ANCA: JUSTICE THAT PUNISHES THE PERPETRATOR, MAKES THE VICTIM WHOLE, AND PREVENTS FUTURE CRIMES
15:39, 24 Dec 2014
It’s particularly vicious to hear people preaching that Armenians
should only be working for change from within Turkey, according to
Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America
(ANCA).
“We once had this chance, and, despite great challenges and even
greater risks, played a courageous and consequential role in reforms —
until 1915, when Turkey massacred and exiled us, effectively ending
our ability to press for progress as citizens of that state. It
takes a very cruel or equally calculating heart to lecture the
brutalized victims of a crime about their failure to rehabilitate
their attackers,” Aram Hamparian said, according to Asbarez.
“Given the vast post-genocide power asymmetry between the Turkish state
and the surviving Armenian citizens of Turkey — or between Turkey
and landlocked, partitioned, and blockaded Armenia for that matter —
arguing that the Armenian Genocide should be a matter between Turks
and Armenians is just a harsh way of saying leave Turkey alone to
consolidate the fruits of its crime,” he said.
Turkey’s preferred “lion and lamb” formulation is all the more
one-sided by virtue of the added power Turkey secured through genocide
and the incalculable harm caused to the Armenian nation by this still
unpunished crime, according to Hamparian.
“This approach, of course, stands at odds to the basic conceptions
of justice held by nearly every culture on earth. Genocide may be
the worst of all crimes, one with serious geopolitical implications,
but it remains a crime. And the answer to crime is justice. Justice
that punishes the perpetrator, makes the victim whole, and prevents
future crimes,” he said.
“It is to our credit that decades of diasporan advocacy for justice
— undertaken in countries around the world in the wake of our near
annihilation — has started to break down walls of denial in Turkey
and sparked a small but growing domestic movement for a truthful and
just resolution of the Armenian Genocide,” he added.
“Having “forced the Spring,” we are now — with increased resolve —
waging our struggle on two mutually reinforcing fronts: one in Turkey,
one in the rest of the world,” Hamparian concluded.