Providence Journal, 4/28/08

Tribute paid to Armenian ‘martyrs’

01:00 AM EDT on Monday, April 28, 2008

By Richard C. Dujardin

Journal Religion Writer

PROVIDENCE – With the Armenian Martyrs Memorial at the North Burial
Ground serving as a backdrop, several hundred people, including clergy
and politicians, assembled under a gray sky yesterday to once again pay
tribute to the 1.5 million Armenian "martyrs" who suffered and died in
what has long been called the Armenian genocide.

The prayer service, coming as it did within three days of the 93rd
anniversary of when it is believed the Turkish Ottoman Empire began its
years-long effort to drive out and eliminate the Armenian minority from
their ancestral homeland, was a bittersweet one for participants who had
been following the effort to get Congress to adopt a resolution that
would have denounced the decades-old atrocities.

After getting early support from congressional leaders, the resolution
was put on hold last October in the face of opposition from the Turkish
government, which angrily denies there was such a genocide and which
showed it was ready to use the resolution as a pretext to make
incursions into northern Iraq.

U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.. one of the Senate sponsors for the
resolution, said he personally believes that the sooner that the United
States takes a stand recognizing the genocide, the better it will be for
everyone.

"The Turks have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to put
their stamp on the history of that time," Reed said in an interview. "I
think the sooner we get beyond that and the sooner we recognize it as a
historical reality, we can have a more productive relationship with the
Turks."

Yesterday, however, community leaders said they also had much to be
happy about. Last week, they learned that not only is teaching about the
genocide to be part of the new statewide social studies curriculum but a
handbook, A Case Study of the First Genocide of the 20th Century, is now
complete and should be ready for use for all of the state’s social
studies teachers by this fall.

Robert Petrucci, a social studies teacher in East Greenwich, who four
years ago became the first high school teacher in Rhode Island to create
a course on genocides of the 20th century, said that when he began the
course he asked his students to think of the "worst crime that could
happen to your family and how you would feel if no matter who you told,
no one would recognize that the crime happened in the way you knew it
did."

At the time, he said, you would have to look hard to find even a
sentence acknowledging the atrocities inflicted on the Armenians, he
said, though that’s now changing.

Guest speaker Henry Theriault, a professor of philosophy at Worcester
State College and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Genocide Studies and
Prevention, said the fierce opposition displayed during the last six
months by the Turkish government shows the degree to which hatred of
Armenians still exists in Turkey and why it is not just an argument
about overcoming denial. "There is work to do in changing anti-Armenian
attitudes in Turkey that have led to Armenians being denigrated in
Turkey even today," he said.

The professor said that he was thinking of all those who endured the
rain and cold weather to sit through a series of speeches, and he
appreciated it very much. "But I was also thinking this is a little bit
of a reminder to us how much those Armenians who died and those who
lived through the genocide, walking through the desert in 110 degrees
stripped naked and with burned flesh would have welcomed this little
rain, this little coolness in their lives."

rdujardi@projo.com