A letter to Pashinyan

Dear Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan:

Having read your remarks as quoted in the Armenian American and diasporan press, I would like to offer an answer to the question you asked: “How is it that in 1939 there was no Armenian Genocide [recognition] agenda, and how is it that in 1950 the Armenian Genocide agenda emerged?” 

The Armenian Genocide as a historic event evolved into a more public presence after World War II because of the evolution of a global culture of human rights. Raphael Lemkin developed the concept of genocide as a crime in international law and coined the term “genocide” around 1943. He used the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe and the Turkish genocide of the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey as foundational events for his thinking. It was the great legal scholar Lemkin who coined the term “Armenian Genocide” at that time. 

After the war, the Nuremberg Trials did a great deal to impress in public consciousness the concept of genocide as an international crime. In the post war decades, the emergence of a human rights culture evolved rapidly. The decolonization movements across the globe were crucial, and in the United States, a human rights culture was accelerated because of the African American Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the second wave of feminism, and a new awareness about Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust. In this new environment, the Armenian Genocide became a more prominent history, and Armenians worldwide responded with their own necessary movements for acknowledgement and justice. 1965 was a crucial year for this. 

Peter Balakian

In the face of the continued full-scale Turkish government propaganda that sought to erase this history, blame the victims and coerce global opinion, Armenian communities were challenged, and the trauma of the event was exacerbated. Genocide scholars have studied Turkish denialism as an extreme and virulent case and have noted the following: the denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide because it seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators and because it sends the message that genocide can be carried out without consequence and demands no accountability.

As the first case of genocide carried out in a modern modality, the Armenian Genocide is taught as an important history in the curricula in the United States and in other nations around the world. Scholars continue to study the impact of Turkish denialism and the necessary Armenian quest for some forms of justice, and they regard this as a significant ethical issue with many ramifications for the cultures and ethnic groups who have been subjected to such violence. 

Mr. Pashinyan, it would be useful for you to acquaint yourself with some of the major scholarship on the Armenian Genocide, including scholarship that deals with the social and psychological impact of denialism on both Armenians and Turks today. It might be more helpful if you asked Armenians, in the Republic and in the Diaspora, what kinds of creative and constructive responses they might formulate in response to the continued violence of the Turkish government’s propaganda campaign of denial. 

I understand that you are trying to find ways to deal with Turkey in this very fraught moment. I can imagine how difficult this is. But situating the Armenian Genocide in a broader human rights context and challenging Armenians to think creatively about this predicament might be a good place to start. As you know well, the voices of the people matter.

Sincerely,
Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian

Peter Balakian is the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, which was a New York Times Best Seller and winner of the Raphael Lemkin Prize. He is the recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He teaches at Colgate University.

10 Comments

  1. We Armenians know and heard, many of us first hand, of the atrocities our ancestors endured. There is no question as to what happened. This happened over a hundred years ago and really only Armenians care and carry this specific scar. There have been other genocides since them and unfortunately more will occur.

    However to dwell upon this horrific event and and to continually rub the nose of the Turks in their shameful history of murder is self destructive. For the sake of preserving whatever is left of our ancestral homeland, and as Christians, let’s just take this off the table. Armenians worldwide need to look forward and strive to establish normalized relationships with Turkey and Azerbaijan. Armenia needs this to survive.

    • this is a clear blackmail from Turkey/Azerbaijan. the next “thing to accept” will be their 1 million refugee replacement in Armenia. are you going to accept that too?

    • Excuse me!!?? Why should we let go of our rights, and not the turks let go the denial policy and admit what they have done. Germans were civil and accepted their mistakes; the turks should do the same asap
      God forbid, someone kills your own Family, are you ready to let that go, for the sake of living in peace, seriously 😒

    • Mr. Zartarian,

      Before offering such a naive and misguided opinion, I urge you to educate yourself on the historical atrocities committed by the Turkish government, its ongoing political, social, and economic destabilization efforts, and its broader geopolitical ambitions—particularly in its unwavering support for Azerbaijan, yet another extension of Turkey’s aggressive Genocidal agenda. Your lack of awareness on these matters is not only regrettable but also undermines the gravity of the situation at hand. I suggest a more informed and critical approach before engaging in such discussions.

  2. You mentioned ethics in your article, I doubt he understands what ethic means, I believe Armenians should investigate who financed and empowered him to become Prime Minister, usually powerful people bring to power incompetent leaders which can be easily maneuvered.

  3. Beautifully written and great question and we should expect a true answer from a president of a country the diaspora has largely supported for so many years.

    • PM Pashinian should learn to shut his mouth and swallow the poison that he is going to spit it out, so that he’s the only one who is poisoned and not the whole of the Armenian nation.
      Armenia should make it a law to check the mental and physical health of all its politicians starting with the current PM.
      Shame on him.

  4. Throughout my 40-year-long engagement with that geographical and historical entity east of Anatolia once called Turkish Armenia I’ve always, in my heart, known that the most dangerous enemies to its existence will eventually be from among Armenians and from the Armenian state, not from Turks and the Turkish state.

    • Have you also been on Turkish government’s payroll for all those 40 years to spew such racist nonsense to blame the victims themselves for their demise? Do you even know what genocidal Ottoman Turkish Empire was all about? For five plus centuries all these Central Asian criminals did was to invade, occupy and subjugate the indigenous inhabitants of these lands under the banner of Islam and Turkish fascism. And when they tried to free themselves from these criminal occupiers they were subjected to mass deportation, mass extermination and genocide. As an analogy, what you wrote here is no different from blaming the Palestinians themselves for their ethnic-cleansing at the hands of the Israelis just because they wanted to live and exist on their own homeland free of occupation.

      P.S. The name of the place is Western Armenia and neither “Turkish Armenia” nor “Anatolia”. The term “Anatolia” is not even Turkish. It has Greek roots and it means territory “east of Greece” which means today’s Western Turkey. The reason this fabricated term “Anatolia” or “East Anatolia” is used to refer to this region is to remove from the map any mention of Western Armenia and to erase from memory the indigenous populations of the land murdered in cold-blood and by premeditated genocide as part of the Islamization and Turkification of these ancient Christian lands after the loss of all occupied territories.

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