PRESS RELEASE –

This year’s Genocide Memorial Day to be held on Sunday 16 January will home in on the problem of sanitising genocide and genocidal acts.

GMD aims to raise awareness of genocide so that new generations can understand the causes and recognise the warning signs of such atrocities.

Wherever and whenever genocidal acts have been committed the perpetrators have made great efforts to conceal, justify or dress up their crimes. Slavery was justified as the white man’s burden, a humanitarian and even divinely mandated mission to civilise people who were sub-human. Colonialism sought legitimacy on the same basis. In their home countries, the champions of these projects were decorated as heroes and histories were woven to beatify them.

Even today, bloody imperial adventures such as the occupation of Afghanistan are defended under false pretexts of liberating women, nation building and promoting social progress. Israel, with the unqulaified support of the West, continues to justify its brutal occupation of Palestine on the grounds that it is defending itself and fighting terrorism.

GMD takes place on the third Sunday of January each year. It was started by IHRC in 2010 to commemorate past and ongoing genocides, and to raise awareness around genocide prevention. Since then events have taken place all over the world.

For the GMD project, the act of remembrance is not limited by the background of either the victims or the perpetrators of any of the genocides.

A renowned panel of speakers is to address these and other issues in the online event this weekend.

Prof Richard Falk: “Responding to Genocide: Law, Morality, and Politics”?
Prof Penny Green: ‘Genocide denial and the Myanmar state’
Imam Dawud Walid: ‘Governmental Whitewashing of the Maafa’

Other contributors include decolonial scholar Prof Ramon Grosfoguel, historian Dr Bilal Ware, Jewish historian Prof Ilan Pappe, and Bosnian survivor of the Srebrenica genocide Hasan Nuhanović.

WHEN: Sunday 16 January 2022, 1pm UK time

WHERE: Online, ihrc.tv, YouTube and Facebook

For more information or comment please contact the Press Office on (+44) 7958522196[ENDS]

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IHRC is an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations.
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