Raffi K. Hovannisian: Armenia’s Stand: Justice At Home, Justice Abroad
[Raffi K. Hovannisian, Armenia’s first foreign minister, currently represents the Heritage Party in parliament.]
We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional, and it is better to speak now.
Armenia, that ancient civilization deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order. Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate expectations of the international partnership....
Armenia and its people the world over shall never forget the great Genocide and the dispossession of their homeland. They cannot be expected, through protocols or other avenues of persuasion, to ratify their loss or to legitimize the fruits of genocide. These include an illegal de facto boundary negotiated by the Bolsheviks and Turkish Nationalists, the destruction of a thousand years worth of cultural heritage and architectural treasures, the mass expropriation of homes, schools, academies and other properties, and an abiding official escape from responsibility into the annals of schizophrenic denialism.
There is a growing current in Turkish society which seeks to look their history in the eye and thus to recast the exclusivist foundations of their state. They should be embraced and supported in their long-overdue self-discovery, just as the Turkish family who in 1915 saved my grandmother’s life by risking their own should find their due in the textbooks of tomorrow.
As with the Holocaust and the liberating leadership of postwar Germany, acknowledgment must beget atonement which, if anchored in truth, will lead to redemption, restitution, a right of return to a national home, and ultimate reconciliation between the Armenian and Turkish nations....
Read entire article at Foreign Policy Journal
We are at the brink of a pair of wars, civil and regional, and it is better to speak now.
Armenia, that ancient civilization deprived by the tragedies of yore of its capacity for contemporary statecraft, needs immediately to put its house in democratic order. Finally responsible for its own record, it also has legitimate expectations of the international partnership....
Armenia and its people the world over shall never forget the great Genocide and the dispossession of their homeland. They cannot be expected, through protocols or other avenues of persuasion, to ratify their loss or to legitimize the fruits of genocide. These include an illegal de facto boundary negotiated by the Bolsheviks and Turkish Nationalists, the destruction of a thousand years worth of cultural heritage and architectural treasures, the mass expropriation of homes, schools, academies and other properties, and an abiding official escape from responsibility into the annals of schizophrenic denialism.
There is a growing current in Turkish society which seeks to look their history in the eye and thus to recast the exclusivist foundations of their state. They should be embraced and supported in their long-overdue self-discovery, just as the Turkish family who in 1915 saved my grandmother’s life by risking their own should find their due in the textbooks of tomorrow.
As with the Holocaust and the liberating leadership of postwar Germany, acknowledgment must beget atonement which, if anchored in truth, will lead to redemption, restitution, a right of return to a national home, and ultimate reconciliation between the Armenian and Turkish nations....