BOOK: CHILDREN OF ARMENIA

Foreign Affairs
January 2010 – February 2010

Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics

BYLINE: Robert Legvold
SECTION: Pg. 151 Vol. 89 No. 1

Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the Century-Long
Struggle for Justice. By Michael Bobelian. Simon & Schuster, 2009, 320
pp. $26.00. Much has been written about the deportation and slaughter
of the Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915, but much less has been
written about what followed in the years after — which is odd given
that the event is so deeply seared into the memories of Armenians
everywhere and remains an immense burden on modern Armenian-Turkish
relations. At every turn, Bobelian argues, from the post-World War I
peace to the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass genocide resolutions
in the 1990s, the Armenian cause has fallen victim to broken Western
promises and been sacrificed to the priorities of others. He carefully
unwinds three entwined threads, starting with the hopes for an
independent homeland that were dissolved when Armenia was absorbed
into Soviet Russia. The second thread emerges from the 1920s onward,
when Ataturk’s Turkey made denial of the episode an element of the
country’s emergent nationalism. The third thread is the quest to have
the events of 1915 recognized as genocide, efforts that have been
thwarted by U.S. administrations concerned with protecting relations
with a NATO ally.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress