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CALL GENOCIDE BY NAME
By Armen Zenjiryan
Ventura County Star , CA
April 25 2006
Ninety-one years ago April 24, the Ottoman Turkish government commenced
a three-year campaign to decimate its empire's ethnic Armenians. Before
it was over, 1.5 million people - men, women and children alike -
were dragged from their homes and slaughtered.
For those Armenians whose ancestors witnessed the genocide, the wound
is reopened each year on April 24, Armenian Genocide Remembrance
Day, because of the failure of the Turkish government to admit
culpability. For Armenian-Americans, the insult is worse. The United
States, Turkey's NATO ally, characterizes this unambiguous instance
of ethnic cleansing as a mere byproduct of war, no more morally
significant than the usual carnage of battle.
But the evidence for the deliberate extermination of an ethnic minority
is clear, as is Turkey's calculating attempts to smother it.
Dozens of eyewitness accounts describe the horrors on the Anatolian
plateau during the period when Turkey denies it committed genocide.
Protocols and telegrams exchanged between diplomats and ambassadors
describing mass deportations of Armenians and murder still exist
in Turkish and German archives. The Turkish government officially
denies photographs of Armenian women avoiding rape only by burying
themselves in the sand.
It dismisses as mirages the countless number of Armenians dragged
into the Syrian Desert without food or water.
This amnesia is not universal. Several governments, including France,
Argentina, Greece, Russia and Vatican City, formally recognize the
genocide. To their credit, hundreds of members of the U.S. Congress
call upon the president each year on the anniversary of the genocide
to change his noun of choice from "massacre" to "genocide."
In doing so, the president would acknowledge that the actions of
the Turkish government were no mere battle against a hostile enemy,
but an atrocious, systematic and deliberate extermination of a people.
Does it matter that President Bush use the proper language to describe
what happened to 1.5 million Armenians? For this president, it should.
We are fighting a war on terrorism, and recently fought a war against
a regime that, like the Ottoman Turkish Empire before it, sought
to wipe out entire ethnic segments of a population. Part of Bush's
justification for the current war was that tolerating genocide is
unacceptable to any enlightened democracy.
While this is true, continuing to mollify our ally Turkey by remaining
complicit in a conspiracy to mask the truth, Bush undermines his
own principle.
Principles, as the president has often reminded us, matter in war.
The practical effect of the United States' reluctance to call the
Armenian genocide a genocide is its confinement to the footnotes of
history. This is a strange fate for a crime that international law
expert Raphael Lemkin, who himself escaped the Holocaust, uses as
the archetype for all genocides. To call the Armenian genocide an
act of war between hostile enemies not only distorts its meaning,
but also limits its usefulness when we try to identify the political
and social precursors of genocide.
Denial of genocide is a message of hate and prejudice. Some even
note that denial of genocide is the atrocity's final act. We share a
universal responsibility to combat each instance of genocide denial; in
fact, to do less is a disservice not only to the victims of yesterday,
but also to the victims of the present and future.
After all, what better proof is there of history's potential to
repeat itself than when Adolf Hitler himself, nearly 70 years ago,
justified the planned genocide of the Jews by asking, "Who nowadays
speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?"
- Armen Zenjiryan is a first-year law student at Pepperdine Law School
in Malibu. He obtained his bachelor's degree in political science from
the University of Southern California in 2004 and served as executive
director of the Armenian-American Political Action Committee prior
to entering law school.
By Armen Zenjiryan
Ventura County Star , CA
April 25 2006
Ninety-one years ago April 24, the Ottoman Turkish government commenced
a three-year campaign to decimate its empire's ethnic Armenians. Before
it was over, 1.5 million people - men, women and children alike -
were dragged from their homes and slaughtered.
For those Armenians whose ancestors witnessed the genocide, the wound
is reopened each year on April 24, Armenian Genocide Remembrance
Day, because of the failure of the Turkish government to admit
culpability. For Armenian-Americans, the insult is worse. The United
States, Turkey's NATO ally, characterizes this unambiguous instance
of ethnic cleansing as a mere byproduct of war, no more morally
significant than the usual carnage of battle.
But the evidence for the deliberate extermination of an ethnic minority
is clear, as is Turkey's calculating attempts to smother it.
Dozens of eyewitness accounts describe the horrors on the Anatolian
plateau during the period when Turkey denies it committed genocide.
Protocols and telegrams exchanged between diplomats and ambassadors
describing mass deportations of Armenians and murder still exist
in Turkish and German archives. The Turkish government officially
denies photographs of Armenian women avoiding rape only by burying
themselves in the sand.
It dismisses as mirages the countless number of Armenians dragged
into the Syrian Desert without food or water.
This amnesia is not universal. Several governments, including France,
Argentina, Greece, Russia and Vatican City, formally recognize the
genocide. To their credit, hundreds of members of the U.S. Congress
call upon the president each year on the anniversary of the genocide
to change his noun of choice from "massacre" to "genocide."
In doing so, the president would acknowledge that the actions of
the Turkish government were no mere battle against a hostile enemy,
but an atrocious, systematic and deliberate extermination of a people.
Does it matter that President Bush use the proper language to describe
what happened to 1.5 million Armenians? For this president, it should.
We are fighting a war on terrorism, and recently fought a war against
a regime that, like the Ottoman Turkish Empire before it, sought
to wipe out entire ethnic segments of a population. Part of Bush's
justification for the current war was that tolerating genocide is
unacceptable to any enlightened democracy.
While this is true, continuing to mollify our ally Turkey by remaining
complicit in a conspiracy to mask the truth, Bush undermines his
own principle.
Principles, as the president has often reminded us, matter in war.
The practical effect of the United States' reluctance to call the
Armenian genocide a genocide is its confinement to the footnotes of
history. This is a strange fate for a crime that international law
expert Raphael Lemkin, who himself escaped the Holocaust, uses as
the archetype for all genocides. To call the Armenian genocide an
act of war between hostile enemies not only distorts its meaning,
but also limits its usefulness when we try to identify the political
and social precursors of genocide.
Denial of genocide is a message of hate and prejudice. Some even
note that denial of genocide is the atrocity's final act. We share a
universal responsibility to combat each instance of genocide denial; in
fact, to do less is a disservice not only to the victims of yesterday,
but also to the victims of the present and future.
After all, what better proof is there of history's potential to
repeat itself than when Adolf Hitler himself, nearly 70 years ago,
justified the planned genocide of the Jews by asking, "Who nowadays
speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?"
- Armen Zenjiryan is a first-year law student at Pepperdine Law School
in Malibu. He obtained his bachelor's degree in political science from
the University of Southern California in 2004 and served as executive
director of the Armenian-American Political Action Committee prior
to entering law school.