The Unrequited Past
By Raffi Hovannisian
Moscow Times, Russia
April 21 2005
The Armenian genocide and its final act turn 90 this week. The lack of
recognition, redemption, and closure of this defining watershed for
Armenians and Turks alike has been driven by power politics and the
hedging of history, aggressive revisionism and a strategic incapacity
of the perpetrators, the victims and the generations that followed
them to call it like it is and move beyond.
The lessons, risks and dangers flowing from the genocide and its
contemporary continuation are all the more poignant because the
Armenian case was not only the physical murder of most of the people
making up the nation, but also the violent interruption of their way
of life and the forcible expropriation of the homeland they had lived
in for thousands of years. This pivotal distinction constitutes a
primary source — different from that of the Holocaust — for the
denialist demeanor of the Ottoman Empire’s successor regime, the
quest for justice and personal integrity of the battered and scattered
Armenian survivors, and the vicissitudes of international diplomacy.
The legal, ethical, educational, material and territorial components
of this landmark catastrophe have proved too complex a challenge for
any party or power to meet.
It is the truly unique underpinning of the Armenian experience that
accounts in large measure for why a historical, world-documented
nation-killing remains in limbo to this day and continues to serve
as an instrument for polemics, politics and a variety of “national
interests.”
Absence of a meeting of modern Turkish and Armenian hearts and minds
means a history that is off limits but ever present, a frontier that
is undelimited but closed, and a relationship — or lack thereof —
that is hostage to the heritage of homeland genocide. It is this very
relationship, between Turkey and Armenia and their constituencies,
that is the key to creating a brave new region where the interests of
all players converge to form a single page of security and development.
And it is this relationship, if honestly and efficiently forged,
that would become the foundation for the strengthening of respective
sovereignties, for cooperation in matters of education, culture and
historical preservation, for an enduring peace in Nagorny Karabakh,
Nakhichevan and the broader neighborhood, for open roads, skies
and seas, and for the guaranteed choice of a rightful return of all
refugees and their progeny to their places of origin. As it stands,
however, an unrequited past still doubles as an unsettled present,
leaving unchecked and unpredictable the many future impediments to
peace, stability and reconciliation.
How long can this commingling of tenses go on? How can all concerned
frame a process for a resolution of substance?
Can the heirs to the Turkish perpetration translate self-interest
into seeking atonement, and can the descendants of the great Armenian
dispossession agree to move on? Will we, or our children, ever see
the light, let alone reflect back from the heights, of a post-genocide
world?
Turkey’s and Armenia’s initially separate paths to European integration
might provide them one, perhaps penultimate opportunity, against
their own odds, to assume history, draw the line, and embrace a
promising epoch as sound, if unlikely, partners in regional and
global affairs. New benchmarks and new leaders and a new discourse
are in order.
Raffi Hovannisian, formerly Armenia’s foreign minister, is founding
director of the Armenian Center for National and International Studies
in Yerevan. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.