ARMENIAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE OF CANADA
3401 Olivar-Asselin
Montréal, Québec
H4J 1L5
Tél. (514) 334-1299
Fax (514) 334-6853
Contact: Shant Karabajak 514-334-1299
PRESS RELEASE
April 24, 2005
THE SOLIDARITY OF SORROW
Gerald Kaplan at 90th commemoration of the Armenian Genocide in Toronto
The Armenian National Committe of Canada would like inform you of the speech
delivered by Gerry Kaplan, keynote speeker at the 90thanniversary
commemoration event in Toronto, on April 17, 2005.
The following is a transcript
Keynote Address to the Toronto Armenian Community on the 90th Anniversary of
the Armenian Genocide
April 17, 2005.
Gerald Caplan
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots in the spring rain.
T. S. Eliot wrote these haunting, unforgettable words in his epic poem The
Waste Land. This was 7 years before the Armenian genocide, which we
commemorate on April 24 and which we have no evidence Eliot was touched by.
It was 21 years before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the 2nd World War,
during the black heart of the Holocaust, which we commemorate on April 19
and which Eliot could hardly have conceived only 2 decades later. And it was
72 years before the genocide in Rwanda, the great genocide of the late 20th
century, occurring almost exactly half a century after the world, emerging
from the nightmare of Hitler, vowed Never Again. April, when the lilacs
bloom again.
The 20th century has gone down in historical infamy as the Century of
Genocide. I’m sorry I don’t know whether the 1904 genocide by the German
army of the Herero people of south-west Africa (now Namibia), the first
genocide of the last century, also took place in April. But we do know that
the near-genocide of the Fur people of western Sudan has now entered its 3rd
April with little respite and no adequate international intervention. We
also know from Rwanda and Darfur that Never Again has been trivialized as so
much rhetorical bombast by public figures on public occasions, sound and
fury signifying little. We now know that unless major strategic or economic
interests are at play, if nothing is at stake beyond mere human life, on
however massive a scale, then the accurate description of the state of our
times is Again and Again and Again.
What we also know, I’m afraid-and this is an equally dismaying
observation—is that for a very large number of those descended from
victims and survivors of the genocides of our time, the precise concept is
in any event NOT Never Again. It’s that never again will OUR people be the
victims of such a calamity.
I am honored and humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address on
this historic occasion. But I also feel outraged and almost morally
defeated-as you all must surely be— that the central message of this 90th
anniversary remains the relentless effort to persuade our own government in
Ottawa, the Government of the United States, and-I single it out for reasons
that I’ll try to make clear—the government of Israel, to perform a simple
act of justice. We must continue to insist that each of them officially
recognizes that in 1915, a classic genocide, wholly consistent with the
definition set down 35 years later in the United Nations Convention for the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, was deliberately
inflicted upon the Armenian people living in Turkey by the Turkish
government and army and their proxies.
It happens to be among the several terrible ironies of this humiliating
situation that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who coined the
word genocide and almost single-handedly pressured the United Nations into
adopting the Convention in 1948, cited the annihilation of the Armenians as
a seminal example of genocide.
I have asked myself why I was selected for this role today. I assume my good
friend Aris Babikian, well-known to you all, played a key role in this
decision. I’m very sorry family matters have prevented Aris from being here
today. For those who may not know, I want to tell you that in my view, Aris
Babikian is the best single ambassador that the Canadian Armenian community
has. NOT because he never stops lobbying anyone with the slightest power and
influence about the injustice of non-recognition, although that is true. But
because he is THIS community’s link to OTHER communities who have shared
comparable tragedies. In fact, I regret to say frankly, in my experience
Aris is one of only few Armenian Canadians who have shown a genuine interest
and who has reached out to such other communities.
And that’s why I believe I’m here. Because like Aris, I believe in the
solidarity of sorrow and the solidarity of victims.
My own special focus is Rwanda. For various reasons, I came to write a long
report, a history, in effect, of the Rwanda genocide. Called “Rwanda: The
Preventable Genocide,” it documents the organized slaughter in 1994 of
perhaps 800,000, perhaps a million—no one yet knows for sure– Rwandan
Tutsi and thousands of pro-democracy Rwanda Hutu, and the complicity in or
indifference to this genocide by members of the international community.
When the report was published, I found myself unable simply to walk away and
begin new and unrelated pursuits. I feared that the memory of the genocide,
only 6 years after the tragedy, had already almost vanished, assuming any
but a bare minority ever knew the truth about it in the first place beyond a
few horrific TV images.
Working from my home, I founded an international voluntary movement called
Remembering Rwanda, dedicated to commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary
of the genocide. (The 11th anniversary, on April 7, passed with barely a
murmur; I doubt many outside Rwanda knew of it at all.) From the start, I
particularly sought out the support and cooperation of Jewish and Armenian
organizations.
I had 2 reasons. I instinctively believed that the solidarity of victims
would be obvious to these 2 communities above all, so that the simple fact
of shared victimhood would lead their survivors and descendants to rush to
support each other. And I believed (as someone who has always been involved
in political action for social change) that for good practical reasons of
increased influence, the more of us that we could unite in a common cause,
the better for us all.
Despite my long years in the political trenches, I seem to have been
stunningly naïve. Of course we found some support. A number of prominent
Jews in North America, Europe and Israel lent us their names. A few
prominent Armenians did the same. Aris managed to get the agreement of
several international Armenian organizations to use their names as well, but
I believe that I only ever spoke to a couple of their members in total.
During last year’s 3-day commemoration in Toronto for the 10th anniversary
of the Rwanda genocide, Aris alone showed up on behalf of the Armenian
community. I can tell you how gratified the Rwandans were by his presence.
In the dozens of other cities throughout North America and western Europe
where commemorations took place, sometimes a few known Armenians were
involved, sometimes none at all. Why should this be? I asked a number of
people. The bottom line always seemed to be a preoccupation with the
Armenian genocide to the exclusion of any other.
This is of course understandable. We naturally all feel most strongly the
loss of our own family and kin. But beyond that, the Armenian people, like
the Rwandans in certain ways, still must cope with the special burden of
official denial. They are assaulted by the harsh reality that the Turkish
government to this day refuses to acknowledge the crime that was committed
and lobbies incessantly against recognition of the genocide by other
governments. I know that this insult continues to drive the Armenian
community.
Nevertheless, I must tell you frankly that I found the general disinterest
of Armenians in the Rwandan genocide to be not only morally disappointing
but from your own point of view, politically short-sighted.
As for the Jewish communities of the western world and the government of
Israel, with notable honorable exceptions they failed to respond in a
positive manner. I believe that most of the western Jewish and Israeli
establishments were more or less indifferent to the Rwandan genocide.
In regard to the Armenian genocide, I must report that these same elements
were in the vanguard of denial.
I fully understand that these are very sensitive and delicate matters, and
it’s much easier not to raise them at all. But that would be running away
from uncomfortable truths carrying important lessons. I want instead to try
to talk about them as carefully as possible. I’m sure the fact that I’m
Jewish-wholly non-religious, even anti-religious, but yet Jewish to my
core—complicates the issue considerably. These are thoughts I have tried
to work out for several years. Today seems to be an appropriate forum for
articulating them.
On the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
DC, are inscribed one of Hitler’s more intriguing statements. In 1939, just
before he launched his aggression against Poland, triggering the Second
World war, Hitler explained that he was dispatching special death squads to
Poland that would deliberately slaughter large numbers of Polish men, women
and children. But he wasn’t remotely concerned about the reaction. “Who,
after all,” he asked, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
In other words, he was saying, with sufficient shamelessness, you could
literally get away with murder, even murder of the ultimate kind. For the
past 8 decades, a series of Turkish governments and their supporters have
largely confirmed Hitler’s cynical insight, as they have denied the very
existence of the genocide and attempted to undermine all attempts to have it
recognized.
As it happens, in recent years their bullying and intimidation tactics have
increasingly failed, as a growing number of countries have officially
recognized the genocide. But to our shame, Canada has not, the United States
has not, and Israel has not.
One year ago, the House of Commons in Ottawa voted to recognize the genocide
by a large margin, 153 votes to 68. But the entire cabinet voted against the
resolution, citing the need to maintain good relations with Turkey. So the
bizarre situation in our own country is that the Canadian House of Commons
recognizes the genocide of the Armenians, but the government of Canada
officially does not.
In the United States, although George Bush promised recognition in his first
presidential campaign, he soon enough reneged in the face of joint pressure
from both Turkish officials and significant Jewish-American organizations,
such as the highly influential American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.
This is not often widely discussed publicly. But it’s perfectly familiar in
American political circles since Congress too has been convinced by this
same tenacious lobby to reject resolutions calling for recognition. This
lobbying effort was hardly unknown, having been documented last year by the
Israeli daily Haaretz among other sources.
I should also stress that on the other hand, and as one would have hoped and
expected, prominent among those publicly calling for American government
recognition of the genocide were a significant number of Jewish Americans.
They included Holocaust scholars, rabbis and community leaders, all of whom
had concluded from the evidence that there was absolutely no question that a
classic genocide had been inflicted on Turkey’s Armenians.
The cooperation between Turkish officials and these Jewish American
organizations naturally reflects Israel’s own position on the question. That
position is an adamant refusal to acknowledge the 1915 genocide, regardless
of the evidence. In fact so strongly has this policy been maintained by a
series of Israeli governments that it is, unfortunately, fair to say that
rather than indifference, rather than the passivity of the bystander,
Israelis, with a few notably courageous exceptions, have taken active
measures to undermine attempts to safeguard the memory of the Armenian
genocide. One of these, I’m afraid, has been to deny that a genocide ever
occurred. Here we have the most appalling irony of them all: that those who
consider that denial of the Holocaust is tantamount almost to a 2nd
Holocaust, have now become deniers of the genocide of the Armenians.
The motives of this almost Orwellian stance are, however, clear enough.
There are two.
The first, and the better-known, is based on Israel’s determination to
maintain a strategic alliance between itself and Turkey in the Middle East.
Israel’s vital interests are deemed to be at stake here, not to say it’s
very survival. This is an understandable and easily defended position. But
it’s a position that places realpolitik and national strategic interests
ahead of ethics, ahead of the solidarity of genocide victims, and ahead of
Israel’s self-declared claim to be a different kind of nation, indeed a
“light unto the nations”. This is a position that says that even the common
fate of genocide cannot take priority over Israel’s perceived self-interest.
But this leads to the 2nd reason for Israel’s refusal to recognize the
genocide, one that I find far more difficult to understand or to share. It
is precisely the refusal to accept that the Holocaust and the Armenian
genocide, or the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, or the Holocaust and
any other human catastrophe, can be equated in any way.
As the Jerusalem Post editorialized a decade ago: “There is nothing in
history like the Holocaust. It was not even JUST a genocide.” The Holocaust
must be seen as transcendent, as being in a separate category, from all
other presumably “ordinary” genocides like the Armenians’. In fact it’s not
a genocide at all. It’s THE Holocaust, and it’s always with a capital “H”.
I want to say again that these are remarkably sensitive issues, frankly
uncomfortable and difficult to discuss. They are felt passionately and
unforgivingly by many. For many Jews, both in Israel and the western world,
recognizing other genocides somehow diminishes the singularity, the
uniqueness, of what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe, and on this uniqueness
they are uncompromising. Nothing, they declare, can compare to the
Holocaust. It is incomparable. It is unprecedented. It is unique. It is
even, in the actual words of two scholars determined to end any possibility
of further debate, “uniquely unique”.
The significance of this debate has been described by one Israeli scholar
this way: “From Auschwitz came 2 people: a minority that insists it will
never happen again, and a majority that insists it will never happen to US
again.”
This is a helpful way to frame the debate. It points out that the lesson of
the Holocaust, or at least the implication, can be seen as either
particularistic or universalistic, as either a unique episode in human
history applicable only to the Jewish people or a grotesque reflection of
the potential capacity of human nature for depravity. Of course every event
in history is unique and unprecedented in certain ways, and beyond question
some aspects of the Holocaust are literally unique, that is to say, nothing
else like them had ever happened before or indeed since. But the same, alas,
can be said of aspects of both the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.
I believe that what the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides have in
common transcend their differences.
For what all 3 have in common is that in each case, a cabal of conspirators
set out explicitly and deliberately to exterminate all the members of the
target group for the simple reason of WHO they were, not what they did. What
all have in common is a demonstration that whether Turks in the
circumstances prevailing in 1915, or Germans in the context of Nazi Germany
and World War 2, or Rwandan Hutu in the ambience of the 100 days after April
7, 1994-in each of these circumstances, ordinary Turks and ordinary Germans
and ordinary Rwandans perpetrated crimes that no one would have thought
them-or any other human being—capable of. I believe that in advance, few
of them would have believed themselves capable of such a descent into
barbarism.
For that reason, I consider that I too am capable-under unfathomable but
feasible circumstances-of perpetrating similar crimes. For that reason, I
see in the Holocaust a universal and not a particular lesson.
I see that any people anywhere may suddenly become the victims of
unspeakable atrocities.
I see the solidarity of sorrow, not the competition of victims.
I see that all racism, all bigotry, all hatred, all anti-democratic
behaviour must be opposed without compromise.
I see the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed and the victimized
wherever in the world they may be.
Let me conclude with a quote from an article written in 1918 by a man named
Shmuel Tolkowsky. Tolkowsky mattered. He was secretary to Chaim Weizmann,
then the leader of the world Zionist movement and later the 1st president of
the State of Israel. The article, written only 3 years after the genocide of
the Armenians, was called “The Armenian Question from the Zionist Point of
View”. It is reproduced in a recent book given to me by Aris Babikian called
The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, written by an
Israeli, Yair Auron.
“We Zionists look upon the fate of the Armenian people with a deep and
sincere sympathy,” Tolkowsky wrote. “We do so as men [he meant humans], as
Jews, and as Zionists. As men our motto is.’I am a human being. Whatever
affects another human being affects me.’ As Jews, our exile from our
ancestral home and our centuries of suffering in all parts of the globe have
made us, I would fain to say, specialists in martyrdom; our humanitarian
feelings have been refined to an incomparable degree, so much so that the
sufferings of other people-even alien to us in blood and remote from us in
distance-cannot but strike the deeper chords of our soul and weave between
us and our fellow sufferers that deep bond of sympathy which one might call
the solidarity of sorrow. And among all those who suffer around us, is there
a people whose record of martyrdom is more akin to ours than that of the
Armenians?”
Today I would add: “Or that of the Rwandans?”
So I hope that Armenians, Rwandans and Jews, and all women and men who
believe in justice and a better, more equitable world, will work together
for genocide prevention, will work together to end the terrible calamity in
Darfur, and will work together to ensure that when we meet again 10 years
from now, we will commemorate together the 100th anniversary of the Armenian
genocide, mildly comforted that, at long last, the entire world will finally
have come to acknowledge the terrible, indisputable reality of your history.
-30-
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress