Dr. Stanton created the world-famous “Ten Stages of Genocide” as a presentation to the U.S. Department of State when he worked there in 1996.
DESPARDES — An internationally acclaimed expert has raised concerns about possible mass extermination of Muslims while briefing the US Congress on situation in Kashmir and Assam.
Dr. Gregory Stanton briefed the Congress weeks after Kashmiris, lawyers and human rights advocates testified at a US congressional hearing on Kashmir, demanding investigation into current crisis.
The latest hearing also included a narrative of Kashmiris to the world, told by Kashmiris themselves– human rights lawyer Sehla Ashai was among the seven members who testified before the two-and-a-half-hours long hearing in Washington, DC.
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Dr. Stanton, who is the founder of Genocide Watch, addressed an audience of Congressional and Government officials at a briefing titled Ground Reports on Kashmir and NRC in Washington D.C on December 12 where he said, “Preparation for a genocide is definitely under way in India.” He said that persecution of Muslims in Assam and Kashmir “is the stage just before genocide,” adding, “The next stage is extermination — that’s what we call a genocide.”
A former President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Stanton’s research on genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda, and of the Rohingya Muslims, is recognized worldwide.
The latest hearing was conducted as Kashmiri Americans, legal observers, scholars and lawyers also took the frontbench weeks after the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearings were conducted — more than 135 days have elapsed after India stripped the Himalayan region’s autonomy and imposed a crippling lockdown in the Himalayan valley.
The Congressional briefing was organized by three U.S.-based civil society organizations, namely, the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC), Emgage Action, and Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR).
Dr. Stanton created the world-famous “Ten Stages of Genocide” as a presentation to the U.S. Department of State when he worked there in 1996. According to Dr. Stanton, the ten stages of genocide are as follows:
- The first stage was “classification” of “us versus them”.
- The second stage, “symbolization”, named the victims as “foreigner”.
- The third stage, “discrimination”, “classified [the victims] out of the group accepted for citizenship” so that they had no “human rights or civil rights of citizens” and were “discriminated against legally”.
- The fourth stage, dehumanization, “is when the genocidal spiral begins to go downwards. You classify the others as somehow worse than you. You give them names like ‘terrorists’, or even names of animals, start referring to them as a cancer in the body politic, you talk about them as a disease that must be somehow dealt with.”
- The fifth stage was creating an “organization” to commit the genocide: the role played by the “Indian army in Kashmir and the census takers in Assam”.
- The sixth stage was “polarization”, which is achieved by propaganda.
- The seventh stage was “preparation”
- The eighth “persecution”, where Assam and Kashmir currently were.
- The ninth stage is “extermination” and;
- The tenth stage is “denial”.
Dr. Stanton also drafted UN Security Council resolutions that created the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda and the Burundi Commission of Inquiry, two places where genocides had occurred.
