ARMENIANS COMMEMORATE 1915 GENOCIDE -DESPITE TURKISH CENSORSHIP
Submitted by Bill Weinberg
World War 4 Report, NY
April 25 2007
April 24 marks the 92nd anniversary of the start of the Armenian
genocide, and Armenians worldwide commemorated the "First Genocide
of the 20th Century" with solemn religious and civil ceremonies.
However, little more than a week before the anniversary, the United
Nations dismantled an exhibit on the Rwandan genocide and postponed
its scheduled opening by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon-in response
to objections from the Turkish mission to the exhibit’s references
to the Armenian genocide, which Turkey denies happened.
The panels of graphics, photos and statements were assembled in
the UN lobby on April 5 by the British-based Aegis Trust. The trust
campaigns for the prevention of genocide and runs a center in Kigali,
the Rwandan capital, memorializing the 500,000 victims of the massacres
there in 1994.
Hours after the show was installed, a Turkish diplomat noticed
references to the Armenians in a section entitled "What is genocide?"
and raised protests. The passage said that "following World War I,
during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey," Raphael
Lemkin, a Polish lawyer credited with coining the word genocide,
"urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as
international crimes." James Smith, the chief executive of Aegis,
said he was told by the UN April 7 the text would have to be struck
or the exhibit would be closed down.
Armenian ambassador Armen Martirosyan told the New York Times he
sought out Kiyotaka Akasaka, UN under-secretary general for public
information, and thought he had reached an agreement to let the
show go forward by deleting the words "in Turkey." But Akasaka said:
"That was his suggestion, and I agreed only to take it into account
in finding the final wording." Turkish ambassador Baki Ilkin said:
"We just expressed our discomfort over the text’s making references to
the Armenian issue and drawing parallels with the genocide in Rwanda."
Smith said he was "very disappointed because this was supposed to
talk about the lessons drawn from Rwanda and point up that what is
happening in Darfur is the cost of inaction." (NYT, April 10 via the
Armenian-American website MezunUSA)
Historical material realted to the Armenian Genocide and a list of
global commemorations is online at GenocideEvents.com. They write:
During WWI, The Young Turk, political faction of the Ottoman Empire,
sought the creation of a new Turkish state… Those promoting the
ideology called "Pan Turkism" (creating a homogenous Turkish state)
now saw its Armenian minority population as an obstacle to the
realization of that goal.
On April 24, 1915, several hundred Armenian community leaders and
intellectuals in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) were arrested,
sent east, and put to death. In May, after mass deportations had
already begun, Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha ordered their
deportation into the Syrian Desert.
The adult and teenage males were separated from the deportation
caravans and killed under the direction of Young Turk functionaries.
Women and children were driven for months over mountains and desert,
often raped, tortured, and mutilated. Deprived of food and water and
often stripped of clothing, they fell by the hundreds & thousands
along the routes to the desert. Ultimately, more than half the
Armenian population, 1,500,000 people were annihilated. In this
manner the Armenian people were eliminated from their homeland of
several millennia.
On April 29, 1915, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. United States Ambassador to
the Ottoman Empire, had stated that "I am confident that the whole
history of human race contains no such terrible episode as this. The
great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant
when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915."
In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted,
the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community
as a crime against humanity.
(Westender, Brisbance, Australia, April 24)
Tens of thousands of people silently marched in Yerevan, Armenia’s
capital, in the annual remembrance of the estimated 1.5 million
victims of the Armenian genocide. The official commemoration of the
anniversary began with a prayer service at the genocide memorial
on Yerevan’s Tsitsernakabert Hill. It was led by the head of the
Armenian Apostolic Church, Garegin II, and attended by President
Robert Kocharian and other top government officials.
In a written address to the nation, Kocharian evoked the increasingly
successful Armenian campaign for international recognition of the
genocide. "The international community has realized that genocide
is a crime directed against not only a particular people but the
entire humanity," he said. "Denial and cover-up of that crime is no
less dangerous than its preparation and perpetration." Nearly two
dozen countries, among them France, Canada and Russia, have formally
recognized the Armenian massacres as the first genocide of the 20th
century.
Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian said genocide recognition will remain
on the Armenian government’s foreign policy agenda, but also called
for normalizing relations with Tirkeu. "We remember our past, but
Armenia is moving forward, seeking to establish normal relations
with all of its neighbors," he said. Sarkisian voiced solidarity with
dissident Turkish intellectuals who publicly recognize the genocide,
and recalled the recent assassination of Turkish-Armenian editor
Hrant Dink who also challenged the official Turkish revisionism.
Said Hrant Markarian of the governing Armenian Revolutionary Federation
(Dashnaktsutyun): "A state can not live by denying its past. Turkey
must recognize the Armenian genocide as soon as possible for the sake
of Turkey’s future."
Dashnaktsutyun branches in the worldwide Armenian diaspora have for
years lobbied the parliaments and governments of Western states to
officially recognize the Armenian genocide. The nationalist party
controls one of the two main Armenian lobbies in Washington seeking
to push a genocide resolution through the US House of Representatives
this year.
While praising Armenian efforts at genocide recognition, Raffi
Hovannisian, a US-born opposition leader, sounded a note of caution.
"I believe that we must not excessively concentrate on or be very
buoyed this spate of recognitions because the Armenian genocide and the
loss of our people’s homeland is a fact affirmed by many historians,"
he said. (Armenia Liberty, April 24)