THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE: NOT JUST FOR ONCE A YEAR
by George Shirinian
Published: Wednesday May 28, 2014
A scene from the annual April 24 protest at the Turkish embassy in
Washington. Photo via ANCA
Many Armenians express their interest and concern in the genocide
once a year, around April 24. They feel the need to participate in
commemorative events because some feel obligated because of guilt,
some do it once a year because they don’t want to visit the trauma the
rest of the year, and some dread the past altogether and stay away
from it throughout the year, but for the sake of keeping the memory
alive they feel compelled to attend these commemorative events. There
are those who don’t commemorate even once a year because they are so
divorced from the history.
But there is so much more to be done. The Armenian Genocide is a
subject vital to Armenians that must be thought about and acted upon
every day. Here are some critical reasons.
1. It is a mass crime that demands recognition and restorative justice
for the international criminal justice system to have any credibility
for punishment, deterrence, or prevention.
2. To bring a measure of comfort and closure to the victims and their
descendants, who must endure tremendous psychological pain, not only
for the loss of life, land, and property, but also for the threat to
the sustainability of Armenian culture and civilization.
3. To search for truth and understanding of the Genocide, what
happened, how it happened, and its ongoing impact. This is still
aggressively denied by the Government of Turkey and its supporters,
who treat the Armenians as unworthy of consideration as human beings
and perpetuates the effects of the Genocide, as Prof. Roger W. Smith
has written so eloquently.
4. The Genocide is the main obstacle to normal relations between
Armenia and Turkey today. Turkey has unilaterally closed their mutual
border and imposed an economic blockade on Armenia. Ostensibly this is
over the Karabagh issue. But, clearly the Genocide is a major aspect
of it, as Turkey continues to insist on a historical commission to
review the subject. Thus, the 1915 Genocide is national security for
Armenia’s existence today.
5. Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide is an assault not only on
Armenians, but also on truth, on world history, and thus on humanity,
itself.
The deniers are at work every day. Prof. Vahakn Dadrian has described
there being an “industry of denial.” They are supported by the Turkish
government in various ways with all the political and economic leverage
that a powerful state has at its disposal. They organize conferences,
give public lectures, publish books and articles using the forms
of scholarship, with appropriate academic language and footnotes,
but what they produce is not scholarship; it is anti-Armenian
propaganda. Real scholarship follows the evidence-all the evidence-to
arrive at conclusions. Real scholarship takes account of the arguments
of other scholars and builds on them with new evidence or serious
arguments. It does not hide, ignore, or dismiss information or ideas
that do not fit a preconceived model. Recently, they have also been
active in the courts, seeking legal validation in various ways for
their denialist position.
Therefore, it is necessary for us to deal with this issue more than
once a year. We must be active in working energetically every day in
promoting education and awareness of the Armenian Genocide at every
level and to combat its pervasive, well funded denial, racism and
hostility towards Armenians.
There is at least one organization that has been doing just that
successfully for the past thirty-two years, the Zoryan Institute.
Zoryan has excelled at bringing the key Armenian issues to prominent
international settings and publishing groundbreaking books on critical
subjects, using original research based on archival materials. It
collected original archival documentation, including some 3,000 hours
of oral history testimony of Armenian Genocide survivors on video,
providing raw data for future researchers, as well as a link to the
eyewitness experience of the survivors for future generations. It was
behind such significant international public events as the Permanent
Peoples Tribunal in Paris in 1984, the first judicial hearing of the
Armenian Genocide. Its verdict found that genocide had been committed
against the Armenian people and that the modern republic of Turkey
inherited the legal responsibilities for dealing with the consequences.
Among the more than forty books and two journals fundamental to the
field that Zoryan has produced, let me mention just a few example. A
Shameful Act is the first account by a Turkish historian which
documents that the mass killings of Armenians during WWI was a
deliberate, centralized program of state-sponsored extermination.
Judgment at Istanbul (in Turkish and English) provides the scholarly
documentation and analysis of the Ottoman Military Tribunals
prosecuting the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. The Armenian
Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915-1916
(in German, Turkish and English), pioneering work fourteen years in the
making, which led the German Parliament to pass a unanimous resolution
acknowledging Germany’s role in the Genocide. It also prompted one
of Turkey’s leading journalists to write, “…if you read the book
and look at the documents, if you are a person who is introduced to
the subject through this book, then there is no way that you would
not believe in the genocide and justify the Armenians.” He called it
“an extremely important and expensive study.”
Zoryan has also been engaged in court cases, participating as an
academic amicus curiae, along with other distinguished organizations,
to help defend Massachusetts from having to include denial literature
in its high school curriculum on the Armenian Genocide. It was involved
as an amicus curiae in helping to defend California’s law on extending
the deadline for payment of life insurance policies for victims of
the Genocide. And as recently as a month ago, Zoryan was instrumental
in organizing a coalition of major Armenian organizations in Europe
and North America in a successful endeavor to persuade Switzerland
to appeal the European Court of Human Rights’ ruling absolving Dogu
Perincek of Armenian Genocide denial.
This work needs professionals, trained academics and experts involving
huge financial resources for identifying, collecting, analyzing,
transliterating, translating, editing and publishing, authoritative,
universally recognized original archival documents on the history
of the events surrounding 1915. This material must be distributed
worldwide, especially in Turkey.
No one expects the average person to devote him or herself to such
specialized and labor intensive work. But, the denial and as a result,
the racism and the threat of security to the Armenians must be resisted
by everyone. The only way this can be done is through a professional,
successful, highly acclaimed research center such as Zoryan Institute
and with the generous financial support of every Armenian.
In this month of April, the world commemorates the genocide not
only of the Armenian, but also the Jewish and Rwandan peoples. We
naturally focus on these issues at this time, but the work on the
Armenian Genocide is not for just once a year.
– George Shirinian is Executive Director of the Zoryan Institute;
contact him at [email protected]
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