Activists honor Genocide Memorial Day

A mother dances with her son during a pro-government demonstration against TIAR or the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, in Caracas, Venezuela, Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2019. Representatives from over a dozen nations that are signatories of the Cold War-era defense treaty for the Americas moved Tuesday to further isolate close allies of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with economic sanctions. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Genocide Memorial Day was marked with moments of silence and discussion at three locations in Europe on Sunday.

The event was created in 2010 by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, a U.K.-based non-profit group, which commemorates past and current genocides with a focus on those that have been given "insufficient exposure" by the media.

This year's theme was economic sanctions with experts in London, Brussels, and Amsterdam, focused on sanctions in Iran and Venezuela.

"Genocide is normally associated with violent actions that lead to the deaths of large numbers of persons. But what if large numbers of persons die, not due to violence, but due to sanctions?," the IHRC said on their website.

"In Iran for example many medicines needed by patients can only be imported and U.S.-led sanctions have curtailed their supply. The lives of hundreds of thousands of patients in Iran are now under direct threat as a result of sanctions."

This table shows estimated risk for onset of mass killing in 2019-20 for the top 10 countries by risk. The length of the bar indicates the estimated risk. Data is from the Early Warning Project. An asterisk means there are ongoing mass killing episodes.

The organization says the "western narrative" argues that sanctions are meant to pressure the government, but in reality, they harm ordinary people and fuel social discontent.

In Venezuela, the economic boycott has led to 40,000 deaths from 2017-2018. The number of deaths in the coming years could be tens of thousands due to lack of medicine, according to research by the Center for Economic and Policy Research in the U.S.

Indigenous men sit in a courtroom as they wait for former Guatemalan army operations chief Cesar Octavio Noguera Argueta to appear before a judge, in Guatemala City, Monday, Oct. 28, 2019. Noguera Argueta was arrested last week on charges of genocide for actions between 1978 and 1982 during the country’s civil war. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)

Some have criticized Genocide Memorial Day as diminishing Holocaust Remembrance Day which takes place on January 27.

The Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity in the U.K. has said that Genocide Memorial Day "enables the IHRC to gently subsume the genocide of European Jewry under the sheer scale of man's inhumanity to man. Challenge this as sophistry and you are forced into a somewhat nauseating comparative study in human suffering."

The IHRC does not believe in a hierarchy of suffering and genocide, said Massoud Shadjareh, Chairman of the IHRC at this year's event in London.

"We are not racist. We actually think that one man's victimhood is the same as any other man's victimhood," he said. "The reality is that there are more people are dying as a result of sanctions than as a result of wars that we've seen in our lifetime," Shadjareh said.

Kosovo president Hashim Thaci, comforts Hafiz Musafaj, during his visit to the Recak memorial, in the village of Recak on Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2019, where he called on Serbia to apologize for the genocide on his country as the first step toward a peaceful future relationship. Thaci, a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army independence fighters, or KLA, said that during its genocide campaign in 1998-1999 Serbia committed some 400 massacres, killing about 13,000 civilians, including 1,300 children. Some 1,650 are still unaccounted for. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu)