FOR TOO LONG, ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DENIED
Manoug Manougian
St Petersburg Times
April 23 2010
FL
When Hitler was planning his swift and brutal takeover of Poland
and the murder of Jews, for just being Jews, to his critics he said,
"Who, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Sunday, April 11, 2010, was Remembrance Day for Jews. Of the 12 million
who were exterminated under Hitler’s Nazi regime, the lives of about 6
million innocent Jews were extinguished in gas chambers. The cries of
the Holocaust survivors for "Never Again" seem to have fallen on deaf
ears, and crimes against humanity continue unabated. From Darfur to
Iraq and around the globe, innocent people continue to suffer at the
hands of dictators, warmongers and ideologues. When will it end? When
will again and again become never again?
Today, Armenians around the world reflect on the events of the early
part of the last century when about a million and a half innocent
Armenians were massacred. The genocide represents the largest number
of Christians in history targeted and massacred because of their
religion and ethnicity.
When the Young Turks assumed power, their policy to rid Turkey of its
Christian population intensified, and in 1915 the carnage escalated.
Armenian men of all ages were murdered, young and old women were raped,
priests and their parishioners were herded into churches and burned
alive, hundreds were drowned, and hundreds of thousands were forced
to leave their homes and march through the forbidding Syrian Desert
with no food or water. In the words of Talaat Pasha, the Turkish
minister of interior at the time, "We are ensuring their eternal rest."
In the face of overwhelming evidence, Turkey refuses to validate a
historical fact that took place under the Young Turk regime. Yet,
on July 5, 1919, a Turkish Military Tribunal, with a unanimous vote,
found Talaat Pasha, Minister of War Enver Effendi, Minister of the
Navy Djemal Effendi and Minister of Education Dr. Nazim, guilty of the
massacres of the Armenian population in Turkey. Why then the denial?
Newspapers of the era, including the New York Times, as well as
Western diplomats were reporting on the massacres that were being
committed by the Young Turk regime. The renowned British historian
Arnold J. Toynbee wrote about the massacres in a book titled: The
Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation. Why then the denial?
During Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, the Department of State instructed
Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Turkey, to deliver a message
warning the Young Turk regime that it would be held liable for
crimes against humanity for its treatment of the Armenians. Theodore
Roosevelt, in a letter to Cleveland H. Dodge, Wilson’s adviser, dated
May 11, 1918, stated, "The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime
of the war and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it." Why
then the denial?
Toward the end of World War I, Talaat Pasha fled Turkey and sought
asylum in Germany. An Armenian survivor, Soghomon Tehlirian, caught
up with Talaat, and on a street in Berlin he shot him dead. Soghomon
was apprehended, tried and found guilty of murder. Soon thereafter, a
Jewish law student in Poland, Raphael Lemkin, saw the headlines about
Soghomon and asked his professor: "Is it a crime to kill a man, but
it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million?" His
professor answered: "There is no law against mass murder."
Thus began Raphael Lemkin’s relentless journey to create the word
"genocide," and help establish the United Nations’ Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention
in part states: "genocide means any of the following acts committed
with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group as such: (a) Killing members of the group,
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. …"
On March 4, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a
resolution that calls on President Barack Obama to officially recognize
the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish government reacted immediately by
recalling its ambassador in protest and warned that if the resolution
is adopted, U.S.-Turkish relations would be adversely affected. Once
again, as with presidents before him, Obama has decided that political
expediency trumps human decency. Even worse, it is mind-boggling that,
of all nations in the world, the government of Israel, for economic
and other reasons, does not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide.
Today, scores of nations — and 43 U.S. states — recognize the
Armenian massacres and call it by its rightful name, genocide. It is
time for the government of Turkey to stop the denial, join the world
community to fight crimes against humanity, and promote peaceful
coexistence for all the peoples of the globe.
Manoug Manougian is co-author and associate producer of the documentary
The Genocide Factor, shown on PBS, the History Channel and the BBC. He
teaches a course on the history of genocide in the Honors College at
the University of South Florida. He is also a professor of mathematics
at USF.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
