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New museum brings lessons of genocide to Mexico

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  • New museum brings lessons of genocide to Mexico

    New museum brings lessons of genocide to Mexico
    By MOLLY O'TOOLE and ALEXANDRA OLSON (AP) - 10/11/2010

    MEXICO CITY - A new museum is bringing the lessons of the Holocaust and
    its grim cousins to new generations of Mexicans - and reminding them the
    intolerance that feeds genocide can even grow close to home.

    The five-story glass and concrete building inaugurated Monday beside
    Mexico's Foreign Relations Department takes visitors through chilling
    displays on the Nazi Holocaust and how it was seen from Mexico, then
    continues through other horrors, including the slaughters of Armenians,
    Tutsis and Sudanese.

    It moves toward the very borders of Mexico as well: the 36-year civil
    war in neighboring Guatemala, where government forces exterminated
    scores of Mayan Indian villages during a bloodbath that cost some
    200,000 lives and drove thousands of refugees into Mexico.

    "It's important as a nation to be very vigilant about any act of
    exclusion," said President Felipe Calderon during the inauguration. "We
    have not overcome discrimination, which affects many groups of society -
    indigenous people, women, children, people with disabilities and
    migrants."

    Genocide survivors from Rwanda to Yugoslavia attended the opening, which
    featured tours of the exhibits and a reception in the cavernous wood and
    concrete main hall.

    Vjollca Bajraj, who came to Mexico as a refugee after fleeing ethnic
    cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, cried when she saw images of Albanians
    being expelled from their land. At least 6,000 were killed and 1.5
    million driven out by Serbians, according the U.S. State Department.

    "I'm very moved that a country so far from my home has a representation
    of the pain I suffered," Bajraj said, adding that 54 members of her
    family were killed. "Mexico is a tolerant place, though there's still a
    lot to be done here, like in the rest of the world."

    The 75,300-square-foot (7,000-square-meter) museum, a decade in the
    making, is the dream of Sharon Zaga, whose grandmother moved to Mexico
    from Czechoslovakia as World War II broke out and whose great-aunt
    survived Auschwitz.

    At 15, she declared during a career day at school that she would build a
    museum dedicated to the Holocaust and began pursuing that goal in her
    early 20s, taking university courses on genocide and making connections
    among some 250 Holocaust survivors in Mexico and their descendants.

    In 1999, a group founded a nonprofit organization - Memoria y Tolerancia
    - which began collecting donations and material for the museum, whose
    funding almost entirely comes from private individuals, many of them
    Jewish.

    Mexican artists donated their time, including architect Ricardo
    Legorreta who designed the white building overlooking the tree-shaded
    Alameda park.

    A quarter of the museum's original objects come from individuals,
    including spoons and forks used in concentration camps. Poland sent a
    railroad boxcar once used to transport Jewish prisoners to death camps.

    Zaga, 34, visited other Holocaust museums around the world and decided
    the Mexico museum would have a special focus on bringing the effects of
    prejudice and intolerance home to Latin Americans, who sometimes see the
    U.S.-backed war in Guatemala as a thing apart from widely recognized
    crimes against humanity like the Holocaust, the Rwanda massacres and the
    brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

    A dark wall with hundreds of protruding nails provides the background
    for the exhibit on Guatemala - the nails symbolizing the coffins built
    during the war.

    A screen shows footage of Mayan men lowering child-sized coffins into
    graves, of an excavated grave with a skeleton intertwined with brightly
    colored Mayan attire, of an elderly Mayan woman on her knees, praying,
    surrounded by soldiers.

    Visitors are confronted as well with the sorts of scenes they might see
    leaving the museum itself: the discrimination and poverty faced by
    indigenous people in Mexico, of Indian children juggling on street
    corners, of the elderly begging on the streets.

    Francisco Chavez, a human rights worker who came from Guatemala for the
    opening, saw images of his mother and grandmother in photographs of the
    dead.

    "We were surprised. We didn't know we were going to find an exhibit like
    this," said Chavez of the Association for Truth and Reconciliation in
    Guatemala, where no top military leaders have been prosecuted for the
    atrocities. "It motivates us to keep going to achieve the justice we've
    been seeking in Guatemala."

    Associated Press Writer Juan Carlos Llorca in Guatemala City contributed
    to this story.




    From: A. Papazian
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