Don't forget Armenia: On anniversary of genocide, President must press Turkey to admit to its crimes

Kaster/APPresident Barack Obama needs to address the Armenian genocide. Ninety-six years after the event, the Armenian genocide remains an ethical issue that won't go away. In 1915, under the cover of World War I, the Ottoman Turkish government implemented a final solution for its Armenian population, some 2.5 million Christians living on their ancient homeland of 2,500 years and throughout what is today Turkey; in the end, more than a million Armenians perished, the rest sent into the diaspora.The catastrophe had such an impact on modern thinking that it was the central impetus in Raphael Lemkin's coining the term genocide, and it so emboldened Adolf Hitler that he exhorted his military advisers in 1939, just before invading Poland: "Who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?" The genocide of the Armenians would become a template for genocide in the modern era, as it was murder carried out with the apparatus of modern technology and bureaucracy.Although all Turkish governments since WWI have denied the crime of genocide against the Armenians, the consensus on the historical facts and moral definition of the events of 1915 are indisputable. The International Association of Genocide Scholars has written two open letters to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan outlining the historical record.Every year on April 24, the President of the United States issues a statement commemorating the annihilation of the Armenians that began on that evening in Constantinople (now Istanbul) with the arrest of 250 of their cultural leaders. They were sent to prison to be tortured, and most were killed.Every year, Armenians around the world look to the American President to use the accurate term for the mass killing of the Armenian population: genocide. Every year, a President says everything he can about the meaning of the event, but stops short of using that word because the Turkish government, fearful of the truth, employs every possible tactic to dissuade the President from speaking it.Coercion works, because Turkey is a consequential ally, and our government has not been able to muster the moral courage to do what many countries around the world have done: Make an official statement of recognition of the Armenian genocide. Such statements - by Canada, Uruguay, France, Russia, Poland, Greece, Lebanon, Sweden and so on - have been made not to legislate history, but only to affirm what is a clear, resolved historical record and to make what might be called a redress to official Turkish denial.It seems perfectly clear that the 21 countries that have made such resolutions find Turkey's aggressive efforts of denial ethically repugnant and unacceptable for a NATO member that also aspires to European Union admission.Many in the human rights community believe that President Obama has an obligation to join the ethical stances of these countries by affirming that the United States understands the importance of ethical memory in the face of a planned, state-sponsored, cynical program of denial that the Turkish government persists in.Obama has already done more than any previous President by telling the Turkish parliament in 2009 that not acknowledging the past properly can be a heavy weight to carry; as he told Turkish President Abdullah Gul: "I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915, and my view of that history has not changed." (Obama emphatically asserted the need to acknowledge the Armenian genocide during his campaign.)Having opened the door, he should now heed his own words by acknowledging the views expressed by the courageous Human Rights Association in Istanbul: "Today, the 24th of April, is recognized worldwide as the date signifying the Armenian Genocide. Only in Turkey is this taboo. The Turkish state mobilizes all its resources to deny the meaning of this date. . . . Our struggle for human rights in Turkey is at the same time our mourning for our common losses and is an homage paid to the genocide victims."Obama could also recall one of many statements Lemkin, the father of the UN Genocide Convention, made about the Armenian genocide. On a sweltering August day in 1950, he wrote: "Let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat of the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915."Balakian is the author of "The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response." He teaches at Colgate University.