The New York Times reported today that the U.S. House is debating putting to a vote, a bill which would call the deaths of over 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey during WWI an act of genocide. I can hear you now “1.5 million Armenians… WWI… genocide…I haven’t heard of this before” so I’ll give you a brief history and direct you towards someone who can give you a much better account. In the Pulitzer Prize winning book A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power details acts of genocide from the 20th century and denotes this as the first incident. In 1915 the Turks were at war and became fearful that the large Armenian minority in their country would lead a massive revolt after a few small revolutionary plots were uncovered. The Turks systematically murdered large groups of able bodied Armenian men throughout the country and forced the remaining Armenians to “relocate” to a desert “camp” which in reality never existed. The relocation was, in reality a death march during which the Armenian’s were raped, beaten and left to die along the road, all at the hands of their Turkish military “escort”. For the sake of brevity I’ll stop here and let you read the rest for yourself.
The reason most people haven’t heard about the Armenian genocide as opposed to the other genocides of the 20th century (the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge, Bosnia, Kurds in Northern Iraq, the Hutu/Tutsi conflict, Darfur) is because it was done under the cover WWI and presented to the world as a military operation. Despite the pleas of the American ambassador in Turkey at the time the United States refused to intervene or even pressure Germany (Turkey’s main ally at the time) to do anything to stop the massacre. The view the U.S. held in regards to the Turkish problem was the same view held by most countries at the time which was that you don’t try to intervene in the domestic matters of another country. The Armenian genocide also suffers from lack of recognition due to the fact that at the time the word genocide had not been invented. The phrase was not invented until 1944 when Raphael Lemkin coined it, Power does a phenomenal job relating the story of Lemkin and his tireless struggle to force the world to sit up and notice of the atrocities of both the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. I’ll stop with the history lesson and book review now and get on to why I’m upset about this bill.
The bill itself is a great idea. Well, let me rephrase that; the bill itself is as great an idea as an idea to make a small semantic distinction in relation to a massacre that took the lives of 1.5 million innocent people almost a century after the fact, can be. What is not so great is the fact that the Bush administration is leaning, very heavily, on Nancy Pelosi and the other main sponsors of the bill to kill it because they are afraid of what the Turkish reaction might be if the bill is passed. Apparently despite the fact that 15 other nations have already passed legislation calling the act genocide if the United States did so then the Turks would really be embarrassed. When the French passed a similar bill Turkey “cut all contacts with the French military and terminated defense contracts under negotiation”. The White House has decided to play the Support Our Troops card yet again (by the way, did you hear that if you don’t buy seven American flags by April 8th and display them prominently about your property then you’re emboldening the enemy and refusing to support our troops) by saying the bill “could harm American troops in the field” if Turkey gets upset and reduces military ties with the U.S.. I guess when Bush decides he wants to launch a war he doesn’t care what other nations are behind him and a “coalition of the willing” will do just fine, when he’s actually in the war though, that’s when he decides to be diplomatic.
The U.S. stance on genocide is completely hypocritical. Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Sadam on trial in absentia for the genocide of the Kurds? Isn’t that one of the only legitimately tenable arguments for going to war in Iraq in the first place? Yet they are afraid of hurting any international feelings and don’t want a bill to pass which would in reality only change the wording in a few history books. Then again if you look at the current crisis in Sudan you’ll see the Bush administrations mind set towards a suffering population, I suppose if you’re a poor African nation that the U.S. can’t exploit for its own benefit then we don’t really need to help you. Despite the fact that Colin Powell called the situation in Darfur a genocide in 2004 the U.S. has refused to act. The world’s stance of genocide is a precarious one as well. Nations have no problem condemning genocide after enough time has passed to safely comment on it without being held accountable for allowing it to happen but they are petrified to stop (or even point out) a genocide when it is occurring. This is the case for two main reasons: the first is that the idea that domestic conflicts are out of the reach of the international community still abounds. The fact that politicians throughout the world aren’t pressured by their own populations to stop acts of genocide is the second. No politician has ever lost a job because of a stance on genocide due to the face that genocide doesn’t matter to people as much as healthcare, education, taxes, etc. Most people are so concerned about their day-to-day dealings that they don’t want to think about the suffering of a group of people half a world away, let alone get involved. It only takes on example to illustrate how apathetic the American population in particular is to genocide:
The UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted in 1948. The United States didn’t ratify (and only did so after it could be assured immunity from prosecution without its consent, which basically makes the agreement with regards to the U.S. worthless) the agreement until 1988. It took 40 years for the American legislature to say “You know what, you’re right. The systematic killing of an entire culture is wrong”.
You’ll have to excuse me if I’m a bit cynical about this bill actually passing.
