Excercise 4: Prevention Through Genocide Education: Tips for Students from CEE

• Duration: 45 min
• Methods: individual and group work
• Materials: Worksheet 4 (digital or printed version)

Instruction

Watch a short film How to Prevent Genocide – a conversation with war crimes expert, Theodor Meron, United Nations, 4.02.2020.

• Reflect on the message from Theodor Meron’s speech in the context of the recent migration crisis (2016-2021) and migration to the European Union caused by war, culturicide, ethnic cleansing, religious cleansing, and humanitarian crises taking place in different parts of the world.
• In pairs, discuss how you understand the message conveyed by the words of the World War II survivor.

Then go to the next stage of the module.

Mô Bleeker: Today’s Conversation about Genocide Prevention Below are the ideas and tasks relevant to the possibilities of implementing prevention activities identified by M. Bleeker:

• Educating, training and increasing the number of well-informed actors in the field of genocide prevention;
• Disseminating knowledge to diversify sources of pressure on governments so that they take responsibility for genocide prevention “before it is too late”;
• Developing communication and decision-making at both international and national government levels to disseminate procedures for rapid response in case of alarming signs and symptoms of a genocidal situation, identifying contact persons in each government to work when states become involved in international prevention networks, initiating formal discussions between governments on these issues;
• Learning from experiences and using them to develop joint actions with the governments of the countries concerned;
• Encouraging national parliaments to legislate on the issue and to formulate strategic proposals for their citizens;
• Strengthening civil servants and representatives of civil society with knowledge (trainings, workshops);
• Supporting efforts oriented towards rapid communication of the global community in crisis situations.

Source: M. Bleeker, Today’s conversation about Genocide Prevention, „Politorbis”, 47(2)/2009.

Mô Bleeker, head of the Task Force on Dealing with the Past and Preventing Atrocities of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in her article “Today’s conversation about genocide prevention” detailed the ideas and tasks relevant to the feasibility of prevention. She pointed that genocide prevention is indeed a collective commitment and contribution to a shared future free of collective violence. Education, as shown by the examples of ideas and tasks identified by Bleeker, is still seen as one of the main preventive factors embedded in the understanding of processes, phenomena, the role of the individual and the group in social life, and social memory.

Think about the ideas and tasks above while taking into account the international situation related to the migration crisis, wars and armed conflicts in recent years. Prepare a set of tasks that can be developed for students and secondary school pupils from CEE to strengthen their awareness and help prevention through education about genocide (jointly agreed ideas and tasks concerning prevention through education about genocides should be included in the worksheet).

After completing this task, discuss the ideas and assignments about prevention through genocide education you have written down as a class or a group. Below are the final questions for reflection. It may be useful to discuss them in a group while the three-card method can be used as a summary of the activity. Each participant gets three cards in different colours. On the first one, the answer to the first question is written, while the second includes the answer to the second question, and so on. Next, each participant goes to a board (divided in three parts according to the questions) and attaches his/her cards with a magnet. In the last part of the debriefing, the teacher and students analyse together the answers and questions provided.

Questions for reflections

• What is the definition of the genocide?
• What do I know about genocides and their connections with the migration crisis?
• What would I like to know about genocides and their connections with migration crisis?

Tip: As a conclusion, the teacher can go back to the Exercise 1. In the same groups, students can complete the worksheet again or comment on the answers already given.