University of Southern Maine

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USM Hosts Program on 20th & 21st Century Genocide

April 20, 2005

USM's newly opened Hannaford Lecture Hall in the Joel and Linda Abromson Center for Continuing Education Center on the Portland campus will be the location of a free public lecture and panel on genocide in the 20th and 21st centuries. The program "Living in an Age of Genocide: Remembering the Victims, Preventing the Perpetrators" will begin at 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 27. It commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Herero Genocide in Namibia, the 90th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, and the 60th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust, while remembering victims of other genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries.

A lecture, "Will Genocide Ever End?" will be given by Hubert G. Locke, author of "Learning from History: A Black Christian's Perspective on the Holocaust" and co-founder of the Annual Scholars' Conference on the Church Struggle and the Holocaust. Locke is professor emeritus in the Evans School of Public Affairs, University of Washington, Seattle.

Following Locke's talk there will be a panel discussion, "The Generations of Genocide." Members of the panel are descendants of genocide victims and include: Rebecca Sockbeson representing Native Americans; Rachel Talbot Ross representing African Americans; Gerard Kaladjian and Diana Der Hovanessian representing Armenians; Michael Messerschmidt representing Holocaust victims; Pirun Sen representing Cambodians; Reza Jalali representing the Kurds; Father Joseph Bizimana representing Rwanda/Burundi; and Hassan Cober representing the Darfur region of Sudan.

The final part of the program will have a series of prayers offered by each of the generations of genocide represented in the program and a reading of the "Declaration of the Generations of Genocide to Stop the Slaughter of the Innocents."

The program is sponsored by USM's Academic Council for Post-Holocaust Christian, Jewish and Islamic Studies, with support of New Century Community Program and the Maine Humanities Council. For more information about the program contact Abraham Peck at 780-4003.

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