VARTAN OSKANIAN CLOSING ADDRESS AT ULTIMATE CRIME, ULTIMATE CHALLENGE CONFERENCE
Armenpress
YEREVAN, APRIL 22, ARMENPRESS: On behalf of the National Commission,
I wish to publicly express our sincere appreciation to everyone who has
participated in this conference. I want to thank the Zoryan Institute
for their professional and organizational counsel. I especially wish
to thank the scholars, writers, professors – all with serious work
and time commitments – who traveled to Armenia to be here with us at
this time, this year. The symbolism is not lost on anyone. We are
here 90 years later calling for recognition and prevention so that
in 2015 we can gather together only for remembrance.
Over these two days, each of our speakers has found various eloquent
ways of saying the following:
Genocide is the ultimate crime against humanity. It is the extreme
abuse of power. It is a betrayal of the responsibility of custody
by the very people entrusted with insuring the security of their
own population. The human rights challenge facing all of us is to
be able to recognize that a government has the capacity for such
immorality and inhumanity, and that particular governments have indeed
committed genocide. There is no national history in a vacuum. No nation
can escape its history entirely, it can only transcend it. But to
transcend, one must confront history, both internally and in relation
to others. And those others, too, must also jointly confront theirs.
In other words, Armenia and Turkey must confront their histories.
Individually and together. Armenia believes Turkey must put excuses
aside and enter into normal relations with a neighbor that is neither
going to go away nor forget its history.
We are not the only neighbors in the world who have had, and who
continue to have, a troubled relationship. Troubled memories, a
tortured past, recriminations, unsettled accounts and the enduring
wounds of victimhood, plague the national consciousness of peoples on
many borders. In our case, some distance between our two countries
might have allowed us to put distance between our past and our
future. But we have no such luxury. There is no space, no cushion,
between us. We live right here, close by, reminded at all times of
the great loss that we incurred. Yet it is because we live right next
door that we must be willing and prepared to transcend the past.
But we can only do so if the demons of the past have been
rejected by our neighbor, too. You notice, I didn’t say ‘by
the perpetrator.’ Armenians are able to distinguish between the
perpetrators and today’s government of Turkey. Two-thirds of the
Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire were massacred or deported
between 1915 and 1918. Today’s Republic of Turkey must be able to
condemn these acts for what they are. The evidence is overwhelming,
clear, unavoidable.
Armenians were one of the largest minorities of the Ottoman
Empire. Where did they go? Is it possible that all our grandmothers
and grandfathers colluded and created stories? Where are the
descendants of the Armenians who built the hundreds of churches and
monasteries whose ruins still stand in Turkey? Is US Ambassador Henry
Morgenthau’s account of the atrocities that he witnessed a lie? Why
was a military tribunal convened at the end of World War I, and why did
it find Ottoman Turkish leaders guilty of ordering the mass murder of
Armenians? How does one explain the thousands and thousands of pages
in the official records of a dozen countries documenting the plans
to exterminate the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire? If
it wasn’t genocide and they were simply ‘war time deportations’ of
so-called rebellious Armenian populations near the eastern border with
the Russian Empire, as Turkish apologists sometimes claim, why were
the homes of Armenians in the western cities looted and burned? Why
were the Armenians of the seacoast towns of Smyrna and Constantinople
deported? Boatloads of people were dumped in the sea – is that what
deportation is all about? Could rounding up scores of intellectuals
on a single night and killing them be anything but premeditation?
When a government plans to do away with its own population to solve a
political problem – that’s genocide. At the turn of the 20th century,
the Ottoman Empire was shrinking, it was losing its hold over its
subjects along the periphery of the empire. For fear that in Anatolia,
too, the Armenian minority would agitate for greater rights and invite
foreign powers to exert pressure, the Ottoman leadership used the cover
of World War I to attempt to wipe out the Armenians, beginning with
the leadership, following with the men, and finally deporting women,
children and the elderly.
This fits neatly into the definition of genocide: The perpetrator did
cause a multitude of deaths; these persons did belong to a particular
national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The perpetrator intended
to and in fact did destroy, in whole or in part, that national,
ethnical, racial or religious group, and this destruction followed a
consistent pattern. In fact, US Ambassador Henry Morgenthau called
what he witnessed, the Murder of a Nation. Others called it ‘race
murder’. They did so because there was no term Genocide yet. When the
word was finally coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin, it was done with
clear reference to genocidal acts prior to that date, the Armenian
Genocide included. There is no doubt that if the word genocide had
existed in 1915, every one of the hundreds of articles in the NY times
or elsewhere, would have used the term. Look how frequently the word
‘genocide’ is used today to describe events and cases where the scale
and depth of the atrocities are incomparable.
Armenians continue to live with the memory of suffering unrelieved
by strong condemnation and unequivocal recognition.
On the contrary, Turkey spends untold amounts to deny, dismiss, distort
history. Not just money, either. Today, their continued insistence on
rejecting and rewriting history costs them credibility and time. One
does not knock on Europe’s door by blindfolding historians and gagging
writers. Especially when the subject at hand is one as grave and
consequential as genocide. The Turkish parliament’s recent call to
revisit, review, revise the documents gathered by Arnold Toynbee and
James Bryce for the British Blue Book series brought the revisionist
efforts to a new low. Turkey has moved on from trying to rewrite its
own history to thinking it can convince others to rewrite theirs. This
only frustrates the process, exacerbates the emotions and refuels the
fury. Worse, such cynical moves embolden those who do not believe in
reconciliation, understanding its great risks and costs.
Elie Wiesel has said that denial of genocide is the final stage of
genocide because it “strives to shape history in order to demonize
the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.” That is what Turkey –
not the people but the government – is trying to do. Today’s Turks do
not bear the guilt of the perpetrators, unless they choose to defend
and identify with them. Armenians and Turks, together with the rest
of the modern world, can reject the actions and denounce the crimes
of the Ottoman Empire.
Turkey must also de-link history from politics. The excuses about
what might follow genocide recognition are just that – excuses. Why
are they surprised that Ararat is on our state seal? Armenians have
lived on these lands for thousands of years, and Armenia’s borders
have changed a great deal over the millennia. That’s a historical
fact. The Armenian kingdom stretched from sea to sea. That’s a
historical fact. The last change came at the beginning of the 20th
century. That, too, is a historical fact. By the provisions of the
Treaty of Sevres, the territory of Armenia was ten times what it is
today. That is a historical fact as is the fact that Turkey defied
the treaty which had been signed by its own government, and by force,
created a new de facto situation, which led to the signing of another
agreement, without the same signatories. This new agreement delineated,
more or less, today’s borders. That too is historical fact.
But it is a political reality that both Turkey and Armenia exist today
in the international community with their current borders. It is a
political reality that we are neighbors and we will live alongside
each other. It is a political reality that Armenia is not a security
threat to Turkey. And finally, it is a reality that it is today’s
Armenia that calls for the establishment of diplomatic relations with
today’s Turkey.
For these reasons, anything beyond genocide recognition has not been
and is not on Armenia’s foreign policy agenda.
Yesterday I was being interviewed by a Turkish television crew. I was
surprised at the amount of misinformation that they had. They were
surprised that the Armenian-Turkish border is open from the Armenian
side, that it is Turkey that keeps it closed. They were surprised that
Armenia has no pre-conditions for establishing diplomatic relations
with Turkey. They were highly surprised that even the recognition of
Genocide is not a precondition. They were also surprised that the
Kars Treaty has not been denounced or revoked by the Government of
Armenia. Now I’m surprised that official Turkish propaganda has taken
over and blurred the views of many.
There’s another misunderstanding. By default, people assume that we’re
opposed to Turkey’s membership in the EU. They’re wrong on this one
too. Of course we would like to see Turkey become an EU member. Of
course we’d like to see that Turkey meets all European standards. We’d
like to see that Turkey resemble Belgium, Italy and others. We’d like
to see Turkey become an EU member so that our borders will be open,
so that our compatriots and Turkish scholars will speak more freely
about Genocide. We would like to see Turkey as a member so that our
churches and properties will be protected and restored.
Armenia believes that, at exactly this time, when Turkey is having
to reconsider human and civil rights, freedom of expression and
religion, it must be encouraged, and persuaded, to acknowledge its
past. Such encouragement and persuasion must come from both outside –
and more importantly, as Hrant Dink stressed yesterday – from within
Turkish society.
Turkish writers and politicians have begun that difficult process of
introspection and study. Some are doing so publicly and with great
transparency. We can only assume that Europe will expect that a Turkey
which is serious about EU membership, which is indeed able to juggle
the complex relationships that EU membership entails, will have to
come to terms with its past.
In this context, it is essential that the international community
doesn’t bend the rules, doesn’t turn a blind eye, doesn’t lower its
standards, but instead consistently extends its hand, its example,
its own history of transcending, in order for Armenians and Turks,
Europeans all, to move on to making new history.