To Honor the 50th Anniversary of the U.N.
Genocide Convention
We Commemorate the
Armenian Genocide of 1915
and Condemn the Turkish Government's
Denial of this Crime Against Humanity
On April 24, 1915, the Young Turk government of the Ottoman
Empire began a systematic, premeditated genocide of the Armenian
people — an unarmed Christian minority living under Turkish rule.
More than a million Armenians were exterminated through
direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches.
Another million fled into permanent exile. Thus an ancient
civilization was expunged from its homeland of 2,500 years.
The Armenian Genocide was the most dramatic human rights issue
of the time and was reported regularly in newspapers across the
U.S. The Armenian Genocide is abundantly documented by
Ottoman court-martial records, by hundreds of thousands of
documents in the archives of the United States and nations around
the world, by eyewitness reports of missionaries and diplomats, by
the testimony of survivors, and by eight decades of historical
scholarship.
After 83 years the Turkish government continues to deny the
genocide of the Armenians by blaming the victims and
undermining historical fact with false rhetoric. Books about the
genocide are banned in Turkey. The words "Armenian" and "Greek" are
nonexistent in Turkish descriptions of ancient or Christian
artifacts and monuments in Turkey. Turkey's efforts to sanitize its
history now include the funding of chairs in Turkish studies — with
strings attached — at American universities.
It is essential to remember that...
- When Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in
1944 he cited the 1915 annihilation of the Armenians as a seminal
example of genocide.
- The European Parliament, the Association of Genocide Scholars,
the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Jerusalem), and the
Institute for the Study of Genocide (NYC) have reaffirmed the
extermination of the Armenians by the Turkish government as
genocide by the definition of the 1948 United Nations
Genocide Convention.
Denial of genocide strives to reshape history in order to
demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators. Denial
of genocide is the final stage of genocide. It is what Ellie
Weisel has called a "double killing". Denial murders the
dignity of the survivors and seeks to destroy remembrance of the
crime. In a century plagued by genocide, we affirm the moral
necessity of remembering.
We denounce as morally and intellectually corrupt the Turkish
government's denial of the Armenian genocide. We condemn
Turkey's manipulation of the American government and American
institutions for the purpose of denying the Armenian genocide.
We urge our government officials, scholars, and the media to
refrain from using evasive or euphemistic terminology to appease
the Turkish government; we ask them to refer to the 1915
annihilation of the Armenians as genocide.
This statement has been signed by more than 150 distinguished
scholars and writers, including:
K. Anthony Appiah
Professor of Afro-American Studies & Philosophy, Harvard
University.
Michael Arlen
Writer
James Axtell
Professor History, College of William & Mary
Ben Bagdikian
Former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of
California at Berkeley
Houston Baker
Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Peter Balakian
Writer; Professor of English, Colgate University
Mary Catherine Bateson
Clarence J. Robinson Professor in English & Anthropology,
George Mason University
Yehuda Bauer
Professor of Holocaust Studies, Hebrew University, Jerusalem
Robert N. Bellah
Elliott Professor of Sociology, University of California,
Berkeley
Norman Birnbaum
University Professor, Georgetown University
Peter Brooks
Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University
Robert McAfee Brown
Professor of Theology and Ethics Emeritus, Pacific School of
Religion
Christopher Browning
Professor of History, Pacific Lutheran University
Frank Chalk
Professor of History, Concordia University
Israel W. Charny
Director, Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem
Ward Churchill
Associate Professor of American Indian Studies, University of
Colorado
Rev. William Sloane Coffin
Pastor Emeritus, Riverside Church, N.Y.C.
Vahakn Dadrian
Director, Genocide Study Project, H.F. Guggenheim Foundation
David Brion Davis
Sterline Professor of History, Yale University
James Der Derian
Professor of Political Science, University of Massachusetts
Marjorie Housepian Dobkin
Writer
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics,
University of Chicago Divinity School
Kai Erikson
Professor of Sociology, Yale University
Craig Etcheson
Acting Director, Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale University
Helen Fein
Executive Director, Institute for the Study of Genocide, John Jay
College of Criminal Justice
Lawrence J. Friedman
Professor of History, Indiana University
William Gass
David May Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Washington
University
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Professor of Afro-American Studies, Harvard University.
Carol Gilligan
Patricia Albjerg Graham Professor of Gender Studies, Harvard
University
Langdon Gilkey
Kennedy Distinguished Visiting Professor of Theology, Georgetown
University.
Daniel Goldhagen
Associate Professor of Government & Social Studies, Harvard
University
Sandor Goodhart
Director of Jewish Studies, Purdue University
Vigen Guroian
Professor of Theology and Ethics, Loyola College
Geoffrey Hartman
Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University
Seamus Hearney
Harvard University; Nobel Laureate for Literature
Judith Herman
Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Raul Hilberg
Professor of Political Science Emeritus, University of Vermont
Richard G. Hovannisian
Professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History, UCLA
Kurt Jonahsson
Professor of Sociology, Concordia University
Alfred Kazin
Writer, Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus, CUNY Graduate
Center
Steven Kepnes
Director of Jewish Studies, Professor of Religion, Colgate
University
Ben Kiernan
Professor of History, Yale University
Robert Jay Lifton
Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, John Jay
College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate School of the City
University of New York
Deborah E. Lipstadt
Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies, Emory
University
Norman Mailer
Writer
Eric Markusen
Professor of Sociology, Southwest State University, Minnesota
Robert Melson
Professor of Political Science, Purdue University
Saul Medlovitz
Dag Hammarskjold Professor of Law, Rutgers University
W.S. Merwin
Wrtier
Arthur Miller
Writer
Henry Morgenthau III
Writer
George L. Mosse
Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Hebrew
University, Jerusalem
Joyce Carol Oates
Writer
Grace Paley
Writer
Harold Pinter
Writer
Robert A. Pois
Professor of History, University of Colorado
Francis B. Randall
Professor of History, Sarah Lawrence College
Nicholas V. Riasanovsky
Sidney Hellman Professor of European History, University of
California, Berkeley
Leo P. Ribuffo
Professor of History, George Washington University
David Riesman
Henry Ford II Professor of Social Science, Harvard University
Nathan A. Scott
William R. Kenan Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus,
University of Virginia
Christopher Simpson
Professor of Communications, American University
Roger Smith
Professor of Government, College of William & Mary
Susan Sontag
Wirter
Wloe Soyinka
Nobel Laureate, Woodruff Professor of the Arts, Emory
University
Max L. Stackhouse
Stephen Colwell Professor of Christian Ethics, Princeton
Theological Seminary
Charles B. Strozier
Professor of History, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The
Graduate Center, City University of New York
Rose Styron
Writer; former Chair Freedom to Write Committee, PEN American
Center
William Styron
Writer
Ronald Suny
Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago
Raymond Tanter
Professor of Political Science, University of Michigan
D.M. Thomas
Writer
John Updike
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut
Writer
Derek Walcott
Professor of English, Boston University; Nobel Laureate for
Literature
Cornel West
Professor of Philosophy & Religion, and Afro-American Studies,
Harvard University
Howard Zinn
Professor Emeritus of History, Boston University
