Letter to Editor of the TLS in Response to the Review of The Burning Tigris by TLS (published in TLS)
by Mr. Raffi Sarkissian - Chairman of CRAG - 22 September 2004
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Dear Madam / Sir:
Reference The definition by Andrew Mango on p13 of the TLS for the week of 17 September 2004 reviewing Peter Balakian's The Burning Tigris on the Armenian Genocide.
It is truly dishonest that some writers choose selectively their references or sources when attempting to deny the historical veracity of the Armenian Genocide. To every 'denier', whether past or present, there are many more historians, academicians, researchers and eyewitness accounts both in the UK and elsewhere who confirm the truth of the murder of Armenians in such vast numbers and with such barbarous methods.
The malevolent intent with which Ottoman Turkey prosecuted the extermination of Armenians during WWI conforms also with the definition of the UN Convention on Genocide of 1948. It is significant that Raphael Lemkin [Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the term 'genocide' with reference to the 'systematic elimination of a mass of a race or a nation'] refers also to the Armenian case in his unpublished writings at the Archives at the New York Public Library.
Was it not Hans Wangenheim, German ambassador to Turkey whose government was the principal ally of Turkey, who reported in a confidential cable to Berlin that the Turkish government 'is really pursuing the aim of destroying the Armenian race' and that there has never been any historical doubt that the Turkish government tried to exterminate its Armenian population in the first years of WWI?
Taner Akçam, a Turkish research scholar in Hamburg, referred to the dynamics of the genocide when he wrote, "If you want 'to understand' and analyse collectively committed cruelty, and you wish to prevent the repetition of such events, then you will not find a solution if you direct your attention primarily to the group of 'victims'. Attention must be directed to the 'perpetrators' in order to uncover a series of 'conscious or unconscious' mechanisms which underlie their actions, for it is the activation of these mechanisms that makes these people 'perpetrators'" (Akçam, 1995, p353)
When such sadly vacuous attempts are made in the name of critical erudition, the cogent points of a review regrettably lose their impact too. I condemn any miscreant attempt to deny the genocide of any one people by another, and refer to Professor Israel W Charny that 'the denial of genocide is a crucial symbolic and ideological process which not only follows every genocide after it has taken place, but is a process which is intended to desensitise and make possible the emergence of new forms of genocidal violence to peoples in the future (Charny, 1992a, 1999).
Is it not high time for scholars to express honest views without singing from the hymn sheets of politicians?
Yours Truly,
Raffi Sarkissian, Chair, CRAG - London