Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

DURANTY, WALTER
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itself quite shocking—the guards, who had seen some of the hardest fighting around
Dunkirk, believed the internees to be Nazi saboteurs and spies, and treated them with
such brutality that the Dunera became known as a “floating concentration camp”—once
the Dunera Boys arrived in Australia they were able to make new lives for themselves in
the new country. Saved from the Nazis twice (first by leaving Germany, then by leaving
blitz-ravaged Britain), the Dunera Boys of 1940 became the harbingers of the multicultural
Australia that was to receive its kick start after the war. Many went on to become
professors, company founders and directors, judges, senior public servants, and leading
members of their professions.
Duranty, Walter (1884–1957). A U.S. journalist reporting from the Soviet Union
before World War II. English by birth (born in Liverpool), he was controversially awarded
the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for a collection of accounts of life in the Soviet Union that he
had written the previous year when he was the Moscow correspondent for The New York
Times. Altogether, Duranty lived in Moscow for twelve years. In the early 1930s he was
sending dispatches back to the United States on events in the Soviet Union. At the time
it was the high point of Josef Stalin’s (1879–1953) epic reforms, involving extensive
industrial expansion and the agricultural collectivization. Because the USSR was not recognized
by the government of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1884–1945) until
1933, news from the Soviet Union was received with considerable curiosity by the public,
who knew next to nothing about the country as a whole, or the Five year Plans (the
centralization of all economic, agricultural, and industrial activity according to statedetermined
targets) in particular, let alone the lethal state violence which accompanied
these programs. Ensconced in Moscow, Duranty had a sanitized view of what was taking
place outside the capital. Most of his reports were enthusiastic in their praise of the Soviet
goals to modernize Russia. His liberal optimism fired his admiration for which he was later
honored with the Pulitzer Prize. Crucial to an assessment of Duranty’s reportage is what
he omitted. It appeared as though he viewed the USSR through rose-tinted glasses: there
is, for instance, no hint of the 1932–1933 Soviet man-made terror-famine that raged from
the Ukraine to Kazakhstan in Soviet Central Asia. The death of millions caused as a
result of this state-induced mass starvation is thus a shocking gap in Duranty’s portrait of
the USSR. This omission helped cover up a major state crime that was genocidal in scope,
and warped the true image of the USSR for many years after the death of Soviet dictator
Josef Stalin (1879–1953).
Duranty, who returned to the United States during World War II, died in 1957. Several
decades later, on account of his biased reporting, some critics sought the withdrawal
of his Pulitzer Prize, owing to what they understood to have been his sycophancy and
compliance with Soviet propaganda in the 1930s. The Pulitzer Prize committee did
review the award, but in 2003 decided not to overturn the original decision—even
though it recognized that Duranty’s journalism was of a lower standard.
Dutchbat. The unit name given to a 1,170-strong Dutch paratroop battalion that was
deployed to Bosnia to help guard the “safe areas” declared by the United Nations on
April 16, 1993. In reality, there were three Dutchbat units; the first and second (Dutchbat I
and II) completed their six-month tours in Bosnia unremarkably—guarding UN convoys,
negotiating between the warring parties, and so on. Dutchbat III, deployed in 1995, had
an altogether different fate. Earlier Dutchbat units had been detailed to safeguard the city
of Srebrenica, where the first troops—570 in number—had arrived on March 3, 1994. By