it will not return to me empty: June 2012

In the fall of 2000, an Armenian Genocide Resolution was proposed by Congress which asked then President Bill Clinton to refer to the slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide in his annual commemorative speech on April 24. The resolution also requested that Foreign Service officers be educated about human rights and ethnic cleansing by being familiarized with the United States official records on the Armenian Genocide. The House subcommittee passed it by a large majority despite severe harassment from the Turkish government (Balakian, 388).

However, within hours of the subcommittee vote on the House floor where it was expected to pass, Ankara issued a warning. Turkey warned the United States that it would close its air bases to U.S. planes, including those near the Iraqi border, and cancel weapons contracts with the United States. In the midst of outbreaks of terrorist violence in the Middle East, Turkey also threatened not to protect American citizens in Turkey in the case of a violent eruption. The State Department was told that the passage of the new resolution would ruin U.S. relations with Turkey. As violence broke out between Israel and Palestine and throughout the Middle East, the State Department, with pressure from Israel at Turkey’s request, told President Clinton that the Armenian Genocide Resolution must not pass for the sake of “national security” and the bill was called off (Balakian, 389). After the U.S. bent to the censorship of a state with an appalling history of discrimination, suppression and mass murder, Des Pres asked, “What does it mean when a client-state like Turkey can persuade a super power like the United States to abandon its earlier stance toward the genocide of 1915? (Balakian, 385)”. Turkey has mastered the two most far-reaching and dangerous potential capabilities of a state: to commit genocide and to escape the hands of justice and restitution unscathed.
One of the most famous accounts of the atrocities of the genocide is captured in a poem by Siamanto called “The Dance” in which the author describes a group of young brides who were stripped naked and forced to dance as the soldiers doused them with kerosene and set their graceful bodies on fire (Balakian, 237). The cruelty that was aimed towards these innocent women is beyond our scope of imagination but it is the reality for the grandparents of my generation whose parents knew no parents and whose stories will haunt the generations to come.

The “dancing women” was no isolated event. In all corners of the Ottoman Empire, Armenians were rounded up, arrested, kidnapped and Islamicised by Muslim families and either shot or put on deportation (death) marches to starve in the desert (Balakian, 175). There were an estimated two million Armenians living as citizens of the Ottoman Empire before the start of World War I. Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half million were killed while half a million became refugees in foreign nations (Graber, 140).
Though the massacres ended in 1923, the Turkish government continues to annihilate the Armenian people by denying their history and thus, their identity. Deborah Lipstadt argues that “denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators, and is-indeed-the final stage of genocide” (Balakian, 383). Just as a strong centralized state has the economic, military and intelligence resources to carry out genocide, it also has the facility to cover up its criminal acts through its extreme control over the media and international intimidation. The Turkish government pressures and lobbies the press not to use the word “genocide” and demands that every time the Armenian side is discussed in the press that the Turkish side be given equal time. The Turkish government only refers to the Armenian Genocide as “the alleged Armenian Genocide” and goes as far as referring to the genocide as a “civil war” or “intercommunal warfare” (Balakian, 379).

During an Armenian Genocide commemoration held at Times Square in New York City in the 1970s, a Washington-based Turkish organization working in conjunction with the Turkish government passed out pamphlets which continued the attacks on Armenian survivors with statements like “Carefully coached by their Armenian nationalist interviewers, these aged Armenians relate tales of horror which supposedly took place some 66 years ago in such detail as to astonish the imagination, considering that most of them already are aged eighty or more. Subjected to years of Armenian nationalist propaganda as well as the coaching of their interviewers, there is little doubt that their statements are of no use whatever for historical research” (Balakian, 381). The Turkish government went even further to assault the collective memory of these people by funding American scholars, researchers and professors in prestigious universities to support the “other side of the story” through writing and speaking out against Armenian propaganda. Des Pres stated that in this way, knowledge and history were no longer based on “the mind’s ground of judgment but a commodity for hire” (Balakian, 381).