Longmont Daily Times-Call - 08/24/2006

A million Ramseys: Groups on mission to stop genocide
Armenians’ journey reaches Longmont

By Ben Ready

LONGMONT — Imagine JonBenet Ramsey had a sister and both were murdered 10 years ago. Would the international media and billions of people worldwide care twice as much with two victims instead of one?

And imagine that the killers were thousands armed to the teeth and committed to killing all little white girls in America. Might you see this on the front page for a few weeks?

So why is it that when you hear about not one or two but thousands of murder victims in Darfur today, so few seem to care?

Two groups committed to stopping genocide asked these questions in Longmont on Wednesday.

“One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic,” said Kim Christianian, chairwoman of the Armenian Genocide Commemoration Committee.

Six Armenian students left Los Angeles on foot June 27 and arrived in Longmont on Wednesday during their Journey for Humanity genocide awareness and prevention campaign.

For the students’ stops in Denver, Boulder, Longmont, Loveland, Fort Collins and Greeley, they were joined by the Colorado Coalition for Genocide Awareness and Action.

Together the groups hope to remind Americans of the slaughter of millions of human beings — each as unique and precious as JonBenet Ramsey, the loss of each individual worthy of the same public outrage shown after the loss of Ramsey’s life, the group said.

A photo exhibit of starved bodies, rape victims and mass graves along Main Street in front of Longmont Free University said it with numbers too:

• 1895-1923 — 1.5 million Armenians massacred
• 1932-1933 — 7 million Ukrainians killed from manmade famine
• 1938-1945 — 11 million massacred in the Nazi Holocaust
• 1970-1980 — 3.3 million Cambodians massacred
• 1994 — 1 million Rwandans massacred
• 2003-present — 400,000 and counting killed and 2.5 million displaced in Darfur.
  

“This is the thing we have on our hearts. We are survivors,” said Levon Sayadyan, whose Armenian great-grandparents were forced to watch Turkish soldiers behead their daughter. “We cannot be bystanders. ... We need to take action.”

Sayadyan and 12 others joined for a discussion after their walk from Boulder. The students will walk to Loveland today, Fort Collins on Friday and Greeley on Saturday. Their 3,200-mile Journey for Life will end in Washington, D.C., before November.

Not only do the students in “Stop Genocide Now” T-shirts want to remind people along their path of past atrocities, but they also hope their discussion circles will reduce American complacency about the killings in Darfur today. Seeing U.S. humanitarian efforts following 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Indonesia, students said they have no doubt Americans are generous.

But after being ignored or rebuffed by throngs of reporters in Boulder on Tuesday, who were gathered under a tent and doing little but waiting for a breaking bit of information in the Ramsey murder case saga, the students said, walker Edward S. Majian wondered how the press and public could be so indifferent to the genocide of an African people.

“When we have a genocide, political actors and their allies become complicit for tolerating it. We ignore certain things because it’s not politically comfortable to talk about,” Majian said.

According to the groups, understanding genocide — defined as “the systematic destruction by a government of a racial, religious or ethnic group” — is the first step in fighting it.

When people then familiarize themselves with the world’s recent history of genocides and grasp the combination of social complacency and hatred that fuels them, taking action to stop today’s genocide is the easy part, said Hasmig Tatiossian.

“You donate time, talk to friends, donate money to coalitions, contact the media, call your congressmen, talk to your kids, encourage your teachers to teach students about this,” she said. “You don’t have to be Armenian or Jewish to take action. ... Just realize that we’re all human and all interconnected.”

For more information about stopping genocides, go to www.savedarfur.org, www
.journeyforhumanity.com or www.ccgaa.org.

Ben Ready can be reached at 303-684-5326, or by e-mail at bready@times-call.com.