DOWNTOWN -- Culminating a week that saw remembrances of both the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, the city held an event Thursday that illustrated how the inhumanity that sparked those two horrors is alive and well in the world today.

The city's "Man's Inhumanity to Man" presentation, held at the Glendale Police Department headquarters, featured video documentation of the ongoing conflict in the Darfur area of Sudan -- where observers say the regime in Khartoum has massacred, displaced or sexually abused hundreds of thousands of ethnic Africans -- and a witness of the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

City Councilman Ara Najarian, in presenting Thursday's program, remarked on the paradox of the title of the city's event, which drew almost 100 people.

"How can we be both human and inhuman at the same time?" asked Najarian, the event's co-chairman. But he illustrated that inhumanity through a litany of the millions killed by genocide throughout the ages, from the Chinese slaughtered by Genghis Khan's Mongol hordes, to Spanish conquistadors' massacre of the Aztecs, to the Native Americans dispossessed and exterminated first by the British and then the Americans, and the horribly efficient genocides of the 20th century.

Dan Alba, of Facing History and Ourselves, a group that conducts workshops for educators, presented the documentary, "Witnessing Darfur." The film featured the testimony of a former U.S. Marine, who participated in peacekeeping operations in Sudan's Darfur, where an estimated 300,000 were killed and 2 million displaced since the Sudanese government began using troops and paramilitary militias to put down a rebellion of African tribespeople.

The documentary showed photos of mutilated corpses, interviews with women who claimed they were raped by the Arab militias and troops for the purposes of "bearing a lighter-skinned child" and evidence of helicopter strikes on African villages, a tactic the Sudanese government denies using.

Alba stressed that the ongoing atrocities in Sudan, and those that have occurred elsewhere in the world throughout history, did not have to happen.

"These acts are not inevitable," he said, noting that even now tens of thousands are perishing in Sudan, which has been declared a genocide by the U.S. and United Nations but has so far elicited little international response. "They happened because individuals and groups made choices that allowed them to happen. The perpetrators were looking for the silence of those around them, which gave them the permission to continue with the violence."

Among the witnesses at Thursday's event was Father Vasken Movsessian, a local Armenian priest who visited Rwanda, where more than a million people were killed in the mid-1990s simply because of their tribal affiliation.

"There were 650,000 people buried in this concrete slab we were standing on," he said, detailing his visit to the genocide museum near the country's capital, Kigali.

"And every story on the walls of that museum brought tears to my eyes, because they were the same stories told to me by my grandparents years ago. These same stories are repeating themselves."

Movsessian, whose grandmother told him about being dragged through the desert by the Turks and having to dig a grave for her dead 2-year-old with her bare hands, was then led into an area of the museum where two rooms were dedicated to the Armenian Genocide.

"Here I was in deepest, darkest Africa and they have recognized what George Bush has yet to recognize," Movsessian said, noting that the U.S. has yet to acknowledge the atrocities against Armenians as a genocide. He also showed slides of his trip, in which scores of human skulls were shown displayed in the Rwandan museum, showing cracks made when the victims were hacked to death with machetes.

It is important not only to never forget the atrocities of the past, but to continue to spotlight the horrors of the here-and-now, through events such as the one held Thursday, Councilman Rafi Manoukian said.

"We talk about genocide 91 years ago, and some don't want to hear about it," said Manoukian, co-chair of the city's genocide commemoration events. "But if people don't recognize man's inhumanity to man it is going to happen again and again. It has happened in our lifetimes in Rwanda, it is happening right now in Sudan."

He noted an editorial read at Tuesday's City Council meeting by local history buff Michael Morgan, which appeared in 1915 in the Glendale Evening News, this paper's predecessor. The editorial urged readers in the city to collect donations for the Armenian people, which it said were being massacred and displaced by the Turks.

"Those were days before the Internet, when information was much harder to come by, and even then the people heeded the editorial's call and took action," Manoukian said.