HITTING A NERVE (PBS Documentary “The Armenian Genocide”)
Matt Zoller Seitz
The Star Ledger, NJ
April 17 2006
“The Armenian Genocide” arrives on PBS tonight (10 p.m., Channel 13)
preceded by a wave of controversy. The public broadcaster is accused
of nothing less than a form of holocaust denial.
Some back story first. This documentary recounts the extermination
of 1 million Armenians in eastern Turkey by the Ottoman Empire. The
systemic nature of the extermination, which has been confirmed by
the International Association of Genocide Scholars, is taken as a
given by this documentary. The program also points out that the Turks
killed another 200,000 people in historic Armenia and Constantinople
(now Istanbul).
PBS ran afoul of Armenian-Americans by adding a post-screening
panel discussion that included two scholars who said that not all
of the victims died as a direct result of Turkish violence — that a
percentage of them were lost to disease, starvation and other causes
that affected all of Turkish society, not just Armenians.
This genocidal caveat was considered a slap in the face to
Armenian-American groups, who argued that most legitimate scholars
agree that the mass deaths qualified as genocide, and that PBS would
follow a documentary about the World War II genocide against the Jews
with a panel that tried to qualify or explain away the horror.
PBS responded that the panel wasn’t meant to cast doubt on the
“genocide” label — that it was just an attempt to explore a
contentious issue and be as inclusive as possible — but this has
only inflamed Armenian outrage. (There’s even a petition circulating
online that condemns the panel discussion.)
It’s unfortunate that PBS blundered into this morass in the first
place, because the documentary is a serious, literate and ultimately
heartbreaking work — a historical primer on an event few Americans
even know about. (For a dramatic take on the same subject, rent
“Ararat,” by Atom Egoyan, a Canadian director of Armenian heritage.)
Moving through the end of the 19th century, the documentary explains
how things just kept getting worse for the Armenians, a people who
existed peacefully within the Muslim-ruled Ottoman Empire despite
having adopted Christianity as the state religion back during Roman
times.
As historians point out, the Sultan of the Ottoman empire designated
individual non-Muslim peoples — Greeks, Armenians, Jews — as
“infidels.” But for practical reasons, he still tried to stay out of
their business as much as possible. The empire’s subjects were given
the limited ability to rule themselves as long as they paid their
taxes, obeyed the Sultan’s rules and didn’t try to rebel.
‘Discriminatory, unequal, hierarchical,” the University of Chicago
professor Ron Suny tells the filmmakers. “But if you obeyed, you could
get along, and Armenians did rather well for centuries, actually.”
Then Armenians began agitating not necessarily for equal rights, but
simply to have their unequal treatment explained and justified. This
led to increasingly brutal government crackdowns, and eventually to
a Turk-centric re-education campaign, carried out by a radical new
Otttoman government run by religious and political extremists.
Genocide soon followed.
Armenians contend that the Turks tried to exterminate them to suppress
an Armenian uprising and destroy any chance that the Armenians might
give aid to an invading Russian army. The Turkish government continues
to deny that Armenian deaths were anything other than an unfortunate
byproduct of national misery.
Most legitimate historians favor the former interpretation, and the
documentary says so. Given the intelligence and precision of this
documentary — whose main fault is brevity — it’s depressing that
PBS managed to turn it into a rallying cry for the oppressed, more
perhaps through ignorance than malice. And the network’s attempts to
fix the situation only made it worse.
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