ON ARMENIAN GENOCIDE, GO AHEAD AND OFFEND TURKEY
Assyrian International News Agency AINA
April 16 2015
By Peter Balakian
Los Angeles Times
Posted 2015-04-16 02:43 GMT
A friend once sent me a Christmas card with a handwritten greeting:
“May your genocide be recognized this holiday season.” It still makes
me laugh out loud, because it captures something about the absurd
and profound impasse between Turkey and the Armenian people.
One hundred years ago this month, the Ottoman Empire began carrying
out a systematic plan to exterminate its minority Armenian population.
Between 1 million and 1.5 million people were killed or died of
starvation. Yet the Turkish government won’t admit this historical
fact. It spends a fortune annually to stop scholarly and cultural
events about the genocide, even going so far as to pay former Sen.
Richard Gephardt’s Gephardt Group more than $1 million each year
to lobby against congressional resolutions on the genocide. Turkey
has threatened several times, most recently in 2007, to close Turkish
missile bases to U.S. airplanes if Congress passes a simple non-binding
statement acknowledging the events of 1915 as genocide.
And its tactics work; the resolution, which had the votes to pass,
was killed at the State Department’s behest.
The United States isn’t the only target of this censorship effort. At
their government’s prompting, Turkish diasporan organizations in 2009
mounted a campaign to stop the Toronto school board from including
the Armenian genocide in a human rights curriculum. In 2010, Ankara
succeeded in pressuring the Rwandan government to scrap a presentation
on the Armenian genocide at a panel on genocide at the United Nations.
In 2012, the Turkish government was successful in demanding that
the British government order the Tate Gallery to remove the word
“genocide” from the wall text of an Arshile Gorky exhibit.
Substitute “Jews” for “Armenians” and “German government” for “Turkish
government” and you can imagine the ensuing moral outrage. The Armenian
community has been waiting a century for the international community
to stand up to Turkey. It shouldn’t have to wait any longer.
The word “recognition” hovers over the history of the Armenian
genocide like a hawk. It’s a defining word that embodies an ethical
basis for accountability after a human rights crime. The issue of
recognition is not an abstraction, or a rhetorical game. The “R-word”
is about responsibility, social justice and repair in the aftermath
of one of the most extensive human rights crimes of the modern era:
the crime that was instrumental in Raphael Lemkin’s coining the very
word and concept of genocide.
When Lemkin was asked in February 1949, just after the U.N. Genocide
Convention was ratified, why he became interested in genocide, he
answered, “Because it happened so many times. It happened to the
Armenians. And after — the Armenians got a very rough deal at the
Versailles conference because the criminals who were found guilty
weren’t punished.” Lemkin was not only noting the importance of the
event but also pointing out that it’s ethically harmful to commit
such a crime with impunity.
Denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide because it strives
to kill the memory of the event; denial seeks to demonize the victims
and rehabilitate the perpetrators; denial creates what the psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton has called “a morally counterfeit universe for the
survivors and their legacy.”
In December, after North Korea organized a hacking operation against
Sony Pictures to stop the release of “The Interview,” President Obama
spoke out against the use of threats by foreign powers to inhibit
free speech in the United States.
“We cannot have a society where some dictator someplace can start
imposing censorship here in the United States,” he said, “because
if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical
movie, imagine what they’ll do when they see a documentary that they
don’t like, or news reports that they don’t like — or even worse,
imagine if producers or distributors or others start engaging in
self-censorship because they don’t want to offend the sensibilities
of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be offended.”
Obama has gone further than any other president in confronting Turkish
leaders by asking them to deal with the events of 1915 honestly,
as he did in 2009 when he visited Turkey. But he should heed his own
wisdom and stop self-censoring.
The president understands clearly that what happened to the
Armenians is genocide. In 2008, before his election, he stated,
“My firmly held conviction [is] that the Armenian genocide is not
an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view, but rather a
widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical
evidence.” The president should follow the example of Pope Francis
who, in acknowledging the historical significance of the Armenian
genocide on Sunday, refused to be intimidated by Turkish government
bullying and cajoling.
The Turkish government, for its part, should stop interfering with
cultural events and intellectual freedom in democratic societies. And
it should listen to many of its own ethically committed citizens who
work hard for truth in Turkey. The Turkish scholar and journalist
Cengiz Aktar spoke for many of his citizens when he wrote, “The
Armenian genocide is the Great Catastrophe of Anatolia, and the mother
of all taboos in this land. Its curse will continue to haunt us as long
as we fail to talk about, recognize, understand and reckon with it.”
Removing the curse won’t require magic. All that’s necessary is
moral leadership.
From: A. Papazian