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For Too Long, Armenian Genocide Denied

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  • For Too Long, Armenian Genocide Denied

    FOR TOO LONG, ARMENIAN GENOCIDE DENIED
    Manoug Manougian

    St Petersburg Times
    April 23 2010
    FL

    When Hitler was planning his swift and brutal takeover of Poland
    and the murder of Jews, for just being Jews, to his critics he said,
    "Who, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?"

    Sunday, April 11, 2010, was Remembrance Day for Jews. Of the 12 million
    who were exterminated under Hitler's Nazi regime, the lives of about 6
    million innocent Jews were extinguished in gas chambers. The cries of
    the Holocaust survivors for "Never Again" seem to have fallen on deaf
    ears, and crimes against humanity continue unabated. From Darfur to
    Iraq and around the globe, innocent people continue to suffer at the
    hands of dictators, warmongers and ideologues. When will it end? When
    will again and again become never again?

    Today, Armenians around the world reflect on the events of the early
    part of the last century when about a million and a half innocent
    Armenians were massacred. The genocide represents the largest number
    of Christians in history targeted and massacred because of their
    religion and ethnicity.

    When the Young Turks assumed power, their policy to rid Turkey of its
    Christian population intensified, and in 1915 the carnage escalated.

    Armenian men of all ages were murdered, young and old women were raped,
    priests and their parishioners were herded into churches and burned
    alive, hundreds were drowned, and hundreds of thousands were forced
    to leave their homes and march through the forbidding Syrian Desert
    with no food or water. In the words of Talaat Pasha, the Turkish
    minister of interior at the time, "We are ensuring their eternal rest."

    In the face of overwhelming evidence, Turkey refuses to validate a
    historical fact that took place under the Young Turk regime. Yet,
    on July 5, 1919, a Turkish Military Tribunal, with a unanimous vote,
    found Talaat Pasha, Minister of War Enver Effendi, Minister of the
    Navy Djemal Effendi and Minister of Education Dr. Nazim, guilty of the
    massacres of the Armenian population in Turkey. Why then the denial?

    Newspapers of the era, including the New York Times, as well as
    Western diplomats were reporting on the massacres that were being
    committed by the Young Turk regime. The renowned British historian
    Arnold J. Toynbee wrote about the massacres in a book titled: The
    Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation. Why then the denial?

    During Woodrow Wilson's presidency, the Department of State instructed
    Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Turkey, to deliver a message
    warning the Young Turk regime that it would be held liable for
    crimes against humanity for its treatment of the Armenians. Theodore
    Roosevelt, in a letter to Cleveland H. Dodge, Wilson's adviser, dated
    May 11, 1918, stated, "The Armenian massacre was the greatest crime
    of the war and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it." Why
    then the denial?

    Toward the end of World War I, Talaat Pasha fled Turkey and sought
    asylum in Germany. An Armenian survivor, Soghomon Tehlirian, caught
    up with Talaat, and on a street in Berlin he shot him dead. Soghomon
    was apprehended, tried and found guilty of murder. Soon thereafter, a
    Jewish law student in Poland, Raphael Lemkin, saw the headlines about
    Soghomon and asked his professor: "Is it a crime to kill a man, but
    it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million?" His
    professor answered: "There is no law against mass murder."

    Thus began Raphael Lemkin's relentless journey to create the word
    "genocide," and help establish the United Nations' Convention on the
    Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention
    in part states: "genocide means any of the following acts committed
    with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
    racial or religious group as such: (a) Killing members of the group,
    (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. ..."

    On March 4, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a
    resolution that calls on President Barack Obama to officially recognize
    the Armenian Genocide. The Turkish government reacted immediately by
    recalling its ambassador in protest and warned that if the resolution
    is adopted, U.S.-Turkish relations would be adversely affected. Once
    again, as with presidents before him, Obama has decided that political
    expediency trumps human decency. Even worse, it is mind-boggling that,
    of all nations in the world, the government of Israel, for economic
    and other reasons, does not officially recognize the Armenian Genocide.

    Today, scores of nations -- and 43 U.S. states -- recognize the
    Armenian massacres and call it by its rightful name, genocide. It is
    time for the government of Turkey to stop the denial, join the world
    community to fight crimes against humanity, and promote peaceful
    coexistence for all the peoples of the globe.

    Manoug Manougian is co-author and associate producer of the documentary
    The Genocide Factor, shown on PBS, the History Channel and the BBC. He
    teaches a course on the history of genocide in the Honors College at
    the University of South Florida. He is also a professor of mathematics
    at USF.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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