Back from Armenia

Haaretz
27 April 05

By Yossi Sarid

We returned from Jerevan, Armenia, after taking part in the
international conference marking the 90th anniversary of the Armenian
genocide. We were four Israelis there – Prof. Yehuda Bauer, Prof. Yair
Oron, Dr. Israel Charny and I. Most of those invited were researchers
and academics. Only a few were statesmen. The Israeli presence was
very important for the organizers, so they changed the schedule to
suit our needs: We all wanted to be home for the Pesach seder.

The Israeli-Jewish position on their genocide is a matter of great
worry for the Armenians, and also a source of hope. Worry, over the
ongoing alienation by official Israel toward their terrible disaster,
from which they have yet to recover; and hope, because of the signs
being shown by the international Jewish community – and even among us
– indicating strong reservations with the infamous statement made by
Shimon Peres, in effect denying there had been any genocide of the
Armenian people.

That entire debate about whether there was or wasn’t genocide is
foolish and ugly. Nobody disputes the fact that more than one million
Armenians were murdered during a two-year period, and a million people
are not murdered without planning and without organization. The Turks
can invent a thousand reasons to explain what happened, but of what
importance will that be when the important thing is that people,
women, men, children, died strange and ruthless and unnatural deaths?

After 90 years, one can of course ask what is the point of digging at
history and wounds. A bad question. Genocide has not passed from this
world, it still takes its victims and not only in Darfur in
Sudan. Dealing with the past is therefore dealing with the present and
the future, so it is forbidden to leave it only to the historians, as
Peres suggested in his day. It won’t be the historians who prevent
more cases of genocide now lurking at the doorsteps of various nations
in more than 60 different places around the world, according to the
researchers’ diagnosis. Only the politicians can prevent it, if they
want – but they don’t really want.

Those same researchers point to another horrifying fact: In the 20th
century, some 160 million civilians were murdered in gases of genocide
and “politicide,” compared to “only” some 40 million
soldiers. Fighting apparently is less dangerous than living in the
zones of abandonment, where nationalist hatred and racist incitement
are the opium for the masses.

The genocide yet to come can be prevented, if the previous cases are
not whitewashed, on condition that those responsible don’t get away
with it. The Turkish position is grave and outrageous: The murderers
themselves are long since dead. Contemporary Turks are not guilty, so
it is not entirely clear why they insist on their great denial instead
of accepting the moral and historic responsibility. They are only
harming themselves, their stature and image, just as they knock on the
doors of the international community and want to be accepted to the
European Union. They should be accepted, but not before they recognize
their responsibility.

It’s not always remembered that the Armenian genocide was the first
case of genocide in the 20th century, characterized more than previous
ones by monstrosity, reaching its satanic climax in the Holocaust of
the Jews (though Prof. Bauer always steps in with the correction that
the first genocide of the last century was conducted by the Germans in
Namibia, but it has been forgotten completely).

If already then, in the early part of the century, the international
community had dealt the way it should have with the Armenian genocide,
it is very possible that it would have been possible to prevent all
that came after it, maybe even the Holocaust. But the eyes closed to
the Armenian victims were what made it possible for all the murderers
of the world to come out of their holes and slaughter, knowing there
was no shield to protect small and weak nations, which are such easy
prey.

The alliance between the victims is very important for the Armenians,
and important for us; the main importance is meant for the entire
human race. Knowing our species, its impulses and talent for
destruction, we cannot accept victims without murderers, genocide
without the responsible. An orphaned genocide is the father of the
next genocide.