RECOGNIZE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE IN INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
The Justice: Brandeis University Independent Student Newspaper, Waltham, MA
February 9, 2015 Monday
by: Jessica Goldstein
In 1939, during the siege of Poland, Adolph Hitler gave a speech
expressing his right to exterminate the Polish. He justified
mass murder thusly: “I have placed my death-head formations in
readiness-for the present only in the East-with orders to send to
death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women and children of
Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living
space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation
of the Armenians?”
Grievously, we are nearly reaching the 100th anniversary of the
genocide against the Armenians, and this still remains the case. The
international community fails to recognize this event as, in fact, a
“genocide.” Although this genocide occurred during the First World
War-meaning that it predates the actual word “genocide”-the term
very much applies to this case. In fact, it inspired Raphael Lemkin
to invent the word “genocide” in the first place.
According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,
genocide means “any of the following acts committed with the intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily
or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction
in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births
within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to
another group.” The distinction between genocide and other atrocities
is that genocide is always perpetrated with the “intent to destroy.”
According to the Armenian National Institute, the genocide was
perpetrated by the Turkish government during World War I (between
1915 and 1918) against the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire-the
largest Christian minority in the Anatolian portion of the empire. In
addition to the mass killings, victims were subjected to deportation,
expropriation, abduction, torture and starvation in an attempt to
further the genocide and ethnic cleansing. Many would fall victim in
rather ordinary ways from hunger, thirst and disease.
Two weeks ago, Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer, took the case
of the Armenian genocide to the European Court of Human Rights,
defending the honor of some 1.5 million slaughtered by Turkish
officials a century ago. This case is long overdue.
Clooney is joining a movement that was established nearly a century
ago. Before the genocide even occurred, the international community
took notice of the mass atrocities committed against the Armenians,
and, surprisingly, successful activist movements arose in the United
States. This is recounted in Peter Balakian’s The Burning Tigris:
The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.
In fact, beginning in the 1890s, the response to the “Hamidian
Massacres”-and, later, genocide-marked the first international human
rights movement in American history, according to Balakian, helping
to establish our place as a global power, accompanying European powers.
And on Nov. 26, 1894, individuals gathered in the historic FaneuiI
Hall to solidify this movement and began addressing the grievous
atrocities being committed in the Ottoman Empire by the Sultan Abdul
Hamid II. News of the massacres splayed across the pages of papers like
the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe-just to
name a few. In 1915, the New York Times published some 145 articles
on the massacres in that year alone. Influential figures like John D.
Rockefeller helped to establish the National Armenian Relief Committee
to raise significant amounts of money for relief and later encouraged
Clara Barton to take her Red Cross relief team internationally for
the first time to further their cause.
Yet, oddly enough, we now seem to have forgotten about the genocide
against the Armenians. The Sultan’s attempt to solve “the Armenian
question” falls deafly on our ears. Perhaps Hitler was right in his
assumption that the world had forgotten about the Armenian genocide.
In fact, according to the Armenian National Institute, only twenty-one
countries-or 11 percent of countries in the world today-officially
recognize the genocide. Rest assured, the United States is one of them.
However, Turkish officials still to this day deny the existence of
the genocide, expressing that whenever Armenian scholars write about
the genocide, it is the “Armenian point of view.” At the same time,
the Association of Genocide Scholars and the community of Holocaust
scholars assert that this intentional extermination of the Armenians
is a genocide-one which claimed the lives of nearly two-thirds of
that population. Elie Wiesel writes that the Armenian genocide is a
“double killing” because it kills the memory of the event.
However, denial of a genocide is more than an altered historical view.
Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a noteworthy scholar of genocide denial at
Emory University, takes it a step further, stating that denial is in
fact “the final stage of genocide,” as it “strives to reshape history
in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.”
We must do better.
Not addressing and recognizing a genocide nearly a century after
the fact is setting a frightening precedent. Although the United
States does not categorically deny that the genocide occurred, this
doesn’t give us a Get-out-of-Jail-Free card. As a global power, we
must ensure that our government holds others in the international
community accountable for their human rights atrocities. Otherwise,
we are forgetting the precedent we set all those years ago when we
gathered in Faneuil Hall to protest an unjust act. We are forgetting
the precedent that ensured the world that we would soon be great.
http://issuu.com/justice/docs/march_13