Amberin Zaman
A proposed art project commemorating the 1915 mass slaughter
by the Ottoman Turks of the empire’s Armenian subjects has sparked a
tug-of-war between the Turkish government and Switzerland’s ethnic
Armenian community, sharpening decades of mutual suspicion and
resentment and pitting the federal government in Bern against the local
government in Geneva, where the monument is to be placed.
With only months to go before the April 24 centenary of the
genocide, the stakes are higher than ever — and so far, Turkey is
prevailing. In early December, the Swiss Foreign Ministry
declared that it opposes erecting the Armenian monument in the canton
of Geneva because “it is important for federal authorities to preserve
the absolute impartiality of Geneva,” where the United Nations and
various other international organizations are headquartered, Turkey’s
semi-official Anadolu news agency crowed.
More likely, the Swiss are responding to Turkish bullying, Armenian activists and diplomatic observers say. The UN has reportedly also sided with Turkey. A UN spokeswoman in Geneva declined to comment.
“It is an international scandal that Swiss diplomacy surrendered so
voluntarily to Turkish pressure,” complained Vicken Cheterian, a
Geneva-based ethnic Armenian academic in an interview with Al-Monitor.
“A beautiful artwork is now in exile in search of a safe haven where it
can rest, to reflect the memory of a people sacrificed and humanity in
denial.”
The project, called “Reverberes de la Memoire,” or “Streetlights of
Memory,” consists of eight lampposts placed in an arc in parkland lying
between the International Red Cross building and the Palais des Nations,
where the United Nations’ precursor, the League of Nations, once stood.
The lamp posts will soar to nine meters (29.5 ft.) and sprout elongated
chrome tear drops in which pedestrians can view their own reflections.
The pillars will be inscribed with texts about exile and dispossession
by acclaimed French Armenian psychoanalyst Janine Altounian, whose
parents survived the genocide.
A Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman did not return calls for
comment. But Turkish officials speaking on condition of strict anonymity
privately acknowledged to Al-Monitor that the Swiss government had been
“encouraged” to scupper the bronze memorial, which was conceived in
2008 by the French Armenian artist Melik Ohanian. In keeping with
Switzerland’s federal laws, the final say rests with the cantonal
government in Geneva, expected to deliver its verdict in mid-January.
Stefan Kristensen, a Swiss Armenian activist, says should the local
administration follow the Foreign Ministry’s advice, the project
organizers will pursue the matter in court. “There is no legal basis for
caving to pressure from Bern and Ankara,” Kristensen told Al-Monitor.
Sympathy for the Armenians among the Swiss people is nothing new. In the late 19th century, when the ruling Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II ordered pogroms
against the Armenians, more than 400,000 Swiss citizens (13.7% of the
population) signed a petition demanding that their federal government
intervene with the Sublime Porte to end its brutality.
Swiss pharmacist Jacob Kunzler and his wife, Elizabeth, figure
prominently in the Armenian pantheon of heroes. Between 1899 and 1922,
the couple saved thousands of Armenian orphans in Turkey and Lebanon.
Moreover, Switzerland has laws that criminalize denying or justifying genocide.
In 2007, a federal court found Turkish writer and leftwing politician
Dogu Perincek guilty of racial discrimination for calling the genocide
“an international lie” on Swiss soil. The case wound up in the European
Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in 2013. The Strasbourg-based court
concluded that Switzerland had violated Perincek's
right to free speech. In March, Switzerland appealed to the ECHR’s
17-judge Grand Chamber to overturn the ruling. Armenia waded in on
Switzerland’s side with its own team of lawyers. The latter is said to
include Amal Alamuddin,
the much-respected Lebanese-born international human rights lawyer
married to actor George Clooney. In a further twist, Alamuddin’s great
uncle, Najib, is said to have been married to Kunzler’s daughter, Ida.
Perincek was merely parroting Turkey’s official line. Turkey denies
that the 1915 tragedy constitutes genocide. Imposing its own version of
events — that most of the Armenians died of exposure, starvation and
disease during forced deportations to the Syrian desert — has long been a
cornerstone of Turkish foreign policy. Sabotaging planned genocide
memorials is an integral part of this. Thus, when the ethnic Armenian
residents of the California town of Montebello decided to build a monument
to honor the victims of 1915 in the mid-1960s, Myron Goldsmith, a
retired army major who doubled as Turkey’s honorary consul general,
lobbied the city council to prevent its construction.
The episode was colorfully depicted in journalist Michael Bobelian’s
2009 book “Children of Armenia: A Forgotten Genocide and the
Century-Long Struggle for Justice.” We learn, for instance, that
Goldsmith accused the Armenians of “concocting a Communist plot” and
that the State Department “contacted Montebello’s city council to
pressure it to shut down the project.” In the end, the council voted in
favor of the monument but “bowed to the State Department’s wishes,”
spurning Armenian demands for the genocide to be mentioned in its
dedicatory plaque. A former Turkish intelligence officer who requested
anonymity claimed in remarks to Al-Monitor that the Turkish government
had “wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars” in covert operations to
deface Armenian genocide memorials. California is home to the largest
Armenian diaspora community in the United States, and three Turkish diplomats were murdered there in revenge killings carried out by ethnic Armenians between 1973 and 1982.
In 2011, the battle against monuments shifted to Kars,
a city close to Turkey’s sealed border with Armenia, where a former
mayor commissioned a sculpture that was meant to symbolize
reconciliation. Turkey’s President (then Prime Minister) Recep Tayyip
Erdogan called the work a “freak” and an “abomination” that needed to be
demolished and replaced with “a beautiful park.” Demolition of the two
giant figures facing each other, hands extended in a gesture of peace,
duly began in April of that year, with their decapitation.
“It cost more money to destroy the monument than to build,” observed former mayor Naif Alibeyoglu
Such actions run counter to the recent softening in Turkey’s official
stance — last year, Erdogan went as far as to offer an apology of sorts
when he acknowledged the suffering endured by the Armenians in a
statement made that April 24.
Using the word "genocide" is no longer a criminal offense in Turkey. Yet, Turkey’s sustained efforts
to suppress commemorative monuments are “a pernicious kind of
aggression against our right to remember, to celebrate the fact that we
are still alive,” said Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, an art historian at
the University of California, in an email interview with Al-Monitor.
Should Ankara succeed in permanently switching off Geneva’s
“Streetlights of Memory,” the wounds of the past will be even harder to
heal.
"Al-Monitor," December 24, 2014
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