Armenian diaspora: One of the world’s most dispersed peoples fight for
their suffering to be recognised
The Guardian (London)
March 6, 2010 Saturday
Ian Black Middle East editor
As he planned the extermination of Europe’s Jews before the second
world war, Adolf Hitler is famously said to have asked: "Who speaks
today of the annihilation of Armenians?"
The answer is that the Armenians themselves have lobbied hard to
ensure that their suffering in Turkey during the first world war is
never forgotten.
Thursday’s vote by a US congressional committee, recognising the 1915
killings of 1.5m Armenians as genocide, is a vivid example of those
efforts -and how much the issue can stir up trouble.
Armenians are one of the world’s most dispersed peoples, with a
diaspora of about 8 million living outside Armenia, once part of the
Soviet Union and now home to 3 million people.
The world’s largest Armenian communities are in Russia, France, Iran,
the US and Georgia. Smaller numbers live in Syria, Lebanon and
Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, as well as in Cyprus, Greece,
Argentina and Canada. Turkey still has 40,000 to 70,000 Armenians and
there are 140,000 in disputed Nagorno-Karabakh where they form a
majority.
Political campaigning on the genocide issue is concentrated in Paris
and Washington. Armenian activists in Europe have tried to block
Turkey’s EU membership application, recently warning of the threat of
the country’s "neo-Ottoman, imperial and Islamic shift".
In 2006 France’s national assembly outlawed denial of the Armenian
genocide – mirroring penalties in countries for denial of the Nazi
Holocaust.
But Turkey prefers to deal with the present rather than admit to past
crimes. Last year it normalised relations with Armenia, hoping to use
that to counter the influence of the Armenian-American lobby.
"Armenia does not make normalisation conditional on Turkey’s formal
recognition as genocide of the 1915 forced relocation and massacres of
Armenians under the Ottoman Empire," commented the International
Crisis Group. "But it must take into account the views of Armenians
scattered throughout the global diaspora, which . . . has long had
hardline representatives."
Canadian film director Atom Egoyan, whose parents were
Armenian-Egyptians, once said: "You can talk about Holocaust denial,
but it’s marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the
Armenian genocide is how it has been forgotten."