Left In Lowell

Please allow me to shift gears.

On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Turkish government rounded up over 400 Armenian intellectuals in the city of Constantinople, now called Istanbul. Thus began the Armenian Genocide. The Rwanda Genocide also began in the month of April but in 1994.

In between there were a number of other genocides including the Jewish Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide and the ethnic cleansing carried out in Kosovo.

All these genocides have the same pattern. The minority residents of a particular nation are attacked by the majority in an attempt to exterminate the minority. A plan is drafted to begin the killing of the ethnic/religious/political/racial minority, this plan is then executed over a period of time, once it is completed the denial or the distortion of the facts begins. How much can one people hate another people to want them eliminated from the face of the earth?

It takes a people decades and generations to exorcise the psychological impact of being driven from your ancestral homeland, attacked and raped along the long journey to a neighboring country that may offer sanctuary.

So today as the survivors of the Darfur Genocide seek shelter in Chad, some in the world watch helplessly while many others, unable to cope, ignore it.