WHY THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE MATTERS
The Huffington Post
hy-the-armenian-genocide_b_496995.html
March 12 2010
You may ask yourself why the Armenian Genocide currently matters,
or more accurately, why Turkey is so resolute against it being
recognized as such. One would think after almost a hundred years,
an official apology for killing or displacing 2 million Armenians
would be a welcome and long overdue occasion for Turkey to make peace
with Armenia. But as we’ve seen, Turkey has threatened "diplomatic
consequences" if Obama doesn’t suppress a congressional resolution
that would officially use the label "genocide" for the incident, even
going so far as to withdraw their U.S. Ambassador because of it. In
fact, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said the issue was a
matter of "honor" for his country and no less than Turkish President
Abdullah Gul said the following:
"I declare such a decision that was taken with political concerns in
mind to be an injustice to history and to the science of history.
Turkey will not be responsible for the negative results that this
event may lead to."
Before we examine this further, it would be helpful to define the
term "genocide" so that we know what we’re talking about. In 1948,
the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this
convention 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; [and] forcibly
transferring children of the group to another group."
Under these terms, the widespread massacres and deportations of
Armenians in 1915- which included the use of 25 major concentration
camps, forced marches, mass burnings, drownings, and gassings- were
in every way a genocide by the Turks against the Armenians. So why is
Turkey so against calling it as such, let alone apologizing? After all,
Germany has made great steps to publicly acknowledge and profusely
apologize for the Jewish Holocaust, even paying reparations, making
holocaust denial and the display of symbols of Nazism a criminal
offense and establishing a National Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Berlin. But Turkey? They won’t even allow the US to label the Armenian
Genocide as such or acknowledge it in any way. Here is why: land.
Take a look at a map of pre-Genocide Armenia here, here and here. What
you will notice is that a huge chunk of what is now Turkey was
then considered Armenia. If the 1915 Turkish actions were indeed
recognized as a genocide, current day Armenia could potentially
petition for the return of its land. Note that this may even include
the area known as Cilicia, a separate but ethnically connected entity
bordering the Mediterranean Sea that dates back to the Kingdom of
Cilician Armenia in the early part of the second Millenium. These
historically grounded lands could rightfully be considered Armenian if
they could establish that they were unlawfully taken from them via the
Genocide. The evidence is there and so is the history. Armenia itself
was officially named way back in 512 BC when it was annexed to Persia,
while Cilicia was established as a principality it 1078. After years
of struggle under Turkish, Kurdish and Mongol rule, the Ottoman Empire
ruled Armenia from 1453-1829, after which the Russian Empire ruled
through the rest of the 19th century. After the Genocide and WWI,
what’s left of Armenia was annexed by Bolshevist Russia and became
part of the Soviet Union from 1922-1991, after which Armenia declared
its independence. But let’s back up for a moment for a glimpse at
what happened during WWI.
In 1913, three so-called Young Turks took over the Turkish government
via a coup with a goal of uniting all of the Turkic peoples in
the region and creating a new Turkish empire called Turan with one
language and one religion. The wanted to expand their borders eastward
but standing in their way was historic Armenia. Hence, the Armenian
Genocide. In December of 1920, the Treaty of Alexandropol was signed
between the Democratic Republic of Armenia and the Grand National
Assembly of Turkey, thereby ending the Turkish-Armenian War while
forcing Armenia to cede over 50% of it’s land to Turkey. In seven
years, the Turkish government had ethnically cleansed and took over
most of Armenia. Armenia was granted formal international recognition
with the 1920 signing of the Treaty of Sevres and with the help of
President Woodrow Wilson, arranged for the return of a portion of
their historic homeland. However, Turkey soon elected Mustafa Kemal,
an extreme nationalist who refused to honor the treaty and set about
re-occupying those lands, leaving current day Armenia as a far smaller
portion of its former self.
Interestingly (and not all unexpected) Turkey is predominantly Muslim
and Armenia is predominantly Christian, dating back to AD 40 when
the Armenian Church was purportedly founded by two of Jesus’ disciples.
Currently, over 93% of Armenian Christians belong to the Armenian
Apostolic Church and they rightly claim that the Armenian Genocide
was a religious and ethnic cleansing. It was also a purging of a
culture that was in many ways more advanced and educated than their
Turkish neighbors. Here’s a passage from the Armenian Genocide page
on historyplace.com that’s illuminating:
There were also big cultural differences between Armenians and Turks.
The Armenians had always been one of the best educated communities
within the old Turkish empire. Armenians were the professionals in
society, the businessmen, lawyers, doctors and skilled craftsmen. And
they were more open to new scientific, political and social ideas
from the West (Europe and America). Children of wealthy Armenians
went to Paris, Geneva or even to America to complete their education.
By contrast, the majority of Turks were illiterate peasant farmers and
small shop keepers. Leaders of the Ottoman Empire had traditionally
placed little value on education and not a single institute of higher
learning could be found within their old empire. The various autocratic
and despotic rulers throughout the empire’s history had valued loyalty
and blind obedience above all. Their uneducated subjects had never
heard of democracy or liberalism and thus had no inclination toward
political reform. But this was not the case with the better educated
Armenians who sought political and social reforms that would improve
life for themselves and Turkey’s other minorities.
The Young Turks decided to glorify the virtues of simple Turkish
peasantry at the expense of the Armenians in order to capture peasant
loyalty. They exploited the religious, cultural, economic and political
differences between Turks and Armenians so that the average Turk came
to regard Armenians as strangers among them.
Even before the Young Turks took over, there was a spike in Islamic
fundamentalism and Christian Armenians were branded as infidels. In
1909, tens of thousands of Armenians from hundreds of villages in
Cilicia were massacred, setting the stage for the Genocide years
later. Reading an account of these atrocities is not for the faint
of heart and yet, we must not shield our eyes from the dark realities
of history, lest we want to see them repeated. As much as we wish to
see these barbaric behaviors relegated to the distant past, one need
only look to places like Darfur, Bosnia and Rwanda to see modern day
humans at their worst.
The histories of Armenia and Turkey are surely intertwined and yet,
this Genocide remains a black stain on both their psyches. Judging
from Turkeys recalcitrance to discuss or acknowledge it, that stain
may never go away. But that doesn’t mean it will ever be forgotten,
no matter how much Turkey wishes it would fade into history. Though
they would like to take advantage of the worlds collective amnesia,
the internet has made it impossible to forget and erase this so-called
"injustice to history". Here is a telling quote from Adolph Hitler,
speaking to his generals before invading Poland in 1939:
"Thus for the time being I have sent to the East only my ‘Death’s
Head Units’ with the orders to kill without pity or mercy all men,
women, and children of Polish race or language. Only in such a way
will we win the vital space that we need. Who still talks nowadays
about the Armenians?"
We all do, Mr. Hitler, and long after your genocidal dreams have
faded, long after the last survivors of those inflicted generations
have passed, they will not be forgotten. Armenian-American author
William Saroyan put it best:
"I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this
small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars
have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose
literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no
longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is
again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you
can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have
neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See
if they will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if
the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor,
twenty years after, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead,
see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from
mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of
Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them."