RICHARD HOVANNISIN DISCUSSES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE AT UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Noyan Tapan
Armenians Today
Mar 30 2006

SALT LAKE CITY, MARCH 30, NOYAN TAPAN – ARMENIANS TODAY. The Turkish
government refuses to acknowledge the genocide committed against
the Armenians, said Richard Hovannisian, professor of Armenian
and near-eastern history at the University of California at Los
Angeles. According to Daily Utah Chronicle, Hovannisian commented
on the contemporary interpretations of the Armenian genocide at the
University of Utah Hinckley Institute of Politics on March 23.

Hovannisian’s talk focused on the scholarly debate over whether
the genocide was premeditated or a “crime of passion” that occurred
suddenly during the tense conditions of war. He expressed his opinion
that the elimination of the Armenians had been contemplated by
the Ottoman government before the outbreak of war, but that it was
wartime conditions that allowed it to turn a “final solution into
an accomplished fact.” The Ottoman Empire distrusted the Armenians,
in part because they were a tight-knit Christian ethnic group in
the middle of a mostly Muslim empire, Hovannisian said. “They were
an ethnic group seen as potentially troublesome to an authoritarian
state at war,” he said. No official government document specifically
outlining the Ottoman plan to eliminate Armenians has been found,
although there is overwhelming evidence that the massacres occurred,
he said. There may be a “smoking gun” somewhere in Turkish archives
proving that the Ottomans premeditated the Armenian genocide,
Hovannisian said, but the nation’s government does not provide
Western historians with access to those materials. He said there
are psychological reasons that Turkey refuses to admit the genocide
occurred. “They don’t want to believe that their grandparents could’ve
been murderers,” Hovannisian explained. “They also don’t want to
deal with the consequences of recognition, including contrition and
restitution.”