I am not supposed to be here. If the plan had gone accordingly, millions, along with my grandparents, would have died and an entire race would have vanished. The perpetrators did not fulfill this goal, but they were responsible for committing the first genocide of the 20th Century.
The genocide I am referring to is the Armenian genocide of 1915, which began 91 years ago this week, leaving an estimated 1.5 million Armenians dead. The Young Turks, the political party in power of the Ottoman Empire at the time, planned and administered genocide against the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. First, the Ottoman government went after the muscle of the Armenian population by enlisting men in the army and labor camps and then killing these men to prevent future resistance to their plan.
Although massacres of hundreds of thousands of Armenians occurred at the end of the 19th Century under Sultan Hamid, in one instance they then went after the brains of the Armenian population by rounding up the intelligentsia killing 100 prominent Armenians on April 24, 1915, which marks the starting point of the genocide. Lastly, the government forced the remaining men, women, and children on death marches into the desert. The Young Turks released Turkish and Kurdish criminals from prisons and assembled them into death squads. These bands of criminals raided, raped, and murdered the Armenian civilians as they marched through the harsh desert without food or water. This systematic plan resulting in the death of 1.5 million men, women, and children became known as the Armenian genocide.
My grandfather was a young boy during the genocide who never had a chance to say goodbye to his family because they were left to die in the desert. He was fortunate enough to escape and a Kurdish family adopted him. Years later, his uncle was looking for family members who may have survived the genocide, and he found my grandfather and purchased him from the Kurdish family. I would often look at my grandfather's face and into his eyes and wonder what it must have been like to live through such horror. What it must have been like for a government to target your entire race and kill your parents, brothers, sisters, and neighbors. For years I wondered, but I never had the courage to ask him to tell me his story and how he managed to live with the horrific images and the burden of being a survivor. How would one even approach such a subject? He like many other survivors perished without closure to this heinous crime perpetrated against our people and our culture.
Perhaps it is understandable why denying the genocide is such a personal affront to Armenians. Today, Turkey denies the genocide and argues that the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were a threat to national security. Peter Balakian, a professor at Colgate University said, "If we are going to pretend that a stateless Christian minority population, unarmed, is somehow in a capacity to kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, or civil war, we are living in the realm of the absurd."
Last year, Turkey arrested one of its most famous novelists, Orhan Pamuk, for using the word genocide when referring to the Armenian genocide. He was charged with "insulting Turkey's national character" and faced three years in prison. Several other Turkish scholars also call it genocide and many countries including France, Germany, and Argentina officially recognize the genocide. Last year, the European Parliament passed a resolution asking that Turkey recognize the genocide as a prerequisite for joining the European Union.
What is most painful for us is the United State's role in Turkey's campaign of denial. The United States does not recognize the Armenian genocide because having Turkey as a geopolitical ally serves more of a national interest than does recognizing genocide. John Evans, the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, said in a speech last year, "I will today call it the Armenian genocide." For that statement, he was forced by his superiors at the State Department to make a correction and then faced losing his job. Ninety-one years ago, it was Henry Morgenthau Sr., U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, who cabled Washington and and warned that the "whole Armenian nation would disappear."
The Turkish government has had ninety-one years to stand up and recognize the genocide. In her book on genocide, Samantha Power writes about the victims of 20th Century's genocides including Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Rwandans, and Bosnians. She also writes about Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish legal scholar who coined the word "genocide" in 1943 while examining the Armenian genocide and the then on-going Holocaust. It is paradoxical that some refuse to refer to this systematic and government sanctioned massacre of a race, "genocide" even though this specific case played a crucial role in the coining of the word.
Armenians and human rights activists across the globe will continue on this struggle for recognition until Turkey reconciles with its past. Ninety-one years is not enough time to forget, to be at peace, or to rest.
Edward Babayan is a first year law student at the Washington College of Law, and a member of the
AU Armenian Club.
