February 3, 2022

Armenian Genocide

In all solemnity, on the 24th of April 2022, Armenia honoured the 107th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the first historically recorded state ordered systematic eradication of an entire people.

The definition of the word “Genocide”, as found in the oxford dictionary is: “the murder of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group”. The very notion of an existing desire to destroy an entire nation or group is a very disturbing one as we are talking about not only physical people being murdered, but the need to eradicate any sign of existence of an entire culture, their history, their art, their literature, their music . . .

With the notable exception of Turkey, the perpetuating country, who still denies the very existence of this horrible crime against humanity, leaders from around the world have paid tribute to the memory of the 1,3 million Armenian lives lost between 1915 and 1917. Across the world’s capitals, people joined the Armenian diaspora to deposit flowers and light torches, many marching side by side with their Armenian brothers and sisters to demand recognition of this historical event by Turkey. Internationally, these events were held in an organized and peaceful manner, befitting the occasion, with security forces in many countries praising the Armenian diaspora for their behaviour.

Unfortunately, 107 years later, little has changed. Only 24 years after the Armenian Genocide, the Nazis perpetuated a similar action on the Slavic, Tzigane and Jewish people. 79 years later, the Serbian Army inflicted genocide in a crumbling Yugoslavia only to be followed, only one year later, by the Rwandan genocide. Similarly to the world’s half-hearted condemnation of the eradication of the Palestinian, Rohingya or the Uyghur people, today, western leaders hesitate to label the atrocities happening in Ukraine as “Genocide” to avoid being dragged into a face-to-face military conflict with the Russia military.

In the last 107 years, the same nationalistic motivations behind such criminal regimes’ desires to create racially homogenous “or pure” societies continue to exist. Erasing all trace of the existence of those people whose culture, beliefs or values stand in the way of your political agenda remains a policy adopted in the world and condemned when convenient and ignored when not.

Hitler was heard to have said to his followers: “Go ahead, kill – Who after all still remembers now the extermination of the Armenians?” This haunting thought is the last quote you see when you leave the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan, and history since has only proven him right.