Introduction
In 2008 Istanbul University published a book of the proceedings of an unusual conference that took place in Istanbul in March 2006 containing presentations variously in Turkish and English.
In the present issue of GPN GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW, we are first publishing "Istanbul report," a report of the conference by Israel Charny and then the extraordinary paper given by Yair Auron in which he affirmed assertively the authenticity of the Armenian Genocide before a largely silent Turkish audience in Istanbul.
Yair Auron is a professor at the Open University of Israel where he has founded and directs a very significant program of genocide studies that is devoted to the genocides of all peoples, the only such program in an Israeli college or university at this time. Auron is also an Associate Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, the publishers of GPN. What makes Auron’s paper highly unusual is that he opened the conference heroically with an explicit statement about the Armenian Genocide, and this was after we had seen in the actual conference program that the Turkish text did not use the word genocide that Yair Auron had submitted in his English text. Moreover, amazingly, Auron’s statement was featured prominently and accurately the next day in the Turkish press – we saw these reports with our own eyes.
This was an extraordinary conference in which for several days the large majority of paper delivered fulfilled the Turkish government line that there had been no Armenian Genocide, but even so several invited speakers from overseas represented and presented in different ways the historicity of the Armenian Genocide.
We genocide scholars who clearly affirm the historical truth of the Armenian genocide were overwhelmingly outnumbered, in no small part because a large number of invited scholars from overseas rejected the invitation of the Turkish university, but a few of us -- including the undersigned and Yair Auron --accepted after weighing carefully whether our participation could possibly contribute to Turkish denials of the Armenian Genocide. I personally explored my decision to participate with a good number of my Armenian colleagues, including outstanding leaders of the Armenian community, and came to the hopeful conclusion that participation might advance us in our battles against denials of the Armenian Genocide rather than, heaven forbid, contribute to the deniers’ strength.
To the credit of our Turkish hosts, we were fully protected and given full rights to speak as we intended. Following the conference the host university also put together a printed volume of the proceedings, and here too to their credit they reproduced our statements about the validity of the Armenian Genocide. It should be remembered that in Turkey such statements can land a person in jail in Turkey for violations of Article 301 of the Penal Code that outlaws all statements that are defined as dishonoring the Turkish Republic, and we are all aware and in some cases personally connected to persons who have sat out painful jail sentences under this law.
We were in all 5 scholars who explicitly represented the validity of the Armenian Genocide: Yair Auron of Israel – who as noted opened the conference so heroically; Levon Zekiyan from Venice, who had pioneered a conference including Turkish scholars – but non-deniers—in Venice a year earlier; Hilmar Kaiser from Germany—who has spent a great deal of time researching in the Archives in Istanbul (from which he had been ejected years ago); Ara Srafian from London – who was invited to appear on a lengthy major TV show in the course of the conference; and myself. Intriguingly, the Turkish Armenian publisher, Hrant Dink, was also expected to participate in our team, but he never showed up and we never heard from him. The same Hrant Dink was later murdered in Istanbul and there are many who attribute his murder to the government.
The report that follows is the report that I sent out to colleagues and to the International Association of Genocide Scholars on my return from Istanbul, presented here now with two important modifications.
First of all, based on a steady stream of newly published researches over the last few years, I have enlarged the list of additional victim peoples alongside the Armenians when I make the point that all our peoples should grow towards an ability to recognize and honor ALL victims alongside of our own people, without feeling that such recognition reduces the significance of our fates as victims or even as primary victims who were at the center of the genocidal thrust, as the Armenians were for the Turks and then the Jews were for the Nazis. Second, I have now included remarks that I had included in my earliest report on Istanbul to my closest colleagues but dropped in subsequent public reports out of a concern at the time that we might not be ready to look at the very painful issue of victim peoples themselves also appearing in history at times as perpetrators. Slowly but surely, however, I believe that we need to move towards becoming a totally honest and committed community of genocide scholars who stand without hesitation against all genocidal killing including by our own peoples/otherwise victim peoples.
I also add now that events in the last year reduce the optimistic hopes I expressed in the report. Turkey under Erdogan has continued and even intensified its duplicity and strong arm insistence in denials of the genocides of the Armenians and other non-Turkish peoples.
The report in PDF format is the text of the paper delivered in Istanbul and published in the conference book by Yair Auron. In the next issue of GPN we will also present the text of my paper at the conference on denials of genocides. Please click here to see the PDF of the full presentation by Prof. Yair Auron in Istanbul as published by the university in Istanbul.
The following is the full text of my "Istanbul Report":
Istanbul Report
A remarkable conference took place at Istanbul University in Istanbul on the 15-17 March 2006. As I told CNN (Turkish edition), as well as the conference attendees in the round table that closed the conference, the title of the conference, "New Approaches to Turkish-Armenian Relations," necessarily bespeaks a quest for a new peace and reconciliation between the Turkish and Armenian peoples – such a title could not possibly refer to a renewal of hatred or destruction. The conference was remarkable because in a land where it is still illegal to use the phrase "Armenian Genocide" for fear of criminal prosecution for violating law 301 which deals with inciting or doing injury to the State of Turkey, the conference was true to its promise that those who referred, indirectly or even directly, to the Armenian Genocide were in no way harassed or under legal risk. When I first received my invitation from Istanbul University, I wrote promptly to say, "As you undoubtedly knew when you invited me…I am as I have been for many years very convinced of the historical authenticity of the Armenian Genocide," and indeed the organizers remained true to the response which they sent in which they said that Istanbul University is an academic institution and there are no limitations on expression of views.
My overall sense of the conference is that it is a Turkish government message to the Armenian people, the rest of the free world and especially the European Union which Turkey so desires to join that they are prepared to initiate a corrective cultural process which could, slowly but surely, lead to their acknowledgment of the genocidal killings of the Armenians in WWI.
Yet this does not mean that such a process will take place overnight, nor are there guarantees that the process will go as far and as clearly as most of us in the West would wish. There are now several Turkish scholars, some of whom even live and work in Turkey, although several do not, who have acknowledged fully the facts of the Armenian Genocide but who nonetheless propose that we grant Turkish society a reprieve, at least for some years, as to the use of the word genocide which has become so identified for that society with humiliation, and perhaps also demands for capital restitution which they are far from ready to consider after so many years of an adamant mythology that (a) they did not murder Armenians in any collective fashion; (b) there were killings of Armenians only in response to suppressing Armenian riots against Turkey and joining Russia, Turkey's war foe in the complex panorama of the region in WWI; and (c) besides the only thing that matters is that in the course of fighting against the Turks it was the Armenians who committed acts of genocide against the Turkish population.
It is very hard to come down from a policy of extensive denial propaganda after so many years. But I am impressed from my experience in Turkey now that this is what some influential leaders in the Turkish government and cultural leadership wish to achieve. Not that the corrective process was done elegantly at this conference. The overwhelming majority of papers and statements in my judgment were (a) one-sided rehashes of Turkish denial propaganda; (b) a basic intellectual failure since they did not even mention or refer to or in any way acknowledge any of the voluminous documentation and evidences of the Armenian Genocide that are now part of world culture; and (c) a great number were emotional diatribes rather than "scientific" or properly scholarly contributions.
Nonetheless, this was a conference in Turkey where my dear colleague from Israel, Professor Yair Auron, opened the conference with the first paper in which he stated in a strong resonant voice that there was no question but that the Armenians had suffered genocide at the hands of the Turks; where intrepid Armenian researcher Ara Sarafian who is based in London did the same on another day; where Yair Auron's remarks were featured prominently and amazingly accurately in the English language and Turkish language press the next day -- in Turkey!; and where Sarafian was invited to an extensive television appearance on a very popular show in prime Turkish television time!
It was striking to me that when Yair Auron concluded his sterling confirmation of the Armenian Genocide, I did not see a single participating scholar or diplomat in the ranks of the participants who were sitting up front next to the stage clapping for Auron, not even a token clapping which would acknowledge his right to speak as he did. It was eerie. There was a small ripple of mild applause from a few rows in the back of the hall. And yet, as I have emphasized, Professor Auron did get to say what he said and was quoted accurately and prominently in several Turkish ewspapers. I think we should be grateful for these large small miracles.
I would not be carried away with anger at the shoddy and bigoted presentations that dominated the conference and miss expressing the appreciation and respect that the breakthroughs in this conference and the media events surrounding it represent. It was in this spirit that I spoke in my presentation and my participation in the closing summary session (about which one Armenian colleague-friend said to me that he felt so sorry for me for having to sit on stage for so many hours as the only representative of the history of the Armenian Genocide among those who had been invited to sum up the conference). It seems to me that to wish that a culture that has invested so heavily in the denial of the facts make a total and complete turnabout overnight is a child's wish for a perfect world -- which I too still have in my heart, but also know that it cannot be; and that mature efforts at progress call for much greater patience, diplomacy and wisdom, without abandoning our principles.
The day after the conference was concluded, a BBC reporter, who had interviewed me some time ago in Venice at a conference on Turks and Armenians that was not sponsored by the Turks, asked me on live-air time what had happened to the tough resolute statements I had made about deniers in Venice. She said that now in Istanbul I spoke with much more gentleness and understanding. I explained that I believe there is a potential path forward opening up if we develop it properly.
What I told the closing session of the conference was that I believe that contributions to such conferences should be screened on the basis of a model that includes three principles:
I came away from the conference believing that exchanges directly between Turks and Armenians are valuable insofar as they expose people to one another as people and by dispelling the totalitarian Turkish censorship and criminalization of studies about the Armenian Genocide. But I propose that the next steps of progress might best be created by international commissions or conferences sponsored and led by outstanding cultural academic authorities from other countries, which of course include Turks and Armenians but are under the leadership of scholars from other nationalities, where all presentations are pre-evaluated for their satisfying the model I gave earlier, and where participants would agree in advance to authorize a panel of "scholar-judges" who would preside as experts with the right to remove any statements that are in open violation of established statements of world history, are racist or prejudiced, or are legitimating or inciting of violences. I would begin such a brave and ambitious process on a small scale and see if we participating humans are up to it. A Turkish speaker at the present conference who gave an excellent presentation on the social psychology of collective beliefs called on all of us in the future to strive for a combination of "cooperative politics, fact-based history, and empathy memory rather than traditional collective memory." I couldn't agree more.
What was my personal experience like?
Participation at the Istanbul Conference was for me a difficult "ride" between relief at not being harassed either by Turkish legal officials or by the public, great pleasure at what I have described of the unheard-of progress of our very presence and in our contributions being heard in Turkey, and distinct sadness, discomfort and anger at the shallowness and intellectual as well as ethnic bigotry of so many presentations. I have never been treated to so many different looks going through me as if I were a piece of glass. I found the prevailing discourse so stilted, blocked and rigid with denials that I literally decided not to hand out publicly flyers I had brought for the Encyclopedia of Genocide -- which presents a great deal of information about the Armenian Genocide, or membership forms for our International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) -- which in the past has issued a unanimous resolution confirming the authenticity of the Armenian Genocide (but I did give these materials to selected individuals who were a pleasure to meet).
I met the two kinds of deniers about which I have written so much in the professional literature on denial. The first group of deniers are those whose use of denial is a patent expression of their hatred, prejudice and bigotry. They are fascists who celebrate violence and want more of it. The second are what I have dared to call in the literature in several extensive papers "innocent deniers," and these include people whose conscious intentions and even much of their unconscious intentions make them spokesmen and advocates of peace between peoples. I hated the former, and liked several of the latter – even as I disciplined myself against letting the liking seduce me away from the dangerously wrong position these people take.
Personally, I also have proposals for our side about strengthening the integrity of our positions on genocide even as we fight hard against the deniers. I know that many of my colleagues will reject or at least be uncomfortable with this proposal out of a concern that it might weaken the case for the Armenian Genocide, but I don't think so. Note that this is the same proposal that I advance insistently for my own Jewish people. My proposal is that we give full information about all victims of a genocide without in any way compromising or reducing the basic position that our people were the predominant victims of the era of the genocide in question.
Thus, I believe that the Jews must recognize a considerable number of other victims of the Holocaust who died along with them such as the Romani who shared the concentration camps and gas chambers with them; and Russian POWs of whom it is said one million were killed by Germany, and who at times literally went through the same extermination gas chambers that the Jews did; and mentally and physically defective people; and some number of homosexuals -- by every standard also human beings. It is intriguing but also saddening how resolutely so many Jews have fought against recognition of other victims who perished alongside them, as if the full power of the Jewish protest at the terrible fate of the Jews in the Holocaust would be lessened by recognizing other victims. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, I believe sincerely that Armenians will only gain a new measure of dignity and power by acknowledging and indeed working at documenting at length the murders of other minorities, especially fellow Christians such as the Assyrians and the Greeks, but also non-Christians such as the Yzedis, and even Kurds –who otherwise were involved in killing Armenians but in some areas were also exterminated by the Turks, all the victims being defined as non-Turkish peoples. In doing so, Armenians will be demonstrating the kind of growth to a higher level of integrity that peoples too can make.
My second proposal is that when any of our peoples stumble into our own ugly human sides of us too being responsible for some degree of massacre of others, I believe that our integrity requires us to stand up to the truth. So I think that if Armenian scholars are willing to enter with the Turks into joint examinations of events (as Ara Sarafian agreed in Istanbul), including situations where the Turks claim they were the victims of genocidal massacres, it might open a door to relieving the total sense of humiliation and disgrace that I believe Turks feel at being charged with the worst crimes human beings can commit. I believe that many people in Turkey really want to be far more European and to be valued and honored by Europe. But it has to be totally clear that no examination of a possible massacre is to take away from the clear-cut responsibility of the Ottomans for a coordinated full-blown program of genocide of the Armenian people.
Personally, I have published research and spoken many times about us Jews accepting full responsibility for cases of genocidal massacres we have committed, such as at Kfar Kassem, and at Deir Yassin and at Lod in the War of Independence. I give as an analogy a recent article in the New York Times which surveyed the history of genocide in the Former Yugoslavia and said clearly that "90%" of the genocidal killing was done by the Serbs, but that an additional 10% was executed by Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
What a step forward for civilization for all of us to commit ourselves to telling all of the truth. What an advance for civilization to recognize that the flame of doing harm to other human beings is present in all peoples and groups. We do not give up our resolute claims and proofs of the overwhelming responsibility of the perpetrator for the genocide of our people even when we acknowledge some of our own human failings.
What I want out of it all is a world where there is wholehearted memorial of past losses of all innocent lives and a basic quest and commitment to overcome the genocidal impulse that can be found in all peoples in our human civilization. By being exemplary in our own integrity as victim peoples, we become stronger, not weaker; and we contribute meaningfully to the possible evolution of other peoples as well.
Conclusion
My bottom line judgment, and certainly hope, is that what the Turkish cultural process cannot do all at once on its own, namely to arrive at an acknowledgment of the genocide of the Armenians, it will rise to do in the course of the next 15 years as Turkey moves closer and closer to its deep desire to be part of the European Union. I came away from Turkey impressed that the Turks have a very strong desire to come out of their marginal kind of status of being neither 'full' Europeans nor a part of the fundamentalist Islamic world. I think this is the doorway through which real though not perfect progress can be made, and I recommend that we redefine ourselves as helping Turkey make this step.
- Israel W. Charny, Executive Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, and Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide
In 2008 Istanbul University published a book of the proceedings of an unusual conference that took place in Istanbul in March 2006 containing presentations variously in Turkish and English.
In the present issue of GPN GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW, we are first publishing "Istanbul report," a report of the conference by Israel Charny and then the extraordinary paper given by Yair Auron in which he affirmed assertively the authenticity of the Armenian Genocide before a largely silent Turkish audience in Istanbul.
Yair Auron is a professor at the Open University of Israel where he has founded and directs a very significant program of genocide studies that is devoted to the genocides of all peoples, the only such program in an Israeli college or university at this time. Auron is also an Associate Director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, the publishers of GPN. What makes Auron’s paper highly unusual is that he opened the conference heroically with an explicit statement about the Armenian Genocide, and this was after we had seen in the actual conference program that the Turkish text did not use the word genocide that Yair Auron had submitted in his English text. Moreover, amazingly, Auron’s statement was featured prominently and accurately the next day in the Turkish press – we saw these reports with our own eyes.
This was an extraordinary conference in which for several days the large majority of paper delivered fulfilled the Turkish government line that there had been no Armenian Genocide, but even so several invited speakers from overseas represented and presented in different ways the historicity of the Armenian Genocide.
We genocide scholars who clearly affirm the historical truth of the Armenian genocide were overwhelmingly outnumbered, in no small part because a large number of invited scholars from overseas rejected the invitation of the Turkish university, but a few of us -- including the undersigned and Yair Auron --accepted after weighing carefully whether our participation could possibly contribute to Turkish denials of the Armenian Genocide. I personally explored my decision to participate with a good number of my Armenian colleagues, including outstanding leaders of the Armenian community, and came to the hopeful conclusion that participation might advance us in our battles against denials of the Armenian Genocide rather than, heaven forbid, contribute to the deniers’ strength.
To the credit of our Turkish hosts, we were fully protected and given full rights to speak as we intended. Following the conference the host university also put together a printed volume of the proceedings, and here too to their credit they reproduced our statements about the validity of the Armenian Genocide. It should be remembered that in Turkey such statements can land a person in jail in Turkey for violations of Article 301 of the Penal Code that outlaws all statements that are defined as dishonoring the Turkish Republic, and we are all aware and in some cases personally connected to persons who have sat out painful jail sentences under this law.
We were in all 5 scholars who explicitly represented the validity of the Armenian Genocide: Yair Auron of Israel – who as noted opened the conference so heroically; Levon Zekiyan from Venice, who had pioneered a conference including Turkish scholars – but non-deniers—in Venice a year earlier; Hilmar Kaiser from Germany—who has spent a great deal of time researching in the Archives in Istanbul (from which he had been ejected years ago); Ara Srafian from London – who was invited to appear on a lengthy major TV show in the course of the conference; and myself. Intriguingly, the Turkish Armenian publisher, Hrant Dink, was also expected to participate in our team, but he never showed up and we never heard from him. The same Hrant Dink was later murdered in Istanbul and there are many who attribute his murder to the government.
The report that follows is the report that I sent out to colleagues and to the International Association of Genocide Scholars on my return from Istanbul, presented here now with two important modifications.
First of all, based on a steady stream of newly published researches over the last few years, I have enlarged the list of additional victim peoples alongside the Armenians when I make the point that all our peoples should grow towards an ability to recognize and honor ALL victims alongside of our own people, without feeling that such recognition reduces the significance of our fates as victims or even as primary victims who were at the center of the genocidal thrust, as the Armenians were for the Turks and then the Jews were for the Nazis. Second, I have now included remarks that I had included in my earliest report on Istanbul to my closest colleagues but dropped in subsequent public reports out of a concern at the time that we might not be ready to look at the very painful issue of victim peoples themselves also appearing in history at times as perpetrators. Slowly but surely, however, I believe that we need to move towards becoming a totally honest and committed community of genocide scholars who stand without hesitation against all genocidal killing including by our own peoples/otherwise victim peoples.
I also add now that events in the last year reduce the optimistic hopes I expressed in the report. Turkey under Erdogan has continued and even intensified its duplicity and strong arm insistence in denials of the genocides of the Armenians and other non-Turkish peoples.
The report in PDF format is the text of the paper delivered in Istanbul and published in the conference book by Yair Auron. In the next issue of GPN we will also present the text of my paper at the conference on denials of genocides. Please click here to see the PDF of the full presentation by Prof. Yair Auron in Istanbul as published by the university in Istanbul.
The following is the full text of my "Istanbul Report":
A remarkable conference took place at Istanbul University in Istanbul on the 15-17 March 2006. As I told CNN (Turkish edition), as well as the conference attendees in the round table that closed the conference, the title of the conference, "New Approaches to Turkish-Armenian Relations," necessarily bespeaks a quest for a new peace and reconciliation between the Turkish and Armenian peoples – such a title could not possibly refer to a renewal of hatred or destruction. The conference was remarkable because in a land where it is still illegal to use the phrase "Armenian Genocide" for fear of criminal prosecution for violating law 301 which deals with inciting or doing injury to the State of Turkey, the conference was true to its promise that those who referred, indirectly or even directly, to the Armenian Genocide were in no way harassed or under legal risk. When I first received my invitation from Istanbul University, I wrote promptly to say, "As you undoubtedly knew when you invited me…I am as I have been for many years very convinced of the historical authenticity of the Armenian Genocide," and indeed the organizers remained true to the response which they sent in which they said that Istanbul University is an academic institution and there are no limitations on expression of views.My overall sense of the conference is that it is a Turkish government message to the Armenian people, the rest of the free world and especially the European Union which Turkey so desires to join that they are prepared to initiate a corrective cultural process which could, slowly but surely, lead to their acknowledgment of the genocidal killings of the Armenians in WWI.
Yet this does not mean that such a process will take place overnight, nor are there guarantees that the process will go as far and as clearly as most of us in the West would wish. There are now several Turkish scholars, some of whom even live and work in Turkey, although several do not, who have acknowledged fully the facts of the Armenian Genocide but who nonetheless propose that we grant Turkish society a reprieve, at least for some years, as to the use of the word genocide which has become so identified for that society with humiliation, and perhaps also demands for capital restitution which they are far from ready to consider after so many years of an adamant mythology that (a) they did not murder Armenians in any collective fashion; (b) there were killings of Armenians only in response to suppressing Armenian riots against Turkey and joining Russia, Turkey's war foe in the complex panorama of the region in WWI; and (c) besides the only thing that matters is that in the course of fighting against the Turks it was the Armenians who committed acts of genocide against the Turkish population.
It is very hard to come down from a policy of extensive denial propaganda after so many years. But I am impressed from my experience in Turkey now that this is what some influential leaders in the Turkish government and cultural leadership wish to achieve. Not that the corrective process was done elegantly at this conference. The overwhelming majority of papers and statements in my judgment were (a) one-sided rehashes of Turkish denial propaganda; (b) a basic intellectual failure since they did not even mention or refer to or in any way acknowledge any of the voluminous documentation and evidences of the Armenian Genocide that are now part of world culture; and (c) a great number were emotional diatribes rather than "scientific" or properly scholarly contributions.
Nonetheless, this was a conference in Turkey where my dear colleague from Israel, Professor Yair Auron, opened the conference with the first paper in which he stated in a strong resonant voice that there was no question but that the Armenians had suffered genocide at the hands of the Turks; where intrepid Armenian researcher Ara Sarafian who is based in London did the same on another day; where Yair Auron's remarks were featured prominently and amazingly accurately in the English language and Turkish language press the next day -- in Turkey!; and where Sarafian was invited to an extensive television appearance on a very popular show in prime Turkish television time!
It was striking to me that when Yair Auron concluded his sterling confirmation of the Armenian Genocide, I did not see a single participating scholar or diplomat in the ranks of the participants who were sitting up front next to the stage clapping for Auron, not even a token clapping which would acknowledge his right to speak as he did. It was eerie. There was a small ripple of mild applause from a few rows in the back of the hall. And yet, as I have emphasized, Professor Auron did get to say what he said and was quoted accurately and prominently in several Turkish ewspapers. I think we should be grateful for these large small miracles.
I would not be carried away with anger at the shoddy and bigoted presentations that dominated the conference and miss expressing the appreciation and respect that the breakthroughs in this conference and the media events surrounding it represent. It was in this spirit that I spoke in my presentation and my participation in the closing summary session (about which one Armenian colleague-friend said to me that he felt so sorry for me for having to sit on stage for so many hours as the only representative of the history of the Armenian Genocide among those who had been invited to sum up the conference). It seems to me that to wish that a culture that has invested so heavily in the denial of the facts make a total and complete turnabout overnight is a child's wish for a perfect world -- which I too still have in my heart, but also know that it cannot be; and that mature efforts at progress call for much greater patience, diplomacy and wisdom, without abandoning our principles.
The day after the conference was concluded, a BBC reporter, who had interviewed me some time ago in Venice at a conference on Turks and Armenians that was not sponsored by the Turks, asked me on live-air time what had happened to the tough resolute statements I had made about deniers in Venice. She said that now in Istanbul I spoke with much more gentleness and understanding. I explained that I believe there is a potential path forward opening up if we develop it properly.
What I told the closing session of the conference was that I believe that contributions to such conferences should be screened on the basis of a model that includes three principles:
(1) whatever the position taken by a presenter, there should be respectful acknowledgment of other differing positions by scholars and interpreters of the historical event;I said, quietly, to the audience that the majority of presentations at the conference did not satisfy the above combined criteria. But I also said to them that I celebrated the fact that even many papers which expressed polarized points of view that were unacceptable to me made a strong point that I believe should be regarded as largely sincere that the goal of both nations today has to be peace between Turks and Armenians. "Peace in the world. No more hatreds," said a speaker emphatically who otherwise justified the "measures" taken by the Turkish government against the Armenians as a military necessity. "The past should not darken our present and future. We need to create peace between the Armenian and Turkish peoples," said a former Turkish ambassador to the United States who is well known to many of us as having pushed for suppression of academic works on the Armenian Genocide and whose paper at the present conference continued the same kind of folly on how a classical British report of the Armenian Genocide, no less than by Lord Bryce and historian Arnold Toynbee, was a forgery.
(2) there should be a demonstrated openness to information that is critical of the errors of one's own national, ethnic or religious group (is there any nation or religion that has not failed to be decent or human at various times?);
(3) the scholarship needs to be rooted in a clear-cut commitment to nonviolence and peace.
I came away from the conference believing that exchanges directly between Turks and Armenians are valuable insofar as they expose people to one another as people and by dispelling the totalitarian Turkish censorship and criminalization of studies about the Armenian Genocide. But I propose that the next steps of progress might best be created by international commissions or conferences sponsored and led by outstanding cultural academic authorities from other countries, which of course include Turks and Armenians but are under the leadership of scholars from other nationalities, where all presentations are pre-evaluated for their satisfying the model I gave earlier, and where participants would agree in advance to authorize a panel of "scholar-judges" who would preside as experts with the right to remove any statements that are in open violation of established statements of world history, are racist or prejudiced, or are legitimating or inciting of violences. I would begin such a brave and ambitious process on a small scale and see if we participating humans are up to it. A Turkish speaker at the present conference who gave an excellent presentation on the social psychology of collective beliefs called on all of us in the future to strive for a combination of "cooperative politics, fact-based history, and empathy memory rather than traditional collective memory." I couldn't agree more.
What was my personal experience like?
Participation at the Istanbul Conference was for me a difficult "ride" between relief at not being harassed either by Turkish legal officials or by the public, great pleasure at what I have described of the unheard-of progress of our very presence and in our contributions being heard in Turkey, and distinct sadness, discomfort and anger at the shallowness and intellectual as well as ethnic bigotry of so many presentations. I have never been treated to so many different looks going through me as if I were a piece of glass. I found the prevailing discourse so stilted, blocked and rigid with denials that I literally decided not to hand out publicly flyers I had brought for the Encyclopedia of Genocide -- which presents a great deal of information about the Armenian Genocide, or membership forms for our International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) -- which in the past has issued a unanimous resolution confirming the authenticity of the Armenian Genocide (but I did give these materials to selected individuals who were a pleasure to meet).
I met the two kinds of deniers about which I have written so much in the professional literature on denial. The first group of deniers are those whose use of denial is a patent expression of their hatred, prejudice and bigotry. They are fascists who celebrate violence and want more of it. The second are what I have dared to call in the literature in several extensive papers "innocent deniers," and these include people whose conscious intentions and even much of their unconscious intentions make them spokesmen and advocates of peace between peoples. I hated the former, and liked several of the latter – even as I disciplined myself against letting the liking seduce me away from the dangerously wrong position these people take.
Personally, I also have proposals for our side about strengthening the integrity of our positions on genocide even as we fight hard against the deniers. I know that many of my colleagues will reject or at least be uncomfortable with this proposal out of a concern that it might weaken the case for the Armenian Genocide, but I don't think so. Note that this is the same proposal that I advance insistently for my own Jewish people. My proposal is that we give full information about all victims of a genocide without in any way compromising or reducing the basic position that our people were the predominant victims of the era of the genocide in question.
Thus, I believe that the Jews must recognize a considerable number of other victims of the Holocaust who died along with them such as the Romani who shared the concentration camps and gas chambers with them; and Russian POWs of whom it is said one million were killed by Germany, and who at times literally went through the same extermination gas chambers that the Jews did; and mentally and physically defective people; and some number of homosexuals -- by every standard also human beings. It is intriguing but also saddening how resolutely so many Jews have fought against recognition of other victims who perished alongside them, as if the full power of the Jewish protest at the terrible fate of the Jews in the Holocaust would be lessened by recognizing other victims. In the case of the Armenian Genocide, I believe sincerely that Armenians will only gain a new measure of dignity and power by acknowledging and indeed working at documenting at length the murders of other minorities, especially fellow Christians such as the Assyrians and the Greeks, but also non-Christians such as the Yzedis, and even Kurds –who otherwise were involved in killing Armenians but in some areas were also exterminated by the Turks, all the victims being defined as non-Turkish peoples. In doing so, Armenians will be demonstrating the kind of growth to a higher level of integrity that peoples too can make.
My second proposal is that when any of our peoples stumble into our own ugly human sides of us too being responsible for some degree of massacre of others, I believe that our integrity requires us to stand up to the truth. So I think that if Armenian scholars are willing to enter with the Turks into joint examinations of events (as Ara Sarafian agreed in Istanbul), including situations where the Turks claim they were the victims of genocidal massacres, it might open a door to relieving the total sense of humiliation and disgrace that I believe Turks feel at being charged with the worst crimes human beings can commit. I believe that many people in Turkey really want to be far more European and to be valued and honored by Europe. But it has to be totally clear that no examination of a possible massacre is to take away from the clear-cut responsibility of the Ottomans for a coordinated full-blown program of genocide of the Armenian people.
Personally, I have published research and spoken many times about us Jews accepting full responsibility for cases of genocidal massacres we have committed, such as at Kfar Kassem, and at Deir Yassin and at Lod in the War of Independence. I give as an analogy a recent article in the New York Times which surveyed the history of genocide in the Former Yugoslavia and said clearly that "90%" of the genocidal killing was done by the Serbs, but that an additional 10% was executed by Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
What a step forward for civilization for all of us to commit ourselves to telling all of the truth. What an advance for civilization to recognize that the flame of doing harm to other human beings is present in all peoples and groups. We do not give up our resolute claims and proofs of the overwhelming responsibility of the perpetrator for the genocide of our people even when we acknowledge some of our own human failings.
What I want out of it all is a world where there is wholehearted memorial of past losses of all innocent lives and a basic quest and commitment to overcome the genocidal impulse that can be found in all peoples in our human civilization. By being exemplary in our own integrity as victim peoples, we become stronger, not weaker; and we contribute meaningfully to the possible evolution of other peoples as well.
Conclusion
My bottom line judgment, and certainly hope, is that what the Turkish cultural process cannot do all at once on its own, namely to arrive at an acknowledgment of the genocide of the Armenians, it will rise to do in the course of the next 15 years as Turkey moves closer and closer to its deep desire to be part of the European Union. I came away from Turkey impressed that the Turks have a very strong desire to come out of their marginal kind of status of being neither 'full' Europeans nor a part of the fundamentalist Islamic world. I think this is the doorway through which real though not perfect progress can be made, and I recommend that we redefine ourselves as helping Turkey make this step.
- Israel W. Charny, Executive Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, and Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Genocide
