By SHMULEY BOTEACH,

Could you imagine the Jewish community tolerating a candidate with dual German citizenship who equivocated on whether or not the Holocaust occurred?

Next month’s Senate race in Pennsylvania will mark the first-ever campaign by a candidate with dual citizenship. Will Dr. Mehmet Oz, a citizen of Turkey with reported ties to Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, clearly state that the Armenian Genocide occurred? The question is more than reasonable. It is essential in understanding the values he would bring to Congress.

Last week, the Oz campaign canceled a fundraiser in his home state of New Jersey amid demands for clarity on his position. The agitators in New Jersey’s Jewish and Armenian communities were clear; anything less than a full acknowledgment of the grave atrocities visited by Turkey upon their Armenian victims is an affront against history and conscience.

Could you imagine the Jewish community tolerating a candidate with dual German citizenship who equivocated on whether or not the Holocaust occurred? Such a scenario, of course, is hard to imagine. Unlike Turkey’s approach to the Armenian Genocide, Germany has wrestled with its past.

The Senate unanimously voted in 2019 to recognize that genocide was undertaken against the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian people in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire. Would Dr. Oz have stood with the senators he wishes to join? It is not a question of semantics.

For the one million-strong Armenian community of the United States, the genocide is a lived reality. The majority of Armenians living in the United States are direct descendants of its survivors.

Genocide denial has very real consequences

The failure of the international community to prevent and adequately respond to the Ottoman Empire’s systematic murder of 1.5 million Armenians – that continued through the birth of the nascent Turkish Republic – inspired other genocidal despots to do the same.

The Armenian Genocide was in many ways the blueprint for the Holocaust, which saw the murder of six million Jews including 1.5 million children. On the eve of the Nazi invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler infamously said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the Armenians?”

It was this impunity the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide were afforded that led Jewish jurist Rafael Lemkin to coin the word “genocide.” The word described the industrialized eradication of a people; no existing term of law could quite capture the unparalleled atrocity.

Lemkin would later face the horrors of genocide himself. The Nazis murdered his entire family for the crime of being Jewish.

To deny genocide is to do more than just refute historic facts. It is to actively abet the erasure of history and memory, to whitewash the horrors of the past and undermine our resolve to confront the horrors of the present. Holocaust survivor and advocate for Armenian Genocide recognition Elie Wiesel once described the denial of genocide as a “double killing.”

Genocide denial in Turkey

In Turkey, the consequences of this denialism have been profound. Turkey today continues to engage in the destruction and desecration of its Armenian, Greek and Assyrian cultural heritage sites.

Turkey’s minorities – particularly its dwindling, embattled Christian communities – continue to face routine harassment, discrimination and threats emanating from the highest political offices.

Erdogan – with whom Oz has appeared publicly on multiple occasions – has publicly praised the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide and referred to their victims as “remnants of the sword.”

To this day, Turkey continues to sell weapons to Azerbaijan, which last week launched a brutal unprovoked assault on the sovereign territory of Armenia, targeting civilian populations and displacing several thousand people.

Genocide remains as great a threat to humanity today as it did a century ago. From the persecution of the Uighurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Tigray in Ethiopia, genocidal despots across the world continue to challenge international norms and laws, not to mention the values we hold dear as Americans.

To date, the Oz campaign has issued only nebulous affirmations against genocide in principle, without specifically acknowledging or affirming his position on the Armenian Genocide.

It is not too late for him to be on the record.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the executive director of the World Values Network. Aram Suren Hamparian is the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ , EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF LAW, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL 

newsweek It is a historical fact that beginning in approximately 1915, the Ottoman Empire murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenians. This was part of a program of ethnic cleansing and a desire by Turkish Muslim leaders to get rid of Armenian Christians. There is some dispute as to the precise number of Armenians killed, ranging from approximately 600,000 to double that number. There is also some dispute about the causes of this atrocity, especially the role of World War I. But no honest person can dispute the basic facts: namely, a decision was made by Ottoman authorities to exterminate and/or expel Armenians, and that the order was carried out largely by the military.

in They have done so by threats, extortion, and bribery. For many years these tactics worked. Indeed, it is reported that Hitler, in 1939, used the Armenian genocide as a way of assuring the German people that the world will not react to his planned genocide against the Jews. According to reports by eyewitnesses, he said the following to the audience: “Who remembers now the extermination of the Armenians?” Whether or not this is an exact quote, it accurately summarizes the lesson Hitler drew from the Turkish genocide against the Armenians: no one will really care if the Nazi’s exterminate the Jews.

Ken Burns recent documentary on the Holocaust suggests that Hitler was probably right. Between 1939 and 1945, six million Jews—babies, children, women, the elderly, men in the prime of their lives—were murdered by gas chambers, shooting squads and pogroms organized by the Nazis and in which local Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, and others took part. Although after it was over, memorials have been built to commemorate this unspeakable tragedy, while it was occurring, most countries in the world—including the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom—did worse than nothing: they willfully and deliberately shut their doors to Jews trying to escape the Nazi barbarity.

In some respects, Hitler won at least one of the two wars he began in 1939. He lost his war of conquest and German expansion, but he won the war against the Jews. He has been reported to have said that he would kill Europe’s Jews and Germany would become richer and more powerful. Both of these predictions have come true. He murdered two thirds of Europe’s Jews, and following the war and the Marshall Plan, Germany has become the wealthiest and most powerful nation in Europe.

Would all this have happened if the Turkish government had been brought to justice for the genocide it committed against the Armenian people? We can never know the answer to that haunting question. But we can know that the world’s reaction to genocides has been weak at best. Turkey paid little or no price for its mass murders. Nor did Germany, despite grudging and minimal economic reparations.

Washington, D.C. – The Armenian National Institute (ANI) announced the election of new members to its Board of Governors. Chairman of the ANI Board, Van Z. Krikorian, welcomed Dr. Armen Baibourtian, Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, and Mr. Mark Malkasian, who are joining the current serving members including Carolyn Mugar, Annie Totah, Bianka Kadian Dodov, and chairman emeritus Aram Kaloosdian.“ANI is fortunate to add such distinguished individuals to its Board,” stated Krikorian. “From the start, our Institute understood that the worst chapters of Armenian history could repeat themselves. The addition of expertise reflected by our new board members will not only advance the educational mission of ANI, but also contribute to our efforts at genocide prevention.”Dr. Baibourtian, who holds a doctorate in history and another in international relations, filled several posts around the world and in the United States in increasingly important assignments in his capacity as ambassador and consul general for the Republic of Armenia. He also served on the faculty of Yerevan State University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Having completed his diplomatic service with the rank of ambassador, Dr. Baibourtian is now working in the United States.Archbishop Vicken Aykazian, who also holds a doctorate in history and historiography and is working on a second on the canon law of the Armenian Church, has been the long-serving Diocesan Legate of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America in Washington, DC. In his capacity as Ecumenical Director of the Eastern Diocese, he was elected to several offices in the World Council of Churches and to the presidency of the National Council of Churches in the United States. He is presently the vice-moderator of the central committee of the World Council of Churches.Mr. Mark Malkasian is the author of a number of important works on modern Armenian history, including Gha-ra-bagh!: The Emergence of the National Democratic Movement in Armenia. An educator and curriculum developer, Malkasian is also a web developer who has served as the ANI webmaster from the very beginning and contributed immensely to strengthening the online presence of the Institute whose websites have long been leading references on the subject of the Armenian Genocide.The ANI website on the Armenian Genocide has generated millions of hits annually over the past many years and is relied upon by multiple academic and media sources. Translated versions of the ANI website are also available in Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. The vast catalogue of affirmation documents from around the world collected by the Institute, and posted on its website, is a unique feature that has served as a ready resource for community efforts to secure international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.Dr. Rouben Adalian, who has served as the director of ANI since its founding in 1997 was joined last year by Mr. Robert Arzoumanian, who has been assisting in maintaining and expanding the Institute’s online resources and social media handle. Besides its own extensive website, ANI also maintains the online Armenian Genocide Museum of America, which has served as another important and popular educational resource for teachers and students.

Founded in 1997, the Armenian National Institute (ANI) is a 501(c)(3) educational charity based in Washington, D.C., and is dedicated to the study, research, and affirmation of the Armenian Genocide. The ANI website can be consulted in English, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. ANI also maintains the online Armenian Genocide Museum of America(AGMA).

At least 108 Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries in Nakhichevan have been demolished or blown up by the Azerbaijani government, according to the Caucasus Heritage Watch.

by Avedis Hadjian,

A yearlong investigation by a team of scholars affiliated with Cornell and Purdue universities has documented a pattern of deliberate obliteration of Armenian cultural heritage in Nakhichevan, a historically Armenian region that became part of Azerbaijan following the Sovietization of the republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan between 1920 and 1921. The new report by the Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) identified 108 medieval and early modern Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries in Nakhichevan that were completely destroyed between 1997 and 2011 — an eradication described by the report’s authors as a “striking portrait of cultural erasure that, in its surgical precision, totality, and surreptitiousness, has few parallels.”

Of all the Armenian cultural heritage sites that CHW was able to locate and assess for this investigation, 98% have been completely wiped out. Proportionally, the degree of destruction is greater than the elimination of mosques by the Chinese government in the Xinjiang Uyghur region.

Nakhichevan is now an exclave at the intersection of Armenia, Iran, and Turkey, separated from Azerbaijan by the southern Armenian region of Syunik.

Azerbaijan’s 44-day war against Armenia and the Republic of Artsakh (the official name of the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which Azerbaijan claims) in 2020, when roughly 5,000 Armenians died and Artsakh lost 75 percent of its territory to Azerbaijan, was followed by continued aggression against Armenia by the Azerbaijani regime of Heydar Aliyev — including an unprovoked attack against Armenia this week, on September 13 to 15, that left at least 135 Armenians dead — heightening concerns about the fate of Armenian heritage.  

Entitled “Silent Erasure: A Satellite Investigation of the Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage in Nakhchivan, Azerbaijan,” the report was produced by Lori Khatchadourian, Adam T. Smith, Husik Ghulyan, and Ian Lindsay. It is the first time that conclusive evidence is presented about the systematic cultural erasure as part of “Azerbaijan’s domestic ethnic policies,” the authors of the document add. 
“The program of silent erasure that we documented in Nakhchivan took place many years ago, but the outcome of the 2020 war over Nagorno-Karabakh gives it new urgency,” said Khatchadourian, associate professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, in an interview with Hyperallergic. “As a result of that war, hundreds of Armenian monasteries, churches, and cemeteries were ceded to Azerbaijan, the very state that perpetrated systematic cultural erasure in Nakhchivan.”
There are reasons to “fear it could happen again,” she added. 
The release of “Silent Erasure” could not have been more timely. Just this week, CHW released satellite imagery showing the destruction of a historic Armenian church in the village of Mokhrenes (Susanlyq, in the Azerbaijani nomenclature) in Nagorno-Karabakh between March and July of this year, Khatchadourian said. “This was the first major violation of the December 2021 International Court of Justice ruling that called on Azerbaijan to prevent and punish such acts.” 

Last year, a report by Simon Maghakyan based on satellite imagery provided by CHW alerted about the destruction of churches by Azerbaijan in occupied Armenian territories. The report also acknowledged the groundbreaking work by Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman, who in 2019 identified “a pattern of total cultural erasure” in Nakhichevan.

Between 1998 and 2005, more than 800 khtachkars (stone crosses) were removed or destroyed with picks and maces by Azerbaijani soldiers in Old Jugha. In 2005, a Scottish specialist in Oriental Art History who visited Nakhichevan to investigate the condition of Armenian monuments was told by a local policeman that “there never were any Armenian churches anywhere in Nakhchivan.” It was towards the end of a short visit through a landscape of desolation, with very few Armenian ruins left: “There were no Armenians ever living here —so how could there have been churches here?,” the policeman added.

The population of Nakhichevan became majority Azerbaijani following massacres in the early 20th century. The 2,000 Armenians still left in Azerbaijan by 1989 fled following the beginning of Azerbaijani ethnic cleansing campaigns as the Soviet Union was unraveling.  

“Silent Destruction” applied a combination of traditional cartography and modern technology to archeological forensics.

“Methodologically, the most significant issue in this kind of heritage forensics is geolocation,” said Smith, distinguished professor of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. “Simply finding sites whose very existence is denied is challenging.” Yet declassified American spy satellite images and archival Soviet topographic maps allowed CHW to determine the locations of sites. “A fascinating collaboration of former Cold War rivals,” he added.

Read more: https://hyperallergic.com/761723/cultural-armenian-heritage-sites-in-nakhichevan-destroyed-by-azerbaijan/