All right, admit it: you’ve never heard of Tsitsernakaberd, so when RFE/RL reported today:
… hundreds of thousands of people marched to the Tsitsernakaberd hilltop memorial to lay flowers at the eternal flame …
you didn’t know why those people were marching.
At the top level the story is simple: the marchers commemorated the Armenian genocide — which Armenians call Meds Yeghern or “The Great Calamity” — in which the Ottoman Turkish government systematically exterminated about 1.5 million Armenians, mostly in 1915. Meds Yeghern was used by Hitler to justify the Holocaust, and it remains the most-studied genocide after the Holocaust itself. Tsitsernakaberd is Armenia’s official memorial to the victims.
But there’s more to it than that. Although Armenians visit Tsitsernakaberd and have similar observances elsewhere to make sure that the world does not forget the victims, the Turkish government rejects the historical consensus, calling it “fictional” and “a distortion of history for political objectives”. And because of Turkish denialism, countries that do not want to offend Turkey have refused to call Meds Yeghern a genocide.
The US government is one of those countries. Statements by President Obama and now President Trump have said “Meds Yeghern” rather than using the word “genocide”, although the word “genocide” clearly applies to what happened. (Turkey strongly objects to the phrase “Meds Yeghern” too, for what it’s worth.)
Israel is another such country. As Yossi Melman reports in Foreign Policy, Turkey was a strategic ally of Israel from the 1950s until recently. And although Turkish–Israeli relations have badly deteriorated, Israel has a new reason to not say “genocide”: they don’t want to offend Ilham Aliyev, the corrupt and authoritarian leader of Azerbaijan, a country that purchases arms from Israel. In the 1990s Azerbaijan lost a large chunk of territory to Armenia and they are on the Turkish side of this dispute.
In all this talk about the word “genocide” and who’s to blame and who’s friends of Turkey or not, we often lose sight of the millions of victims of Meds Yeghern. Today is the day to remember them.