"It is not possible for those who belong to the Muslim faith to carry out genocide"(Ha'aretz).
Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts
Showing posts with label genocide. Show all posts
Sunday, November 08, 2009
Erdogan on Genocide
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan today rushed to the defense of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, ahead of the Organization of the Islamic Conference meet in Istanbul. Although the Sudanese head of state will most likely not attend, Erdogan thought it was important to express his opinion on Bashir's involvement in the atrocities in Darfur, for which the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in March 2009. According to Erdogan,
Friday, October 12, 2007
Turkey "Baffled" by Lantos
The Turkish Daily News reports that Ankara is "baffled by [Democratic Congressman Tom] Lantos's vote" to approve the Armenian genocide resolution for a floor vote in the House. The source of the confusion? According to the newspaper's unnamed Washington sources, "Israel had been lobbying against the resolution's passage." Since the longtime House representative and chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs "is one of Israel's strongest supporters in Washington," he was, so the logic goes, expected to vote against the resolution. Ankara has continued to warn American Jewish groups that their support for recognition would damage Turkey's relationship with Israel.
Brian Ardouny of the Armenian Assembly of America expressed his gratitude to the House Foreign Affairs Committee for supporting the resolution in the face of pressure from the White House.
Aram Hamparian of the Armenian National Committee of America called the adoption of the resolution by the House Committee a "meaningful step toward reclaiming our right, as Americans, to speak openly and honestly about the first genocide of the 20th century."
At the risk of sounding pedantic: the Armenian Genocide was not the "first genocide" of the 20th century. This statement is unfortunately repeated unthinkingly by many people working toward the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. I don't really understand why it is necessary to claim any sort of primacy (does it make the tragedy worse?), but if one is going to do so, there is at least one earlier case - the genocide of the Herero and Nama in South-West Africa by German colonial troops between 1904 and 1907.
Brian Ardouny of the Armenian Assembly of America expressed his gratitude to the House Foreign Affairs Committee for supporting the resolution in the face of pressure from the White House.
Aram Hamparian of the Armenian National Committee of America called the adoption of the resolution by the House Committee a "meaningful step toward reclaiming our right, as Americans, to speak openly and honestly about the first genocide of the 20th century."
At the risk of sounding pedantic: the Armenian Genocide was not the "first genocide" of the 20th century. This statement is unfortunately repeated unthinkingly by many people working toward the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. I don't really understand why it is necessary to claim any sort of primacy (does it make the tragedy worse?), but if one is going to do so, there is at least one earlier case - the genocide of the Herero and Nama in South-West Africa by German colonial troops between 1904 and 1907.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Donald Bloxham Winner of the Lemkin Award for his Book on the Armenian Genocide
Donald Bloxham has received the 2007 Raphael Lemkin Award for his book The Great Game of Genocide Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians. I got acquainted with this work back in Berkeley last year, by my friend Amos. Bloxham's study adds an important piece to the historical inquiry about the Armenian genocide, with rich insights on European and American interests in the Ottoman Empire from the end of the 19th century until after the war.
Raphael Lemkin was an international lawyer who coined the word "genocide."
Raphael Lemkin was an international lawyer who coined the word "genocide."
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
"Controversial"...
... would be the pretext once again invoked to avoid a public event talking about the Armenian genocide. It has been a couple of weeks now that I have been receiving the excellent news that the Taviani brothers' film, "Masseria delle Allodole", was in the run up for the Berlin film festival. In "The Lark Farm", Paolo and Vittorio Taviani are setting up the story of a family which lives in Western Armenia and awaits the arrival of their parents from Italy. Alas, the First World War prevents this family from joining and the family members became victims of the genocide perpetrated by the Turks. The scenario is inspired by the autobiographic novel of Antonia Arslan. But a news reported by PanArmenian.Net suggests that the film is eventually being put aside the main lineup in order to avoid a "contreversial" topic. We need to wait for further information, but, if true, this would but one more piece to the already wide file of movies censored or marginalized for dealing with the Armenian genocide, from the Forty Days of Musa Dagh to Ararat and others.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Recent Books on Responses to the Armenian Genocide
Robert Melson has a review essay in the last issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2006: 20 (1), pp. 103-111) on four books published in the last few years that deal with international responses to the Armenian genocide. The works reviewed are:
Yair Auron, The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005)
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response (New York, 2003)
Arman J. Kirakossian, ed., The Armenian Massacres, 1894–1896: U.S. Media Testimony (Detroit, 2004)
Gordon and Diana Severance, Against the Gates of Hell: The Life & Times of Henry Perry, a Christian Missionary in a Moslem World (Lanham, MD, 2003)
Jay Winter, ed., America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge, 2004)
Noting that "the literature on the Armenian Genocide is quite extensive and growing" with works having been published on the 1894-1896 massacres, origins of the 1915–1923 genocide, the role of the great powers, memories of the survivors, the post-WWI Armenian Republic, the parallels to the Shoah, and the denial by the Turkish government and its advocates, Melson remarks that these four books shift the focus to "the role of the bystander," in particular the US, but also the yishuv and the state of Israel.
In fact, Yair Auron's latest book, unlike his earlier work, is not about the yishuv's reactions to the genocide but about the role of the memory of the genocide in Israeli society and state policy. Thus, it seems to me the odd man out in this review, as it is the one book that does not deal at all with the response of contemporaries to the actual events of the genocide but only with issues of memory and recognition in the post-1948 history of the country. A significant part of Balakian's book, too, however is devoted to the post-war aftermath of the Armenian genocide in American politics.
The category of the "bystander" has long been recognized in the historiography on the Shoah. As Saul Friedlander has observed, since its beginnings, the field has been dominated by a basic division into histories of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims (see Friedlander, "The Holocaust," Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, p 412). In recent years, the categories of perpetrator and bystander have increasingly coalesced - perhaps Jan Gross's Neighbors, on the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne by Poles from the town, is a good example of that.
A fair amount of debate has also taken place on a very different kind of bystander than the one to which Melson and the authors above refer. Scholars have examined Allied, and, particularly American, inaction in the face of reports from Europe. (It is interesting to note in this context that the two figures most persistent in urging the US to stop both genocides were Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during WWI, and his son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury during WWII). In fact, the debate on America's "failure to bomb Auschwitz" is still not over - a number of prominent Holocaust and military historians have sought to contextualize and explain the US's reluctance to bomb the trains and camps (see Edward T. Linenthal's discussion of the debate in Preserving Memory, pp.220-223).
Auron's and Balkian's works are the most critical of their subjects. Their works have a moral, prophetic function in the present - alerting us to our responsibilities to shake off indifference about the fates of others. However, we ought to be wary of those who would seek to take the argument even further by coalescing the categories of perpetrator and bystander too much. It is important to criticize America and Israel (as well as many other states) for failing to recognize the Armenian genocide; it is, however, dishonest to make them as complicit in it as the actual perpetrators. America, and certainly not the tiny yishuv in Palestine, cannot even be compared to the "bystanders" who assisted the Nazis in deporting European Jewish communities or those who beat, raped, killed, and expropriated deported Armenians.
The most important question raised by these works is not one of moral complicity but of moral endurance. As Melson asks in his conclusion,
Noting that "the literature on the Armenian Genocide is quite extensive and growing" with works having been published on the 1894-1896 massacres, origins of the 1915–1923 genocide, the role of the great powers, memories of the survivors, the post-WWI Armenian Republic, the parallels to the Shoah, and the denial by the Turkish government and its advocates, Melson remarks that these four books shift the focus to "the role of the bystander," in particular the US, but also the yishuv and the state of Israel.
In fact, Yair Auron's latest book, unlike his earlier work, is not about the yishuv's reactions to the genocide but about the role of the memory of the genocide in Israeli society and state policy. Thus, it seems to me the odd man out in this review, as it is the one book that does not deal at all with the response of contemporaries to the actual events of the genocide but only with issues of memory and recognition in the post-1948 history of the country. A significant part of Balakian's book, too, however is devoted to the post-war aftermath of the Armenian genocide in American politics.
The category of the "bystander" has long been recognized in the historiography on the Shoah. As Saul Friedlander has observed, since its beginnings, the field has been dominated by a basic division into histories of perpetrators, bystanders, and victims (see Friedlander, "The Holocaust," Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, p 412). In recent years, the categories of perpetrator and bystander have increasingly coalesced - perhaps Jan Gross's Neighbors, on the massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne by Poles from the town, is a good example of that.
A fair amount of debate has also taken place on a very different kind of bystander than the one to which Melson and the authors above refer. Scholars have examined Allied, and, particularly American, inaction in the face of reports from Europe. (It is interesting to note in this context that the two figures most persistent in urging the US to stop both genocides were Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during WWI, and his son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury during WWII). In fact, the debate on America's "failure to bomb Auschwitz" is still not over - a number of prominent Holocaust and military historians have sought to contextualize and explain the US's reluctance to bomb the trains and camps (see Edward T. Linenthal's discussion of the debate in Preserving Memory, pp.220-223).
Auron's and Balkian's works are the most critical of their subjects. Their works have a moral, prophetic function in the present - alerting us to our responsibilities to shake off indifference about the fates of others. However, we ought to be wary of those who would seek to take the argument even further by coalescing the categories of perpetrator and bystander too much. It is important to criticize America and Israel (as well as many other states) for failing to recognize the Armenian genocide; it is, however, dishonest to make them as complicit in it as the actual perpetrators. America, and certainly not the tiny yishuv in Palestine, cannot even be compared to the "bystanders" who assisted the Nazis in deporting European Jewish communities or those who beat, raped, killed, and expropriated deported Armenians.
The most important question raised by these works is not one of moral complicity but of moral endurance. As Melson asks in his conclusion,
How can the United States, Israel, and the rest of the world community ever hope to prevent genocidal mass-murder in the future and to bring perpetrators to justice, when they do not even have the moral fiber to affirm the facts of the Armenian Genocide, a crime under international law, that occurred over ninety years ago?
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