Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Crimes so immense
by Clarke Thomas, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Wednesday, April 11, 2001
Posted: Friday, April 13, 2001 11:26 pm CST

Turkey's 1915 genocide against Armenians warrants recognition

The Holocaust with 6 million Jewish victims is well known. But how many people nowadays know about the genocide of 1.5 to 2 million Armenians in Turkey in 1915?

And who cares 86 years later? That was precisely the point of a symposium, "Indifference: Remembering the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust," held last Wednesday at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. The Armenian genocide inflicted, directly or indirectly, by the Sultan, the Turkish ruler at the time, was one of the early 20th century examples of a sovereign state acting against its own population with a planned annihilation.

I found numerous lessons for today from this symposium held 1,700 years after the Armenian tribe accepted Christianity, a point made by seminary president Carnegie Samuel Calian, himself of Armenian heritage. Unfortunately, we have seen the same horror later in Nazi Germany, and more recently in Cambodia, in Bosnia, in Sudan and in Rwanda. On Aug. 22, 1939, Adolf Hitler declared, "I have ordered my death units to exterminate without mercy or pity men, women and children belonging to the Polish-speaking race. It is only in this manner that we can acquire the vital territory which we need. After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?" Therefore, the Armenian story is of relevance today.

First, praise to organizations in Pittsburgh's Jewish community for helping to sponsor the symposium. So well has the Holocaust story been told that some worry that the implication is that no other group ever suffered anything catastrophic. Second, both these organizations and the Presbyterian seminary recognized their common "Abrahamic roots" to cross religious barriers to include two frightful examples of a planned annihilation.

This collaboration also allowed a comparison of the aftermath of the two horrors. The Germans - albeit at first under Allied occupation - have faced up to their guilt, including reaching out to Israel. The Turks, even though the Sultanate is long gone, never have. Even though losers in World War I, Turkey was not punished because it was seen as a bulwark against the communists who had just taken over Russia.

Moreover, as Richard Hovannisian outlined, to this day the Turkish government brings economic and political pressures against any country that so much as mentions the 1915 genocide. Hovannisian, professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History at UCLA, cited retaliations against France for its parliament passing a one-sentence resolution on the subject, even though it didn't mention Turkey or the date. Similarly, a resolution in Congress was quashed by the Clinton administration in the face of Turkish pressure.

Why does a Turkish recognition of the massacre matter? Because for the matter to be put to rest, the victimizers need to admit their part so that the victims know that their suffering is properly acknowledged. Otherwise, Hovannisian said, we are putting memory to sleep, and without memory, facts vanish. And in the scholar's words, lack of acknowledgment is a barrier to the future.

As for the plight of the Armenians, repression still goes on in Turkey, as I have learned from reading "From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East." In it a Scotsman, William Dalrymple, describes visiting monasteries and churches, both those alive and abandoned, in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt.

The import of his book is that Christianity and its communities in those countries are under constant pressure, with some close to dying out altogether because of out-migration. Turkey is a particularly egregious example as the Armenian remnant there is caught in the conflict between the Turkish army and Kurd separatists. The latter were among the victimizers of the Armenians in 1915 and are now the victims, but still hostile to the Armenians in their midst.

Other than the case of Turkey's secular government, most of the pressure on Christians in the Middle East is coming from Islamic fundamentalists, an anomaly because throughout the centuries Islam was much more tolerant of other religions than, say, the Christians. Palestinian Christians, of course, are caught in the struggle between their people and Israel. And the Dalrymple book underscores that Jewish fundamentalists are seeking real estate inroads into the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem, undermining that faith's historic home there.

What to make of all of this? First, it underscores all over again the importance of proper treatment of minorities, whether for reasons of religion, color, race or, for that matter, gender preference. After all, Hitler's priorities for extinction not only were the Jews, gypsies and Slavs, but also homosexuals.

Second, it poses the continuing difficulty of how a group or a faith can preserve memory and the remembrance of sacrifice and still go on. If grudges are never settled, when can there ever be a resolution for moving ahead? For all its many shortcomings, the people of the United States for the most part have been able to accomplish that. Of course, as was pointed out in the Theological Seminary symposium, we still haven't completely answered for our genocidal assaults on some American Indian tribes.

Finally, I am more than ever convinced of the need to bolster the international community as it seeks to bring to book those involved in crimes against humanity. In that regard, I was particularly struck by a statement by Vicken Aykazian of Washington, D.C., bishop of the Armenian Diocese of America, that if the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide of 1915 had been punished, it would have prevented the Holocaust a quarter-century later.

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