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The Turks' unspeakable genocide
Today, Calgary's Armenian community commemorates the saddest day in 4,000 years of Armenian history. On April 24, 1915, under cover of world war, Ottoman Turks wiped out a third of the Armenian population.
The world saw similar horrors later in Nazi Germany, the U.S.S.R. in eastern Europe against the Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians and Estonians from 1930 to 1940, and more recently in Cambodia, Bosnia, Sudan and 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.
After all, who remembers today the extermination of the Armenians?" This shows why the Armenian genocide is relevant today.
Seven million Armenians are commemorating this day, and continue to demand that the government of Turkey recognize and apologize for the extermination. The Turkish government denies the genocide ever happened and brings economic and political pressures against any country that mentions it.
Major powers such as Canada, Great Britain and the U.S.A. still do not recognize the Armenian genocide. In Canada, the Quebec and Ontario legislatures recognized it in 1980. Alberta recently passed a resolution (Bill 26) to mark "Holocaust and Genocide Remembrance Day" but did not mention the Armenians.
Here are some of the facts:
- The 1915 events against Armenians match word for word the United Nations' definition of genocide.
- The Association of Genocide Scholars, the foremost authority on the subject, unanimously adopted a resolution reaffirming that the mass murder of Armenians in Turkey was genocide.
- According to the Encyclopedia of Genocide, published in 1999 by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, about 1.5 million Armenians were massacred or died during forced marches, deportations and internment in the Syrian Desert.
- A statement signed by 150 scholars, writers and Nobel laureates in 1988 stated: "We denounce as morally and intellectually corrupt the Turkish governments denial of the Armenian genocide."
- Thomas Burgenthal, an Auschwitz survivor on the UN's Human Rights Committee says, "You do all these things to the victim and then you say it never happened. That is killing them twice."
For the Turks, the problem is enormous. An acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide might result in land claims and reparations. They have only to look at recent German and Swiss history. Turkey has tried to control who writes history by offering funding for academic programs at universities. The history department at UCLA voted to reject a $1-million endowment in Turkish and Ottoman studies because it was conditional on their denying the Armenian genocide.
The argument over who controls history continues, even on the Internet. In August 2000, the Turkish government tried to suppress a Microsoft online encyclopedia entry. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Turkish government threatened Microsoft with serious reprisals unless all mention of the Armenian genocide was removed.
For the matter to be put rest, Turkish recognition of the massacre is important. Otherwise, we are putting memory to sleep, and without memory, facts vanish. Lack of acknowledgment is a barrier to the future.
The refusal to call what the Turks did by its proper name sends a message, which is that for a price, a nation can purchase a revision of its history. It's an ugly bargain, but it won't hold for long. In the end, history gets written by its survivors, and despite Turkish efforts, the Armenians are still here.
Raffi Migdesyan is a member of Calgary's Armenian community.
Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News Archives