Armenian Studies Program
Barlow Der Mugrdechian, Coordinator
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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.
http://www.fresnostate.edu/artshum/armenianstudies/