EDITORIAL: An inclusive museum on genocide (03/28/99)

EDITORIAL

An inclusive museum on genocide

In recent months, thanks to the introduction of a private members' bill by a parliamentarian of Armenian background, Canada's Ukrainian community has been handed an opportunity to publicly occupy the moral high ground on the issue of commemoration of victims of genocide.

On February 15, Sarkis Assadourian proposed in Bill C-479 that a permanent exhibit be set up at the Canadian Museum of Civilization "that recognizes the crimes against humanity perpetrated during the 20th century and acts as a reminder of the inhumanity of people towards one another."

This has allowed a project which the Ukrainian Canadian Congress proposed to Heritage Minister Sheila Copps in December 1998 to receive airing in debate in the country's highest and most public political forum, instead of the airless chambers of academia or bureaucratic meeting rooms.

In the words of Adrian Boyko, UCC vice-president and chair of its Government Relations Committee, the bill is "uniquely Canadian in its inclusiveness" and an opportunity for Canada to "once again be a leader in human rights and human endeavor by supporting such [an exhibit]."

At such an institution, all members of humanity could meet and understand that a genocide can happen to any people. Equally important: the specifics of how a genocide occurred to a certain people - such as the Holocaust of the Jews, the Famine directed at Ukrainians, the Massacre of Armenians, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia - are an important object lesson about the need to recognize and curb the dark side of our natures.

The frightening fact of the recurrence of genocide as depicted in such a museum should serve both to ensure vigilance and to quicken empathy.

The horrors of the recent decade seemed to spring out of a bizarre complacency borne out of perceptions that genocide is somehow exceptional. Instead of being made vigilant by the call "Never Again," it seems the world was repeatedly lulled by a sense of "It couldn't be happening again."

As was written in this space earlier this year, "genocides don't belong to the people on whom they were inflicted. They are history's burden of responsibility placed on humanity's shoulders, which asks: Why wasn't it stopped? What have you done to ensure that it never happens again?"

Thanks to Mr. Assadourian, Ukrainian Canadians and other supporters of the bill can claim the moral high ground. But the task ahead is not the easier for it. A moral high ground calls for a heightened sense of moral responsibility and discipline, not for thin-skinned sensitivity to insult if one's project is opposed.

For example, understanding and tact will be needed to draw others on side for the project, such as members of the Jewish community who insist on separate Holocaust memorials. After all, it was a concern for inclusiveness in a Holocaust exhibit that enabled the space on the high ground, presently illuminated by Mr. Assadourian's bill, to become visible.

The establishment of an inclusive exhibit or museum would appear to be a morally unassailable proposition. Bill C-479 stands on high ground, but politically it needs shoring up. A private members' bill needs unanimous support from every one of the 295 members in Canada's House of Commons, and a lobbying effort spearheaded by Mr. Assadourian (supplemented by the UCC's various branches) is in full swing.

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