Honoring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 31 May 2015. “For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.'”
May 31, 2015
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honoring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future
January 5, 2015
A Century of Silence: A family survives the Armenian genocide and its long aftermath
Raffi Khatchadourian, A Century of Silence: A family survives the Armenian genocide and its long aftermath. The New Yorker, 5 January 2015. “My grandfather spent most of his life in Diyarbakir, a garrison town in southeastern Turkey. Magnificent old walls surround the city; built of black volcanic rock, they were begun by the Romans and then added to by Arabs and Ottomans. In 1915, the Ottomans turned the city, the surrounding province, and much of modern-day Turkey into a killing field, in a campaign of massacres and forced expulsions that came to be known as the Armenian genocide. The plan was to eradicate the empire’s Armenians—“a deadly illness whose cure called for grim measures”—and it was largely successful. The Ottomans killed more than a million people, but, somehow, not my grandfather.”
November 20, 2013
Looking Away From Genocide
Gary Bass, Looking Away From Genocide. The New Yorker, 20 November 2013. “On March 25, 1971, the Pakistani Army launched a devastating military crackdown on restive Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. While the slaughter in what would soon become an independent Bangladesh was underway, the C.I.A and State Department conservatively estimated that roughly two hundred thousand people had died (the official Bangladeshi death toll is three million)…. Pakistan was a Cold War ally of the United States, and Richard Nixon and his national-security advisor, Henry Kissinger, resolutely supported its military dictatorship; they refused to impose pressure on Pakistan’s generals to forestall further atrocities.”