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Genocide and its Relevance Today (Part V) – Just Words? The Failure of the ‘Never Again’ Convention

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by Anna Plunkett

A group of Rohingya refugees, crossing the border into Bangladesh (Image credit: Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

In 1994, some fifty years after the Holocaust ended, the Rwandan Genocide rocked the world; forcing us to re-evaluate the international community’s role in addressing crimes against humanity. Yet in 2017 it became clear that the call for such atrocities to happen ‘Never Again’ was more a sentiment than a commitment to the world’s most oppressed. As the world watched Rohingya villages pillaged and burned, the violence forced over half a million persons to flee. The UN failed to act, respond, or protect those in Myanmar’s Western State.

The Crisis

It was in August 2017 that the ongoing plight of the Rohingya people erupted onto international consciousness as over half a million people fled their homes and villages in Myanmar across the border to Bangladesh. In the weeks and months that followed, first-hand accounts, mobile footage, and aerial imagery provided evidence of the extent of the devastating violence and destruction, including widespread rape and torture, mass killings, and the razing of villages. These actions, conducted by the military, were condoned as part of a ‘land clearance’ operation said to be focused on the neutralisation of ethnic armed rebels operating in the area.

Whilst shocking, the warning signs of the possibility of such atrocities were there. Despite the country’s rich diversity, the Rohingya have struggled to gain legal recognition within Myanmar. The Citizenship Law of 1982 removed the nominal legal status they had held since independence within the country. Although they were eventually granted white cards, which provided them nominal rights, it also identified them as having a migrant rather than citizenship status. Moreover, these cards were revoked before the 2015 election leaving most of the community with no access to their right to vote and with no Muslim candidates being fielded for the election. Further laws restricted the Rohingya’s access to education, healthcare, or work, as well as leaving them without any right to marry and have children. If this was not enough, in 2015 the migrant boat crisis in Asia was only a warning sign of what, for the Rohingya people, was to come just a few years later in 2017.

The Response

Despite the warning signs of oppression, the international recognition of the difficulties the Rohingya faced came too little and too late. In the immediate wake of the crisis, the UN and other international organisations were left paralysed after Myanmar refused to grant access to the affected region or officially acknowledge the events unfolding there. Despite international outcry and pressure being placed on the newly elected government, the violence continued unabated. On the international level, a lack of consensus within the UN Security Council left its international mechanisms unable to respond effectively to the ongoing crisis.

The UN response was further limited in-country by internal struggles. The UN Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee, who can no longer enter the country, has struggled to lead and complete effective monitoring on Myanmar’s human rights situation due to ongoing barred access to affected communities. Moreover, in 2017 the Resident Coordinator of the UN Country Team in Myanmar was rotated out after the state government raised complaints with regards to suspected bias. Although a UN Special Envoy has since been deployed and the Security Council delegation visit to Myanmar conducted in May 2018 went ahead, access is still limited with most negotiations held in the capital Naypyidaw, far away from the realities of Rakhine.

Where are we now

It took almost a year for the reality of the Rohingya situation to be officially recognised. The UN report summarising the fact-finding missions finally identified what many in the human rights community had been labelling it for over a year, accusing the Myanmar military of the Rohingya genocide.  This is a claim the Myanmar government continues to refute.

Investigations continue, and in November 2019, The Gambia filed a lawsuit with the International Court of Justice on the crimes of genocide against Myanmar. The case was heard in The Hague the following month with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi representing and defending Myanmar against the lawsuit. This event, controversially, presented a disturbing portrait of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner and previously world-renowned human rights activist. The final verdict may take months or years to be read.

Whilst there has been limited success in reaching a sustainable solution to the ongoing plight of the Rohingya, over the last year there has been increasing movement towards some cooperation. In October 2018, Myanmar and Bangladesh agreed on a repatriation programme for the refugees. Yet few Rohingya have shown willingness or even interest in returning, with no guarantee of access to citizenship or protection from the military should they do so.  Further, the continued refusal of the government to identify the group as Rohingya, or to accept as valid accusations of crimes against humanity or genocide, highlights an unwillingness to compromise or cooperate with either the affected people or the international community to resolve this deadlock.

A reflection on the utility of the Genocide Convention

An independent report into the UN’s handling of the Rohingya Crisis has identified ‘systematic and structural failures’ to protect the Rohingya people. We are not merely witnessing an unfolding tragedy in the mountains between Myanmar and Bangladesh, even one on a scale we never thought possible again. More significantly, this episode demonstrates the difficulties and failures of the UN to protect the world’s oppressed populations.

These failures highlight one of the most structural obstacles facing the UN – the willingness of its member states to cooperate. Myanmar is a member of the UN and despite not signing the Rome Statute, is still a signatory on the 1948 Genocide Convention. Their engagement and acceptance of international law is intermittent and limits the ability of the international community to cooperate and engage in Myanmar. Demonstrably, the presence and acceptance of UN policies to protect minority communities from state oppression, namely the Genocide Convention and Responsibility to Protect, have proven inconsequential. In the face of ‘Never Again,’ we have indeed stood by and observed such crimes occur. The effectiveness of UN’s policy, for all its good intentions, is dependent on the support and acquiescence of the host state and where this is not provided, neither is the protection of the world’s most vulnerable.

Anna is a doctoral researcher at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She received her BA in Politics and Economics from the University of York, before receiving a scholarship to continue her studies at York with an MA in Post-War Recovery. She was the recipient of the Guido Galli Award for her MA dissertation. Her primary interests include conflict and democracy at the sub-national level, understanding how various political orders are impacted by transitions at the sub-national level.

Genocide and its Relevance Today (Part IV): When does Genocide end?

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by Mariana Boujikian

Denial of genocide sustains the pain, rather than resolving it (Jennifer Hu/Daily Bruin)

Man-made catastrophes such as genocides and other crimes against humanity impact people for many generations to come. Indeed, it is often the case that children of the survivors and their children, in turn, remain affected by that original sin. This intergenerational pain engages with one of the great issues that permeate the study of genocides and other atrocities: when does the process end? Can we say that after a few decades, genocides and their aftermaths are effectively over and dealt with? Above all, one can ask the question of whether this type of violence works with an expiration date, after which its effects completely dissipate?

In addition to extreme human loss, among the most immediate consequences of mass atrocities, a process of deterritorialisation and the creation of a diaspora takes place in which the survivors migrate to a new land where they can be free of persecution. This step is often accompanied by a state of silencing over the recently lived trauma. For the survivors, there is immense difficulty in verbalising and publicising the violence experienced. Marcio Seligmann-Silva, for example, argues that the survivor needs to elaborate a narrative and build “a bridge between himself and society”. Otherwise, he will be stuck between two worlds: the one in which he lived before, a place of horrors; and the one that he inhabits now, where most people around him do not know of his experience. The literature on other cases of gross violations of human rights shows that many survivors do not wish to build this narrative and prefer silence as a way of trying to spare subsequent generations of suffering. This attitude can also occur when victims feel that words are not enough to express their experience. As Fiona Ross, who studied the testimonies of women in post-Apartheid South Africa, points out: “Sometimes the voice escapes from experience.”

In this context, the promotion of spaces that provide public address on the subject are essential to provide healing for the ones who were traumatised by the violence and loss. Laura Moutinho identifies how South Africa’s experience of reconstruction after Apartheid was centred on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which sought to “produce a clearly therapeutic effect in the elaboration of losses, traumas, and suffering”. Without this kind of reparative action and public dialogue after events of extreme violence, victims hardly feel welcomed and supported in their grief. As a result, the concealment of tragic events can become the very tonic of their family’s memory. Therefore, the lack of an official or otherwise process for transitional justice, an erasure of collective memory around the period of violence can occur. This silencing scenario can be further exacerbated when associated with denialism and state-sponsored strategies of erasure, as in the case of the Armenian Genocide.

The absence of justice and reparation measures at the end of the period of persecution against the Armenian population – who lived as an ethnic and religious minority in the Turkish-Ottoman Empire – led to a process of mourning that was forged outside legal and institutional processes. Jones summarises, after the end of the war “the stage was set for the rebirth of Turkish nationalism and resuscitation of Turkish statehood”. The perpetrators were not blamed, and Turkish society was reborn in the Kemalist rise, which prevented any formal recognition of the crimes committed by the Empire from which it inherited its structures. After this process, Jones explains that when “denied formal justice, Armenian militants settled on a vigilante version” – referring to the Operation Nemesis, which hunted down the main Turkish perpetrators and assassinated them as vengeance for what had happened during the period of 1915-1923.

The killing of the men responsible for planning the massacres and deportations was a desperate attempt to get payback and draw international attention to the tragedy. However, the mission only provided a sense of revenge, for the official recognition of the genocidal process by the Turkish state or other world powers has not occurred until this day. The case of the Armenian Genocide continued to be marked by a blatant negation of the past, and public mentions of the events are still punishable inside Turkey. The mere acknowledgment of the act has resulted in the punishment of various Turkish intellectuals, such as Orhan Pamuk, Taner Akça, and Ragip Zarakolu. Even more than a century after the events, the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians remains one of the biggest cases of denialism.

Through denial – considered by Stanton as the final stage of genocide – the topic remains an open wound. When analysing the testimonials of descendants of survivors in the diaspora it becomes clear that the topic is still very much alive among the community. One descendant defined the continued denialism as a prolonged pain: “What the Armenian people struggle today is for recognition. Because it will not change anything. Nothing goes back, nothing will change, the suffering continues. But I think people want to breathe, you understand? Take a deep sigh?”

From an anthropological perspective, the social or cultural life of the community has also marked this major event: 24 April commemorations of the genocide take place in Armenian churches, schools, clubs, and other social spaces. Those who were not alive in 1915 are aware that their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents experienced situations of tremendous violence and deprivation. Some women who descend from survivors shared complete narratives about the trajectory of their relatives and what they suffered along the way. The stories seem to pass from generation to generation through testimonies and extremely violent images, such as beheadings, the difficulties of crossing the desert, the path full of bodies, etc. As one of the respondents described: “(…) my mother said that my grandmother reported that it was like this: rivers of blood in the way they were going.”

Others, for their part, did not know the events that led their relatives to migrate, and reported having heard only fragments related to the flight of their relatives. In those cases, minutiae or details of what happened before seemed lost in time. The cities or regions of origin within their ancestral land are not even remembered, and subsequent generations seem bothered by the lack of this important information. As one Armenian woman stated: “They said they came [to Brazil] running away from the war. That’s what we all know about. That they came, the story of coming on the ship, these things. And sometimes they let out a little something like that”. She completed with a sigh: “I’d like to know more, I really would”

These discoveries are consistent with what Dr. Volhardt and Dr. Nair found on their research with group victims of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, and other people who lived in refugee camps, in which “groups oscillate between silence and transmission of victim narratives”.

Another participant, a third-generation descendent from Armenia, only learned about her family’s past when she became a teenager and started living with her Armenian grandmother. She mentioned feeling in her life marks of something she had not lived:

“I think we come with a deep mark because we are torn from our lands … to be plucked from the ground and with no prospect of returning, I think this goes through generations, I usually say that I have a melancholy that is very Armenian, and that it is very much the result of genocide. It’s something I always felt in my grandmother, in my aunts, an eternal longing for a place they did not even know.”

In the subject of transgenerational trauma and the transmission of the events, research indicates that descendants who were born after the events – distanced in a temporal and geographic sense from the mass violence – can feel symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or other side effects often seen in people who lived through those episodes. This perpetuity of the past demonstrates the force with which events like genocides are disseminated throughout the decades, in a way that even those who have not been subjected to trauma feel their effects.

Through denialism, the effects of this tremendous violence are often reactivated. Such obstruction of the reconstruction of public memory can forestall the healing process. Without the acknowledgment of the events and the pain they caused, recovery is an even harder task for victims and their descendants. These persons are put in a position of having to prove their own suffering instead of being able to move forward. As such, we can conclude that although many of the known cases of genocide occurred during a specific time frame and are often studied based on what happened during that period, it is safe to say that genocide it is not over when the last death occurred, or when wars and conflicts are resolved, for its consequences can linger and travel through time and space, crossing generations.

Mariana Boujikian holds a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the University of Sao Paulo (USP) – Brazil. She is part of the Social Anthropology Masters Program of the same institution, specialising in studies of genocide and diaspora, with a focus on the aftermaths of the Armenian Genocide.

Genocide and its Relevance Today (Part III) – A Quarter Century after Dayton: Reconciliation in the Western Balkans?

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by Karla Drpić

Stari Most, the ‘Old Bridge’ in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina was destroyed during the Croat-Bosniak War of the 1990s and rebuilt in 2004 (Image credit: Omer Tarik Koc)

November of 2020 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Dayton and Erdut Agreements that respectively ended the Bosnian and Croatian wars. Since the end of the Kosovo War in 1999, the former Yugoslav region has enjoyed two decades of relative peace, stability, and political rapprochement between the regional states. With these developments in mind, the region is seemingly headed in the right direction. However, as in most post-conflict societies, this progress has been uneven and at times contradictory.

Over the last two and a half decades, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in particular has become the ideal case study for researchers writing on a variety of aspects found in post-conflict societies. One such aspect is ‘thin reconciliation’, a term that describes superficial, top-down reconciliation without a deep bearing on people’s interpersonal relationships in post-conflict societies. This issue is also pertinent to the other two protagonists of the Yugoslav Wars: Croatia and Serbia. Now more than twenty years since the end of the wars, what progress has been made in these three countries concerning reconciliation, transitional justice, and the establishment of truth?

The recent history of BiH, Croatia, and Serbia puts forward a unique case for the study of reconciliation and transitional justice. Unlike Argentina, South Africa, and Sierra Leone, countries which eventually established truth and reconciliation committees; BiH, Croatia, and Serbia no longer constitute a unified political entity. As three sovereign states that achieved durable independence after the Yugoslav Wars, each one of them has engaged in mutually exclusive history-building projects. There are no immediate political incentives to harmonise these histories through agreement on an ‘acceptable’ account of the wars, as could be seen in Rwanda, for instance. Establishing a similar ‘harmonisation’ project in the former Yugoslav region could potentially result in stronger cross-border dialogues about the war, especially regarding emotionally charged wartime events.

The Srebrenica genocide and Operation Storm provide some of the most pertinent examples of this dissonance. In 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted the former Commander of the Main Staff of the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS), Ratko Mladić, of genocide in Srebrenica, eastern BiH. Yet, the Serbian leadership has criticised the severity of this verdict. Similarly, Operation Storm – a Croatian offensive against internationally unrecognised and rebel Serb-held Krajina region in Croatia– is seen by many Serbs as ethnic cleansing. On the other hand, in Croatia, this is celebrated as a liberation of national territories.

The importance of ICTY’s work in this context was paramount, not only for delivering justice but for establishing facts regarding individual criminal responsibility. However, the underfunded ICTY Outreach Programme has failed to effectively correct the misconceptions surrounding its purpose and commitment to the wider population in the region, and so is yet to establish grassroots truth or facilitate reconciliation efforts. The ICTY has never managed to change the media-fuelled misconceptions and misunderstandings about its work; its verdicts, caseload, mixed jurisdiction, and investigation methods were never systematically discussed with ‘common people’ across the region and in their own language.

Furthermore, the ICTY was never intended to be a victim-oriented court the way that the Gacaca courts were in Rwanda. Its location in The Hague also meant that it was far removed from the day-to-day lives of victims of the wars. Yet, a universally accepted truth and reconciliation commission has never been established to fill this gap, leaving many victims to initiate bottom-to-top reconciliation processes.

Other barriers to reconciliation persist. One-sided accounts of the war continue to be passed on from parent to child, while hard-line politicians like convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj propagate sectarian rhetoric. EU-led regional rapprochement will remain difficult so long as the issue of missing persons is not resolved and recent events, such as the Srebrenica verdict or the Bosnian Croat Slobodan Praljak who killed himself in court, have done little to resolve matters. In fact, both events have been met with denial in parts of Serbian and Croatian communities. Ethnicity-motivated incidents still occur, such as the Day of Republika Srpska celebrations in BiH – ruled as unconstitutional by BiH’s Constitutional Court and considered by many Bosniaks as an act of political provocation that glorifies war and fuels ethnic tensions. BiH itself is still divided by ‘Inter-Entity Boundary Line’ – a boundary set up in the Dayton era that separates the majority Serb Republika Srpska from the majority Muslim Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – and national allegiances towards BiH’s state symbols vary widely. Top Serbian politicians range from Boris Tadić, former Serbian President who previously apologised for Vukovar [1] and Srebrenica, to Aleksandar Vučić, former Minister of Information for Slobodan Milošević, whose wartime speeches included statements such as ‘for every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims’.

Despite the very real obstacles that BiH, Croatia, and Serbia face, signs of progress do exist. Most Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs in BiH believe that they can live together peacefully without international supervision. The highest number of tourists in Belgrade in 2019 were Croats and the number of Serbs moving to or vacationing in Croatia has been rising steadily since 2014. Moreover, some grassroots regional reconciliation initiatives, such as RECOM, have actively operated since the early 2000s despite a lack of broad political support.

‘Live and let live’ seems to be the best way to describe the current situation in the Western Balkans. While people from different communities seem to be putting their differences aside, ‘thick reconciliation’ is distant and conversations about the war remain conditioned by contradictory national narratives. Furthermore, a solution for the reconciliation efforts remains unclear: should people in the Balkans be given more time to digest their past; should the younger generations be encouraged to foster more neighbourly relations; or should there be a push for profound political change? The most likely answer is a combination of the three. However, after twenty-five years of peace, asking for more time could raise eyebrows. Following the EU’s renewed interest in the Balkans perhaps it is high time to restart these conversations.

[1] The Vukovar massacre was the largest massacre committed by Serbian forces during the war in Croatia: more than 200 people were removed from the city hospital and murdered on a nearby farm. Vukovar’s wartime history still deeply divides the Croatian and Serbian communities living in the city. For more information, see: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2015/11/vukovar-divided-war-croatia-serbia-massacre-151120090853383.html

Karla Drpić is an MA War Studies student at King’s College London. In 2019, she completed her BA degree in International Relations and Modern Languages at the University of Essex. Her academic interests include geopolitics, international organisations, civil wars, and separatist/secessionist movements. You can Karla on Twitter @drpicka

Genocide and its Relevance Today (Part II) – Remembering the Holocaust at 75

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by Hannah Rose

A look from inside the camp at the gatehouse of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) leading to the gas chambers (Image credit: Michel Zacharz/Wikimedia)

On 19 April 1945, leading BBC broadcaster Richard Dimbleby reported the scene at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, four days after its liberation by British Forces:

Dead bodies, some of them in decay, lay strewn about the road and along the rutted tracks. On each side of the road were brown wooden huts. There were faces at the windows; the bony, emaciated faces of starving women, too weak to come outside, propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before they die. And they were dying, every hour and every minute. I saw men wandering dazedly along the road, stagger and fall. Someone else looked down at him, took him by the heels, and dragged him to the side of the road to join the other bodies lie unburied there.

At first, the BBC refused to broadcast Dimbleby’s report, believing it to be too implausible to be true. The Nazi’s systematic dehumanisation and persecution of six million Jews as well as the murder of five million LGBT+ individuals, people of Roma, and Cinti descent, political opponents and disabled individuals – even seventy-five years later – are facts that are still barely conceivable for the human mind.

The steady erosion of each of those victim’s humanity can be traced back to the the Nazi’s first attempts to exclude Jews from public life. These efforts culminated in the concentration and extermination camps, with Auschwitz-Birkenau featuring as the spiritual centre of the Nazi genocide. This journey from expressions of racial hatred to the extermination of a people provides valuable lessons for how the conditions which we create as a society on a micro-level can lay the foundation for large-scale oppression. In particular, we learn from the Holocaust that there were three types of people: the perpetrator, the victim, and the bystander. Without all of these categories fulfilling their respective function, Nazi antisemitism would not have been able to industrialise and expand to its infamous extent. It was only through the societal normalisation of the Nazi dehumanisation project that the conditions for genocide could be allowed to take root and develop. Therefore, it is only through mass resilience to prejudice that we can immunise our society. From education about the Holocaust, we all have not only an opportunity, but even more so a responsibility to play our part in preventing the road to genocide.

Although the crimes of the Nazis may appear self-evident, recent research of British adults published by ComRes reveals revisionist attitudes seeping once again through the fringes of our discourse. Of those surveyed, one third said they knew little or nothing about the Holocaust, and the same portion said that Jewish people usurp the Holocaust for their gain. Whilst often such beliefs come simply from a lack of education, some conspire that the facts are deliberately being skewed in order to benefit Jewish people or the state of Israel. Such rhetoric, present on both the far-right and the far-left, is reminiscent of the sinister conspiracy theories that allowed the Holocaust to happen in the first place.

Meanwhile, in mainstream European politics, the Holocaust has been a topic of hot debate. Particularly in Poland, where the Auschwitz-Birkenau were respectively located in the villages of Oświęcim and Brzezinka, that memory is an especially vivid one. Recent legislation which criminalised accounts of Polish complicity in Nazi genocide received global condemnation for its attempt to revise and remove blame for the Holocaust. It became illegal to refer to concentration or extermination camps in Poland as ‘Polish camps’ despite there being definitive evidence of complicity by some Poles and Polish institutions in these war crimes. Though this ruling was later overturned, the Polish government had already given the green light to historical revisionism and growing far-right sentiments in the country.

This issue is not isolated to the Jewish population of Europe. Mass demonisation of minorities has in the past been employed to perpetrate genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. Currently, ethnic cleansing of the Yazidi people in Syria, the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the Uyghur people in China’s Xingjiang province is living proof that as a global community we have failed to sufficiently learn the lessons of the Holocaust.

In the year of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Belsen, Auschwitz, and the Jews of Europe more generally, remembrance must not be a noun, but a verb. In the age of alternative facts, deep fakes and the reshaping of information for political purposes, the state of knowledge itself will not prevent persecution. It is our responsibility not just to know, but to teach; not just to listen, but to repeat; not just to understand the lessons, but to action them.

Hannah Rose is the former elected President of the Union of Jewish Students in the UK, and spoke on this topic in Brussels on a panel with Holocaust survivors and diplomats from Israel, Germany, and the European Commission. In her previous roles, Hannah Rose worked as an MP’s staff for the chair of the APPG on Holocaust Education, and interned at the Holocaust Educational Trust. In April she led a bus of Jewish youth around Poland and to Bergen-Belsen for the anniversary of the liberation. Rose is currently enrolled in the MA Terrorism, Security, and Society programme at King’s College London. 

Genocide and its Relevance Today (Part I) – The Ongoing Relevance of Holocaust Education in German Migration Society: Why this Topic at all?

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by Elisabeth Beck

A passage through the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin (Image credit: Flickr/Jerzy Durczak)

The debate on migration is an emotionally charged one, particularly when that migration was forced. The same also applies to the discourse surrounding the culture of remembrance in Germany. The weight of such a discussion is further exacerbated when migration and memory are simultaneously present. Politicians and educators get involved in the discussion when it comes to the aims that Holocaust education ought to pursue in an immigration country, asking whether the participation of immigration and their prior life stories impact the objectives of that education in any meaningful way. People from different countries are socialised with various narratives about the Holocaust and, therefore, remember it differently – or not at all. Consequently, there is also a debate about the obligation for immigrants to learn about the ‘German’ past and to remember it in an assumed and specifically ‘German’ way. These various expectations from different players have created challenges for Holocaust education and, hence, the question arises as to how educational approaches in this field ought to look like in a society characterised by migration [1].

In 2017, of the 82.6 million people living in Germany, 19.3 million of them were seen or marked as ‘immigrants’ or had foreign backgrounds. In this light, Germany is a highly diverse country[2]. However, there are still people who reject this and seek to portray German society as a homogenous entity. Such a nation-state-oriented production of an ‘us’ – as a counterpart to an ‘other’, a ‘them’ – negates plurality which has been present even prior to the refugee crisis of 2015-2016. Global history is history of migration, and yet, this understanding is conflictual because discussing migration and forced migration remains highly complex and politically divided. The focus in social, scientific, and media debates on migration and integration is mostly on the linguistic and vocational training of immigrants and refugees. Because of this, little is known on how migration influences the way we remember, or on how education about the German past deals with processes of pluralisation. Even more so, it remains uncertain to what extent there exists a necessity of a ‘different’ or a rather more ‘contemporary’ method of remembrance.

When it comes to the Holocaust, there is a specific way of remembering the past in German society. In the past, the country developed and upheld a strongly institutionalised remembrance mechanism. This fulfills both political and social functions, from state integration, the identification with the political system, and consensus building to the creation of mass loyalty and stability assurance[3]. For this reason, history and its remembrance forms ‘our’ identity and the way we see ‘our’ society and ‘ourselves’, in stark contrast to the ‘the others’. Still, the construction of an ‘us’ refers to the rigid entity of nation and, in many cases, neglects the heterogeneity in society that results from migratory processes. In so doing, one of the biggest contemporary challenges is the inclusion of different perspectives in the education of history and the avoidance of the production of an ‘other’ (symbolised by such terms as ‘here’ and ‘there’ or ‘us’ and ‘them’). In short, Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust education in Germany needs to be open to new spheres and develop new forms of remembering and training in order to enable all people living in Germany to participate and conceptualise the country’s history.

Different communities and diverse groups remember ‘their’ past in various ways. Since remembrance is such a powerful resource, conflicts can emerge as a result of its different conceptualisation, e.g. in the form of victim hierarchies or ‘competitions’. In addition to the question of what plural remembrance can look like, the question of the legitimacy of remembering in general is also not uncommon in Germany. However, it is important to cope with fundamental societal changes and, therefore, with upcoming changes in Holocaust education and equally in genocide education. Discussing the reason why we ought to still remember at all and why we should think and educate about cruel pasts cannot be a solution.

Since the Holocaust is an event in history that shook the foundations of civilisation, Germany has a responsibility in remembering and not having to repeat the tragedies of the past[4]. This responsibility, however, arises not only from ‘being German’ or living in Germany. As human beings and critical individuals we all have the responsibility to prevent the occurrence of atrocities, namely any exclusion, discrimination, genocide, or ethnic cleansing in the world. This responsibility cannot be delegated to a national or state level. It must just as well be located within the individual. Recognising and developing this accountability is widely regarded as a challenge for education.

As such, education is an essential tool in the prevention of genocide by promoting knowledge about past violence. It does so by studying the causes, circumstances, dynamics, and consequences of such violent episodes in history; as well as developing skills, values, and attitudes in order to prevent group-targeted violence and genocide. Consequently, education needs to respond to changes in society by taking the diversity of people’s backgrounds and experiences with discrimination, exclusion, and the violation of human rights (often related to processes of migration– into account. This is particularly important in cases of forced migration caused by war and violent conflict, both underlining the necessity and urgency to address crimes against humanity in education.

Still, by including different views and perspectives of Holocaust education participants, challenges may occur. Educators need to face problems like anti-Semitism and discrimination with increasing frequency. The number of people harbouring anti-Semitic attitudes – such as Holocaust denial, is widespread, not only in the German right-wing extremist scene[5] but also in the region of the Middle East and North Africa where more than fifty per cent of refugees who fled to Germany in 2017 came from. Holocaust education cannot immunise against anti-Semitism but it can raise awareness and sensitise individuals to the different and in many cases traditional images of the enemy, and their different functions in respective societies. In so doing, Holocaust education in Germany can contribute to an increasing awareness of prejudices and stereotypes without demonising and putting refugees and migrants marked as ‘the others’ under general anti-Semitism.

Furthermore, research on this topic is mostly conducted in secondary school and training that usually takes place in school and through extracurricular youth education. Adults are rarely recipients of Holocaust education. In 2017, thirty-three per cent of the non-German population was at the age between 18 and 35 years. Therefore, it can be assumed that – depending on the latest migration movements in Germany – the majority of this community has not had access to the German educational system. Access to formal training is furthermore often limited and not available to every immigrant.

Consequently, immigrants and refugees living in Germany do not necessarily come in contact with Holocaust education in any formal way. They may not know about the meaning of the highly institutionalised Holocaust remembrance which is a key pillar in the formation of a presumed ‘German’ identity. This laguna presents a challenge to adult education because participants carry their own narratives and also victim discourses with them. These past experiences have a major impact on the education itself. Educators have to make sure that different narratives and family connections to the Holocaust are thematised. At the same time, they have to moderate and contextualise the different discourses in order to avoid a marginalisation or trivialisation of the Holocaust. Only a collaborative debate on the past – or rather different pasts – can help to highlight the relevance of this topic for German society and lead to a better understanding of the reason why it is important to remember – not only for German nationals but for every person living in Germany.

Equally important for developing a contemporary Holocaust education and genocide education for adults is the inclusion of various experiences of migration, discrimination, exclusion, and even the violation of human rights. The conceptualisation of a ‘Holocaust Education and Beyond’ that has an emancipatory effect and highlights the values of democracy and human rights is essential. Holocaust education has the aim of strengthening people into taking responsibility for their own actions in the present and future. Beyond that, Holocaust education as one of genocide education can provide knowledge and an ethical imperative for present and future actions by people. It can build bridges into the world in order to carry these ideas further to ensure a ‘Never Again!’[6] pertaining to any violation of human rights. Genocide being one of them.

[1] A migration society is characterized by the assumption that migration is a societal normality and that a society is influenced and shaped by migration processes. Therefore, every society is a migration society. Old and new affinities are negotiated conflictually. Contradictions of presumed clearly defined concepts of belonging, space and culture are identified, shown and deconstructed. However, set boundaries and limits are problematised by migration.

[2] With the term ‘diversity’ in this blog post I only refer to different ethnic backgrounds and diversity.

[3] Dietmar Schiller, “Politische Gedenktage in Deutschland. Zum Verhältnis von öffentlicher Erinnerung und politischer Kultur” in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 1993, B25/93, p. 32-39

[4] The responsibility for remembering results from the certainty that atrocities in history mostly started with latent terms of exclusion and discrimination. This is what has to be prevented by remembering the past since history does not repeat exactly the same way it happened (see for example Jörn Leonhard, Die Büchse der Pandora. Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs)

[5] The German Federal Ministry of the Interior indicates a number of 25.000 people for whom there are indications of a right-wing extremist endeavour.

[6] Theodor Adorno states in his essay “Education After Auschwitz”: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again. […] Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz.” (emphasis added by the author)

Elisabeth Beck is a research associate at the Center for Flight and Migration and a PhD student in educational science at the Department of Adult Education and Extra-Curricular Education, both at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. Her research interests include education in the context of heterogeneity, migration pedagogy, Holocaust education, human rights education, and civic studies. Furthermore, she is a lecturer at the University of Augsburg. During her PhD training, she also served as a research associate at the University of Augsburg, where she acquired her Master’s Degree. Her current research project focuses on new perspectives in Holocaust education in the German migration society.