Calling Genocide what it is - The 100th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan

2015 is a year of many anniversaries – among the ones to ‘celebrate’ are: 70 years after the end of World War II, 25 years of Germany’s reunification, Elvis Presley would have turned 80 this year, 25 years after Nelson Mandela was released from serving 27 years in prison, 200 years after the Battle of Waterloo, and the signing of the Magna Charta 800 years ago.

However, there are anniversaries we commemorate with less ‘jubilation’: notably the terror attacks in London on 7/7 took place in 2005, and the marking 70 years since humanity showed its cruelty by dropping two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But one anniversary is too often forgotten – 100 years ago a people in the Caucasus feared extermination. Denied by Turkey to this day, the Armenian genocide began in 1915.

Instead of educating people about the events and fighting for ‘never again’, several governments, among them the German, refused for a long time or still refuse to call the events what they were – genocide. This resonates too clearly with the atrocious events in 1994, when around 800.000 Tutsi (and moderate Hutu) in Rwanda were massacred by radical Hutu – yet almost all powerful governments were reluctant to referring to it as genocide since that would have required some reaction. Instead they tried to classify it as a civil conflict, despite the fact that many had previously ratified the Genocide Convention and were thus obliged to act in the case of genocide. Due to the refusal to call it a genocide, hundreds of thousands lives were lost. At least the failure to classify the horrific events was rectified later.

However, in advance of the preparations for commemorating the Armenian Genocide, statements have caused outrage – and rightly so – when governments refused to openly refer to it as Genocide.

On April 24th, 1915 the Ottoman Empire’s government started its campaign of extermination against the Armenian minority in what is today Turkey. The Ottoman officials portrayed Armenians as collaborating with Russia, and thus tried to justify deportations as necessary for the Empire’s safekeeping in the circumstances of the First World War. Systematically, the Armenians were rounded up, put into concentration camps, or sent on ‘death marches’. The male population was mostly killed during massacres or by forcing them into extreme labour that would only end in death. Women, children and elderly died of starvation or exhaustion as a consequence of the death marches into the Syrian desert. Even today there is not an exact number of victims, but estimations vary between 500,000 and 1.5 million between 1915 and 1918. Other numbers include further massacres that were committed during the Turkish-Armenian War (1920-1921).

It was Raphael Lemkin who used the phrase genocide to describe the denial of other’s existence. His work tremendously influenced the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines genocide as “the following acts committed with 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;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

Almost all of these acts where committed by the Empire’s officials. Numbers however are not essential for defining a genocide. The fact is, that the Ottoman government intended to exterminate the ethnic minority of Armenians in the Empire and they were efficacious in doing so.

It is a huge disappointment that many governments still avoid the term, even when in other countries, such as Greece, Italy, Slovakia and Switzerland, the denial is criminalised. After disagreement over the use of the term in the German parliament in early April 2015, the Obama administration has now also backpedalled – due to “opposition from some at the State Department and the Pentagon”. Although Obama had stated in 2008 “the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence“ – in this week’s commemoration the term will not be used. Some members of the German Parliament urged the Federal government to finally make a statement and use the term and now it seems they will finally acknowledge the necessity of using the term. Most likely, both Germany and the US are concerned with staying on good terms with their ally and partner Turkey, as successor of the Empire, who still refuses any responsibility and denies that genocide occurred. Particularly because of strong relationships between the partners, the 100 year commemorations are the right moment for the German and US officials, and everyone else, to accept everyone’s duty to acknowledge and name the events as what they were – genocide.