The Global Reparations Movement and Meaningful Resolution of the
Armenian Genocide
Friday, May 7th, 2010
BY HENRY THERIAULT
>From The Armenian Weekly
April 2010 Magazine
Over the past half millennium, genocide, slavery, Apartheid, mass
rape, imperial conquest and occupation, aggressive war targeting
non-combatants, population expulsions, and other mass human rights
violations have proliferated. Individual processes have ranged from
months to centuries. While the bulk of perpetrator societies have been
traditional European countries or European settler states in
Australia, Africa, and the Americas, Asian and African states and
societies are also represented among them. These processes have been
the decisive force shaping the demographics, economics, political
structures and forces, and cultural features of the world we live in
today, and the conflicts and challenges we face in it. For instance,
understanding why the population of the United States is as it is – why
there are African Americans in it, where millions of Native Americans
have `disappeared’ to, why Vietnamese and Cambodian people have
immigrated to the United States, etc. – requires recognizing the
fundamental role of genocide, slavery, and aggressive war in shaping
the United States and those areas, such as sub-Saharan Africa and
Southeast Asia, affected by it.
Around the globe, those in poverty, those victimized by war after war,
small residuals of once numerous groups, and others have recognized
that their current difficulties, their current misery, is a direct
result of these powerful forces of exploitation, subjugation, and
destruction. Out of the compelling logic of `necessary fairness’ – fair
treatment that is necessary to their basic material survival and to
their dignity as human beings – many have recognized that the
devastating effects of these past wrongs must be addressed in a
meaningful way if their groups and societies can hope to exist in
sustainable forms in the future. This recognition has led to various
reparations movements. Native Americans lay claim to lands taken
through brutal conquest, genocide, and fraud. African Americans demand
compensation for their contribution of a significant share of the
labor that built the United States, labor stolen from them and repaid
only with cruelty, violence, and individual and community destruction.
Formerly colonized societies whose people’s labor was exploited to
build Europe and North America, whose raw materials were stolen to
provide the materials, and whose societies were `de-developed,’ now
struggle to survive as the global Northern societies built on their
losses capitalize on the previous thefts to consolidate their
dominance. And so on.
In the past decade those engaged in these various struggles have begun
to recognize their common cause and a global reparations movement has
emerged. In 2005, for instance, Massachusetts’ Worcester State College
held an international conference on reparations featuring renowned
human rights activist Dennis Brutus, with papers on reparations for
South African Apartheid; African American slavery, Jim Crow, and
beyond; Native American genocide and land theft; the `comfort women’
system of sexual slavery implemented by Japan; the use of global debt
as a `post-colonial’ tool of domination; and the Armenian Genocide.
While there are dozens if not hundreds of major reparations processes
in the world today, it will be instructive to consider these cases in
detail, as illustrations of these many struggles.
U.S. slavery destroyed African societies and exploited and abused
violently millions of human beings for 250 years. At its dissolution,
it pushed former slaves into the U.S. economy without land, capital,
and education. Initial recognition of the need to provide some
compensation for slavery in order to give former slaves a chance
toward basic economic self-sufficiency gave way to violent and
discriminatory racism. Former slaves were forced into the economic
order at the lowest level. Wealth is preserved across generations
through inheritance. Those whose people begin with little and who do
not enslave or exploit others will remain with little. Reparations for
African Americans recognizes that the poverty, discrimination, and
other challenges facing African Americans today result from injustices
more than 100 years ago that have never been corrected, and the
subsequent racist violence and discrimination that has preserved the
post-slavery status quo every since.
The South African case revolved around the fact that, as the world had
divested from South Africa in the 1980’s, the Afrikaner government
borrowed money, especially from Switzerland, to continue to finance
Apartheid. Against the international embargo, bankers’ loans paid for
the guns and other military hardware that were used to kill black
activists and keep their people in slavery. The fall of Apartheid did
not mean an end to the debt. Today’s South Africans live in poverty as
their country is forced to pay off the tens of billions of U.S.
dollars in loans incurred to keep them in slavery before. They pay yet
further billions for the pensions of Afrikaner government, military,
and police officials living out their days in quiet comfort after
murdering, torturing, and raping with impunity for decades. What is
more, U.S. and other corporations drew immense profits from South
African labor. Many victims of Apartheid reject the loan debt and
demand reparation for all they suffered and all that was expropriated
from them as the just means for bringing their society out of poverty.
After years of refusal, the South African government itself has
recently reversed its position based on the desire to curry favor with
large corporations and has begun to support U.S. court cases for
reparations from corporations enriched by Apartheid.
In the aftermath of decolonization, societies devastated by decades or
centuries of occupation, exploitation, cultural and familial
destruction, and genocide were left in poverty and without the most
basic resources needed to meet the minimum needs of their people.
Forced suddenly to compete with those who had enriched themselves and
grown militarily and culturally powerful through colonialism, they had
no chance. Their only option was to borrow money in the hope of
`catching up.’ But corrupt and selfish leaders diverted billions to
private bank accounts (with winks from former colonial powers),
invested in foolish and irrelevant public works projects, and
otherwise misappropriated money that was supposed to help these
societies. Loan makers, such as the International Monetary Fund and
World Bank, imposed conditions to push these societies into a new
servitude to the economies of the United States and other great
powers. Servicing the loans that have not helped their economies
develop now means sacrificing basic human services and healthcare in
these desperate societies and accepting extensive outside control of
their societies to benefit former colonizers and multinational
corporations at the expense of further degradation of the dignity and
material conditions of their populations. The Jubilee movement calls
for debt cancellation as a crucial step toward justice for the
devastation of colonialism and post-colonialism and a path toward a
sustainable and fair global economy.
Former comfort women have long faced assaults on their dignity in
their home countries and by Japan. They were often impoverished by
their devastating experiences of being raped on average thousands of
times in permanent rape camps as sexual slaves to the Japanese
military. Physical damage from incessant forced intercourse and the
brutal violence soldiers subjected them to, the aftermath of coerced
drug addiction, and intense psychological trauma have frequently
followed the women into their old age. They have needed medical care
as well as acknowledgment of the inhuman injustice done to them. In
the early 1990’s, surviving `comfort women’ began calling for
reparations to address the effects of what they had suffered.
Native Americans and Armenians share certain similarities in their
past experiences and challenges today, from being crushed by competing
as well as sequential imperial power-games and conquests, and a series
of broken or unfair treaties, to a history of being subject to
massacre, sexual violence, and societal destruction. Members of both
groups have been sent on their `long marches’ to death. In the
aftermath of active genocide through direct killing and deadly
deportation, even the remnants of these peoples on their own lands
have been erased, through the raiding and destruction of hundreds of
thousands to millions of Native American graves as a policy of the
U.S. `scientific’ establishment, and the continuing destruction of
remaining Armenian Church and other structures throughout Turkey. For
Native Americans, the continuing expropriation of land and resources,
the blocking of Native American social structures and economic
activity, and the dramatic demographic destruction (an estimated 97
percent in the continental United States) has left behind a set of
Indian nations subject to the whims of the U.S. government and
struggling to retain identity and material survival in a hostile
world. Reparations, particularly of traditional lands, are essential
to the survival of Native peoples and cultures. Similarly, from its
status as the major minority in the Ottoman Empire a century ago,
today an Armenian population of below 3 million in the new republic
faces a Turkey of 70 million with tremendous economic resources built
on the plunder of Armenian wealth and land – through genocide and the
century of oppression and massacre that preceded it – and tremendous
military power awarded it through aid from the United States in
recognition of its regional power – also gained through genocide. The
Armenian Diaspora of perhaps five million is dispersed across the
globe and slowly losing cohesion and relevance as powerful forces of
assimilation and fragmentation take their toll. Reparations in the
form of compensation for the wealth taken, which in many cases can be
traced to Turkish families and business today, and lands depopulated
of Armenians and thus `Turkified’ through genocide, are crucial to the
viability of Armenian society and culture in the future. Without the
kind of secure cradle the Treaty of Sevres was supposed to give
Armenians, true regeneration is impossible: Turkish power, still
violently hostile to Armenians, grows each day, as the post-genocide
residual Armenia degenerates.
Of course, reparations are not simply about mitigating the damage done
to human collectivities in order to make possible at least some level
of regeneration or future survival, however important this is.
Reparations also represent a concrete, material, permanent, and thus
not merely rhetorical recognition by perpetrator groups or their
progeny of the ethical wrongness of what was done, and of the human
dignity and legitimacy of the victim groups. They are the form that
true apologies take, and the act through which members who supported
the original assault on human rights or who benefited from
it – economically, politically, militarily, culturally, and in terms of
the security of personal and group identity – decisively break with the
past and refuse to countenance genocide, slavery, Apartheid, mass
rape, imperial conquest and occupation, aggressive war focused on
civilians, forced expulsions, or any other form of mass human rights
violation.
***
It is with both dimensions in mind that in 2007 Jermaine McCalpin, a
political scientist with a recent Ph.D. from Brown University
specializing in long-term justice and democratic transformation of
societies after mass human rights violations; Ara Papian, former
Armenian ambassador to Canada and expert on the relevant treaty
history and law; Alfred de Zayas, former senior lawyer with the Office
of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Chief of Petitions,
and currently professor of international law at the Geneva School of
Diplomacy and International Relations; and I came together to study
the issue of reparations for the Armenian Genocide in concrete terms.
The Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group’s (AGRSG) work has
culminated in a draft report on the legal, treaty, and ethical
justifications for reparations and offers concrete proposals for the
political process that will support meaningful reparations. The
following are some of the elements of the AGRSG findings, arguments,
and proposals.
International law makes clear that victim groups have the right to
remedies for harms done to them. This applies to the Armenian Genocide
for two reasons. First, the acts against Armenians were illegal under
international law at the time of the genocide. Second, the 1948 UN
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide applies
retroactively. While the term `genocide’ had not yet been coined when
the 1915 Armenian Genocide was committed, the Convention subsumes
relevant preexisting international laws and agreements, such as the
1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions. Since the genocide was illegal under
those conventions, it remains illegal under the 1948 Convention. What
is more, the current Turkish Republic, as successor state to the
Ottoman Empire and as beneficiary of the wealth and land
expropriations made through the 1915 genocide, is responsible for
reparations.
While the 1920 Sevres Treaty, which recognized an Armenian state much
larger than what exists today, was never ratified, some of its
elements retain the force of law and the treaty itself is not
superseded by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. In particular, the fixing
of the proper borders of an Armenian state was undertaken pursuant to
the treaty and determined by a binding arbital award. Regardless of
whether the treaty was ultimately ratified, the committee process
determining the arbital award was agreed to by the parties to the
treaty and, according to international law, the resulting
determination has legal force regardless of the ultimate fate of the
treaty. This means that, under international law, the so-called
`Wilsonian boundaries’ are the proper boundaries of the Armenian state
that should exist in Asia Minor today.
Various ethical arguments have been raised against reparations
generally and especially for harms done decades or centuries in the
past. Two of particular salience are that (1) a contemporary state and
society that did not perpetrate a past mass human rights violation but
merely succeeded the state and society that did, does not bear
responsibility for the crime nor for repairing the damage done, for
this would be penalizing innocent people; and (2) those pursuing
Armenian Genocide land reparations are enacting a territorial
nationalist irredentism that is similar to the Turkish nationalism
that drove Turkification of the land through the genocide, and is thus
not legitimate.
To the first objection, the report responds that because current
members of Turkish society benefit directly from the destruction of
Armenians in terms of increased political and cultural power as well
as a significantly larger `Turkish’ territory and a great deal of
personal and state wealth that has been the basis of generations of
economic growth, they have a link to the genocide. While they cannot
be blamed morally for it, they are responsible for the return of
wealth and making compensation to Armenians for other dimensions of
the genocide. To the second objection, the report responds that the
lands in question became `Turkish’ precisely through the
ultranationalist project of the genocide. Retaining lands `Turkified’
in this way indicates implicit approval of that genocidal
ultra-nationalism, while removing Turkish control is the only route to
a rejection of that ideology.
In addition to the legal, political, and ethical arguments justifying
reparations, the report also proposes a complex model for the
political process for determining and giving reparations. The report
makes clear that material reparations and symbolic reparations,
including an apology and dissemination of the truth about what
happened in 1915, as well as rehabilitation of the perpetrator society
are crucial components of a reparations process if it is to result in
a stable and human rights-respecting resolution. The report proposes
convening an Armenian Genocide Truth and Reparations Commission with
Turkish, Armenian, and other involvement that will work toward both
developing a workable reparations package and a rehabilitative process
that will tie reparations to a positive democratic, other-respecting
transformation of the Turkish state and society. As much as
reparations will be a resolution of the Armenian Genocide legacy, they
will also be an occasion for productive social transformation in
Turkey that will benefit Turks.
Finally, the report makes preliminary recommendations for specific
financial compensation and land reparations. The former is based in
part on the detailed reparations estimate made as part of the Paris
Peace Conference, supplemented by additional calculations for elements
not sufficiently covered by the conference’s estimation of the
material financial losses suffered by Armenians. The report also
discusses multiple options regarding land return, from a symbolic
return of church and other cultural properties in Turkey to full
return of the lands designated by the Wilsonian arbital award. The
report includes the highly innovative option of allowing Turkey to
retain political sovereignty over the lands in question but
demilitarizing them and allowing Armenians to join present inhabitants
with full political protection and business and residency rights. This
model is interesting in part because it suggests a human
rights-respecting, post-national concept of politics that some might
see as part of a transition away from the kinds of aggressive
territorial nationalisms – such as that which was embraced by the Young
Turks – that so frequently produce genocide and conflict.
On May 15, 2010, the AGRSG will present its draft report formally in a
public event at George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict
Analysis and Resolution in Arlington, Va.