The Desert Sun, CA
May 27 2005
Where’s the accountability in Armenian genocide?
Lillie D. Merigian
Special to The Desert Sun
May 27, 2005
Even as we move ahead into the 21st century, civilized man needs to
commemorate the tragedy of man’s inhumanity to man.
The paradox only begins there. We who have devised so many ways of
honoring our dead – mourning, eulogizing, memorializing, martyring –
have yet to find viable means of preventing the deliberate
annihilation of one group of human beings by another. We have yet to
establish a permanent mechanism of rectification for those who
suffered and survived the horror of such outrageous acts.
April 24 marked the 90th anniversary of the genocide of 1.5 million
Armenian people who were mercilessly slaughtered on their
2,500-year-old homeland by the Ottoman Turkish Government in 1915.
Henry P. Morgenthau, American ambassador to Turkey at that time,
wrote the following account in his autobiography in a chapter titled
“Murder of a Nation”: “The facts contained in the reports received at
the Embassy from absolutely trustworthy eyewitnesses surpass the most
beastly and diabolical cruelties ever before perpetrated or imagined
in the history of the world.”
Less than 30 years later, Adolph Hitler looked askance and said to
his military hierarchy, “Who nowadays still talks of the
extermination of the Armenians?” The first genocide of the 20th
century was a devastating blow to a people whose cultural roots
predate the second millennium. Those who survived or escaped the
ravages of the genocide fled to other lands where their indomitable
spirits sustained and revitalized them. But the scars and the pain of
remembrance remain eternal.
American poet-philosopher George Santyana has said, “Those who forget
the past are condemned to relive it.”
Can there by any doubt that if the civilized world had taken
stringent action against the Turkish government in 1915, Hitler would
have dared to attempt the eradication of European Jews?
Genocide is a crime that has no statutory limitations. The moral,
psychological, and political impact does not diminish with the
passage of time. Monuments and commemorations for the victims of past
injustices are grim reminders to a few, but meaningless deterrents to
those who blatantly violate human rights as an expedient means to
achieve their ends. (Note those in recent history: Cambodia,
Indonesia, Iraq, Rwanda and the Sudan). Neither political expediency
nor solicitous silence must prevail over morality or human rights.
Today, 90 years after the Armenian genocide, no world court has
convened; no judge or jury has heard the charges against the Turkish
Republic, which is the responsible successor to the Ottoman
government. The Armenians have yet to have their Nuremberg. The
Armenian case remains unresolved.
Just as there are those who have labeled the Nazi Holocaust of the
Jews a “hoax,” there is an equally unconscionable effort by the
Turkish government to distort and deny the truth about the planned,
systematic genocide of 1.5 million Armenians.
The governments of France, Belgium, Sweden, Italy and the European
Commission have openly acknowledged the Armenian genocide. The United
States, a world superpower, continues to give in to Turkish
intimidation by failing to acknowledge the Armenian genocide as such,
opting not to antagonize a “loyal NATO ally.”
Today, Turkey is trying desperately to be admitted into the European
Union. It is doing everything to skirt the genocide issue while
trying to make it look as if it is interested in “studying the matter
further” to gain E.U. favor.
Civilized nations need to defy inhumane acts of governments and not
implicitly or explicitly condone these acts by looking the other way
or accept them in the time-honored, but highly perverted name of
“national interest.” The dignity of mankind must not suffer
degradation at the whim and will of madmen, and human rights must not
be cast aside by the misplaced priorities of modern governments.
Who nowadays still talks of the extermination of the Armenians?
Armenians do. And they will not let history be rewritten or
forgotten.
Lillie D. Merigian is a resident of Palm Springs.