Armenian historians have penned a letter to US President Joe Biden, urging him to use the word “genocide” in his April 24th address on the 106th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. The letter has been signed by the Union of Historians of Armenia, the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences, Yerevan State University’s Faculty of History, Yerevan State University’s Institute of Armenian Studies and the Armenian State Pedagogical University’s Faculty of History. The letter reads:
Honorable Mr. President,
This application addressed to you by the historians of Armenia does not seek to prove the obvious fact of the Armenian Genocide once again scientifically. Evidence of this has long been known to the entire civilized world, including the scientific community in the United States. The anxiety that gripped us on the eve of April 24 is connected with the persistent denial by Turkey, which serves as a carte blanche for it to commit new genocidal acts.
The latest of those was carried out against the self-determined civilian population of Nagorno-Karabakh through the extensive involvement of international terrorist organizations. The NATO member state, by combining the modern technical means and capabilities of such a powerful security system with the capabilities of terrorist organizations, once again behaved like a serial killer in Nagorno-Karabakh because it did not answer for its previous crimes against humanity and civilization.
Turkey’s actions, which now combine Western technology and medieval methods of assassination by terrorists, remind us once again of the crimes against humanity and civilization in the joint statement of the three Entente powers, Britain, France and Russia, on May 24, 1915. The accusation is still relevant today.
Thus, the grave accusations leveled at Turkey by the Entente countries in 1915 and the United States shortly afterwards in World War I, on the part of its president, the well-known Woodrow Wilson, remain legally vague and suspended, giving rise to new crimes. Turkey, the unpunished perpetrator of the first genocide of the 20th century, the Armenian Genocide, has been cleverly maneuvering between the world’s poles of power for more than a hundred years to evade responsibility and carry out new genocidal acts against not only Armenians but also Greeks, Assyrians, Yezidis, Kurds and Arabs.
Moreover, today the Turkish leadership, which is de facto out of the control of the international community and carried away by the tyrannical wind, like the leaders of Nazi Germany, which was not punished at the time, poses a threat not only to Armenia but to all its neighbors and the entire civilized world.
The Turkish phenomenon of the unpunished criminal is now also manifested in the systematic work of a huge propaganda machine aimed at the destruction of the material and spiritual culture created by its victims and the consistent and systematic falsification of the historical memory of the peoples of the region.
We, the historians of Armenia, have written complete volumes over the years about all the Machiavellian tricks that Turkey is trying to use to mislead the international community and to exclude the word “Genocide” in your April 24 message. The latest batch of such falsifications is connected with the allegedly baseless assertion about the absence of a court decision confirming the Armenian Genocide and the distorted interpretation of the fact that the Genocide Convention was adopted only in 1948.
Meanwhile, the fact of the Armenian Genocide was first recognized by the courts of the Ottoman Empire with their decisions made during 1919-1920. Moreover, although the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Genocide was adopted in 1948, a few years after the Holocaust, its author, Rafael Lemkin, defined the main features of the concept of genocide, including not only the Holocaust but also the Armenian Genocide. Of those, the forcible transfer of children from one group to another under Article 2, Point E of the Convention did not occur during the Jewish Holocaust.
This was one of the peculiarities of the Armenian Genocide, that is, the Convention of December 9, 1948 was created with the inclusion of the crime of the Armenian Genocide, so it cannot but apply to the historical fact that was its basis, just as it applied to the Holocaust, also perpetrated before 1948. The two greatest crimes against humanity and civilization during World War I and World War II, the Armenian Genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, delineated the red lines that defined the 20th century, the red lines guaranteeing peaceful coexistence on planet Earth, which became an integral part of all human consciousness. Protecting them and preventing new genocides depends first and foremost on the will of the United States, the most powerful guarantor of freedom and human rights in the world.
Only by calling this crime by its clear legal name – genocide – will it be possible to possible to overcome the current Munich policy of ignoring and even encouraging Erdogan’s genocidal aspirations by some irresponsible representatives of the international community. All other solutions, instead of confronting the perpetrator and the victim and real reconciliation, will continue to serve to further expand Erdogan’s dangerous ambitions, consistently playing the role of Eastern Hitler, through the systematic concealment of truth and justice.
At this historic moment, not only the innocent victims of the Armenian Genocide, but also the souls of millions of martyrs who have gone through the paths of violence and suffering, pray to see the concept of GENOCIDE clearly in your April 24 annual message.