Ellen Kennedy, the Executive Director of World Without Genocide, has long been committed to human rights, but a trip to Rwanda changed everything.
The year was 2005, and over a decade had elapsed since the 1994 genocide — when a million people were killed in 100 days, mostly ethnic Tutsis. Yet vestiges of the brutality remained. Bodies were still being found in the country’s swamps and forests. The pervasive use of war rape had left many women and girls with HIV. The country was full of widows and orphans. And almost everyone had a story — how they escaped, where they fled, what they lost, whom they lost. So it was with Alice Musabende, a guide and translator for a USAID project for rebuilding the coffee indusry.
Kennedy had traveled to Rwanda with a friend who’d been supporting a coffee co-op run by women genocide survivors. One day, on the shores of Lake Kivu, Alice revealed that she’d lost her grandparents, parents, sister, and two brothers during the genocide. At the time, she was only 14 years old, the same age as Kennedy’s daughter.
The next day, Alice took Kennedy to a small genocide memorial near Lake Kivu. Near the memorial was a Quonset hut full of human skulls — many with machete marks — and other remains that had been found in the nearby woods and fields and not yet identified and buried. Upon seeing these symbols of the carnage, Kennedy began to sob, and Alice gently led her to the exit. Outside, the young woman was empathetic, but firm. “You don’t have to do anything about this,” she told Kennedy. “This is our problem. This is not your problem.”
But a few weeks later, in Minnesota, Kennedy realized that it was, indeed, her problem.
That day Kennedy, a professor, was reading Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families with her class. Afterward, a distressed student approached.
“What are we going to do about this?” she asked.
“I was very disturbed,” Kennedy said, “because I thought I was doing a lot. It was a wake-up call that I needed to engage in something more profound.”
A year later, she founded World Without Genocide. The 501(c)3 is headquartered at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, and is a member of the Minnesota International NGO Network.
In 2007, the atrocities in Darfur were making headlines, and one of Kennedy’s first efforts was to get the Minnesota State Board of Investment to divest from companies that indirectly supported the genocidal Sudanese government. Due to her legislative efforts, Minnesota became the thirteenth state to divest. Eight Minnesota cities, including Minneapolis, followed suit.
Now ten years after its launch, World Without Genocide is involved in many educational activities, including a speakers’ series, two documentaries (one, Children of Genocide: Five Who Survived, was nominated for a regional Emmy), and a traveling exhibit called Tents of Witness: Genocide of Conflict that features ten 8’ X 12’ canvas tents similar to those used in refugee camps. Each tent highlights the story of a group that’s been persecuted because of its identity.
In 2013, World Without Genocide persuaded state legislators to designate April as Genocide Awareness and Prevention Month, and it was signed into law by Governor Dayton.
And in 2014, they won the Minnesota Ethical Leadership Award.
Central to these successes is a two-pronged approach that emphasizes both education and advocacy; Kennedy believes that neither can stand alone. “Knowledge is not power,” she stresses. “Knowledge plus action is power.”
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At Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, a tree-lined avenue honors “Righteous Among the Nations”: non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews from extermination. Since 1963, Israel has bestowed this honorific title on over 25,000 people from 45 countries.
There have been few efforts to recognize people who’ve tried to stop or document genocides since the Holocaust. Yet every day, people are acting in heroic ways. Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, used the word “upstander” to describe those who take heroic action, often despite danger to themselves and those close to them.
“I believe that most people want to be upstanders,” Kennedy said, “but they don’t feel like they know enough about genocide or what they can do about it. But people can help.”
Below are three of her suggestions:
1) Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
The reasons why genocide happens can be hard to decipher. Kennedy distinguishes between proximate and ultimate causes. Proximate causes are race, religion, nationality, or ethnic origin — “the causes that allow us to point a finger,” she said. But the ultimate causes are more complex and have to do with “people’s access to what sustains their lives” like food, water, and fuel. “When people are hungry, that’s when we see violence, when we see a psychology of violence accepted. People are more reluctant to engage in violence when they feel like they have a future.” She notes that the genocide in Rwanda occurred a year after the country experienced a drought that wreaked havoc on agriculture and caused caloric intake to plummet. Other genocides have followed similar patterns.
Because global climate change leads to droughts, floods, and extreme temperature change — things that make food, water, and fuel scarce — it can exacerbate violence and, hence, genocide. As a result, individuals can help by reducing their carbon footprint — via carpooling, use of mass transit, and more.
2) Buy Conflict-Free Electronics
The Democratic Republic of Congo has seen intense conflict, including genocide, for over a decade. The country is rich in minerals like tin, coltan, tungsten, and gold, which are used in consumer electronics. Buying these electronics often indirectly funds armed groups that use violence, child slavery, and other atrocities to extract the minerals.
World Without Genocide supports the Enough Project, which has a national campaign that encourages consumers to be selective about the electronics they buy. The project has ranked electronic companies on their efforts to manufacture “conflict-free electronics.” Their ranking scale is here.
3) Think Locally
Gender violence, including sex trafficking, “is a systematic problem that’s always at the heart of genocide,” Kennedy said. And whatever crimes exist globally also exist locally, in our own communities.
Minnesota has one of the nation’s highest rates of sex trafficking. The FBI has identified the Twin Cities as one of 13 US cities with a high incidence rate of child prostitution. The reasons are multifold: a computer-savvy population (perpetrators often lure people via the Internet), a large northern border, an international airport, the Mall of America, and more.
The typical victim is a 12 to 14-year-old female runaway. Once trafficked, she may remain trafficked for years, even a lifetime. Some stay mired in trafficking due to financial necessity; victims often have minimal education and job skills. Additionally, traffickers use drugs and threaten violence to control or ‘break’ their victims. “For many women and girls, a life of being trafficked will be nearly impossible to escape,” Kennedy said.
One way to help is to refer to those being trafficked as “someone who’s being prostituted,” not “a prostitute.” This simple wording change aids in efforts to prosecute traffickers and to see those who are trafficked as the victims that they truly are.
Raising awareness of this issue, especially in high school settings, is also important; World Without Genocide routinely does outreach to educators, telling them about warning signs to look for like a student who’s suddenly alienated herself or is acting out or dressing differently. “People who suspect trafficking need to call 911 and report it,” Kennedy said.
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Looking ahead, Kennedy would like to expand World Without Genocide’s reach by creating regional offices. She’s committed to continue changing the way America views and responds to genocide.
“No American president was ever forced out of office for failing to prevent genocide,” Kennedy said, describing ways that the United States lags behind other countries on human rights issues: America hasn’t ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, or the Ottawa Convention (to ban landmines). Neither is the United States a member of the International Criminal Court. But this could change.
“Genocide happens because we let it happen,” Kennedy said. “Genocide is not a tsunami or an earthquake. Genocides are manmade crimes; they can be prevented. Everyone can be an upstander.”
Kennedy’s Recommended Reading:
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power
All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals by David Scheffer