the Iranian authorities closed down the Institute several times as part of the pattern of suppressing the Bahá'í community. Between September 30 and October 3 1998, and most recently again in 2014, officials from the Ministry of Intelligence entered the homes of academic staff of the BIHE, seizing books, computers and personal effects as well as shutting down buildings used for the school.-Ron Price with thanks to “Cultural Genocide,” Wikipedia, 19/9/’14.

It is such a long story going

back to the 1840s and in my

lifetime to the 1950s, & me

in a culture where people do

not give a tuppence what are

your religious beliefs as long

as you drink beer or wine, &

take an interest in football, &

don’t take religion seriously.

 

Religion here is like a custom;

It’s something you take on like

a feeling you get when you go

into a church. Catholic, Jew, &

Protestant—a complacent trinity,

part of a small, safe & familiar

world they grew-up in and so

hang-on to like an old-doll or

dummy for psycho-comfort….

 

Ah well, it’s better than all that

fanatical anti-Baha’i stuff I’ve

been reading about in Iran all my

Baha’i life. I think I’ll take the big

doses of indifference that have been

my lot since I was in my teens, and

my friends found out I actually took

my religion seriously and it was not

the same stuff they all got in church

and did not give a tuppence-apeny

for, anyway, most of the time..time.

Ron Price

19/11/’12 to 9/10/'14.

_______________________________________________________

A QUESTION OF JUSTICE

Part 1:

The rule of the Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge first came onto my radar in the late 1970s when I was up-to-my-ears in my own life's battles. I had my own psychological killing fields to worry-about as I bottomed-out yet again on my journey, my life-narrative.  Last night Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were back on my agenda at about 3 a.m. when I got up from my 12 hours-in-bed-a-day for a cup-of-tea.

"The Khmer Rouge: A Question of Justice" on SBSONE¹ was being televised in the middle of the night and the middle of an Australian autumn season. The focus of this film was the faltering attempts at providing Khmer Rouge victims with long overdue justice.  When the atrocities were ending and the Khmer Rouge were ousted from rule in Cambodia in early January 1979, I was just settling-in to my second period of years in far-off Tasmania where I had first come back in September 1973 to a job at what is now the University of Tasmania. With a wife and 3 children, and the rigors of bipolar disorder winging their wild-fires on my emotions I was simply unable to take-in the horrors of April 1975 to January 1979 and, for that matter, the next 19 years of Khmer Rouge soldiers waging guerilla warfare.

Part 2:

In 1999 I stopped my 60 to 80 hour a week life of nose-to-the-grindstone stuff that had kept me busy in a myriad of different ways from 1949 to 1999. I took an early retirement at the age of 55 and began working out how to go on a disability pension. This I achieved by the age of 60 in 2004.  I was finally able to devote myself to a life of writing and editing, research and study, poetizing and publishing. The court set up in the late 1990s and, with Pol-Pot finally dead, it began its work in 2006. By then I had also retired from PT and casual employment and was engaged in a 60 hour literary-work-week at the bottom-end of the world in my third period of years in Tasmania.

Watching this doco on TV last night made me more aware of the incompetence and ineffectiveness of the court, the corruption, the lengthy trial proceedings and the complicated political issues involved in the years 2006 to 2014. Since I retired form FT work in early 1999 neither Cambodia's local civil society organizations nor its citizens have had much say in the functioning of the tribunal. They follow it on TV for the most part and justice can not be arrived at due to the fact that the court can not prosecute individuals who are currently part of the government.²-Ron Price with thanks to ¹SBSONE TV, 2:40 a.m. to 4:20 a.m., 8/10/'14 and ²Lak Chansok, "Can Khmer Rouge Survivors Get Justice?" The Diplomat, 30/5/'14.

² Lak Chansok is a lecturer at Institute of Foreign Languages’s Department of International Studies, Royal University of Phnom Penh, and has been a research fellow at the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace.

__________________________________________________

GENOCIDE AND ME

Ben Kiernan tells us that “genocide” is a very new word, invented in 1944 by a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, and given legal definition by the United Nations in 1948 through The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. That convention defines the crime of genocide as “an attempt at extermination through acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnical, or religious group.”¹

My life beginning, as it did, in that same year 1944 has seen many an example of genocide which I won’t list here or cite in any detail, but there is one group with whom I have been personally associated and this simple prose-poem deals with that group.–Ron Price with thanks to ¹Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan, Yale University Press, 2008.

I will say, though, that

the religion I have now

been associated with for

more than 60 years has

also been associated with

the word genocide in the

land of its birth; it has been

this fierce opposition and

hatred that has been the

chief instrument for the

spread of its organization

& form to every corner of 

the planet. I have seen this

in my lifetime since the

beginning of the second

century of the Baha’i Era

while I have lived and had

my being-& the story is far

from over in this century!!

 

Ron Price

20/11/'11 to 9/10/'14.

_____________________________________________________

STARS IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

 

Section 1:

 

In 1994, as I was heading into my last five years of employment as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator, the ruling Hutu government in the then small African nation of Rwanda, set out to eradicate its Tutsi minority. The Rwandan Genocide, as this eradication program came to be called, consisted of the mass murder of an estimated 800,000 people. The Hutu people alleged that the Tutsi minority held an unfair monopoly of power in Rwanda.

 

The majority Hutu people had come to power in the rebellion, the revolt, of 1959–62 which overthrew the Tutsi monarchy, and established a republic. I was just 15 years old in 1959, had just joined the Baha’i Faith, and played a lot of baseball, hockey and football in a small town in southern Ontario. By 1962 I was working on my matriculation studies and had begun to travel and pioneer for the Canadian Baha’i community.

 

Section 2:

 

In the colonialist period, under Belgian rule before 1959, the Tutsis and Hutus, the two ethnic groups concerned, had come to hate each other through systematized inequality and a struggle for power.  It is a somewhat complex story that can be easily read by those interested.  I shall say no more here.  I certainly knew none of this back around 1960, occupied as I was with my local agenda, with growing-up, in the small town culture of Burlington Ontario.

 

In August 1998 the largest war in modern African history began. Called the Second Congo War, it began on the eve of my retirement after 50 years in classrooms: 1949 to 1999.  It directly involved eight African nations as well as about 25 armed groups. It took place in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  By 2008, the war and its aftermath had killed 5.4 million people mostly from disease and starvation. This war was the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II.  Millions more were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighbouring countries. 

 

By then, by 2008, I was  fully ensconced in retirement, had taken a sea-change, was on a pension, and was still as far removed from all this slaughter in Africa as I had been 14 years before. I had, though, begun the recreation of my life and its narrative from a teacher and tutor to writer and author, student and researcher, online blogger and journalist.-Ron Price with thanks to "All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace",  SBSONE TV,  8:30-9:30 p.m. Parts 1-3, 18/10/’11 to 1/11/’11.

 

So much of the world’s slaughter

goes on in some parallel universe

as one eats one’s evening meal &

tries to get through one’s own life

unscathed by the slings-&-arrows

of some outrageous fortune..And

Ill-equipped to interpret the social

commotion at play throughout the

planet, we listen to the pundits of

error & sink deeperinto the slough

of despond, troubled by forecasts

of doom and doing battle with our¹

wrongly informed imaginations as

our days pass swiftly like those tiny

twinkling stars that fill a night sky!!

 

¹ Ridvan message 1999, The Universal House of Justice

 

Ron Price 2/11/'11 to 9/10/14.

 

MEANDERING

 

In the Old Testament, in Genesis 11:31, Abraham is portrayed as leaving the city of Ur, as commanded by God, to cross the desert wilderness to Haran.  Other manifestations of God in the great religions are also required to move from place to place.  But, as far as I know, the Bahá'í Faith is the only religion on earth that has its beginnings in a refugee experience, commanded not by God, but by man, to leave its place of origin, its homeland.  The experience of community in a prison colony, a type of concentration camp would come to provide a relevant metaphorical base for its future struggle. 

 

Its early history also experienced an attempt at genocide, an attempt not yet entirely finished.  That early history has affected and will affect the Bahá'í community, perhaps, forever.   The years of being convicts, the prison years, were relatively short, 1867-1907.  Certainly by the time of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Western tour in 1912 they were well and truly over.  But they would affect the community for centuries to come. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, May 30^th 2006.

 

You can’t have birds flying dead,

candles stuck in flesh and heads

rolling around in a lounge-room,

thousands dying over decades,

prison cells, bodies smashed

to smithereens without it affecting

the way you live, move and are.

 

A telescopic-lens to look at

one’s universe is born out of

all this horror and violence,

a lens to see it all as one single,

divinely inspired current, vision,

dogma, principle of such magnitude

and emotional potency--a oneness,

no unwitting over-simplification, nor

mankind’s presumptuous construction?

 

The impulse to envisage, comprehend

the whole of life is deep within us

and the individual seems obliged,

under pain of being stunted, enfeebled

in his own development, if he disobeys

to carry others along with him in his

march to perfection, to be continually

doing all he can to enlarge the volume

of the human stream sweeping along

and flowing down from mountain,

meandering to the great ocean of life.

 

Ron Price

30/5/'06 to 9/10/14.

__________________________________________________________

MANUFACTURING

 

On 1 June 1962, as I finished my high school exams in Canada, and about 12 weeks before my Baha’i travelling-pioneering life began near the end of August, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi boss responsible for transporting 100s of thousands of Jews to death camps, was executed.  Research Professor of history and specialist in Jewish history, David Cesarani, argues that Eichmann had a corporate mentality and that he made a conscious career decision to do what he did within the immense bureaucratic wheel of the German totalitarian state.

 

He was not an embodiment of evil, not a brutal, depraved, an ideologically-driven psychopath.  These popular views are a myth, Cesarani argues.  He learned to be an anti-semite; he learned to hate and chose to be part of the genocide process.  He was part of a “paperwork-based collapse of morality.”  He was in many ways a detached, passionless administrator, as the sociologist Max Weber describes such men so well;  he was an ordinary, common, far from atypical man, a graduate in mechanical engineering.  He could have been, so argues Cesarani, you or I.-Ron Price with thanks to David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Times, Vintage, 2004.

 

You can get a man’s life so

wrong, even if you study him

for years; and you can get your

own life quite wrong even though

you live it decade in and decade out,

for man, it is said, is God’s mystery.

 

You certainly found, as the decades

rolled insensibly and sensibly by,

some bad, false wretched fame,

notoriety, a failed celebrity,

mortifying failure, a career move

in the wrong direction, a socio-historical,

ideological apparatus and a psycho-social

profile that manufactured you

as they manufacture us

with enough autonomy thrown-in

so that we can call ourselves free

even if we are everywhere in chains

in the Most Great Prison that is our life,

in which we cannot walk away but

in which there is always a degree of

voluntarism, there are always half-truths

and we must manage our lives within

a new structure of freedom for our age.

 

Ron Price

23/12/'05 to 9/10/'14.

_________________________________________________________

 

In the months both before and after I was born in 1944, Jewish prisoners were exterminated in a planned program of genocide in Nazi concentration camps.  Auschwitz had the biggest killing machine of all the camps.  It was situated in Poland southwest of Krakow and between 1 and 1.5 million Jews were gassed from 1942 to 1944.  In September 1944 the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz ended, and in November 1944 the gassing operations ceased.  The camp of Auschwitz was liberated on January 27^th 1945.  That was nearly 70 years ago, as I revise this original prose-poem. 

 

 It seems to have taken me at least 50 years of living before the power of understanding, and the reinforcements of the electronic media, have enabled me to see the holocaust in any kind of perspective, of conceptual integration.  What I was born into back in July of 1944, that 'final solution' as it was sometimes called, I had no idea even existed until at least my mid-to-late teens in the late 1950s and early 1960s, more than half a century ago.  The light, the darkness, dawned on me insensibly over six decades.  -Ron Price with thanks to “Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution,” ABC TV, 9:25-10:15 p.m., 13/10/'05-3/11/'05, and 9/10/'14.

 

The gassing stopped before

I was four months old,

little did I know then

in those early months

of life in the lunch-pail

city of Hamilton Ontario

Canada a million miles away

with a 40 year old mother,

a 55 year old father,

a 70 year old grandfather

helping me into my world

on the edge of a Canadian Lake.

 

Surely that was the nadir, then,

of civilization’s journey, surely?

But the dark heart had yet to come,

the darkest hours of a slough of despond

when, in a brief span of time, so charged

with potential and hope for all of humankind

I would inscribe my mark and assist in the

operation of forces that would lead us out

of the valley of that misery and shame

which bestrewed my years and my father’s---

to the loftiest summits of majesty and glory.¹

 

¹The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 1996.

 

Ron Price

28/10/'05 to 9/10/'14.

____________________________________________________

THE INTERNET: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The internet now has a great deal of material on the subject of genocide in addition to an online game entitled Genocide. One such example is: The Second Regional Forum on the Prevention of Genocide took place in Arusha, Tanzania on March 3–5, 2010.  The Regional Fora on the Prevention of Genocide are co-organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the United Republic of Tanzania, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Commerce and Religion of the Nation of Argentina.

 

The First Regional Forum took place in December 2008 in Argentina, and the next forum is scheduled to be held in Asia in 2011. Two additional examples are: (i) the Fourth Regional Forum on the Prevention of Genocide Co-organized by the Governments of Argentina, Cambodia, Switzerland and Tanzania, 28 February – 1 March 2013; and (ii) The New York Review of Books has an article on the problems the definition of genocide is causing, a case of where the popular definition of the word clashes with a legal one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by RonPrice - 10-Oct-2014 at 06:09