Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Massacres genocide? 23 states have legislation that recognizes stance of Armenians
by Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 1, 2001
Posted: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 03:10 am CST

Mass killings and deportations of Armenians during the waning stages of the Ottoman Empire have proved to be a difficult subject for several states to address in their history standards.

According to Rouben Adalian, director of the Armenian National Institute, five other states besides Virginia recognize the massacres of between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923 as genocide in their history curriculum guides. They are California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York.

The Virginia Board of Education recently decided to strike any reference to the ethnically directed violence in a draft of Standards of Learning revisions. However, Virginia's history and social science SOL Teacher Resource Guide lists the "Turkish persecution of Armenians" as one of eight examples of genocide in the 20th century.

But while 23 states have officially recognized through legislative actions the killings as genocide, 44 states have chosen not to deal with the issue in their education guidelines.

Last week Maryland adopted a resolution siding with Armenians to recognize the killings as genocide after strong lobbying from the Armenian and Turkish communities. Turks, who insist the killings were not genocide, did succeed in striking a provision that would have required the Armenian story to be taught in all Maryland public schools. The state's education department has declined to enter the fray.

Instead, Maryland's broad, conceptual standards call for high school students to study "human rights violations" without specifically naming any.

"I'm not interested in offending Turks or Armenians," said Marcie Taylor-Thoma, the state social studies coordinator. "Both sides will not agree on the story, and they never will. We don't have enough evidence to back up either story.

"We can take a stand on what happened in the Plains Indians wars, which we know did not have a very good outcome, or our own Civil War. We know what happened there."

Maryland educators may well have to deal with the issue in a few years, though. The state is undertaking a project to write more specific standards in all content areas, including history, and world history is coming up in 2004, Taylor-Thoma said.

Massachusetts has two references to the "Armenian genocide" in its history standards. One plank referring to the "dawn of the 20th century" says: "The dark side: abiding destitution, disease, imperial clashes, armaments races, terrorism and assassinations; the Armenian genocide." The other standard comes under the "human toll of 20th century wars and genocides; the Holocaust": "The Armenian genocides, mid-1890s and 1915."

Susan Wheltle, the state's director of humanities, said Massachusetts also mentions the "Armenian genocide" in a short publication that describes how issues of genocide and other human rights violations should be taught. She said a panel of teachers and historians in 1997 decided the event was a "key topic" in a history curriculum. Those standards are currently being revised, but Wheltle said she thought the genocide reference would appear in the new version.

When California was drawing up its new history standards in 1998, "It was just assumed the Armenian genocide would be there," said Thomas Adams, the state's administrator for curriculum framework.

California has required that the matter be studied since 1987, under a state law passed during the administration of Gov. George Dukmejian, who is of Armenian descent. The state published the "Model Curriculum for Human Rights and Genocide" that year and reissued it last year without change, describing how the "forgotten genocide" of the Armenians should be taught.

"On the night of April 23-24, 1915, Armenian political, religious, educational, and intellectual leaders in Constantinople (Istanbul) were arrested, deported into Anatolia, and put to death," the publication says in a section labeled "The genocidal process." " . . . Armenians serving in the Ottoman armies had already been segregated into unarmed labor battalions and were now taken out in batches and murdered. Of the remaining population, the adult and teenage males were, as a pattern, swiftly separated from the deportation caravans and killed outright under the direction of Young Turk agents, the gendarmerie, and bandit and nomadic groups prepared for the operation. Women and children were driven for months over mountains and deserts. Intentionally deprived of food and water, they fell by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands along the routes to the desert."

Guler Koknar, executive director of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, said such characterizations are unfair because they fail to acknowledge the 2.5 million Turks who were killed during the period in question. Turks say the Ottoman government deported and killed about 600,000 Armenians in an effort to quell civil unrest during World War I.

"They deny the massacres of thousands of people," Koknar said of the Armenians. "It's very obvious whose side was distorted. They will keep doing this because if you get in the minds of young people, you have the advantage."

Adalian, of the Armenian National Institute, said it is the Turks who are in denial. Armenians say 1.5 million of their people were massacred or deported to their deaths in a genocide that took place between 1915 and 1923.

"This denialist position really doesn't hold with educators," he said. "There is only one source of denial - the Turkish government, the Turkish embassy."

Related Information...

Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News Archives