Archive for April, 2009

By James Boyce

Common Sense NMS is the new media consultant for Genocide Prevention Month, which commemorates past genocide and mass atrocity crimes and calls for a global prevention policy. Here’s a post I wrote about it:

Here in New England, people look forward to April as the days turn longer, and warmer and the first signs of Spring emerge. The young, and young at heart, often recite the old standard, “April showers bring May flowers.” Unfortunately, in far too many parts of world, April is not a month to look forward to, as April is well on its way to becoming known as a month of tragedy; one with a strange and deadly history. In the last century, all of the six major genocides that have been perpetrated- Armenia, the Holocaust, Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda — all have major anniversaries that take place in the month of April, an eerie and unsettling coincidence. With this in mind, survivors from these genocides have joined together and declared April “Genocide Prevention Month,” and are observing the 30-day span to remember and mourn the many friends and family that they lost in their struggle to escape systematic extinction. Read the rest on Huffington Post