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Join SIS for a conversation focused on the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre and genocide in the 20th century.
About this event
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar, also known as the Babi Yar, massacre, when in a span of 48 hours, nearly 34,000 Jews were brought to and murdered in the Babyn Yar ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv in then Nazi-occupied Ukraine. While the Nazis attempted to hide evidence of the massacres, eyewitnesses and other evidence indicate the truth of the atrocities at Babyn Yar, which became one of the many symbols of the Holocaust.
This is only one example of genocide that has taken place in the 20th century. Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Armenia…the list continues. SIS professor Mirjana Morosini will lead a panel discussion with several scholars and experts on the topics of the Babyn Yar massacre, genocide around the world, and the prevention of future horrors like this. An audience Q&A follows the conversation.
Registrants will receive confirmation emails containing the Zoom webinar link.
Biographies
Karel Berkhoff is the co-director of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) and a historian of Eastern Europe (especially Ukraine and the Soviet Union) and the Holocaust (particularly in Kyiv). He is a senior researcher at the NIOD Holocaust at the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, and has published the monographs, Harvest of despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule, and Motherland in Danger: Soviet Propaganda during World War II.
Mario Buil-Merce is the Political Affairs Officer for the United Nation’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. Prior to this assignment, his work at the United Nations has included responsibilities at the Mediation Support Unit of the Department of Political Affairs, the Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq.
Andrii Rukkas is the director of the Institute for Holocaust Studies in Eastern Europe at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. He is also an associate professor of the History Department as the chair of Central and Eastern European history at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, as well as scholarly director of the Center for Genocides and Mass Atrocities Studies at the Faculty of History. His work is on modern Ukrainian history, with a focus on the military history and WWII Holocaust history in Ukraine and the entire Eastern Front. He writes extensively on the topic of Babyn Yar massacre.
Gregory Stanton is the founder and president of Genocide Watch. He was the Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution of George Mason University. He founded Genocide Watch in 1999, was the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and is the founder (1999) and Chair of the International Alliance to End Genocide, the world’s first anti-genocide coalition. From 2007 – 2009, he was the President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He served in the State Department (1992-1999), where he drafted the United Nations Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, and the Central African Arms Flow Commission. He also drafted the U.N. Peacekeeping Operations resolutions that helped bring about an end to the Mozambique civil war. Actively involved in human rights since the 1960s, when he was a voting rights worker in Mississippi, he served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast, and as the Church World Service/CARE Field Director in Cambodia in 1980. And from 1988 to 1992, he was legal advisor to RUKH, the Ukrainian independence movement, for which the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America named him Man of the Year in 1992.
Mirjana Morosini (moderator) is a professor at SIS and is an historian of modern Europe, with particular emphases on Germany and broader Central Europe, the Balkans, Italy, and modern European imperial overseas possessions. Her work focuses on comparative and transnational history of ethnic politics, ethnic conflict and genocide, nationalism, borderland identities, and the history of science and technology.