 Media Credit: Brendon DiVincenzo/The Daily Northwestern Leon Lim, co-founder of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, spoke at the panel. [Click to enlarge]
| |
By Matt RadlerThe Daily Northwestern
Telling stories of brutality, poverty and war that spanned a century and the globe, a panel of genocide survivors and activists spoke Tuesday night at the McCormick Tribune Center Forum.
About 200 people attended the speech, entitled "Silenced Voices: A Genocide Survivor Panel" and hosted by the Sheil Catholic Center, Hillel Cultural Life, the Northwestern University Darfur Action Committee and NUnite, which covered genocides from the extermination of Armenians in Turkey during World War I to the present-day bloodshed in Sudan.
The stories of personal loss and survival began with activist Greg Bedian's account of his grandmother's hardship during the Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians died under the persecution of the government of the Ottoman Empire. Bedian said his grandmother was forced to march across a section of what is now Turkey, losing relatives along the way.
"You can count the people and you can count the buildings, but you cannot quantify the loss," Bedian said. "Even today the names of cities, the names of rivers have been changed. The ethnic cleansing is systematic and continuing and they're still stealing my culture and my life."
Leon Lim, co-founder of the Cambodian American Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, spoke of his years living under the campaign of terror conducted by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia beginning in 1975. Educated Cambodians were rounded up and shot to death by army officials, many of them boys as young as 12, he said.
"The Khmer Rouge turned Cambodia into a country with no cities, no hospitals, no schools and no private property," Lim said. "They killed students, doctors, teachers and professionals. They even killed people for wearing reading glasses."
One panelist, Jacqueline Murekatete, discussed the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Most of her family was murdered during the attempt by the Hutu-led government to purge the country of Tutsis, Murekatete's ethnic group. Propaganda and the legacy of colonial ethnic divisions made the bloodshed possible, she said.
Spring Break
The DAILY encourages you to share your thoughts on this story. Please help us keep the discussion lively, but civil. Comments that are abusive to others, off-topic or vulgar, or comments that misrepresent someone's identity, will not be tolerated. We reserve the right to delete any comments in violation or to close comment threads on articles.
Please e-mail online@dailynorthwestern.com to flag a comment or for more information.
Be the first to comment on this story