A GENOCIDE NOT TO BE DENIED
Boston Globe, MA
Aug 3 2007
THE ANTI-DEFAMATION League is caught in a controversy not of its
making. Still, as an organization concerned about human rights, it
ought to acknowledge the genocide against the Armenian people during
World War I, and criticize Turkish attempts to repress the memory of
this historical reality.
Some members of Watertown’s Armenian-American community want the
league, a predominantly Jewish group that sponsors a No Place for
Hate campaign in that neighborhood, to condemn the genocide or end its
sponsorship of the campaign. Armenian-Americans are seeking recognition
of the genocide in Congress, and the ADL would seem like a natural
ally. Its No Place for Hate program has been successful nationally
at improving relations across ethnic, racial, and religious lines.
Armenian-Americans are frustrated that Turkey has failed to acknowledge
the 1915-1916 genocide orchestrated by leaders of the Ottoman Empire,
predecessor to modern Turkey. "An end must be put to their existence,"
wrote Talaat Pasha, the Ottoman interior minister, in 1915. In his
1918 memoir, Henry Morgenthau, the US ambassador, wrote that "The
whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as
this." Perhaps 1.5 million people died.
The slaughter of the Armenians would be followed a generation later
by the Holocaust, a crime against humanity with a greater death toll.
There is some evidence that Hitler saw the genocide as a precedent
for his atrocities. This is disputed by those who falsely dismiss
the Armenian slaughter as exaggerated. In any case, the historical
record needs to be affirmed.
The matter is complicated by ADL support for Israel, which needs to
keep on good terms with Turkey, one of its few friends in the Islamic
world. But the ADL is not an arm of Israel, and whatever it does will
not affect Turkish foreign policy.
Moreover, Turkey’s genocide denial is being used as one of the pretexts
to keep it out of the European Union. It would be in Turkey’s interest
to acknowledge the crime, apologize, and get this controversy out of
the way.
"Facing History and Ourselves," the nonprofit educational organization,
pioneered study of the Holocaust in the public schools 30 years
ago. Its curriculum includes sections on the mistreatment of Chinese
immigrants in the United States, the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s,
and — with particular emphasis — the Armenian genocide.
An outline of this section concludes: "Following the First World War,
an absence of political and moral will dashed any hopes for justice."
The bloodshed in the Darfur region of Sudan is the first test of
whether genocide can be stopped in this century. Failure to acknowledge
past atrocities will encourage would-be perpetrators to believe they
can get away with them, just as the Ottoman Empire did.