The Armenian Genocide Bill: The Right Move At The Wrong Time
The Armenians are a people with a prominent place on the long list of those shafted by history. They may consider, as Congress wavers on an Armenian genocide resolution so tantalizingly close, that they are about to get it again.
Like others in their ancestral neighborhood, the Armenians are a proud people who consider themselves to represent the ancient origins of man and civilization. In their case, direct descent from Noah, who landed his ark on their sacred mountain of Ararat, currently and regrettably located on the wrong side of the Turkish border. They will also proudly tell you that they were the first to adopt Christianity as a state religion in 301 A.D. And that more or less ever since, they’ve waged a rearguard action for Christianity and western civilization.
Armenia once stretched from the Mediterranean to the Caspian. Today, there is an Armenia of memory and dreams, preserved and nurtured in multi-generational exile in California, Massachusetts, France and Lebanon. Actual Armenia is a wretchedly poor rump state, landlocked, wedged between enemies in Turkey and Azerbaijan, with unstable Georgia to the north and pariah Iran to the south, a survivor of the highly successful Turkish ethnic cleansing campaign of 1915-22, and a victim of the Soviet political and economic oppression that followed.
It is a tortured history. The Armenians have been fighting for a very long time, often without friends, in a part of the world where it is sometimes necessary to choose one’s allies and one’s enemies according to the circumstances as they present themselves. Their experience has made them tough, bitter, resourceful and determined, a people not to be trifled with. It has also made them very practical.
Consider the example of General Dro.
Drastamat “Dro” Kanayan was born during an earthquake in 1884, an Armenian in what is now eastern Turkey. He was buried in exile in a New England blizzard in 1956. In 2000, accompanying the party that brought his exhumed remains home, I witnessed his final triumphal return amid hail and the crash of lightning to Bash Abaran, the scene of his 1918 rout of a Turkish division.
Dro started his career as a terrorist, fighting the Russian occupiers of eastern Armenia. By 21, he had committed three political assassinations — two Russian officials and one Armenian collaborator. But in 1914, he chose the Russians over the Turks as the lesser of two evils. Czar Nicholas would later decorate him for bravery.
“I am a soldier,” Dro is reported to have said as he prepared to join the Russian army to fight the Turks. “I know nothing about politics. But I am convinced that this will be the last and decisive battle. Freedom or death. And I also have a feeling that many of us will not return from the battlefield. Great work requires many victims.”
Dro’s lifelong concern was Armenia’s survival. Who he aligned himself with and how he might feel about them was secondary to the needs of his people in the moment. Because he had no other choice. Czarist Russians against Ottoman Turks. German Nazis against Soviet Russians. Turkish-allied Americans against the Soviet Union. Dro had to make his calculations and make his choices in a life spent at war.
So Dro threw his lot with his erstwhile enemies, the Russians. By 1918, Russia was involved in its own revolution and Armenia was left to defend itself against the Turks. Dro is noted in Armenian history for insisting forcefully that Armenia sacrifice territory to Turkey — including his own hometown of Igdir — so that the outnumbered Armenian troops could consolidate on a smaller front and save something of Armenia.
Then, as the Turkish army advanced and Armenia’s politicians in Yerevan considered capitulating before they were overrun, Dro demanded that the army be allowed to fight until the end. The Turks were routed weeks later in two key battles, one of which was fought by Dro and his men.
In the last days of May 1918, the roads over the mountain passes leading to Yerevan were clogged with thousands of desperate refugees and bedraggled Armenian soldiers, retreating ahead of the Turkish army. Armenian officer Arthur Ayvazian described chaos, panic, death and starvation.
“Men, women, children, babies, deserting Armenian soldiers in military uniforms, cows, donkeys, carts, etc., were all together in one solid mass, going nowhere,” he wrote. “I saw … hungry Armenian refugees, mostly women, with sunken eyes and cheeks, bent over, like a herd of sheep, plucking green grass with their fingers and eating it. …I saw the bodies of dead babies wrapped in rags.”
Turkish forces were closing in on Yerevan from the west in a three-pronged attack at Sardarabad to the south, the mountain pass at Bash Abaran in the center, and Karakilisa farther north, according to UCLA professor Richard Hovannisian and other sources. Armenian forces managed to halt the southern Turkish advance at Sardarabad on May 22.
At Abaran, Dro, then 33, commanded a brigade of about 3,000 Russian-trained regulars and guerrillas. On May 25, he sent his cavalry against the Turkish line near the village of Knodakhsaz. But where they had expected to find a regiment of Turks, they found a division of 10,000. Dro’s cavalry were pushed back with heavy losses.
On May 26, the Turks counterattacked with a pincer movement, attempting to encircle Dro’s smaller force. His men dug in and held along a line of villages. Dro, known for his fearlessness as a military leader, is said to have used the cover of a sleet storm to personally reconnoiter the Turkish positions and rearrange his own troops.
On May 28, he lured the Turks into the open. He had concealed the arrival of 1,700 reinforcements, which he sent forward in a furious assault.
“Half the cavalry was slaughtered,” said Martin Kanayan, the general’s son. “But when the cavalry charged them, even though they lost so many, it terrified the Turks and broke their line.
“After they had repelled the Turks, his comment was, `My sons, my brothers. There is no way you can stop and rest. You have to keep pushing them over the horizon,’” Dro’s son said. The routed Turks abandoned equipment and weapons as they fled. Dro’s troops recaptured Bash Abaran May 29, securing the route to Yerevan and sending the Turks in full retreat.
The news of the victories lifted the spirits of the refugees and inspired soldiers further up the line, leading to a successful push against the northern Turkish advance at Karakilisa.
“It was a beautiful spring evening, but the road was covered with disorganized soldiers, covered with mud, tired and dispirited. The endless row of wagons of refugees, horsemen here and there, a cannon on wheels, cries, noise, confusion,” recalled one veteran, quoted by Hovannisian. “But then suddenly the news and everyone listening emotionally to news that our side had crushed the enemy. … Excitement and joy for those tired and depressed people. `Our boys have triumphed, we have defeated them.’ … It was a miracle.”
Within two years, that miracle had expired. At the age of 35, Dro began a lifelong exile after the Soviets invaded his briefly independent Armenia, ending up in Romania by the start of World War II.
Turkish critics, who accuse Dro of a long list of war crimes, have slammed him for collaborating with the Germans after they occupied Romania. A fierce anti-communist, promised of a free Armenia by the Nazis, Dro raised and led an Armenian force that was part of the German Army on the Russian Front. Armenian scholars say he was not a Nazi and claim he used his influence among the Germans to save captured Red Army Armenians from Nazi death camps.
By Dro’s bier in Yerevan in 2000, I met an old Soviet Red Army veteran, there to pay his respects to the forceful Armenian in a German uniform who he said intervened to save him, when Germans had ordered him shot in the Ukraine in 1944.
“He saved my life. What else can I say,” said Arutyun Sevoyan, 78, his chest full of Soviet medals. “I have tears of happiness, of joy, to see Dro’s body returned to his homeland. He was a god who saved my life, and those of 5,000 to 7,000 other Armenians. Dro was a hero then and always will be in my eyes.”
Dro himself was later saved from Soviet imprisonment and probable death when Allied intelligence officers, with whom he is said to have maintained contact during the war, spirited him to America and allegedly employed him as an agent in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.
America, Armenia’s best hope, was ironically allied with Armenia’s old enemy, Turkey, against a new common enemy, the Soviet Union. Dro’s reburial in free Armenia in 2000 did not just honor his victory over the Turks that allowed what is left of Armenia to exist. It represented a final triumph over the Soviets and not least a triumph over bitter political divisions within the larger Armenian diaspora.
Dro’s is a tale of resourcefulness, determination, brinksmanship and practical compromise in a war that never ended, with only partial victories and few satisfactions.
Recognition of the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians and the theft of their property by the Turks remains a burning issue for Armenians today. Armenians in Nagorno Karabagh have fought bitter war to hold Armenian lands against the Turkic Azeris as recently as the 1990s.
Armenians are justified in their frustration and anger over the world’s failure to acknowledge the murderous injury they suffered, and Turkey’s absurd denials and prosections that continue to this day, and have campaigned long and hard for the United States and other nations to address that.
Many in Congress are recognizing, however, that in the bad neighborhood that is the Middle East, America has an ongoing war of its own, and needs to choose its enemies carefully. The Armenian genocide is, outside Turkey, universally accepted history, and Turkey only makes itself look foolish by denying it. But Turkey is a vital supply route for the U.S. military in Iraq, and there are also highly sensitive issues surrounding Kurdish rebels use of Iraqi territory in their guerrilla war against the Turks. Revisiting the more sordid aspects of Turkish history, some congressmen are beginning to recognize, may run counter to vital American interests in time of war.
War supply issues aside, current events may have superceded Congress’ moral concerns. Kurdish separatist attacks and the Turkish military response in the last few days have raised the specter of a new combat zone in a formerly quiet corner of Iraq. It’s a prospect that may have sobered even the Democratic-led United States Congress, notoriously unconcerned about the consequences of its actions regarding Iraq.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had said she would go ahead with a vote on the Armenian Genocide resolution, but late last week was said to be wavering in the face of opposition. Her poor choice of enemies in this case is now being called one of her greatest missteps.
Questions have been raised about the extent to which Pelosi’s desire for Armenian justice is a principled moral stand, as opposed to an underhanded effort to undercut a war she has not been able to influence the progress of the war more directly. If that is the case, it is beyond ironic that Pelosi would risk new hazards for American soldiers, and pursue a course toward enabling a new genocide in Iraq, through a symbolic assignment of blame on the murders of 90 years ago. Given Pelosi’s earlier efforts to boost Syria, an overt adversary of the United States, it is heartening to see her own party’s membership apparently acting as a check on her dangerously poor judgment. It is probably too much to hope that Pelosi, having made a poor choice of enemies, risks losing allies.
But Armenians themselves may want to consider whether it advances their cause to expect Americans in time of war to act against America’s interest on their symbolic behalf. The blood of Armenian genocide victims does cry out for recognition. But the example of their own hero suggests that each day is another day, each battle another battle, and you have to choose your allies and your enemies carefully.
Read more from Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement.
Well said and thanks for the history lesson.
“Questions have been raised about the extent to which Pelosi’s desire for Armenian justice is a principled moral stand, as opposed to an underhanded effort to undercut a war she has not been able to influence the progress of the war more directly.”
This is not a conscious decision by Pelosi. One would do well to read James Burnham’s Suicide of the West. Subconsciously, the leftists are driven to destroy their own society. They despise its alleged racism and overall vileness. It is far deemed better to bring about a new utopia out of the ashes of the past best forgotten.
I wish Congress would instead reflect on the United State’s failure to accept a League of Naiton’s Mandate for the fledlging Armenian State in 1920.
Gen Harbord cited one reason why the US should in his report on return from his mission to Armenia,
Harbord’s 14th point,
14. Here is a man’s job that the world says can be better done by America than by any other. America can afford the money; she has the men; no duty to her own people would suffer; her traditional policy of isolation did not keep her from successful participation in the Great War. Shall it be said that our country lacks the courage to take up new and difficult duties?
We didn’t stand up to the job then and it’s worth asking why.
Oh really?? so there is a right time and a wrong time to speak up against genocide?? Mass murder??? Would anyone say that about the holocaust???? How can speaking the truth be bad for national security? Oh, so we pick and choose which crimes against humanity we will denounce according to our political interest.
To the silly right, it’s this brainless administeration that continually lies to the public and uses the constitution like toilet paper. I’m no demacrat or republican but if George W. is the poster child for the right I want no part of it. He got us in this mess in iraq crying wolf and now there is no end in sight. And he still wants us to to do the turkish dog and pony show and keep the sham, that no Armenian genocide occured in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. In so doing WE LOSE ALL OF OUR MORAL Credability. The Armenian Genocide is a fact and needs to be ackowledged NOW as such. Since when do we give in to Genocide perpetrators????
so there is a right time and a wrong time to speak up against genocide?? Mass murder???
yes, HT there is a right time.
That time is when the costs do not outweigh the benefits.
And Nancy Pelosi has clearly chosen a time when the costs far outweigh the benefit.
I rest my case. A lousy speaker, and an even worse secretary of state.
Bravo!
It’s worth pointing out that Armenia has been one of Russia’s only stalwart allies as it hurtles into a neo-Soviet abyss. This means that Armenia is supporting Russia as it funds and arms Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran (not to mention Venezuela). So it’s hardly an innocent victim in all this; if Armenia wants the West to take its interests seriously, then perhaps it should start taking the West’s interests that seriously.
Krauthammer has argued that Pelosi is only doing this to drive stalwart Turkey out of the Bush camp and create failure conditions in Iraq. If so, that’s treason.
http://publiuspundit.com/2007/10/that_woman_behind_the_armenian.php
You would be in favor of it if Nancy Pelosi was not the one pushing this bill through Congress. Turkey is gone now. Unless there is a military coup, Turkey is now in the hands of Islamists.
No, I would not be in favor of making a moral pronouncement of an event that happened almost 100 years ago. Not even if Ronald Reagan or FDR were pushing it thru Congress (non-partisan!)
I want Congress to take care of this country, not get on their moral highhorse. Look in the mirror first type of thing.
It is exactly these type of hypocracy that sustains the armenian allegations. In the whole story of about “Dro” the butcher the author choose a specific line of presenting armenian position on every possible point – whatever armenians did was justified.
Armenians 1918 were occupying Azerbaijany capital of Baki. In just this city they killed 30 azerbaijanies in the March of 1918. This authors does not mentioned that. She does not mentioned that Armenia currently occupies about %20 of Azerbaijan and has made %10 of Azerbaijanies refugees. It is type of lobbyst that give the armenians hopes in their aggressions. How carefully she has chosen her presentation of Dro to call sympathy to her payers.
No matter how I weigh it, I can only reach one conclusion with two possibilities for it: Either the amateur foreign policy maven and her henchmen brought the Aremnian issue to committee without realizing its consequences to the U.S. position in the Middle East and our vulnerabilities in Iraq, or she brought it with full knowledge of both. In the first instance the Pelosi led shadow state department is filled with idiots and incompetent; in the second it is both vile and guilty of treason. Either way, this country cannot afford to have these buffons running our foreign policy.
We need Turkey, like we need Pakistan. I’d love to pass this resolution someday, when Turkey isn’t necessary for our interests.
Armenians – Wait for us to finish up in Iraq, then we can talk.
Nancy Pelosi is an icon of stupid moves. With her it is darn near impossible to say what her motivations were…some say it was the Armenian American campaign contributions in her district. Here, in California’s mostly conservative Central Valley, we have a Republican Congressman, George Radanovich, who co-sponsored the bill.
He was on radio KMJ AM, a 50k watt talk-show powerhouse out of Fresno, touting how good this bill was on a Monday, and it all blew up in his face within the next two days. Radanovich said on radio, “It’s the 1st time I have agreed with Nancy Pelosi.” Radanovich further stated the Turks would get over it in 3 weeks time and all would return to normal”.
How naive, but it would be even more naive of me to believe that Radanovich did not partner with Pelosi on this due to the numerous wealthy Armenian Americans in his district. Proving once more, people can be bought and suckered, even the very naive Congressman George Radanovich (R-CA).
Your Right. We shouldn’t recognize the holocaust either. After all it happened almost 70 years ago. Why keep “insulting” the Germans?…… Seriously, just a reminder to all, the Armenain genocide Resolution was a bipartisan bill endorsed by both republicans and democrats to officially recognize the first genocide of the 20th century. Mrs. Pelosi has been an advocate on this most important human right issue for 20 years. Unlike George Bush who promised the Armenian community to acknowledge the Armenain genocide before being elected, but now has no problems flip flopping and cowars to the genocidal denialist, anti-american, anti-semetic “sudo tukish ally” who after the US gave 26 Billion US tax payer dollars, didn’t let our troops go through. Turkey is no ally. THEY JUST WANT U.S. TAX PAYER DOLLARS. Tukey isn’t going anywhere. And I say no one country is worth our country lying for them especially about genocide…The right time to speak against genocide is NOW!
IT IS A BIG LIE
There is a legitimate historical controversy concerning the interpretation of the events in question and most of the scholars who have propounded a contra genocide viewpoint are of the highest calibre and repute, including Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, David Fromkin, Justin McCarthy, Guenther Lewy, Norman Stone, Kamuran Gürün, Michael Gunter, Gilles Veinstein, Andrew Mango, Roderic Davidson, J.C. Hurwitz, William Batkay, Edward J. Erickson and Steven Katz.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. A good number of well-respected scholars recognize the deportation decision in 1915, taken under World War I conditions, as a security measure to stop the Armenians from co-operating with the foreign forces invading Anatolia.
On the legal aspect, the elements of the genocide crime are strictly defined and codified by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Genocide, adopted by the General Assembly on 9 December 1948. However, Armenians, claiming that “the evidence is so overwhelming”, so far have failed to submit even one credible evidence of genocide.
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You are obviously a very biased person. You forgot to mention that Armenians rebelled in Eastern Turkey were they were a numerical minority (17%) which is the reason why Armenians were expelled in the first place. Similarly, you forgot to mention that during those rebellions your “hero” Dro Kanayan slaughtered thousands of Muslim (Turkish, Azerbaijani, Kurdish, Circassian, etc.) women and children during WWI. If you read his memoirs, you would see that he took great pride in such actions-which he describes in grusome detail!
As if calling expulsion “genocide” and calling terrorists “heroes” weren’t enough, you seem to justify Armenian occupation of 20% of Azerbaijan’s territory including Karabakh. Not surprisingly, you forgot to mention the +35,000 Azerbaijani Turk civilians killed in 1992 because of that occupation -a real genocide. Nor did you mention the +1,000,000 Azeri refugees created by Armenian terror. Instead of describing the whole story truthfully, you chose to engage in propaganda and lies.
oh boy, Republicans don’t know what they are supporting it seems.
The Turks don’t want to admit to the genocide of the Armenians because they continue to practice genocide against the Kurds at the moment. Hundreds of Kurds are quietly killed every year out of the limelight by the Turks and yet no one cares so when the Kurds rebel against the torture and killing machine…we are supposed to call the Kurds ‘terrorists’.
Just to get the Grey Wolves howling I’ll add that the ‘Turks’ are late comers to Asia Minor. Armenians and Greeks were there before them…it was with Genghis Khan their Mongol leader with whom the Turks fought with out of Central Asia that Turks were able to conquer Asia Minor…and then the Ottomon Empire with it’s torture sessions controlled much of the Near East and Greece and the Balkins with an Iron Hand using techniques out of the Middle Ages. This Medieval idea of using torture and violence is too much with the Turks of today. Which is why so much violence continues there. the EU is having second thoughts about Turkey as a result. And the recent occupation of Cyprus is another reason to not support Turkish imperialism.
also, Azerbaijan attacked Armenia first, not the other way around.. and salute to the poor country of Armenia in protecting their people from a possible Turkish genocide from the East as well as from the West.