November 17, 2006
The Student Newspaper of Rice University
6/11/17/armenian_genocide
November 17, 2006
Armenian genocide must not be denied
Mhair Dekmezian
On April 15, 1915, 250 Armenians, including doctors, bankers,
businessmen and even a member of the parliament, were rounded up in the
Ottoman capital of Constantinople and sent to their executions. This
incident began the final portion of a systematic attempt at the
complete annihilation of the Armenian race by the Turkish rulers of
the Ottoman Empire – an event that is to this day denied by modern
Turkey in addition to an active denial movement.
While the Christian Armenians, having lived in the area for thousands
of years, experienced limited discrimination by the Muslim rulers
over many years, the paranoid Sultan Abdulhamid took this to a new
level, effectively attempting to ban the very existence of the word
"Armenian." He began in the 1890s with the bloody slaughter of more
than 200,000 Armenians, stopped only after a coup by the Young Turk
regime in 1909. With their promise that "under the blue sky we are
all equal," most Armenians hoped this would mark a new era.
However, by 1914, the War Office began a propaganda campaign to present
all Armenians as "subversive elements," justified by actions of two
Armenians leading czarist battalions, as Russia was engaged in war
with the Ottomans.
The actions of a few individuals were used to formulate a fictional,
widespread "revolutionary uprising," used from that point as a
carte blanche for the destruction of an entire race, guilty only
of being Armenian. From there, entire villages were cleared of men,
women and children, who were often killed brutally on the outskirts
of their towns or "deported" to concentration camps in the Syrian
deserts. Along the way, they were robbed, raped and murdered by
their Ottoman guards. Caves, rivers and fields filled with mutilated
bodies were left in the wake. By the end of the war, about 1.5 million
Armenians were killed.
The historical factuality of these occurrences is not even remotely
in question – there is consensus among modern scholars of all
nationalities.
Countless foreign archives and Turkish documents detail the approval
of these violent massacres of Armenians by their Ottoman rulers. The
New York Times published 145 articles in 1915 alone detailing the
campaign of "systematic race extermination."
Reports by Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman
Empire, confirmed a systematic, unprovoked slaughter under the
full knowledge and approval of the Young Turk leaders. He detailed
numerous frustrating conversations with Talaat Pasha, Minister
of Interior Affairs, who justified the attacks by saying, "[the
Armenians] innocent today might be guilty tomorrow," and that he
"accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months
than Abdulhamid accomplished in 30 years."
There were hundreds of other eyewitness accounts by foreign
missionaries, travelers and diplomats. Several of these witnesses were
Germans – then allied with the Ottomans – and some were Americans,
who were neutral with the Turks. All reports confirm a systematic
plan of annihilation under the guise of deportation. Today, people
only need to look for a few of the numerous mass graves scattered
across eastern Turkey to see with their own eyes the still-present
remnants of these mass killings.
By the end of the war in 1918, Turkish tribunals in Constantinople
convicted hundreds of the leaders of the Young Turk regime – including
in absentia top leaders Talaat, Enver and Djemal Pasha due to their
post-war flight to Berlin – confirming the disaster was a "result of
a premeditated decision taken by a central body . and based on oral
and written orders issued by that body." However, the rise to power
of Mustafa Kemal Atatuerk, the ultra-nationalist founder of modern
Turkey, caused these trials to fade into obscurity as to present an
image of Turkish unity and independence from the post-war agreements
imposed by the Allied powers. Declaring the post-war treaty requiring
the war crime trials as treasonous, Atatuerk secured the return of
remaining captives awaiting trial through an exchange of prisoners
of war with Britain, several of whom became high-ranking officials
in the new government.
At the time, the term "genocide" had yet to be created: Raphael Lemkin,
a Polish Jew driven by the atrocities committed against the Armenians,
then embarked on his mission to find the word sufficient to describe
the absolute horror of what had occurred.
"I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times,"
he said in a 1949 CBS interview. "First to the Armenians – then after
the Armenians, Hitler took action." The UN Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted in 1951, far too
late to try the original perpetrators.
Denial of the occurrences of World War I has led to serious
consequences for humanity. In World War II, the Third Reich modeled the
Holocaust after what was observed in Turkey, with Hitler declaring a
week prior to invading Poland, "The aim of war is . to annihilate the
enemy physically. It is by this means that we shall obtain the vital
living space that we need. Who today still speaks of the massacre of
the Armenians?"
Modern Turkey has shown itself unable to implement basic human rights
protections by continually attempting to destroy Kurdish heritage and
culture. Freedom of speech is explicitly banned, with Article 305 of
the Penal Code defining acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide as an
"anti-national plot." Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk openly spoke of
the atrocities and was subjected to a hate campaign and prosecution
in 2005.
Turkish historian Taner Akcam in 1978 was sentenced to 10 years in
prison for his attempts to contextualize the genocide within Turkish
history.
International relations are also crippled, with most European Union
states demanding massive human rights reforms and genocide recognition
as a precondition for membership. Turkey to this day refuses to
establish diplomatic ties with the Republic of Armenia, despite
President Robert Kocharian’s offer to "establish normal relations"
without any pre-conditions, as only then can the two governments
jointly try to resolve historical issues. The offer still remains
ignored. Until Turkey acknowledges history, it well be impossible
for it to reconcile with the rest of Europe.
Modern day deniers of genocide are also complicit in the act itself.
According to Emory University Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies Deborah Lipstadt, denial, the final stage of genocide,
"strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and
rehabilitate the perpetrators."
Rather than blindly ignore all factual evidence and scholarly
discussion, I invite genocide deniers to examine the vast body of
evidence themselves.
Visit the local Holocaust Museum for a small view of the continued
horrors that occur as a result of society’s collective inability to
recognize crimes against humanity – not just in the Ottoman Empire,
but throughout the world.
Mhair Dekmezian is a Brown College junior.