As he welcomed his guests to Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, Vartan Gregorian paraphrased Bertolt Brecht: “Cursed are the lands that need heroes.”
The president of the Carnegie Corporation is a co-founder, alongside businessmen Ruben Vardanyan and Noubar Afeyan, of the Aurora Prize, which was conceived to commemorate the Armenian genocide by awarding selfless and sustained acts of humanitarianism with $1 million (£690,000).
Last year marked the centenary of the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s massacre of Armenians; 1.5 million people were killed. Today, the genocide, and the long battles to convince foreign governments to recognise that it took place, still overshadows Armenian identity.
We can’t solve all the world’s problems in one weekend and with one prize but we can spark new activists who are going to stand up to the systems…
The Aurora Prize is an attempt to channel the country’s experience into a more positive forum, as Afeyan says: “in particular, rather than to focus on aspects of victimisation and injustice, to expand the narrative and think about what it is to be a survivor, what it is to recover, what it is to be a global citizen today.
“The idea was to establish an annual prize that would recognise the heroism of saviours who put their lives at risk and save the lives of others in a meaningful way.”
The inaugural laureate, Marguerite Barankitse, rescued thousands of Rwandan orphans during that country’s genocide, taking them to her centre in her native Burundi, Maison Shalom, and educating them together, building bonds between ethnic groups.
Last year, she had to move the centre again, as Burundi itself began to spiral towards ethnic conflict, in the aftermath of a constitutional crisis precipitated by the president, Pierre Nkurunziza. She hopes that the international community will recognise the dangerous path that Burundi has returned to, and that global attention will force the Burundian government to step back from the brink.
“I think that the Aurora Prize is going to push them to question what they are doing,” Barankitse says. “They are going to see that they are doing evil.”
A day after the award was announced, the International Criminal Court opened an investigation into political violence in Burundi.
The prize will be awarded annually in Yerevan. The proceeds are shared amongst organisations chosen by the winner. Observers say that it has the potential to become a rally point for a public that is jaded by overlapping humanitarian crises.
“Of course we can’t solve all the world’s problems in one weekend and with one prize,” says veteran US foreign policy advisor Nancy Soderberg. “But we can spark new activists who are going to stand up to the systems… If you have enough people who say: ‘I can help too’, it can make a difference.”
Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for 100 Lives
