Author: Martha Carol and Rachel Kaplan
The Armenian Students Association (ASA), First Nations club, Hillel and Students Taking Action Now for Darfur (STAND) organized a series of events to recognize Genocide Awareness Month throughout April.
The four clubs co-hosted a talk by a Holocaust survivor, a screening of “Ararat” and several quad displays about life on a reservation and the genocide of Native Americans.
Each club focused its programming on a different genocide – the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish in 1915, the genocide of Native Americans in the United States, the Holocaust in 1940s Eastern Europe and the current genocide in Darfur.
Last Wednesday, the ASA screened Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s 2002 film “Ararat.” The film examined the influence of the Armenian genocide of 1915 on the modern-day Armenian diaspora.
On Thursday, Hillel brought Holocaust survivor Regina Hirsch to speak about her experience in Auschwitz and Nazi-controlled Poland.
On Friday and Monday, First Nations, the Native American student group on campus, held displays of the problems facing Native Americans and the genocide in the quad.
The goal of Genocide Awareness Month programming was to educate the Occidental community about past and present genocides, club leaders said.
“The key word is awareness,” William Bighorse (junior), president of First Nations said. “We are presenting people with information to hope that they will change their perceptions.”
“It’s really important to represent our own ethnic history,” Anahid Yahjian (junior), president of ASA, said. “The purpose is to not only remember what happened in the past as a means of commemorating those who died but as a way of preventing it in the future. As we can see, history does repeat itself.”
Event organizers said they focused their events away from the disheartening aspects of these genocides and toward what students could do to ensure that genocide does not continue and happen again.
“We’re trying to refocus all of the depression into positive things . . . We have a theme of activism,” Leah Wolf (junior), co-president of Hillel, said.
STAND’s program emphasized this activism and was meant to encourage students to put effort toward changing what some say is continuing genocide.
“In the case of Darfur, the genocide is happening – it’s too late to prevent it. We’re raising awareness . . . and believe it’ll cause people to want to take action to intervene and put an end to the genocide,” STAND member Amrit Gill said.
This is the first year that Oxy has held a cohesive Genocide Awareness Month with several clubs sponsoring the event. Last year, the events centered on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was brought to campus by Hillel in collaboration with STAND to promote genocide awareness. “We wanted to make it one cohesive month around the idea of genocide,” Wolf said.By including ASA, which is only in its second year, and First Nations, the event has grown in its scope.
“There’s this element of global awareness. We’re trying to connect to all of the events,” Wolf said.
The next upcoming event for Genocide Awareness Month is a discussion by History Professor Michael Gasper about the historical context of the Armenian Genocide in Turkey on April 21.
The following Wednesday, STAND will be hosting a screening of “The Devil Came on Horseback,” a documentary about the genocide in Sudan.
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