 I will have a chance later in the afternoon to take part in a panel in which we will focus particularly on Guatemala and the U.S. role in the terrible things that took place in Guatemala. At this point, I've been asked to speak about the crime of genocide itself, and so I want to focus on the rest of the world in order to put this into context. I think you know that the word genocide was invented during World War II. It was invented by a Polish Jewish scholar of international law who had immigrated to the United States, Rafael Lemkin, and in addition to inventing the word Lemkin lobbied the United Nations to adopt the genocide convention which he drafted, and the United Nations General Assembly adopted it by voice vote on December 9, 1948 at a meeting of the General Assembly in Paris. It was the first international human rights treaty adopted by the United Nations. It was adopted the day before the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and thereafter Lemkin lobbied for the ratification of the genocide convention. I had a personal opportunity to gauge his dedication to the lobbying because I was a high school student in New York. I attended Stuyvesant High School and I was president of the History Club, and on behalf of the History Club, I invited Rafael Lemkin to come to our school to speak about the genocide convention, and he invited me to visit him at the United Nations to meet him in the Delegates Lounge. I didn't realize it then, but I realized afterwards that he chose the location because he didn't actually have an office at the United Nations, so he could only meet in the Delegates Lounge, but he was perfectly willing to go to a high school or any place else where he thought he might promote ratification. He was particularly interested in ratification by the United States, and that didn't happen until nearly 30 years after he died in 1959. The genocide convention was ultimately ratified by the United States in 1988 during the last year of the presidency of Ronald Reagan, but it was ratified with so many reservations that in fact it effectively nullified the significance of United States ratification of the genocide convention. One of the things that has happened with respect to genocide since the time of Lemkin and before the time of Lemkin is every time there has been a genocide, there have also been those who have been eager to deny what took place or to try to shift the responsibility for what took place. Of course, Lemkin was reacting to the crimes of World War II, and that certainly happened during World War II. There was, during World War II, a certain amount of information in the State Department about what was taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe, but there were State Department officials at the time who were not eager to call attention to the Holocaust as it was taking place. It appears that their main concern was they did not want to allow the immigration of a larger number of Jewish refugees to the United States. There was an official, a man named Herbert Pell, who was the father of the one-time senator from Rhode Island, Claiborne Pell, who lobbied very hard to allow the immigration of Jewish refugees and to call attention to what was taking place in Europe, but Herbert Pell was a fairly lonely voice at that time, but it wasn't only in the State Department. It was also in various other institutions that there were interests in not calling attention to what was taking place. One example is the New York Times. The New York Times then and now is a Jewish-owned newspaper, but when New York Times reporters gathered information that tended to show what was taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe, the newspaper had a tendency to downplay the story and bury the story deep in the paper. The concern of the publishers of the New York Times seems to have been that they didn't want Americans to think that they were engaged in a war in Europe on behalf of the Jews and therefore downplaying the Holocaust was important to them. One of the institutions I respect most in the world is the International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors armed conflicts to try to see that the laws of armed conflict are complied with and tries to ease the suffering of people in armed conflict. But because the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is a Swiss organization separate from the National Red Cross societies, was present in different parts of Europe, it gathered quite a lot of information on what was going on during World War II. And its executive counsel met in Geneva during the war to discuss whether it should disclose what was taking place. And they decided against it on the ground that it would limit the access of the International Committee of the Red Cross to a certain number of detention centers and therefore compromise their ability to do their regular work. And they felt that sustaining their regular work was more important than calling attention to the Holocaust. Any rate, in the period after World War II, things have been like that. When the Cambodian Holocaust took place in the latter part of the 1970s, it was among those who were eager to deny the crimes that were being committed by the Khmer Rouge were a number of leftists in the United States, peace activists who had opposed the war in Vietnam. So prominent among them were a man named Gareth Porter and a man named George Hildebrand. And they published at that time arguing that the reason the Khmer Rouge was driving people out of Phnom Penh and the other cities of Cambodia was for the good of the residents of those cities. And Noam Chomsky and his regular co-author Edward Herman wrote an article for the nation at the time echoing the arguments of Porter and Hildebrand. When the genocide against the Kurds took place in Iraq in 1988, what was called the Anfal, one of the dramatic moments of that was Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons in the Kurdish town of Halabja. And apparently about 5,000 people were killed in Halabja by the use of chemical weapons. The State Department at that time didn't want to confirm that this had taken place and cast doubt on it and the CIA was also active on this. The reason was that 1988 was the last year of the Iraqi-Iran war and America's enemy was the Khomeini regime in Iran. State Department officials were not eager to discredit Saddam Hussein for the use of chemical weapons. To his great credit, after a period, Secretary of State George Shultz broke ranks. He was influenced by a State Department official, Morton Abramowitz, who had investigated the matter. And Shultz acknowledged publicly that Saddam Hussein had used the chemical weapons in Halabja. At the time of the Bosnian war, I encountered this sort of thing from UN officials. I can remember one meeting I had in Sarajevo during the war with the UN commander at that time, a British general, General Sir Michael Rose, who had just arrived on the scene. And General Sir Michael Rose echoed the line, which I had heard previously from a number of other UN officials, and that is that the atrocities that took place against the Bosnian Muslims had been committed by the Bosnian Muslims themselves in order to arouse international sympathy and get international intervention in the war in Bosnia. And General Rose told me that the famous breadline massacre in Sarajevo had been committed by the Muslims themselves, that they had blown up a mine at the scene. And he was brand new in Sarajevo, so I asked him if he had been to the scene, and he said he had not. And I asked him whether as a military man, he knew what a mortar explosion looked like on a sidewalk. And he did, and he could describe it. It creates a flower kind of pattern, a mine exploding, tears up the earth. It's a very different thing. I had visited the scene. Many others had visited the scene. But the UN officials were telling their story about a mine explosion to create the view that the Muslims were inflicting casualties on themselves. The UN didn't want conflict to take place. At that moment, Britain and France were supplying the principal troops in Bosnia. They were engaged in humanitarian assistance. They didn't want military intervention, which they thought would interfere with the delivery of humanitarian assistance. And so they came up with these stories about people committing atrocities against themselves. When the Rwandan genocide took place in 1994, the United States was among those most eager to avoid any possibility of involvement. The Clinton administration had sort of escaped the bullet with respect to the killing of 18 Marines in Mogadishu and Somalia six months earlier than the Rwandan genocide and didn't want an involvement in another African conflict that it did not understand. And so the U.S. was in the forefront of those in the UN Security Council calling for the withdrawal of UN troops from Rwanda. And as I think you probably know, General Dahlia, the Canadian commander of the UN troops in Rwanda felt that he could have done something quite significant to halt the genocide in Rwanda. Any rate, this is the pattern. We'll get to the role of the United States with respect to what took place in Guatemala. In my view, there are many discreditable episodes that have taken place in dealing with genocide in different parts of the world. But I think the way the United States behaved in Guatemala may take the cake. And that's a later chapter in the story this afternoon. The only thing I would say in conclusion, or maybe two things in conclusion, one thing is that all these efforts to act as an apologist for genocide or to pretend that it was not taking place are important because in every case, if there had been acknowledgement of what was taking place, while it was taking place, it would have had an effect upon the situation. The genocide might not have been halted, but it would have been mitigated by acknowledgement of what was taking place at the moment that it was taking place. Acknowledgement after the fact, which is what we got in the trial that took place in Guatemala, is immensely important because I think that too has a tremendous impact on the possibility that genocide will take place at other times, but even more important than recognizing genocide after the fact, it seems to me, is recognizing it while it takes place. The other thing I would say in conclusion is I'd really quote a colleague of mine, an anthropologist named Beatrice Mons, who worked with me in the 1980s in trying to investigate what was going on in Guatemala at the time that it took place and who testified as a prosecution witness in the trial in Guatemala. I know Beatrice gave a talk on this case a few days ago in California, and I'm borrowing from what she had to say at that time. She said that in 1633, the holy office required Galileo to recant his claim that the earth moved around the sun, and the holy office annulled his teaching, and after the trial Galileo said and yet it moves. In this case, the Constitutional Court annulled the verdict against Río Smont, and I would say she said and yet the verdict will stand. Thank you.