The Alberta Teachers’ Association

I have an aversion to hurting animals, have never hurt anyone and was never bullied as a child. Although I grew up knowing that people kill people, it's always been beyond my comprehension how people can hate and murder others because of their religion, race, colour or beliefs. Having lived as a member of the majority group has made it easy for me. I was, after all, a very ordinary "pinko-grey" (E. M. Forster's term for whites) Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), living in a WASP community. When I read about genocide or see the images on TV, I still fail to understand the enormity of the act.

In the introduction to her book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, Barbara Coloroso lists genocides, beginning with the 15 million indigenous people killed in North America from 1492 onward—15 million indigenous people killed by us pinko-greys, proving our superiority in stealing land and property, all too often in the name of God. The whole link horrifies me—the eyes of that deer haunt me.

In her anatomy of genocide, Coloroso concentrates on understanding and analyzing three 20th-century genocides: the Armenian annihilation in Turkey, 1915–18; the European holocaust of Jews and Roma, 1933–45; and the Rwanda massacres, 1994. To help readers understand these events, Coloroso includes documented personal accounts describing atrocities almost impossible to imagine.

One of the challenges facing the world community is to acknowledge the occurrence of genocides. For example, under the heading "Denial, Apathy and Impunity," Coloroso describes the reaction of Canada toward the Armenian genocide:

On April 21, 2004, the Canadian House of Commons passed a Bloc Québécois Motion: "This House acknowledges the Armenian genocide of 1915 and condemns this act as a crime against humanity." After pressure from the Turkish government regarding a joint NATO exercise, the Canadian government decided to establish a committee to investigate "both sides of the story."

Canada is not alone in ignoring reality. In 1994, as the massacre of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda unfolded, the world (including the United Nations and the media) choose to stand back and watch rather than get involved. Can you imagine (with the memory of the Holocaust in recent history) killing 10,000 men, women and children a day for three months?

Part of the problem in recognizing and acknowledging genocide lies in its definition. In an attempt to separate the rhetoric of war from genocide (what Roméo Dallaire called "ethnic cleansing in its most sinister form"), Coloroso states:

Wielding the power of the state, they [individual human beings] intended to exterminate a group of human beings selected on the basis of their birth, religion or culture. It is this intentionality to identify, target and slaughter—as well as the murderous ideology of the state behind the intention—that is key to distinguishing genocide from all the other crimes against humanity.

Genocides do not just happen; they are not the result of long-suppressed intertribal rivalries. Genocides are not the causes or consequences of war, though the rhetoric of war is often used to disguise genocides. Genocides are methodically executed policies of a government. Any attempt to make excuses for genocide just doesn't work. The Armenian massacre was described by the Young Turks as a "spontaneous unplanned act of violence." The start of the Holocaust was explained as "the spontaneous outburst of an enraged nation." The massacre of the Tutsis was an act of "sudden irrational lunacy" or "the excesses of crowds gripped by fear and ancient hatred." These reasons are merely excuses. Genocide is not perpetrated by monsters. The perpetrators tend to be "no different in their moral makeup from the rest of the population." Coloroso suggests that contempt is the cold hate that is at the heart of genocidal impulse.

Many of you will have read Coloroso's books or heard her speak about bullying. In 2005, she was invited to the National University of Rwanda in Butare to talk about The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander (HarperCollins, 2002) and she used that "opportunity to demonstrate that the concept of genocide in general and the Rwandan genocide in particular are macrocosms of the drama known as bullying." She asserts that genocide is the most extreme form of bullying and it is within the realm of ordinary human behaviour. It is but a short walk from schoolyard bullying to criminal bullying (hate crime) to genocide, warns Coloroso.

What frighten me are the bystanders. Dan Olweus's Bullying Prevention Program ("Schoolyard Bullying Circle") illustrates the elements in the evolution of the bullying process. It is bystanders—those who see what happen and choose to do nothing about it—who are suffering from intentional blindness. I suspect that it frightens me because I see myself in one of those two categories: the "disengaged onlooker," who pretends not to see or simply doesn't take a stand, or the "potential witness," who knows that he or she ought to help but, offering a variety of reasons or excuses, chooses not to act. That is a challenge that Coloroso places before her readers: where do you stand in the bullying circle?

Her book is an indictment of the United Nations for its passivity and paralysis, and the equally pathetic politics of the Security Council in failing to act on Rwanda. Other nations and organizations could be blamed for not acting in the earlier Turkish and German atrocities. War, Coloroso claims, can be resolved by some form of conflict resolution, but genocide must be stopped by third-party intervention.

Coloroso concludes by emphasizing the need to restore community, claiming that "we must no longer view hatred as natural, normal, or necessary; disparity in wealth as inevitable; or injustice as simply regrettable." We must no longer tolerate man's inhumanity to man, wherever and whenever it occurs, and we must never ignore it because it is in a different country or different culture.

This short history is terrifying, its images horrifying, but Coloroso's case for involvement is well argued and makes a great deal of sense. To paraphrase Holocaust survivor Chaim Ginott, education, after all, is important only if it makes our children more human. Those eyes haunt me still!