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SAS Anniversary Conference in Washington D.C.-Part II

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  • SAS Anniversary Conference in Washington D.C.-Part II

    Armenian Studies Program
    Barlow Der Mugrdechian, Coordinator
    5245 N. Backer Ave. PB4
    Fresno CA 93740-8001

    ASP Office: 559-278-2669
    Office: 559-278-2669
    FAX: 559-278-2129

    Visit the ASP Website: http://www.fresnostate.edu/artshum/armenianstudies/


    Society for Armenian Studies Washington DC
    Conference on Armenians in the Ottoman Empire-Part II

    By Aram Arkun

    PHOTO CAPTION:
    SAS Part II:

    1) SAS Conference-Genocide Panel: Panel on the Armenian Genocide and its Aftermath, Part I

    Left to right: Dr. Rouben Adalian, Khatchig Mouradian, Asya Darbinyan, and
    Ã=9Cmit Kurt. Standing, panel chair Prof. Barlow der Mugrdechian.

    2) 1-SAS 40 th Conference Group: Scholars at the International conference on Armenians in the Ottoman Empire organized by the Society for Armenian Studies.




    WASHINGTON - Society for Armenian Studies (SAS) Vice President Bedross
    Der Matossian welcomed guests back on November 22 to the final session
    of the conference `Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th-20th
    Centuries.' Like the second panel of the session of the previous day,
    it was devoted to the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath.

    Dr. Carina Karapetian Giorgi, visiting assistant professor of
    sociology at Pomona College, was the first speaker. Her 2013
    dissertation from the University of Manchester is an examination of
    the lives of Armenian women migrants to the US from 1990 to 2010. She
    found this migration to be an unexamined growing phenomenon, which she
    felt, constitutes a disruption in conventional gender relations within
    Armenia. Her current research project is examining the Armenian
    matrilineal ritual and tradition of tasseography or coffee grounds
    reading from a queer theoretical and quantum physics perspective. Her
    conference paper was called `Critical Reevaluation of the
    Historiography of the Armenian Women during the Armenian Genocide.'

    Giorgi reexamined from the feminist gender queer perspective Armenian
    memoirs of genocide. She felt that a void existed on the large role
    gender played in survivor experiences, as in her opinion, the focus of
    mainstream Armenian scholarship has been refuting denialists. Her
    presentation combined two future separate articles on visual and
    written accounts of Armenian women.

    Giorgi argued that a myriad of simplistic gender constructs are found
    within the literature on the Armenian Genocide. In the works of
    writers like Vahakn Dadrian or Taner Akçam, she contended, women often
    are depicted as helpless as children and objectified as lost
    possessions, while men are active in resistance.

    Survivors faced male control, violence and stigmatization from both
    Turkish and Armenian men, she stated. On the other hand, Armenian
    women fedayi fighters in military uniforms disrupted the traditional
    view of femininity, with passive women as victims. Victoria Rowe's
    work on Zabel Yesayan, a key observer of Armenian massacres, showed
    how it is necessary to interrogate history once more.

    Giorgi has collected and is studying between 50 and 75 accounts of
    women's lives pertaining to the Armenian Genocide. She also intends to
    compare experiences of male to female rape, including the aftermath,
    and who experienced difficulties returning home.

    The second speaker, Dr. Richard Hovannisian spoke on `Armenian
    Genocide Denial 100 Years Later: The New Actors and Their Trade.'
    Professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History and past holder of the
    Armenian Educational Foundation Chair at the University of California,
    Los Angeles, Hovannisian is also a Distinguished Chancellors Fellow at
    Chapman University, adjunct professor of history at USC (to work with
    the Shoah Foundation), and a Guggenheim Fellow. A consultant for the
    California State Board of Education, he is author or editor of more
    than 35 books, including the four-volume Republic of Armenia .

    Hovannisian expressed skepticism over statements that the recognition
    of the Armenian Genocide has been achieved, so that it is time to move
    on to the next phase of reparations. Denial of the Armenian Genocide
    took place from the very beginning, and then during the Republic of
    Turkey attempts were made at the suppression of memory. The hope was
    that any mention of genocide would just pass from the scene, he
    noted. The best example was the successful Turkish suppression of the
    film version of the novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh , with the
    complicity of the US government. In the US, the Cold War alliance with
    Turkey also aided in the acceptance of Turkish efforts.

    Post-1965 Armenian activism and even violence led to the return of
    active deniers. After efforts at suppression came a phase of
    relativization and rationalization. Great suffering and deaths were
    not dismissed but instead put into context. The arguments in the 1985
    book of retired Turkish diplomat Kamuran Gurun 20 years later were
    almost parroted by American denier Gunter Lewy.

    Hovannisian spoke about contemporary deniers like Dr. Hakan Yavuz at
    the University of Utah, who is funded by the Turkish Coalition of
    America (TCA), which itself has aggressively pursued legal action
    (such as its lawsuit against the University of Minnesota) against
    entities showcasing the Armenian Genocide. Yavuz organizes
    international conferences, runs a publication series and writes
    directly on the subject, depicting Turkey as the victim of Western
    Orientalism. Yavuz even insisted that it was the Soviet Union that was
    the first to use the term genocide concerning the Armenians due to
    Cold War propaganda value, and that Raphael Lemkin was untrustworthy
    because he was an employee of the US government.

    Among other contemporary deniers of the Armenian Genocide, Hovannisian
    finds Edward J. Erickson, relying on Ottoman documents and military
    despatches, might appear solidly academic to some. Yet he portrays
    Armenians as distinct from Ottomans, as evidenced in his book title
    Ottomans and Armenians: A Study in Counter-Insurgency (2013) . Gunter
    Lewy adopts a similar approach. Both use modern Western methods of
    scholarship and have extensive citations and bibliography which make
    their works appear scholarly.

    Hovannisian concluded that logical argumentation does not succeed with
    such deniers. For example, historian and denier Stanford Shaw just
    corrected the factual errors that Hovannisian pointed out in his work
    in a second edition, while leaving the approach and conclusions the
    same. Denial is still enormously dangerous, and little is being done
    despite new scholarship by serious scholars, including young Turkish
    ones. One further problem is that on the Internet, denialist websites
    often come up first in searches for materials on the Armenian
    Genocide.

    The third panelist, Dr. Keith David Watenpaugh, spoke on `The
    Practical Failures of the League of Nation's Interwar Humanitarian
    Project for Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Origins of
    International Human Rights.' Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of
    Modern Islam, Human Rights and Peace at the University of California
    (UC), Davis, where he directs the UC Davis Human Rights Initiative. He
    recently finished a year as an American Council of Learned Societies
    Fellow. He is the author of the forthcoming book Bread from Stones:
    The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism , and Being
    Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, and Colonialism
    and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton 2006), along with many journal
    articles.

    Watenpaugh prefaced his formal presentation with some remarks on his
    own experience as a target of threatened lawsuits from the Assembly of
    Turkish-American Associations, and commented on similar high-pressure
    tactics employed by the TCA. He felt that any time scholars make
    substantive claims about groups or individuals engaged spreading
    denial of the Armenian Genocide, the threat of legal action should be
    expected as an attempt to suppress criticism. Some scholarly
    periodicals which privately agreed with Watenpaugh's views rejected
    his articles out of fear of legal hassles. Watenpaugh suggested that
    it was important to shelter junior scholars from such threats and
    attacks, and that funding of scholars should be increased by Armenian
    organizations and groups to prevent the replacement of Armenian
    scholarship by denialist literature. Watenpaugh also mentioned the
    publication of the memoir of Karnig Panian in English translation (
    Goodbye, Aintoura: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide ) by Stanford
    University Press as an example of a book that, with the ratification
    by publication of a major university press, can be used in classes on
    comparative or modern genocide, unlike the prolific denialist
    literature.

    In his official talk, Watenpaugh showed some `iconic' pictures on the
    post-Genocide period and Armenians as he discussed what the
    international community did after failing to create a state for the
    Armenians, who were seen as the most deserving of all the peoples
    after World War I, and how this contributed to the contemporary
    humanitarian regime and discussions on human rights. The first decade
    of the League of Nations saw the abandonment of Armenian national
    aspirations. Shifting League policies nevertheless affected the
    status, position and even survival of Armenian refugee communities,
    and sometimes even individuals. The League formulated a sui generis
    humanitarianism for Armenians, with an emphasis on Armenian communal
    survival instead of just assimilation.

    Armenians and Russians received refugee status not because of
    individual persecution but because they were part of a group that no
    longer had national protection. The Nansen passport was developed as a
    partial solution. It was not an actual passport but an internationally
    recognizable identification document that would allow obtaining visas
    and travel. Armenians could thus move on, but these documents made no
    provision for any civil or political rights, and host countries had no
    binding obligations toward the Armenians. In essence, Turkey was
    relieved of responsibility toward its citizens that it had turned into
    refugees. These documents, Watenpaugh states, constituted an early
    international juridical notice of the permanence of the exile of the
    Armenians.

    The final speaker was Dr. Gregory Aftandilian, adjunct faculty member
    at Boston University and Northeastern University, and an associate of
    the Middle East Center at the University of Massachusetts at
    Lowell. Aftandilian had been policy advisor for Congressman Chris Van
    Hollen and Senator Paul Sarbanes, as well as foreign policy fellow to
    the late Sen. Edward Kennedy. He worked 13 years as a Middle East
    analyst at the US Department of State. He is the author of several
    works on Middle East and Armenian politics, including Egypt's Bid for
    Arab Leadership: Implications for US Policy , Looking Forward: An
    Integrated Strategy for Supporting Democracy and Human Rights in Egypt
    , and Armenia, Vision of a Republic: The Independence Lobby in
    America, 1918-1927 .

    The title of Aftandilian's talk was `The Impact of the Armenian
    Genocide on the Offspring of Ottoman Armenian Survivors.' While some
    work has been done concerning survivors, much less is known about how
    their offspring, now in their 80s and 90s, have been
    affected. Aftandilian found that the extensive scholarship on
    transmission of trauma to children of Holocaust survivors is relevant
    for Armenians too, though denial in the Armenian case is an additional
    exacerbatory element.

    The survivors themselves in the US formed a highly traumatized
    community, with even bachelors who came prior to World War I suffering
    from survivor guilt. Those who did go through the events would often
    recount stories about them later. The poor socioeconomic status of the
    US Armenian community in the 1920s and 1930s compounded the ordeal of
    the survivors, along with local discrimination. Nonetheless, there was
    an attempt to transmit provincial or local identities to the next
    generation through the creation of a closed ghettoized world.

    The general absence of grandparents, children being named after
    murdered relatives, and overly protective survivor parents made life
    more difficult for the new generation. Children even when shielded
    came to understand the grief or depressive state of mind of many of
    their parents.

    World War II became another great traumatic event for the parents, who
    had to send off their first sons to the war. Aftandilian interviewed
    some veterans who broke down in tears not about what they witnessed in
    combat but about the stress caused to their parents when they left
    home.

    Prof. Simon Payaslian served as the discussant for this final
    panel. Holder of the Charles K. and Elizabeth M. Kenosian Chair in
    Modern Armenian History and Literature at Boston University, he is the
    author of United States Policy toward the Armenian Question and the
    Armenian Genocide ; Political Economy of Human Rights in Armenia:
    Authoritarianism and Democracy in a Former Soviet Republic ;
    International Political Economy: Conflict and Cooperation in the
    Global System (with Frederic S. Pearson); and The History of Armenia:
    >From the Origins to the Present .

    Payaslian suggested that more context and use of existing literature
    would be helpful in Giorgi's work. He agreed with Hovannisian's views
    on current Armenian Genocide denial. He pointed out for Watenpaugh
    that the origins of modern international human rights began with
    slavery and the abolitionist movement, and the post-World War I League
    of Nations efforts were contributions to the development of
    international human rights. Finally, he wondered whether the
    disintegration of Armenian communities in places like Worcester,
    Mass. could be connected to the transfer of trauma resulting from the
    Armenian Genocide.

    The panelists then defended their approaches and answered further
    questions from the audience, after which Barlow Der Mugrdechian,
    Treasurer of the SAS, thanked all organizers, participants and
    audience members and closed the conference. He said that Armenologists
    did not have the opportunity to interact in this open manner in many
    other places, so this conference was a useful contribution to the
    furtherance of Armenian Studies.

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