By Brenda Haugen
The killing fields of Rwanda — site of one of the nastiest conflicts of the 20th century — delivered a chilling message to Gregory Gordon: the human propensity for violence was not quenched by the Holocaust, Nazi Germany’s industrialized mass killing of European Jews and other minorities that didn’t fit the Aryan ideal of racial purity.
“I remember as a child seeing the images (of the Holocaust) and being absolutely appalled, and something deep inside me stirred,” said Gordon, a University of California, Berkeley-trained attorney and one of UND’s newest law professors. “It left a profound mark on me.”
Gordon vowed as a youth to remedy the effects — however he could — of the intense hatreds that can drive a whole nation to genocide.
His journey with that vow transported him from a World War II-era battleground in France into the thick of international genocide prosecutions in Africa, anti-drug work, and the pursuit of Nazi war criminals and others of that ilk. It’s now brought him to UND to teach law and encourage awareness of human rights.
Mapping his anti-Holocaust philosophy through wide-ranging global experiences, Gordon made the first big stretch as a college student with a summer job delivering Belgian chocolate in the Ardennes Forest region of France. There, at that strategic site, Gen. George Patton led a victorious lightning tank attack against deeply entrenched Nazi troops in December 1944. That pivotal contest was dubbed “the Battle of the Bulge.”
Later, armed with a summa cum laude degree in French and his Juris Doctor, Gordon got his first taste of teaching in Paris, a class in international relations. Then followed Gordon’s professional development as a lawyer: clerking for a federal judge and practicing law in San Francisco.
But with his Holocaust vow still sharp in his mind, Gordon jumped at the chance to join the United Nations-sponsored Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Arriving in Kigali, Rwanda, in early 1996, Gordon served as legal officer and deputy leader of a team that prosecuted media members accused of inciting genocide in the African nation.
“It was intense,” Gordon recalled.
Rwanda’s Hutu population tossed out the Tutsi king in 1959, setting off decades of bloodshed that killed or forced into exile hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Their children formed a rebel alliance that ignited a civil war in Rwanda in 1990. Media-fueled hatred between Hutus and Tutsis erupted in April 1994 in the mass killing of about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
When Gordon arrived in Rwanda, the country was rife with volatile ethnic tensions; though he and his teammates lived in a guarded compound, no one was truly “safe.”
“I felt like I lived under the threat of death,” he said. “We had to take land mine training. It was tough to reconcile (Rwanda’s) beautiful landscape with those horrors.”
While his official mission was to put genocidal perpetrators behind bars, Gordon figured a little relief of another sort might help: he launched Actors for Orphans and starred in its first production, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Actors for Orphans, he explained, raised thousands of dollars to benefit Rwandan children who had lost their parents in the civil war and genocide. This effort, fueled in part by Gordon’s commitment to healing and alleviating such violence, turned personal. He looked after a young orphan in Rwanda and secured care for the child after Gordon himself returned home.
His efforts in Rwanda were lauded by the Clinton Administration. Gordon won the Justice Department’s award for “Service to the United States and International Justice.” He then served as a criminal prosecutor in the Tax Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and was later appointed as the division’s Pacific Region liaison to the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces.
In Sierra Leone, Gordon conducted a post-civil war justice assessment for the Department of Justice’s Office of Overseas Prosecutorial Development, Assistance, and Training. Gordon’s next assignment with the Department of Justice was with the Criminal Division’s Office of Special Investigations, where he helped to investigate and prosecute Nazi war criminals and modern human rights violators.
Such close-up contact with really ugly behavior would be sufficient, some might think, to taint ideals such as Gordon’s. But he stresses the more positive outlook.
“You’re fighting the good fight,” Gordon said. “It sustains you. You can’t let the ugliness and violence get the better of you or you can’t be effective.”
He puts that philosophy to work in the classroom at the UND School of Law, which he joined last year as an assistant professor, teaching international human rights, criminal law, and criminal procedure. He also launched the International Human Rights Center on campus and is working with the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition to bring human rights information to rural areas of the state.
“One of the big reasons why I wanted to come here was to put human rights on the radar screen,” Gordon said. “When you have a law license, you are given a key to effect positive change. That’s the most important lesson I try to convey.”
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