SENATE RESOLUTION NO. 102

BY  DANIELSON

A Resolution recognizing the month of April 2012 as Genocide Awareness Month.

   WHEREAS, the dawn of the 20th century was welcomed as an age of science, an age of enlightenment, and an age of prosperity and peace; and
   WHEREAS, the 20th century also brought a century of misery and death, including the Musa Dagh resistance in 1915 followed by the Armenian persecution, the Rape of Nanking in 1937, the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s, the killings in Cambodia in 1975, the massacres in Bosnia in 1992, the slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, and now in the 21st century the displacements and deaths in Darfur; and
   WHEREAS, all of these tragedies, separated by time and distance, have one common thread, the murder of men, women, and children, young and old alike, based only on where they lived, what God they worshipped, what language they spoke, or to what community they belonged; and
   WHEREAS, this phenomenon of organized mass murder was given a unique name, genocide, in the last century; and
   WHEREAS, in the last 100 years genocide has brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people; and
   WHEREAS, in the dawn of the 21st century the world community must dedicate itself to the task of ending genocide and creating the age of prosperity and peace that was dreamed of over a century ago; NOW THEREFORE,

   BE IT RESOLVED BY THE SENATE, That the Senate recognizes the month of April 2012 as Genocide Awareness Month and urges Iowa’s schools, universities, and civic organizations to raise public awareness of the history and horror of genocide and encourages public debate on how genocide may be eliminated.