For many decades, the horrors inflicted upon the Armenian people were little-known in the outside world. Indeed, the Nazis' genocide against the Jews, the Poles, and others may have been facilitated by the "memory hole" into which the Armenians had fallen. "Who today remembers the extermination of the Armenians?" mused Adolf Hitler in 1939, as he ordered a merciless assault on the civilian population of occupied Poland.
In recent decades, fortunately, the lie has been put to Hitler's rhetorical question. Armenian scholars and activists, joined by numerous sympathizers around the world, have worked to research and publicize the genocide, and to gather the testimony of survivors before they pass from the earth. Gradually, much of the outside world has acknowledged the scale and character of the slaughter. The Europan Parliament in 1987 voted in favour of recognizing the Armenian Genocide, as did the Russian parliament in 1994. Also in 1994, Israel, after decades of state-sponsored suppression of the facts of the genocide (which was felt to distract from the "exceptional" character of the Jewish holocaust), informally recognized that the fate of the Armenians "was not war," but "certainly massacre and genocide, something the world must remember," in the words of Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin.
The major exception to the rule, predictably, is Turkey. In the brief interim (1918-20) between the Ottoman collapse and the ascendancy of the nationalist Ataturk regime, the Turkish government did hold trials for dozens of accused war-criminals, but only fifteen death sentences were passed, and only three insignificant actors actually executed. (The three main organizers of the genocide were subsequently killed -- Enver Pasha while leading an anti-Bolshevik revolt in Turkestan in 1922, and Cemal Pasha and Talat Pasha by Armenian assassination squads, who tracked them down to deliver summary justice.) The Ataturk government effectively cancelled the court-martial process (Ataturk himself claiming that the Armenians killed were "victims of foreign intrigues" and guilty of abusing "the privileges granted them"). (For more on the trials, see Vahakn Dadrian, "The Turkish Military Tribunal's Prosecution of the Authors of the Armenian Genocide", Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 11: 1 [Spring 1997].)
Since the early 1920s, successive Turkish governments have maintained an ostentatious silence on the subject, broken only to issue denials that the genocide ever occurred, and denunciations of those who assert that it did. In 1990, for example, the Turkish ambassador to the U.S. dismissed the holocaust as resulting from "a tragic civil war initiated by Armenian nationalists." The Turkish government has also devoted millions of dollars to a propaganda campaign aimed at western universities and a handful of compliant scholars. (See Amy Magaro Rubin, "Critics Accuse Turkish Government of Manipulating Scholarship", Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 October 1995.) They have had support from NATO and other western countries, which view Turkey as a linchpin of "stability" in the Near East. In the United States, for example, "conforming to Turkey's wishes, all congressional resolutions to recognize the Armenian Genocide have been opposed by the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations, and all such resolutions have thus far been defeated." (Levon Chorbajian, "Introduction," in Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, eds., Studies in Comparative Genocide, p. xxvi.)
As Stanley Cohen of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem puts it:
The nearest successful example [of "collective denial"] in the modern era is the 80 years of official denial by successive Turkish governments of the 1915-17 genocide against the Armenians in which some 1.5 million people lost their lives. This denial has been sustained by deliberate propaganda, lying and coverups, forging documents, suppression of archives, and bribing scholars. The West, especially the United States, has colluded by not referring to the massacres in the United Nations, ignoring memorial ceremonies, and surrendering to Turkish pressure in NATO and other strategic arenas of cooperation.
http://www.gendercide.org/case_armenia.html
Genocide Watch
Genocide Watch has posted Gregory H. Stanton’s descriptions of “The 8 Stages of Genocide”, presented in 1996 to the U.S. State Department:
1. CLASSIFICATION
2. SYMBOLIZATION
3. DEHUMANIZATION
4. ORGANIZATION
5. POLARIZATION
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