A friend once sent me a Christmas card with a handwritten greeting:
"May your genocide be recognized this holiday season." It still makes me
laugh out loud, because it captures something about the absurd and
profound impasse between Turkey and the Armenian people.
One hundred years ago
this month, the Ottoman Empire began carrying out a systematic plan to
exterminate its minority Armenian population. Between 1 million and 1.5
million people were killed or died of starvation. Yet the Turkish
government won't admit this historical fact. It spends a fortune
annually to stop scholarly and cultural events about the genocide, even
going so far as to pay former Sen. Richard Gephardt's Gephardt Group
more than $1 million each year to lobby against congressional
resolutions on the genocide. Turkey has threatened several times, most
recently in 2007, to close Turkish missile bases to U.S. airplanes if
Congress passes a simple non-binding statement acknowledging the events
of 1915 as genocide. And its tactics work; the resolution, which had the
votes to pass, was killed at the State Department's behest.
The
United States isn't the only target of this censorship effort. At their
government's prompting, Turkish diasporan organizations in 2009 mounted
a campaign to stop the Toronto school board from including the Armenian
genocide in a human rights curriculum. In 2010, Ankara succeeded in
pressuring the Rwandan government to scrap a presentation on the
Armenian genocide at a panel on genocide at the United Nations. In 2012,
the Turkish government was successful in demanding that the British
government order the Tate Gallery to remove the word "genocide" from the
wall text of an Arshile Gorky exhibit.
Substitute "Jews" for
"Armenians" and "German government" for "Turkish government" and you can
imagine the ensuing moral outrage. The Armenian community has been
waiting a century for the international community to stand up to Turkey.
It shouldn't have to wait any longer.
The word "recognition"
hovers over the history of the Armenian genocide like a hawk. It's a
defining word that embodies an ethical basis for accountability after a
human rights crime. The issue of recognition is not an abstraction, or a
rhetorical game. The "R-word" is about responsibility, social justice
and repair in the aftermath of one of the most extensive human rights
crimes of the modern era: the crime that was instrumental in Raphael
Lemkin's coining the very word and concept of genocide.
When
Lemkin was asked in February 1949, just after the U.N. Genocide
Convention was ratified, why he became interested in genocide, he
answered, "Because it happened so many times. It happened to the
Armenians. And after — the Armenians got a very rough deal at the
Versailles conference because the criminals who were found guilty
weren't punished." Lemkin was not only noting the importance of the
event but also pointing out that it's ethically harmful to commit such a
crime with impunity.
Denial of genocide is the final stage of
genocide because it strives to kill the memory of the event; denial
seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators; denial
creates what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called "a morally
counterfeit universe for the survivors and their legacy."
In
December, after North Korea organized a hacking operation against Sony
Pictures to stop the release of "The Interview," President Obama spoke
out against the use of threats by foreign powers to inhibit free speech
in the United States.
"We cannot have a society where some
dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United
States," he said, "because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out
of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they'll do when they see a
documentary that they don't like, or news reports that they don't like —
or even worse, imagine if producers or distributors or others start
engaging in self-censorship because they don't want to offend the
sensibilities of somebody whose sensibilities probably need to be
offended."
Obama
has gone further than any other president in confronting Turkish
leaders by asking them to deal with the events of 1915 honestly, as he
did in 2009 when he visited Turkey. But he should heed his own wisdom
and stop self-censoring.
The president understands clearly that
what happened to the Armenians is genocide. In 2008, before his
election, he stated, "My firmly held conviction [is] that the Armenian
genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion or a point of view,
but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of
historical evidence." The president should follow the example of Pope
Francis who, in acknowledging the historical significance of the
Armenian genocide on Sunday, refused to be intimidated by Turkish
government bullying and cajoling.
The
Turkish government, for its part, should stop interfering with cultural
events and intellectual freedom in democratic societies. And it should
listen to many of its own ethically committed citizens who work hard for
truth in Turkey. The Turkish scholar and journalist Cengiz Aktar spoke
for many of his citizens when he wrote, "The Armenian genocide is the
Great Catastrophe of Anatolia, and the mother of all taboos in this
land. Its curse will continue to haunt us as long as we fail to talk
about, recognize, understand and reckon with it."
Removing the curse won't require magic. All that's necessary is moral leadership.
Peter
Balakian is the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the
Humanities at Colgate University and the author of many books, including
"The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response."
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