Newswise — UND Law Professor Greg Gordon never lived amid the horrors of the Ethiopian "Red Terror" of 1977-1978. He has, however, relived specific moments of those dark days through the eyes and vivid reflections of someone who actually was there.
Now, Gordon, an expert on international human rights law, as well as others on the UND campus are trying to preserve those memories for all to learn from, in hopes they're never repeated. The first step in this endeavor was taken in December 2007 with the establishment of the UND Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies.
Gordon, the center's director, explains the idea stemmed from conversations he had with an Ethiopian woman, who was brutalized during Red Terror. She survived the violence and later successfully helped prosecute her tormenter.
"She was tortured, but she escaped and went to Canada, and eventually she became the lead plaintiff in the case," Gordon said.
Gordon met the woman while working on African cases with the U.S. Department of Justice's Human Rights Violator Unit prior to joining the UND Law School. At the time, a special prosecution, which had been set up to handle Red Terror cases, was on the verge of wrapping up its work.
"They were going to be ending and she feared that all of the documents that had been collected by the special prosecuter would be boxed up and put somewhere in obscurity and that no one would be able to find them," Gordon said.
The woman revealed to Gordon that she wanted to set up a special documentation center to ensure that the traumatic experiences of Red Terror victims and the evils of those who perpetrated the acts would never be forgotten.
In the Summer of 2007, Gordon, who had since taken his position at UND, and the woman went to Ethiopia to meet with high-ranking government officials about plans for an "Ethiopian Red Terror Documentation Research Center." They were joined on the visit by Wilbur Stolt, UND director of libraries. The trip was supported by the Office of the UND Vice President of Academic Affairs and Provost.
Once the foundation was set for the Ethiopian documentation center, Gordon and Stolt returned to UND and began forming what would become UND's Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies.
"We decided that our mission would be to increase understanding of the history and issues that lead to genocide and other issues of violation of human rights, with the intent of preventing such atrocities in the future and advancing human rights on all levels," Gordon said. "And we want to do this by creating a muliti-disciplinary program that facilitates research and teaching across disciplines here at UND.
"We also want to work with other organizations in the region, such as the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which is about to open, other universities, such as the University of Manitoba, the International Peace Garden and the North Dakota Human Rights Council."
In addition to the interdisciplinary work on campus and around the region, the center plans an archival role in which important documents that detail past human rights violations and genocide can be duplicated and kept safely in electronic data bases. In the case of the Ethiopian Red Terror, Gordon said the center will create a "mirror set" of the paper archives that will be kept at the Ethiopian Red Terror Documentation Research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
"We would like to have a computer version right here at UND -- that's our big goal for that," Gordon said.
Also, he said, the center will feature one the few complete archives of Nuremberg War Crimes prosecutions.
"We will have the first in the world computer data base of Nuremberg archives related to the Nazi occupation of Norway," he said.
UND was able to obtain the Nuremberg archives by virtue of having one of its professors serve as a chief administrator for the prosecution, Gordon explained.
UND has more than 240,000 pages of Nuremberg Trial documents in its Special Collections Department at the Chester Fritz Library. This collection includes more than 300 pages from "the Hostage Case" concerning the Nazi invasion and occupation of Norway from April 9, 1940 to 1944, and many documents from Justice James Morris, former North Dakota Supreme Court Judge, who presided over the "I.G. Farben Case," according to UND Special Collections.
UND is one of the original twenty-two Universities across the country that has papers from Nuremberg, and it's one of the most complete collections. The documents came to Grand Forks in 1949 thanks to the efforts of Howard Russell, a UND English professor before serving in World War II. Russell served as Secretary General of the American Military Tribunals from May 10, 1948 until the end of the trials.
The new center also will be bringing visiting scholars and experts on human rights to the UND campus to interact with faculty and students. During the month of October alone, the center played host to five such people, including Gunnar S∅nsteby, the most decorated person in Norwegian history who led the Norwegian resistance against Nazi occupation during World War II.
"This is a guy -- when he walks in to a restaurant or any public place, people stand and give him an ovation," Gordon said.
S∅nsteby was joined at UND by Ivar Kraglund, director of the Norwegian Resistance Museum, and Anne Myklebust, an official with Royal Norwegian Cultural Office.
The center also invited Indian human rights scholar and economist Sudip Chakraborty as a visiting fellow. Chakraborty, a Fulbright Fellow from the University of Minnesota, spoke to UND students, faculty and the public about child labor exploitation. Lastly, the center had the special privilege of playing host to Robert Lyon, a survivor of the infamous "Kristallnact pogrom" (the night of broken glass), in which nearly 100 Jews were killed and thousands more were arrested and deported to concentration camps in a single night in November 1938 across German-controlled lands.
Gordon said UND, with its campuswide interdisciplinary focus on peace issues and as the flagship University of the Peace Garden State, is a perfect setting to house a Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies and to accommodate all of the special guests.
"We are trying to bring together all of these organization on campus," he said. "From Peace Studies to campus human rights groups to the Center for Conflict Resolution, we want to partner with all of them to see what we can do to promote human rights," he said.
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