THOMAS DE WAAL,

After decades of agonizing, a U.S. president has called the massacre and deportation of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 and 1916 a genocide. Does it make a difference, and what happens next?

U.S. President Joe Biden’s dignified statement honoring the more than 1 million Armenians who died in 1915 and 1916 in the Ottoman Empire differed from those of his predecessors only in the use of one word: “genocide.”

The first thing to say is how much this means to Armenian Americans whose grandparents died in the slaughter in eastern Anatolia during those years. The Armenian diaspora after all is only a diaspora because of this tragedy. Nearly all the 2 million or so Armenians who were living in the Ottoman Empire were either killed or deported from their homes, and the survivors were scattered around the world. The historical record is absolutely clear.

WHAT THE WORD GENOCIDE REPRESENTS

Over the last fifty years, the word genocide has gradually become normalized as a term to describe the gravity of the “Meds Yeghern,” or “Great Catastrophe,” as it is known in Armenian. Not using the word has come to be felt as a denial of trauma by the descendants of those who lost their lives.

The Turkish authorities have tenaciously resisted the description, despite historical evidence to the contrary. Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide (in a 1944 book published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) in the shadow of the Holocaust. Almost reflexively, Turks complain their forebears are being judged as Nazis by implication.

In Turkish citizens’ collective memory, the era of 1914–1922 is one of successive cataclysms as the UK, France, and Russia sought to destroy the Ottoman Empire. A total of 5 million people died in the empire during those years, vast numbers of them Muslims. The Turkish Republic rose from the empire’s ashes, virtually against the odds. Some Turks irrationally fear that the push to recognize the slaughter of Armenians as a genocide is a campaign to break up Turkey, just as the Christian powers did a century ago.

The Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink became Turkey’s foremost civil rights activist and did more than anyone else to educate Turkish society about the blank pages in its history and its lost Armenians. Dink opposed international recognition campaigns, arguing with great moral force that Turkey must first democratize and that would naturally lead to a true reckoning in the country where the killings happened.

Dink, showing acute psychological understanding of both peoples, memorably said, “Turks and Armenians and the way they see each other constitute two clinical cases: Armenians with their trauma, Turks with their paranoia.”

In the mid-2000s, progress was made in Turkey. Kurdish municipalities in eastern Turkey apologized to the Armenians and erect memorials to them. Groundbreaking memoirs were published and conferences were held.

Yet Dink himself was cruelly assassinated in 2007, and the civil rights movement he was part of has been all but dismantled. The far-right Nationalist Movement Party is now the key partner of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, and it espouses old bigoted arguments. In his response to Biden, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fell back on outdated nationalist rhetoric, alleging bizarrely that it was Armenians who killed Turks, rather than the other way around. In this political environment, it makes little difference for the United States finally to call a spade a spade. There may be some political fallout—though fortunately everything has been on the level of words not deeds so far—but the Ankara-Washington relationship is no longer that of close allies.

What happens now? Genocide is a noble but flawed term used for confusingly different purposes.

The first way it is used is as a legal term, as set out in the Genocide Convention of 1948. Some Armenian political commentators and activists, ignoring Biden’s words about seeking reconciliation, draw a straight line from the recognition of genocide to the pursuit of legal claims against Turkey.

The U.S. government (and most legal experts) argue, however, that the convention cannot be applied retroactively. Lemkin himself would seem to have supported this view. In his memoirs, he describes how in 1950 he approached the Turkish mission to the United Nations and successfully lobbied the Turkish government to be one of the first to ratify the convention. The clear implication of his recollections is that it was understood that this would not trigger the prosecution of Turkish perpetrators of crimes against Armenians, many of whom were still alive at that time.

This legal clarification will not deter Armenian lawsuits already under way. Yet it will undoubtedly be hard to prove legal claims dating back more than a century. In other historical cases, restitution of this kind has usually been a voluntary and symbolic act—an act the Turkish government will resist, but which some Kurdish municipalities have already performed.

The word genocide is also used as an angry weapon of identity politics. Many national elites instrumentalize the suffering their people have endured for political ends. In the last three decades, the term genocide has sometimes been used to stoke divisions in cases that do not rise to the severity of genocide, as the term is traditionally defined. This tactic is especially acute in the former Soviet Union. For instance, the term genocide has been employed in the Armenian-Azerbaijani rhetorical conflict—even though Azerbaijanis had nothing to do with the killings of 1915 and even though nothing that either side has endured since 1988 can properly be given that term.

The third use of the term is the one that Biden evidently intends in his April 24 statement: a synonym for mass killing and cultural erasure and the wholesale denial of human rights, which must be recognized to achieve reconciliation and closure. Biden’s statement locates the genocide in the past by calling it “Ottoman-era,” thus not pointing blame at modern Turkey. He stresses empathy for Armenian descendants and talks of “looking to the future” and of “healing and reconciliation.”

A MORE COMPLETE HISTORY

Such reconciliation looks very far off. Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic relations, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon, following Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan in the recent war over Nagorny Karabakh. If anyone can a point a way forward, perhaps it is academic scholars. The historiography of the Armenian Genocide and this era has grown vastly more sophisticated, thanks in large part to the unprecedented collaboration of Armenian and Turkish historians, including Taner Akçam, Halil Berktay, Fatma Müge Göçek, Gerard Libaridian, and Ronald G. Suny. This new round of scholarship has conclusively discredited denialist Turkish theses. It also now contextualizes and explains what happened—but does not justify it—within the framework of the end of the Ottoman Empire and World War I. Old stereotypes of “terrible Turks” have been dispensed with in favor of real history.

Historians can further fill out the full dreadful story of the years between 1914 and 1921. The Armenian Genocide was the most terrible crime in the sense that the Armenians, and also the Assyrians, were not only killed but also had their culture destroyed. Other stories can be told properly too, including those of the Sunni Turks, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis who suffered at the hands of great power armies in those years and sometimes at the hands of vengeful Armenians too. Another painful history is that of the Pontic Greeks, whose enforced exile from Turkey marked the close of this era in 1923, as Muslim Turks came the other way from Greece.

Armenians could contribute to this filling out of history by opening the still-restricted archives in Watertown, Massachusetts, to share the historical records of the Dashnaktsutyun (or the Armenian Revolutionary Federation), which ruled Armenia from 1918 to 1920.

For now, this is a time for mourning and remembrance in Armenian-American families, no longer having to worry that a feeling of official equivocation hangs over the fate of their loved ones.

Correction: This piece was amended on April 30 to correct the date range and proportion of Muslim casualties in the late Ottoman Empire from 1914–1922, not 1921. The author also clarified his language on how the term genocide has been instrumentalized by political elites.End of document

Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.

Source: https://carnegieeurope.eu/2021/04/30/what-next-after-u.s.-recognition-of-armenian-genocide-pub-84440

For decades, Jewish groups outside of California largely avoided weighing in, with Turkey urging Israel and its supporters to stay out of the debate

By Gabby Deutch

n Saturday, in a statement marking the mass murder of Armenian Christians in Ottoman Turkey, President Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to refer to the atrocity as a “genocide,” a symbolic move that nevertheless marks a major shift in U.S. policy. The move was lauded by portions of the Jewish community. 

More than a century after the Ottomans murdered between 650,000 and 1.2 million Armenian Christians, the question of whether to use the word “genocide” to describe the atrocity has morphed into a global geopolitical controversy, with Turkey exerting its muscle to urge countries like the U.S. and Israel to avoid using the term. Biden’s declaration marked the end of a years-long effort by activists to push the federal government to use the word.

The push for congressional recognition of the Armenian genocide, which culminated in a near-unanimous 2019 resolution recognizing the genocide, was led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a Jewish member of Congress whose L.A.-area district includes a sizable Armenian population. “The word ‘genocide’ is significant because genocide is not a problem of the past — it is a problem of today,” Schiff told JI. “By speaking the truth about this horrific period of history, refusing to be silent, and calling it a genocide, we can ensure that the United States is never again complicit.”

The announcement was met with resounding praise from a number of Republicans as well — conservative commentator Ben Shapiro credited Biden and called the move “long overdue.” 

Turkey has long claimed that both Armenians and Turks were killed at the time as part of the devastation of World War I, rather than any concerted ethnic cleansing by the Ottomans. 

The issue remains a source of controversy. Although Turkey and Israel no longer enjoy particularly close relations, for many years Turkey was Israel’s closest Muslim ally, leading the Jewish state to refrain from referring to the massacre as genocide. A statement Israel’s Foreign Ministry released on Saturday mentioned the “terrible suffering and tragedy of the Armenian people” without using the term genocide.

In 2007, the Anti-Defamation League urged members of Congress to vote against a resolution recognizing the genocide. (Similar legislation passed for the first time in 2019.) Abe Foxman, the longtime former national director of the ADL, said at the time that “Israel’s relationship with Turkey is the second most important, after its relationship with the United States. All this in a world that isolates Israel, and all this can’t simply be waved away.” Seven years later, in 2014, Foxman updated his position and referred to the massacre as genocide in a speech. By that point, Israel’s relationship with Turkey soured, after the Israeli military raided a Turkish flotilla that intended to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza.

More recently, as Armenia and Azerbaijan have clashed over the territory Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey has come to the defense of Azerbaijan, a fellow Muslim nation. The Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it was backing Turkey following Biden’s declaration. Israel and Azerbaijan have cooperated in recent years, and Armenia recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv after Israel went through with an arms sale to Azerbaijan in October 2020. 

Some Jewish organizations lauded Biden’s declaration. “We believe that remembrance of any genocide is imperative to preventing future tragedies, and that process begins with recognition,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the current CEO of the ADL, told JI.

“Bravo to President Biden for being the first American leader to stand up to Turkey and say what was needed,” David Harris, CEO of the American Jewish Committee, told JI. “AJC cannot sit idly by and allow that outrageous denial to take root. And next, by the way, it could be about the Holocaust.”

Mark Weitzman, the director of government affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, was one of 126 prominent Holocaust scholars who signed a statement two decades ago calling for official recognition of the genocide. He told JI, “President Biden’s statement not only affirms historical truth but represents a moral commitment to the repudiation of political support for genocide denial. It honors the memory of the victims by not distorting their fate and allows for the honest assessment of responsibility.”

JI did not receive responses from the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, two prominent national Jewish organizations, seeking comment on whether they now support such a declaration. 

In California, home to the country’s largest Armenian population, local Jewish organizations were some of the first Jewish groups in the nation to publicly refer to the massacre in Armenia as a genocide. 

“Nearly all nations have been victimized during the course of history. Yet being singled out for genocide is a horror that, fortunately, has been visited upon very few peoples,” Ephraim Margolin, then the chairman of the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council, wrote in a 1990 letter to the Armenian bishop in San Francisco. “We applaud the efforts of the Armenian community to educate those in this country about ‘the forgotten genocide.’ Please convey to the leaders of the Armenian community our most sincere support for this measure.”

Speaking to JI the day before Biden’s announcement, Richard Hirschhaut, director of the AJC’s Los Angeles office, said that “if President Biden indeed invokes the term genocide in his remarks on Saturday, that step surely will be met by a chorus of relief, exaltation, tears of joy and an affirmation of the fundamental goodness of America as a beacon of hope to the world.” 

“The relationship between the Armenian and Jewish communities in Los Angeles is strong [and] vibrant,” said Hirschhaut. “We worked very closely together, just especially in the last two years with the introduction of a model ethnic studies curriculum in California, and its initial exclusion of the Jewish experience [and] the Armenian experience among other ethnic and minority groups.”

Hirschhaut was referring to a years-long effort by activist groups in California to provide ethnic studies resources to the state’s education system. A coalition of Jewish organizations in the state worked to amend the curriculum after earlier drafts included material that was deemed by some to be antisemitic, while largely leaving out the experiences of Jewish Americans as well as an explanation of antisemitism. Armenians and some other ethnic minorities were also excluded from core sections of the curriculum. 

Information about the state’s Armenian and Jewish communities was included in the final version of the curriculum. (The final version of the ethnic studies curriculum does refer to both the mass killing of Armenians and the Holocaust as “genocide.”)

“The Armenian genocide has been too long denied, diminished in importance or politicized,” Deborah Lipstadt told JI. “This is a step in rectifying that. It comes too late for those who experienced this horror, but it will be a bit of a balm to their children, grandchildren and other descendants.”  

“Certainly, the shared experience of genocide and trauma that our communities have been through is is a point for people to bond around,” California Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel, a Democrat who represents the San Fernando Valley, told JI. Gabriel, who serves as majority whip and chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, said Biden’s announcement “will be warmly applauded by a lot of folks in the Jewish community in Los Angeles.”

When Armenians in California protested Azerbaijan’s actions in Nagorno-Karabakh last year, members of the Jewish community came out in support. “When Azerbaijan was bombing [the region] and Turkey was supplying military weapons and artillery, Jewish World Watch took the lead and reached out to a number of Jewish elected officials and leaders” to get them to rally in support of Armenia, said Serena Oberstein, executive director of the Los Angeles-based anti-genocide organization.

Historians have long declared that what occurred in Armenia between 1915 and 1916 was, in fact, a genocide. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that the mass murder of Armenians by the Ottomans “aimed to solidify Muslim Turkish dominance in the regions of central and eastern Anatolia by eliminating the sizeable Armenian presence there.” 

“The Armenian genocide has been too long denied, diminished in importance or politicized,” Deborah Lipstadt, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, told JI. “This is a step in rectifying that. It comes too late for those who experienced this horror, but it will be a bit of a balm to their children, grandchildren and other descendants.”  

Historians acknowledge that the Armenian genocide served as a frame of reference for Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who coined the term genocide in the mid-1940s as a Jewish refugee living in Washington, D.C. He used the term in a book about the Nazis, but his definition was broad, referring to the “destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.” Lemkin stated on many occasions that learning about the Ottoman Empire’s persecution of Armenians from 1915 to 1916 influenced his thinking on the topic. 

“Historians have long recognized the atrocities against Armenians of 1915-1916 as a genocide, as did Raphael Lemkin,” said Jeffrey Veidlinger, the Joseph Brodsky collegiate professor of history and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan. “From a Jewish perspective, it provides a frame of reference for the Holocaust. We can better understand the Holocaust and the pogroms that preceded it when we contextualize them within the wider patterns of ethnic bloodshed that occurred as old empires collapsed and new nation-states emerged in their place.”

by PAUL ANTONOPOULOS,

The favourite newspaper of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the ultra-nationalist Yeni Şafak, has doggedly stayed loyal to the Turkish propaganda model of simultaneous denial of genocide but also blaming Armenians for massacres against Greeks.

It is recalled that earlier this week the Turkish President said that “Armenian gangs did not hesitate to massacre even Greek Ottoman citizens in the area of ​​Trapezounta (Τραπεζούντα, Turkish: Trabzon).”

This time however, Yeni Şafak produced reports by the Fire Brigade Manager of the Smyrna Insurance Company, Austrian-Serb Paul Greskovic, who blames the Armenians for the Great Fire of Smyrna.

At the end of the Greco-Turkish War, just as Greek soldiers were leaving Anatolia to return to Greece, Turkish forces set first to the Smyrna (Σμύρνα, Turkish: İzmir), killing up to 100,000 Greeks and Armenians.

Greskovic wrote in a report that Armenians started the fire.

He even claimed that Greek women and children cursed the Armenians and asked soldiers to blockade the Armenian neighbourhoods.

However, what Erdoğan’s favourite newspaper omits is that 92% of Greek, Armenian and Italian wealth in Smyrna, the richest city in the Mediterranean, was insured with the Austrian company.

As they did not want to pay damages to the victims, Greskovic attempted to blame the victims themselves for the Great Fire.

Greskovic’s report of the Great Fire of Smyrna runs contrary to accounts by not only the victims themselves, but several high profile European and American diplomats, journalists, businessmen and missionaries, as extensively reported.

In fact, the Turks cannot seem to decide who to blame for the fire.

Another one of their unfounded theories is that Greeks started the fire.

So which one is it?

READ MORE: Erdoğan’s games: “Armenians killed Greeks in Pontus.”

The President of Armenia, Armen Sarkissian, sent a letter of gratitude to the speaker Nancy Pelosi of the US House of Representatives. The letter reads as follows:

“President Biden joined the US Congress to recognize the Armenian Genocide, by making clear that “what happened should never be repeated.” We are sincerely grateful to all those who made this happen by providing their devotion, passion, and moral or any other assistance, and contribute to restoring justice.

You and your team have always been vocal about the fact that the barbarism committed against the Armenian people was a genocide. By being attached to your values, you did everything to reach the official recognition and remembrance of the Armenian Genocide. Thank you, Madam Speaker!” 

byPaul Antonopoulos,

A former U.S. diplomat tweeted that it is worth looking “at restoring the Treaty of Sèvres.”

Alberto Miguel Fernandez, a former U.S. diplomat, made the comment in a retweet of an Ahval article.

The article quoted Turkey’s Energy Minister Fatih Dönmez calling for the renegotiation of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty which set the borders of Greece and Turkey.

In response to the article, Fernandez said it is “certainly worth looking at restoring the Treaty of Sèvres in place of the Lausanne Treaty.”

Eastern Anatolia and Pontus was to be within Armenia’s borders, an independent Kurdistan would be establishment, and the region of Smyrna (Σμύρνα, Turkish: İzmir) and most of eastern Thrace would unite with Greece.

Turkey are so paranoid that the Treaty of Sèvres could return that there is the Sèvres Syndrome (Turkish: Sevr Sendromu), and the former diplomat’s tweet would have surely created irrational fear in Ankara.

Turkish historian Taner Akçam describes this syndrome as an ongoing perception that “there are forces which continually seek to disperse and destroy us, and it is necessary to defend the state against this danger.”

Historian Nick Danforth said that “Sèvres has been largely forgotten in the West, but it has a potent legacy in Turkey, where it has helped fuel a form of nationalist paranoia some scholars have called the ‘Sèvres syndrome’”.