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Indonesia’s
Forgotten
Bloodbath
Cold War Crime and Cover-Up
Gary J. Bass
The Killing Season: A History of the
Indonesian Massacres, 1965–66
BY GEOF F REY B. ROBINSON.
Princeton University Press, 2018, 456 pp.
“
F
orgetting the past was easy to
do in Indonesia,” wrote Barack
Obama in his 2006 book, The
Audacity of Hope. When the future U.S.
president was six years old, he moved to
Jakarta with his mother, who had married
an Indonesian man. They arrived in
1967, shortly after what the adult Obama
would describe as “a massive purge of
communists and their sympathizers,” when
“between 500,000 and one million people
were slaughtered.” Obama’s mother later
insisted that they never would have gone
to Indonesia if she had known about the
massacres. His stepfather, who had been
drafted into the Indonesian army, said
that “some things were best forgotten.”
Few Americans have any awareness
of what happened in Indonesia. Standard
histories of the Cold War pay the country
only cursory attention. (The historian
Odd Arne Westad’s recent book, The
GARY J. BASS is Professor of Politics and
International Affairs at Princeton University and
the author of The Blood Telegram: Nixon,
Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide.
158
f o r e i g n a f fa i r s
Cold War: A World History, is a distin
guished exception to that rule.) Today,
with Asia central to world politics, what
was once dismissed as the strategic
periphery has become the core. But most
Americans are ill equipped to understand
the region and the role their country has
played there.
In The Killing Season, an authoritative
and harrowing account of the massacres
in Indonesia and their aftermath, Geoffrey
Robinson seeks to recover this episode
from historical oblivion. Robinson, a
history professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who previously
worked for Amnesty International,
tempers his indignation with scholarly
rigor. Confronted with a void, he fills
it with archival citations. What emerges
is a scathing and persuasive indictment of
the Indonesian military and the foreign
powers—especially the United States and
the United Kingdom—that were complicit
in the brutality.
THE DESCENT INTO VIOLENCE
During the Cold War, Indonesia—the
fourth most populous country in the
world—became an irresistible prize
for the United States, China, and the
Soviet Union. As these powers vied
for influence, they deepened existing
divisions within the country. On the
right, there was Indonesia’s reactionary
army, as well as nationalist and Islamist
parties, which often had their own
militias. On the left was a behemoth,
the Indonesian Communist Party (pki),
which boasted some 3.5 million members,
as well as 20 million people who belonged
to organizations aligned with it. The pki
was the third-largest communist party
in the world, behind only those ruling
China and the Soviet Union. By the
Indonesia’s Forgotten Bloodbath
mid-1960s, the United States and the
United Kingdom feared that Indonesia
was about to go communist.
The carnage began on October 1, 1965,
when a group of junior Indonesian army
officers killed six generals. The army’s
remaining chiefs, led by Major General
Suharto, claimed that the killings were
part of a Communist-backed coup attempt.
They then unleashed what Robinson
describes as an “awful juggernaut of
arbitrary detention, interrogation, torture,
mass killing, and political exile,” system
atically wiping out those branded as
Communists or Communist sympathizers.
Right-wing militias, death squads, and
armed civilians often participated, too.
Alleged association with the wrong
group—regardless of the truth—was
grounds for arrest or execution. President
Sukarno’s leftist government was swept
away in the onslaught, and Suharto and
the generals seized power. Robinson
conservatively estimates that by the time
the military assault ended, just over six
months later, as many as half a million
people had been killed. An additional
million had been thrown into arbitrary
detention or packed off to penal colonies
and labor camps. All told, Robinson
concludes, the campaign represents
“one of the largest and swiftest, yet least
examined instances of mass killing and
incarceration in the twentieth century.”
DISPELLING THE MYTHS
After 1966, Suharto’s regime, eerily called
the New Order, tried to shrug off the
massacres as a popular uprising against
the Communists rather than a coordinated
military assault. Emphasizing the role of
militias and local death squads, officials
claimed that the violence was the spon
taneous product of communal conflict.
Robinson dispenses with that myth.
Drawing on Indonesian primary sources,
he catalogs the brutality in haunting and
gruesome detail and breaks down 50 years
of official whitewash to reveal the army’s
central role in the massacres. These
chapters are unbearable to read. Robinson
shows that there was nothing banal or
impersonal about the extermination of
humans whom one Indonesian army
officer called “less than animals.” People
were shot, decapitated, throttled, clubbed
to death, gutted with bamboo spears,
or slashed apart with knives, machetes,
swords, or ice picks. Before being killed,
women were often raped. Torture was
routine. Guards would beat prisoners
with clubs or electric cables, crush their
toes, break their fingers, burn them with
cigarettes, or deliver electric shocks. Some
prisoners were forced to observe the
torture of their spouses or children.
As in better-known cases of mass
atrocity, such as those in Bosnia, Rwanda,
and Syria, the horror in Indonesia was not
the inevitable result of ethnic grievances
or socioeconomic strife but a wellorganized, systematic campaign carried
out by political authorities. Robinson
persuasively argues that without the
Indonesian army to provide training,
organization, and encouragement, indi
viduals with parochial grudges could
never have inflicted such widespread
devastation. Although midlevel authorities
had some discretion in choosing their
methods, grisly patterns found throughout
the country imply institutional repertoires
of violence: decapitation, castration, the
public exhibition of body parts and corpses,
and particular forms of torture were all
common. Local militia forces were almost
always working either under the command
of the army or with its blessing. And
July/August 2018
159
Gary J. Bass
the army supplied ideological justifi
cations for the killings by dehumanizing
accused Communists as “devils,”
“whores,” “terrorists,” “animals,” and—
particularly salient for some Islamist
militias—“atheists.”
worsened, the Johnson administration
offered no criticism. In November 1965,
the U.S. deputy chief of mission in
Jakarta told a senior Indonesian army
officer that the Johnson administration
was “generally sympathetic with and
admiring of what [the] Army [is] doing.”
WESTERN RESPONSIBILITY
Despite its brutality, the army’s campaign
But the Indonesian army was not the
was met with enthusiasm in the Johnson
only responsible party. The Killing Season administration: Undersecretary of State
also harshly condemns Western powers: George Ball told Vice President Hubert
Robinson argues that in Indonesia, “the Humphrey that if “the pki is cleaned up . . .
United States and its allies aided and
we will have a new day in Indonesia.”
abetted crimes against humanity, possibly
Johnson’s team also spun the
including genocide.”
Washington press. Ball told James
In backing up that grave accusation,
Reston of The New York Times that
Robinson provides less a smoking gun
the Indonesian army had the “strength
than a kind of smoldering miasma. For
to wipe the earth with the pki and if
one thing, the book contains few quotes they don’t, they may not have another
from top White House officials and none chance.” These actions met with no
from U.S. President Lyndon Johnson.
evident resistance from other parts of
The loquacious president’s silence here is the administration. (In comparison, in
notable when compared with his depiction 1971, U.S. diplomats in East Pakistan
in other histories of this period, such
[now Bangladesh] risked their careers to
as Fredrik Logevall’s classic account of
oppose U.S. President Richard Nixon
U.S. escalation in Vietnam, Choosing War, and National Security Adviser Henry
which shared ample direct evidence of
Kissinger’s support for a Pakistani military
Johnson’s thinking. But what Robinson
junta that was massacring Bengalis.)
does reveal is sordid enough.
In April 1965, the U.S. ambassador
COLD WARRIORS
in Jakarta wrote to Johnson that WashRobinson spares no one, but his indictington should give the army and other
ment is nuanced and rises above Cold
anti-Sukarno forces “the most favorable War passions. He finds no evidence that
conditions for confrontation”; it’s not
the United States or the cia orchestrated
clear how or if the president responded. the coup attempt or the massacres. He
When the killing began, the cia informed doubts that a small cia station could
Johnson that it favored a broad crackdown manage such devastation, and he is wary
on the Indonesian Communists, and he of exonerating the Indonesian army
apparently did not object, according to
leadership and local murderers. Further
Robinson. Around this time, British
more, Robinson repeatedly criticizes the
and U.S. officials made secret assurances charismatic Sukarno and other militant
to a top Indonesian general that they
nationalists for dangerously escalating
would not interfere in the country’s
the country’s tensions. In 1959, Sukarno
domestic affairs. Even as the atrocities
had decried parliamentary democracy
160
f o r e i g n a f fa i r s
Indonesia’s Forgotten Bloodbath
as a foreign implant that was alien to
Indonesian culture and had installed
an authoritarian “guided democracy.”
Although the country was nominally
nonaligned, Sukarno veered leftward—
particularly as Mao’s China, on the brink
of its Cultural Revolution, galvanized
revolutionaries across Asia. To rally the
public, Sukarno campaigned to crush the
new country of Malaysia, which had been
created from former British colonial
territories in what he saw as a neoimperialist attempt to throttle Indonesia. In a
1965 speech, he declared, “We are now
fostering an anti-imperialist axis—the
Jakarta–Phnom Penh–Hanoi–Peking–
Pyongyang axis.”
In criticizing the United States and
its allies, Robinson also points out that
they were responding to Soviet military
aid to Sukarno and growing Chinese
influence. China, in particular, had backed
Sukarno’s campaign against Malaysia
and offered to help him develop nuclear
weapons. Zhou Enlai, Mao’s premier,
offered the pki 100,000 light arms to help
it develop a militia force that would arm
some 21 million workers and peasants.
As the historian Taomo Zhou has shown,
in 1963, the Chinese premier included
the pki in a meeting with Communist
leaders from Southeast Asia, exhorting
them to “go deep into the countryside,
prepare for armed struggle, and establish
base camps.” All this Chinese bluster,
Robinson contends, while more show
than substance, emboldened Sukarno
and the pki to challenge the army.
Still, Robinson’s main complaint is with
the United States, the United Kingdom,
and their allies, which had been pressing
the Indonesian army to smash Sukarno
and the Communists for years. After 1958,
when the Soviets extended massive
military aid to Indonesia, U.S. officials
began funneling smaller amounts of
support to the Indonesian army, which
the Joint Chiefs of Staff described as “the
only non-communist force in Indonesia
with the capability of obstructing the
progress of the pki toward domination
of the country.” As China ramped up
its support of Sukarno, the United States
started covertly funding and aiding
anticommunists—including an Islamist
party whose members proved particu
larly brutal during the killing campaign.
Worse yet, even after the mass killing
began, the United States provided political
support and modest amounts of covert
assistance to the Indonesian military.
And after Suharto seized power, in
March 1966, the United States and the
United Kingdom gave him ample aid,
including military support. Soon after,
the Australian prime minister, Harold
Holt, cruelly joked to a New York
audience, “With 500,000 to one million
Communist sympathizers knocked off, I
think it is safe to assume a reorientation
has taken place.”
DOOMED TO REPEAT?
Mass atrocity is almost always followed
by denial, and Indonesia is an especially
bleak case in point. Suharto’s regime
remained unrepentantly dedicated to
stamping out any remaining leftists and
repressing the subjugated provinces of
Aceh, East Timor, and West Papua. Under
his rule, Indonesia jailed a staggering
number of political prisoners, and the
New Order added hundreds of thousands
of killings to its ledger.
Even after Suharto resigned, in 1998,
in response to nationwide protests and the
Asian financial crisis, Indonesia continued
to bury its past. Unlike in Argentina,
July/August 2018
161
Gary J. Bass
Bosnia, Germany, and South Africa, there
have been no war crimes trials, truth
commissions, or even monuments to the
dead. While some brave Indonesian
scholars, activists, and journalists have
spoken up, the slaughter has been con
signed to oblivion—thanks in part to
Western governments with bad consciences.
Robinson accuses U.S. officials, such
as the ambassador in Jakarta and the
cia station chief there, of publishing
deceitful accounts that whitewashed
American responsibility. And for decades,
the U.S. government refused or ducked
requests to declassify relevant documents
under the Freedom of Information Act.
In 2017, under pressure from historians,
activists, and Tom Udall, a Democratic
senator from New Mexico, the government
finally released 30,000 pages of records
from the U.S. embassy in Jakarta from
1964 to 1968. The glacial pace of declas
sification is an affront to the victims, an
impediment to accountable democratic
governance, and a gift for conspiracy
theorists. (It is also routine. I’m still
waiting on a mandatory declassification
review request related to U.S. policy
toward Bangladesh that I filed six years
ago with the Nixon Presidential Library.)
The United States is not the only
country concealing things. As Robinson
argues, it is high time for Indonesia to
open up its own archives and hold war
crimes trials for those implicated. China
also keeps its foreign policy decisions
shrouded in darkness. Although Beijing
briefly declassified some Foreign Ministry
papers from this period in 2008, author
ities reclassified the bulk of that material
in 2013. Chinese scholars worry about
the political risks of trying to dig up dirt.
The findings of Robinson’s pain
staking scholarship may shock those
162
f o r e i g n a f fa i r s
accustomed to triumphal readings of
the Cold War, but Robinson provides
a more accurate, if less inspirational,
perspective on U.S. policy. The fall of
the Soviet empire was a historic victory
for liberty, but that is all the more reason
to look hard at the United States’ darker
deeds during the Cold War: devastat
ing wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia; support for bloodstained
governments in countries such as
Argentina, Brazil, Iran, South Africa,
and Zaire (present-day Congo); covert
backing for coups in Iran and Guatemala;
and complicity in campaigns of mass
violence in Indonesia and East Pakistan.
The United States has done little to
memorialize or make amends for these
dire chapters of its history. There is no
prospect of a truth commission for the
Cold War. Obama, marked by his early
experiences in Indonesia, was unusually
forthcoming. In a momentous visit to
Jakarta in 2010, he made only an oblique
reference to “violence and killing,” which
“was largely unknown to [him] because
it was unspoken by [his] Indonesian family
and friends.” But in the spring of 2016,
he told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg,
“We have history in Iran, we have history
in Indonesia and Central America.”
Around that time, Obama paid a somber
visit to a memorial to the victims of
the U.S.-backed military dictatorship
in Argentina. In September 2016, he
acknowledged the civilians killed in the
secret U.S. war in Laos, although he
stopped short of apologizing. Republicans
called these actions unpatriotic.
More than 50 years after the massacres in Indonesia, the United States
remains a country that rarely takes
responsibility for past transgressions,
devotes little effort to educating its
citizens about foreign countries or its
historical entanglements abroad, and
has a political system that rewards
ill-informed and belligerent candidates.
All those flaws have congealed in the
squalid presidency of Donald Trump,
who is more openly contemptuous of
human rights than any president since
Nixon—and lacks any of Nixon’s
strategic vision. Trump has expressed
admiration for authoritarian leaders
such as Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi, North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir
Putin, and Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan. He publicly applauded
Saudi Arabia’s “strong action” in Yemen
without mentioning the thousands of
civilians killed by its bombs. And he
praised Rodrigo Duterte, the brutal
president of the Philippines, for an
“unbelievable job on the drug problem”—
explicitly supporting the alleged
extrajudicial killings of over 7,000
people, a campaign that Human Rights
Watch says could amount to crimes
against humanity. It seems likely that
Trump will echo some of the worst
offenses of his predecessors—and
commit some new ones of his own.∂
163
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The G-Word
The Armenian Massacre and the Politics
of Genocide
Thomas de Waal
O
ne hundred years ago this April, the Ottoman Empire began
a brutal campaign of deporting and destroying its ethnic
Armenian community, whom it accused of supporting Russia,
a World War I enemy. More than a million Armenians died. As it
commemorates the tragedy, the U.S. government, for its part, still
finds itself wriggling on the nail on which it has hung for three
decades: Should it use the term “genocide” to describe the Ottoman
Empire’s actions toward the Armenians, or should it heed the warnings of its ally, Turkey, which vehemently opposes using the term
and has threatened to recall its ambassador or even deny U.S. access
to its military bases if the word is applied in this way? The first
course of action would fulfill the wishes of the one-million-strong
Armenian American community, as well as many historians, who
argue that Washington has a moral imperative to use the term. The
second would satisfy the strategists and officials who contend that
the history is complicated and advise against antagonizing Turkey,
a loyal strategic partner.
No other historical issue causes such anguish in Washington. One
former State Department official told me that in 1992, a group of top
U.S. policymakers sat in the office of Brent Scowcroft, then national
security adviser to President George H. W. Bush, and calculated that
resolutions related to the topic were consuming more hours of their
time with Congress than any other matter. Over the years, the debate
has come to center on a single word, “genocide,” a term that has acquired
such power that some refuse to utter it aloud, calling it “the G-word”
THOMAS DE WAAL is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace and the author of the forthcoming Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the
Shadow of Genocide. Follow him on Twitter @TomdeWaalCEIP.
136
f o r e i g n a f fa i r s
The G-Word
instead. For most Armenians, it seems that no other label could possibly
describe the suffering of their people. For the Turkish government,
almost any other word would be acceptable.
U.S. President Barack Obama has attempted to break this deadlock in statements he has made on April 24, the day when Armenians
traditionally commemorate the tragedy, by evoking the Armenianlanguage phrase Meds Yeghern, or “Great Catastrophe.” In 2010, for
example, he declared, “1.5 million Armenians were massacred or
marched to their death in the final days of the Ottoman Empire. . . .
The Meds Yeghern is a devastating chapter in the history of the
Armenian people, and we must keep its memory alive in honor of
those who were murdered and so that we do not repeat the grave
mistakes of the past.”
Armenian descendants seeking recognition of their grandparents’
suffering could find everything they wanted to see there, except one
thing: the word “genocide.” That omission led a prominent lobbying
group, the Armenian National Committee of America, to denounce the
president’s dignified statement as “yet another disgraceful capitulation
to Turkey’s threats,” full of “euphemisms and evasive terminology.”
In a sense, Obama had only himself to blame for this over-the-top
rebuke. After all, during his presidential campaign, he had, like most
candidates before him, promised Armenian American voters that he
would use the word “genocide” if elected, but once in office, he had
honored the relationship with Turkey and broken his vow. His 2010
address did go further than those of his predecessors and openly
hinted that he had the G-word in mind when he stated, “My view of
that history has not changed.” But if he edged closer to the line, he
stopped short of crossing it.
HISTORY AS BATTLEGROUND
Back in 1915, there was nothing controversial about the catastrophe
suffered by ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The Young
Turkish government, headed by Mehmed Talat Pasha and two others,
which ruled what was left of the empire, had entered World War I the
year before on the side of Germany, fighting against its longtime foe
Russia. The leadership accused Christian Armenians—a population
of almost two million, most of whom lived in what is now eastern
Turkey—of sympathizing with Russia and thus representing a potential
fifth column. Talat ordered the deportation of almost the entire people
Januar y/Februar y 2015
137
Thomas de Waal
to the arid deserts of Syria. In the process, at least half of the men
were killed by Turkish security forces or marauding Kurdish tribesmen.
Women and children survived in greater numbers but endured appalling
depredation, abductions, and rape on the long marches.
Leading statesmen of the time regarded the deportation and
massacre of the Armenians as the worst atrocity of World War I.
One of them, former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, argued in
a 1918 letter to the philanthropist Cleveland Dodge that the United
States should go to war with the Ottoman Empire “because the
Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and failure to
act against Turkey is to condone it.”
Some of the best sources on the horrific events were American.
Because the United States had remained neutral during the war’s
early years, dozens of its diplomatic officials and missionaries in the
Ottoman Empire had stayed on the ground and witnessed what
happened. In May 1915, Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador
in Turkey, delivered a démarche from the Ottoman Empire’s three
main adversaries—France, Russia, and the United Kingdom—that
denounced the deportation of the Armenians. The statement condemned
the Ottoman government for “crimes against humanity,” marking the
first known official usage of that term. In July 1915, Morgenthau cabled
to Washington, “Reports from widely scattered districts indicate
systematic attempts to uproot peaceful Armenian populations.” These
actions, he wrote, involved arbitrary arrests, torture, and large-scale
deportations of Armenians, “accompanied by frequent instances of
rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre.”
At the other corner of the Ottoman Empire, Jesse Jackson, the U.S.
consul in Aleppo, watched as pitiful convoys of emaciated Armenians
arrived in Syria. In September 1916, Jackson sent a cable to Washington
that described the burial grounds of nearly 60,000 Armenians near
Maskanah, a town in today’s northern Syria: “As far as the eye can reach
mounds are seen containing 200 to 300 corpses buried in the ground pele
mele, women, children and old people belonging to different families.”
By the end of World War I, according to most estimates of the
time, around one million Armenians had died. Barely one-tenth of
the original population remained in its native lands in the Ottoman
Empire. The rest had mostly scattered to Armenia, France, Lebanon,
and Syria. Many, in ever-greater numbers over the years, headed to
the United States.
138
f o r e i g n a f fa i r s
The G-Word
History boys: Armenians demonstrating against Turkey in Athens, April 2013
R E U T E R S / YA N N I S B E H R A K I S
From the 1920s on, the events of the Great Catastrophe became
more a matter of private grief than public record. Ordinary Armenians
concentrated on building new lives for themselves. The main political
party active in the Armenian diaspora, the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation (which had briefly ruled an independent Armenia in 1918–
20, before it became a Soviet republic), expended most of its efforts
fighting the Soviet Union rather than Turkey. Only in the 1960s
did Armenians seriously revive the memory of their grandparents’
suffering as a public political issue. They drew inspiration from
“Holocaust consciousness,” the urge for collective remembrance
and action that brought together the Jewish people after the 1961
trial of Adolf Eichmann for Nazi war crimes.
The Republic of Turkey, founded by Mustafa Kemal in 1923, was a
state rooted in organized forgetting—not only of the crimes committed in the late Ottoman period against Armenians, Assyrians, and
Greeks but also of the suffering of the Muslim population in a string
of wars in Anatolia and the Balkans prior to 1923. As the new Turkish
state developed, the vanishing of the Armenians became a political,
historical, and economic fait accompli. In Turkey, only one substantial book addressing the issue was published between 1930 and the
mid-1970s.
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When Turkish historians finally returned to the topic in the late
1970s, they did so in response to a wave of terrorist attacks on Turkish
diplomats in Western Europe, most of them carried out by Armenian
militants based in Beirut. The campaign set off a war among nationalist historians. A simplistic Armenian narrative told of Turkish perpetrators, callous international bystanders, and innocent Armenian
victims, downplaying the role that radical Armenian political parties
had played in fueling the crackdown. Countering this story was an
even cruder narrative spun by some pro-Turkish scholars, several of
whom were receiving funding from the Turkish government. That
story line portrayed the Armenians as traitors and Muslims as victims
of scheming Christian great powers that sought to break up the
Ottoman Empire.
The United States served as the main arena for these assertions and
denials. In one book published in 1990, Heath Lowry, the head of the
newly established Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C.,
pursued a common line of Turkish argument: casting doubt on the
authenticity of Westerners’ eyewitness testimonies. His account, The
Story Behind “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” alleged that Morgenthau
was an unreliable witness. Others argued that U.S. missionaries were
untrustworthy sources because of their anti-Muslim bias. Over
the years, efforts to discredit dozens of primary sources have grown
increasingly tortuous. The U.S.-based Turkish website Tall Armenian
Tale, for example, laboriously tries to cast doubt on every single one
of the hundreds of eyewitness testimonies of the massacre.
A more legitimate line of historical inquiry has focused on the
hitherto overlooked tribulations of Muslims in Anatolia and the
Caucasus during World War I. These accounts have pointed out that
the Armenians were not the only people to face persecution in eastern
Turkey. The Kurdish and Turkish populations, too, suffered grievously
at the hands of the Russian army, which contained several Armenian
regiments, when these forces occupied swaths of eastern Turkey not
long after the Armenian deportations. Later, in 1918–20, Muslim
Azerbaijanis were deported from the briefly independent Republic of
Armenia before it was conquered by the Bolsheviks.
The wartime context of the Armenian massacre and the multiple actors
involved—in addition to Armenians and Turks: Assyrians, Azerbaijanis,
Greeks, Kurds, British, Germans, and Russians—make it harder to tell
the story in all its nuance. The history of the Armenian genocide lacks
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the devastating simplicity of the Holocaust’s narrative. But a new generation of historians has finally taken up the challenge of explaining the
full context of the tragedy. Some of them, such as Raymond Kevorkian,
are Armenian, whereas others, including Donald Bloxham and Erik-Jan
Zurcher, hail from Europe. Several come from Turkey, including Fikret
Adanir, Taner Akcam, Halil Berktay, and Fuat Dundar.
At the heart of most of these histories lies a hard kernel of truth:
although Muslims suffered enormously during World War I, in both
Anatolia and the Caucasus, the Armenian experience was of a different
order of pain. Along with the Assyrians, the Armenians were subjected
to a campaign of destruction that was more terrible for being organized
and systematic. And even though some Armenian nationalists helped
precipitate the brutal Ottoman response, every single Armenian suffered
as a result. As Bloxham has written, “Nowhere else during the First
World War was the separatist nationalism of the few answered with
the total destruction of the wider ethnic community from which the
nationalists hailed. That is the crux of the issue.”
WORD AS WEAPON
If the issue of the experience of the Armenians in World War I were
merely a matter of historical interpretation, a way forward would be
clear. The huge volume of primary source material, combined with
Armenian oral histories, authenticates the veracity of what Armenians
recall—as does the plain fact that an entire people vanished from their
historical homeland. All that historians have to do, it would seem, is
fill out the context of the events and explain why the Young Turks
treated the Armenians the way they did.
But what dominates the public discourse today is the word “genocide,”
which was devised almost three decades after the Armenian deportations
to designate the destruction not just of people but also of an entire
people. The term is closely associated with the man who invented it,
the Polish-born Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. Lemkin barely escaped
the horror of the Holocaust, which wiped out most of his family in
Poland after he immigrated to the United States. As he would later
explain in a television interview, “I became interested in genocide
because it happened so many times. It happened to the Armenians,
and after the Armenians, Hitler took action.”
Lemkin had a morally courageous vision: to get the concept of genocide enshrined in international law. His tireless lobbying soon paid off:
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in 1948, just four years after he invented the term, the United Nations
adopted the Genocide Convention, a treaty that made the act an international crime. But Lemkin was a more problematic personality than
the noble crusader depicted in modern accounts, such as Samantha
Power’s book A Problem From Hell. In his uncompromising pursuit of his
goal, Lemkin allowed the term “genocide” to be bent by other political agendas. He opposed the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, adopted a
The Armenian genocide
week after the Genocide Convention,
lacks the devastating
fearing that it would distract the internasimplicity of the Holocaust. tional community from preventing future genocides—the goal that he thought
should surpass all others in importance.
And he won the Soviet Union’s backing for the convention after
“political groups” were excluded from the classes of people it protected.
The final definition of “genocide” adopted by the un had several
points of ambiguity, which gave countries and individuals accused of
this crime legal ammunition to resist the charge. For example, Article
2 of the convention defines “genocide” as “acts committed with intent
to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious
group, as such.” The meaning of the words “as such” is far from clear.
And alleged perpetrators often deny that the destruction was “committed
with intent”—an argument frequently made in Turkey.
Soon, however, only a careful few were bothering to refer to the un
convention in evoking the term. In the broader public’s mind, the
association with the Holocaust gave the word “genocide” totemic
power, making it the equivalent of absolute evil. After 1948, the legal
term that had initially been created to deter mass atrocities became an
insult traded between nations and peoples accusing each other of past
and present horrors. The United States and the Soviet Union each
freely accused the other of genocide during the Cold War.
The Armenian diaspora saw the word as a perfect fit to describe what
had happened to their parents and grandparents and began referring
to the Meds Yeghern as “the Armenian genocide.” The concept helped
activate a new political movement. The year 1965 marked both the
50th anniversary of the massacre and the moment when the Armenian
diaspora made seeking justice for the victims a political cause.
In the postwar United States, it was normal practice to put the
words “Armenian” and “genocide” together in the same sentence. This
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usage came with the assumption that the un convention—one of its
first signatories was Turkey—had no retroactive force and therefore
could not provide the basis for legal action related to abuses committed
before 1948. For instance, in 1951, U.S. government lawyers submitted
an advisory opinion on the Genocide Convention to the International
Court of Justice, in The Hague, citing the Turkish massacre of the
Armenians as an instance of genocide. In April 1981, in a proclamation on the Holocaust, U.S. President Ronald Reagan mentioned
“the genocide of the Armenians before it, and the genocide of the
Cambodians which followed it.”
Political circumstances changed this thinking in the 1980s. Reagan
himself performed an abrupt about-face following the 1982 assassination of Kemal Arikan, the Turkish consul general to the United
States, by two young Armenian militants in Los Angeles. The death
of a diplomat of a close nato ally in Reagan’s own home state enraged
and embarrassed the president. He and his team concluded that on
three of the foreign policy issues that concerned them the most—the
Soviet Union, Israel, and terrorism—Turkey was staunchly on the
U.S. side. Armenians, by contrast, were not.
Seven months after the killing of Arikan, the State Department’s
official bulletin published a special issue on terrorism, which included
a piece titled “Armenian Terrorism: A Profile.” A note at the end of the
article said, “Because the historical record of the 1915 events in Asia
Minor is ambiguous, the Department of State does not endorse allegations that the Turkish government committed a genocide against the
Armenian people. Armenian terrorists use this allegation to justify in
part their continuing attacks on Turkish diplomats and installations.”
In response to furious Armenian complaints, the bulletin ended up
publishing not one but two clarifications of that statement. But from
that point on, a new line had been drawn by the executive branch, and
the term “Armenian genocide” was outlawed in the White House.
DEADLOCK ON THE HILL
Congress, meanwhile, was plowing its own furrow. By the 1970s, one
million Armenians lived in the United States. Younger generations
were no longer willing to limit the discussions of their ancestors’ deaths
to Sunday dinners, requiem services, and low-circulation newspapers.
Many Armenian Americans who had political savvy and wealth, such
as the Massachusetts businessman Stephen Mugar, began to lobby
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Congress. They found an ally in the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tip O’Neill, whose congressional district included the
de facto capital of the Armenian American community: Watertown,
Massachusetts. In early 1975, urged on by Mugar and others, O’Neill
managed to get the House to pass a resolution authorizing the
president to designate April 24 of that year as the “National Day of
Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man” and observe it by honoring all victims of genocide, “especially those of Armenian ancestry
who succumbed to the genocide perpetrated in 1915.”
That occasion marked the only time Congress has passed any kind
of resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide. In 1990, the Senate
spent two days in fierce debate over whether April 24 should again be
officially designated as a national day of remembrance, this time of
the “Armenian Genocide of 1915–1923.” Kansas Senator Bob Dole led
the argument in favor of the motion, but opponents managed to block
it. Ever since, with the White House opposed to officially recognizing
the phrase “Armenian genocide,” resolutions of this kind have failed.
They have become an increasingly tired and predictable exercise:
however much historical evidence the Armenian lobbyists produce to
support their case, the Turks play the trump card of national security,
lightly threatening that a yes vote would jeopardize the United States’
continued use of the Incirlik Air Base, which is on Turkish territory, a
key supply hub for U.S. military operations in the region. In 2007,
when one genocide resolution appeared certain to pass the House, no
fewer than eight former secretaries of state intervened with a joint
letter advising Congress to drop the issue—which it ultimately did.
The fight for genocide recognition has now become the raison d’être
for the two dominant Armenian American organizations, the Armenian
Assembly of America and the Armenian National Committee of
America. They do not conceal that the campaign helps them preserve
a collective identity among the Armenian diaspora—an increasingly
assimilated group that is losing other common bonds, such as the
Armenian language and attendance at services of the Armenian
Apostolic Church. But they do not like to admit that the campaign
has also damaged their cause. For many Americans, the phrase
“Armenian genocide” now evokes not a story of terrible human
suffering but an exasperating, eye-roll-inducing tale of lobbying and
congressional bargaining. Inevitably, the need to secure votes for
any given resolution on the topic means that the memory of the
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Ottoman Armenians is cheapened by being tied to other items of
congressional business. What results is routine horse-trading, as in,
“You vote for the farm bill, and I’ll back you on the genocide resolution.”
A few thoughtful Armenians object to such genocide-recognition
lobbying campaigns on the grounds that they turn the deaths of their
grandparents into one big homicide case. They see that their fellow
Armenians are less interested in grieving for the dead than in demonstrating outside the Turkish embassy with pictures of dead bodies—
the more gruesome, the better—and struggling to prove something
that they already know to be true. The obsession with genocide,
argues the French Armenian philosopher Marc Nichanian, “forbids
mourning.”
Armenian campaigners have a point when they contend that their
pursuit of genocide recognition has had the benefit of focusing Turkey’s
mind on an issue that the country would rather have forgotten. But
their campaign has also heightened
Turkish passions, since their efforts have Turkish society has begun
indirectly strengthened the Turkish to revisit the dark pages of
nationalist story line of World War I.
That partial, but not entirely inaccu- its past.
rate, account portrays the great powers
of the time as conspirators plotting to undermine the Ottoman
Empire. Consequently, any resolution passed by a modern great
power condemning Turkey’s historical crimes would only inflame
a sore spot.
Fueling this paranoia, many Turkish policymakers have expressed
their suspicion that a genocide resolution would pave the way for territorial concessions. These fears have little basis in reality. Although
some radical groups, such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation,
continue to make territorial claims, the Republic of Armenia has all
but officially recognized Turkey’s current borders. Reestablishing full
diplomatic relations between the two countries, which have been on
hold since the Armenian-Azerbaijani war in the early 1990s, would
make this recognition formal. No statements made by a political party
that last ruled Armenia in 1920 can change that reality.
As for reparations, it is hard to see how Washington’s adoption of the
word “genocide” would make the case for them. Most international
legal opinions are clear that the un Genocide Convention carries no
retroactive force and therefore could not be invoked to bring claims
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on dispossessed property. Such a scenario is all the more difficult to
imagine because it would trigger a nightmarish relitigation of the whole
of World War I, during which not only Armenians but also Azerbaijanis,
Greeks, Kurds, and Turks were robbed of their possessions in Anatolia,
the Balkans, and the Caucasus. Yet the invocation of the controversial
word still fills Turkey with dread.
A TURKISH THAW
The only good news in this bleak historical tale comes from Turkey
itself. Since the election in 2002 of the post-Kemalist government led by
the Justice and Development Party (known as the akp), in a process
largely unconnected to outside pressure, Turkish society has begun to
revisit some of the dark pages of its past, including the oppression of the
non-Turkish populations of the late Ottoman Empire. This growing
openness has allowed the descendants of forcibly Islamized Armenians to
come out of the shadows, and a few Armenian churches and schools have
reopened. Turkish historians have begun to write about the late Ottoman
period without fear of retribution. And they have finally started to challenge the old dominant narrative, which the historian Berktay has called
“the theory of the immaculate conception of the Turkish Republic.”
From the Armenian standpoint, this opening has been too slow.
But it could hardly have proceeded at a faster pace. As one of the
key figures behind the thaw, the late Istanbul-based Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, pointed out, Turkey had been a closed society for
three generations; it takes time and immense effort to change that.
“The problem Turkey faces today is neither a problem of ‘denial’ or
‘acknowledgement,’” Dink wrote in 2005. “Turkey’s main problem is
‘comprehension.’ And for the process of comprehension, Turkey seriously needs an alternative study of history and for this, a democratic
environment. . . . The society is defending the truth it knows.”
In that spirit, Dink, a stalwart of the left and a confirmed antiimperialist, criticized genocide resolutions in foreign parliaments on
the grounds that they merely replicated previous great-power bullying
of Turkey. He saw his mission as helping Turks understand Armenians
and the trauma they have passed down over generations, while helping Armenians recognize the sensitivities and legitimate interests of
the Turks. Dink’s stand broke both Turkish and Armenian taboos, and
he paid the highest price for his courage: in 2007, he was assassinated
by a young Turkish nationalist.
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The G-Word
Dink’s insights suggest that the word “genocide” may be the correct
term but the wrong solution to the controversy. Simply put, the emotive
power of the word has overpowered Armenian-Turkish dialogue.
No one willingly admits to committing genocide. Faced with this accusation, many Turks (and others in their position) believe that they
are being invited to compare their grandparents to the Nazis.
It may be that the word “genocide” has exhausted itself, and that
the success of Lemkin’s invention has also been its undoing. Lemkin
probably never anticipated that coining a new standard of awfulness would set off an unfortunate
global competition in which nations— The term “genocide” has
from Armenia’s neighbor Azerbaijan to
Sudan and Tibet—vie to get the label grown emotionally fraught
applied to their own tragedies. As and overly legalistic.
the philosopher Tzvetan Todorov has
observed, even though no one wants
to be a victim, the position does confer certain advantages. Groups
that gain recognition as victims of past injustices obtain “a bottomless line of moral credit,” he has written. “The greater the crime in
the past, the more compelling the rights in the present—which are
gained merely through membership in the wronged group.” Conversely, the grandchildren of the alleged perpetrators aspire to absolve
their ancestors of guilt and, by association, of a link to Adolf Hitler
and the Holocaust.
In A Problem From Hell, Power chastised the international community
for its timidity and failure to stop genocides even after this appalling
phenomenon had been named and outlawed. But the problem can be
posed the other way around: Could it be that international actors
hide behind the ambiguities of genocide terminology in order to do
nothing—and that the very power of the word “genocide” and the
responsibilities it invokes deter action? It may be no coincidence that
the first successful prosecution under the un Genocide Convention,
that of a Rwandan war criminal, came only in September 1998, nearly
50 years after the convention was adopted.
In the Armenian case, the phrase “Armenian genocide” has become
customary in the scholarly literature. Those who avoid it today risk
putting themselves in the company of skeptics who minimize the tragedy
or deny it outright. Many progressive Turkish intellectuals, too, now use
the term. Among them are such brave voices as the journalist Hasan
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Cemal, grandson of Ahmed Cemal Pasha, one of the three Young Turkish
leaders who ran the brutal Ottoman government in 1915.
But that does not mean that Meds Yeghern is an inferior and less
expressive phrase. If it becomes more widely used, it might acquire the
same resonance as the words “Holocaust” and “Shoah” have in describing
the fate of the European Jews. There is also the legal term “crimes
against humanity,” first applied in 1915 specifically in reference to the
Armenian massacre. This concept lacks the emotional charge and the
definitional problems of the word “genocide” and covers mass atrocities
not falling under its narrow definition—those in which the perpetrators
may not have intended to eradicate an entire nation but have still
killed an awful lot of innocent people.
The challenge for the United States, then, is not simply to find a
way to once again use the term “Armenian genocide,” a phrase it has
employed before, but to do so while also accepting the limitations of
a concept that has grown emotionally fraught and overly legalistic.
The mere act of using the term, without a deeper engagement with
the history of the Armenians and the Turks, would do little to resolve
the bigger underlying question—namely, how to persuade Turkey to
honor the losses of the Ottoman Armenians and other minorities a
hundred years ago.
Having been a neutral power in 1915, the United States can assert that
it bears no historical grudge against Turkey. Washington can therefore help bring about the rapprochement between the Armenians and
the Turks that Dink advocated. The United States can urge Turkey
to hasten the process of historical reckoning by taking steps to keep
the small Armenian Turkish population from leaving the country, to
conserve what little Armenian cultural heritage survives in Turkey,
and to restore the place of Armenians and other ethnic minorities in
Turkey’s history books.
Armenians need to be able to finally bury their grandparents and
receive an acknowledgment from the Turkish state of the terrible fate
they suffered. These steps toward reconciliation will surely become
more possible as a more open Turkey begins to confront its past as a
whole. If that can be made to happen, everything else will follow.∂
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