RFE/RL – Genocide Scholar Sees ‘Virtual Commemorations’ As New Way Of Reaching Out For Armenians

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.”