Stop this genocide
Stop this genocide
Billions of dollars are being spent
To look for life on other planets
And trillions spent to kill life
On this one.
Stop this war, stop this genocide,
With hearts parched, terror-etched faces,
Blowing rings of hope
In the midst of despair, nursing a dream to
find the dead alive
Among bomb blasts and the furies of war.
The cacophonies and atrocities around us
Are engulfing us alive, crying for mercy.
How long will the blood of martyred sons
Write the history of the world?
How long will scheming puppeteers
Play with the strings of chemical weapons?
Look around……look at Syria,
The cry of mothers, loud and clear,
Asking world leaders to stop war,
Asking poets to write about peace
And musicians to play the tunes of love.
Look at the volcanoes sending ash
Billowing up to five kilo meters,
The huge forests burnt with the force of
fire,
The fury of the winds, the waters
With their powers submerging all.
Mother Nature is revolting,
She is saying,
Make peace,
Stop this genocide.
-- Varaz Samuelian
Raphael Lemkin fled from Poland after the German invasion in 1939, arriving in Sweden and then the US in 1941. he lost 49 of his relatives during the Holocaust , and the only survivors were his brother and family, who were captured by the Soviets and sent to a forced labor camp; Lemkin managed to arrange their emigration to Canada in 1948. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published his "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe" in 1944, in which he coined "genocide" (Greek "genos" [family/tribe/race] + Latin "cide" [killing]). The book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in occupied countries in World War II, which he had begun while in Sweden. In 1945-1946 he became an advisor to Robert H. Jackson, the US Supreme Court justice who served as chief counsel at the Nuremberg Trial chief counsel at the war crimes trial at Nürnberg, which adopted Lemkin's notion of genocide as consitituting an offense against international law and one of the legal bases of the trials themselves. He also drafted an anti-genocide resolution which became the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the General assembly of the United Nations in 1948 and ratified in 1951. One of the 1st accusations of genocide submitted to the UN was drafted by the Civil Rights Congress, which charged the US with complicity in genocide for failing to pass legislation or prosecute those responsible for lynchings. Beginning in 1967 US senator William Proxmire gave a floor speech every day the Senate was in session urging his colleagues to ratify the Convention; after giving 3,211 speeches he finally achieved his goal in 1986.
ReplyDeleteThe Syrian Civil War (Al-ḥarb al-ʼahliyyah as-sūriyyah) began in 2010 when president Bashar al-Assad cracked down on political dissent and quickly escalated into a multi-faction insurgency: the Syrian government and its international allies; a loose alliance of Sunni Arab rebel groups (including the Free Syrian Army); the majority-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF); Salafi jihadist groups (including the al-Nusra Front); and Daesh (the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ie ISIl/ISIS). By 2016 at least 470,000 people had been killed and 1.9 million wounded (11.5% of the population) and 13.8 million became refugees. The Syrian government has been repeatedly accused of "deliberate extermination" (according to Amnesty International).