Who, After All, Speaks Today of the Annihilation of the Armenians?

By John Kiriakou, Reader Supported News

27 April 17

eople of Armenian descent commemorated this week the 101st anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Empire’s systematic extermination of as many as 1.5 million ethnic Armenians in what is now Turkey. Tens of thousands of Greeks, Kurds, Pontians, and Assyrians also were killed. Modern-day Turks deny that any such event ever took place. They claim only that Armenians were “deported” in the fog of World War I and that they died of disease and starvation.

But American consular officials in Turkey at the time reported on what they described as “a campaign of race extermination” in a telegram to the State Department. Indeed, U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau Sr. wrote, “When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”

Even the successive governments of modern Turkey have taken a hard line against non-ethnic Turks. The Greek community, which numbered 200,000 in 1920, is now around 1,200. Turkey’s ethnic Greeks had to endure events like the “Great Population Transfer of 1922,” what the Greeks call “The Disaster of 1922,” when Turkey expelled nearly the entire Greek community. Greeks are not permitted to repair churches without government approval, which never comes; they are not permitted to educate their children using the Greek language; and, most importantly for many in the community, the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church, the “first among equals” of all Orthodox Christian patriarchs and the leader of more than 200 million Orthodox Christians around the world, must, by law, be a Turkish citizen. The problem there is that the Turkish government does not allow Greek Orthodox Christians to educate new priests, and so there are no more young priests with Turkish citizenship.

The Turks are, in effect, wiping out the entire community. It’s exactly what they’ve done to the Armenians, the Kurds, and others.

That gets us back to the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. President Donald Trump this week elected to ignore it. The statement that came out of the White House never even mentioned the word “genocide.” The head of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), released a statement complaining that Trump had “chosen to enforce Ankara’s gag rule against American condemnation and commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. In failing to properly mark April 24th, President Trump is effectively outsourcing U.S. genocide-prevention policy to Recep Tayip Erdogan, an arrogant and authoritarian dictator who clearly enjoys the public spectacle of arm-twisting American presidents into silence on Turkey’s mass murder of millions of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and other Christians.”

This isn’t on just Trump. Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush all also declined to commemorate the genocide out of fear of angering the Turkish government and Washington’s powerful Turkish lobby. There was precedent for commemoration, though. President Ronald Reagan did so in 1981, and Congress passed resolutions doing the same in 1996, 1984, and 1975.

This may seem like low-level diplomatic silliness over an event that happened before almost everybody in the world was born. But it’s much more important than that.

This was the first genocide of the 20th century. It set the stage for other genocides to follow. Adolph Hitler said on August 22, 1939, in reference to his invasion of Poland, “I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for the present only in the east—with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the space which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

After the Armenians came the Poles, the Jews, the Roma, the gays, the Russians, the Chinese, the Bosnians, the Rwandans, and others. Wouldn’t a commemoration of such a catastrophic event perhaps remind others that these actions are never acceptable and will never be forgotten? Isn’t it worth the stroke of a president’s pen? I think it is.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.

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