Genocide awareness club comes to Pitt

Shamanta Mostofa said other students ask her “if political leaders can’t control [genocide], what are a bunch of college kids going to do?”

With the her newly-established group, the Genocide Relief and Awareness Club, Mostofa hopes to find that answer at Pitt.

Wednesday night, Mostofa and 10 other students gathered in room 204 of the Cathedral of Learning for the Genocide Relief and Awareness Club’s meeting — the first of its kind in Pitt’s history. The motivation for starting the club, according to Mostofa, one of its founders, stemmed from Pitt’s lack of an organization centered on raising genocide awareness. 

The goals of the club, Mostofa — a sophomore neuroscience and psychology major — said, are to “prevent, stop and punish genocide and other forms of mass murder.”

Though Mostofa said the club is not going to be able to fix the “larger political issue at hand,” it “can do something that will mitigate the blows.”

“We can aid in the healing process. We can make people aware of the issue, recognize the innocent lives being lost and be compelled to tell their stories, raise the call for action and then get tangible funds to aid victims,” she said.

With the club, Mostofa hopes to raise genocide awareness and education on campus by holding movie screenings, hosting speakers and collaborating with other human rights clubs on campus. In addition to raising money for charities that support genocide victims, she wants to establish a campus community to get students involved socially, both online through social media and in person at their weekly meetings.

Mostofa started the genocide awareness club at Pitt because she was involved in a similar club in high school. 

Because many genocides don’t have official death tolls, Mostofa said, it is difficult to gauge how many people genocide affects worldwide. But Genocide Watch, the international alliance to end genocide, reports that 170 million people died as a result of genocide in the 20th century. In the Nanking Massacre, for example, which lasted from December 1937 to January 1938, Japanese troops killed 300,000 residents of Nanjing, China, according to a Chinese census, roughly the current population of Pittsburgh.

Mostofa said although Pitt is an involved campus, it’s still relatively consumed in a bubble of privilege. 

“People aren’t immediately concerned with issues such as genocide because it’s not visible,” she said. “There’s nothing to evoke in the campus because people don’t see it. Or worse, people are not even informed of the atrocities continuing to happen.”

Aisha Upton, a graduate student pursuing a doctorate in sociology, said she decided to become the adviser for GRAC, as there is “a need for a club on campus that deals with genocide. It is an issue that is not frequently discussed, and awareness is necessary,” she said.

According to Upton, GRAC has the potential to grow into something used for a variety of different activist purposes, with the ability to align with other organizations and take on other human rights projects.

Upton alluded to Elie Wiesel, a Jewish-American activist and Holocaust survivor, who was one of the first to use the word “holocaust” to describe the atrocities Jews faced during World War II, which shaped the idea of what human rights mean today. 

Upton said she wanted to support the club because it has the power to change the way students think about human rights in general through awareness about genocide.

“A group of students who have the courage to inspire conversations about genocide is rare, especially because it is a difficult dialogue to have,” Upton said.

Dialogue is necessary to find a solution, Upton said, even though it may be difficult. 

When Mostofa first told her there was no club dedicated to genocide awareness at Pitt, she was shocked. Upton said she encouraged the creators to continue working to create the club, despite the hoops — including the required 10-student petition — that they had to jump through. 

When Mostofa set out to start the club, she needed 10 students to sign a petition to become officially registered with the Student Organization Resource Center. She invited Bryan Trew, a sophomore architecture major, to the group, who said he did not know much about genocide before Mostofa emailed him about the new club. Trew said he now realizes it is a “major problem,” and joining the club was a “small, easy way to combat a problem that is bigger than all of us.”

“It’s a small start,” Trew said, “but you never know what these kinds of things can turn into.”

Though Mostofa’s school, Mechanicsburg Area Senior High School, only graduates about 300 to 400 students annually, their genocide awareness club was able to raise $10,000 at a benefit concert in 2010. Mostofa said she hopes to do even greater things at Pitt. 

Upton said the most important message was that the student body should come to the meetings, even just to gain awareness about the issue, because the meetings are a safe space to learn. Students can join the club, Mostofa said, by reaching out to the group on social media, through its Facebook page or Twitter account, @Pitt_Grac. 

“We can’t go in with guns blazing and say ‘stop doing this,’” Mostofa said, “but we’re doing what we can.”