MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS OF THE REPUBLIC OF ARMENIA
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PRESS AND INFORMATION DEPARTMENT
Government House # 2, Republic Square
Yerevan 0010, Republic of Armenia
Telephone: +37410. 544041 ext 202
Fax: +37410. 562543
Email: [email protected]
INFORM ATION FOR JOURNALISTS
26-04-2007
Minister Oskanian Speaks On Genocide Remembrance in Brussels
The Royal Conservatory of Belgium was full of diplomats, journalists and
students on April 25 as Foreign Minister Vartan Oskanian highlighted a
Commemorative Evening under the auspices of the Armenian Embassy in
Brussels.
The Minister¹s talk, entitled ³Remembering a Past, Forging a Future,²
addressed the nature and purpose of remembering. He spoke about Armenia¹s
readiness for normal relations with Turkey, even as the Genocide and its
impact are remembered and recognized. [For the full text of the Minister¹s
remarks, see below.]
Belgian Senator Roelants du Vivier, head of the Belgian Senate¹s Committee
on Foreign Affairs, spoke about the imperative of acknowledging both to
honor genocide victims and to prevent future atrocities. He related how,
during a recent visit to Yerevan, in the Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial
museum, he was moved by the display of Hitler¹s words. The Belgian Senator
had, in 1987, joined in the first Genocide recognition resolution passed by
the European Parliament.
Noted violinist Sergei Khachatrian, who in 2005 had won Belgium¹a Queen
Elisabeth Prize, performed pieces by Bach, Komitas and Franck. He, with
Lusine Khachatrian on piano, received the audience¹s deep appreciation.
Speech by H. E. Vartan Oskanian
Minister of Foreign Affairs
At a Commemorative Evening
Conservatoire Royal
Brussels, April 25, 2007
Thank you Mr. du Vivier, for sharing this evening with us and conveying your
message from the halls of Brussels. And thank you Sergey and Lusine. Sergey
graciously accepted my invitation to join us this evening, because I knew
well that Sergey¹s ³message² will resonate in this hall and stay with us
as the context for an evening of commemoration.
This is an evening of commemoration, much like those that are being held in
nearly every major city around the world this week. It¹s a day of
remembrance much like those that have been held every year for the last half
century.
But over these years, and especially since independence, the nature and the
purpose of our remembering have changed.
I would like to speak with you today not just about our past, but about our
future. I want to set the record straight about what we want for our people,
our country and our neighborhood. And I want to do that here in this
European capital that is the symbol of unity and not divisiveness.
Today, I want to talk about what we remember, how we remember and how the
reasons for remembering have evolved, just as our communities, our country
and the world around us have evolved. We have had a difficult, painful past
that we will continue to remember and honor. But let me be clear: we don¹t
want to live in the past. We want to reconcile with the past as we forge a
future.
In Aleppo, Syria, where I grew up, remembering rituals consisted mainly of
gathering to hear the stories of someone who had suffered things we could
not really imagine. Aleppo was the end of the road for those who were
deported and marched thru the deserts. This is where those with no hope of
returning to their homes set up ramshackle, flimsy refugee camps, trying to
cope with enormous loss, with wounds that refused to heal.
I think back now at our naïve efforts to lessen the grief of the survivors
by encouraging them to forget and not to speak of their experiences. We did
not understand that their lives and outlooks, memories and experiences were
forever traumatized. That is how they lived, how they raised their children,
how they interacted with the societies and countries in which they found
refuge. This we learned years later, as we read about Holocaust survivors
trying to cope.
Only when solitary memories were transformed into formal, community-wide
tributes, did the survivors begin to feel that their own individual
histories of horror had significance beyond the personal. Remembering became
a shared activity, a commemoration. Decades later, programs such as
Remembering the Cambodian Genocide, and the Remembering Rwanda Project
served the same purpose.
For Armenians, commemorations became the outlet for the disbelief and
outrage at how this historical event deeply affected our way of being in the
world, our sense of personal and collective identity. This was a new
generation, no longer victims, a generation that had come to understand that
what had been done had been done not to 1.5 million individual Armenians who
comprised 2/3 of a nation, but to an entire people who had been massacred,
uprooted, deported and whose way of life, whose culture and history, had
forever been altered. And all this, by government decree.
For a long time, we memorialized these events by ourselves. We were left
alone because there were two versions of history  the official and the
alleged. The acknowledged and the denied. The Ottoman Empire that fell was
succeeded by a Republic with an immaculate, almost divine, self-image. Such
murderous acts and their tolerance could not fit within this
self-definition. Therefore, a new history was invented in which these acts
never happened. The crimes were never committed.
The records of their own military tribunals were ignored, the eyewitness
reports of missionaries and diplomats were disputed.
Our history became the Oalleged¹ truth. Their history was the official
truth. And since the official truth had the backing of the entire state
apparatus, ours became the forgotten genocide.
Occasionally, some would raise their voices against forgetting, and for
condemnation. In 1987, Mr. du Villier and others introduced a resolution at
the European Parliament, calling the events of 1915, Genocide. Since then, a
host of countries have joined us in recognition and in commemoration.
These commemorations are very critical in the face of growing threat of
genocide in the world today from Bosnia to Rwanda to Darfur.
Commemoration is a way of countering the distortion of history, countering
the subversion of truth by power.
Commemoration is the victory of truth over expediency.
Commemoration is a condemnation of the violence.
Commemoration is a call to responsibility, and therefore to prevention.
Commemoration is an acknowledgement of the past, and even the present, but
not an obstacle to the future.
And herein lies the irony  I don¹t want to say impasse — in our
relations today, with Turkey.
We cannot build a future alone. But neither can we build a future together
with a neighbor that is disingenuous about the past, our common past.
This Monday¹s International Herald Tribune carried an ad that also ran in
many major newspapers around the world. It is a perfect distillation of
Turkey¹s willful blindness to historical and political processes
surrounding it. Just as it succeeded in creating a new history for itself,
it wants the world and us to dismiss all other histories not in line with
its own.
Turkey calls for Armenians to agree to a historical commission to study the
genocide. Not because none have ever convened, but because Turkey does not
like their conclusions! Reputable institutions such as the International
Assn of Genocide Scholars, the International Center for Transitional Justice
have seriously studied these historic events, independent of political
pressures, and independently arrived at the conclusion that the events of
1915 constituted Genocide.
Does Turkey want to go shopping for yet another commission, hoping for
different results? It has gagged its writers and historians with a criminal
code that punishes free speech. What does it expect these historians to
study? And with a closed border between our two countries, how does it
expect these historians will meet to explore this topic? This is why we
wonder about the sincerity and usefulness of the historical commission idea.
Despite these obvious obstacles to serious scholarly exchange, we have
agreed to an intergovernmental commission that can discuss everything, so
long as there are open borders between our two countries. If Turkey needs
discussion, we are ready to cooperate. But we don¹t want discussion for
discussion¹s sake; we don¹t want discussion of the past to replace
today¹s
vital political processes that are essential for us, for Turkey, for the
region. Yes, we want to explore and understand our common past, together.
But we don¹t want that past to be the sole link between our peoples and our
countries. We don¹t want that past to condition the future.
We, the victims of Genocide, have not made Turkey¹s recognition of that act
conditional for our present or future relations. Turkey, however, wants
Armenians in and out of Armenia to renounce our past, to understand their
denial of our past, as a condition for moving forward. Who is trapped in the
past?
I welcome the words of a Turkish intellectual who has said, I am neither
guilty nor responsible for what was done 90 years ago. But I feel
responsible for what can be done now.
I, too, believe that we must distinguish between the Ottoman Empire and
today¹s government of Turkey. But I must say that although that is possible
to do when speaking of the events of 1915, it becomes increasingly difficult
to do when speaking about the denial of the Turkish state today. As Elie
Wiesel said, the denial of genocide is the continuation of genocide So, how
do we distinguish between the two states, if the ideology that is put forth
and defended is the same?. This policy of denial is both intellectually and
morally bankrupt. And it is costing us all time. The later they get around
to making a distinction between their stand and that of their predecessors,
the harder it will be to dissociate the two regimes in people¹s minds.
It is absurd that 92 years later, Turkey can say, in public, that the
Armenian allegations of genocide have never been historically or legally
substantiated.
Dear Friends,
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
today? What kind of open and honest discussion is possible with a government
that loudly and proudly announces its renovation of the medieval Armenian
jewel of a church, Akhtamar in Lake Van, while it carefully, consistently,
removes every reference to its Armenianness from all literature and signs?
What is Turkey afraid of?
It is a political reality that Armenia is not a security threat to Turkey.
It is a political reality that both Turkey and Armenia exist today in the
international community with their current borders.
Today, as the Foreign Minister of the Republic of Armenia, as the grandson
of genocide survivors, I can only say that Armenia and Turkey are neighbors
who will remain neighbors. We share a border. We can only move forward
together.
There is no national history in a vacuum. It can neither be created nor
transcended in a vacuum. For France and Germany, England and France, Poland
and Germany, in order to transcend their histories of conflict, they had to
transcend the past together to transform their future. That, too, can only
be done together.
Not always does history give mankind a second chance. In this neighborhood,
with our neighbors, we have a second chance. We can make history, again, by
transcending boundaries and opening the last closed border in Europe and
moving forward, together.
Europe  the premise of Europe and the legacy of Europe  is the distinct
promise of our age. Europe is where one takes from the past whatever is
necessary to move forward. Europe is where former enemies and adversaries
can dismiss and condemn actions, policies and processes, but not peoples.
Instead, people in Europe move from remorse to reconciliation, and embrace
the future. This is precisely what we want to do in our region. Thank you.
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