Why No One Should Believe Reports of Armenians' 'Voluntary' Exodus from Artsakh

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
Shushan Karapetian

Over the last two weeks, thousands of vehicles have lined a serpentine road stretching for three miles in the South Caucasus Mountains near the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan. At times, the multitude of cars was so dense that it could be seen from space. The travelers — refugees — survived extreme deprivation for nine months and a harrowing military assault against their homeland.

The road, known as the Lachin Corridor, is the sole escape route out of the Armenian Republic of Artsakh, also called Nagorno-Karabakh, situated on territory Azerbaijan claims is its own. As of Monday, more than 100,000 Artsakh Armenians, the Indigenous people of the region, had fled from the land their ancestors lived on for millennia. They face an uncertain future.

An Interview with Dr. Jacobs on Genocide in the Ottoman Empire

George N. Shirinian

Dr. Steven Leonard Jacobs holds the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies and is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa. An ordained rabbi, Professor Jacobs is a specialist on the Holocaust and Genocide, Biblical Studies, Jewish-Jewish Christian Relations, and is one of the foremost authorities on Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), who coined the term “genocide” and devoted his life to the enactment of an international law on the punishment and prevention of genocide.

Among his numerous publications, Prof. Jacobs is the author of the chapter entitled, “Lemkin on Three Genocides: Comparing His Writings on the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Genocides,” in the recently published book, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks 1913-1923, edited by George N. Shirinian (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017, published in association with The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center and The Zoryan Institute).

Pope in Armenia: Father Lombardi Says that the Armenian Word "Medz Yeghern” Is “Stronger” than the Term Genocide

 Translated from Italian by Vartan Matiossian

The Armenian word "Medz Yeghern" is even "stronger" than the term genocide. This is what answers Father Federico Lombardi, director of the press office of the Vatican, to the question about why there is still a certain shyness in the Vatican about using the term genocide to indicate the persecution and elimination that the Armenian people suffered in 1915. "Why -- Lombardi asked -- all this obsession to ask about this?" He added: "We know what happened. Nobody rejects that these were horrible massacres and we recognize that. But we do not want to make a trap of political debates because we go to the substance. It is an enormous tragedy."

The Post-Centennial ‘What’s Next’: Where Music Videos Will Not Help

Anahit Sargsyan

While we all understand that one hundred is only a number, given the iconic roundup of the century, the Centennial provided the perfect opportunity to stop, reevaluate and re-plan. The worldwide commemoration ceremonies, coupled with unprecedented media attention, made it clear that raising awareness has ceased being the main issue in the Armenian Genocide recognition process. Certainly, raising genocide awareness is a strong foundation, yet it is still only a foundation, a platform, on which we should continue to build. It is also essential that we take a step back to explore the ways that we can practically use the recognition that we have achieved so far. This is a simple concept that most Armenians realized during the Centennial. However, what is not so simple is the attempt to understand what exactly the next step should be. Although it is compelling to consider that reparations should be the new focus of our attention, in reality, the question of “what’s next” requires a far more comprehensive approach. In fact, “what’s next” is not a single goal, but rather a chain of interconnected objectives that we should consider equally. Inevitably, this chain must start with a strong and reliable Republic of Armenia. It requires modifications in the way genocide is studied in the Armenian educational system. In addition, it demands an unprecedented focus on international law within Armenia. Working together, these will lead to increased credibility for Armenia in the international sphere as a qualified candidate to take the lead in the pursuit of remedies for the Armenian and other unrecognized genocides.

Armenian Genocide, a Century on

Vicken Cheterian

 

Geoffrey Robertson started his talk at the Responsibility 2015 conference in New York by telling the story of his great-uncle. William Robertson was an Australian soldier in the allied forces who in 1915 was sent to fight against the Ottoman army and, hardly twenty-four hours after disembarking at Gallipoli and joining his comrades in a charge on the cliff-top defences, was felled by a sniper or machine‐gunner.

Confronting the Yazidi Genocide

Aren Torikian

 

Thousands of people leaving their ancestral homeland. Women and children being kidnapped, raped, and sold as slaves. Men slaughtered by the dozens.

While this sounds like something from the Armenian Genocide, it is going on in the world as I write. In Northern Iraq, where the Babylonians and Assyrians once ruled vast empires, the Islamic State (IS) has been waging a genocidal war against the defenseless Yazidi people.

The IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/al-Sham/the Levant), is a descendant of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group the U.S. Army fought against for almost a decade. Taking advantage of the Syrian Civil War, the IS swept through Syria in 2013, capturing towns from Kurds, Syrian government forces, and other rebels. The IS continued to grow this year, and expanded operations into Iraq. Coupled with an Iraqi Army retreat, the IS’s advance led to gains just outside of Baghdad, hundreds of miles from where it started its rampage. After capturing Mosul in the north, Iraq’s second largest city, the IS started to consolidate its gains. Ethnic Yazidis, fleeing from almost certain death, collected on Mount Sinjar, and were soon surrounded by IS forces. Facing starvation, heat stroke in the 100-degree Iraqi sun, and massacres, the Yazidis became a sort of call to action.

"Genocide" Does Not Describe The Armenian Experience

Jano Boghosian



The Armenian experience is as common as it is unique. Armenian history is a part of human history, thus the Armenian experience must be remembered as a significant part of the human experience. To fully comprehend the historiography of the Armenian experience requires the examination of the events leading up to 1915, not in a vacuum, but, in the context of world history. This article is meant to analyze the legacies that transcend past the survivors into our collective consciousness.

Genocide Encyclopedias and the Armenian Genocide

Alan Whitehorn

The two key human rights concepts of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” have their roots in the response to the Young Turk mass deportations and massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Following the April 24, 1915 mass arrests of hundreds of Armenian political, religious, and community leaders in Constantinople and their subsequent exile and deaths, and the massacres of multitudes of other Armenian civilians, the Entente allied powers of England, France, and Russia on May 24, 1915 warned that the Young Turk dictatorship would be held accountable for the massacres and the “new crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization.”

Word Atrocities: Of Little Phrases and Great Crimes

Vartan Matiossian

Like the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the Cambodians which followed it—and like too many other such persecutions of too many other peoples—the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten.

–Ronald Reagan (1981)(1)

I brought up matter of Holocaust Museum. It seems someone has approved a room dedicated to 1915 massacre of some Armenians by the Turks. I’m against it but don’t know what we can do.

–Ronald Reagan (1988)(2)

Raphael Lemkin and Samantha Power's Problem from Hell

Gabriel Sanders

Ten years ago, Samantha Power won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “A Problem From Hell,” a history of American inaction in the face of genocide. As she awaits Senate confirmation to be the country’s next ambassador to the United Nations (*), the book offers a glimpse into Power’s political philosophy — and a sense of whom she might want to emulate as America’s voice at the world body.             

The Father of Genocide

Outraged by the Ottomans' massacres of Armenians,

a young Polish lawyer pushed to have

the crime of genocide enshrined in law

 

 

Yascha Mounk

 

During World War I, Soghomon Tehlirian, an Armenian civilian, looked on helplessly as Ottoman troops shot his mother, raped his sisters and hacked his brother to death. Six years later, on a Berlin street, Tehlirian approached Talaat Pasha, a grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire who had coordinated the killing of Armenians. "This is for my mother," he told Pasha as he shot him dead.

The Gezi Park of Taksim Square Was the Place of the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery

Hakob Chakerian

Translated by Vartan Matiossian

 



Yesterday morning the demonstrators clashed again with the police in the Gezi Park of Taksim Square, in Istanbul. The inflamed passions do not and will not calm, even when today Prime Minister Erdogan meets with the leaders of the "Taksim Platform," the group that coordinates the protests. The problem are not the trees of the park, namely, it is not ecological, but the reaction of the secular Kemalists against the Islamist government, which is being expressed in Prime Minister Erdogan's project to rebuild Taksim Square. 

The "Exact Translation": How "Medz Yeghern" Means Genocide

Vartan Matiossian

Yes, until World War II, the Medz Yeghern of 1915 was unprecedented not only in the history of our people, but in the entirety of humankind. An entire people, an entire nation coming from the depths of millennia was killed, was dying.

We condemn genocide [genotsid] or zhoghovrtasbanutiun with all our heart and soul.

There is and there cannot be either juridical justification or any motion of prescription for genocide.

Genocide, be it the horrifying slaughter of Armenians in Der or in the banks of the Euphrates in 1915, or the torturing death by massacre of the other peoples during World War II in Majdanek and Büchenwald, must always be condemned without reservations, and its perpetrators must be condemned by all of humankind.

Nagush Harutiunian (1965)¹

 

The president of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic proclaimed these words at the official commemoration of the genocide on April 24, 1965 in Yerevan. Harutiunian did not hesitate to pair “genocide” (he used the Russian loanword genotsid and the Armenian translation zhoghovrtasbanutiun, literally “democide”; tseghasbanutiun was not yet commonly used in Eastern Armenian) and “Medz Yeghern.”

The Instrumentalization of the "Great Catastrophe"

Vartan Matiossian

 

It was a pleasant surprise to find out, a few days ago, that our first article, "The Birth of 'Great Calamity: How Medz Yeghern Was Introduced onto the World Stage" (The Armenian Weekly, October 25, 2012, see also elsewhere in this blog), had appeared in French on November 12 on the website of Collectif VAN (Vigilance Armenienne contre le Negationnisme), a non-partisan alliance against Turkish denial actively working in France since 2004 (www.collectifvan.org). Here is the main paragraph of the well-crafted introduction to Tigran Mheryan's translation, signed by the Collectif VAN:

2500 or 4500 year-old homeland?

Despite the proverbial opposition by the U.S. government and the age-old breaking of electoral promises as a candidate by the sitting President, on March 4, 2010 the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives voted 23-22 to approve H.R. 252 regarding the recognition of the Armenian Genocide. Now it remains to be seen if this resolution will make it to the floor of the House, despite the usual antics by Turkey and the "shameful act" of natural convergence between the interests of the military-industrial complex  and those of American foreign policy, where money seems to have trampled any claims to moral high ground since the times of the Gettysburg Address, if not before.

Of Protocols and Lack of Protocol

The process that ended on October 10, 2009 with the signature of the Armenia-Turkey protocols triggered an avalanche of opinions, both in Armenia and the Diaspora, perhaps unseen since the time of the Gharabagh Movement (1988-1991). First of all, let's be honest and state that nobody has the crystal ball, not even those who are sure of having it. Therefore, whatever may happen from now on is open-ended.