By Henry Theriault, Ph.D.Professor and Chair of Philosophy Worcester State University
USA
A contemporary discussion of the Armenian Genocide in a Turkish context is well-served by certain prefatory remarks. First, the recent movement in Turkey to engage thoughtfully the legacy of the Armenian Genocide can be seen as an attempt to keep the heretofore unfulfilled promise of 1908. In 1908 some members of the Young Turk movement, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, and other Turks, Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Greeks, and Assyrians embraced a new vision for the Ottoman Empire.
For a short time, they began developing a multinational liberal democracy and civil rights for all members regardless of religion or ethnicity. At that moment, there was the possibility that the Ottoman Empire would become a beacon of change in the world, passing such societies as the United States with its segregrationist oppression of African Americans. This dream, unfortunately, collapsed into authoritarianism and genocide, a tragedy first and foremost for Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks,[2]but also eventually for Kurds, Turks, and all others in the Ottoman Empire. After nearly a century of ultra-nationalist exclusivism, oppression of minorities, and militarism, those in Turkey pushing for change have rekindled the possibility of 1908. We are at a special point in history. Even if the direct damage of genocide can never be undone, its long-term effects can at least be mitigated by active engagement, and the perpetrator society can rework itself by rediscovering and reopening positive historical trajectories that would not have led to genocide.
Second, one of the unfortunate side-effects of the culture of denial in Turkey is that even progressive scholars tend to look at the Armenian issue in isolation rather than in its broader historical context. This is, of course, laudable, as they refuse to engage in the denialist tactic of refocusing attention away from their own history to that of other societies to undermine attention to the Armenian Genocide. The unfortunate truth about human history, however, is that genocide, mass rape, slavery, apartheid, colonial domination, and aggressive war have been so prevalent that one could tell our whole history through the sequence of these horrors. Genocide has been a constant in human history, from the destruction of Melos by the Athenian democracy proclaimed as the font of Western culture to Sudan today. The past 520 years have seen a level of bloodshed and societal destruction that belies trite Western claims of modern social, political, cultural, and ethical progress. For instance, through the genocidal acts of Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and most if not all “post-colonial” states in the Western Hemisphere, led by the United States, the pre-Columbian population of indigenous Americans went from approximately 100 million, with advanced and stable societies, to less than 10 million today, with many in abject poverty and facing great human rights abuse and even genocide still. The indigenous population of the continental United States was reduced from 10 million prior to European conquest to less than 250,000 by 1900, a destruction rate of approximately 97 percent.[3]
We can add to the genocide and related mass killing roll-call the Europe-wide Holocaust driven by the Nazis of Germany but also Germany’s 1904-07 genocide of the Herero in Southwest Africa, Britain and Australia’s genocides of the Tasmanians and the Aboriginal people, Japan’s Nanjing Massacre, the mass killing in Britain’s colonial exploits in Africa and South Asia, the Great Famine in Ireland, France in Algeria, Stalin’s Ukraine Famine and other mass killings, Communist China’s destruction of millions of political enemies, Indonesia’s 1965 genocide of 500,000 opposition political activists, the Belgians in the Congo, the Russians in Chechnya, and the genocides in Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Guatemala, Bosnia, and Rwanda, to name just some from the past two centuries alone.[4] University of Hawai’i political scientist R. J. Rummel estimates that from 1900 to 1987 governments murdered “almost 170 million [innocent, non-combatant] men, women, and children.” They “were shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners.” “Depending on whether one uses high or more conservative estimates, the [death count from this period] could conceivably be nearly 360 million people.”[5]
Recognizing the Armenian Genocide as part of this broader problem of genocide and other mass violence is crucial to understanding how it can be properly and productively confronted in Turkey today. Genocide is a crime against humanity and each individual genocide has its role in an overall destruction of humanity. With this in mind, while part of what motivates this paper are family experiences of grandparents who led the Kaiseri area after pre-Genocide violence and during the Genocide, an equal share is driven by the firm commitment of a U. S. citizen to recognize and make amends for the great crimes of that country and society, the genocide of Native Americans; slavery and apartheid against people from Africa and their progeny; imperialist conquest of large, rich parts of Mexico; direct and indirect actions and roles in genocides, massacres, coups, slavish exploitation, and other mass human rights violations in the states and societies of Central and South America; decisive support for the Shah of Iran against the democratically-elected leadership in the 1950s; immoral imperialist aggression against Vietnam that entailed the deaths of 2 million people, countless rapes of girls and women by U. S. soldiers, and the purposeful introduction of toxins into the ecosystem that still causes suffering today; human rights violations against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan; and other such acts.
It is in this that those engaging the Armenian Genocide and all these other cases have our solidarity, as citizens of countries who deny the genocides, wars of aggression, colonial conquests, and/or other human rights violations in our histories while our governments and societies refuse to confront them in honest and morally responsible ways. We stand in solidarity with those in Turkey, the United States, Russia, Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan, France, Britain, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Japan, China, Serbia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and unfortunately many other societies around the world who have committed themselves to an honest, unflinching, responsible, and just engagement with their society’s past and present toward a better, truer, righteous future.
The road toward that future is a challenging one. What is that road for Turkey?
Much has been made of the recent Armenia-Turkey protocols for normalizing relations between the two countries. Is this the road toward a morally responsible resolution of the Armenian Genocide issue?
There are two points in the protocols with particularly important implications for the Armenian Genocide issue. First, the agreement commits both countries to a joint “historical commission” to determine what happened in 1915. Those who have studied the decades-long global denial campaign by the Turkish government recognize this for what it is, a rear-guard action attempting to undo the failure of the denial campaign in the past decade. The Armenian Genocide is no longer a legitimately contested issue, as the overwhelming historical evidence has finally been taken seriously in academic, political, and even corporate circles around the world. The Turkish government is pretending that the past 30 years of developing clarity on the Armenian Genocide did not happen in order to justify ignoring the vast amount of evidence available. It hopes to reinsert uncertainty into a process that has already been settled, in order to forestall confronting historical reality.
Second, the protocols include recognition of the current border between Armenia and Turkey. The Turkish government’s attempt to prevent land reparations for the Armenian Genocide is part of a broader refusal to countenance reparations at all. This is the major obstacle to resolution of the Armenian Genocide issue and truly positive Armenian-Turkish relations. To understand why, it is necessary to examine closely at the nature of Turkish-Armenian relations in their historical context.
Recent diplomatic initiatives to improve the Armenian-Turkish relationship approach it as a tension generated by rival nationalisms with attitudes of anger, prejudice, and distrust on both sides resulting from a “difficult history” that remains a source of disagreement. Resolution is pursued through negotiative dialogue with the goal of reaching agreement or accord, that is, statements from both parties stipulating that attitudes have changed and there is no longer a tension. Even if on both sides such statements will reflect a change in attitudes and willingness to normalize relations and include acknowledgment of the Armenian Genocide, no merely rhetorical shift such as this can address the legacy of the Armenian Genocide, a material event with concrete and demonstrable political, economic, social, cultural, familial, and military impacts that remain strong today and are fundamental to the current relationship between the Armenian and Turkish republics and Armenians and Turks inside and outside of these states.
The kind of purely discursive approach that has been advocated by some within the Turkish, Armenian, and other communities – and has been pushed by the U.S. government in particular – is based on and fosters a complete misunderstanding of the actual nature of the Turkish-Armenian relationship. This approach misconstrues that relationship as an ongoing encounter between interlocutors who negotiate freely with each other. It assumes that they function as equal participants in a shared dynamic, each able to make free decisions in the process, mutually affecting and affected by the other to an equal degree. But the relationship between Turkey and Armenia and Turks and Armenians is an asymmetrical domination relation.[6] The Armenian Genocide was not an aberration in the history of their relationship, fixed and bounded in history and thus separable from the current situation. It was the point at which the Committee of Union and Progress maximized the asymmetry. That maximized domination has persisted since the end of the direct killing of the Genocide because nothing has been done to mitigate that domination, that is, the consequences of the Genocide.
Perceptions of the Armenian-Turkish relationship are skewed and inaccurate because the status and power imbalance is ignored. This is possible because the Armenian Genocide and its impacts are excluded from a meaningful structuring role in the recent negotiative approach: in no way is the Genocide-exacerbated status and power differential addressed in a manner that would support a truly mutual interaction between Turkey and Armenia and Turks and Armenians. This is clear in the way that the range of Armenian nationalisms that have their origins in the pre-Genocide struggle to protect Armenians from violence and oppression[7]is equated with the aggressive, racist, genocidal ultra-nationalism that drove the Genocide and that persists in its current denial and the anti-Armenian attitudes that continue to be present in Turkish politics and society. Quite different from extreme versions of Turkish nationalism,[8] the main Armenian nationalisms,[9]however imperfect, realistically respond to the continuing post-Genocide oppression and danger of Turkish anti-Armenianism and promote not the harm of other groups or superiority of Armenians to others, but rather the simple fundamental right of Armenians to exist as free, equal, and self-determining with basic security of life. If both are kinds of nationalism, they are fundamentally different kinds. Why should Armenian political efforts be condemned and even vilified because of an inaccurate association with the genocidal sins of Turkish, German, and other extremist nationalisms?
The Armenian-Turkish relationship actually began centuries ago with the Turkish military conquest of Armenians. That conquest was then frozen into the hierarchy of the millet system, the structure of the Ottoman state. The millet system made permanent the initial imperial conquest, such that it reasserted that conquest as the core of the Armenian-Turkish relationship. The Genocide did not change this relationship but, rather, reinvigorated the conquest by pushing it from a state of static oppression to full-scale destruction, that is, an attempt to complete the conquest in the most brutal manner possible.
Even those admitting the facts of the Genocide itself frequently see the end of the Genocide as the breaking of this destruction relation. But this is incorrect. The Genocide ended because the perpetrators’ goals were largely met – an end to the substantial presence of Armenians and their political, social, and cultural impact on what was perceived through nationalist extremism as Turkish territory and expropriation of almost all of the land and other resources of the victims.
The post-Genocide relation has two salient features. First, to the extent that Armenians still exist and pose a conceptual and political problem for a Turkish state based on an exclusivist Turkish nationalism, by resisting subjugation, that is, by insisting on their basic equality and rights, including the right to bear witness to their history, they are met with an aggressive denial campaign that is the continuation of the Genocide by other means. Second, in so far as the relationship has been one of disengagement by Turkey, this disengagement actually supports the Genocide by freezing the gains made through it. Even if Turkey ends its denial and other political acts against Armenians, this will merely prevent further harm from being done. It will not mitigate the already accomplished damage done through the 1915 Genocide nor the status and power asymmetry based on it.
The problem with the negotiative approach to Armenian-Turkish governmental dialogue can now come into focus. To succeed, negotiative dialogue depends on the equality of the participants. In negotiations between significantly unequal parties, as Armenians and Turks are in terms of not just of economic resources, military strength, territorial size, political support, geopolitical position, identity security, psychological comfort, and more, but also in terms of just treatment and the impact of history, the result is not a decrease in the level of domination and inequality, but quite the contrary. In the case of a status and power asymmetry, without any break on or balancing of the dominant power, the negotiation process almost inevitably functions to increase the power and advantage of the dominant party. This is especially true where the dominant party is unrepentant about its past use of mass violence and aggression in dealings with the weaker. U.S. President Obama’s apparently progressive choice to leave Armenians and Turks free from outside influence to work out their problems – a bitter pill for Armenians to swallow after so many years of U.S. interference on behalf of Turkey and crucial U.S. role in increasing Turkish power – leaves the weaker at the mercy of the stronger.
To say that the outcome of the present Armenian-Turkish mediation effort will place Armenians in a markedly worse position compared to maintaining the status quo by not engaging in negotiation from a position of dramatic disadvantage and relative weakness is not to say that Armenians would protest the negative outcome of the negotiation. Pressured by the international community, Armenian leadership that is incapable and of dubious moral character, and Turkish power and diplomatic prowess into a no-win situation, Armenians might well feel compelled to give their approval to Turkey’s consolidation of the benefits from the Armenian Genocide, in terms of land, wealth, political status, and more, which could well represent the culmination and final victory of the 1915 Genocide.
To describe fully the disadvantage of Armenians today relative to the Turkish state and society, it is crucial to consider the specific losses suffered by Armenians through the Genocide and the corresponding Turkish benefits. Irreversible harms include the Armenians killed as well as Armenians coerced by the situation into committing suicide to avoid rape or other forms of hyper-violence[10]; Armenian fetuses prevented from birth through direct violence or the killing of women carrying them; the vast number of potential Armenians who would have been born had those who would have been their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents not been murdered or otherwise physically or psychologically limited in child-bearing ability; victims’ physical suffering from rape and other tortures, starvation, thirst, disease, and so on; the pain and suffering of psychological trauma for those who died and those who lived at the violence, profound degradation, and torment they experienced and that they witnessed loved ones, community members, and total strangers experiencing; losses of family and community members, including children; and losses of social and family networks, personal security, and religious and cultural identity. Material damages include loss of land, buildings, businesses, products, crops and animals, money, valuables, household goods, clothes, and so on – virtually every public and private possession of Armenians.[11] Structural losses include social, political, religious, and cultural formations and institutions as well as economic networks and systems. A further loss is all that would have been built with the labor of those who were killed, enslaved, disabled, and/or never born. On top of all these material damages are the passive increases in the values of the stolen land, jewelry, etc., and the active losses of all that would have been produced with the expropriated land and other resources and through the functioning of businesses, political structures, and so on. Finally, there is the on-going economic, political, social, cultural, and religious harm done to the residual Armenian community in Turkey through oppressive policies and practices and the anti-Armenian attitudes of the Turkish state and society.
Resulting from these losses have been greatly reduced Armenian political status, stability, and economic presence. As Richard Hovannisian once commented, even if the Genocide had occurred but the first Armenian Republic had not been subjected to conquest, renewed killings, and long-term subjugation by Kemalist forces, there might exist today a secure, economically vibrant regional power with a population of on the order of 20 million people.
These losses for Armenians were and are mirrored by Turkish gains and benefits, in terms of territory, political consolidation and status, military power, global and regional relevance, security and prominence of national existence and identity, cultural cohesion and internal dominance, and more. One can argue in fact that contemporary Turkey is built more than anything else on the material, political, military, and other gains made through the Armenian Genocide and continues to benefit from the dramatically reduced size, status, and power of the neighboring Armenian state.
Regardless of their effect on the Armenian-Turkish relationship, reparations for the harms to Armenians are clearly morally justified. While of course nothing can ever make up for the killings, rapes, and other tortures or the cultural, social, and other such losses, certainly something can be done, something significant.
A specific set of reparations for the Armenian Genocide might include the following. First is return of or compensation for expropriated land and other wealth, when that wealth has been preserved. It should also compensate for (1) all destroyed property and wealth that is otherwise no longer accessible, (2) the interest that can be calculated on the original material losses, (3) slave labor, (4) the pain and suffering of those who died and all who survived, (5) the loss of 1.5 million people in general and as specific family and community members, and (6) the loss of cultural, religious, and educational institutions and opportunities. Second, Turkey must take active steps to support the redevelopment in the Armenian Republic as well as Genocide-produced Diaspora of Armenian social, political, economic, etc., structures, institutions, and capacities toward fuller reconstruction of the victim group than has been possible under the pressure of Turkish domination and given uncompensated Armenian losses. This should include economic support, in the forms of investment and trade. Third, the Turkish government must fully admit all aspects of the Genocide, ensure meaningful knowledge of and engagement with that history by the Turkish population, and promote broad global awareness and understanding of the Armenian Genocide. Fourth, the Turkish state and society must go through a rehabilitative process – which will be aided by the giving of material reparations to Armenians – finally to extirpate all elements of genocidal ideology, institutional practices, traditions, and forms, and to transform prejudicial Turkish attitudes toward Armenians, including elements of the dominant Turkish national identity built on a sense of entitled imperial superiority to Armenians and other groups. This process should address domination over and violence against women universally in connection to the rape and sexual enslavement central to the Armenian Genocide, which must be seen as having targeted Armenian women as women as well as Armenians.
But reparations, beyond being justified in themselves, are also crucial for meaningfully improved Armenian-Turkish relations. While there are many particular ethical arguments supporting reparations for the Armenian Genocide and answering standard objections, the remainder of this paper will focus on the ways in which reparations support a positive transformation of the Turkish-Armenian relationship.
Some argue that democratization of Turkey is the key to transformation of the Armenian-Turkish relationship. While democratization could be helpful in creating the possibility of meaningful engagement with the Armenian Genocide, in itself, however, it is not sufficient to produce this transformation. Democracy is, indeed, fully consistent with the violation of the rights of minorities or outside groups and societies. As just one example, for more than seven decades the democratic United States maintained a system of slavery of people of African descent and then a segregationist system for a century after the end of slavery. Discrimination against minorities is still prevalent in the United States, even after more than two centuries of supposed progress. It is important to stress that the laws justifying enslavement of African-Americans and segregation were enacted through democratic processes. Democratic principles apply only to those considered full citizens of a democracy, not to those denied full human status within and outside a democracy’s borders. Democratic institutions must be grounded on a strong ethical commitment to human and civil rights shared by the population and government to exclude the possibility of oppression of minority groups and/or outsiders. If the majority of a population subscribe to prejudicial views, then those will tend to determine legal, political, economic, and social arrangements within the society, despite any constitutional safeguards that would appear to militate against such domination. As the foregoing analysis of the Armenian-Turkish power dynamic implies, a genuine change in the attitudes of the Turkish government or society toward Armenians requires material change in that dynamic, which depends on a reparative engagement with the Armenian Genocide. Only in that way can a broad ethical commitment to human rights, including the rights of Armenians, be coupled to democracy. Engagement of the Armenian Genocide as a focus and because it is morally right is necessary to any process of democratization in Turkey. This means that engagement itself is not sufficient, as it is too easy to treat the Armenian issue instrumentally, that is, to put engagement with it into service of a specifically Turkish agenda that need not ultimately address Armenians.
One typical objection to reparations is that Turkish people today did not perpetrate the Genocide and so it is unfair to require them to give up land they might have purchased long after the Genocide with hard-earned money and, directly or indirectly, to pay compensation for other damages. There are two points of response that should be considered. First, today’s Turkey and many Turks derive great material benefit from the Genocide, including continuing to profit from land, businesses, and other property seized through the Genocide. These are things they would not otherwise have if not for the Genocide and which thus cannot be said to be rightfully theirs even today.[12] Second, even if this first point is not accepted or in cases in which, for instance, a person has not derived demonstrable benefit from the Genocide, it is crucial to analyze the unfairness of the situation further. If one holds that payment of reparations will be unfair for some contemporary Turks, the cause of that unfairness is not Armenians, but the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide who created the situation that exists today. It is their own ancestors who have forced contemporary Turks into this situation. What is more, Armenians have borne and continue to bear an inestimably greater burden of genocidal consequences. The past unfairly forces these burdens on Armenians today, who have no choice in the matter. Even if Turkey gives the fullest possible reparation package, contemporary Turks will still bear only a fraction of the burden forced on today’s Armenians. By taking that burden on, Turkish people will demonstrate their willingness to share at least part of the tremendous impact of the Genocide. This will signal an important shift in mainstream Turkish attitudes. Far beyond a rhetorical act of Genocide acknowledgment without material consequences, reparations will mean that Turkish people are ready to share the reality of the post-Genocide experience in order to create the foundation for a new relationship built on mutual respect, truth, and responsibility.
Another objection is that pushing for reparations will alienate many well-intentioned Turks and thereby undermine potential improvements in Armenian-Turkish relations. It is even likely to produce a backlash of resentment against Armenians for their perceived taking advantage of Turks or intent to undermine the “territorial integrity” of Turkey as misperceived through the prism of the dominant Turkish nationalism. But if reparations (1) are objectively right and fair and (2) should be embraced by Turks truly committed to doing the right thing and respecting Armenian rights, then this kind of resistance would actually show that those resisting hold deep anti-Armenian attitudes and approve of the Genocide implicitly if not explicitly. If good relations with Turks depend on Armenians not asking for basic justice and respect for their rights, then this means that nothing will have changed in the Turkish-Armenian domination relationship. Armenian-Turkish dialogue will hide and leave intact the anti-Armenian prejudice present in Turkish culture and politics. As long as Armenians defer to Turkish interests, power, and insecurities, there will be no tensions, but as soon as Armenians expect to be treated as real human beings with respected rights, the anti-Armenianism lurking beneath the surface of Turkish society will emerge,[13]as it did in the assassination of Hrant Dink, whether a calculated message to Armenians or a spontaneous assertion of destructiveness and dominance.
Only when there is no Turkish resentment regarding reparations but recognition of their moral correctness will genuine progress in Armenian-Turkish relations be evident. Reparations will represent a material sacrifice by Turks that will show genuine good faith toward Armenians and confirm that changed rhetoric corresponds to real transformation of underlying attitudes and practices. Reparations will also alter the material situation of Armenians and create the necessary material foundation for a more balanced Armenian-Turkish status and power dynamic. Even if the giving of reparations does produce negative reactions among Turks, this will be a positive part of the dialogue process by exposing the deep-seated negative attitudes embedded in aspects of Turkish culture and institutions so that Turkish people can honestly confront them.
The refusal by most Turks to entertain the notion of land reparations is a particularly telling example of the persisting attitudes that are the true obstacle to meaningful progress in Turkish-Armenian relations. Those who hold the view that Turkish “territorial integrity” is sacrosanct such that even lands taken from Armenians through genocide are now perceived to be inherently and inalienably Turkish in fact maintain the same genocidal ideology that motivated and justified violent Turkification of these lands. To view Armenian lands as Turkish is to embrace the results of the Genocide; responsible engagement requires rejecting the fruits of genocide.
As asserted already, reparations will also mitigate the concrete material inequality and domination that are mirrored in the attitudes just discussed. While of course reparations will not make Armenia and Turkey and Armenians and Turks materially equal, they will mitigate the material inequality while also guaranteeing the material security of Armenians. What is more, they will be coupled with an attitude change that will represent a commitment by most Turks against the status and power asymmetry, which will further mitigate its effects.
This brings the issue back to the initial discussion of the global context of the Armenian issue. What makes pursuit of reparations for the Genocide not just not a naïve hope but a genuine political possibility is the new global reparations movement that has coalesced in recent years, with various groups participating, from African Americans and Native Americans to former Comfort Women victimized as sexual slaves by Japan during the Pacific War and South Africans victimized by Apartheid. Reparations for genocide, colonialism, slavery, mass rape, corporate harm and exploitation, and more could well be one of the central global political issues of the 21st Century and the movement for reparative justice one of the more significant political forces in this century. The global reparations movement is the cornerstone of a new vision of social, political, and economic progress and justice emerging today. Armenian reparation efforts can and should be considered part of this global movement.
[1] This paper largely follows “Restorative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide,” in The Armenian Genocide and International Law, edited by Antranik Dakessian (in English, forthcoming 2012), which in turn is based on remarks presented in Ankara, Turkey, on 25 April 2010 as part of the “Ermeni Meselesi: Ne ve Nasil Yapmali?” panel at the “1915 Within Its Pre- and Post-historical Periods: Denial and Confrontation” Symposium, 24-25 April 2010, and “Restorative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide,” a paper presented on 4 September 2009 at the “Armenian Genocide and International Law” Symposium held in Beirut, Lebanon, 2-4 September 2009.
The present paper is dedicated to Dennis Brutus, a great South African human rights activist and poet who lived his life as an endless inspiration for those struggling against Apartheid in South Africa and violence and oppression around the globe. Dennis passed away in December 2009 at the age of 85. His papers form the Dennis Brutus Collection, housed at Worcester State University.
[2] My work focuses on reparations for the Armenian Genocide. While claims of the progeny of Ottoman Greeks and Assyrians are just as important, I lack the case expertise necessary to a full treatment of them and, because I am not a member of either group, do not have the political legitimacy to formulate claims about reparations on behalf of members of those groups. I do hope, however, that a reparative dialogue between the Turkish government and these groups develops.
[3] See, for example, Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997), and Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 1995).
[4] On the history of genocide and many of the cases that are part of it, see Israel Charny, editor, The Encyclopedia of Genocide, Vols. 1 and 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1999), Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), and Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, editors, Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 3rd edition (New York: Routledge, 2009).
[5] R. J. Rummel, “The New Concept of Democide,” in The Encyclopedia of Genocide, Vol. 1, edited by Israel Charny (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1999), pp. 18-23.
[6] I introduced this approach in “Toward a New Conceptual Framework for Resolution: The Necessity of Recognizing the Perpetrator-Victim Dominance Relation in the Aftermath of Genocide,” panel paper, International Association of Genocide Scholars 6th Biennial Conference, Boca Raton, FL, June 7, 2005. For more detailed analyses of elements of this issue, see “Rethinking Dehumanization in Genocide,” in The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, edited by Richard Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2007), pp. 27-40; “Post-Genocide Imperial Domination,” in Controversy and Debate: Special Armenian Genocide Insert of the Armenian Weekly, April 24, 2007, pp. 6-8, 26; and “From Past Genocide to Present Perpetrator-Victim Group Relations,” in Commemorating Genocide: Images, Perspectives, Research: Special Armenian Genocide issue of the Armenian Weekly, April 26, 2008, pp. 2-6.
In the present article, I have gone from “power asymmetry” to “status and power asymmetry” to capture an additional dimension of the problem, that genocide not only has direct material impacts on the power and viability of the victim group, but it also alters the status of that group in political and other terms that are in part dependent on the lesser value accorded the victims even by non-perpetrator group members. Even where there is great sympathy for victims, this appears always coupled with a sense of their inferiority. Indeed, the very fact that they need sympathy grounds this inferiorizing devaluation.
[7] See Richard G. Hovannisian, “The Historical Dimensions of the Armenian Question, 1978-1923,” in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1986), pp. 19-41.
[8] It is crucial to recognize that not all Turkish nationalisms are these kinds of ultra-nationalism. For instance, those alternative forms that promote human rights are not.
[9] This includes the views typical of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, for instance, however much these are demonized in certain Turkish and, in the past, Armenian circles. It does not, however, extend to the ideologies of such groups as the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), the program of which included the use of terrorism.
[10] See, for instance, Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 103-05.
[11] A noteworthy example of the extensive evidence of these material losses is Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), especially Chapter 22, “Confessions of a Slayer Captain,” pp. 139-50. In “The Economic Aspect of the Armenian Genocide in the Diyarbaker Region” (public lecture, Haigazian University, Beirut, Lebanon, September 4, 2009), Uğur Ümit Üngör presented ground-breaking new research on one portion of these losses.
[12] See, for instance, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 150-53.
[13] This follows the line of analysis regarding racism against African Americans in the United States made by Kibibi Tyehimba in the paper she gave as part of the “Reparations as Justice Panel” of the “Armenians and the Left Conference,” City University of New York Graduate Center, April 7-8, 2006, on April 8.
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