Four university professors from around the nation discussed the denial of genocide and similar crimes against humanity in Rwanda, Germany, Turkey and Japan to a capacity crowd in McNeir Auditorium on Saturday.

Roger Smith, emeritus professor of Government at the College of William & Mary began the lecture. He focused on the effects of denying genocide by perpetrators and citizens or country bystanders.

“Denial is a universal strategy,” Smith said. “Genocide is a crime against humanity, not just a particular people, and to let such acts go unremembered limits us all.” According to Smith, one of the most frequent tactics is to compare the criminal acts to other areas or time periods and declare them relatively mild. This tendency toward relativity is simply a kind of rationalization, he said.

Samantha Power, adjunct lecturer in Public Policy and Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, delivered a speech on the denial of the 1994 Hutu killing of the Tutsi people in Rwanda. Continuing with the issue of the mechanics behind denial, she noted a primary tactic of convincing oneself it’s not genocide. American policy makers believe genocide is bad, but they convince themselves it’s not genocide they’re seeing, she said.

“Americans weren’t using the word `genocide.’ Instead we were saying `all Tutsi are vulnerable’ which is the same thing,” Power said. “You can’t deny the facts, but you can deny the interpretation of the facts and the implication of the facts.”

The situation in Rwanda stands out because the Clinton administration had people who cared, but didn’t act, Power said. 800,000 Tutsi were killed 100 days after a peace accord was signed between the Hutu and Tutsi. Even though images of Tutsi with wires wrapped around their wrists were broadcast on television,

the U.S. implemented full withdrawal of troops, she said. Clinton and current administrators now say `we didn’t appreciate’ the magnitude of the situation, she said.

Power concluded her speech by addressing the amount of action that should be taken in cases of genocide. The idea that we can’t really do anything or that it has to be all or none intervention is inappropriate, she said. According to Power, we shouldn’t fear the costs that would be incurred and choose to do nothing.

Peter Ronayne, adjunct professor at the University of Virginia, agreed with Power that two of the key issues are denying the act of genocide itself and remaining too inactive.

In his speech, “The Holocaust and the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide Since World War II,” Ronayne discussed the Genocide Convention of 1949 as well as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War and issues in Bosnia.

The U.S. never considered intervening during the rise of the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and backed off in Bosnia even though the murders and rapes of civilians were known, Ronayne said.

Christopher Simpson, professor in the School of Communications at American University, followed Ronayne’s idea in his speech “The Armenian Genocide,” by stating that the U.S. needed to “be fearless.”

In the case of Armenians in Turkey, genocide was technically avoided because it was said to lack “intent to destroy,” a characteristic that sets genocide apart from other crimes against humanity. In addition, propaganda and the media played a significant role by justifying the genocide with tales of Muslim Turks being expelled by the Armenians, he said. Simpson called this technique “exploiting doubt” to evade the responsibility of serious crimes.

“What we have are networks of deniers, like historical and political organizations, who have crafted a very strong denial campaign,” Henry Theriault, assistant professor and coordinator of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Worcester State College said. Theriault is also a visiting lecturer at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.

In his speech, “Japanese Wartime Atrocities in East Asia from 1931-1945 and the Comparative Dimensions of Denial,” Theriault focused on war crimes in general that were denied, especially by the media. For example, he said there were killing contests in Japan to see who could kill 100 people the fastest.

“It was shown in the newspapers that they were killing soldiers but really they were killing civilians. Because of the strength of denial and omission, the massacres are not very well known,” he said.

Theriault also discussed an instance with a Japanese high-school textbook that didn’t portray Japan as the aggressor in World War II, yet was still passed by the committee that approves textbooks. This type of “forget and forgive” attitude, he said is just another form of denial.

The Armenian Students Association of Georgetown University, in conjunction with the Armenian National Committees of Virginia and aryland and The Genocide Prevention Center-Improve the World International, sponsored the lecture, which was called “Exposing the Denial of State-Sponsored Crimes Against Humanity.”

Following the speeches, a question and answer session linked the separate cases of genocide by focusing on the common trends and issues such as what we can do as a society to combat denial. Edward Chaglassian (COL ’03), president of the Armenian Student Association, said he was very impressed with the turnout and the reactions and feedback from the audience.

“A lot of times these issues are looked at separately, but this brought them all together,” he said. “The goal was to educate people and start exposing the up-and-coming scholars and us as a society to the differing views.”