Sunday, April 24 marked the
90th anniversary of a genocide I
didn’t even learn about until last November. It’s one of those 1.5 million-
people cock-ups that our history teachers like to sweep under the rug as just another problem resulting from World War I. While it may not measure up to Hitler’s cold extermination of the Jews, the Ottoman
Empire’s systematic murder of Armenians from 1915 to 1923 merits more mention in class and in public. Awareness of genocide is not enough in
itself to prevent future genocide, but it certainly is a good first step. Hitler himself, while masterminding his death camps, looked on the Armenian genocide with a sneer. “Who remembers the Armenians?” he is reported to have asked.
The government of Turkey continues to hold fast to a flimsy charade, pretending there were no victims in its history other than some resulting from the occasional uprising. It
denies that Armenians were taken on long death marches and then slaughtered for absolutely no reason. Indignant ignorance and falsifying the lessons of our past only lead to repeated mistakes. How many times do we have to see that ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away? If the American government denied the Japanese internment during World War II, I have a feeling the Bush administration would be treating Arab-Americans far worse than it already does. While our policies may not be all that enlightened, they certainly could be hellishly poorer.
Turkey to this day insists that no more than a few people died, and other countries step lightly to avoid Turkey’s anger. The Bush administration hasn’t exactly been reluctant to offend allies in the past but here referred to the massacre and mass exile of thousands of innocent Armenians as merely a “tragedy” — heaven forbid we alienate our strategic partners.
We’re not the only ones Turkey is trying to bully into silence. France, with its large Armenian subcommunities, planned to publicly commemorate the event, only to receive threats from Turkey. When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger spoke against it, Turkish groups called for his movies to be permanently banned from the country.
Well, I doubt anybody in Turkey is reading my columns, so I’m perfectly happy to blow what little political capital I have in the region.
The massive deaths of the Armenians marked the first genocide of the twentieth century. Not only were Armenians subjected to death and torture, but they were also taken from their homes and forcibly exiled to the deserts of Syria, where they died en masse of starvation and dehydration. In addition, the Ottoman Empire expropriated all Armenian wealth and raped thousands of women. Armenian concentration camps caused indirect slaughter by epidemic and exhaustion.
April 24, 1915, is specifically commemorated because on that night, the government rounded up 200 Armenian leaders in Constantinople. They were all imprisoned, and most of them were executed as a penalty for being politically prominent.
Before then, the Turks had already disarmed all the Armenian battalions and had begun expelling them from their homes along the eastern war front, but news blackouts kept these acts secret until those blatantly evil arrests. By killing the leaders, Turks removed Armenian rivals, effectively crushing any official Armenian resistance in just one of many brutal strokes. For that reason, April 24 is the Armenians’ “Kistallnacht.”
Of course, part of what makes genocide so horrifying is the absence of logic or reason. Nationalist panics send friends into furies, causing them to turn on their own neighbors. For centuries, Armenians and Turks lived side by side, but as other Christian minorities separated themselves from the Ottoman Empire, the Armenians were isolated. These Armenian-speaking communities were the roadblock to a pan-Turkic Empire. When once a Turk would have gone to an Armenian for a cup of sugar, Turkish soldiers now came for pints of blood.
The first step was for the Turkish government to demand that Armenians turn in their hunting weapons for the “war effort.” Some communities had to buy extra to make their quotas. Of course, the government then used the amount of weapons as “proof” that the Armenians were about to rebel, drafting Armenians into virtual slavery where they were worked or shot to death.
Leaving victims unacknowledged and uncompensated has, for Armenians, created a national black hole. The least we can do as a nation is agree that these people deserve recognition. I hope that next year President Bush will not let this sad anniversary slip by without rectifying our 90-year silence.

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