A century ago, in April 1915, an event began that’s come to be known as the Armenian Genocide. One scholar believes that massacre should remind us of the long-term implications of events playing out in our own time.
It’s thought that up to 1.5 million people may have been massacred or expelled from their homes in the Ottoman Empire during the worst atrocity of World War I. For almost a century, Turkey has denied the enormity of the event, but that may be changing.
Thomas de Waal works for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Recently, he returned to Turkey with a group American Armenians -- descendants of those who fled the genocide in the early 20th century.
"We were actually greeted incredibly warmly," de Waal told WNPR. "In a couple of places, Armenian churches had been reopened, people came out and shared stories about their Armenian grandparents. So on the ground in Turkey, that memory is coming back and those people to people contacts are happening."
His experiences are recounted in a new book, Great Catastrophe -- that’s the term many Armenians use for those months in 1915.
De Waal spoke recently at Connecticut College, and he said it is language that illustrates how divisive those events remain. The subtitle of his book is Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide. The term genocide -- the attempt to eradicate an entire people -- was first coined in the 1940s, and de Waal said that while at a scholarly level, it is correct to call what happened to the Armenians genocide, the use of the word has unfortunate consequences.
"It’s become a barrier to the solution of the problem," de Waal said. "Which is for Armenians and Turks to communicate more, and understand each other’s history. And you’ve got this big, dark 'genocide' word standing between them."
The descendants of the Armenian diaspora continue to seek closure, and that search has shaped U.S. politics. The Armenian lobby is powerful in Congress, but still finds itself at odds with America’s political alliance with Turkey.
De Waal said the fact that this is still relevant today should alert us to the lingering effects of events in our own time. “It only takes a few weeks or months to commit an atrocity. But the effects can cascade across the generations, and trauma can be transmitted from generation to generation.”
It also, he said, illustrates the importance of good history -- an understanding of events that tells a human story and not a morality play.
