COMMENTARY: IF IGNORED, GENOCIDE ENABLED
By Dan K. Thomasson
2010/03/ 26 | 18:03
world
There was a time in this country when mothers ordered their children
to clean their plates by reminding them of the "poor starving
Armenians." So thoroughly inculcated in my recollection was this
admonition that when I first met a person of Armenian descent,
I blurted that he couldn’t be Armenian because he wasn’t starving.
The origin of this was, of course, the elimination of an estimated
1.5 million Armenians, or half of that nation’s population, by the
Turks in the waning years of the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and
1919 by massacre, death marches and starvation. It was a tragedy
only exceeded in modern history by the Holocaust and the murder of 2
million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge and it resulted in the coining
of the word "genocide."
The Republic of Turkey has refused to take any responsibility for this
policy of destruction despite the fact that history and at least 20
other nations have recognized it as such.
Many Armenians who survived the devastation made it to America and
became among this nation’s most productive citizens. The noted author
William Saroyan and the financier George Mardikian, whose biography,
"The Song of America," became a paean to his adopted country and
a bible of inspiration to tens and thousands of immigrants, are
among them.
So the resistance of the Turkish government to recognition of what
the rest of the world knows is about to get a jolt from the American
descendents of those who expired nearly 100 years ago. It will be in
the form of a major new museum smack dab in the middle of Washington,
14th Street just above Pennsylvania Avenue where millions of tourists
will be tastefully but firmly educated about man’s inhumanity to man.
Down the street is the Holocaust Museum.
The Armenian Genocide Museum of America will be established in a
limestone building that once housed the National Bank of Washington
run by the United Mine Workers of America.
Coupled in proximity with the Holocaust Memorial and in a location
so close to the White House and Capitol Hill, it will be one of the
more significant punctuations to the ideal of human rights for which
this country always has stood if not always adhered to in its own
dealings with minorities.
Perhaps if the rest of the world had paid attention to the implications
of Armenia, later genocides would not have occurred. It’s time the
Turks owned up.