National Public Radio (NPR)
April 11, 2009 Saturday
SHOW: Weekend Edition Saturday 12:00 PM EST NPR

Genocide is a Matter of Opinion

SCOTT SIMON, host:

When President Obama was beginning his run for office, he said he
believed the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians by Turkey was not
war but genocide, that the American people deserve, quote, "a leader
who speaks truthfully about the Armenian genocide and responds
forcefully to all genocides."

But when President Obama addressed the Turkish parliament this, he
referred only to, quote, "the terrible events of 1915."

I was part of a PBS program called "The Armenian Genocide." There was
no question mark in the title. I think there are times when you have
to say genocide to be accurate about mass murder that tries to
extinguish a whole group. That’s why the slaughter of a million Tutsis
in Rwanda is not called merely mass murder. An American politician who
got to Germany, for example, and called the Holocaust of European Jews
merely killings would be mocked.

Now, I don’t doubt that President Obama is still outraged by the
Armenian genocide. When he ran in the presidential primaries, it was
important to win support from people concerned about human rights, and
perhaps Armenian- Americans in California.

Now, President Obama may feel it is more important for the United
States to win Turkey’s cooperation on a range of issues than it is for
him to be consistent on a controversy that may seem like old
history. But it’s not. Almost every year the Turkish government has
charged reporters and writers, including the Nobel Laureate Orhan
Pamuk, for insulting national identity by referring to the massacre of
1.5 million Armenians as genocide.

Peter Balakian, the preeminent scholar of the genocide and
co-translator of a new widely-lauded family memoir called "Armenian
Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide," told us this week he
admires President Obama for telling Turkish leaders that confronting
the past and restoring good relations with Armenia is important. But
he believes that Turkey’s campaign against acknowledging its genocide
raises questions about their reliability.

Mr. Balakian told us a country that spends millions of dollars a year
in an effort to stop the facts about the Armenian genocide from being
known and that persecutes and prosecutes its own citizens for speaking
truthfully about the extermination of the Armenians is hardly a
government to trust to broker honest and just foreign policy.

In a way, the president’s choice to say killings in front of his host
may just remind us it might be wise to regard what any politician says
as the words of a suitor who coos I love you during courtship. They
mean it at the moment, but any adult should know they may not mean it
in just a few weeks.