BALAKIAN: OBAMA’S APPROACH TO AFFIRMING THE GENOCIDE TAKES THINGS FURTHER THAN ANY OTHER PRESIDENT HAS
By: Peter Balakian
Armenian Weekly
Thu, May 6 2010
Peter Baker’s article, "Obama Marks Genocide Without Saying the Word"
(New York Times, April 24, 2010), like most of the media’s coverage
of President Barack Obama’s April 24 commemoration of the Armenian
Genocide, was based on an imprecise reading of the text of the
statement. Although the president made the effort to avoid offending
Turkey, he found a skillful way of acknowledging the Armenian Genocide
of 1915 by stating, "my view of that history has not changed." That
view, which he expressed as a Senator and presidential candidate,
was that the Armenian Genocide is "a widely documented fact supported
by an overwhelming body of historical evidence." In this year’s
address, Obama also referred to the events of 1915 as "one of the
worst atrocities of the 20th century," and used the Armenian term
Medz Yeghern twice–angering high-level Turkish officials because,
for Armenians, it is synonymous with what Shoah is for the Jews. That
Turkey’s foreign minister, for example, said the president’s statement
was "not right and not acceptable" speaks to how adroitly Obama made
it clear that, as he stated during his candidacy, he continues to
accept as valid the designation "Armenian Genocide."
If at this moment in U.S.-Turkish relations the State Department
does not have the ethical courage to stand up to Turkey on the
Armenian Genocide, Obama has taken a step forward in affirming it as
president. In the future it could not be more appropriate for Obama,
a former law professor, to note that Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar
who created the word "genocide" in 1943, was compelled to pursue the
legal concept of genocide as an international crime on the basis of
what happened to the Armenians in 1915.
It was Lemkin who first called the Turkish intended group destruction
of the Armenians: genocide. Although the Holocaust had a direct and
personal bearing on Lemkin, who lost 49 members of his family to the
Nazis, he explicitly argued that there is no hierarchical value placed
on genocides.
In 1948, he wrote: "In 1916 and thereafter, President Wilson took
a warm interest in the fate of the Armenians, who fell victims of
genocide. More than 1,200,000 men, women, and children were massacred
at that time. The USA State Department wrote, ‘This government cannot
be a tacit part of an international wrong.’ The genocide convention
condemns mass violence as a system of government. This crime did not
start with Hitler and did not end with Hitler."
Following the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by the General Assembly of
the United Nations, in December 1948, Lemkin wrote: "Genocide is
defined in this Convention as the intentional destruction of national,
racial, ethnical, and religious groups. Examples of genocide are the
destruction of the Armenians in the first World War, the destruction
of the Jews in the second World War."
Many of us in the International Association of Genocide Scholars
(IAGS) and the human rights community hope that Obama will openly
use the term Armenian Genocide that Raphael Lemkin first did when he
coined it in the 1940’s.
With Obama, in his way, having taken a significant step toward a full
acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide, there is potential for a
new atmosphere in this country in which Turkish denial and coercion
are no longer tolerated.
Peter Balakian is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of
the Humanities at Colgate University and the author of many books
including The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s
Response, winner of the Raphael Lemkin Prize.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
