A PBS DOCUMENTARY MAKES ITS CASE FOR THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, WITH OR WITHOUT A DEBATE
New York Times
April 17 2006
TV Review
It is impossible to debate a subject like genocide without giving
offense. PBS is supposed to give offense responsibly.
Photo: Two Cats Productions
A scene from “The Armenian Genocide” on PBS; a follow-up panel will
not be shown on many PBS stations.
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And that was the idea behind a panel discussion that PBS planned
to show after tonight’s broadcast of “The Armenian Genocide,”
a documentary about the extermination of more than one million
Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman Empire during World War I.
The powerful hourlong film will be shown on most of the 348 PBS
affiliate stations. But nearly a third of those stations decided to
cancel the follow-up discussion after an intense lobbying campaign
by Armenian groups and some members of Congress.
The protesters complained that the panel of four experts, moderated
by Scott Simon, host of “Weekend Edition Saturday” on NPR, included
two scholars who defend the Turkish government’s claim that a genocide
never took place. The outrage over their inclusion was an indication
of how passionately Armenians feel about the issue; they have battled
for decades to draw attention to the genocide.
But the fact that so many stations caved is a measure of something
else: PBS’s growing vulnerability to pressure and, perhaps accordingly,
the erosion of viewers’ trust in public television.
The camera lends legitimacy, but as Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s
performance on Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” famously showed, it
also can undermine credibility. Panel discussions in particular give
people with outlandish views a hearing – and also an opportunity to
expose the flaws in their arguments.
That is certainly the case with the discussion program “Armenian
Genocide: Exploring the Issues.” It turns out that there is only one
articulate voice arguing that Armenians died not in a genocide but
in a civil war between Christians and Muslims – that of Justin A.
McCarthy, a history professor at the University of Louisville. His
Turkish counterpart, Omer Turan, an associate professor at the Middle
East Technical University in Ankara, tries ardently to back him up,
but his English is not good enough to make a dent. And the two other
experts, Peter Balakian, a humanities professor at Colgate University,
and Taner Akcam, a visiting professor of history at the University
of Minnesota and a well-known defender of human rights in Turkey,
lucidly pick Mr. McCarthy’s points apart.
Mr. Balakian, who is one of the experts cited in the documentary,
gets the last word. “If we are going to pretend that a stateless
Christian minority population, unarmed, is somehow in a capacity to
kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, or civil
war,” Mr. Balakian says, “we’re living in the realm of the absurd.”
Tone and appearance on television can be as persuasive as
talk. Mr. McCarthy mostly sounds condescending and defensive, while
Mr. Balakian is smooth and keeps his cool.
“The Armenian Genocide ” which was made by Andrew Goldberg in
association with Oregon Public Broadcasting, does not ignore the
Turkish government’s denial, or its repression of dissidents in Turkey
who try to expound another point of view. One of the film’s merits
is that it tries to explain both the circumstances that led to the
atrocities of 1915 and the reasons why Turkish officials are still
so determined to keep that period unexplored. “There is a feeling
that Turkey would be putting itself permanently in the company
of Adolf Hitler,” Samantha Power, the author of “A Problem >>From
Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” says. “That same stain would
envelop Turkey as it seeks, of course, to be a major player on the
international stage.”
Several of the experts in the film, including Turkish scholars,
argue that because Turkey is seeking admission to the European Union,
its leaders will eventually have to bend to international will and
acknowledge responsibility. But official Turkish denial remains fierce,
and intellectuals and even well-known writers like Orhan Pamuk can
still be brought to trial for mentioning the treatment of Armenians
and Kurds.
The documentary, which is partly narrated by Julianna Margulies,
Ed Harris and others, includes rare clips of Turkish scholars
acknowledging the anti-Armenian campaign as genocide as well as Turkish
villagers recounting their ancestors’ stories about participating in
the killings. “They caught Armenians and put them in a barn and burned
them,” a man in a town in eastern Turkey says to an interviewer. There
are also shots of ordinary Turks who insist their ancestors were
incapable of that level of barbarity.
Mostly, however, the film painstakingly makes the case that a genocide
did take place, relying on archival photographs, victims’ memoirs
and the horrified first-hand accounts of diplomats, missionaries and
reporters. The forced deportations and killings did not take place
unnoticed – public figures like Theodore Roosevelt and H. L. Mencken
spoke out about the horrors. In 1915, The New York Times published
145 stories about the systematic slaughter of Armenians.
Even after World War II, the fate of Turkey’s Armenian population was
high on the list of crimes against humanity. The film includes a clip
from a 1949 CBS interview with Raphael Lemkin, a law professor who
in 1943 coined the term genocide. “I became interested in genocide
because it happened so many times,” he tells the CBS commentator
Quincy Howe. “First to the Armenians, then after the Armenians,
Hitler took action.”
The documentary honors the victims of the Armenian genocide and also
pays tribute to dissidents in Turkey who are brave enough to speak
out despite government censorship. And that makes it all the odder
that so many public television stations here censored the follow-up
program as soon as a few lobby groups complained.
The Armenian Genocide
PBS, tonight at 10 Eastern and Pacific times; 9 p.m., Central time.
Written, directed and produced by Andrew Goldberg. Produced by Two
Cats Productions in association with Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Narrated by Julianna Margulies, Ed Harris, Natalie Portman, Laura
Linney and Orlando Bloom.
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