As a descendent of Armenians who were massacred by the Ottomans before and during World War I, I am greatly relieved that the United States government has now officially given these massacres the name they deserve: genocide. As reported in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/...), President Biden has done what no other president since WWI has had the guts to do: he has resisted the pressure to appease members of the Turkish government (the successors to the Ottomans) for fear that recognition of the 1915 genocide would upset them. Thank you, Joe!
When my grandfather was a toddler in the 1890’s, living with his family in the Harput Province of eastern Anatolia (now part of Turkey), Sultan Abdulhamid presided over the Hamidian Massacre of Armenian families. Somehow, my grandfather’s family was able to hide him, but the rest of his family — his mother, father, and siblings — were murdered by the Ottomans and tribes that were allied with them. He ended up in an orphanage and came to America as an 18-year-old refugee in 1910. Ironically, he served stateside in the U.S. Army during WWI. If he had still been in Armenia, he most certainly would have been one of the 1.5 million Armenians who died during the genocide.
The massacre of my grandfather’s family was part of a sporadic pattern of paranoid-driven oppression of Armenians, Christians, and others by the Ottomans, even before WWI. It is therefore not surprising that at some point, the Ottomans carried out their own version of the “final solution.”
In fact, when the Nazis were planning the extermination of their enemies, Hitler is reported to have said, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” In other words, he felt that he could do the same thing without facing repercussions, as had the Ottomans. This was a man who fought in the German army during WWI on the side of the Ottomans. Even Hitler believed that the Ottomans annihilated the Armenians. And the Holocaust he inspired would result in the creation of the term “genocide” to describe this type of horror.
During the Nuremberg Trials, the U.S. Government prosecuted Nazis who participated in the Holocaust without fear of upsetting the Germans and their new government. Today, we as Americans openly accept the reality that the Nazis/Germans killed millions of Jews during the 1930’s and 1940’s. [Yes, I know there are Holocaust deniers, but they are a small minority of Americans.] We do not hold it against the current citizens of Germany nor their government. And the Germans themselves openly admit to their own history. They aren’t offended when others refer to the dark period of their history that was the Holocaust; they accept and face up to it so that it never happens again.
Similarly, we Americans need to accept responsibility for the genocide of Native Americans. It is the only way in which we can face the reality of the suffering that past and current tribal members experience as a result of the actions of the U.S. government. Fortunately, our current (and some of our past) leaders are at last accepting this responsibility; President Biden’s American Jobs Act will provide unprecedented — and long deserved — aid to tribes. It is only a beginning, but the admission of wrongdoing is a huge step forward.
The Turkish people and government need to follow the Germans’ example and accept a dark period of their history. In fact, the country of Turkey didn’t even exist during the 1915 Genocide. It was formed after WWI and named so because of the Turkish tribal members who led the country, both in the Ottoman Empire and early Turkey.
Turks have given various convoluted reasons over the past 106 years for why the murder of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 was not genocide. Their main reason is that this was wartime, and the Armenians posed a threat to the Ottoman Empire. The Nazis said the same thing about the Jews: they posed a threat to Germans and the German way of life. This does not justify, nor should it ever justify, the wholesale killing of ethnic or tribal peoples: women, children, the elderly, etc.
As an Armenian-American, I do not want to punish the Turkish people or their country for the genocide. I don’t want reparations or forced mea culpas. I have supported Turkish/American owned businesses. I do not hate the Turks. However, I do want them to face their past, admit the reality of what happened in 1915, and realize that this genocide was in fact a genocide — just as many Americans now accept the genocide of Native Americans. It’s time.
So, now, Turkish President Recep Erdogan is making his usual threats against the United States to get Joe Biden to take it all back. Unfortunately for him, our House of Representatives and Senate have also recognized the Armenian Genocide. There is no going back. Whatever threats he throws our way — tariffs, NATO-related threats, etc. — we should ignore them. The United States and its allies faced down and defeated the Nazis in a gruesome war that took a tremendous toll on both soldiers and citizens. Surely, we can deal with the relatively minor political fallout that may stem from this.
There is never an acceptable reason to turn a blind eye to genocide. I am so proud that our President has the courage of his convictions and will never turn a blind eye to the Armenian Genocide. I am incredibly grateful to him.
N.B. I learned much about the Armenian Genocide from a great book by Eugene Rogan, “The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East.” It was chilling for me to read, on p.12, about the Hamidian Massacre in Harput Province. It was the first time I read an actual reference to the massacre that killed my grandfather’s family — and learned that the horror that his family experienced even had a name: the Hamidian Massacre. You cannot tell me that this was not genocide.
