Hum Rights Rev (2009) 10:505–519 DOI 10.1007/s12142-008-0092-0

Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend? William F. S. Miles

Published online: 8 July 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract It is understandable that Iran’s December 2006 hosting of an international conference casting doubts on the historicity of the Holocaust would raise questions about treatments of the Shoah elsewhere in the Third World. In fact, indigenization the Holocaust—the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have come to incorporate the Holocaust in their intellectual work—has been positive overall. Within the framework of intellectual globalization, much of the Third World intelligentsia has come to include this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories. Although some of the indigenization of the Holocaust is political and instrumental, the deviant variant expressed at the Tehran Holocaust conference is atypical. Governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide should be considered as an emerging human right. Keywords Holocaust . Iran . Third World . Holocaust denial . Anti-Semitism . Human rights

An earlier version of this paper was originally delivered at the conference “Humanitarian Narratives of Inflicted Suffering” at the Foundations of Humanitarianism Program, University of Connecticut, Storrs, October 13–15, 2006. It has been substantially rewritten, thanks to the comments and suggestion of the editors and anonymous reviewers of this journal. I alone remain responsible for errors, omissions, or other defects. W. F. S. Miles The Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA W. F. S. Miles (*) Political Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Holocaust Denial in Human Rights Perspective If governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide is a human right, then December 11–12, 2006 stands out as a grim violation of it, for that is the date of the Holocaust denial conference sponsored by the government of Iran.1 Officially entitled “Review of the Holocaust Global Vision,” the conference was held under the auspices of the Institute for Political and International Studies at the University of Tehran. In addition to its inaugural ceremony, during the 2 days of the event, 18 speakers—mostly non-Iranian, hailing from Malaysia to Mexico—spoke in three separate sessions to 67 official attendees. For better or worse, media coverage of this propagandized “review” of the Holocaust was extensive (Fathi 2006a, b; Slackman 2006). Implicit in the coverage, it seemed, was the impression that what was happening in Tehran was somehow typical of a broader trend of Holocaust denial throughout the world, and particularly in the Third, or developing, World. A closer examination of the Tehran conference reveals, however, that most presenters constituted a well-known, if not notorious, group of First World Holocaust deniers. More importantly, a broader review of the academy and intelligentsia outside the Arab and Persian spheres demonstrates that accurate learning about the Shoah (i.e., the Nazi Holocaust) is gradually taking root throughout the developing world. This acknowledgment of the Holocaust is certainly filtered through local lenses and historical sensitivities. Overall, though, it is a positive trend, one that I have previously described as “indigenization of Holocaust consciousness”: That is, the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have themselves come to incorporate the Holocaust, thereby including this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories (Miles 2004). Before exploring the indigenization of Holocaust consciousness thesis, closer scrutiny of the Tehran Conference and Iran’s broader role in Holocaust denial is in order.

Iranian Anti-Semitism and Tehran Conference Participation By virtue of its status as “the most radical” of states to disseminate Holocaust denial in the Middle East (Litvak 2006), Iran stands as the most anti-Semitic government in the world today. Beyond its virulent anti-Zionism and rejection of the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood, Iranian foreign policy “denies Jewish history and deprives the Jews of their human dignity by presenting their worst tragedy as a scam” (Litvak 2006, p. 1). This is a policy that dates back to 1979, when the Islamist Revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini (who had long preached an anti-Jewish theology)2 The term “Holocaust,” both in the context of the conference and this paper, refers to the Nazi genocide against the Jews during World War II. In other contexts, it may also refer to the genocidal campaigns waged by the Nazis against the Sinta, Roma, Slavs, and other groups.

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2 One of Khomeini’s most important books, The Governance of the Jurist: Islamic Government, begins by describing the “afflict[ion]” of Islam by Jews: “from the very beginning [they] established anti-Islamic progaganda and engaged in various [anti-Muslim] stratagems” (see Litvak 2006, p. 269).

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overthrew the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. There is no claim here that antiSemitism is intrinsic to Iranian society or culture, or otherwise immune to transformation. Its current regime, however, has politicized Jewish history, especially the destruction of two thirds of European Jewry during World War II, and hence “elevating” anti-Semitism to state policy. Denouncing alleged Zionist myths about the Holocaust has been one strategy adopted by official Iran. Supporting Western Holocaust deniers, both through propaganda and asylum, has been another. Iranian radio has lent its airways to Holocaust denial by broadcasting interviews with Ernst Zundel and Mark Weber. After serving 6 months in Sweden for racial incitement in Sweden, North African radio broadcaster Ahmad Rami was warmly embraced by the Iranian government. The Tehran Times has quoted approvingly from two well-known European deniers, the UK writer David Irving and the French academic Robert Faurisson. In its pages, the Iranian press took up the cause of dual German–Australian citizen Fredrick Toben, whom it characterized as a hero for standing up to Zionist media and legal influence. Toben went on to become an official guest of the Islamic Republic of Iran. To Jurgen Graff, a neo-Nazi from Switzerland condemned to over 1 year in jail for Holocaust denial, the government extended political asylum. It similarly protected a Graff supporter from Austria, the engineer Wolfgang Frohlich. The greatest Iranian treatment for a Western Holocaust denier was reserved for Roger Garaudy from France, whose prosecution for Holocaust denial made him a veritable cause celèbre in Iran. Garaudy’s case was taken up by no less than Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, Council of Guardians Secretary Ayatollah Janati, and State President Khatamei. Given its state-sponsorship of Holocaust denial and support of Western deniers, it is therefore not surprising that (a) Tehran should have hosted a conference intending to deny or minimize the historical reality of the Holocaust and (b) a preponderance of conference participants themselves hailed from the West. Of the 18 panelists listed on the official conference program, 10 were from Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia. Only three were from non-Arab and nonPersian Third World countries. Japan was represented by Patrick McNally and Mexico by Bradley Smith, a North American who has long posted a Holocaust denial website. (The government of Mexico issued a rejection letter of the Conference through its Foreign Ministry. In a similar vein, Ban Ki-Moon, in one of his earliest acts as secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), issued a statement to the effect that “denying historical facts, especially as such an important subject as the Holocaust, is just not acceptable.”) The most high-profile attendee (not a panel presenter per se) from the USA was David Duke, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and one-time Congressional candidate from the state of Louisiana. In short, the Tehran Conference was hardly a gathering that highlighted Holocaust denial beyond a familiar coterie of First World and Middle Eastern anti-Zionists.3 It was, above all, a pseudo-scholarly media event that united First World with Persian Gulf Holocaust deniers.

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The latter, it should be noted, included ultra-Orthodox Jews from the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect. See Santos 2007.

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“Ownership” of Holocaust History One valid question that even Holocaust deniers raise is: To whom does the Holocaust “belong”? Six and a half decades after the end of World War II, one can no longer aver (if one ever could) that the memory of the Shoah “belongs” primarily to the Jewish people or to the nations that perpetrated and witnessed the Holocaust, or to the memory of those who actively combated the so-called Final Solution. Memory of the Shoah, as human rights in general, “belongs” to the entire world. The questions are “How is that memory preserved?,” How is it conveyed to new generations?,” and “How is it invested with meaning?” Narratives of suffering from the Holocaust were initially a preoccupation of the fragile community of survivors and the Ashkenazic Jewish community writ large. By the 1960s, Israeli society had become, if ambivalently at times, a repository for actively circulated memory of the Shoah (the preferred Hebrew word for the genocide of European Jewry during World War II). On the one hand, as the Jewish State, Israel assumed the obligation of perpetuating the memory of the Holocaust through general education and museums (e.g., Yad Vashem, Israel’s major Holocaust memorial museum, in Jerusalem). On the other hand, a generalized stigma within longstanding Zionist circles was attached to survivors for their communities’ supposedly passive submission to their fate (Segev 1993). Perpetrator Europe utilized these narratives for self-reflection and as a means for formulating human rights responses to collective injustices. With European nations leading, the United Nations has adopted various legal instruments dealing with human rights, resulting in at least 72 human rights conventions worldwide (Marie 1996). The 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide paved the way for the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950. In 1969, 25 Latin American and Caribbean nations signed on to the American Convention on Human Rights; the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights was ratified in 1981. Significantly, although the Arab League drafted its own Arab Charter on Human Rights in 1994, not a single member has adopted it. The international legal path paved since World War II continues, with the UN assigning special rapporteurs in 2005 to develop Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law. In the 1970s, Americanization of the Holocaust had multiplied through movies and television shows, educational programs (e.g., Facing History and Ourselves), art, literature, and memorials (Flanzbaum 1999; Novick 1999). The opening of a Holocaust museum on federal soil in the nation’s capital in 1993 is a strong symbol of this process. A tragedy that had once been viewed as a strictly European responsibility was elevated through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to the status of American preoccupation. The USHMM not only highlighted America’s role in the liberation of Nazi death camps but presented the lessons of the Holocaust through the prism of American values: pluralism, tolerance, and multiculturalism. Not only do scholars and professional chroniclers of the Holocaust in America, Israel, and Europe experience its memorialization but, more important, so do mass citizenries there through mass media, governmental

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institutions, and educational curricula. As Robert Novick and Hilene Flanzbaum’s writings emphasize, Americanization of the Holocaust had a particular political agenda, bound up, as it was, with the place of Israel in American foreign policy. Americanization of the Holocaust was a trendsetter for both the general globalization of Holocaust consciousness throughout the world and its indigenization in the developing nations. Novick also points out that it was a form of displacement and denial for atrocities, such as slavery and the extermination of indigenous peoples, in US history. With respect to more recent movements to redress human rights violations, “the new wave of reparations starting in the 1990s…owes a great deal to German reparations after World War II, which set a precedent for, and constitutes a turning point in, victims’ rights” (Colonomos and Armstrong 2006, p. 411; see also Ludi 2007 and Daly and Sarkin 2007). Indeed, one cannot introduce a modern human rights perspective without contextualizing it in terms of genocide and the specific genocide that gave rise to the very word (O’Byrne 2003).4 Every new type of narrative or interpretation of the Holocaust is problematic, whether it occurs outside Western society or within, for it immediately raises questions of motive and agenda. It is particularly unsettling to those for whom the Shoah is sacrosanct, who territorialize the event or limit its recognized, legitimate, and specialized chroniclers. But even survivors must eventually accept that narratives of the Holocaust are no longer confined—and should not be confined—to the survivors themselves and to their families. Study of the Shoah has penetrated the province of the academy, not to mention the realm of politics. In an age of globalization, throughout the non-Western world (particularly in Latin American, African, and African-diaspora societies that have experienced genocide), the Holocaust is increasingly becoming part of the consciousness of leaders, intellectuals, and opinion-shapers. This perspective is what Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider (2006) in their The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age refer to as the “cosmopolitanization of memories.” What are cosmopolitan memories? “Transnational memory cultures… transcending ethnic and national boundaries.” John Torpey (2006) is more ironic about the global appropriation of the suffering also known by the Hebrew word Shoah. The Holocaust, he writes, has become a veritable “‘gold standard’ against which to judge other cases of injustice” (Torpey 2006, p. 37). The subtitle of Professor Torpey’s work conveys his skeptical stance: Reparation Politics. Torpey is right to question the exploitation of the Holocaust by entrepreneurs—in both developed and developing nations—of reparation politicians. But my larger point is that the globalization of the academy simultaneously indigenizes the study of the Holocaust, extending preoccupation with it from the traditional province of Western publics and academics (by Western, I include Israeli as well as European and North American academia). It is instructive to pay attention to what serious scholars, intellectuals, and writers are saying about the Shoah in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. This is an admittedly difficult time to advocate openness to Third World views of the Holocaust. When the President of Iran characterizes the Holocaust as a European “myth” and sponsors an international Holocaust-denial conference, as Mahmoud 4

Polish jurist and Jewish Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1944.

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Ahmadinejad did in December 2006; when Muslim reaction to tasteless Danish cartoons deteriorates into cartoon lampoons of the Shoah, as it did in summer of 2006; and when anti-Semitic jibes can surface at the UN conference on racism in Durban in 2001; at such times, it hardly seems propitious to advocate openness to the views of public intellectuals from every nation on the meaning of the Holocaust.

Arab Acknowledgments Against the background of general Arab (let alone Palestinian) hostility to the idea of commemorating the Holocaust, the efforts of individuals like Khaled Kasab Mahameed stand out prominently. Mahameed is a commercial lawyer in the city of Nazareth who mounted the first Holocaust exhibit in the Arab world, at least from a sympathetic perspective. According to Mahameed, “If Arabs could acknowledge and empathize with Jewish suffering,” it might neutralize Jewish–Israeli survival anxieties and create “a more sharing mood between the peoples” (Sappir 2003). Another exception to Arab hostility toward Holocaust commemoration can be found in the Arabic programming center at the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Heritage Museum in Western Galilee. Guided by Israeli Arabs and conducted in Arabic, the center brings Arab students for an optional course of 10 consecutive Sundays culminating in their becoming Holocaust museum docents. Similarly, one should note the 2003 visit of 100 prominent Israeli Arabs to the Auschwitz camp memorial museum. A key organizer of the trip was Nazir Mgally, a journalist from Nazareth. Satloff’s (2006) book on documenting evidence of Arab rescuers of Sephardic Jews targeted under Vichy, Fascist, and Nazi regimes in North Africa has also heightened Arab-world consciousness of the Shoah. Undoubtedly, such acknowledgment of Jewish suffering during the Holocaust is far from representative of Arab and Muslim societies across the board.5 AntiWestern and anti-Zionist responses to the Holocaust are trumpeted more loudly than human rights ones. Due to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Arab and Muslim sensitivity to Jewish victimhood in mid-twentieth century Europe is inevitably fragile and conditional. But the Muslim and Arab worlds are hardly monolithic in eschewing the Shoah as a subject worthy of serious consideration and respect. Among the nations voting for the first ever commemoration by the United Nations in January 2005 of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps were Oman, Morocco, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Hoge 2005; Miller 2005). Outside the broader Arab and Muslim orbit, the Third World as a whole is no longer in lock-step behind pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli, and anti-Jewish radicalism. For various reasons (many of them tied to the end of the Cold War), the Arab bloc no longer commands the allegiance of the Third World intelligentsia as it once did. Consequently, African, Asian, and Latin American intellectuals increasingly avail themselves of the academic freedom to view the Holocaust non-dogmatically.

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Nor is Israel itself above a kind of Holocaust denial: Witness the unsuccessful attempts by Yossi Sarid and others to incorporate teaching about the Armenian genocide within the curriculum. See Auron 2000 and 2003.

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East Asia Forty years ago, there was no Center for Judaic Studies in Nanjing, China. The center was founded by Professor Xu Xin, President of the China Judaic Studies Association and author of, in Chinese, Antisemitism (1996) and the Encyclopedia Judaica. In Shanghai, Professor Pan Guang, whose boyhood neighbors included Russian–Jewish refugees, heads another Center of Jewish Studies. Shanghai alone hosted 30,000 Jews during World War II, an indication of the sympathy toward Jews displayed by pre-War statesmen and elites in China. The contemporary relevance of this history is reinforced by the notoriety of Jewish families who survived the Holocaust in Shanghai. These include the families of Michael Blumenthal, former US Treasury secretary, and Israel’s current Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.6 The examples of Pan Guang and Xu Xin demonstrate how even such disparate and seemingly unconnected cultures as the Jewish and Chinese have, in recent years, begun to find common ground through the Shoah. In particular, Holocaust studies provide a framework for the Chinese to revisit and cope with their lingering pain from the Nanking massacre and other mass atrocities visited upon them by Nazi Germany’s Japanese allies (Xin 2003).7 Consider the following in terms of Chinese history: Madame Sun-Yatsen led a demonstration at the German consulate in 1933 to protest Nazi anti-Semitic legislation. In 1939, the Chinese government planned to establish a settlement near Beijing for Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. (Outbreak of the war ultimately superseded the plan.) Nevertheless, coming at a time of Japanese invasion and following the infamous massacres of Chinese civilians in Nanking, such willingness to assist European Jews is noteworthy. Following the War, a Chinese version of the Diary of Anne Frank sold about half a million copies. Yet it was not until 1972 and President Nixon’s visit that books and movies about the Shoah began to circulate freely. Some Chinese scholars began to focus on the Holocaust, a tendency that accelerated in the 1990s after normalization of relations with Israel. The Simon Wiesenthal Center succeeded in airing a documentary on Chinese television and in devising a traveling exhibition on the Shoah. A Chinese-produced documentary in 1998, in addition to China’s presidential visit to Israel (including Yad Vashem) in 2000, also raised consciousness of the Shoah in China. With regards to Chinese teaching and scholarship, the last decade has seen an outpouring of books and articles dealing with Jewish history and Israel. The subject of the Holocaust is part of this development. Study of the Shoah in China has moreover been linked to a broader consciousness over human rights. Courses on the Holocaust are now offered at the university level, and the Shoah is the object of postgraduate theses. According to Professor Xin, Jewish philosophy and theology counters Buddhist-influenced Chinese thought, according to which “life is pain and suffering” and preparation for the next reincarnated life is more important than the present one. In contrast, Xu Xin conveys the Jewish perspective that “life is given by 6

For recent recognition of Filipino sanctuary for Holocaust refugees, see Berger 2005.

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For an early example, see Qingling (1952). See also Jin (2000).

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God” and therefore must be enjoyed and respected. Here is an unexpected basis for human rights in China: Jewish post-Holocaust theology. Within the context of (relative) religious freedom after many years of Maoist-dictated atheism, instruction about Judaism and Jewish history has a small but not inconsequential place in Chinese consciousness-raising. Christianity in China has no monopoly on alternative explanations for the meaning of life. Within a country in which memories of the Nanjing massacre are still painfully fresh, audiences and classes embrace Xu Xin’s communication of a comparative Jewish perspective.8 Collective memory, evoked by respective Jewish and Chinese attitudes toward their respective suffering in the Second World War, is a related contrast. Jewish memory, according to Xu Xin, is much longer than that of the Chinese. Whereas Jews recall major historical tragedies, such as slavery in Egypt or destruction in Europe, the Chinese tend to suppress historical pain. Professor Xu thus uses Holocaust studies to help his compatriots come to grips with their own victimization by Axis aggressors during the last World War. As for the perpetrators of targeted war-time suffering in China, Nippon’s national form of indigenization may be referred to as “Japanization” of the Holocaust (Tokudome 2003). On one side are those who look to the way Germany faced its past and collectively took responsibility for the Shoah. In contrast, Japan has yet to fully come to terms with its own World War II crimes. There are those who insist— instrumentally—on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, thereby downplaying the largescale killings committed by Japanese troops, attributing them to consequences of the heat of battle and not to any state-sponsored or systematic policy. The most prominent member of this strain of nationalist intellectuals is Professor Kanji Nishio; precursors include Asahiro Masatoshi and Dazai Osamu (Nishio 1997; Masatoshi 1961; Osamu 1956). This group invokes the case of Chinue Sughira, the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who saved thousands of Jews by issuing transit visas, as emblematic of the supposed beneficence of the Japanese authorities of the time. Both camps are fully aware of how the comparison of Japan’s war crimes with the Holocaust can exert a powerful influence on the current debate over Japan’s wartime history. Japanization of the Holocaust was spearheaded by Ariga Tetsutaro, a Protestant theologian; Maruyama Masao, a social scientist; and editors of the Misuzu publishing house. The publishing of original and translated books on the Holocaust (especially The Diary of Anne Frank), the huge audiences for “Schindler’s List” and other Holocaust movies, the success of the Wiesenthal Center traveling exhibit, and Japan’s own Holocaust museums (Holocaust Education Center in Hiroshima prefecture, the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center, and The Auschwitz Peace Museum of Japan) attest to contemporary Japanese fascination with the Shoah on the part of some groups. Perhaps, the most enduring, if not problematic, aspect of Japanese indigenization is the putative parallel between the Holocaust and Hiroshima (Goodman and Miyazawa 2000; Tokudome 1999b). It is not only that the term “whole burning” 8

From an Eastern theological perspective, see also Masao Abe’s dialogue with Jewish scholars on the “karma” of Holocaust evil and purification in Ives (1995). Abe’s attempts to “heal” human rights violations spiritually through a transcendent Zen theology is not easily accepted within a Jewish framework, but it does indicate expanded Eastern incorporation of the Holocaust into its world view.

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(literal translation of “holocaust”) applies as well to nuclear annihilation as it does to industrial crematoria. Both Jewish and Japanese writers have drawn parallels between the innocent victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and those of Auschwitz and Maidanek. Death by atomic bombing is as catastrophic as that by gas chamber. But in so associating the ultimate victims of the Manhattan Project with that of the Final Solution, some commentators have used the Holocaust–Hiroshima parallel to mask the identity of the aggressors in the respective theaters of war.

Latin America In Latin America, the indigenization of the Holocaust is even more ambiguous. Latin America became not only a refuge for Jewish refugees of Nazi persecution during the War but also an asylum for Nazi perpetrators after the Shoah (Stavans 2003). The continuous presence there of unprosecuted Nazi fugitives makes Latin America, even more than Germany, the continent where post-Holocaust justice has been least rendered (Latin American offspring of fugitive Nazis are numerous enough to warrant a collective euphemism: “Swiss Germans”9). Such a situation is at least as much a bystander’s problem as it is a victim’s obsession: Not until 2000 did the president of Argentina apologize with “a deep feeling of pain” for the sanctuary his country had provided for Nazis. Argentina also is the site of the one Shoah memory institution in South America, the Memorial Foundation of the Holocaust in Buenos Aires (established in 1994). Beside its historical and communitarian activities, its goal is to promote civil rights and combat discrimination in contemporary Argentinean society. Recent groups and speakers include those from the Defense Ministry and the Federal Police Academy. Another branch of the Foundation exhibits paintings, drawings, and sculpture art to memorialize the Holocaust and genocide. Latin American artists meld both World War II era genocide with post-War recollections and expressions of crimes against humanity. The counterinsurgencies of the 1970s were conducted, as it turns out, by local fascists, some of whom had been trained by Nazis or the children of Nazis. For sure, a disproportionate number of Jews, including some prominent ones, were targeted in “dirty wars” that resurrected Nazi imagery. This spilled over into massive human rights violations visited upon indigenous peoples by official armed forces and paramilitaries in Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, and elsewhere. It was a chance visit by Dr. Roberto Cabrero to Israel’s Holocaust Museum that gave rise to a program of post-genocide trauma therapy in his native Guatemala. Trauma therapy in Latin America must cope with a psychological resistance long known to those familiar with Holocaust survivors: a self-suppression of discussion of their experiences, one that has been only gradually overcome—but not in all cases—with approaching old age. As with European Jewish survivors of the Shoah, Mayan Indian escapees of the dirty wars preferred to bury their emotional pain rather than verbalize it. Mental health professionals have found that articulation of such memories has therapeutic and cathartic value (Danieli 2007). Families of 9 Qualifying the German origin of the expatriates with the term “Swiss” was an attempt to denationalize their true identity and cast them in a “neutral” way.

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taciturn Holocaust survivors have found that old age does predispose some of these parents and grandparents toward recounting their memories (Epstein 1979; Hass 1990). Such lessons are being transferred to the sphere of post-genocide therapy in Latin America. On a broader level, as with survivors of the Holocaust who have received reparations from Germany, the Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights has emphasized that therapy for human rights abuses requires societal recognition of victimization (Danieli 2007, p. 309).

Caribbean, Africa, and African Diaspora In Latin America, particularly the Caribbean, claims for justice and reparations have taken their cue from post-Holocaust success. The campaign to have slavery declared a crime against humanity goes hand in hand with the most vigorous reparations activism in the Third World. Taking the name in 1993 of the “Reparations to Africa and Africans in the Diaspora” movement, at its inaugural congress in Abuja, Nigeria, it set out to “explore the modalities and strategies of an African campaign of restitution similar to the compensation paid by Germany to Israel and the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust.” In Abuja, British Queens Counsel Lord Anthony Gifford invoked the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal as the appropriate international legal precedent. African Americans and other “New World” diasporics of African descent most actively pursue this reparations movement, which is aimed at both governments and corporations (Brooks 2007; Edmondson 2001; Peté and du Plessis 2007; Sammons 2007).10 An anecdote relates the spread of a Holocaust human rights perspective at the Third World grassroots level. On the French Caribbean island of Martinique, populated mostly by descendents of African slaves, the author chanced upon an elementary school group that was visiting a touring UNESCO exhibit on Aimé Césaire, Martinican founder of the négritude movement of Black consciousness. In explaining négritude to the schoolchildren, the guide read from this poem, displayed in the exhibit, by Césaire: To leave. As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be a Jew-man A colored-man A Hindu-from-Calcutta man A non-voting-Harlem-man Famine-man, insult-man, torture-man.

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With respect to African-Americans, Roy Brooks notes that the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which inspired the “modern redress movement for slavery” embodied in Congressional Bill H.R. 40 of 1989, was itself a reflection of “the growing global concern for human rights since the end of the Holocaust” (Brooks 2007, p. 302).

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The exhibit catalogue, in its explanation of négritude, reinforced the parallel: “The Negro is also the Jew, the Foreigner, the Amerindian, the Illiterate, the Untouchable, He who is different…” Clear cross the globe, on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius (also once populated by African slaves), there is growing consciousness about the detention camps set up by the British during the Holocaust for over 1,500 Jewish refugees deported from the coast of Palestine: 126 of them died during their incarceration from malaria, typhoid, and in at least two cases, suicide. Mauritian songwriter Zul Ramiah invokes the Holocaust in his Kreole dirge, “Zenocide,” and scholar Shawkat Toorawa reflects his community’s ambivalent Holocaust consciousness as an “itinerant Muslim” (Toorawa 2003). But, it is on the African continent itself that the indigenization of the Holocaust is strongest. In The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgivenness, Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka (1999) mentions the Holocaust and demagogic anti-Semitism several times. In one passage, speaking of reparations as “a cogent critique of history and thus a potent restraint on its repetition,” Soyinka refers to the tireless efforts of Jewish survivors and their heirs “to recover both their material patrimony and the humanity of which they were brutally deprived” (p. 83). Kissi (2003) has documented the ways in which rebels in Ethiopia employed Holocaust parallelism as a strategy to garner support for their cause within the United States Congress. Eltringham (2004) discusses why Rwandan survivors (especially the exiled elite) themselves choose to integrate the Holocaust into their discourse on victimization. There are both “pull” and “push” reasons. On the one hand, claiming parallels with European Jewry of the 1940s puts African Tutsis within a human category and historical framework with which Westerners can more easily identify. Otherwise, the Rwandan genocide risks being consigned to the simplistic tribalistic and atavistic interpretations that the mass media advanced at its outbreak. Eltringham quotes both informants who emphasize the similarities with the Holocaust as well as those who acknowledge differences. For his part, Mahmood Mamdani (2001), by citing Hannah Arendt’s linkage of race ideology to both African and European genocide, also incorporates the Holocaust in his important treatment of the Rwandan Itsembamboka.11 African indigenization of the Holocaust takes three main forms: (1) programs of healing that include Holocaust survivors and second-generation survivors (such as the educational office of the Cape Town Holocaust Centre), (2) commemorative exhibitions that include displays on the Shoah (such as at the memorial museum in Kigali, Rwanda),12 and (3) the pursuit of justice for war criminals and perpetrators of crimes against humanity, à la Nuremberg. It is in Rwanda that this legal avenue has been pursued most explicitly (Gahima 2003; Miles 2002); should the balance of power in the future be reversed in Khartoum, we might expect similarly framed prosecutions regarding Darfur. 11 12

For a discussion of the problematic nature of the comparison, see Miles 2000.

Hamber (2006, p. 573) cautions that Western consultants to museums and memorials in the Third World, in borrowing from Holocaust memorialization templates, may unwittingly diminish indigenous cultural expressions of reparations. Such, at any rate, has been suggested in the case of memorials to apartheid victims in South Africa.

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In October 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted the resolution referred to above, establishing an annual day to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. This is the same body that in 1976 voted the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution. The 2005 resolution, moreover, specifically rejects all denial of the Holocaust and urges member nations to educate their citizens about the Shoah. The UN’s resolution had 109 sponsors and co-sponsors, and was adopted by consensus. It was the first time that a General Assembly resolution sponsored by Israel had ever been approved. The record of the immediate past Secretary-General of the United Nations is all the more relevant in this context. Kofi Annan, from Ghana, is married to the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who took many risks to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust and whose own demise, under Soviet detention, remains subject to much speculation. As secretary-general of the United Nations, Annan was never reticent to remind audiences of his connection with and deep respect for Wallenberg. Nor has his quest for a just solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict overshadowed his concern for properly commemorating the Shoah in its own right. The Jewish people have been victims of anti-Semitism in many parts of the world, and in Europe they were the target of the Holocaust—the ultimate abomination. This fact must never be forgotten, or diminished. It is understandable, therefore, that many Jews deeply resent any accusation of racism directed against the State of Israel—and all the more so when it coincides with indiscriminate and totally unacceptable attacks on innocent civilians. A unique combination of professional and marital circumstances converged to make of Annan a most personal example of African indigenization of the Holocaust. Annan’s successor, Ban Ki-Moon of South Korea, was no less emphatic in castigating the Iranian-sponsored campaign to deny the Holocaust (Hoge 2006). As the post-World War II order began to form and a human rights paradigm began to emerge, it was inconceivable that an African would be chosen Secretary-General of the United Nations. At that time, neither the “Holocaust” nor the “Third World” was a recognizable term. In the ensuing 60 years, world consciousness has been compressed through an evolutionary process captured often, if crudely, in the single word “globalization.” For better or for worse, it is a world in which the Third World indigenizes the Holocaust, while the West, especially in the wake of Rwanda and Darfur, ponders the current meaning of the post-Holocaust promise “never again!”

Conclusion Despite what one may infer from the Tehran Conference regarding the extent of Holocaust denial in the Third World, the following countertrends are in evidence: 1. Intellectual globalization includes the Shoah within the emerging universal consciousness of world history. Americanization of the Holocaust may have paved the way toward indigenization, but it no longer monopolizes the framing of it.

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2. Many Third World peoples are making reparations claims for historical injustices based on the moral authority and tactical moorings from precedents established for Holocaust victims. Collective reparation, more than reparations to individuals, is an increasingly advocated model adapted from claims agreements between Germany and Israel. 3. Otherwise ignored groups under fire in the developing world utilize the idea and word “holocaust” as an instrument to gain support and sympathy from the West. There is a multiplicity of reasons for promoting parallels with the Shoah, from garnering foreign assistance during conflict to advancing reparations claims afterward. The degree of political instrumentalism in invoking the Holocaust differs from case to case.13 Implicit in several of the parallels is recognition of national solutions (à la Zionism) to the problem of ethnic powerlessness. 4. Critics of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians, from the Third as well as First Worlds, can and do compartmentalize the historical dimension of the Holocaust. Criticism of Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza do not necessarily degenerate into negation or minimization of the Holocaust. Conversely, there is an emerging recognition of post-Shoah Jewish sensitivities regarding group survival and the concomitant legitimacy of a Jewish state. 5. Denial of genocide is not limited to the Holocaust: The Tehran Conference gained notoriety because the genocide in question was the Shoah. Survivors of genocides in Africa (e.g., Rwanda), Asia (e.g., Turkey), and Latin America (e.g., Guatemala) have also had to confront the indignity of denial.14 Iran is among those nations that still refuse to acknowledge the killings in Darfur as genocide (Miles 2006). In short, scholars and intellectuals from the Third World are increasingly indigenizing the Holocaust and its legacies in diverse ways. Although some of that indigenization is political and instrumental, the practice of history is rarely purely objective and apolitical. Overall, indigenization of the Holocaust, a byproduct of human rights sensitivity to post-genocidal politics, is positive, as the aforementioned evidence from South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia attests. The Tehran Conference—for all its delusional pretensions (Dalrymple 2007)—should not obscure this alternative trend in developing nations outside of the Middle East. Indeed, even in Iran itself, this perspective has gained a foothold. Two months after the conference, over 100 Iranian intellectuals and artists signed a statement condemning the Tehran Conference and its attempts “to falsify history.” Signers of the statement paid “homage to the memory of the million of Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust” (Fathi 2007; http://www.nybooks.com). If even in Iran, where human rights are under siege, the Holocaust can become a rallying cry for intellectual honesty, then surely consciousness of the Shoah is spreading beyond the familiar pale of the West.

13

See Miles 2003 and 2004, pp. 382–387. Zertal (2005) grapples with the political instrumentalization of the Holocaust within Israel itself.

14

See Miles 2004, pp. 388–389, for elaboration.

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