BY CHRIS BOHJALIAN,
If Las Vegas were taking bets on whether Joe Biden will use the word “genocide” in the president’s annual statement about the Armenian Genocide on April 24 — this Saturday — I would put my money on yes.
You would think that was a no-brainer, since historians agree that the Ottoman Empire’s systematic annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians, 300,000 Assyrians, and countless Greeks between 1915 and 1923 was genocide by any definition. The eyewitness testimonies and memoirs alone fill a library and the news media covered the genocide extensively at the time. The New York Times was especially committed to raising awareness of the massacres, running well over 100 articles about the atrocities and the staggering numbers of Armenians being slaughtered.
We also know what the American diplomats saw in what is today eastern Turkey, and how ferociously the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, fought Talat Pasha — the architect of the Genocide — over the policy of extermination.
Likewise, the Germans witnessed it, too, and while some were appalled, some were inspired. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, was there during the first world war; Heinrich Himmler considered moving to Ataturk’s new Turkey in the early 1920s; and Hitler kept a bust of Ataturk in his office.
The Holocaust might have happened without the precedent of the Armenian Genocide. But historian Stefan Ihrig argues persuasively in his book, “Justifying Genocide,” that the young Nazis were there when the Young Turks were at work and saw how easy it was to blame the problems of the nation on a small ethnic minority — and then rationalize their murder. As Hitler told his Wehrmacht commanders on Aug. 22, 1939, a week and a half before unleashing his Panzers on Poland, “I have placed my death-head formation in readiness with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
But no American president has ever used the word “genocide” on the 24th, the day we commemorate the start of the Armenian Genocide, for fear of angering Turkey, which vehemently insists that its Ottoman grandparents and great-grandparents have no blood on their hands. (Why do Armenians remember the dead on April 24? Because that was the day when the Armenian religious, business, and intellectual leaders of Istanbul were rounded up, almost all of whom would be dead within months. That was the day the genocide began.) Instead, American presidents have always found synonyms that are more palatable to Turkey.
I believe this year might be different.
First of all, on the campaign trail, then-candidate Biden said he would call the slaughter “genocide.” I view him as a man of his word.
Second, we have seen consistently over the past decade what a reprehensible ally Turkey is. In 2015, I stood on Turkey’s Syrian border and saw firsthand what a sieve it was for ISIS soldiers to move back and forth. In the autumn of 2020, Turkey aided Azerbaijan’s unprovoked attack on the fledging Armenian democratic republic of Artsakh, providing arms (including kamikaze drones) and transporting mercenary soldiers to further assist the Azeri army. According to Human Rights Watch, in 2020 Turkish President Recep Edrogan’s government had 58,409 citizens on or awaiting trial for the 2016 “coup” attempt; 132,954 under criminal investigation on trumped-up terror charges; and another 25,912 held in in prison on remand.
Third, the United States did nothing to stop that Azeri attack on Artsakh last year: we never sanctioned Turkey or Azerbaijan, or demanded the countries stand down. We have done nothing to demand that Azerbaijan return the Armenian prisoners-of-war. Acknowledging that the Ottoman Empire was responsible for genocide a century ago will not rectify either of those moral lapses, but in the world of
realpolitik, it will send a signal to Erdogan that once more the United States is re-engaged with international diplomacy and we are not oblivious to the Caucasus.
Fourth, the U.S. Senate and House voted overwhelmingly in 2019 to pass resolutions that the slaughter was “genocide,” and the sky didn’t fall. I still get emails from Turkish Airlines asking me to fly with them. Congressional action makes President Biden’s use of word even less risky.
Fifth, historians note how the last stage in genocide is denial, and that denial becomes the first stage in the next one. As a character in one of my novels remarks, “There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Bosnians and the Rwandans. There are obviously more, but really, how much genocide can one sentence handle?”
Now, I’m wrong all the time. I wrote in The New York Times in 2016 that I never thought Artsakh and Armenia would lose a war to Azerbaijan. Four years later, they did.
But if the sports books in Nevada start taking bets this week, I know where I would put my money. The fact is, it’s time for an American president to call massacres and removal of the Armenian people from our homeland — the template for the Holocaust — genocide. Chris Bohjalian, an Armenian American who lives in Vermont, is the author of 22 novels, including “The Sandcastle Girls,” “The Flight Attendant,” and “Hour of the Witch,” which goes on sale May 4.
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