By Ara Nazarian
The Armenian Reporter
April 5, 2008
Boston -- Andrew Tarsy, the former New England Regional director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), delivered the 2008 “Robert Solomon Morton Memorial Lecture” at North Eastern University’s Behrakis Hall, on March 19. Tarsy -- who came to prominence last summer by defying the national ADL organization’s dismissive stance on the Armenian Genocide, after which he was fired, re-hired, and (in December) resigned from the organization -- chose as the theme of his talk: “The Power of Words: Why the Term ‘Genocide’ Matters So Much, 60 Years After it Became an Internationally Recognized Crime.” Mr. Tarsy spoke of the personal nature of his recent experiences, and the intense period of learning and reflection that has followed his departure from the ADL. What follows is a summary of his remarks on the occasion. He began by describing the meaning and the roots of the terms “genocide” -- coined by the Polish-born Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to describe the intentional annihilation of the Armenians by the Ottoman empire early in the 20th century -- a fact most likely unknown to many listeners in the substantial general audience.
The seed of Lemkin’s life’s work
As Tarsy related it, Lemkin had been troubled by the widespread use of violence in the world under the guise of national security and interest. He was especially affected by the assassination by Soghomon Tehlirian of Talaat Pasha, Turkey’s Interior Minister and one of the three leaders of the so-called “Young Turks.” An outraged Lemkin, while a student at Lvov University, asked one of his professors whether Tehlirian had tried to have Talaat arrested and brought to justice, and was apparently told that there were no laws under which Talaat could have been arrested. The experience became the seed of Lemkin’s life’s work to establish a set of laws to deny sovereign nations the ability to subject their citizens to intentional annihilation. Lemkin presented his work at the 1933 League of Nations in Madrid, but to no avail; it was deemed “too political.” By 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and though Lemkin escaped to the United States, he failed to convince his family to move with him. While in the U.S., he tried in vain to persuade the government to save those targeted by the Nazis, and by 1944 he had published a book that employed the term “genocide” -- meaning the destruction of a nation or ethnic group -- for the first time. Shortly thereafter, the term “genocide” entered into a legal context at the Nuremberg Trials, as one of the charges levied against one of the defendants. In the aftermath of the Nuremberg Trials, Lemkin lobbied the United Nations to designate genocide as an international crime -- and his efforts finally paid off in 1948, when the UN adopted the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Even so, it took another 45 years after the adoption of the convention to convene the first international tribunal to address crimes including genocide -- which took place in the former Yugoslavia in 1991. It was 50 years after the adoption of the convention that the first verdict was issued by the international tribunal: against Jean-Paul Akayesu for his involvement in the Rwandan genocide.Tarsy went on to present a detailed overview of the Armenian Genocide, starting with the Hamidian massacres of the late 19th century, followed by the murder of Armenian political leaders, intellectuals, and priests in the early 20th century, to the execution of men and the rape, torture, and murder of the women and children on the deportation routes in the years following 1915. He referenced the many pleas made by Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman empire, urging Talaat to refrain from ill treatment of the Armenians. Talaat’s reply to Morgenthau, cited by Tarsy, was: “It is no use for you to argue. We have already disposed of three quarters of the Armenians, there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzeroum. The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.” Samantha Power, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell, has written that Talaat “presided over the killing by firing squad, bayoneting, bludgeoning, and starvation of nearly one million Armenians” in 1915. Several eye witness accounts, reports from missionaries, American, German, and other diplomatic sources, and hundreds of newspaper articles (including 145 in the New York Times in 1915 alone), reported on the methodical destruction of the Armenians. Tarsy recounted such hallmarks of the annihilation plan as the passage of laws in the Ottoman senate for the mass deportation of Armenians and the confiscation of their properties; direct orders issued to provincial and local officials to round up the Armenians and execute and/or deport them; and punishments prescribed for any Turks who dared to provide refuge for Armenians.
Validation, Justice, Reconciliation, Prevention
Turning to the title of his lecture “Why the Term ‘Genocide’ Matters So Much” -- Andrew Tarsy presented four reasons for unambiguously employing the term “genocide” to certain crimes against humanity. He called them “Validation, Justice, Reconciliation, and Prevention.” As regards Validation: Tarsy noted that the very fact of designating such a crime as “genocide” assures the victims that the world is aware of their plight. The world was fully aware of the atrocities brought upon the Armenians, he said; unfortunately, the persistent denial efforts of the Turkish government over the years (and the willingness of Turkey’s allies to turn a blind eye) has introduced seeds of doubt after the fact. Nevertheless, he said, much of the world outside Turkey acknowledges the facts of the Armenian Genocide; and those who choose not to are caught in a political no-win situation of “choosing politics over truth.” Some have felt that the validation conferred by the term “genocide” would render all genocides the same. Tarsy cited this criticism, but added that he saw no such evidence of it; and to the contrary he had found the consciousness of have suffered under genocide engendered mutual empathy between communities, such as Armenians and Jews, which was a source of healing. The second rationale for employing the term “genocide” -- Justice -- is important for bringing about a sense of closure for the victims, Tarsy said. Additionally, holding perpetrators accountable for the crimes committed by them is a fundamental aspect of administration of justice. Reconciliation, he said, is a byproduct of candid, honest, and precise discussion between ethnic groups, and is a gateway to moving from tragedy to new possibilities. He quoted Samantha Power as asserting that “Pinpointing individual responsibility” via the designation of the word “genocide” “allow[s] ethnic or religious groups to coexist even after horrific events.” The post-Rwandan genocide approach, for example, has been based on the concept of reconciliation and bringing responsible parties to justice, in order to allow Tutsi survivors to be able to return and live alongside their Hutu neighbors. Mr. Tarsy assessed Prevention is the most important, yet the most elusive, of all the reasons why the word “genocide” matters. The continuing reluctance to use the term to describe recent atrocities stems from a combination of political reasons, including a desire to be accurate, but also to not trigger obligations under the international convention. All of the foregoing reasons have been put forward by the United States and the United Nations to justify their sluggish responses to the genocide in Rwanda. Tragically, while nearly everyone now sees the events in Rwanda as genocide, the acknowledgement came too late: 800,000 people lost their lives in a span of 100 days, Tarsy said, while nations and world bodies debated about the terminology to be used.
Policy enabled by complicity
Mr. Tarsy concluded his remarks by stating that we are all part of the problem when we make excuses for distorting history. And while we must not blame modern-day Turkey for the sins of its forefathers, we have an obligation to reflect candidly on what happened early in 20th century, and to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide by the Ottoman empire. Additionally, he said, having permitted genocides to go forward in Cambodia, Rwanda, and other places, we have a greater responsibility to understand these terrible events, and to provide support to the survivors. He left the audience with a final thought that genocide is not simply a government policy. It is a government policy enabled by the complicity of citizens, intellectuals, the clergy and cultural icons -- a lethal combination that produced the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust of the Jews and other victims of Nazism, and the genocides which followed. Andrew Tarsy’s talk was part of a distinguished lecture series sponsored by Northeastern University’s Holocaust Awareness Committee, originally created by Professor William Geisen in honor of his longtime friend Robert Morton Solomon, a German Jew who escaped persecution in the early years of the Nazi regime, and fled to America, where he served for many years as the caretaker of the Hillel Foundation at Harvard University. The Robert Salomon Morton Lecture is sponsored by the Gustel Cormann Memorial Fund at Northeastern University.
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About Andrew Tarsy
Andrew Tarsy worked for the ADL for seven years, beginning in the year 2000, and served as its New England Regional director for two and a half years. Previously, he was a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and a private practice lawyer focusing on civil rights litigation. For his principled stand in support of Armenian Genocide recognition -- a stance that led to his firing from the ADL, and his eventual resignation after having been reinstated -- Tarsy was named to the Jewish Daily Forward’s “Forward 50” list in 2007. He has recently accepted a position with Facing History and Ourselves, a Brookline, Mass.-based group with an international mission of tolerance. He is a graduate of Boston’s Roxbury Latin School, Cornell University, and George Washington University School of Law.
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