WoonsocketCall.com

The birth of genocide

MICHAEL HOLTZMAN, Staff Writer03/20/2005

PROVIDENCE – The template for genocide in the modern era happened in 1915 to
the Armenian people in their homeland of the Ottoman Empire, an acclaimed
author on this subject shared with an education-minded audience last week at
Rhode Island College.

Former President Theodore Roosevelt called the annihilation of 1-1½ million
Armenians “the greatest crime” of World War I, said Peter Balakian, a
Colgate University English professor and author of “The Burning Tigris: The
Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.”

Balakian, the keynote speaker, and other scholars and writers addressed an
audience of teachers, students and participants during a “genocide
symposium” of workshops titled “Remembering Our Past, Educating Our Future.”

Organizers distributed to teachers a California curriculum guide on human
rights and genocide, the first in the country focused on the Armenians as a
case- study of victims in the 20th century. World history teachers in the
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Unified School District prepared it.

“I think this history is in the process of an exciting recovery,” said
Balakian, likening this relearning to previous rebirths of African American,
Native American Indian and women’s history in recent decades.

He and other presenters encouraged educators to find opportunities to teach
about the Armenian and subsequent modern genocides.

Decades of continued Turkish government denial of the Armenian genocide
remains a potent weapon for keeping the event buried beneath world history.
At the same time, genocide scholars like Balakian say America retains “blood
on its hands” for its unacknowledged extermination of Native American
Indians tribes.

With Rhode Island one of a handful of states in the country to recently
legislate pursuit of teaching genocide and human rights issues — coupled
with the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide next month — Armenian
committees organized the symposium at RIC.

Crimes of these proportions, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, (D-R.I.,) told about 100
people, “are usually perpetrated by ordinary people. The people who actually
do it are not too much different than us,” he said.

Reed cautioned that Americans would not necessarily be different under
similar wartime circumstances. “We, individually, have a responsibility to
resist” atrocities like genocide, he noted.

In 1915, the most able-bodied Armenians in the Ottoman Turkish Army were
disarmed, thrown into labor camps and gunned down by their military
comrades. But an even more insidious, systematic extermination followed,
Balakian said.

On the night of April 24, 1915, and the following day, about 250 of the
cultural and community leaders in the capital city of Constantinople
(present-day Istanbul) were rounded up and tortured by the Turks. Most of
them were killed, reported Balakian, who in his award-winning memoir “Black
Dog of Fate” traced his own family roots to this genocide.

“After April 24 it would be easy to carry out the genocide program, for many
of the most gifted voices of resistance were gone,” Balakian wrote.
Subsequently, thousands of other Armenian leaders were quickly rounded up
and killed throughout the country.

He likened the killing the Armenian soldiers and intellectuals by the
Turkish government during World War I to “cutting out the tongue” and
“chopping off the head.”

The women, children and less able men became easy prey for a purpose Adolf
Hitler would openly emulate during his extermination of six million European
Jews during the Holocaust of World War II.

As the Nazi Armies invaded Poland, on Aug. 22, 1939, Hitler reportedly told
his commanding generals that any criticism of his planned genocide would
bring execution by firing squad. “Who, after all, speaks today of the
annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler said.

The Holocaust has been followed in this century by Cambodian dictator Pol
Pot in the 1970s killing and starving 1.8 million of his people, the Hutus
eliminating 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda and 200,000 to 300,000 killed and 1
million homeless during the ongoing Sudanese genocide in Darfur. Yet the
Armenian genocide, Balakian said, “remains a seminal event.”

“It was the first time Americans were confronted with unfathomable numbers
of the murder of innocent, unarmed civilians,” he said.

When Balakian said half to two-thirds of the 2.5 million Christian Armenians
perished at the hands of the Turkish government, one listener asked if it
was the responsibility of teachers like himself to place this history into
its proper place in the classroom.

“How did this fall off the map?” asked Marco McWilliams, a junior African
American history major at RIC.

Terry McMichael, who teaches social studies at Cumberland High School, said
the symposium information and resources she’s gained would help bridge the
gaps in instruction she provides her students.

“I know the history of the genocide has been neglected in the history
books,” said McMichael. “I think this is important enough to spend a few
days on it. I know about the Armenian genocide. I’m interested in Middle
Eastern history.”

McMichael said she immediately acquired Balakian’s books and two about the
Armenian genocide written for young adults called “Forgotten Fire” and “The
Road from Home” that she’d use in her classroom. “I feel a strong duty to
teach them social responsibility,” McMichael said.

As testimony to that aim, she said after discussing with students the
genocides in Rwanda and elsewhere around the globe, she wrote a letter to
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. She told him the United Nations
“was shirking its duties.”

“How can I teach my kids about the responsibilities of the U.N.?” she asked.

Beth Bloomer, a junior at Cumberland High who accompanied McMichael to the
symposium, said she’s enthusiastic about the Armenian genocide being taught
at her school. Her classmates, she believes, “will respond in a kind of awe
or shock that this was happening,” Bloomer said.

Her parents asked initially why she was going. “I’m into history and I want
to learn more about the world and people around us,” she said, “and how
other people survived.”

“In most history books, it’s not there,” agreed Lincoln High social studies
teacher Caroline Ricci.

“It’s originally a political issue,” said Ricci, who called the symposium
“very valuable.” If you’re at the forefront of a movement and are vocal, you
get your voice heard. And it took a long time to get their voices heard.”

Perhaps it takes a reading of the 400-page “Burning Tigris” and other
literature of the Armenian genocide to understand how it happened — and why
there have been so many obstacles to uncovering this critical piece of
history.

In a way, it’s stunning, because the history is well documented, Balakian
said. In 1915The New York Times published 145 stories, many on the front
page, about a “campaign of extermination” perpetrated upon upwards of 1
million of the Armenian people.

America responded with unprecedented aid to the “starving Armenians,”
sending more than $100 million at a time a loaf of bread cost a nickel.

As the horrors of the genocide unfolded, it was also a time that American
ambassadors in Turkey — most notably Henry Morgenthau — documented the
mass murders of Armenians in an effort to raise alarm and action back home.
Balakian said he used hundreds of those documents in the National Archives
in Washington, D.C. for “Burning Tigris.”

“It was a reminder of a time,” he said, “people in government wrote with
clarity and ethical purpose.” He said it was also shortly before America
adopted its new policies toward the Middle East in the pursuit of oil.

©The Call 2005