The Broken Promise

Elissa Massimino: Genocide begins long before the first killing takes place.

Naomi Kikoler: It's the same dynamics over and over again.

Amber Aguirre: It's a war of information.

Kikoler: These are foreigners.

They're different.

They're not really fully human, anyway.

Be a part of this new community or die.

And if there's no consequence, it'll happen again and again and again.

Massimino: When human rights violations go unchallenged, it's a lesson that authoritarians everywhere take to heart.

Nury Turkel: Who's going to draw the line on the sand and say, "This has to stop"?

[Men shouting] Men: Join the National Front!

[Shouting continues] Join the National Front!

Paul Mason: When I was a teenager, we had this rise of the far right-- in Britain, this group the National Front-- kind of marching around, Nazi salutes, race hatred, and we mobilized against them, and what we used to chant as they marched protected by the police was, "Never again," and everybody then knew what "never again" meant.

I thought it was a statement of fact.

I thought I was taunting those Nazis by saying, "Never again will you be able to perpetrate what your allies did in the Second World War and the Holocaust."

I now realize it wasn't a fact.

It was an aspiration, and what we, to an extent, have got wrong is the idea that it can only happen once, the Holocaust was so big, so traumatic, so horrible that we would never ever create the conditions for it happening again.

It's rubbish.

It's happening again.

There's been international condemnation of China.

Women in so-called reeducation camps for the Uyghur Muslim minority are being raped and tortured.

Translator: They took my children away from me.

They put a black hood over my head, and they took me to an interrogation room.

Day and night, they asked me questions nonstop.

They tortured me.

Ros Atkins: A group of senior UK lawyers has concluded that Beijing is committing genocide and crimes against humanity.

These are concentration camps.

Yang Xiaoguang: There are no abuses, you see, no abuses.

Everybody is in good condition.

You're reeducating incarcerated Uyghurs.

That speaks to an effort to commit genocide.

Yang: There's no such a thing of genocide.

Turkel: When Xi Jinping come to power, he turned out to be one of the most brutal politicians that the world has seen.

Todd Buchwald: It's hard to know where we're headed, whether this is the beginning of a century of authoritarians ascending.

Jim McGovern: You can't change the past, but you can help to shape the future.

How do you prevent genocides from happening?

Where are the warning signs?

Kikoler: Genocide is not a single act.

Deliberate decisions are made over a gradual period of time.

It's a process.

It's a phenomenon.

Turkel: What happened to this text in our textbooks, "Never again"?

What happened to that vow?

What happened to that promise?

Mason: When we use the word "genocide," we must remember that for the victims of the Holocaust, there was no word "genocide," nor was there a word "holocaust."

Indeed, for them, the entire experience of industrialized mass murder was so unthinkable that they didn't realize what was happening to them, even as it happened.

At the Treblinka Concentration Camp, as Jewish men and women were herded into the gas chamber, there was a man standing beside the path whose job it was to reach into the crowd, to take a baby from its mother's arms, and to smash that baby's head against the concrete.

What that was about was not just mass killing.

It was about mass dehumanization.

It was about inflicting on thousands of people at once the utter despair, the utter despairing thought that, "I am no longer regarded as human."

When we speak about genocide, when we fight it, when we legislate against it, we must always remember what it is and never sanitize it, never reduce it to an abstract concept, and that, I think, is what was in the minds of the post-war generation of lawyers who drew up the Genocide Convention.

K. Alexa Koenig: In the aftermath of World War II, there was this real hunger to create these institutions that would be a deterrence to further harm.

One of the first things that, of course, happened was the creation of the United Nations, and the idea that we needed to bring together countries and leaders to send a clear message that these kinds of crimes were crimes against all of humanity.

A lot of this was first enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Massimino: We had just been through World War II and the Holocaust, and we said, "What do we need to do to make sure that that never happens again?"...

and the answer was, "Respect human rights."

Koenig: So we passed a series of conventions that turned this aspirational document into something that could be legally wielded in the face of injustice, so there's the Convention Against Genocide and ultimately, the creation of the International Criminal Court.

[Applause] Massimino: I suppose you could say that the term "never again" has become the world's most unfulfilled promise.

While we have great aspirations, we have failed to create the institutions that would absolutely prevent genocide.

What does "never again" mean?

I mean, it's happened again and again and again.

Koenig: If you study the genocides of the 20th and 21st century, going all the way back to the Armenian genocide in 1915, what you quickly see is that there's a pattern to the buildup to these genocides.

There are markers that we have learned to look for to begin to predict when these genocides might take place.

Massimino: Genocide begins long before the first shot is fired, the first killing takes place.

Koenig: Markers that we've seen in this rise to genocide have been things like undermining institutions, stigmatize and dehumanize a subgroup within our broader, say, national community to ultimately have a majority turn against that particular population, and framing those narratives in ways that suit the authoritarian and their particular political aspirations.

Massimino: We saw it with the Holocaust.

Koenig: People who have names, who have rich cultures and identities, strip them of that, cast them as an outsider, cast them as someone who is a lesser being, not human.

Aguirre: It was a war of information just like things happen now.

It was propaganda against the Jews.

The Jews became the scapegoats for all the bad things.

Ira Forman: Ofttimes, antisemitism is one of the first signs of a deterioration in society, deterioration of human rights.

It's like a warning signal.

Kikoler: These are foreigners.

They're different.

They shouldn't be your friends.

You should not stand up in opposition if they're being targeted and attacked.

Aguirre: And it wasn't that the German people were any less humanitarian than any other culture.

It's that they believed the propaganda and the lies.

You can visit Berlin and go to railroad tracks where Jews of German descent were transported, and those railroad tracks are right in the middle of a beautiful neighborhood.

Peoples whose homes were right beside the railroad tracks looked out their window, they would have seen their neighbors and friends being deported.

When you have a culture of silence where people aren't going to stand up and speak out when those types of things are occurring, you create an environment where the possibility of genocide is far more conducive.

Patricia Viseur Sellers: If you ever go to Rwanda, it's one of the most beautiful countries you will ever encounter, hills with misty clouds above it.

The genocide against the Tutsis-- the killing that occurred, the sexual violence that occurred-- took place within, you know, a span of, really, several months, so when one has to understand all of this type of massacre-- some of them were individual killing; some of them were mass killings of hundreds, up to thousands of people at the same time in the span of just a couple months-- it is indeed overwhelming.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda traces the history of the radio station that started referring to Tutsis as cockroaches, that started referring to Tutsi women as something that should be desecrated sexually.

Aguirre: If you can dehumanize, see somebody as an animal or as less than, then you don't have that empathy.

You can't relate to them as part of your own species, basically.

Buffie Schmidt: This is how the colonizers and settlers treated us, like we're not humans.

That's their justification, that, "They're less than me.

"They have no feelings.

Their color is different.

They're not one of us."

The way to keep people buying into the institution of slavery was to say, "'Well, it's OK because they're not really fully human, anyway."

Aguirre: "They're not like you.

They're not human.

"You can torture them.

They're not going to feel it because they're not like you."

Sellers: This dehumanizing, this making sure that the other no longer has a right to share your territory, to be in your territory, or even to be alive, there is a very short road between persecution and genocide.

Reporter: What is happening in Myanmar?

Looking across from Bangladesh, huge clouds of smoke fill the sky.

The army is accused of setting fire to Muslim Rohingya villages.

Kikoler: The Rohingya community are a ethnic and religious minority in Burma who have, over the past few decades, been demonized by the government, by, at times, religious figures.

Kikoler: They've gone from being citizens to being stripped of their citizenship and cast as foreigners who should no longer be in Burma, and what we've seen happen is waves of physical violence to drive them out of the country or to destroy entirely particular villages and communities.

Christopher Sidoti: The fact-finding mission has concluded on reasonable grounds that the patterns of gross human rights violations, these have principally been committed by the military, the Tatmadaw-- genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Koenig: There is a very clear personality profile that we have seen with many of these authoritarian leaders, and, unfortunately, we're seeing a whole new wave of authoritarian leaders rise across the globe.

Massimino: We've seen some of that up close and personal in this country.

Trump: I alone can fix it.

[Cheering] Massimino: What does a pre-authoritarian government look like?

It's not rocket science to identify societies in crisis.

Massimino: If you look at Syria going way, way back to before the civil war, the trigger point was when a group of young teenagers sprayed anti-regime graffiti on a wall and, instead of being told to go home, they were arrested and tortured.

That was a signal.

That was a signal of a shift.

This guy feels threatened and is going to torture teenagers for graffiti.

That signals that we're headed in a totally different direction.

The combination of a particular type of leader and the weakness of a society is a deadly combination.

We know what that playbook looks like, and we see it playing out.

Turkel: The Uyghur people are one of the ancient peoples in the world.

They're ethnically Turkic people.

They speak one of the Turkey dialects.

The notion that the Uyghurs are the others had been systematically promoted by the Chinese state for a long, long time.

As I grow up, they always said, "Oh, you are different," and when you asked them, "Why am I different?"

they always said, "Oh, you eat different.

"You speak different.

You look different.

You live different."

The Uyghur people believe in Islam.

Islam is one of the 3 Abrahamic religion.

Uyghurs have been longing for political freedom, sovereignty, to be able to live with dignity.

To the Chinese government, you're a problem.

To achieve this great Chinese identity, they need to do something about it.

Xi Jinping and his cohorts discussed various policy initiatives.

One of them was forced assimilation, change the demographics.

Tom Suozzi: Right now, there are over a million and a half Uyghurs that are being held in forced-labor camps.

There's forced sterilization.

They're not allowed to give their prayers.

Turkel: Millions of Uyghurs disappeared into industrial-scale concentration camps that the Chinese have built.

The world has not seen anything like it at this scale since the Holocaust.

Suozzi: There are people that are being put in the forced-labor camps, and then spouses are left behind with Chinese cohabitators, constant monitoring, constant surveillance of everything they do.

Turkel: This pervasive surveillance, starting from collection of waste samples, face samples, DNA, and then they start handing out I.D.

cards and your facial recognition embedded in that ID card.

Millions of Chinese cadres have moved into the Uyghur homes, sleep and eat with them uninvited, and making the kids to spy on their parents.

You have an honest conversation about your cultural values, talking about your dissatisfaction with the things happening, and the kids' honest answer to those visitors lands that little girl's parents into the concentration camp, and the next thing that little girl knows, she's taken away to the state-run orphanages.

The concentration camp system was a vast network that they set up to round up everyone should be rounded up.

That's the word, reported in November 2019 as part of leaked documents.

This is a new type of genocide that the world has not seen.

Not all genocides look the same.

The attempt to destroy an entire people through suppressing its ability to reproduce, and indeed suppressing its language and culture was decided by the international community and written into international law as a feature of genocide.

If you tick that box, you are committing genocide.

What China is doing in Xinjiang is one of the few examples of a premeditated, state-driven, centrally perpetrated genocide in modern history.

[Sniffles] Massimino: When genocide, crimes against humanity, human rights violations go unchallenged and the perpetrators are acting with impunity, it is a lesson that authoritarians and would-be genocidaires everywhere take to heart.

McGovern: And that's one of the problems right now, is that there are lots of awful governments and dictators around the world that believe they can get away with things without a consequence, and if there's no consequence, it'll happen again and again and again.

It's very easy to get overwhelmed by the numbers.

When you're talking about millions of people being exterminated, that in itself can be a very dehumanizing way to think about these genocides.

When you talk to individual survivors or you talk to the family members of the survivors, you quickly realize the harms that are perpetrated ultimately ripple down through the generations.

[Train chugging] Helen Farkas: I never heard of Auschwitz.

When I saw the sign "Auschwitz," it's another town... [Train chugging] and then as we were slowing down, I saw the big chimneys.

People from behind were asking, "What do you see?"

I said, "Thank God.

It looks like we arrived to the factory," Because we were supposed to be taken to work in factories.

The train stops.

They open up.

Young men with striped clothes like pajamas were standing behind each other, about 6 or 8 of them, in front of each one of the cattle cars.

Chaos broke out because everybody-- the children were crying.

It was frightening because down below, the dogs were barking, you know, the SS soldiers with their dogs and their rifles on their shoulders.

My sister Ethel with her little boy was told, "Give your children.

Young women, give your children to older people."

We had no idea why they're saying that.

Aguirre: When we first went into Auschwitz, my mom showed where the train went and how the train tracks ended, and where Dr. Mengele was standing and how he was funneling people-- "You go to the right.

You go to the left."

My mom was with my Aunt Etu.

She was holding her baby.

They took the baby, and they gave it to my grandmother, and the young and the old who couldn't work were sent to the left, and the healthy who could work were sent to the right.

My Aunt Etu wanted to chase after her son and her mother and go in that line.

Farkas: She was running that way because her little boy was in her mother-in-law's arms, and as she was running that way, the soldier started beating her back, and then I saw what's happening.

I had to go one way or the other, and I grabbed her, and I said, "Come on.

We have to go this way."

Aguirre: And so she watched her child and her mother go off, and that was the line that went to the gas chambers, and my mom and my Aunt Etu lived, and they went to the right, where they were forced to work and labor... but they survived, whereas the rest were all killed.

Farkas: I looked back, I saw my mother, the distress on her face, and when she saw that we are being separated, Ethel and I, that was the worst thing for her, so this is how I remember her.

Every time I think about her or dream or have nightmares, I see my mother that way, with that expression on her face.

We never saw them again.

Aguirre: I could hear her scream at night when she had nightmares.

My mom used to always have dreams that she was hiding someone, like hiding me or later on after I had my daughter, that she was hiding my daughter, trying to protect my daughter, and somehow I took that on in my subconscious, I guess, and had dreams, also, of hiding my daughter from the Nazis or being attacked by Nazis.

Some studies have been done.

When a person's cortisol levels are elevated for long periods of time through trauma, when that happens repeatedly over and over and over again, it actually changes the on and off switches in your DNA so that the on switch can be on more in your children.

Kikoler: I also grew up, you know, with a silence, and the silence was from my grandfather, and my grandfather was the sole surviving member of his family, and he was unable to talk about what happened to him because of just the enormity of the suffering.

On my grandfather's tombstone, there are 3 names-- the name that he was given at birth, which was Aronowicz; there was a name that he got in the displaced persons camps, which is Kikoler-- and that's the name that I carry-- and there was the number that was tattooed onto his arm, and that was the number that was tattooed by the Nazis when he entered the camp system and when he was in Auschwitz... and... for me, that's why I do the work.

[Sniffles] Um...

There have been too many people that I have met in the last 15, 20 years of working on this who, in their own way, share an aspect of that story.

Mohamed I. Elgadi: I was born in Sudan, in Khartoum.

I lived most of my life in a neighborhood called Khartoum Talata, which is middle class.

Nahid Abunama-Elgadi: My father was a very lively individual.

There was always lots of people over at the house, lots of laughter, lots of communication and talk about human rights.

He just seemed hopeful for the world.

Colin Powell: Genocide has been committed in Darfur, a consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities-- killings, rapes, burning of villages.

The government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility.

I was arrested because I was documenting human rights abuses in the country, in Sudan, one of the oldest method of war--rape, mass rape.

They would come to the village, and they would start raping women, girls, and even elderly people.

Elderly people were being raped, a lot of burned village to the ground, a lot of people who were being, like, tortured every day.

I was imprisoned and tortured for 118 days.

Abunama-Elgadi: He was captured, and then I didn't see him for the period of time that he was detained, which was 4 months.

Elgadi: The group against torture in Sudan documented 36 different method of torture, physical torture, from beating up, from standing on hot plates, from burning, from kicking.

The target is the groin area.

Always will be the fear.

Electric shocks with electric rod, usually, like, you don't know when it's coming.

Someone behind you, like, would put it here at the ear, under your ear, and... Abunama-Elgadi: I think the hardest part for me is when he can't speak about what happened, when it's-- when he's, like, trapped in that moment, when he's taken back to being in that small, confined space.

Um... That's the hardest part for me because I want him to be free.

Elgadi: I was released with that condition to work as an informant against my own group of people, human rights activists.

If I refused, like, to work as an informant, then the torture will start again, so I left Sudan.

I tried to go and join my family.

Abunama-Elgadi: And when he arrived, I immediately felt a difference in his energy.

It just didn't feel like the same dad that I knew before.

He was very tense.

He was-- When you would go to touch him, he would flinch.

He was a lot more paranoid, would yell all the time, like, couldn't express his emotions very well.

Elgadi: I found, like, myself as if I left one prison and I went to another bigger prison, so I isolated myself from everyone, did not leave the house.

The whole kind of experience start to come back again to me.

They will tell you, like, there will be-- They always tell you that they will bring your family members, torture them in front of you or, uh, rape them.

He said, like, "You don't want, like, anything to happen to your daughter."

Abunama-Elgadi: My father's torture, I think, impacted me on a daily basis because he wanted things to be so orderly and controlled and safe that I had to kind of navigate and find my way around that.

His "no" or his yelling was really coming from a place of absolute fear and terror for my life, even though it wasn't really justified.

It's like, "Oh, I'm just trying to go to this football game," but he's like, "No, all the billion things that could happen to you."

Elgadi: The threat of sexual torture is always there, and this is what, like, cause a lot of people, like, to become, like, completely-- Sellers: I think it's very important that we understand sexual violence or issues of sexual autonomy and integrity as they relate to genocide.

The Rwandan genocide was basically comprised of sexual violence, of raping Tutsi women prior to killing them.

The Interahamwe militia would pick out the women to rape.

They would pick out the women to make them march around in forced nudity.

Their absolute horror of having to have fled their homes, their male family members were probably dead, and having now been the object of incessant rapes and sexual violence, the Tutsi women basically asked, "Could you kill us?

We can't take anymore.

Could you end our pain?"

Tursun: Sellers: We think of sexual violence usually as being acts of rape, but when one thinks of sexual violence as acts where you're sterilized or acts where reproductivity is prevented, they're all different means of making that population not be able to reproduce itself.

Tursun: [Sniffles] [Sobbing] Ohh... Abunama-Elgadi: Traumatic events, whether they're happening to you or to the people around you, affect you mentally and emotionally and physically, and I say that because as a young child who saw war and saw devastation firsthand and then also experienced the trauma of a torture survivor in my home, I know physically that it affected me.

I would get the shakes.

I would have nightmares severely where I thought people were going to come into our house and kill all of my family members and I was going to be the only one left, like, over and over and over again.

It affected the way that I thought about the world.

I think Sudanese people at large have transgenerational trauma.

There's been war, genocide, mass killings, just brutality, oppression of rights in all manner, starvation.

Everyone is affected by it.

Even though we're very hospitable, we're very open as a culture, we're also very paranoid of one another, and I think that has a lot to do with our collective PTSD, our collective anxiousness about survival, and not being able to do the bare minimum.

Trauma affects you physically.

It affects you emotionally, affects you spiritually, makes you doubt that there is any higher creator that could possibly will this part of reality into existence.

It affects everything about who you are.

Koenig: The trauma that's associated with genocide has ripple effects through generations, and when we think about our own legacy of genocide and of trauma here in the United States, the legacy of slavery, of Native American communities-- it's only been 50 years since the Civil Rights Act-- these traumas are still raw and that these traumas are something that we are continuing to pass down both collectively and individually through our families.

Breland-Noble: I knew very early on about the legacy of slavery, the trauma associated with that, and the impacts of that downstream for people of my generation-- I'm Gen X-- and it's because I have parents who grew up during the civil rights movement and who grew up under segregation in Mississippi... because what we learned in school was sanitized and my parents made sure that we knew the unsanitized version.

Schmidt: A lot of Americans have the notion-- and maybe the world has the notion-- that the United States was founded on bravery, and you hear, "These colors don't run," which is a farce because there were Native people here tending the earth, having a connection with the land and the sky and the water, were forced to either be a part of this new community or die.

When you look at the textbook definition of "genocide," it's sort of a deliberate effort to eliminate a class of people, a culture, and when you think of genocide, you tend to think of places where there have been mass shootings, killings, that kind of thing.

It may not be in the same form in the United States of America, but from slavery to Jim Crow, policies that came down have intentionally tried to disrupt our sense of value, our community, our culture.

As slaves, it was very intentional.

Separating families from their children, refusing to let them think, read, or worship-- that was an intention to devalue them, to get them to have a sense of not belonging, of not having any purpose and value.

Schmidt: When the colonizers were here taking Native families apart, they put a lot of our children in boarding schools.

The language was not legally allowed to be spoken.

That's the erasure of their culture.

They were told and are made and forced to cut their hair and not wear the clothes that we used to and not speak this language that nobody can understand but them.

Breland-Noble: Those occurrences and experiences that traumatized people years ago are passed down, even in our bones and in our genetics and passed through to subsequent generations.

I want to hear the truth about what slavery did to Black people.

I want to hear the truth about how slavery benefited white people.

We never really have a chance as Black people, I think, unless we're very intentional to help that trauma and that pain and the negative mental health impacts dissipate.

Abunama-Elgadi: I think transformative justice is the only way that true healing can happen.

A survivor needs to hear a public testimony of what they experienced and not feel like they're crazy or that they are living alone.

Al-Bashir: Allahu akbar.

Men: Allahu akbar.

Amna Nawaz: For more than a decade, Omar Al-Bashir has been wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture, rape, and genocide in the Darfur region.

Now, what the Sudanese government announced just under an hour ago is that they have agreed with the Darfuri armed groups that they will hand over the former president and others who also had arrest warrants issued against them to the International Criminal Court.

Abunama-Elgadi: Acknowledgement is really important to me because if you're not acknowledged, your reality's not even acknowledged, how can your healing begin?

If your perpetrator is not brought to justice, how can you ever feel safe?

You can't start healing until those two things happen.

You need accountability, you need acknowledgement, and you need justice, and then healing comes after that.

King: I know you're asking today, "How long will it take?"

Somebody's asking, "How long will prejudice blind divisions of men?"

I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment... Man: Yes, sir.

however frustrating the hour, it will not be long.

How long?

Not long because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Man: Yes, sir.

Koenig: We said, "Never again."

We entered into all of these treaties and conventions and created new court systems, including the International Criminal Court, to ensure that there would be accountability for genocide, but over and over, we've seen barriers that have stood in the way of actually ensuring that genocide doesn't recur.

These are barriers that continue to plague us today.

McGovern: We have to care about human rights.

When you see the rise of hate speech or the rise of hate crimes or persecution of a particular group of people, you know, that's a warning sign, and the world community needs to say that's not acceptable.

To turn a blind eye means it just gets worse.

Kikoler: It's always easy to make a case for why not to do something.

It is frustrating to feel like you are faced with kind of "Groundhog Day."

It might be a different country, but it's the same dynamics over and over again, and we're trying to break that cycle.

Coleman: Where we see evil and where we see genocide and where we see oppression and where we see assaults upon the whole communities, think we have a moral obligation to speak out.

And the United States has sometimes done that and sometimes not done that, thinking often that it's going to find some so-called balance between human-rights interests and hard security interests or economic interests.

Koenig: Nowhere is this dilemma clearer than it is with China.

One of the challenges that we certainly have with China is that many of the products that we're importing here to the United States are essentially being made with slave labor.

Turkel: Uyghurs are the people who makes the cheap products that the American consumers buy in various department stores, grocery stores.

China is using Uyghur labor to pollute the global economic system with the tainted products made by modern-day slaves-- anything from sneakers, yarn, agricultural products, food products.

Recently we find out that those forced-labor camps make solar panels and more than 80% of the cotton products made in China sourced in the Uyghur region.

McGovern: We had a hearing in the China Commission about China hosting the Olympics.

Jeff Merkley: Welcome to today's hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China on corporate sponsorship of the 2022... McGovern: And we had all the big sponsors of the Olympics come forward and preface their remarks by saying, "As a company, we have a strong human-rights mission, just so you know that."

I couldn't get one U.S.-based company in that hearing to even say that they're concerned about what's happening to the Uyghurs.

Will you support moving the Olympics to another city and country?

We support the athletes.

We don't have a position on if they're going to be moved or delayed.

We will follow these athletes wherever they compete, but we will also continue... Smith: So if they go to Pyongyang in North Korea, that's OK, too?

I mean, seriously, I mean, your voice matters.

McGovern: They couldn't even bring themselves to say those really mild words slightly critical of China, and the reason why is because they're making a lot of money because China's a big market, you know, and they produce some of their goods cheaply in China, and at the end of the day, profit is a higher priority than human life.

Turkel: Several global brands have been implicated.

That includes Hugo Boss, Volkswagen, Nike, Coca-Cola, and not only they've been implicated.

What is disturbing is that they're spending money, lobbyists in Washington, pressuring both the executive branch and legislative branch of our government to make it OK to use products made by modern-day slaves.

To worry too much about money, too much about profit, who's going to draw the line on the sand and say, "No.

This has to stop."?

McGovern: I mean, like, do we have values?

I mean, do we-- Are we who we say we are?

If we are, we got to start acting like it.

You know, I'm not saying we should never deal with China, but I'm simply saying that in all our dealings with China, we ought to be talking about human rights.

Now China's telling us, "Well, if you want to talk about the climate crisis, "you can't talk to us about the Uyghurs.

"You can't talk to us about what's happening in Hong Kong.

You can't talk to us about how we're treating the Tibetans."

Get real.

I mean, no!

Buchwald: United States government, if it is going to have this policy of identifying where genocide has occurred, should not recoil from doing so because of the perceived consequences, that a much more forthright and honest and sustainable approach over time, if you think there's genocide and don't think there's anything you can do about it, say that.

Don't pretend that there isn't genocide if there is.

Turkel: United States, as a signatory to the Genocide Convention, speaking out on genocide, it is our treaty obligation.

It's our legal obligation.

Massimino: Human rights and respect for human rights is central to achieving these other so-called hard national interests, and if we ignore the role of human rights, any progress that we might make on security and economic and other interests is going to be fragile and short-lived.

McGovern: It took forever to get the Armenian genocide formerly recognized by the United States.

Why?

Oh, because we were afraid of ticking off Turkey.

You know, there's a strategic alliance there.

"Oh, we don't want to upset an ally."

History is important.

Reporter: Turkey has fiercely denied the mass killings of 1,500,000 Armenian men, women, and children was an act of genocide.

"We won't take any lessons about our own history from anyone."

McGovern: Not acknowledging the truth is so insulting and so offensive to the survivors.

Wassim Cornet: Just a few lines of a White House statement which could shake up the complex relationship between two crucial NATO members, Joe Biden has recognized the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces in 1915 as a genocide.

McGovern: I remember when I first got elected to Congress, there would be these annual commemorations for the Armenian genocide.

I remember being at an Armenian church in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I live, and, you know, the first few rows were filled with survivors, and then it dwindled down, dwindled down, and then, I think, the last survivor died a few years ago, all these years, people still showing up to commemorations just wanting just somebody to respect them enough to be able to tell the truth, and our own government was so lax in that.

I wish those survivors could still be around to see that we actually did it.

Kikoler: We continue to live in a world where the denial of genocides that have been committed is broad.

It's not just Holocaust denial that we confront.

Setting that historical record is critically important.

Ideally, what we're working towards, though, is a world where we don't have to do that.

You know, we're trying to move genocide prevention from being priority number 200 for government officials to being priority number 10.

Aguirre: My mom and my aunt, when they went under the "Arbeit macht frei" sign in Auschwitz after our tour, my mom and my aunt held their arms in the air and said, "We survived," and they said, "... you, Hitler," which for my mom was not in her normal vocabulary.

They were saying, "Look.

You couldn't kill us all.

"They wanted to kill all the Jews.

Here we are.

I have children.

I have grandchildren."

Buchwald: To think of "never again" as an unattainable goal is the wrong way to look at it.

You know, "never again" comes from the experience of the Jews after World War II, and it's a vow.

The vow is to fight and to do what can be done.

Robert H. Jackson: The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored.

Mason: The spirit's there.

It was there in all perfectly ordinary grandfathers and fathers, mothers and grandmothers.

They weren't heroes or heroines.

They were as ordinary as we were.

Faced with a danger, they found the courage, and they found the humanity and the connections to do something, and I think this generation-- far more educated, far more knowledgeable, with far more technology at its fingertips-- it can do that again.

Abunama-Elgadi: I remain hopeful because I choose to.

I could be cynical and just live with the realities that are, that people don't care, but there are people who care.

There are people who are doing this work.

I think that we are having a world shift.

We are starting to wake back up again.

"Wait a second.

I care about my planet.

I care about my fellow neighbor."

Massimino: One of the assets that we have today that we did not have in the earliest days of the human rights movement is an uprising of women activists that have joined forces across nations to promote human rights.

We have the International Criminal Court.

Karim A.A. Khan: The fact we are here today is a result of partnerships, that enough good people banded together to ensure that allegations can be subjected to due process.

Massimino: We have a network of organizations and civil society around the world that are focused on trying to prevent crimes against humanity, and that is the profound difference.

Connecting to that common humanity that we all possess, the recognition and realization that we are all human beings, if we draw the circle there, ultimately, I think, a lot of the risks and vulnerabilities that authoritarians, fascists, and others are trying-- the risks they're trying to create become much more difficult to effectuate.

[Indistinct] Kikoler: If you were to talk to the average American, the average Canadian, they don't want to see genocide occur.

What we need is for people to be voicing those beliefs and creating expectations for their elected officials.

McGovern: It's incredibly important that we all understand that politicians work for the people, but you have to connect with and communicate with your elected officials, and, by the way, if they don't return your call, if they don't meet with you, then don't vote for them.

It's a long, hard journey.

Sometimes it's a journey of a lifetime or several lifetimes.

We just can't give up.

Schmidt: The things I do is what I set out to change, and I think everybody can do that, too.

Everybody can make small changes in their own world and not feel like they're overwhelmed trying to change the whole world.

Kikoler: What do you want to at the end of your life look back on and say that you feel proud about having done?

What do you want to be on your tombstone?

What I hope is that each of us in our own way says that we have tried to do everything that we can to help build a better world and help protect people who are the most vulnerable of vulnerable.

That's what I'd like each of us to ask ourselves.

You have one life.

If you can in a small way help... protect others, I hope that you take those steps to do it.

Announcer: To learn more about this program, meet the people who are in it, and how the film was made, please visit our website at thebrokenpromisefilm.com.