Scholars’ Circle – Insights into Cambodian Genocide and Wiriyamu Massacre in Mozambique – April 27, 2025

The Scholars' Circle Interviews

April is Genocide Awareness Month, and no genocide was more devastating, more destructive and more emblematic of the demand for never again like the Cambodian Genocide. Often referring to as the “Killing Fields” after the moving Dith Pran novel and movie of the same name, 2 million people out of a pre-genocide population of 7 million were killed by the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia between the years 1975 and 1979. The importance of the remembrance of the genocide lies in remembering its victims. But learning from the processes by which this killing was committed and to understand how genocides are perpetrated is essential at ensuring Never Again. And in light of the world’s rejection of its commitments to human rights in its contemporary times, including an American government with a much lessening commitment to these rights, how much can we learn from genocides like Cambodia to counter such actions today? [ dur: 30mins. ]

• Alex Hinton is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is also the Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention, and the award-winning author or editor of seventeen books, including, most recently, It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (NYU, 2021), Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Cornell, 2022) and Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (Stanford, 2023). Most recently, he received the American Anthropological Association’s Anthropology in the Media Award in 2022, a 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Network of Genocide Scholars, and a H. F. Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award in 2024.

Portugal’s colonization of Mozambique is part of a pattern of colonialism from European powers in Africa in the 19th and 20th century. Mozambique was one of the last countries to be decolonized. A bitter war of independence broke out in 1964 from a campaign by the Mozambique Liberation front and a ten year resulted in the nation gaining its independence in 1975. Numerous atrocities marked this war and one in particular, the Portuguese massacre at Wiriyamu in December, 1972, marked the brutality of this war and the Portuguese response. Our guest has written the definitive history of this massacre, which proved to be challenging to construct the story. His account serves as an incredibly important marker of the Portugese violence in Mozambique and in Portual’s eventual acknowledgement and apology for the atrocity.[ dur: 28mins. ]

• Mustafah Dhada, is a Professor in the Department of History at California State University, Bakersfield. He is the author of Wiriyamu Massacre: An Oral History, 1960-1974.

This program is produced by Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Maria Armoudian and Sudd Dongre.