Armenian National Committee of America
888 17th St., NW, Suite 904
Washington, DC 20006
Tel: (202) 775-1918
Fax: (202) 775-5648
E-mail: [email protected]
Internet:
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 9, 2004
Contact: Elizabeth S. Chouldjian
Tel: (202) 775-1918
ANCA PRESSES STATE DEPARTMENT ON CONTINUED EXCLUSION OF
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE FROM OFFICIAL WEBSITE ON ARMENIAN HISTORY
— State Department Website’s History of Armenia Fails
to Make any Mention of the Systematic Destruction and
Exile of the Armenian Population between 1915 and 1923
WASHINGTON, DC – In a detailed letter sent today to Secretary of
State Colin Powell, Armenian National Committee Of America (ANCA)
Chairman Ken Hachikian pressed the State Department to end its
practice of excluding any mention of the Armenian Genocide from the
history section of its official website on Armenia.
The State Department website features Background Notes on one
hundred ninety-eight nations. Each entry includes a brief
historical review. The historical section for Armenia makes no
mention of Ottoman Turkey’s systematic destruction of over one and
a half million Armenians, or the “demographic disaster” described
by the Library of Congress as having “shifted the center of the
Armenian population from the heartland of historical Armenia.” The
ANCA issued an action alert on this issue in January of this year.
Hachikian’s letter was written in response to a State Department
letter, dated May 6th, sent to Joe Dagdigian, Chairman of the
Merrimack Valley ANC chapter. Dagdigian had earlier written a
letter, dated April 20th, documenting a series of serious
shortcomings in the State Department website on the history of
Armenia. Dagdigian noted, in part, that:
The historical survey of Armenia omits any reference
to the Armenian Genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey
beginning in 1915. To recount nearly 3,000 years of
Armenian history without the inclusion of this
cataclysmic and relatively recent event in the history
of the Armenian people is inexcusable. Rather than
contributing to an understanding of the region, it
obscures the region’s history and fails to provide the
background necessary for understanding current
Armenian and regional issues.
In response to Dagdigian’s letter, John Fox, the Director of the
Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs, noted that:
Country background notes on the State Department’s
web-site were designed to provide interested readers
with concise and up-to-date information regarding key
economic and political issues in the country, as well
as travel conditions and commercial opportunities.
Country background notes also provide a very brief
introduction to the country’s history. Typically,
each background page will collapse over 2,000 years of
history into 3-4 concise paragraphs. Consequently,
even episodes of great historical importance are often
not treated in our background notes.
Hachikian, responding to this letter from John Fox, wrote a sharply
critical letter to Secretary Powell spelling out the historical
inaccuracy, the basic inconsistency, and the moral bankruptcy of
the State Department’s position of excluding the Armenian Genocide
from its history of Armenia. In this letter, Hachikian wrote that:
Rather than acknowledging and taking steps to correct
this obvious error – or even indicating a willingness
to review this flawed document, the State Department’s
letter, signed by John Fox of the Office of Caucasus
and Central Asian Affairs, instead, sought to reduce
this issue of profound historical and contemporary
significance to a simple consideration of space.
The Hachikian letter then provides an in-depth review of the
assertions made in the State Department letter, concluding that,
“we find it plainly disingenuous, if not outright dishonest, to
imply that the exclusion of the Armenian Genocide is based on space
considerations.” Hachikian added, that, “it is clear that this
historically inaccurate refusal to even acknowledge the
premeditated extermination between 1915 and 1923 of fully two
thirds of all Armenians by Ottoman Turkey and the exile of a nation
from its historic homeland of more than three thousand years,
represents another very sad chapter in the State Department’s
complicity in the Turkish government’s ongoing immoral campaign to
deny the Armenian Genocide.”
Hachikian closed his letter by sharing with Secretary Powell, “how
truly regrettable I find it to have to engage in word-counts to
illustrate the ridiculous and reprehensible lengths to which the
State Department goes to help the government of Turkey to deny the
undeniable – the crime of genocide committed against the Armenian
nation. In the interest of basic morality, historical accuracy,
and the State Department’s credibility, on behalf of the American-
Armenian community, I ask you to immediately correct this obvious
and insulting ‘error.'”
Armenian Americans can express their concern about the Armenia
Background Notes by visiting the following link on the ANCA website.
The full text of the ANCA letter to Secretary Powell is provided below.
#####
Text of ANCA letter to the State Department – June 4, 2003
June 4, 2004
The Hon. Colin Powell
Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C St NW 7th Floor
Washington, DC 20520
Dear Secretary Powell:
I am writing to share with you our grave concerns regarding the
State Department’s response (see attached) to the letter that our
Merrimack Valley Armenian National Committee Chairman, Joe
Dagdigian, sent on April 20th to Under Secretary Margaret Tutwiler,
regarding the Country Profile of Armenia on the State Department’s
website.
I refer specifically to the point raised by Mr. Dagdigian that the
State Department’s “historical survey of Armenia omits any
reference to the Armenian Genocide committed by Ottoman Turkey
beginning in 1915. To recount nearly 3,000 years of Armenian
history without the inclusion of this cataclysmic and relatively
recent event in the history of the Armenian people is inexcusable.
Rather than contributing to an understanding of the region, it
obscures the region’s history and fails to provide the background
necessary for understanding current Armenian and regional issues.”
Rather than acknowledging and taking steps to correct this obvious
error – or even indicating a willingness to review this flawed
document, the State Department’s letter, signed by John Fox, the
Director of the Office of Caucasus and Central Asian Affairs,
instead, sought to reduce this issue of profound historical and
contemporary significance to a simple consideration of space. In
his response, Mr. Fox specifically noted that, because “typically,
each background page will collapse over 2,000 years of history into
3-4 concise paragraphs. . . even episodes of great historical
importance are often not treated in our background notes.”
Although we are deeply troubled – morally, historically, and on
humanitarian grounds – by the Department’s willingness to dismiss
the Armenian Genocide in this fashion, we, nonetheless, took a
serious look at the defenses offered in Mr. Fox’s letter. First,
we surveyed the lengths of each of the one hundred ninety-eight
Background Notes on the Department’s website (see attached list).
Next, we examined the entries for nations that are universally
understood to have suffered genocidal crimes. And, finally, we
reviewed each entry against the standard that “even episodes of
great historical importance” are often not included in Background
Notes due to space considerations. Based on this review, we
discovered the following:
1) Space considerations:
At three hundred three words, the history section in the Armenia
Background Notes is among the shortest of all the one hundred
ninety-eight nations on the State Department’s Background Notes
website. While we appreciate that word length does not necessarily
correlate to the merits of a particular historical overview, we
observe, in light of Mr. Fox’s comments about space limitations,
that fully one hundred sixty-eight entries are larger than
Armenia’s, many being substantially larger. For example, the entry
on Honduras is five times larger, while the one for Bangladesh is
ten times the size of Armenia’s entry; fifty-seven countries are
over one thousand words.
Given that the length of the Armenian Background Notes history
section is less than half the average word-count of eight hundred
sixty-two words, we find it plainly disingenuous, if not outright
dishonest, to imply that the exclusion of the Armenian Genocide is
based on space considerations.
2) Other instances of genocide
Unlike in the Armenian case, the Department of State does properly
address the issue of genocidal campaigns in the Background Notes of
three other nations, namely Cambodia, Israel, and Rwanda, whose
people experienced genocide in the 20th Century. The relevant
portions of these Background Notes are provided below:
Cambodia: “The regime controlled every aspect of life
and reduced everyone to the level of abject obedience
through terror. Torture centers were established, and
detailed records were kept of the thousands murdered
there. Public executions of those considered
unreliable or with links to the previous government
were common. Few succeeded in escaping the military
patrols and fleeing the country. Solid estimates of
the numbers who died between 1975 and 1979 are not
available, but it is likely that hundreds of thousands
were brutally executed by the regime. Hundreds of
thousands more died of starvation and disease–both
under the Khmer Rouge and during the Vietnamese
invasion in 1978. Estimates of the dead range from 1.7
million to 3 million, out of a 1975 population
estimated at 7.3 million.”
Israel: “Mounting British efforts to restrict this
immigration were countered by international support
for Jewish national aspirations following the near-
extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis during
World War II.”
Rwanda: “The killing swiftly spread from Kigali to
all corners of the country; between April 6 and the
beginning of July, a genocide of unprecedented
swiftness left up to 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus
dead at the hands of organized bands of militia
Interahamwe. Even ordinary citizens were called on to
kill their neighbors by local officials and
government-sponsored radio. The president’s MRND
Party was implicated in organizing many aspects of the
genocide.”
3) Exclusion of “episodes of great historical importance”
In Mr. Fox’s letter, he notes that “even episodes of great
historical importance” are not included in Background Notes due to
space considerations. This apparent effort to excuse the absence
of any mention of the Armenian Genocide prompted us to review other
entries in order to determine if this standard was applied
uniformly. While the Department could not find the space, even in
a sentence or two, to deal with a central event in modern Armenian
history, it did manage to include the following entries for other
countries:
Papua New Guinea: “Early garden crops–many of which
are indigenous–included sugarcane, Pacific bananas,
yams, and taros, while sago and pandanus were two
commonly exploited native forest crops. Today’s
staples – sweet potatoes and pigs – are later
arrivals, but shellfish and fish have long been
mainstays of coastal dwellers’ diets.”
Lithuania: “…the Roman historian Tacitus referred
to the Lithuanians as excellent farmers.”
Mali: “Malians express great pride in their
ancestry.”
Based on this review of the Department’s response, it is clear that
the exclusion of the Armenian Genocide from the Background Notes
entry for Armenia is not, as Mr. Fox implied in his letter, based
on space considerations. Rather, it is clear that this
historically inaccurate refusal to even acknowledge the
premeditated extermination between 1915 and 1923 of fully two
thirds of all Armenians by Ottoman Turkey and the exile of a nation
from its historic homeland of more than three thousand years,
represents another very sad chapter in the State Department’s
complicity in the Turkish government’s ongoing immoral campaign to
deny the Armenian Genocide.
By any historical standard, the Armenian Genocide represents an
important chapter in world history and a major milestone in the
life of the Armenian nation. The Library of Congress Country Study
of Armenia, which estimates the number of Armenians killed in the
Armenian Genocide at up to two million, describes the Genocide as
“a demographic disaster that shifted the center of the Armenian
population from the heartland of historical Armenia.” The
exclusion of the Armenian Genocide from any history of Armenia,
however brief, is morally and historically inexcusable.
I will close by sharing with you how truly regrettable I find it to
have to engage in word-counts to illustrate the ridiculous and
reprehensible lengths to which the State Department goes to help
the government of Turkey to deny the undeniable – the crime of
genocide committed against the Armenian nation. In the interest of
basic morality, historical accuracy, and the State Department’s
credibility, on behalf of the American-Armenian community, I ask
you to immediately correct this obvious and insulting “error.”
I would be pleased to meet with you personally to discuss this
matter in greater detail.
Sincerely yours,
[signed]
Kenneth V. Hachikian
Chairman