GAAMAC Chair highlights information, education and accountability for genocide prevention

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 20, ARMENPRESS. Global Action Against Mass Atrocity Crimes(GAAMAC)Chair Silvia Fernandezde Gurmendi attaches importance to disseminating information, education and accountability in the context of preventing new possible genocides.

Silvia Fernandezde Gurmendi made the remarks in an interview with ARMENPRESS during the 4th Global Forum Against the Crime of Genocide in Yerevan.

“Learning from past experiences and past genocides is extremely important to prevent the new ones,” she said, adding that GAAMAC puts a lot of emphasis about learning from the past and education. “Learning from the past is extremely important to prevent a future genocide, to understand how genocide takes place, what is the genesis this is extremely important.”

Speaking about the Armenian Genocide and Turkey’s denial, the GAAMAC Chair said: “I think it is important in any situation to explain the facts and to disseminate the information about them. It’s not about one country; it’s about international community as a whole. Armenia does a lot to try to have this information disseminated.”

“I think, your Prime Minister said something that is extremely important: ‘In order to prevent future atrocities, dialog and cooperation is extremely important’ this applies bilaterally but also multilaterally. That is way multilateral platforms are also extremely important because that is a way of encouraging more dialog and more cooperation,” she added.

Asked what countries should do to prevent new genocides, Silvia Fernandezde Gurmendi said that GAAMAC is about encouraging every national state to promote policies and mechanisms at the national level to prevent genocide.

“I think there are very important issues that are crucial. The first one is memory, truth: Trying to understand what happened in the past. That requires education and it was said today, including everything in the curriculum, curriculum of schools, that everybody, every child knows the facts. So truth is extremely important and establishing institutional mechanisms for memory are extremely important. Reparation to victims is extremely importanta, having good programs with reparations to victims is extremely important. Accountability is extremely important, which can be done at the national level as well as international level. And you have several international tribunals dealing with accountability, there is the international criminal court, a permanent court that has jurisdiction over the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. So promoting and supporting these institutions is extremely, extremely important.”

This year, the forum was held under the title Genocide Prevention in the Era of New Technologies. In this regard, the GAAMAC Chair that technology is part of the problem and part of the solution.

“Well as I said in my opening statement today in the high level segment, technology is part of the problem and part of the solution. Today we see that of course genocide didn’t wait for technology to happen, but we see that new technologies really help to disseminate hate through the media, social media but also through conventional measures. This amplifies the problem, hatred and disseminates fake news. So this is the problem. But the technology also helps us to check and monitor the media. It helps us to check the facts, it helps us to counter narratives. So, the technologies can be part of the problem but also part of the solution, because it helps us to analyze what is going on and to counter the fake news. One problem is that many still believe that it is for the big technology companies to try to avoid, prevent or even delete hateful massages and of course, they have that responsibility but it is not just them. I think that we do need to develop international standards for everybody to comply to this standards. Hate speech today is absolutely recognized as a precursor and a vector of violence that could escalate into violence.”

Silvia Fernandezde Gurmendi thanked Armenia for organizing the forum.

“I would like to thank Armenia for organizing this forum. I think that it is extremely timely and important. And it is also extremely relevant. The people that are here and were invited to be a part of the panels are representing the institutions, academia, states that are really working very hard on this issue of new technology,” she said.