Recognizing the Armenian genocide matters at UC Berkeley

Anamaria Abnusy is an ASUC senator representing Armenian students on campus. She assisted with organizing the Armenian Genocide Awareness Week events on campus.

In the face of erasure, we are still here.

As Armenian students, we carry this statement while walking across this campus, knowing that even as we remember collective violence and trauma, there are voices around us questioning whether there is anything to remember at all.

When the ASUC Senate passed resolutions officially recognizing April 24th as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and September 27th as Artsakh Remembrance Day, UC Berkeley’s student government took an important step in breaking the longstanding institutional silence surrounding the Armenian Genocide and the normalization of denialism surrounding these atrocities.

Armenians are an ancient Indo-European people with their own language, history, culture and religion — and we are a small community, making up less than 1% of the UC Berkeley undergraduate population.

For thousands of years, Armenians occupied their mountainous homeland in eastern Anatolia. Later, one by one, they were wiped out.

In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, the Ottoman government slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Armenians before beheading Armenian leaders and intellectuals, leaving the Armenian people without leadership. Subsequent deportation was followed by rape, starvation and massacre, killing about 1.5 million Armenians.

Despite the population of the Armenian land of Artsakh — also known as Nagorno-Karabakh — being 95% Armenian, Stalin ceded the land to Soviet Azerbaijan, bringing with it decades of cultural suppression through bans on Armenian textbooks, suppression of Armenian media and ethnic cleansing. In 2022, Azerbaijan imposed a nine-month blockade on Artsakh, trapping 120,000 Armenians without reliable access to food, medicine, fuel or heating. The next year, Azerbaijan launched another attack, forcibly displacing more than 100,000 Armenians within 72 hours, effectively cleansing the Republic of Artsakh of all Armenians.

Azerbaijan employed a sustained campaign of military action, blockade and hybrid warfare that specifically targeted the indigenous Armenian population and attempted to depopulate the region. Under international law, this all constitutes ethnic cleansing. To this day, Azerbaijan still holds Armenians hostage in Baku, subjecting them to torture.

And yet, even here, even now, denial persists.

As Armenian students actively post, educate and commemorate the genocide’s anniversary on campus, even some UC Berkeley students still echo the Turkish and Azerbaijani governments’ denial, dismissing, distorting or outright rejecting of the genocide’s reality. On the day of the genocide remembrance, during our protest, a Turkish student was recording and mocking our chants. In a group chat with an Armenian student, other Azeri students were claiming the Armenian monuments as land of Azerbaijan, echoing the propaganda Azerbaijan and Turkey pushes. Under an Instagram post by The Daily Californian recapping Armenian Genocide Awareness Week, a comment attempted to disprove the historical legitimacy of the genocide itself, sparking arguments with Armenian students before eventually being deleted. These moments may appear small to outsiders, but this confirms that denial is not just confined to governments overseas.

And even when denial is harder to see, it is just as painful to experience.

In trying to organize a movie night for American Genocide Awareness Week, we faced an obscene amount of institutional barriers. We submitted a space request to Doe Library, hoping to reserve the Glade for increased visibility of our event. Instead of responding to us within the typical four-day time frame, it took them two weeks to reply to the space request.

At the request of event services, we planned to relocate to West Crescent — an outdoor location that still provided the visibility we wanted. However, the relocation fell through after the Office of Environment, Health & Safety told us over the the phone that it had “forgotten” to respond to our permit request, forcing the Armenian Student Association to abruptly move the event indoors.

Much of this stress, uncertainty and disruption could have been prevented through clearer administrative transparency surrounding the criteria used to approve or deny events, especially when other registered student organizations are permitted to hold similar programming. When communication is delayed, requests are ignored and Armenian events are treated as secondary concerns, it sends a painful message about whose histories are prioritized and whose grief is considered expendable. When institutions respond slowly to Armenian remembrance efforts while denial continues loudly and publicly, silence itself becomes part of the harm.

Historian Julien Zarifian argues that making Armenian history publicly visible in institutional spaces directly affects the possibilities for institutional recognition. Recognition is the precondition for accountability: When perpetrator states deny genocide, institutions abroad, such as UC Berkeley, become the last bastions of history-making for the diaspora.

This is why these resolutions and remembrance events matter. For a community that is so small on this campus, official recognition is not just symbolic. It also means Armenian students do not have to constantly prove that their history is real. It creates space for remembrance without fear of being dismissed and signals that the campus is willing to stand on the side of truth even when others deny it.

I call on Campus to uphold the two ASUC resolutions passed by senate and commit to sending out annual campus-wide emails recognizing both April 24 as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day and September 27 as the beginning of the attacks that led to the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Armenians from Artsakh.

Universities often recognize tragedies and histories that have affected student communities severely, and Armenian students deserve that same acknowledgment and institutional assistance. Official recognition by UC Berkeley serves to educate the wider campus community, provide assistance to Armenian students who still bear intergenerational pain and show that remembering should not be contingent upon political expediency.

In a world where anti-Armenian propaganda and genocide denial continue, even on college campuses, UC Berkeley has a duty to make sure Armenian history is neither neglected nor forgotten.