reflections on the 109th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide

bearing my heart on my sleeve again

Parishioners commemorate the 109th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan, Armenia, with flowers surrounding the eternal flame in Tsitsernakaberd. Photo by Vahram Baghdasaryan via AP.

Today, April 24th, I’m reflecting on the 109th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the year that saw the deaths of one and a half million Armenians.¹ We mark this year due to the significance of casualties, but the genocide took place throughout 20 years of ongoing massacres of the Armenian population within the Ottoman Empire.

I’m reflecting on how the unbearable atrocities of what was done to the Armenians inspired Raphael Lemkin to coin the term genocide. Specifically, I’m reflecting on how genocide inspires genocide, how they become more sophisticated, technologically advanced, swifter and more efficient with each repeated act. I’m reflecting on how state propaganda becomes polished with time, how easy it is to convince a populace that you’re on the right side of history, and how easy it is to fall for the lie that if we don’t kill their children, they’ll come after ours.

I’m reflecting on how we learn about genocide in the textbooks as these grand, atrocious, entirely stoppable historic anomalies. We don’t spend enough class time analyzing the growing campaigns of hate, the ostracization and virulent racism that demands years of conditioning before the killing begins. After all, the world would never sanction murdering an entire people unless it has already been normalized in the culture to hate this one race, this one religion, this one ethnicity in particular. We spend so much time learning about the aftermath of atrocity but never enough time understanding how it manifested.

The Armenian Genocide never needed to claim as many lives as it did. None of the proceeding genocides of the 20th century (The Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide, Cambodian Genocide) needed to claim over a million lives before anyone cared. Genocide doesn’t need to become so grand before we recognize it for what it is.

These genocides of the 20th century aren’t historic anomalies, they’re failures of world governments. We’re living through another failure that is teaching us the painful lesson that money and American hegemony matter more than human life.

I didn’t understand how the world stood by and allowed these atrocities to take place when I was a child first learning about them. I know better now. The propaganda is everywhere. It seeps into the media. It’s in every headline that claims that what Palestinians are experiencing is a war that they started on October 7th. It’s in every news segment focused on — largely baseless — antisemitism (they mean anti-zionism, don’t they?) at student protests and never once uttering the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” or “anti-genocide”. It’s in this recent Al Jazeera English post that casually and senselessly engages in Armenian Genocide denialism.

It’s in the silences, too: the silence of world leaders, celebrities, corporations. It’s in the silence of every regular person who just wants to live their life as a genocide unfolds, everyone in the west who wants to protect their mental health rather than bear witness to suffering they’ve paid for. It’s in the way you, reader, never saw coverage about Azerbaijan’s war with Armenia and subsequent ethnic cleansing of Artsakh at all between 2020 to 2023.

It’s in the distractions, too, the way American media is focusing all coverage on student protests but not on the discovery of several mass graves at Gaza hospitals besieged by the IDF. It’s in the way I’m finding comfort engaging with the student protests because I find their chants hopeful, more bearable than the agony in the voices of Palestinians in Gaza.

---

A joke: I was living in Armenia in 2008 and I remember Obama courting the Armenian-American vote by promising that he would officially recognize that what happened to us in 1915 was actually a genocide. All those years, despite the US opening its doors to Armenian refugees of the genocide in the 1910s, the US never recognized that what had taken place was actually a genocide for fear of disrupting their diplomatic ties with Turkey. We Armenians wanted recognition of the genocide for so long. We wanted those deaths to count, to not be forgotten in the annals of history. We wanted Turkey to admit what they’d done.

Eighty percent of Armenian-Americans went ahead and voted for Obama. In his eight years in office, he never once uttered the word genocide, instead using euphemisms like catastrophe. But wait, that’s not the punchline.

Today, writing this, I found out that the US, that Biden, did recognize the Armenian genocide in 2019. This victory hadn’t registered on my radar. That’s still not the punchline. A year later, in 2020, Azerbaijan began their offensive on the autonomous, ethnically Armenian region of Artsakh. Despite that seal of American recognition, no one intervened.

There’s no punchline. It’s all a joke, after all. The recognition we begged for over a century didn’t save us. Money might have. Oil reserves could have. But witnesses and allies and the 33 other countries that recognized the genocide stood by while a second ethnic cleansing took place.

---

I lost a friend in October over all this. She said it was too painful for her, mentally, to engage with what was happening in Gaza after what happened within Israel on October 7. She said it might be best for her to use her energy to focus on places like Armenia, where that same week, Azerbaijan had fully blockaded Artsakh and ethnically cleansed 150,000 native Armenians from the land. I didn’t have the guts in the moment to tell her this, that Azerbaijan was able to take our land because Israel had been selling them sophisticated, modern weapons of war for years. I wish I’d told her that the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of Armenia and the US support of all this was the destruction of Iraq, too.

My losses are nowhere near as horrific as what people in Gaza are experiencing, but this empire has cost me the loss of the chance to grow up in Baghdad, in my first home, the chance of a life lived in Arabic, which I’ll never stop yearning for, and the chance of a financially viable future in Armenia.

I don’t want to live to see headlines declaring the death of two million and two hundred thousand Gazans before the US finally decides to stop funding and arming the genocide. I don’t want my future children reading textbooks in twenty years commemorating dead Palestinians. I don’t want them to sit in class and wonder how the world stood by, and I don’t want them to experience the castrated thought of how they would have done something if they’d been alive right now, watching a genocide unfold before their eyes.

I want them, instead, to read about a victory. An injustice reversed. I want them to see Palestine on the world map in their geography class. I want them to read about the power of the people to change the course of history, and I want them to feel the will of Palestinians to rebuild, again and again and again. I want them to live in a world where Armenia’s borders are safe, where they can fearlessly venture to the southern provinces to hike around Tatev monastery as I did as a teenager without fear of imminent attack from Azerbaijan. I want them to know Artsakh as I never did. I want them to seek more than recognition and peace. I want them to seek justice.

For further reading, I encourage you to read Stephan Pechdimaldji’s essay published in the Boston Globe today, titled “Why Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day is different this year” (accessed via proxy). In it, Stephan highlights Azerbaijan’s continued ambitions to overtake Armenia, Baku’s military park featuring helmets stolen from dead Armenian soldiers and grotesque wax statues of Armenian prisoners of war, and the continued vitriol and propaganda that Azerbaijan (Israel’s brothers-in-genocide) uses to prime its citizens to forever view Armenians as an enemy to be extinguished. Armenia is in a precarious position, and, as always, we do not get any news coverage. This Genocide Remembrance Day, please take some time to learn about what’s happening to us.

1. The 1.5 million Armenians killed in 1915-1916 comprised 70% of all Armenians at the time.