There are murals on every wall of the Jrimian Armenian School in Valentín Alsina, Buenos Aires, painted by students who each year leave behind bright colors, poems, silhouettes and the imprints of small palms dipped in paint. Mothers of Plaza de Mayo stand alongside Armenian heroes, the march of deportees into the desert next to verses remembering Elena Kalaidjian. Symbols bridge distant tragedies with the same unwavering message: Memoria, Verdad y Justicia (Memory, Truth and Justice) and Nunca
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Almost everything in this article was news to me, starting with the Armenian School named Jirnian (Khrimian), to the evolution of its educational philosophy “From one 24 to another”, to the realization of that there were 22 victims of Armenian descent during those dictatorial years and that one of them was a former student of the school, and about «Diario Armenia, the largest Armenian newspaper in Spanish founded in 1931». Thank you Matias Roubian for sharing this highly informative article.
“In Argentina, the dictatorship is not legally recognized as genocide because most victims were persecuted for their political beliefs, not ethnicity. Yet, countless human rights groups and historians affirm that the systematic killing and disappearance of 30,000 people, censorship and torture used the same instruments of state terror that nearly destroyed the Armenians six decades earlier.”
Art. 2 of the Genocide Convention and art. 6 of the Rome Statute of the ICC indicate that genocide is committed against a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” (We all know that political groups were excluded from the definition of genocide due to the opposition of various countries, included the Soviet Union, based on a collection of arguments that may or may not have enough merit.) Therefore, the use of the word “genocide” for actions against political opposition, regardless of the similitude of instruments of state terror and the indefensible outcome, is not legally warranted. That’s why the Rome Statute created the figure of “crime against humanity” that includes such cases. The New York Times is currently reporting about the disappearance of 100,000 (one hundred thousand) people during the thirteen years of uprising against Bashar al-Assad, that is more than three times (even four by some counts) the number of Argentineans disappeared in the late 1970s. Some of us remember the repression in Romania under Ceausescu, in Turkey under Evren, in Nicaragua under Somoza, in Uganda under Idi Amin, and many other cases all the way down to the Soviet Union under Stalin. People disappeared and were subject to censorship and torture in the same way. Should those cases be labeled as genocide? Is there any reason for Armenians to willingly offer a wide opening for the usual suspects to carve out arguments, as ridiculous as they may be, to diminish, demean, and deny what happened in 1915 as a simple case of excessive use of force against political opposition?
I guess nothing illustrates better the gradual alienation that communities endure over time, to the point that one school affiliated with the standard bearer of the Armenian liberation movement–the Dashnaktsutyun–puts on equal footing the Armenian Genocide, which completely wiped us out from the entirety of Western Armenia, with horrors we still struggle to speak about, with the brutalities and excesses of a military junta in South America. Yes, the “dirty war” in Argentina was brutal, unfair, and involved crimes against mankind. Still, the triggers of that sad chapter in Argentine history and those of the Armenian Genocide could not be farther apart. I am sure the author did not intend to give fodder to the naysayers–Turkey foremost among them–who say that it was not really a “genocide,” that Armenians were “betraying the Turkish homeland, serving foreign interests,” and that “Muslims died too.” Yet here we have a writer with an Armenian name but with very little knowledge of Armenian history, other than basic facts, who argues exactly the same, except to label both events a genocide without providing any legal or philosophical definitions to support his statements. I could not agree more with the comment signed by an Anonymous reader above. Just open a map and look at Argentina. Check out the demographic facts: it has a reasonably healthy population of +50 million or so. Yes, many struggle because of that South American country’s notoriously mismanaged economy and, more often than not, administrations of dubious integrity. Yet comparing an illegal repression that cost so many innocent lives (30,000 at most, yet official documents speak of 9,000, regardless of which each human life is precious and it’s obscene to degrade the conversation to that point) to the extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire–open the atlas again and see what Western Armenia is called now and check out how many Armenians are left on those lands (Zero? Hundreds? Oh, the forcibily converted ones?) is an affront to the martyrs and to us, the descendants of Armenian Genocide survivors. This is when ideological perversions run amok, sadly a common occurrence in South American politics. It’s even sadder to see it coming from Jrimian High School, which in the 1960s and 1970s ranked among the best Armenian schools in the Diaspora. Now, they don’t even know their own–our own–history, and they shoot themselves in the foot. Probably Argentines and non-Armenians come out thinking: “So, the Armenian Genocide was something like the junta’s repression too: there was a guerrilla fighting the dictatorship and the dictatorship hit back.” Keep it up.