EXPERT RELATES ARMENIAN GENOCIDE TO MODERN WORLD
Sara Tracey
SU The Daily Orange
rmenian-genocide-to-modern-world-1.1339168
April 13 2010
A black-and-white photograph of Armenians surrounding a railway boxcar
sits in the archives in the Deutsche Bank in Berlin.
"These are boxcars made for 20 animals stuffed with more than 100
Armenian men, women and children," said Peter Balakian. "They are
being sent to their deaths in southeast Anatolia, to the desert. Half
of them would be dead before they were dumped out in the desert of
famine and disease."
Balakian, an award-winning author and professor at Colgate University,
used this photograph to show how new technology, such as railways,
affected the Armenian genocide of the early 1900s in his lecture,
titled "The Armenian Genocide and Modernity." Balakian’s lecture
began Syracuse University’s first Genocide Awareness Week. Balakian
spoke at the Winnick Hillel Center at 4 p.m. Monday.
Though the bodies of those lost in the genocide may be gone today,
Balakian said the damage inflicted on Armenian culture is still
prevalent. He also spoke about the coining of the word "genocide"
and compared Turkey’s then-government with today’s U.S. government.
"The buildings, the libraries, the synagogues, the churches, the
books, the texts, the cultural producers themselves, the writers,
the artists, the professors, the teachers, the religious leaders
–all of that has been very important to our understanding as the
genocidal crime," he said.
Raphael Lemkin was a Polish scholar and lawyer who coined the term
"genocide" after the crimes committed against the Armenian people
by the Turkish in the early 20th century, Balakian said. He said
Lemkin was adamant about calling the event genocide instead of a
"crime of war."
Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor, lost 49 family members in the tragedy.
His term for mass killing, genocide, was not accepted by the U.S.
government until after his death in 1959, Balakian said.
Balakian drew several comparisons between governmental acts of the
Turks during the genocide and the U.S. government of today. He said
security focuses after Sept. 11 were similar to Turkish government
arrests, made because of the temporary law of deportation employed
in 1913.
The law gave police the power to arrest "every Armenian citizen in
his village, city and town under the pretext that Armenians were
security threats," he said. "It’s under the total war environment. We
saw this in our own culture with the Bush administration, the Vulcans
running the State Department after 9/11. Security paranoia can become
a license for other kinds of abuses."
Today, Turkey is still feeling the effects of the Armenian genocide,
he said. In 2005, the European Union said Turkey must recognize the
genocide before it can be considered for admittance in the union. A
year later, EU dropped the requirement because of the Turkish
government haranguing the union, Balakian said.
Alan Goldberg, co-director of SU’s regional genocide and holocaust
initiative, ended the lecture by saying schools should also have
a hand in acknowledging the genocides. Only a handful of states,
including California and New Jersey, mention the Armenian genocides
in their curriculums.
"For many of us," Goldberg said, "our hope is that states will begin
to even recognize the importance of mandating or even encouraging the
inclusion of the Armenian genocide in its social studies curriculum."