genocide in the 20th century
12 Jul 10
Last March 2010, I visited the Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and was dumbfounded that such an atrocity happened, and happened in the 1970s. The Cambodians made sure none of it was left unremembered, and right in the center of its capital is a museum where visitors–and Cambodians themselves–can understand, even in passing, what went on in that place, while the rest of world went about its business.
Today I read about a memorial in Bosnia put up by Phillip Ruch, a German activist who is demanding accountability for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. “The Pillar of Shame” will be a mound of shoes–16,000 of them–each pair for a life lost in the ethnic cleansing that still haunts people to this day. Ruch says that the memorial serves as a “warning for all future U.N. employees never again just to stand by when genocide unfolds.”
We Filipinos should learn to be not so forgetful either. Do you think we’ll someday see a memorial for our murdered journalists, or the Ampatuan victims?
Maybe we don’t really forget, but we don’t remember either.
