Tufts Against Genocide (TAG) is working to expand awareness and initiate discussion on campus about genocide in both its historical and present-day contexts. This Wednesday, TAG will host its annual Survivors Speak event, where survivors of the Holocaust and the genocides in Darfur, Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia will visit Tufts to share their stories and discuss ways to prevent future violence.
Current TAG co-president Sofia Shield, a senior, helped plan the first Survivors Speak event in 2011. The focus of the event is to create a forum for survivors to compare their experiences.
"It is a unique opportunity to bring survivors of different genocides and atrocities together to look at similarities and differences between each," Shield said.
As survivors of many genocides, particularly the Holocaust, get older, TAG sees bringing individuals together to share their stories as an important opportunity for both students and the survivors themselves, she explained.
"The number of living survivors is dwindling," Shield said. "We want them to have this opportunity while they can."
One major mission of TAG is to spread awareness of mass atrocities that occur even today, according to the club's co-president LiatLitwin.
"Our focus has been primarily on education and awareness on campus, and less [on] activism," Litwin, a senior, said.
With this goal in mind, TAG has sponsored educational events and programming both on and off campus. Most recently, the group has collaborated with the Boston Latin School, a college preparatory school for students in seventh through 12th grade, to promote genocide education.
"We wanted to expand into the community, and reach out to different schools," Litwin said.
Boston Latin School has a strong program for genocide studies, according to Litwin. The school has a Stand for Human Rights club with which TAG has been working.
TAG hopes to increase collaboration with the school in the future, according to Shield. It can sometimes be difficult, however, to raise interest and attract attendance from high school students because programs often occur after regular school hours, she said.
"We didn't realize the differences between doing this work on a college campus versus a high school campus," Shield said.
By extending its reach, however, TAG hopes to share its goals of genocide prevention and education with the students of Boston Latin. Members from TAG have visited Boston Latin's after-school programms, and the school's students will also be attending the Survivors Speak event.
With this partnership, TAG will look to not only to spread education on the topic of genocide on high school campuses, but also to aid students with their transitions to college.
"It's cool to feel like a role model and talk about how to continue [genocide education] involvement in college, and also to pursue one's interests without it having anything to do with [a student's] major," Shield said.
In addition to TAG's work off-campus, its most recent focus has been coordinating the upcoming Survivors Speak event. University Chaplain Greg McGonigle will act as the moderator of the event. TAG plans to use a question and answer format so that students can be as involved in the discussion as possible.
"Tufts students are very excited," Litwin said. "People know the uniqueness of this event, and they know that it is a one-time opportunity."
Litwin speculated that Tufts' emphasis on social justice and civic engagement creates a community that is very receptive to these kinds of events. Given the nature of the discussion, however, Shield acknowledged that it is difficult to listen to survivors' accounts.
"It isn't an easy experience, but it is an important one," she said. "It is not very often that one is able to hear first-hand testimony, and it is a way to connect the facts read in history books to meeting actual people and seeing the survivors."
Shield stressed that she hopes to reach out to all Tufts students with this event.
"This isn't something just for peace and justice or anthropology majors," Shield said. "We want everyone to learn something, share what they learn and get engaged in some way."
Noa Rosen, a sophomore member of TAG, said he believes that the club has been a valuable addition to his Tufts experience.
"I have only been in TAG since the fall semester," he told the Daily in an email. "[But] we have brought in speakers with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences with genocide, from a partisan fighter during the Holocaust to the panel of speakers from around that world that are coming [this week]."
Much of the work done by TAG includes researching and reaching out to survivors and genocide experts in the Boston area. Shield and Litwin said they are working to expand the club's size and reach on campus, both by including more underclassmen and working with other student organizations.
"We're hoping to see more members and more diverse involvement across all grade levels," Shield said.
"We want to continue [and] grow in collaboration with other cultural and religious groups on campus," Litwin added.
One future event that Rosen said he hopes to see is a 20-year commemoration of the Rwandan genocide in April, which would incorporate a wide range of voices from the Rwandan community. Additionally, he reiterated Litwin's and Shield's wishes to extend TAG's mission to all students on campus.
"I think that finding ways to involve student groups not directly related to human rights issues could be a great way to get more people interested in TAG's work," Rosen said
According to Rosen, one of the most important aspects of genocide education is raising awareness of the existence of current atrocities and the ways in which to prevent future genocide.
"My education at Jewish day school always stressed the importance of 'never again,' and when I got to public high school, I realized that most students' genocide educations consisted of a small blurb in their history textbooks about the Holocaust," Rosen said. "Many assume that genocide was eradicated after the Second World War, and TAG works to teach people that this is far from the truth. There is a lot of work to be done still."
