THERIAULT: THE GLOBAL REPARATIONS MOVEMENT AND MEANINGFUL RESOLUTION OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
By: Henry Theriault
The Armenian Weekly
April 2010 Magazine
Thu, May 6 2010 |
Over the past half millennium, genocide, slavery, Apartheid, mass
rape, imperial conquest and occupation, aggressive war targeting
non-combatants, population expulsions, and other mass human rights
violations have proliferated. Individual processes have ranged from
months to centuries.
While the bulk of perpetrator societies have been traditional European
countries or European settler states in Australia, Africa, and the
Americas, Asian and African states and societies are also represented
among them.
These processes have been the decisive force shaping the demographics,
economics, political structures and forces, and cultural features
of the world we live in today, and the conflicts and challenges
we face in it. For instance, understanding why the population of
the United States is as it is–why there are African Americans in
it, where millions of Native Americans have "disappeared" to, why
Vietnamese and Cambodian people have immigrated to the United States,
etc.–requires recognizing the fundamental role of genocide, slavery,
and aggressive war in shaping the United States and those areas,
such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, affected by it.
Around the globe, those in poverty, those victimized by war after war,
small residuals of once numerous groups, and others have recognized
that their current difficulties, their current misery, is a direct
result of these powerful forces of exploitation, subjugation, and
destruction. Out of the compelling logic of "necessary fairness"–fair
treatment that is necessary to their basic material survival and
to their dignity as human beings–many have recognized that the
devastating effects of these past wrongs must be addressed in a
meaningful way if their groups and societies can hope to exist in
sustainable forms in the future. This recognition has led to various
reparations movements. Native Americans lay claim to lands taken
through brutal conquest, genocide, and fraud. African Americans
demand compensation for their contribution of a significant share
of the labor that built the United States, labor stolen from them
and repaid only with cruelty, violence, and individual and community
destruction. Formerly colonized societies whose people’s labor was
exploited to build Europe and North America, whose raw materials
were stolen to provide the materials, and whose societies were
"de-developed," now struggle to survive as the global Northern
societies built on their losses capitalize on the previous thefts to
consolidate their dominance. And so on.
In the past decade those engaged in these various struggles have begun
to recognize their common cause and a global reparations movement
has emerged.
In 2005, for instance, Massachusetts’ Worcester State College held
an international conference on reparations featuring renowned human
rights activist Dennis Brutus, with papers on reparations for South
African Apartheid; African American slavery, Jim Crow, and beyond;
Native American genocide and land theft; the "comfort women" system
of sexual slavery implemented by Japan; the use of global debt as a
"post-colonial" tool of domination; and the Armenian Genocide. While
there are dozens if not hundreds of major reparations processes in
the world today, it will be instructive to consider these cases in
detail, as illustrations of these many struggles.
U.S. slavery destroyed African societies and exploited and abused
violently millions of human beings for 250 years. At its dissolution,
it pushed former slaves into the U.S. economy without land, capital,
and education. Initial recognition of the need to provide some
compensation for slavery in order to give former slaves a chance
toward basic economic self-sufficiency gave way to violent and
discriminatory racism. Former slaves were forced into the economic
order at the lowest level. Wealth is preserved across generations
through inheritance. Those whose people begin with little and who do
not enslave or exploit others will remain with little. Reparations
for African Americans recognizes that the poverty, discrimination,
and other challenges facing African Americans today result from
injustices more than 100 years ago that have never been corrected, and
the subsequent racist violence and discrimination that has preserved
the post-slavery status quo every since.
The South African case revolved around the fact that, as the
world had divested from South Africa in the 1980’s, the Afrikaner
government borrowed money, especially from Switzerland, to continue
to finance Apartheid. Against the international embargo, bankers’
loans paid for the guns and other military hardware that were used
to kill black activists and keep their people in slavery. The fall
of Apartheid did not mean an end to the debt. Today’s South Africans
live in poverty as their country is forced to pay off the tens of
billions of U.S. dollars in loans incurred to keep them in slavery
before. They pay yet further billions for the pensions of Afrikaner
government, military, and police officials living out their days in
quiet comfort after murdering, torturing, and raping with impunity
for decades. What is more, U.S. and other corporations drew immense
profits from South African labor. Many victims of Apartheid reject the
loan debt and demand reparation for all they suffered and all that was
expropriated from them as the just means for bringing their society
out of poverty. After years of refusal, the South African government
itself has recently reversed its position based on the desire to curry
favor with large corporations and has begun to support U.S. court
cases for reparations from corporations enriched by Apartheid.
In the aftermath of decolonization, societies devastated by decades
or centuries of occupation, exploitation, cultural and familial
destruction, and genocide were left in poverty and without the
most basic resources needed to meet the minimum needs of their
people. Forced suddenly to compete with those who had enriched
themselves and grown militarily and culturally powerful through
colonialism, they had no chance. Their only option was to borrow money
in the hope of "catching up." But corrupt and selfish leaders diverted
billions to private bank accounts (with winks from former colonial
powers), invested in foolish and irrelevant public works projects,
and otherwise misappropriated money that was supposed to help these
societies. Loan makers, such as the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank, imposed conditions to push these societies into a new
servitude to the economies of the United States and other great
powers. Servicing the loans that have not helped their economies
develop now means sacrificing basic human services and healthcare in
these desperate societies and accepting extensive outside control
of their societies to benefit former colonizers and multinational
corporations at the expense of further degradation of the dignity
and material conditions of their populations. The Jubilee movement
calls for debt cancellation as a crucial step toward justice for the
devastation of colonialism and post-colonialism and a path toward a
sustainable and fair global economy.
Former comfort women have long faced assaults on their dignity in
their home countries and by Japan. They were often impoverished by
their devastating experiences of being raped on average thousands
of times in permanent rape camps as sexual slaves to the Japanese
military. Physical damage from incessant forced intercourse and the
brutal violence soldiers subjected them to, the aftermath of coerced
drug addiction, and intense psychological trauma have frequently
followed the women into their old age. They have needed medical care as
well as acknowledgment of the inhuman injustice done to them. In the
early 1990’s, surviving "comfort women" began calling for reparations
to address the effects of what they had suffered.
Native Americans and Armenians share certain similarities in their past
experiences and challenges today, from being crushed by competing
as well as sequential imperial power-games and conquests, and a
series of broken or unfair treaties, to a history of being subject
to massacre, sexual violence, and societal destruction. Members
of both groups have been sent on their "long marches" to death. In
the aftermath of active genocide through direct killing and deadly
deportation, even the remnants of these peoples on their own lands
have been erased, through the raiding and destruction of hundreds of
thousands to millions of Native American graves as a policy of the
U.S. "scientific" establishment, and the continuing destruction of
remaining Armenian Church and other structures throughout Turkey. For
Native Americans, the continuing expropriation of land and resources,
the blocking of Native American social structures and economic
activity, and the dramatic demographic destruction (an estimated
97 percent in the continental United States) has left behind a set
of Indian nations subject to the whims of the U.S. government and
struggling to retain identity and material survival in a hostile
world. Reparations, particularly of traditional lands, are essential
to the survival of Native peoples and cultures. Similarly, from its
status as the major minority in the Ottoman Empire a century ago,
today an Armenian population of below 3 million in the new republic
faces a Turkey of 70 million with tremendous economic resources built
on the plunder of Armenian wealth and land–through genocide and the
century of oppression and massacre that preceded it–and tremendous
military power awarded it through aid from the United States in
recognition of its regional power–also gained through genocide. The
Armenian Diaspora of perhaps five million is dispersed across the
globe and slowly losing cohesion and relevance as powerful forces of
assimilation and fragmentation take their toll. Reparations in the
form of compensation for the wealth taken, which in many cases can be
traced to Turkish families and business today, and lands depopulated
of Armenians and thus "Turkified" through genocide, are crucial to
the viability of Armenian society and culture in the future.
Without the kind of secure cradle the Treaty of Sevres was supposed to
give Armenians, true regeneration is impossible: Turkish power, still
violently hostile to Armenians, grows each day, as the post-genocide
residual Armenia degenerates.
Of course, reparations are not simply about mitigating the damage
done to human collectivities in order to make possible at least some
level of regeneration or future survival, however important this
is. Reparations also represent a concrete, material, permanent,
and thus not merely rhetorical recognition by perpetrator groups
or their progeny of the ethical wrongness of what was done, and of
the human dignity and legitimacy of the victim groups. They are the
form that true apologies take, and the act through which members who
supported the original assault on human rights or who benefited from
it–economically, politically, militarily, culturally, and in terms of
the security of personal and group identity–decisively break with the
past and refuse to countenance genocide, slavery, Apartheid, mass rape,
imperial conquest and occupation, aggressive war focused on civilians,
forced expulsions, or any other form of mass human rights violation.
***
It is with both dimensions in mind that in 2007 Jermaine McCalpin,
a political scientist with a recent Ph.D. from Brown University
specializing in long-term justice and democratic transformation
of societies after mass human rights violations; Ara Papian, former
Armenian ambassador to Canada and expert on the relevant treaty history
and law; Alfred de Zayas, former senior lawyer with the Office of
the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Chief of Petitions,
and currently professor of international law at the Geneva School of
Diplomacy and International Relations; and I came together to study the
issue of reparations for the Armenian Genocide in concrete terms. The
Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group’s (AGRSG) work has culminated
in a draft report on the legal, treaty, and ethical justifications for
reparations and offers concrete proposals for the political process
that will support meaningful reparations. The following are some of
the elements of the AGRSG findings, arguments, and proposals.
International law makes clear that victim groups have the right
to remedies for harms done to them. This applies to the Armenian
Genocide for two reasons. First, the acts against Armenians were
illegal under international law at the time of the genocide. Second,
the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide
applies retroactively. While the term "genocide" had not yet been
coined when the 1915 Armenian Genocide was committed, the Convention
subsumes relevant preexisting international laws and agreements,
such as the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions. Since the genocide was
illegal under those conventions, it remains illegal under the 1948
Convention. What is more, the current Turkish Republic, as successor
state to the Ottoman Empire and as beneficiary of the wealth and
land expropriations made through the 1915 genocide, is responsible
for reparations.
While the 1920 Sevres Treaty, which recognized an Armenian state much
larger than what exists today, was never ratified, some of its elements
retain the force of law and the treaty itself is not superseded by
the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. In particular, the fixing of the proper
borders of an Armenian state was undertaken pursuant to the treaty
and determined by a binding arbital award. Regardless of whether the
treaty was ultimately ratified, the committee process determining
the arbital award was agreed to by the parties to the treaty and,
according to international law, the resulting determination has legal
force regardless of the ultimate fate of the treaty.
This means that, under international law, the so-called "Wilsonian
boundaries" are the proper boundaries of the Armenian state that
should exist in Asia Minor today.
Various ethical arguments have been raised against reparations
generally and especially for harms done decades or centuries in
the past. Two of particular salience are that (1) a contemporary
state and society that did not perpetrate a past mass human rights
violation but merely succeeded the state and society that did,
does not bear responsibility for the crime nor for repairing the
damage done, for this would be penalizing innocent people; and (2)
those pursuing Armenian Genocide land reparations are enacting a
territorial nationalist irredentism that is similar to the Turkish
nationalism that drove Turkification of the land through the genocide,
and is thus not legitimate.
To the first objection, the report responds that because current
members of Turkish society benefit directly from the destruction of
Armenians in terms of increased political and cultural power as well
as a significantly larger "Turkish" territory and a great deal of
personal and state wealth that has been the basis of generations of
economic growth, they have a link to the genocide. While they cannot be
blamed morally for it, they are responsible for the return of wealth
and making compensation to Armenians for other dimensions of the
genocide. To the second objection, the report responds that the lands
in question became "Turkish" precisely through the ultranationalist
project of the genocide. Retaining lands "Turkified" in this way
indicates implicit approval of that genocidal ultra-nationalism,
while removing Turkish control is the only route to a rejection of
that ideology.
In addition to the legal, political, and ethical arguments justifying
reparations, the report also proposes a complex model for the political
process for determining and giving reparations. The report makes
clear that material reparations and symbolic reparations, including an
apology and dissemination of the truth about what happened in 1915,
as well as rehabilitation of the perpetrator society are crucial
components of a reparations process if it is to result in a stable
and human rights-respecting resolution. The report proposes convening
an Armenian Genocide Truth and Reparations Commission with Turkish,
Armenian, and other involvement that will work toward both developing a
workable reparations package and a rehabilitative process that will tie
reparations to a positive democratic, other-respecting transformation
of the Turkish state and society. As much as reparations will be
a resolution of the Armenian Genocide legacy, they will also be an
occasion for productive social transformation in Turkey that will
benefit Turks.
Finally, the report makes preliminary recommendations for specific
financial compensation and land reparations. The former is based in
part on the detailed reparations estimate made as part of the Paris
Peace Conference, supplemented by additional calculations for elements
not sufficiently covered by the conference’s estimation of the material
financial losses suffered by Armenians. The report also discusses
multiple options regarding land return, from a symbolic return of
church and other cultural properties in Turkey to full return of the
lands designated by the Wilsonian arbital award. The report includes
the highly innovative option of allowing Turkey to retain political
sovereignty over the lands in question but demilitarizing them and
allowing Armenians to join present inhabitants with full political
protection and business and residency rights. This model is interesting
in part because it suggests a human rights-respecting, post-national
concept of politics that some might see as part of a transition away
from the kinds of aggressive territorial nationalisms–such as that
which was embraced by the Young Turks–that so frequently produce
genocide and conflict.
On May 15, 2010, the AGRSG will present its report formally in a
public event at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict
Analysis and Resolution in Arlington, Va.