Christine Philliou
In this centennial year since the Armenian Genocide, countless
conferences, meetings, and commemorations are underway across the globe.
While
they have all been peaceful so far, they come at the end of a century of
violence. I refer not just to the events of 1915–17, but also the waves
of
violence spurred by memory, recognition, and denial ever since. First
came the
killings, at the hands of individual Armenians, of two of the leading
perpetrators of the violence, Talaat and Cemal Pashas in Berlin and
Tiflis,
respectively, in the 1920s. Then came the nearly 50 people, many of them
Turkish diplomats, killed, and the hundreds more injured, across the
globe by
the Armenian organization ASALA in the 1970s to protest Turkey’s
continuing
refusal to recognize the genocide.
