Be honest — it was genocide

There is no other way to describe what happened to the Armenians.

The Fresno Bee
Editorial Section
04/24/07

When is a genocide not a genocide? When nationalist fervor trumps history.
When geopolitics trumps justice. When blindness to the truth trumps wisdom.

A genocide is not a genocide if you’re the president of the United States,
and the subject is Turkey and the mass slayings of some 1.5 million
Armenians in the period during and just after World War I. A genocide is not
a genocide when you’re the U.S. State Department and you’re worried about
ruffling the feathers of a close military and political ally — an ally so
dedicated to U.S. interests that it closed its borders to the passage of
U.S. combat troops in the invasion of Iraq.

The rest of the world has no trouble recognizing a genocide. That’s why
millions of people, Armenians and non-Armenians alike, will mark the 92nd
anniversary of the onset of the genocide today. It was on this day in 1915
that the Ottoman Turks began the systematic roundup of Armenian
intellectuals and other leaders. Around 250 were subsequently murdered.

Over the next eight years, Armenian were expelled from their ancient
homeland and driven into exile. Many perished from the hardships of that
forced expulsion. Many more were shot, hanged and otherwise butchered. It
was planned and executed with a determination and precision not seen again
until Nazi Germany refined the techniques of genocide and carried out the
even bloodier Holocaust during World War II.

But what happened in Turkey nine decades ago wasn’t genocide, according to
President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates. The administration — like administrations of both parties
in the past — is trying to block efforts in Congress to force official U.S.
government recognition of the fact that genocide did, indeed, take place
against Armenians. They may not be able to do so; congressional support for
recognition is higher than it’s ever been.

Time is running out on those who refuse to recognize what happened to the
Armenians. Turkey and the United States are increasingly isolated in their
revisionist position. Turkey, which desperately wishes to join the European
Union, is finding its path to membership blocked by its intransigence on the
genocide issue. The world knows the facts of the Armenian genocide, and the
world demands recognition of those facts. Now is the time.

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