How then can genocide by prevented? Priority should be given to acceptance, implementation and teaching of international laws of humanity. Since July 1998 the Rome statute which created a permanent International Criminal Court has been ratified by more than sixty countries,even if opposed by the USA, Iraq and Libya.
In November 1998 the British Law Lords decided that former government leaders may be extradited to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Another step would be some strengthening of internationalplansto ensure thathistorybooks in schols, coleges and universities reveal unsavoury facts about the past
and do not peddle xenophobia and nationalist hate by a monstrous distortion of the truth for ideological purposes posing as serious historical analysis. National laws should prohibit denial of genocide.
In the former Soviet Union the Kazan cathedral in Leningrad was deconsecrated to house a Museum of Atheism in which the histories of the religions of the world were detailed together with their cruelties. Alas, in today’s St. Petersburg this cathedral has been reconsecrated and the museum is now only of religion, displaying only Russian Church Art. Perhaps just as all Bavarian school children are taken to see the Dachau concentration camp, educational authorities should organize visits to genocide museums so that’if it ever was admitted… that genocide did take place… then it must follow that the… ideology that was the ultimate cause of that genocide is false, inhuman and fit only for the dustbin of history’
Dr. Jeremy Hugh Baron DM, FRCP, FRCPG, FRCS