The Armenian Genocide:

The first genocide of the 20^th century and the template for other genocides to follow.

The Armenian Genocide of 1915 was the supremely violent historical moment that eliminated a people from its homeland and wiped away most of the tangible evidence of its three thousand years of culture. This first full-scale genocide of the 20^th century was unprecedented in scope and duration. It may be seen as the culmination of the persecutions and massacres of Armenians that had already occurred in the Ottoman Empire since the 1890s. Or it may be placed in the context of modern nationalism and the great upheavals that brought about the dissolution of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire and the emergence in its place of a Turkish nation-state based on a mono-ethnic and mono-religious society.

Mass killings under the cover of war did not begin with the Armenian Genocide. Throughout history, civilian populations have fallen victim to the brutality of invading armies and other forms of indiscriminate killing. In the Armenian case, however, the government openly disregarded the fundamental obligation to protect its citizens and instead turned the full might of the state against one element of the population.

Estimates of Armenian dead vary widely. A report of the United Nations human rights sub-commission put the figure at “at least one million.” The important point in understanding a tragedy of such magnitude is not the precise count of the number who died –that will never be known– but the fact that more than half the Armenian population perished and the rest were forcibly driven from their ancestral homelands. What befell the Armenians was by the will of the government. Although large segment of the general population participated in the massacres and plunder, many Turks were shocked by what was happening, and some helped to rescue and shelter Armenian women and children.

The defeat of the German and Ottoman empires and the collapse of the Young Turk dictatorship at the end of 1918 presented the Allied Powers with the opportunity to fulfill their pledges regarding punishment of the perpetrators and rehabilitation of the Armenian survivors. A Turkish military court martial tried and actually sentenced to death in absentia several of the notorious organizers of the genocide. Yet no attempt was ever made to carry out the sentences, and thousands of other criminals were neither tried nor even removed from office. The Allied Powers, having become bitter rivals over the spoils of war, failed to act in unison to implement the provisions for Armenian restoration and rehabilitation included in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, and instead signed the Treaty of Lausanne three years later that yielded to the demands of the triumphant Turkish Nationalists. The Armenian Question was completely abandoned, and there was no mention of rehabilitation, restitution, or compensation.  In fact, the words “Armenia” or “Armenian” did not even appear in the treaty. The Armenian victims had become invisible.

During the years that followed, the dispersed Armenian survivors concentrated their collective energies on resettlement and the creation of a new diasporan infrastructure of cultural, educational, and religious institutions. Embittered by world indifference, the diasporan communities internalized their frustrations, trauma, and even creative talents. They commemorated the genocide through  requiem  services and observances, yet on substantive issues they could not make their voice heard in the international arena. Meanwhile, the strategy of the perpetrators and their successor government, that of the Republic of Turkey was to avoid public discussion of the genocide, believing that in the course of time the survivors would pass from the scene, their children would be assimilated into their host countries, and the issue would be forgotten.

It was not until the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide in 1965 that a revival of Armenian activism began to undermine the Turkish strategy of avoiding discussion of the mass killings of the victims. In its response to this development, the Turkish government launched a concerted campaign of denial that became progressive more sophisticated through the 1970s and ‘80s. This initiative was aided by certain American and European academics who, rather than adopting the previous unconvincing approach of absolute denial, attempted to give a scholarly veneer to the propaganda by placing the “alleged genocide” in the highly distorted context of the turmoil and exigencies of war. By the 1990s the denial literature had become polished, complete with notations, archival references, and bibliographies. In the face of this tenacious denial, the Armenian worldwide community pursues the struggle to win international recognition of what the entire world acknowledged and knew to be the truth during and in the immediate aftermath of the genocide.

Genocide shapes not only the outlook of the immediate survivors, but also of subsequent generations. Victim groups, rather than viewing the world as a good place with a sense of order, are filled with mistrust and fear of what may come from a horrible world. It becomes essential, therefore, for victims to understand that the terrible events they have experienced are not normal, but rather are aberrations of a generally good world order. Continued denial makes this impossible and reinforces the feelings of insecurity, abandonment, and betrayal. TO overcome these emotions, the victims need to share their pain and sorrow, to voice their outrage, to have the world comprehend their suffering, and especially to receive expressions of regret and remorse from the perpetrator side. Only they can a sense of justice and rightness be restored. Until that time, the pain and the rage fester and the healing process is blocked.

For the descendants of the perpetrators, it is of vital importance to engage in introspection, to face and learn from their history, to question how such violations could have occurred, to examine what there was and may still be in their society that led them to resort to genocide, and to find some redemption through appropriate acts of condition, beginning with acceptance of the truth. If they are unable or unwilling to deal with the truth and instead try to maintain a righteous self-image, then they may again be placed on a path toward the victimization of other groups. The plight of the Kurds in the former Armenian provinces of the Ottoman Empire (now referred to as Eastern Anatolia) is a case in point.

It has been said that powerful states seek to vanquish not only the people they subjugate, but also the cultural mechanisms that would sustain vital memory of historical crimes. Holocaust scholar Terrence Des Pres has written that national catastrophes can be survived only if those to whom disaster happens can recover themselves through knowing the truth of their suffering. And the great Czech writer Milan Kundera has rightfully observed that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Richard G. Hovannisian 
Professor of Modern Armenian History, University of California, Los Angeles

The Genocide in Darfur

“Darfur is more than an occasional headline in the newspaper or 20 seconds on a nightly newscast. It is where genocide continues to happen while the rest of the world goes through the motions of concern but does nothing of substance to stop it. Will the world ever wake up?”

Brian Steide (Witness to the genocide in Darfur)

In 2003, two Darfuri rebel movements- the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)- took up arms against the Sudanese government, complaining about the marginalization of the area and the failure to protect sedentary people from attacks by nomads. The government of Sudan responded by unleashing Arab militias known as Janjaweed, or “devils on horseback”. Sudanese forces and Janjaweed militia attacked hundreds of villages throughout Darfur. Over 400 villages were completely destroyed and millions of civilians were forced to flee their homes.

In the ongoing genocide, African farmers and others in Darfur are being systematically displaced and murdered at the hands of the Janjaweed. The genocide in Darfur has claimed 400,000 lives and displaced over 2,500,000 people. More than one hundred people continue to die each day; five thousand die every month. The Sudanese government disputes these estimates and denies any connection with the Janjaweed.

The Sudanese government appears unwilling to address the human rights crisis in the region and has not taken the necessary steps to restrict the activities of the Janjaweed. In June 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) took the first step in ending impunity in Darfur by launching investigations into human rights violations in Darfur. However, the government of Sudan refused to cooperate with the investigations.

On March 4, 2009 Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, became the first sitting president to be indicted by ICC for directing a campaign of mass killing, rape, and pillage against civilians in Darfur. The arrest warrant for Bashir follows arrest warrants issued by the ICC for former Sudanese Minister of State for the Interior Ahmad Harun and Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb. The government of Sudan has not surrendered either suspect to the ICC.

Darfuris today continue to suffer and the innumerable problems facing Sudan cannot be resolved until peace is secured in Darfur. According to UN estimates, 2.7 million Darfuris remain in internally displaced persons camps and over 4.7 million Darfuris rely on humanitarian aid. Resolving the Darfur conflict is critical not just for the people of Darfur, but also for the future of Sudan and the stability of the entire region.

Now that we know, we can’t act like we don’t know.
If not you, then who? If not now, then when? 

 “A million children massacred” I shall never understand. People tend to think that a murderer weakens when facing a child. The child reawakens the killer’s lost humanity. The killer can no longer kill the child before him, the child inside him.  Not this time. With us, it happened differently. Our Jewish children had no effect upon the killers. Nor upon the world. Nor upon God.

No, I do not understand. And if I write, it is to warn the reader that he will not understand either. You will not understand, you will never understand. You, who never lived under a sky of blood, will never know what it was like. Even if you read all the books ever written, even if you listen to all the testimonies ever given, you will remain on this side of the wall.”

Elie Wiesel

The Holocaust, the systematic, bureaucratic extermination of an entire people-men, women, children and suckling infants- solely because of the identity and belief of their grandparents, defies explanation. The facts may be recounted, but can never be fully understood. Questions may be posed, but answers should not be expected-responses, perhaps, but not answers.

As I have studied the events we call the Holocaust, I gradually realized that my first duty, and that of all students of the Holocaust, is to write down what happened, as clearly and completely as possible. There is no subject more important to me than this. Though there exist tens of thousands of books on the subject in English and many other languages, there has never been a comprehensive book about the Holocaust in Farsi, which is spoken daily by well over one hundred million people worldwide. Hence the reason for writing this book.

When I began my research on this topic fifteen years ago, I wanted to know why and how the Jews of Europe were destroyed - and why and how the world allowed it to happen. As my mentor, Raul Hilberg, has eloquently stated, “The how of the event is a way of gaining insight into perpetrators, victims, collaborators and bystanders.”2

“In a poignant moment during a conference on the Holocaust, Professor Hilberg admitted that after a lifetime of research there was one question for which he could not receive the trace of an answer.  The question was, why? This is a question that cannot rest.”3

“What is it in human nature and institutions that made the Holocaust possible?

“What was the source of the moral immunity felt by the Nazi killers?                                                                 

“What enabled SS men to murder children, the old, and the sick with a sense of justification?

“What was the reason for the senseless indifference of the world?”3

What sets the Holocaust apart from other crimes committed by Nazis, or by others, against many millions of other people, was neither the number of victims, nor the way of their murder, nor the proportion of the murdered compared to the total number of the targeted victims. After all, many more Russians were murdered by the Nazis than Jews. There have been cases in which a much higher proportion of the targeted community was annihilated than the nearly 50% of the Jewish people that died in the Holocaust. And, while most of the victims of the gas chambers were Jews, some were not; Gypsies, Soviet POWs and others also perished there.

The Holocaust was different from the other instances of mass murder because:

“A whole people identified by the faith of their birth were selected to die.

The Jews had to do nothing to give offense; it was sufficient simply to be.

The Jews suffered only because they were. 

To the Nazi regime the Jewish crime was their existence and their refusal to die and while not all the victims were the Jews, all the Jews were victims. The Jews were the central target of the Nazi regime. Nazi Germany considered the elimination of Jews the prescription for national salvation.                   

The Nazi regime decided that the whole people of “a race” should die- a power no one or no government should have.”3, 4, 5

And yet, in a sense, the Holocaust does not belong to the Jews. As Elie Wiesel points out, “The moral imagination has no sectarian allegiance. The Holocaust is a human catastrophe. Whatever happened to the world between 1933 and 1945 had to do with madness. It is not politics alone, not strategy alone, not war alone. It was madness, total madness. Of those who knew what was happening, for those who did not want to know, for those who kept silent, for the churches, the media, the statesmen, the armies, the ideologues.”5

“During the Holocaust the mankind was divided into just and unjust with no neutrality because the neutral ones were guilty as accomplices - especially in the free world like America and Switzerland and Sweden or the Vatican. Surely they were guilty by not helping, by not taking sides, by their willful blindness, indifference or waiting. You must remember that, what you don’t say carries weight.”5

“You cannot kill a million children and believe that the world goes on as it did before.”5 Therefore the story of the Holocaust must be told. The question before us is, how does this story instruct the future?

Those who say “never again” speak only of the final result, the “solution”; the killing centers and the gas chambers. That comes too late for such a vow. The question is, where, at what point in the Nazi series of crimes, does the “never again” begin to apply?

The first sin was not the gas chambers, of course. The first sin came when the Germans cast out the Jews from legal and moral equality. The rights to work, to vote, to study, to speak, to travel, to love, to marry, to practice a religion, claim a theory, teach a value - all these are basic to the right to exist, and when these were cut off for Jews it was preordained that six million should eventually die. We understand that all human rights are connected, that a Holocaust is only the last stage of their loss.

The fact of the Holocaust makes a repetition more likely - a limit was broken, a control or awe is gone. Failure to confront it makes repetition all the more likely. People in general want to forget because it was too horrific, too evil, too sad and too morbid. That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any time.

Our teacher, Elie Wiesel has stated: “I am deeply convinced that if we allow the world to forget, it will be the end not only of our memory; it will be the end of the world. And that is why I write about the Holocaust. We speak for those who didn’t survive. We speak in their stead, by proxy.”5

Only through knowledge and understanding can another Holocaust be prevented. Therefore, the story of the Holocaust must be told. The world that was silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow, unless we open our eyes to someone else’s suffering. Although we have been reminded that it is impossible to write adequately about the Holocaust, yet that task must be attempted, which I have tried in these four volumes.

In Scroll of Agony, the Warsaw diary written by Chaim Kaplan, discovered after his death, Kaplan describes how shocked he was to endure a vicious beating at the hands of a stranger. “How can he hate me?” Kaplan wondered. “He doesn’t even know me.”6 A reversal of Thomas Aquinas belief, “we cannot love what we do not know.”

“If we were to hate everyone who made us suffer, we would become a people full of hate. I think this is our defiance; we cannot hate. When we answer to hate not with hate, not with love either but with affirmation of life and fight with hate, simply by shaping our own destiny, telling our tale and becoming the example. Then it creates some meaning which transcends the present, the routine. If there is going to be any hope for the future of preventing other genocides, we must learn to stop hating humans other than our “own” kind. We must stop being indifferent toward the suffering of the “other”.5

Again, the powerful words of Elie Wiesel:

“If we continue in our indifference one day mankind have to pay for Auschwitz and that punishment will be total, just as Auschwitz meant total crime. Therefore we must care for one another. We can because we should.”5

References 

1. Alvin H. Rosenfeld and Irving Greenberg, eds., Confronting the Holocaust: The Impact of Elie Wiesel.  (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1978).

2. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2003).        

3.  Harold Kaplan, Conscience and Memory: Meditation in a Museum of the Holocaust (University of Chicago Press,Chicago, 1994).

4.  John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York, 1989).

5. Elie Wiesel and Richard Heffner, Conversation with Elie Wiesel (New York, 2001).

6. Chaim Aron Kaplan, Israel Gutman and Abraham I. Katsh, Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (Indiana University Press,Bloomington, 1999).