Congress’s failure to recognize the Turkish genocide insults Armenian communities

Recently, the annual Kwanzaa celebration by the local NAACP in Bangor was cancelled after a man threatened violence against its participants. This was appalling.

When we think of Kwanzaa’s principles – unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, and realize the celebration of these principles was canceled by a community that has struggled through slavery and racism to celebrate them openly, with dignity, one thing becomes clear: the essence of the African-American struggle for freedom was, at least temporarily, negated in Bangor.

Native Americans have a word that describes what happened to their people – mass murder, degradation, loss of a cherished way of life. They call it a “soul wound.” The wounds and their complications take generations to pass away. What happened in Bangor was a form of “soul wound” for its African-American community.

For some communities, those soul wounds have been eased by the fact a word now exists to describe the worst of them. It was created by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, who lost much of his family in the Holocaust. Lemkin gave meaning to what Winston Churchill dubbed “a crime without a name,” the murder of innocents by their government.

Lemkin coined the word “genocide,” a mixture of the Latin word for killing and the Greek word for a race or a people, in 1944, at the height of the murder of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews.

But his real point of reference was the murder of at least 2 million Armenian men, women and children living in Turkey by the Turkish government from the late 1890s to the early 1920s.

In 1948, the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and ruled that “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, [genocide] is a crime under international law which they [The United Nations] undertake to prevent and to punish.”

Such a declaration has brought cold comfort to millions who have been victims of state-sponsored genocide in the nearly six decades since the adoption of the United Nations resolution. There is one unassailable fact behind this ignoble litany of human conflict and suffering: political or social groups wanting to commit murder do. Though there may be obstacles, they are never hindered by a lack of willing executioners.

This is the one constant upon which they can count.

Genocide has taken place time and again, whether in Indonesia, Cambodia, Rwanda and Burundi, Bosnia, Darfur, and now possibly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It has been described as such, and international trials are beginning to take place to punish the guilty.

That communities such as African-Americans and Native Americans suffered forms of genocide centuries before the word became operational means the soul wounds these communities suffered continue to linger.

These wounds linger because our nation, the United States, did not deem it important to sign the 1948 Convention on Genocide until the late 1980s. One of the most direct reasons was objection of Southern congressmen who feared the period of slavery, Jim Crow laws and lynchings could be labeled as genocide.

One community that has suffered the effects of the soul wound without interruption is the Armenian nation, especially those who live in the diaspora, outside the borders of the Republic of Armenia.

For nearly a century, Armenians, including thousands who have lived in Portland and Lewiston-Auburn, have been waiting for an official recognition of their genocide by successive governments in modern Turkey. True, several nations have recognized what happened to the Armenians during the three decades they were systematically slaughtered as genocide: France, and most recently the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

But for the hundreds of thousands of American Armenians, the silence of their government for the past six decades in recognizing the Armenian genocide has been a painful lesson in the politics of denial and obstruction.

A massive Turkish lobby, accompanied by a lavish propaganda budget and veiled threats against an ongoing relationship with the United States and Israel, and against the Jewish community in Turkey, has stymied all efforts for this county to recognize the Armenian genocide.

For a few weeks earlier this autumn, Armenian-Americans were hopeful that this sordid history of American non-recognition would end. With a vote of 27 to 21, the influential House Foreign Affairs Committee, under the leadership of Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif. and a survivor of the Holocaust, took a major step toward ending U.S. complicity in Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide, adopting the Armenian Genocide Resolution, despite an intense campaign of threats and intimidation by the Turkish government and its lobbyists in Washington, D.C.

But the hope was short-lived. The Turkish lobby succeeded in persuading a number of members of Congress who initially supported the resolution to withdraw that support and a discussion by the full House never took place.

Soul wounds can fester for centuries, filling those that received them then and receive them now with a loss of hope in humanity and in themselves. That is what Bangor’s African-American community must now feel and what the state’s Armenian community has felt for nearly one hundred years.

Abraham J. Peck teaches in the department of history and is the Judaica scholar in residence at the Sampson Center for Diversity at the University of Southern Maine. He lives in Portland.