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  • Tribute paid to Armenian 'martyrs'

    Providence Journal, 4/28/08

    Tribute paid to Armenian 'martyrs'

    01:00 AM EDT on Monday, April 28, 2008

    By Richard C. Dujardin

    Journal Religion Writer

    PROVIDENCE - With the Armenian Martyrs Memorial at the North Burial
    Ground serving as a backdrop, several hundred people, including clergy
    and politicians, assembled under a gray sky yesterday to once again pay
    tribute to the 1.5 million Armenian "martyrs" who suffered and died in
    what has long been called the Armenian genocide.

    The prayer service, coming as it did within three days of the 93rd
    anniversary of when it is believed the Turkish Ottoman Empire began its
    years-long effort to drive out and eliminate the Armenian minority from
    their ancestral homeland, was a bittersweet one for participants who had
    been following the effort to get Congress to adopt a resolution that
    would have denounced the decades-old atrocities.

    After getting early support from congressional leaders, the resolution
    was put on hold last October in the face of opposition from the Turkish
    government, which angrily denies there was such a genocide and which
    showed it was ready to use the resolution as a pretext to make
    incursions into northern Iraq.

    U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.. one of the Senate sponsors for the
    resolution, said he personally believes that the sooner that the United
    States takes a stand recognizing the genocide, the better it will be for
    everyone.

    "The Turks have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to put
    their stamp on the history of that time," Reed said in an interview. "I
    think the sooner we get beyond that and the sooner we recognize it as a
    historical reality, we can have a more productive relationship with the
    Turks."

    Yesterday, however, community leaders said they also had much to be
    happy about. Last week, they learned that not only is teaching about the
    genocide to be part of the new statewide social studies curriculum but a
    handbook, A Case Study of the First Genocide of the 20th Century, is now
    complete and should be ready for use for all of the state's social
    studies teachers by this fall.

    Robert Petrucci, a social studies teacher in East Greenwich, who four
    years ago became the first high school teacher in Rhode Island to create
    a course on genocides of the 20th century, said that when he began the
    course he asked his students to think of the "worst crime that could
    happen to your family and how you would feel if no matter who you told,
    no one would recognize that the crime happened in the way you knew it
    did."

    At the time, he said, you would have to look hard to find even a
    sentence acknowledging the atrocities inflicted on the Armenians, he
    said, though that's now changing.

    Guest speaker Henry Theriault, a professor of philosophy at Worcester
    State College and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Genocide Studies and
    Prevention, said the fierce opposition displayed during the last six
    months by the Turkish government shows the degree to which hatred of
    Armenians still exists in Turkey and why it is not just an argument
    about overcoming denial. "There is work to do in changing anti-Armenian
    attitudes in Turkey that have led to Armenians being denigrated in
    Turkey even today," he said.

    The professor said that he was thinking of all those who endured the
    rain and cold weather to sit through a series of speeches, and he
    appreciated it very much. "But I was also thinking this is a little bit
    of a reminder to us how much those Armenians who died and those who
    lived through the genocide, walking through the desert in 110 degrees
    stripped naked and with burned flesh would have welcomed this little
    rain, this little coolness in their lives."

    [email protected]
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