Genocide Scholar Sees ‘Virtual Commemorations’ As New Way Of Reaching Out For
Armenians
Ապրիլ 25, 2020
• Harry Tamrazian
Armenia/USA - Henry Therialult, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at
Worcester State University and President of the International Association of
Genocide Scholars, is interviewed by Harry Tamrazian, director of RFE/RL's
Armenian Service, April 23, 2020
Կիսվել
• 24
Կարդալ մեկնաբանությունները
Տպել
A leading U.S. specialist in genocide studies sees this year’s “virtual
commemorations” of the Armenian genocide conditioned by the need to cope with
the spread of a deadly virus as potentially a new additional way for reaching
out for a stronger global recognition in the future.
Henry Theriault, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Worcester
State University and President of the International Association of Genocide
Scholars, spoke to RFE/RL Armenian Service Director Harry Tamrazian on the eve
of April 24, which Armenians in Armenia and around the world mark as an
anniversary of World War I-era killings and deportations of Armenians in Ottoman
Turkey.
Leading international scholars and more than two dozen governments in the world
recognize the killings of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks as the first
genocide of the 20th century. Turkey denies any planned Ottoman government
effort to annihilate Armenians, ascribing the deaths that it claims were on a
much lower scale to the consequences of civil strife, disease, and starvation.
Instead of holding traditional annual mass events commemorating the genocide
victims, including hundreds of thousands of Armenians’ marching towards a
hilltop genocide memorial in Yerevan known as Tsitsernakaberd, Armenia’s
authorities this year limited the remembrance events to ceremonies involving
only officials. Instead, hundreds of thousands of Armenians sent text messages
to a designated telephone number and their names were projected on the slabs of
the memorial on April 24-25 night. The night before, in conditions of the
stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus epidemic, street lights were switched
off and church bells pealed across the country in memory of the victims.
“I don’t think that one year of changing the form of remembrance of the Armenian
genocide will have a very strong impact. Quite the opposite. I think that in
fact it will allow Armenians to recognize and remember the genocide in a
different way from how it was before and that will be a positive change,”
Theriault said.
“And I think also more practically it will help Armenians develop new ways of
out-reaching regarding the Armenian genocide particularly in using electronic
media in ways perhaps the community has not used before around the world, and
that those tools will actually become very useful in the future. The idea of
having very strong virtual commemorations alongside, I hope next year, very
strong in-person commemorations will actually perhaps double the impact of the
commemorations and allow for an even stronger global recognition of the Armenian
genocide,” he added.
Last year the U.S. Congress almost unanimously passed a resolution recognizing
the Armenian Genocide.
Theriault thinks it took the United States decades to adopt the resolution
because of the political and military influence that Turkey had had in
Washington as well as due to “a lack of commitment generally in the United
States and elsewhere around the world for human rights issues.”
“That changed, I think, as the equation in the region in which Turkey sits has
changed. Turkey has become less aligned with the United States in many ways.
[Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has become more of a wild card and has
pursued his own agenda at times with some animosity towards the United States.
So, I think that that widened the gap between the U. S. political and military
interests and Turkish political and military interests which opened the door to
the possibility of this change,” the scholar said.
Theriault believes that Turkey’s denial of the genocide today “does not have the
power that it once did.” “People are not naive about denial anymore and so the
effect of the Turkish government and its allies on efforts to stop passage of
this bill, to deny the genocide in popular and academic circles really has
decreased and so I think with all those factors together the time was right last
year finally for passage of this resolution,” he said.
Theriault believes that Ankara’s denial has two dimensions. “One is the obvious
political and economic interest in preventing recognition because of fear, in my
opinion, of reparations. I think Turkey is very afraid that if it admits the
Armenian genocide, there will be legal consequences particularly around
expropriated Armenian wealth… But I think at the same time – and this has
actually become worse in the last five years – denial of the Armenian genocide
is unfortunately tied very closely to a fragile Turkish national self-image, an
image that often presents Turkey in an impossibly positive light. No country is
free from human rights violations, but Turkey presents itself internationally as
this incredibly untainted and perfect country. And the glaring truth of the
Armenian genocide undercuts this image that it presents and its own self-image,”
he said.
In the scholar’s opinion the annual letters that the Turkish president sends on
April 24 to the Armenian spiritual leader of Istanbul and in which he regrets
the 1915 Armenian deaths but stops short of admitting they were part of a
premeditated and concerted effort of the Ottoman government to exterminate are
“a subtler form of denial.”
“I think it’s impossible to outright deny that Armenians suffered significantly
in the late Ottoman Empire and in the early Turkish national period. I think
that the historical record is so clear, so the best that Turkey can do to try to
look credible in denying the Armenian genocide is to take the kind of line that
Erdogan has taken, which is to try to relativize suffering to try to recognize
without actually going as far as recognizing this as a case of one-sided mass
violence by a government against the minority group that clearly qualifies as
genocide,” he said.“I think Erdogan is a very shrewd politician. He knows that
if he gave a naïve, extreme form of denial it would be apparent to everyone and
he would not be able to have any credibility. So, he adopts a subtler approach…
I still think it’s not very effective, even that subtler approach is not very
effective at this point.
Official Ankara on Friday reacted angrily to the statement by U.S. President
Donald Trump in which the American leader, while not using the word “genocide”,
described the 1915 Armenian killings as “one of the worst mass atrocities of the
20th century.”
Theriault said, however, that as an American he was relieved that “Trump
wouldn’t be the first sitting U.S. president to recognize the Armenian genocide.”
“I think that would carry some baggage for Armenians because his record on human
rights both within the United States and internationally is extremely poor,” the
genocide scholar said. “I think the fact that he does not recognize the Armenian
genocide actually in one strange way is a confirmation of the importance of this
case and the legitimacy of this case.”