Friday, April 20, 2007

April

April is a peculiar month. It is the month that remembers the Holocaust, and it is the month that marks the remembrance and the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda; and April also marks the beginning of the 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide that took place in BiH.
I have no idea about what is so singular about the month of April.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

"April is a peculiar month. It is the month that remembers the Holocaust, and it is the month that marks the remembrance and the beginning of the genocide in Rwanda; and April also marks the beginning of the 'ethnic cleansing' and genocide that took place in BiH."

- Maybe we could also add siege of Sarajevo to the list? Sarajevo underwent the longest siege in modern military history during the Bosnian war. It was under siege even longer than Stalingrad.

On April 6, 1992, as former communist state of Yugoslavia was disintegrating, Sarajevo was surrounded by the Yugoslav National Army (Bosnian: "Jugoslovenska Narodna Armija") and a number of paramilitary (Bosnian Serb Army) formations. The siege of Sarajevo, which lasted until October 1995, resulted in large scale destruction and dramatic population shifts.

Shaina said...

Thanks for the info; I certainly include the siege on Sarajevo as part of the genocide in Bosnia.

Shaina said...

And as I was just reminded on another blog; April is also the month of Waco, Oklahoma City, Columbine; and now VTech; and the killing of 200 people in Baghdad this week.

Oh, it is also the month of Hitler's b-day. I wonder if that is why they have a Holocaust rememberence week in April; to shift the rightful focus on the victims of the genocide; and not on Hitler? Or, does it mark the liberations of the camps?
I know that there is also an international Holocaust rememberence day in January as well.

Anonymous said...

With the lilacs in bloom here I thought of Abraham Lincoln and 15 April 1865 - the inspiration for the wonderful elegiac poem by Walt Whitman:
http://www.bartleby.com/142/192.html.

Shaina said...

Thanks Owen for the poem.

"WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring."