60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

Is there a south perspective
on genocide?
Alejandro Bendaña
It is unfortunate that we feel it necessary to introduce a South perspective
in contraposition to North perspectives. What we need to
work for is a universal conception and action plan. We need to take
heed of what Richard Falk reminds us is the responsibility of the public
intellectual, or of what Hannah Arendt termed the intellectual in
dark times – a public intellectual is morally and politically motivated
to speak out on particular topics, more as a citizen than as a scholar
or a teacher.
If genocide is a term that confuses people, that keeps them from liberating
themselves, then it must be targeted. That great whistleblower
Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the
truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the
Bastille of words. That time is now.
And to carry out that task in this day and age, what is most needed is
real information, subversive information, empowering as it is, which
of course we do not get from most of the journalists and academies.
Only politicians and media owners like to believe that the media
speaks for the public, as Pilger states. But what they need is truth.
Journalists and social scientists ought to be agents of truth, not the
courtiers of power.
Here are some truths, as seen and felt from the South.
Selectivity in remembering and labelling
A quarter of a century ago, on 16 September 1982, Ariel Sharon, then
Israel’s defence minister, gave orders to root out ’2,000 terrorists’ he
claimed were hiding in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and
Shatila in Lebanon. After a day of bombardment, what ensued, at the
hands of the Lebanese right-wing Christian militia known as the Phalangists
– armed and trained by the Israeli army – was ’[a] massacre so
awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are
gruesome reminders - charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses...
For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour