Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 1. december 2004 / Time Line December 1, 2004
Version 3.5November 2004, 2. December 2004
12/01/2004
Fredsfangerens dag, etableret af WRI, 1956.
12/01/2004
Det er nu 19 måneder siden, at USAs præsident Bush
erklærede krigen i Irak for vundet.
12/01/2004
ONLINE FORUM - LESSONS FROM THE PAST: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE,
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION AND HUMAN RIGHTS
December 1-3
Facing History and Ourselves will host a global online conversation
for educators, scholars, and university and graduate students
focusing on the difficult choices individuals, groups, and nations
have confronted - and continue to struggle with - in the face of
genocide. The forum will build upon the issues explored in Facing
History and Ourselves' newest resource book, Crimes Against
Humanity and Civilization: The Genocide of the Armenians,
as well as examine the work of contemporary human rights activists
and scholars who challenge indifference and believe prevention is
possible.
Facing History and Ourselves staff will facilitate this three-day
online forum with the participation of leading human rights and
Armenian Genocide scholars, including Chair of Modern Armenian
History at the University of California, Los Angeles, Richard
Hovannisian. Smith College Professor and human rights activist Eric
Reeves, a frequent writer and commentator on the genocide in Sudan
will also join us. The online forum is free of charge. For more
information, go to
http://www.facinghistory.org/agforum
Literature: Balakian, Peter: The Burning Tigris : The
Armenian Genocide and America's Responce : A History of
International Human Rights and Forgotten Heroes. - New York :
Harper/Collins Publishers, 2003. - 475 pp. - ISBN 0-06-019840-0
In recent years the Armenian Genocide has been referred to as "the
forgotten genocide," "the hidden holocaust." Such epithets convey
little sense of how large the massacres of the Armenians in the
1890s and the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 loomed in American
(as well as European) consciousness and in social and political
life during a span of four decades. The American response to the
Armenian crisis, which began in the 1890s and continued into the
1920s, was the first international human rights movement in
American history, and helped to define America's emerging global
identity. No international human rights issue has ever preoccupied
the United States for such a duration.
In the past decade there had been much debate about the issue of
United States response to crimes of genocide committed in other
parts of the planet. What is the role of the most powerful nation
in the world when the ultimate human crime is being perpetrated in
plain view? Why was there no US activist response to the Holocaust,
or to Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia in 1978, or to the Rwandan
genocide in 1994, when in fact our State Department, media, and
general public often have known what is happening in these killing
fields? Why is U.S. policy evasive, sluggish, resistant to action
(of various and creative kinds, not simply or only military
intervention), and often tinged with denial? Why has there been so
little political will at the top when media coverage and popular
knowledge and empathy is often large and dramatic?
I believe -- and I hope you will agree after you read my book --
that a deeper understanding of these questions and of the history
of America's confrontation with genocide must begin with a study of
the Armenian Genocide, perpetrated by the Ottoman Turks under the
cover of World War I. In the world after September 11, 2001,
Americans and U.S. leaders may find that the Armenian lesson has
much to teach about the moral accountability of bystanders, trauma
and survivor experience, and the immediate and far-reaching impact
of mass violence committed against innocent civilians.
Theodore Roosevelt spoke to the issue of intervention when he
berated President Wilson for his refusal "to take effective action
on behalf of Armenia. The Armenian massacre," Roosevelt concluded,
"was the greatest crime of the war, and failure to act against
Turkey is to condone it." In my book you will find that the
Armenian Genocide of 1915 spawned extraordinary heroism on the part
of American foreign service officers -- consuls posted in remote
areas of Anatolia (the interior of Turkey). State Department
officials often risked their lives to save men, women, and orphaned
children. The U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau went beyond the duty
of his job as he became the nexus between the killing fields and
the American relief community and the press back home. Eyewitness
accounts of the Armenian genocide from American foreign service
officers became the first body of U.S. diplomatic literature about
a major, foreign human rights tragedy.
It is important to know that the Armenian Genocide prompted two
historic responses in the evolution of international ethics. In May
1915, in the midst of World War I, the Allies meeting in London
conceived of what they termed "crimes against humanity," in warning
the Ottoman government that massacring the Armenian population
would violate a fundamental standard of humanity and would have
consequences. In 1944, the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the
term genocide; he based his definition in large part by what had
happened to the Armenians in 1915 and what was happening to the
Jews of Europe.
By the early 1920s, the American response to the "starving
Armenians" was divided between a passionate popular appeal for aid
and justice, and the limits of the federal government -- the State
Department, the White House, and a powerful segment of the Senate,
which was isolationist and Republican. The post-World War I power
alliance with Ataturk's new Turkish Republic and the American drive
for oil in the Middle East led to the abandonment of Armenia. In
some sense, this paradox would haunt the United States through the
20th century and beyond, when it was faced with the challenge of
genocide and other human rights atrocities, whether committed in
Europe against the Jews, or in Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq, or
Bosnia.
Unfortunately, to write a history of the Armenian genocide still
entails addressing the Turkish government's continued denial of the
facts and moral dimensions of this history. In the final chapter of
my book, you will read a brief history of how Turkey has tried to
coerce and bully foreign governments, the media, and the press on
the issue of the Armenian Genocide. Turkey has not been able to
come to terms with its campaign of genocide against the Armenians
and thus would like the world to wipe this important part of modern
history from memory. It is worth remembering what scholars of
genocide have noted: the denial of genocide is the final stage of
genocide for it seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the
perpetrators, and it sends the message that genocide doesn't
matter, demands no moral response.
12/01/2004
Vibeke Vindeløv udnævnes som professor i
konfliktmægling ved det juriske fakultek i Københavns
universitet.
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