THERE’S A WORD FOR IT: GENOCIDE
By Harry Rosenfeld

Albany Times Union, NY
storyID=631926&category=OPINION&newsdate=1 0/21/2007
Oct 21 2007

>From almost the very beginning, the United States has been clear
about what happened to the Armenians living in Turkey during the
First World War. But when Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the
Ottoman Empire, cabled the State Department in 1915 that "a campaign
of race extermination" was being inflicted on the Armenian minority,
there was no epitomizing word to describe the atrocity that was to
take 1.5 million lives.

It wasn’t until a relentless advocate, Raphael Lemkin, invented a
name for it in 1944 — a name now embodied in the official lexicon
of the United Nations and the world’s governments, as well as among
ordinary people. The name Lemkin came up with, and tirelessly lobbied
the United Nations to formally adopt, was genocide.

Lemkin’s extended family had perished in Hitler’s extermination
campaign only a few years earlier, and he hoped that the descriptive
name would help to prevent future ones. It did not, as demonstrated
by what befell Europe’s Jews and arguably Asia’s Cambodians and
Africa’s Darfurians.

>From 1915 onward, the U.S. government in one form or another of
congressional actions or in presidential statements, has cited the fate
of those Armenians who were deported in a death march by the Turks
as dangerous to the war then being waged. Many officials, including
President Ronald Reagan, had no problem with using the word genocide.

However, when a committee of the House of Representatives made the
latest effort in a series for the U.S. "to accurately characterize
the systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians as
genocide," Realpolitik intruded to block the nonbinding resolution
as it had thwarted past efforts.

In an Op-Ed piece in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, accurately wrote that "Turkey
and the U.S. have been friends, partners and allies for decades."

Turkey today indeed is not the country it was under the Ottomans. It is
the most democratic and moderate Muslim country, plays a stabilizing
role in the volatile Middle East and is the supply lifeline for
American troops in Iraq.

All that was being put at risk by the congressional action "that is
acutely offensive and unjust to Turks," the prime minister wrote.

Even today, Turkey officially describes what happened in 1915 as a
tragedy, but one that also took many Turkish lives. The documentation
of the slaughter of the Armenians is voluminous, including some from
Germany, Turkey’s World War I ally. There is little if any support
of the prime minister’s invocation of Turkish suffering at the hands
of a beleaguered Armenian community.

Ninety years later that is where the problem resides and the issue
festers. Even modern Turkey, a much more democratic and less corrupt
regime than in the neighboring Republic of Armenia, is not willing to
acknowledge its own history, although at first there were some limited
efforts to punish some officials held responsible for the genocide.

The House resolution could not have been to make crystal clear the
United States’ position on the Armenian genocide. That has been done
throughout the years. What the stalled resolution more likely was
aimed at was to encourage Turkey to face up to the terrible actions
in its past.

Perhaps even in failure the resolution might serve this purpose,
helping the present rulers to better understand the burden their
country’s past exacts to this day. In contrast, contemporary Germany
has confronted the horrors of its past, acknowledging the murder of
6 million Jews and others, and is the better for it today within its
own borders and among the nations of the world.

There are elements in Turkey working to open their society up to
modify the norms that continue to be a stumbling block in their
country’s efforts to join the European Union. As for the U.S., it has
reciprocated the Turkish commitment to the alliance with encouragement
and support, going to far as to block the congressional resolutions.

This controversy probably will simmer down as others like it have in
days past. But it will reappear time and again, through the efforts
of Armenians scattered around the world who can never forget what
happened to their forbearers and who will find support among people
of conscience.

The resolution stated that it "will help to prevent future
genocides." Experience tells us that it will always take more than
words, but that words can have inherent power and influence, as
witness Lemkin’s coinage.