An international organisation to stir `bystanders’ to act against genocidal violence was established at a conference in Sweden last month. Benjamin Pogrund was there
FIFTY-THREE years ago Ervin Staub was saved from a Nazi death camp by Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Staub is now an eminent professor of psychology at an American university — and the moving spirit behind an organisation named after Wallenberg which aims to halt genocidal violence before it gets going.
The Wallenberg Action Network was agreed at a conference of human-rights activists, scholars and students held near Stockholm last month. President Bill Clinton sent a message praising the meeting as “a wonderful forum for developing the attitudes and methods necessary to foster a more peaceful and tolerant international community”.
The network will focus on the role of “active bystanders” in preventing or mitigating mass violence. Bystanders, whether individuals or nations, are those who see violence being perpetrated by others and who can decide whether or not to intervene to seek to bring it to an end.
The first network project will be to send a team to Rwanda to assess the traumatic effects of the genocide perpetrated there — to work out ways to help people regain normal lives and prevent a new cycle of violence.
The University of Rwanda’s rector, Charles Murigande, was at the conference. When asked what the university needed, he said: “Everything.”
The inspiration for last month’s conference and the network lies in the actions of Wallenberg: a member of a leading Swedish family he was, at age 31, assigned by his government to Hungary in the terror-filled months of 1944 with the task of saving the lives of as many Jews as possible.
He devised the “Schutz-pass”. Printed in German and Swedish and bearing Sweden’s colours and embassy stamp, it promised that the bearer would gain Swedish nationality in the future. The pass had no legal validity, but Wallenberg distributed it on a mass scale and created a host of “protected” houses for those who had one.
He is credited with saving more than 20 000 Jews, many of whom he removed from trains even as they were bound for the Auschwitz extermination camp. At least another 400 000 Hungarian Jews were deported and killed.
Wallenberg’s efforts ended in January 1945 when the Soviet army occupied Budapest. On January 17 he went to the army’s headquarters to negotiate the transfer of Jews from Swedish to Soviet protection.
He disappeared that day, and only in 1957, after incessant Swedish demands for information, did Moscow reveal that he had been arrested — allegedly as an American “agent” — and had died as long ago as 1947 in the notorious Lubianka prison.
Many refused to believe the date of death and claims of later sightings of Wallenberg in Soviet prisons have persisted.
If anything, his stature as an heroic exemplar of the power of peaceful intervention to save lives has grown over the years. Stockholm is to name a city square after him and plans a monument. In the United States, a Wallenberg stamp was issued earlier this year, with the simple inscription: “Humanitarian.”
Staub and his family were among those saved by Wallenberg. Staub was a six-year- old boy in Budapest when the mass deportations began. At first, his Christian nanny risked her own life to shelter him and his sister. Then he and the rest of his family moved into a Wallenberg “protected” house.
In 1956, when Hungarians rebelled against the Soviet Union, Staub escaped to the US. Now teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst he has specialised in psychological studies of why people do terrible things to other people. He has written extensively about the crucial role that bystanders can play, for bad if they remain passive, for good if they become active.
Staub was not the only victim of tyranny at the conference. Another participant was the Dalai Lama, speaking in a mixture of Tibetan and English and escorted by half- a-dozen monks.
He showed unusual frankness for a world leader. When asked why 95% of the violence in the world is caused by men, he sat quietly, then giggled and said: “I don’t know.”
He ruled out the use of violence to regain his country from Chinese occupation — but did not reject violence as a principle. It depended on the “motivation” and the “aim”, he said.
South Africa featured on the conference’s agenda: the pressure by nations and people of the world through sanctions and boycotts in helping to end apartheid rule was seen as an example of what active bystanders can achieve.
The network will be studying how to apply this lesson to other fraught human situations — and early enough to make a difference.