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The Holocaust Few Remember

IMAGINE IF a producer from National Public Radio invited a scholar to speak about his new book on the Jewish Holocaust and then, to provide "balance," included another guest known for denying that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews.

Inconceivable, right?

Yet this is analogous to what happened to Peter Balakian, a professor of American Studies at Colgate University and author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response (HarperCollins, 2003) -- a gripping and evocative account of the 1915 genocide of more than a million Armenian people at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.

As soon as his book appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, Balakian received a flood of invitations to speak about what some have called "the hidden holocaust."

One NPR producer, however, insisted on inviting another guest to present the Turkish "perspective" that no genocide ever occurred. Balakian declined the invitation.

Unfortunately,much of the American media still thinks that the Armenian genocide is subject to debate. Until recently, many American newspapers wrote about the "alleged" Armenian genocide or felt obliged to give equal weight to Turkey's denial of this grotesque crime.

To counter such historical inaccuracy, in June 1998 the Association of Genocide Scholars unanimously defined this event as the 20th century's first genocide. Two years later, 126 Holocaust scholars, including Elie Wiesel -- awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his lifelong effort to bear witness to genocide -- published a petition in the New York Times affirming "the incontestable fact of the Armenian genocide."

Denial of the Armenian genocide didn't always exist in this country. Before World War I, Americans knew exactly what had occurred. During the 1890s, American reformers launched a human-rights campaign to protest repeated massacres of the Armenian people. In September 1895, the New York Times headlined a story as "Another Armenian Holocaust." During 1915, that paper published 145 articles about the mass murder of the Armenian people, describing the massacre as "systematic, "authorized" and "organized by the government." In 1918, Theodore Roosevelt called it "the greatest crime of the war."

The rest of the world also knew what had happened. In May 1915, the Allies conceived of the term "crimes against humanity" to describe the Ottoman government's massacres of the Armenian people. When the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in the 1940s, he said that his definition was based on what the Armenian people had suffered.

So what cast such a cloud of uncertainty over the Armenian genocide?

The short answer is: oil and military bases.

After World War I, the United States's drive for oil in the Middle East resulted in an alliance with the new Turkish republic. Even though post-war Ottoman military confessions and American eyewitness accounts provided indisputable proof of the genocide, Turkey waged a systematic campaign to erase the Armenian genocide from historical memory.

During the Cold War, Turkey gained even greater leverage to promote its denial when it became a strategic site for American and NATO military bases.

As Rabbi Matthew Berkowitz recently wrote in the Jerusalem Post, "The government of Turkey has been waging a campaign of denial involving threats [to close military bases], political bullying, coercion and an unabashed assault on truth. Successive administrations of the United States have succumbed to pressure, preventing the passage of legislation referring explicitly to the Armenian genocide and calling on Turkey to take responsibility for this blemish on humanity."

Such denial is deadly. Deborah Lipstadt, a distinguished scholar on Holocaust denial, calls such intentional amnesia the "final stage of genocide, " because it "strives to reshape history in order to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators." Wiesel describes such denial as a "double killing" because it also murders the memory of the crime. "To remain silent or indifferent" Wiesel reminds us, "is the greatest sin."

Never forget that Adolf Hitler relied on that silence when he said on Aug. 22, 1939, "Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"