#ChallengingHistories

Left to right: Shackles that bound the enslaved - a tragic reminder of the transatlantic slave trade (UN Photo/Mark Garten) Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Extermination and Death Camp (UN Photo/Evan Schneider) Survivor Innocente Nyirahabimana, she was 12 when her family was murdered during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (Photo: Myriam Abdelaziz)

Department of Global Communications Live Discussion Series

Beyond the long shadow: engaging with difficult histories is a live discussion series organized by the United Nations Department of Global Communications. The series is organized by the Remember Slavery Programme, the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, and the Outreach Programme on the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations. The aim of the collaborative series is to develop a deeper understanding of the legacies of these painful histories – and through examining the past, consider how best to build a world that is just, where all can live in dignity and peace.

 

 

EPISODE 1

Date: Wednesday, 8 July 202O
Time:11 a.m. EST
Watch
Q&A

Museums, Memorials and Memorialization after Atrocity – Communicating a Form of Ongoing Justice?

What role might statues, memorials, museums and memorialization after atrocity crimes, play in furthering the interests of justice?

An expert panel considers whether statues, memorials, museums and acts of memorialization might: a) empower victims and their descendants by serving as concrete expressions of public recognition of the grievous injury done to the victims; b) encourage an understanding of the agency of victims; c) encourage empathy and action to challenge existing inequities; d) counter the tendency to sentimentalize the past and ossify individuals and communities into particular roles.

What is it that a memorial or museum of atrocity crime is hoping to achieve for those injured in the past and their descendants? What of those for whom the history appears to have no immediate connection, and for those who were complicit or who benefitted from the atrocity?

E1: Panelists

EPISODE 2

Date: TBA
Time: TBA
Register: TBA
Watch: TBA

Radio and Reconstruction

How was radio used to facilitate genocide, and how the same medium was used in the aftermath, to assist with the reconstitution and tracing of families?

Radio helped to marginalize, dehumanize and demonize the targets of the Nazis during the Holocaust and the genocidaires in Rwanda. However, just as radio proved a powerful vehicle to foster and incite hatred, so it has been proved a significant vehicle for reconstruction after atrocity crimes. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the International Red Cross and radio stations such as the BBC, broadcast lists of names of survivors in the hope that families would be reunited.

49-years later, 3-months after the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda had ended, the BBC began a lifeline radio project to support the people of Rwanda. The first service, BBC Gahuzamiryango – “the unifier of families” broadcast the names of children who were looking for their parents and collected messages from refugees living in camps in Tanzania, DRC and Burundi who were trying to trace their loved ones.