Author: Mike Maghakian

IN JANUARY, THE Florida Department of Education rejected an Advanced Placement high school course on African American studies. The decision has been widely seen as part of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “anti-woke” efforts to ban schools from covering issues of race, racism, and injustice in U.S. history. Since the uproar, the College Board, the organization that develops AP courses, has issued a revised plan for the course, which omits some of the allegedly controversial content.

This right-wing crusade to censor history is not unprecedented in the United States—the last half-century has seen book burnings and public library battles aplenty. But Americans have not seen a concerted legislative effort to restrict teaching about injustices in the country’s past since the Red Scare of the 1950s. At the university level, DeSantis wants to mandate courses about Western civilization, eliminate faculty tenure, and defund diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

To understand the long-term consequences of this path of repressing a nation’s inglorious past, we can look to another country with collective violence at its origins: Turkey.

For over a century, Turkish leaders have denied the Armenian genocide, the systematic program of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Ottoman Empire that resulted in the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in Anatolia between 1915 and 1921. This period of staggering violence financed the emergence of the Turkish Republic out of the ashes, bones, and estates of the victims.

Today in Turkey, one regularly encounters expressions of anger from the political class over accusations of genocide. Turkish schools are mandated to teach the denial of the Armenian genocide, and in 2017, the Turkish parliament banned its lawmakers from using the term “Armenian genocide,” along with “Kurdistan” and “Kurdish regions.” And, as my recent analysis has shown, foreign archaeologists have been complicit in sanitizing Turkey’s history.

As an archaeologist who has excavated in Armenia and the wider South Caucasus for three decades, I have become increasingly interested in how colleagues who work in Turkey handle the lingering traces of Armenian heritage and its destruction. Archaeologists conducting research in Anatolia work amid ruins, artifacts, and skeletal remains that testify both to centuries of Armenian communities and their violent end.

As research into archaeology’s role in nationalist projects has clearly demonstrated, knowing the past is vital to understanding the present. Typically, nations valorize portions of the past, allowing less savory episodes to recede from popular imagination. As a discipline of memory and memorialization, archaeology can aid this process, providing material evidence for nationalistic narratives. But archaeology can also bear witness to past injustices, uncovering remains that disprove or complicate such narratives.

The Armenian genocide’s 100th anniversary was in 2015. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had already begun taking an increasingly authoritarian turn. At the same time, Turkey had become more active in UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, hosting their annual meeting in 2016. World Heritage has provided a platform that allows Turkey to disseminate state-sponsored narratives about the region’s past—narratives that place considerable pressure on foreign archaeologists.

As I observed these events, I began to wonder how foreign archaeologists working in Turkey were dealing with evidence of the Armenian genocide. My findings, recently published in Current Anthropology, document how over the last four decades, researchers have faced real or perceived state intimidation. Fearing retribution that would end their research programs, archaeologists have deliberately ignored Armenian place names, monuments, and human remains. And as a result, they’ve been coopted as accessories in Turkey’s century-old policy of genocide denial.

I BEGAN MY STUDY by delving through reports written by foreign archaeologists working in Turkey over the last half century. In these publications, I noticed several tactics scholars used to sidestep Armenian heritage. First, the archaeologists conspicuously avoided materials and eras that would raise the question of Armenian presence and force the follow-up question: “Where did they go?”

Next, they emphasized that a handful of undeniable Armenian remnants, such as the Church of the Redeemer at Ani and the Cathedral of the Holy Cross at Aghtamar, were used during the ninth to 11th centuries—a safe remove from the communities destroyed by the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Finally, other enduring Armenian remains were de-ethnicized: referred to not as Armenian but as generically Christian or Byzantine, categories that are treated quite differently in official Turkish discourse.

Given my reading of the published archive, I sought to better understand the interests and experiences of the international archaeologists who created it. Many colleagues politely declined my interview requests; some refused to even answer my initial overtures. Ultimately, I was able to conduct formal interviews with eight anonymous scholars.

                                                                                       A 1966 photograph features the Armenian St. Hovhannes Church of Bagrevand.

What I found was a pervasive climate of fear—fear of retribution, fear of expulsion, fear of permits revoked. This climate led projects to actively discourage any discussion of Armenians, even when researchers encountered remains of murdered individuals or the quiet witness of their living descendants.

This was the case for the most chilling testimony I encountered. An archaeologist recounted excavations in eastern Turkey amid the remnants of an Armenian village whose residents had been massacred and their land and homes expropriated during the genocide. One day, during the dig, a man started praying at the ruins of the Armenian church. It turned out he was the sole Armenian survivor of the village.

“He said he came every year to pay his respect for his ancestors. The bones of whom we excavated up on the top of the site, [each one] with a tiny hole on the back of the head,” the archaeologist explained. The bullet holes observed by the archaeologist clearly marked the skeletal remains as victims of the Armenian genocide.

The archaeologist continued, “Turkish authorities didn’t want to know. [We] didn’t report it. And the bones got chucked.”

This was not a singular occurrence. The archaeologist continued: “The next village where we worked was also an Armenian village. [The bones we found there] got chucked into the Euphrates.”

IN MY ANALYSIS, I concluded that state intimidation has nearly eliminated Armenian heritage from the archaeology of Anatolia. I called this blinkered vision “unseeing” after novelist China Miéville’s dystopian thriller The City and The City, a novel that seems set somewhere along Turkey’s troubled borderlands. By unseeing, I don’t simply mean ignoring parts of the past that are less grand or out of current academic fashion. Unseeing is skilled and deliberate inattention, which occurs when those in power want undesirable facts to disappear.

Like Turkey’s state policy of genocide denial, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the anti-woke right-wing are demanding that people in the U.S. unsee the collective violence and exploitation that lie at the founding of the nation. In Turkey, the goal of unseeing is a sanitized history that legitimates a monoethnic, monotheistic Turkish Republic—not dissimilar from the historical fairy tales that support white supremacy in the U.S.

But as Turkey shows, ignoring the violence of the past ensures that communities can never move beyond it to establish a free and equal future. Fatma Müge Göçek, a Turkish sociologist at the University of Michigan, draws a clear line from Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide to state violence and oppression throughout the following century. That violence extended first to other non-Muslims (that is, Greeks in the 1955 Istanbul Pogrom) and then to non-Turks (including Kurdish communities under attack since 1984).

In the United States, a refusal to acknowledge the suffering of slavery and colonial dispossession not only delays our collective search for a just society, it also opens the possibility of accepting injustice and cruelty as vital to the survival of the nation. Indeed, in Turkey, perpetrators of violence toward religious or ethnic minorities have been hailed as heroes.

Yet, unseeing is a weak form of repression. The archaeologists I interviewed all knew of the collective violence in Turkey’s past, and most were deeply resentful of the censorship required of them. Far from burnishing the nation’s image, unseeing has left archaeologists in Turkey not only ethically compromised, but also aimless. As Lafayette College historian Rachel Goshgarian noted in her response to my article, “What is [archaeologists’] work, really, if they are so fearful of seeing and writing about the past?”

The lesson from Turkey should commit archaeologists worldwide to resist demands that they unsee the past, documenting only a sanitized record purged of struggle, exploitation, violence, and victims. But more broadly, the Turkish case should serve as a caution for the U.S. and its continuing battle over the teaching of American history. A commitment to understanding America’s past demands that we not become complicit in DeSantis’ program of unseeing.

A citizenry fully informed of prior wrongs and able to commit to shared values of decency is prepared to look to the future. A deluded citizenry that believes in a nationalist fairy tale is perpetually worried about defending the past, lest the truth be seen. We must confront the past in its totality and brutality, with an eye to a more just and equitable future. Archaeologists can play a critical role in this process, if only we resist demands to unsee.

Washington, D.C. – The Armenian Assembly of America and the United States Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues leadership congratulated Artsakh on its 31st Independence Day. Armenian Caucus leaders Reps. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), Jackie Speier (D-CA), David Valadao (R-CA), and Adam Schiff (D-CA), reiterated their support in the face of the "ongoing challenges and threats posed by Azerbaijan" in a letter addressed to Artsakh Republic President Arayik Harutyunyan.

"We are pushing the United States government to take every available diplomatic action possible to penalize the Azerbaijani and Turkish regimes for their attacks on Artsakh in 2020 and their deadly actions that continue to this day," the letter emphasized. "This conflict demonstrates the dire need for international actors to pressure President Aliyev into halting his blatant human rights violations and return in good faith to negotiations."

The Armenian Caucus leadership reassured President Harutyunyan that they are urging the Biden Administration to allocate aid to displaced families from Artsakh.

Assembly Co-Chairs Van Krikorian and Anthony Barsamian stated: "We salute democracy in action in celebrating Artsakh's Independence Day and thank the Armenian Caucus and the Biden Administration. The recent high level appointment of a new U.S. Co-Chair to the OSCE Minsk Group, multiple other actions, and commitment to finding peace based on those principles is important to preventing another genocide by the Aliyev and Erdogan regimes."

Also today, on the occasion of Artsakh's anniversary, a bipartisan letter spearheaded by Rep. Pallone and signed by 49 Members of Congress, was sent to the Administration urging humanitarian aid to the Armenian people in Artsakh. House representatives highlighted the hardships caused by the 44-day war launched by Azerbaijan, with the full and open support of Turkey and Turkish-recruited and transported jihadist terrorists, which cost the lives of innocent civilians and thousands of young soldiers, while Armenian prisoners of war remain captive.

In addition, the letter states that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has "acknowledged that over 90,000 refugees displaced to Armenia, the majority of whom are women, children, and elderly, are suffering through an acute humanitarian crisis."

While noting that the U.S. government has funded landmine and unexploded ordnance clearance efforts and has secured millions of dollars of direct aid for humanitarian assistance initiatives, the letter stressed that the "need for this assistance has only grown due to Azerbaijan’s indiscriminate bombing campaigns in 2020 and the ongoing provocations by their troops which further endanger food, water, energy, and other critical resources for these communities."

In addition to Rep. Pallone, the following Members of Congress signed the letter: Nanette Barragán (D-CA), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Tony Cárdenas (D-CA), André Carson (D-IN), Judy Chu (D-CA), J. Louis Correa (D-CA), David Cicilline (D-RI), Jim Costa (D-CA), Katherine Clark (D-MA), Jason Crow (D-CO), Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), Anna Eshoo (D-CA), Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), James Himes (D-CT), William Keating (D-MA), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Andy Kim (D-NJ), Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), James Langevin (D-RI), Rick Larsen (D-WA), John Larson (D-CT), Brenda Lawrence (D-MI), Susie Lee (D-NV), Mike Levin (D-CA), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), James McGovern (D-MA), Grace Meng (D-NY), Joseph Morelle (D-NY), Grace Napolitano (D-CA), Donald Norcross (D-NJ), Chris Pappas (D-NH), Scott Peters (D-CA), Chellie Pingree (D-ME), Katie Porter (D-CA), John Sarbanes (D-MD), Janice Schakowsky (D-IL), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Brad Sherman (D-CA), Albio Sires (D-NJ), Jackie Speier (D-CA), Dina Titus (D-NV), David Trone (D-MD), and David Valadao (R-CA).

In Artsakh, celebrations for Independence Day, including a march and rally dedicated to the proclamation of the Republic of Artsakh, are taking place this evening in Stepanakert's Freedom Square.

In Washington D.C. on Monday, September 19, 2022, the Republic of Artsakh's Minister of Foreign Affairs David Babayan will be the keynote speaker at the event "A Capitol Hill Salute to Artsakh's Independence," which will also include remarks by Members of the bipartisan Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues.

Established in 1972, the Armenian Assembly of America is the largest Washington-based nationwide organization promoting public understanding and awareness of Armenian issues. The Assembly is a non-partisan, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt membership organization.


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Acts of genocide — trying to partially or completely destroy an entire people or group — have been committed countless times in prehistory, and numerous times since. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphs on a memorial stone from the late 13th century B.C. give what may be the earliest-known mention of the people of Israel, along with the erroneous claim that the pharaoh Merneptah killed them all; and in 88 B.C. Mithridates, the king of Pontus, ordered all Italians in his lands killed, resulting in perhaps 100,000 murders and the brutal Mithridatic Wars with Rome. Many times the Romans also committed genocide against their enemies: During the destruction of Carthage in modern-day Tunisia in 146 B.C., for example, an estimated 62,000 people were executed and 50,000 enslaved; and in the Gallic Wars of the first century B.C., Julius Caesar claimed that his armies killed more than a million Gauls and Germans (historians now think the real number was much lower). Many millions are also thought to have died in colonial genocides at the hands of European powers, especially in the New World and in Africa.

However, genocide has only been internationally recognized and become a major world concern in the last 80 years, alongside the industrialization of warfare and the large-scale atrocities that occurred in the 20th century. The term genocide is now almost defined by the Holocaust and other mass killings during World War II, when six million Jews and about 12 million others — including Romani, Russians, and Poles — were murdered during the Nazi German occupation of Europe. 

The concept of genocide originated in the 1920s, as a way to describe the Armenian genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1916, which may have killed more than 1 million people, according to Britannica. And new reports of genocide have marred every decade since, from the communist mass killings in Russia since 1918 and in China after 1949; to the wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the massacres in Rwanda in 1994, and the killings in Sudan that have been ongoing for most of the 21st century.

The word "genocide" was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish international lawyer who in the late 1920s read about the massacres and other brutalities perpetrated on Armenian Christians by the "Three Pashas" government of the Ottoman Empire's nationalist "Young Turks" movement. Lemkin discovered that no laws existed to try the Young Turks leaders for their crimes. During World War II, Lemkin escaped Poland following the invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and he lectured in Sweden; but 49 of his relatives — all Jewish — were killed during the Holocaust. In 1944, after emigrating to the United States, he wrote the book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe," a legal review of the Nazi occupation, in which he introduced the word genocide. The Greek prefix "genos" means "race" or "tribe," while the Latin suffix "cide" translates to "killing," according to the United Nations.

"His idea came out of his horror at the Armenian Genocide, and then he saw it being done again in the Holocaust," said Gregory Stanton, a former U.S. State Department diplomat, former professor of genocide studies at George Mason University at Arlington, Virginia, and the founder of the nonprofit group Genocide Watch. "[Lemkin] realized that international law was totally inadequate to deal with this problem; there needed to be a whole new name for it, and there needed to be a convention, an international treaty."

Lemkin's concept of genocide as a crime under international law was a basis of the Nuremberg trials — a series of trials of former Nazi leaders in 1945 and 1946 conducted by an international tribunal of Allied countries and representatives of former Nazi-occupied countries; and his campaigning led to the establishment of the United Nations' Genocide Convention, a treaty that made genocide an international crime in 1951. The treaty defines genocide as "any act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group." 

The convention lists examples of genocidal crimes, including: killing members of a group; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; inflicting conditions calculated to bring about a group's physical destruction; imposing measures to prevent births in a group; and forcibly taking their children from them to be raised elsewhere. The Genocide Convention is the definition of genocide used by intergovernmental bodies such as the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Critically, Stanton said, the international agreements against genocide don't include the persecutions and killings of people for their political beliefs or membership of an economic, social or cultural group, although these have been a feature of many genocides throughout history. "The aim [of genocide] is to destroy a group," he said. But the major nations at the UN, including the U.K., the U.S., Russia and France, didn't want such a broad definition: "These powers realized that if these things were in there, they'd all be guilty," Stanton said.

According to Stanton, when the convention was first agreed, Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union at the time, was one of the biggest opponents to a broader definition of genocide, probably because tens of millions of his perceived political opponents had been killed since the imposition of communism in Russia in 1917, and tens of millions more would die before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991; a 1990 study by the American political scientist Rudolph Rummel estimated that more than 61 million people were murdered by the Soviet Union. "The Soviet Union probably killed more people than any other entity, except possibly Communist China," Stanton said; Rummel's 1990 study suggested that up to 102 million people had been killed by Chinese communists.

No leaders of the Soviet Union or China have ever been put on trial for genocide, but Stanton said that rulers and officials from other countries have been prosecuted under the existing laws. For example, from 1975 to 1979 the communist Khmer Rouge movement, led by Pol Pot, ruled much of Cambodia and murdered between 1.5 and 3 million people, according to the University of Minnesota. Many decades later, from 1997 to 2012, two of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders were tried and found guilty of war crimes by a joint United Nations and Cambodian tribunal; the crimes included genocide based on Khmer Rouge persecutions of Cambodian ethnic groups, such as the Cham and ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese and Thais.

Communists have also been the victims of genocide. According to a case study at Yale University, more than 400,000 people were killed during the Indonesian genocide in 1965 and 1966, in which the Western-aligned government targeted Communist Party members and sympathizers, as well as ethnic and religious groups. And during a civil war from the 1960s to the 1990s, the Guatemalan government persecuted ethnically Maya people for their presumed support of communist guerrillas; up to 200,000 people were murdered, according to the Holocaust Museum Houston.

People across the world have committed genocide due to ethnic differences. A study published in 2015 in the journal The American Historical Review suggested that the U.S. caused the deaths of more than 4 million Native Americans before 1900. The U.S. has also been accused of genocide against Black Americans, according to a study by University of Washington historian Susan Glenn. The term genocide has also been used to describe the persecutions and mass killings of Indigenous ethnic groups in Central and South America, including in Mexico, Peru, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina.

Massacres of ethnic groups were also committed in Europe during the breakup of Yugoslavia and its aftermath in the 1990s. The Holocaust Museum Houston estimates that Bosnian Serbs murdered tens of thousands of Muslims and Croats in acts of genocide, some of which were euphemistically called "ethnic cleansing." The total includes the victims of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces killed as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys — the worst massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. 

In Rwanda in central Africa, Hutu extremists murdered an estimated 800,000 people and raped hundreds of thousands of women, most of whom were from the country's ethnic Tutsi minority, over 100 days in 1994. Ethnic differences have also played a role in Sudan's Darfur genocide, where it's estimated the Sudanese government has caused the deaths of more than 200,000 people, while millions of people have been driven from their homes. The conflict has been called the first genocide of the 21st century and is still ongoing.

Accusations of genocide have been levelled at Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. According to Stanton, although Russians and Ukrainians share common origins, they are now different national groups and also different ethnic groups because their languages are slightly different. "Genocide is the intentional destruction, in part, of a national group — and the Ukrainians are definitely a national group," he said. The situation in Ukraine is complicated by memories of the Holodomor, also known as the "Great Famine" — a human-made famine that in 1932 and 1933 killed up to 5 million people throughout the Soviet Union, including Ukraine. Its effects were worsened in Ukraine by harsh political decrees, and it's estimated that at least 3.9 million Ukrainians died there between those years, according to Britannica. The Holodomor is now widely recognized as a genocide committed by the Soviet Union against the Ukrainians.

Stanton also regards the persecution since 2014 of ethnic Uyghurs in China's far west Xinjiang province as an ongoing genocide. BBC News reported in 2021 that an unofficial U.K.-based tribunal determined that the sterilizations and birth control measure forced on Uyghurs by the Chinese government were acts of genocide, although no mass killings of Uyghurs were known to have taken place. The tribunal in London heard from more than 70 witnesses and determined that China had detained or imprisoned more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinyang, while former detainees alleged torture, forced sterilizations and sexual abuse. 

China has denied the accusations, however, calling them politically motivated. But Stanton is not persuaded: The Chinese government "has violated every single one of those acts of genocide," he said. "China is trying to wipe out their [the Uyghurs'] culture."

Experts warn that there are more genocides to come. Stanton is especially concerned about some parts of India, where political, ethnic and religious tensions threaten to break out into mass violence; and parts of West Africa, where countries such as Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali are experiencing Islamist insurgencies led by ethnic Fulanis, who mainly target Christian civilians with almost daily killings, kidnappings and rapes, according to a 2017 study in the journal CTC Sentinel. 

Stanton said that by studying telltale aspects of a society, it's now possible to identify potential genocides before they happen. The nonprofit group Genocide Watch lists 10 stages of a genocide, including elements like the separate classification within a country of distinct ethnic, racial, religious or national groups; legal and social discrimination against those groups; efforts to dehumanize them, perhaps by attaching negative names or through hate speech; and the organization, polarization and preparation of genocidal groups, perhaps leading to the persecution and attempts to kill people . The last stage Genocide Watch lists is denial, when the perpetrators of genocide pretend it never happened.

But Stanton said it's often difficult to persuade political leaders to act in response to the signs of an impending genocide. "How do you engage the consciousness and the will of policymakers to act on these warnings, to actually do something to stop the process?" he said. "That is something I don't think we've really solved yet."

Originally published on Live Science.