Colgate Maroon News (subscription), NY
Oct 14 2005
Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris: The Horrors of Armenian Genocide
By Elsie Denton
Published: Friday, October 14, 2005
In the early years of World War I, another tragedy was taking place
far more quietly to the east. Between 1914 and 1916 over a million
Armenians were rounded up by Turkish officials and systematically
“deported” – in most cases this amounted to murder. Modern-day Turkey
currently disputes that the Armenian tragedy should be called
genocide, but there is little doubt in the international community
that the mass killings of Armenians were in fact systematic genocide.
In his book, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s
Response, Colgate’s own Professor of English and University Studies,
Peter Balakian, brings to life both the horror of the Armenian
genocide and America’s humanitarian response to the crisis. Time and
again he uses powerful eyewitness accounts of the genocide, which,
though on a smaller scale, were no less horrendous than the
Holocaust.
On the governmental level, the response to this international tragedy
was meager. Most politicians, Woodrow Wilson included, found their
hands tied by diplomatic complexities. This does not mean that there
was no response to the crisis. As Balakian makes very clear over the
course of his book, the Armenian genocide was America’s first
international human-rights effort.
Thousands of people around the country on many levels of society
poured their hearts out to the Armenian people. They raised money for
relief work and food supplies and helped find homes for the thousands
of Armenians fleeing their homeland. “The Armenian genocide is
important,” said Balakian, “not only because it is one of the
earliest examples of modern genocide, but also because it is
America’s first international humanitarian aid movement. Americans
should know about that part of their history.”
The Burning Tigris recently gained recognition when it won the
prestigious Raphael Lemkin Prize, which is given out biannually to
the best scholarly book on the subject of genocide, mass killings and
gross human-rights violations. Despite the prestige conferred by the
prize, Balakian did not want it to overshadow the real issue: the
reality of terrible and continuing genocide throughout the world.
“Genocide is a real problem today and it is not going away. Nobody is
safe,” he said.
Genocides are not dark phantoms locked firmly in our turbulent past.
They are real and happening right now in many corners of the world
from the Balkans, Rwanda, and East Tambour to the current massacres
in the Darfur region of Sudan. “Genocide is a modern problem,” says
Balakian, “because before the modern era and the evolution of the
nation state, governments didn’t have the centralized bureaucracy or
the technology to systematically target and exterminate ethnic
minorities. It isn’t just that killing occurs that distinguishes
modern genocide, but how fast it occurs.”
The problem of genocide gets surprisingly little governmental
recognition. Many times the issue is simply ignored by those in
power, while people suffer and die. This can often be attributed to
two main causes: lack of recognition and information about the
existence of a genocide and sticky diplomatic maneuvering by the
governments involved.
For instance, the reality of the Armenian genocide is recognized by
all Western powers except for the US and UK. These two countries have
withheld official recognition of the massacres so that they could
maintain their military bases in Turkey.
Even if governments were at all prepared to take action against
genocide, there still remains the difficulty of realizing that
genocide is taking place. A government engaged in the massacre of its
people is unlikely to report its activities to the international
community. Also, many areas in the world are so torn by war and
strife that it is difficult to distinguish coordinated mass killings
from the background level of death and violence. An effective system
of detection needs to be created.
This system would need to be an impartial third party. Balakian
suggests the creation of “an international organization charged with
detection, prevention and intervention in instances of gross
violations of human rights. Not only must this type of organization
exist to prevent future massacres, but it must also have the power to
enforce its edicts in the form of an International Human Rights Army
not beholden to any one world power. Though Balakian maintained that
“we can’t reform or transform the human race,” we can still install
regulations and checks on their capacity to kill one another.
Such a coherent international effort to confront the issue of
genocide is long overdue, particularly with major powers like the US
and UK stalling on the issue. “The Bush administration has
continually refused to take action on what is happening in Darfur,
and refused to embrace the process of the international courts at the
Hague,” said Balakian. “It is then up to ordinary citizens to make a
difference, to take the power into their own hands and to fight for
human rights.”
Last year, a group of students at Swarthmore College did just that.
They started the Genocide Intervention fund to raise money to stop
the slaughter of innocent people in Darfur. The group has been
immensely successful. So far they have raised $250,000, which they
are preparing to donate to the African Union peacekeepers. Their
group may have started as a small group of Jewish and Armenian
students whose pasts were deeply affected by genocide, but it has
grown far larger than that. There are now over 100 colleges
participating in the fund and more are getting involved all the time.
Students interested in becoming involved in the Genocide Intervention
Fund can contact Balakian via email at [email protected] or
to go talk to him during his office hours. More Information is
avaibale at
Balakian teaches a course called Modern Genocide. It is about being
educated about what is going on and doing something about it. “The
study of history enables us to behave more ethically in the present.
That is why teaching about genocide is so valuable,” said Balakian.