Remembering the Armenian Genocide Today
On April 24 Armenians throughout the world honor the victims of the 1915 genocide carried out by Ottoman Turkish authorities. This year was no different. In the country’s capital of Yerevan, men, women, and children hiked up the steep path to the Soviet-era genocide memorial to lay flowers at its eternal flame. It was a solemn affair filled with silent emotions. Ordinary citizens grieved for their ancestors and countrymen, who perished as the result of massacres and forced marches into arid deserts.
Participating in this ceremony reminded me how these tragic events influenced the ways in which we view mass murder and humanitarian responses to such actions. Even after 101 years, this history still resonates.
“Even after 101 years, this history still resonates.”
The state-sponsored killing of Armenians was the first genocide committed in the twentieth century to generate international outcry and condemnation. Although this “noise” failed to stop the killings, it called public attention to these crimes, and, in doing so, helped to lay the foundations for modern human rights activism.
Former US president, Theodore Roosevelt, publicly expressed his outrage at Ottoman crimes and lambasted the Wilson administration for its failure to act. “The news of the terrible fate that has befallen the Armenians must give a fresh shock of sympathy and indignation,” he wrote. “Let me emphatically point out that the sympathy is useless unless it is accompanied with indignation, and that the indignation is useless if it exhausts itself in words instead of taking shape in deeds.”
While few heeded Roosevelt’s call to arms, many other Americans donated their dollars and pennies to aid the hundreds of thousands of destitute Armenian refugees and orphans. Henry Morgenthau resigned his post as Ambassador to Ottoman Turkey to devote his time to raising funds for suffering Armenians. Like other diplomats, Morgenthau used his position to intervene on behalf of the threatened Armenian population with Turkish officials and to raise public awareness of the tragedy. Instead of acquiescing to the Turkish demand that this was an internal affair and not the subject of diplomatic discussion, ambassadors and consuls spoke up.
One of those who did was Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, the German Consul in Erzerum. Witnessing the tragic suffering of Armenian women, children, and the elderly who were being rounded up for deportation, he unsuccessfully tried to intervene with the military authorities. He wired the German Embassy in Istanbul stating that because of the lack of adequate transportation, the “resettlements” of Armenians were tantamount to massacres. He estimated that only half of them would survive the journey. From his discussions with Turkish officials, Scheubner-Richter learned that the end goal of these actions was to be the “utter annihilation” of the Armenians in Turkey.
Ironically, Scheubner-Richter’s career took on a new path after the war. He settled in Munich, where he became an adherent of the Nazi Party. In 1923, he died in a hail of bullets, marching beside Adolf Hitler in the abortive attempt to overthrow Germany’s republican government.
Efforts to punish the perpetrators of these crimes too proved inadequate, yet these failings helped to inspire a young Polish Jewish law student named Raphael Lemkin to envision a concept in international law that would hold individuals and states accountable for mass crimes against religious, ethnic, racial, or national groups. “Sovereignty,” he subsequently wrote, “cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of people.” In 1944, in the midst of the Holocaust, he coined the term, genocide, and pressed for its adoption by the United Nations.
“Sovereignty cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of people.” -Raphael Lemkin
In looking through the contemporary accounts of the Armenian genocide, one is struck by the ominous nature of the comments. German diplomatic and missionary reports speak of concentration camps, in which prisoners die like flies in the thousands and tens of thousands, of deportations, of systematic extermination, and of how the cover of war was used to carry out the annihilation of the Armenians. They recount how Turkish officials justified their actions as self-defense, falsely claiming that the Armenians were planning to carry out the destruction of the Turkish people.
More recent scholarship has shown that the Young Turk leadership engaged in a concerted policy of demographic, religious, and ethnic engineering to remake the Ottoman Empire in the interests of Turkification and Islamization.
To students of the Holocaust all this has a familiar and frightening ring.
Just as prescient are the many descriptions of beheadings, the killings of military-aged men, the forced conversions of Armenians and other Christians to Islam, the kidnapping of children to be raised as Muslims, mass displacement, rape, and the selling of girls and women into sexual slavery.
These practices bear more than a passing resemblance to the genocidal policies carried out by another Caliphate, the self-proclaimed Islamic State. The Armenian genocide serves as a potent reminder of what needs to be done now to protect the lives of those at stake in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere.
Through concerted governmental actions by the international community, the rights of threatened minorities must be guaranteed and those in harm’s way protected. ISIS crimes need to be documented so that the perpetrators can be brought to justice. Those persons who were forcibly converted or pressured into conversion or kidnapped need to be returned to their communities, and the millions of individuals displaced by violence need to be cared for.
As Lemkin once pointed out, “the function of memory is not only to register past events, but to stimulate human conscience.”
Written by Steven Luckert, PhD, senior program curator in the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
