Rick Gladstone
Behind
the Turkish government’s denials of the century-old Armenian genocide
lurks the possibility that survivors and their descendants could be
deemed legally entitled someday to financial reparations, perhaps worth
tens of billions of dollars or more.
The
Turkish authorities take the position that there is nothing that needs
to be repaid. Moreover, no judicial mechanism exists in which claims of
such magnitude, from events 100 years ago, could be litigated. But
Armenian activists have nonetheless increasingly focused on the issue of
compensation in recent years.
They
have followed precedents set by victims of other atrocities of modern
history, most notably Holocaust-era claims against Germany. They have
drawn parallels between their struggle for reparations and those of
Native Americans and African-Americans. They have commissioned studies
to evaluate plundered and seized assets, including land that is now part
of Turkey.
Many
have also been energized by what they see as an increasing
acknowledgment — mainly outside Turkey but also among some Turks — that
from 1915 to 1923, in the tumult of World War I and the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a
genocide committed by members of the generation that created the modern
Turkish state.
“My
parents and grandparents used to say, ‘We’ll never see justice done,’ ”
said Nora Hovsepian, an American lawyer of Armenian descent from
Encino, Calif., and the chairwoman of the Western Region of the Armenian National Committee of America,
an advocacy group for the Armenian diaspora. With more international
acceptance that genocide was committed, she said, “I think the tide is
turning.”
For
human rights historians, the Turkish government’s outrage at recent
calls to acknowledge the genocide from Pope Francis, the European
Parliament, Germany and Austria is intertwined with the reparations
question. Such an acknowledgment by Turkey, such historians say, would
not only reverse a century of denials, but would also weaken Turkey’s
legal defenses from compensation claims.
“If you deny something, it is not given existence by you,” said Jermaine McCalpin,
a scholar of transitional justice at the University of the West Indies
in Jamaica. “If it’s not given existence, there’s nothing to resolve.”
Mr.
McCalpin, who was invited to deliver a speech on Friday at genocide
centennial commemorations in Yerevan, the Armenian capital, served on an
international panel that completed a large-scale study last month on
calculating Armenian reparations.
He
said the reparations question was challenging partly because the events
happened so long ago. “But that doesn’t mean we should do nothing,” he
said in a telephone interview.
“You’re
talking about a long historical trend of denial,” Mr. McCalpin said of
Turkey. “To admit or recognize a genocide also requires acknowledging a
wrong, and that is where reparations come in. You acknowledge, and then
you move to repair.”
The study by the panel, the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group,
was funded in part by Armenian advocacy organizations. It includes
recommendations and formulas for determining the components of a
possible reparations package, including inflation-adjusted compensation
for property, death and suffering, based in part on historical
precedents. Depending on the method of calculation, the total could
exceed $100 billion.
The chairman of the panel, Henry C. Theriault,
a genocide scholar and the chairman of the philosophy department at
Worcester State University in Worcester, Mass., said the question of
reparations was “obviously a pretty central one.”
He also said an official Turkish acknowledgment of genocide, while not critical for reparation claims, was still important.
“It
has symbolic value, for getting the history right,” he said. “The fact
that many people in Turkey aren’t willing to use the word, the
resistance to using it, doesn’t promote reconciliation.”
Other Armenian groups have said Mr. Theriault’s panel vastly understated what was lost. Armenian Genocide Losses 1915, a website established by researchers in Armenia
to estimate damages after the passing of 100 years, uses broader
measures for calculating values, which are correspondingly higher than
the panel’s.
They
include determinations for irreversible harm, such as death and
destruction, and reversible harm, such as restoration of damaged
churches, sea access, water and land resources, an apology and genocide
education. They also include a calculation for “delay damages,” which
reflect deprivation of access to ancestral homelands and emotional
distress.
Under
the website’s formulas, at least nine countries gained indirect
benefits from the genocide, including the United States and much of
present-day Europe. But Turkey gained more than any other, as “chief
beneficiary and main cause of delay in proper redress of the crime.”
The
website estimated the total value of reparations at approximately $3
trillion, of which it said Turkey owes about $1.64 trillion.
Many
Armenians, of course, say reparations on that scale are highly
unlikely, even if Turkey were ever to concede that reconciliation should
include financial compensation. But there is no indication Turkish
leaders are prepared to discuss that possibility.
While
the Turks have said atrocities were committed, they have denied that
Armenians, almost all of them Christian, were intentionally and
systematically killed because of their identity, part of the definition
of genocide.
The
Turks have also said that many Turkish Muslims were killed, and have
sought to portray all victims of that period as regrettable casualties
of conflict. And they have cited agreements made in the aftermath of
World War I that were meant to settle claims and Ottoman-era debts.
“To undo these agreements would be unthinkable,” said G. Lincoln McCurdy, president of the Turkish Coalition of America, an advocacy group in Washington.
“We
would hope that Turkey and Armenia instead could look forward to
reconciliation without the necessity of re-litigating venerable and
time-honored agreements,” Mr. McCurdy said in a statement. “And what
about the losses of millions of Ottoman Muslims, who were driven out of
their ancestral homes in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Russia and
suffered during a century of war at the hands of the great powers and
their proxies?”
Armenians have managed to win some money in the courts, though not from Turkey. In one well-known case,
the New York Life Insurance Company was sued for refusing to pay the
life insurance policies of thousands of Armenians who died in the
genocide. The case, brought in California where many descendants of
genocide victims live, was settled in 2004 for $20 million, plus $3
million for nine Armenian church and charity groups.
Last September, leading Armenian clerics announced they were suing Turkey
in that country’s highest court, seeking restitution for church
properties destroyed during the genocide, notably the Great House of
Cilicia in Sis, near the Turkish city of Adana. If the lawsuit fails,
advocates say, an appeal is planned at the European Court of Human
Rights.
Ms.
Hovsepian said the focus on litigation to redress genocide losses
partly reflected a generational shift in the Armenian diaspora, as many
of the survivors have died and their children have taken up the cause in
a less emotional and more pragmatic way.
“It’s
history passed down,” she said. “Of course we still mourn the dead, but
it goes beyond that. You can see the evolution. It’s become a time of
demands.”
"The New York Times," April 23, 2015
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