PRESS RELEASE
Armenian Community & Church Council of Great Britain
P.O.Box 46207
London, W5 2YE
Email: [email protected]
A brief outline of the lecture given by Professor Richard Hovhannisian
on 27th February, 2005 at the Navasartian Centre, London.
In his 90th Anniversary Lecture to the Armenian Community at the
Navasartian Centre in London, Prof. Hovannisian referred to the
forgotten aspects of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Apart from mourning
the lost generation of approximately 1.5 Million victims, who were
murdered in the most sadistic and inhuman methods at the instigation of
the Turkish authorities, we had failed to emphasise the loss of our
Armenian Homeland and the continuity of Armenian History. We should not
forget the deprivation of land, loss of cultural heritage and the
collective wealth of the Armenian people living in the Anatolian
peninsula.
He said this great tragedy had not been rectified in any way yet. He
said Jewish people had received a great deal of compensation from the
German Republic, (even though no amount of compensation could cover the
great loss in human terms.) However, even this had not happened in the
Armenian case. No reparation, re-instatement or recompense, not even an
acknowledgement of the great physical or psychological damage done to
the Genocide victims and their descendents had yet been proferred by the
Turkish Republic. Referring to the Armenian people living in the
Diaspora he said, ‘We are all products of the Genocide.’
He said, that collective memory was short, referring to the Cambodian
Genocide during the Pol Pot regime, which had already slipped out of the
consciousness of the new generation of his students.
He said that the challenge to us as Armenians was to make the Armenian
Genocide a part of peoples’ collective existence and a part of human
history. In order for the Armenian Genocide to have a meaning to
others, the Armenian experience must be related to everyone’s
experience, in other words, it must be relevant in a universal way. The
only people who had achieved this had been Jewish people in the case of
the Jewish Holocaust.
The challenge was to find a way of educating young people to make the
Armenian Genocide relevant to their lives. The Armenian people in the
Diaspora had found this difficult to do because the people who survived
the 1915 Genocide had been mostly involved in commerce and had worked
hard to put their lives together under very difficult circumstances.
The Genocide had wiped out almost all the intellectuals in 1915 and very
few of these had survived.
He said we had to find ‘handles’ to make the Genocide experience
broader. We could draw parallels between the oppressed and second class
status of Black people in the United States to the oppressed second
class status of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey. Had the
government of the United States not been serious about achieving
equality for all minority groups living in the U.S.A. and had they not
only enshrined it in law but enforced the law, a genocide of Black
people could have been plausible.
Prof. Hovannisian referred to the connection between the Hamidian
massacres of the Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey, in the last
decades of the 19th Century, to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the
‘Final Solution.’ He said although there was a continuity of violence
against a defenceless minority there were in fact differences between
the reasons for the violence and the intended effect. The Hamidian
‘pogroms’ were instigated by a traditional autocratic Sultan, Abdul
Hamid, on the Armenian Christian minority of Ottoman Turkey to suppress
and subdue any expression for a desire for reforms in order to preserve
the status quo. The 1915 Genocide, ‘the Final Solution’, on the other
hand, was the second wave of violence unleashed by the Young Turks –
after deposing the despotic Sultan – in order to create total change in
Turkey, create a homogenous Moslem Turkic population, by eliminating
the entire Armenian Christian population as well as other Christian
minorities such as Greeks & Assyrians.
It was important to study the Armenian Genocide, said Prof. Hovannisian,
because the Armenian Genocide of 1915 had been the ‘prototype’ for all
mass killings of the 20th Century, a century laden with Genocides. He
defined Genocide as the act of an ideologically driven group using
extreme violence to achieve their objective. The Young Turks to the
Armenian population, the Nazis to the Jewish population of Germany and
beyond, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He said that the forceful and
violent implementation of a belief system constituted genocide.
Prof. Hovannisian discussed the common denominators of Genocide. The
economic factor was a major incentive and central motive as well as the
rape of women, which was not only physical violence but a symbolic
shaming as well as actual eradication of the next generation.
Referring to the recently formed Turkish Armenian Reconciliation
Committee, TARC, he expressed scepticism of any such attempt, since he
believed that the Turkish Government only used such platforms to simply
deny the Armenian Genocide at every opportunity and therefore a genuine
reconciliation could not be achieved until Turkish people looked
critically and honestly at their past and distanced themselves from it
by condemning the Genocide committed by the Young Turks. Prof.
Hovannisian said that there were some brave Turkish historians and
writers who were trying to grapple with Turkey’s official denial of
their dark history, trying to write honestly under very difficult
circumstances. However, the idea of having to face their dark genocidal
history was causing the political elite in modern Turkey a huge
dilemma. This was because Ataturk, the first president of the ‘modern’
Turkish Republic and the great hero of the Turkish nation state, was
himself implicated in the Armenian Genocide. Apart from driving out the
last remnants of the Armenian victims towards the end of Genocide
period, Ataturk’s ministers and members of parliament consisted of the
very people responsible for implementing the Armenian Genocide.
Finally, Prof. Hovannisian quoted his friend and colleague, Prof.
Terence Des Pres, who had told him that power destroyed everyone and
everything around them and after the destruction, it sought to destroy
the memory of the people themselves. In the introduction to The
Armenian Genocide in Perspective, edited by Prof. Richard G.
Hovannisian, 1986 (Transaction Books,) Terence Des Pres wrote, “When
modern states make way for geopolitical power plays, they are not above
removing everything – nations, cultures, homelands – in their path.
Great powers regularly demolish other peoples’ claims to dignity and
place and sometimes, as we know, the outcome is genocide …. Against
historical crimes we fight as best we can and a cardinal part of this
engagement is ‘the struggle of memory against forgetting.’
Prof. Hovannisian concluded by saying that in an uneven struggle and we
do the best we can for as long as we can and the weapon is ‘memory.’