Should Security Concerns or Moral Leadership Win Out in Genocide Debate?
FOCUS & FORUM
Daily Journal (Los Angeles’ daily legal publication)
Nov. 09, 2007
FORUM COLUMN
By John A. Hall
The Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives, led by
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, promised to bring to a floor vote a
resolution stating that the suffering of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire
between 1915 and 1917 constituted genocide. However, in the face of
warnings from the White House and others that such a resolution would
seriously damage U.S.-Turkish relations and imperil America’s military
effort in Iraq, support for the bill has crumbled. This is unfortunate.
The collapse of political support for the bill marks a victory of
perceived expediency over genuine moral leadership.
The term "genocide" was first coined in 1943 by the Polish-Jewish legal
scholar Raphael Lemkin in response to the barbarous events in
Nazi-occupied Europe. Lemkin’s notion that genocide should be considered
an offense under international law formed part of the legal foundation
for the Nuremberg Trials, and indeed the specific term was used in Count
3 of the indictment of the 24 Nazi leaders.
Subsequently, Lemkin successfully campaigned for the universal adoption
of the crime of genocide into international law, and on Dec. 9, 1948,
the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 260 (III)A, the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Article 2 of the Genocide Convention famously defines genocide as "any
of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing
members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group."
The case for the horrific abuse of Armenians in 1915 falling under the
rubric of "genocide" would seem to be, on its face, quite
straightforward. The historical record – Turkish denials notwithstanding
– appears overwhelming. In 1915, hundreds of thousands – most probably
in excess of 1 million – ethnic Armenians died as a direct result of
deportation policies instituted by the Ottoman Empire. They were abused,
maltreated, exposed to vile degradation, murdered and faced starvation
because of their membership in a minority ethnic group.
The Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany and Austria during the First
World War, found itself at war with Russia in 1915. Ottoman armies
suffered a series of military reversals, and the Ottoman authorities
blamed the domestic Armenian population for tacitly and even overtly
supporting the Russians. The Armenians, it was claimed, posed an
internal threat, an unacceptable risk to the national security of the
empire.
Beginning in May 1915, Turkish military forces were utilized to
implement a brutal government policy of forced migration. Ethnic
Armenians were driven from their homes and villages in the eastern
provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and forced to march hundreds of miles
through appalling conditions. Turkish soldiers robbed, raped and
murdered the deportees along the way, leaving the survivors to die
without food or water in the desert and mountains. The Armenians died by
the tens of thousands, their corpses strewn along the route, until they
finally arrived at inhospitable resettlement camps in present-day Syria,
where many more died of neglect.
Not surprisingly, this widely studied event is claimed by many scholars
to have been the first example of genocide in the 20th century. Indeed,
Lemkin himself focused quite specifically on the atrocities unleashed
against the Armenians in articulating his theory of the "Crime of
Barbarity," which he presented to the Legal Council of the League of
Nations in 1933, and which was the legal and philosophical forerunner of
his subsequent "Crime of Genocide."
It seems highly probable that were the events of 1915 to take place
today, they would quickly be decried as violating fundamental concepts
of international law. Modern-day Turkey, the successor-state to the
failed Ottoman Empire, has faced repeated pressure to accept the events
of 1915 as genocide. It has consistently refused to do so. Indeed it has
persecuted those who have done so, such as the Nobel Prize-winning
novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was charged with "insulting Turkishness" for
asserting that Turks did not care that 1 million Armenians perished.
More than 20 countries have now formally recognized the events of
1915-1917 as genocide. Why then has the effort to do so in the United
States failed? Why has congressional support for the recent Armenian
Resolution so spectacularly and suddenly collapsed? Why has what was
expected to have been a comparatively straightforward moral statement
about a horrific historical event suddenly and precipitously crashed and
burned?
What is clear is that the sponsors of the bill failed to fully
understand the political and emotional minefield they were entering. It
seems that they naively saw the bill as little more than an opportunity
to assert a clear moral position on a rather distant and unambiguous
historical event. In so doing, of course, they could address a central
concern of a highly vocal and highly motivated Armenian-American
constituency. In contrast, the Turkish-American political voice is
typically subdued.
What was perhaps missing from their calculation was the extent of the
fury such a bill would ignite in Turkey. This is surprising, given the
fact that Turkey had reacted with extreme anger when France recently
passed a similar piece of legislation defining the events of 1915 as
genocide.
Perhaps it was assumed that Turkey would react with more moderation when
responding to the United States. If so, the sponsors of the bill were
mistaken and/or arrogant. A wide cross-section of Turks saw the bill as
deeply and viscerally insulting. For many Turks, the story of 1915 is
not a narrative of genocide or any intentional policy of abuse, but
rather one of administrative miscommunication, governmental inefficiency
and poor logistics, in the midst of a brutal war and the ruinous
collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
For the United States to now move to declare that the Turks committed
genocide is seen as another example of American hubris and insensitivity
in its dealings with Muslims. Given America’s own historical record –
the slaughter and forced deportation of Native Americans to barren
reservations, as well as the abuses heaped on Japanese-Americans during
forced resettlement in World War II, for example – the U.S. position is
seen by many as being deeply hypocritical.
The Turkish government found itself faced with an outpouring of
anti-American sentiment domestically as a result of the Armenian
genocide bill, which played into the hands of Islamic extremists who
have long criticized Ankara’s cooperation with the United States.
Ankara perhaps had little choice but to react in a bellicose fashion to
what was popularly regarded as American arrogance and provocation, and
immediately threatened to curtail the future use of Turkey as a staging
ground for America’s war effort in Iraq. Faced with a suddenly
uncooperative ally, U.S. military planners scrambled to come up with
alternatives for their military supply chain.
Turkey also began to threaten military intervention in pursuit of
Kurdish terrorists into neighboring Iraq. Iraq is of course acknowledged
to be under the effective protection of the United States. By
threatening to send its armed forces into the territory of its sovereign
neighbor, Turkey is making clear the scope of the potential consequences
flowing from a worsening relationship with the United States.
And so, quite suddenly, support for the Armenian genocide bill
evaporated. Faced with the realpolitik consequences of the position they
were advocating, the supporters of the bill fled for the hills. How
appalling. If the slaughter of the Armenians in 1915 was genocide – and
there appears good reason to believe that it was – then saying so now
appears eminently appropriate.
To condemn the events of 1915 as genocide was the correct decision. To
have begun that process without having fully anticipated the
consequences appears at best naïve, at worst downright incompetent.
Backing down now under pressure from Turkey appears craven and lacking
in moral leadership. When dealing with genocide, we need to resist easy
but ultimately weak-willed moral grandstanding, and instead be prepared
to take a real stand.
How can we act against the genocide in Darfur, or elsewhere, if we lack
the will to take a stand against genocide wherever and whenever it
occurs? Shouldn’t we want that to be the position of the United States –
a nation that stands for human rights, human dignity and justice?
John A. Hall is an associate professor of law and director of the Center
for Global Trade & Development at Chapman University School of Law in
Orange.