New national museum will tread carefully in dealing with human rights issues

Steve Lambert, THE CANADIAN PRESS
WINNIPEG - It won't be an easy task, but the people planning the new Canadian Museum For Human Rights - the first national museum outside the Ottawa area - are hoping to portray sensitive issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without setting off a firestorm of controversy and accusations that they are favouring one side over another.

To that end, they are about to launch public consultations and bring in academic experts to help determine which human rights issues should be featured in the museum and how they should be presented.

"The government is trying to get out ahead of the curve," said Arni Thorsteinson, chairman of the museum advisory committee which the federal government set up in October.

"They didn't do that with the war museum. So then people complained."

The Canadian War Museum angered Second World War veterans with a display that said there were questions about the morality of the Allied bombing campaign in Germany. The controversy ended up before a Senate subcommittee and in October, the museum announced it would change the wording of the display.

In an attempt to be fair to all sides, the government and human rights museum organizers will ask Canadians, starting in January, to submit ideas on what they want to see in the museum via a special website.

The government is also hiring academic experts, including Constantine Passaris, a professor at the University of New Brunswick who has served as chairman of the New Brunswick Human Rights Commission.

One of the potential political minefields for the museum is the Holodomor, the famine that claimed millions of lives in Ukraine in the 1930s.

Thirteen countries, including the U.S. and Ukraine, formally recognize the famine as a genocide - a deliberate attempt by the Soviet regime of Josef Stalin to eliminate an ethnic group.

Canada does not recognize it as a genocide, although the Ukrainian Canadian Congress is hoping the museum will include that exact wording.

"We'll be making our case and, frankly, sooner or later that won't be an issue because most countries and academics are moving in that direction of understanding," UCC executive director Ostap Skrypnyk said.

The UCC is raising money for what it hopes will be a permanent Holodomor exhibit at the museum.

Another issue for the museum will be having to choose among the many nationalities and other groups that have been involved in human rights issues both in Canada and around the world.

The plan is to cast a wide net - to feature not only different nationalities but also the disabled, refugees and others. The museum is expected to use some of its floor space for temporary displays that will be set up on a rotational basis.

The end result, Thorsteinson said, will be a museum that highlights human rights issues in a fair way and does not shy away from sensitive topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"It's probably something that should be addressed and we don't want to ignore it," he said.

The human rights museum, first proposed by the late media mogul Izzy Asper, is still in the fundraising stage. The federal government has promised to pay $100 million of the projected $265 million in construction costs, as well as operating costs that are expected to be $22 million a year. Organizers hope to have it open in 2010.

© The Canadian Press, 2007