This post is the first of a three-part series this week for a class on restorative justice that I am taking as a part of my Doctor of Ministry studies at Seattle University. As a part of this class, we have been explicitly asked to engage with our social media circles regarding our work on a particular violent conflict that restorative justice--a framework that has been used in post-apartheid South Africa and post-reunification Germany, among other nations--might help address. Because advocacy on behalf of recognition of the Armenian Genocide has been a cause of mine for many years, this was a natural topic for me to write about.
What follows is the first of three parts of my paper (parts two and three will appear tomorrow and Thursday, respectively). This first part provides an outline of the conflict at hand and exposition of my aims as well as details my own family's story of the genocide, dating back to my great-great grandfather, Sarkis Mouradian. Any and all feedback--reflections, questions, constructive critiques, what have you--from you, my dear readers and friends, would be much appreciated. This feedback may be used in a future paper for this class, and so I would ask for you to include a line specifically giving me permission to use your feedback in that paper.
As always, it remains a blessing to write for you. Thank you! ~E.A.
If
nothing else, the coursing rush of time from one century to another offers to
humanity ample opportunity to change its story, to get its version of events
straight, and to focus on justifying its past sins rather than focus on
preventing future sins. Sometimes, say, when West German Chancellor Willy
Brandt solemnly genuflected before the memorial to the victims of the Warsaw
ghetto under Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the focus on past sins provided a
soul-searching, graphic message for preventing future sins.
Then
again, twenty-five years after Brandt’s profound gesture, another genocide was
being perpetrated in Rwanda, another genocide had already been executed in
Cambodia under Pol Pot, and still more genocides would be attempted in Bosnia
and Darfur. How effective humanity has actually been at preventing additional
crimes against humanity—especially the crime of genocide—is an open question;
at a minimum, the frequency with which genocides have occurred in the 20th
and 21st centuries suggests that we really and truly have learned
very little.
Except
for how to further kill and dehumanize people, for which the Armenian Genocide
of the First World War remains the prototypical blueprint. The methods of
rounding up and deporting mass numbers of citizens was echoed in the Nazi
Holocaust, and the incitement to genocide by use of exaggerated, embellished
propaganda was a part of the genocides in the Third Reich, Cambodia, and more.
These efforts at propaganda—both before and after the genocide itself—served as
blatantly transparent attempts at justifying history-changing sins that ended—and
affected—human life on a genuinely massive scale.
On that
colossally catastrophic scale, 1-1.5 million Armenian men, women, and children
were murdered between the years 1915-1918 within the Ottoman Empire during the
First World War. Though the verdicts on precise numbers vary (hence the
citation of a range of 1-1.5 million souls), the balance of evidence from
firsthand accounts from a variety of sources—missionaries, officials, and
journalists alike—has led a substantial supermajority of historical genocide
scholars to conclude that what took place was, in fact, a genocide.
However,
much as the minority opinion receives outsized attention and utilizes a
disproportionately noisy microphone on questions of, say, human-caused climate
change or the safety of vaccinations, so too does the small minority of
non-Turkish scholars who deny the Armenian Genocide hold considerable sway
within academia, the media, and, by extension, the platforms for dialogue.
The
stubborn refusal of such figures to even countenance the notion that the
Ottoman Empire was indeed guilty of a genocide does more than simply provide
cover for a recalcitrant and increasingly stubborn Turkish government: it also
raises the proverbial stakes on the United States and its interests, which overlap
greatly with Turkey in areas of military strategy and economic convenience.
Because
of these interests, I believe, the United States government has been
tremendously reluctant to proffer any sort of formal recognition of the
Armenian Genocide as a genocide. Perhaps most disheartening has been the
regression of President Obama, who openly referred to the Armenian Genocide as
a genocide as a senator, but who immediately ceased doing so as president.
These
sorts of regressions are a part of the exponential harm that is discussed
within the precepts of the restorative justice framework. They add to the
emotional harm, the humiliation, the mental anguish and pain that the
descendants of genocide survivors live, and relive, every year that passes with
what happened to their families and to their people going unrepentantly
unrecognized.
The
unrepentance of this reality is both important and difficult to understate. A
myriad of excuses are used for denial of the Armenian Genocide, and many of
them resemble the same excuses for denying, say, the Jewish Holocaust
perpetrated by the Third Reich—that the Armenians, like the Jews, somehow posed
an existential threat to their statist overlords, that the numbers of those
killed are somehow grossly overstated, that the Armenians engaged in armed
resistance in some cases just as the Jews did in, say, the ghetto uprisings
(which is implicitly irrelevant in defining genocide).
These
excuses and justifications are often proffered not as objective conclusions,
but as weaponized arguing points, which suggests the absence of repentance,
and, thus, the need for some sort of restorative justice process. However,
until the governments of Turkey, Armenia, and (to a lesser extent) the United
States substantively change, such a process remains more a hope than a reality.
Both
Turkey and Armenia are currently ruled by “democratic” strongmen—Recep Tayyip
Erdogan and Serzh Sargsyan, respectively—who may have been initially
democratically elected to their respective posts but have subsequently
demonstrated a clear and repeated disrespect for the democratic process.
The United States, while demonstrably far more respectful of democratic
outcomes than either Turkey or Armenia, has repeatedly quashed on the
Congressional floor multiple attempts to formally recognize the Armenian
Genocide. Ergo, they too are perpetrators in this ongoing conflict and
infliction of emotional, spiritual, and existential harm upon Armenians.
This
reality points toward a multifaceted, multilayered restorative justice process.
While the victims—at least directly—are relative easily to label and define
(the Armenian people, both native Armenians and diaspora Armenians alike), the
perpetrators have, over the course of time, grown to be many and widespread,
and restorative reconciliation between them and the victims of the Armenian
Genocide and its continued denial needs to happen sooner rather than later, if
for no other reason than to stem the growing tide of further perpetrators.
Assuming
no substantive change in the governments of either Turkey or Armenia, this
would be when and where the churches could step in. The Armenian Apostolic
Church, while having a fraught relationship with non-Orthodox Armenians, still
largely speaks for Armenian interests on the question of genocide recognition
and has a proven track record of ecumenical outreach and inclusion to Roman
Catholicism in particular—Pope Francis’s recent trip to Armenia, and
recognition of the Armenian Genocide while he was there, is on-face evidence of
this commitment.
Armenian
Protestants and evangelicals will also have a role to play. Especially in the
Armenian-American diaspora, many Armenian Christians—this writer included—were
raised, or converted to, Protestantism, but have maintained their deep ties to
the cause of genocide recognition. Additional progress has been made within
American Protestant denominations—my own denomination, the Disciples of Christ,
being one such sect—to recognize the Armenian Genocide as genocide.
All of these bodies can play roles, and especially as they are not
Armenian-centric, they may well have additional moral credibility to act as
facilitators of the process, rather than necessarily as advocates—a valuable
distinction when Turkey’s response to recognition is often knee-jerk in nature.
To
demonstrate the emotional, spiritual, and cathartic value of such a process,
though, it is necessary to begin with a human story—my family’s story.
Specifically, the story of my great-great grandfather, Sarkis Bedros Mouradian,
a wealthy merchant with commercial interests across Asia, from a dozen
family-run leather goods stores in Syria to Singapore, from which they sourced
much of their leather, with interests in the soap, silk, and rice trades in
between. Sarkis and his wife, Mariam, had five children: a daughter, Sarah, and
four sons: Madiros, Hagop, Krikor, and Avedis, who all oversaw different
aspects of the family’s business interests at different points in Asia. Krikor
Mouradian was my great-grandfather and was in Singapore at 1915, which in all
probability ultimately saved his life and that of his wife, my
great-grandmother, Satenig Mouradian.
On April
24, 1915, a day referred to as “Red Sunday” in the Armenian community, the
Armenian Genocide began with the roundup and execution of hundreds of Armenians
in Istanbul. Many of these Armenians were prominent community leaders,
academics, and scholars. Much like the Babylonian policy of taking Judah’s
intelligentsia class into exile to Babylon back in 586 BCE, the Ottoman Empire
saw a need to decapitate its Armenian community by executing its most prominent
figures.
This
sparked further rounds of arrests, deportations, and executions. One week to
the day after Red Sunday, Madiros Mouradian, the eldest of Sarkis’s sons, was
arrest, tortured, and executed by Ottoman forces in Harput, Turkey. Two days
later, Sarkis, distraught with grief over not only his eldest son’s murder but
the horrifically brutal manner of the murder, took his own life. According to
Hagop Mouradian, Sarkis’s next-eldest son, Sarkis did so after uttering the
words, “With all my wealth, how could I have not foreseen this and saved my
family?”
The
terror continued for Sarkis’s bereft family as his youngest son, Avedis, who,
like Sarkis and Madiros, was in Turkey in 1915, and was arrested with the
intention of likewise being executed. Madiros’s widow, Esther, bribed Avedis’s
guards to release him under the auspices of having his last meal with his
family, but she then also bribed a clan of Kurdish peoples to smuggle Avedis
out of the country and escort him safely into Russia. When Avedis’s guards
returned for him to remand him back to prison, Esther defiantly told them that
Avedis had long since made his way to Russia and safety, and she was
immediately summarily executed, joining her husband in eternal rest.
Sarkis’s
middle son, Hagop, returned to Turkey from Syria and smuggled Sarkis’s widow
Mariam, his own wife Victoria, and their own two sons Levon and Zaven, to
safety in Lebanon, where Mariam, having seen her family torn apart at the
seams, very quickly passed away and was buried.
Meanwhile,
Krikor, having learned of what happened to his family while he was in
Singapore, managed to, like Avedis, smuggle himself and Satenig into Russia,
and then across the entire breadth of Russia, through Siberia to Vladivostok.
From Vladivostok, Krikor and Satenig used fake passports to illegally immigrate
into the United States via Alaska. They then settled in a culturally and
ethnically diverse neighborhood in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, where they
had a son, Albert, who served in the Marines in World War II and was K.I.A. at
Okinawa in 1945, and two daughters, Florence and my grandmother, Marianne.
In
addition to losing their patriarch and matriarch indirectly to the Armenian
Genocide, my family lost one of its sons and his wife, was scattered across
Asia and the United States, and had their entire livelihood—their businesses
and merchant interests—taken from them. And my family’s story is not atypical
from those of the families of the other 1-1.5 million victims of the genocide.
How,
then, can restorative justice act as a possible solution for myself and for the
millions of other diasporic and native Armenians, especially when the crime
itself—the Armenian Genocide—remains denied by the descendants of the original
perpetrators, to the extent that the depth and repetition of this denial
necessitates referring to genocide deniers as perpetrators themselves?
Image of the forget-me-not logo courtesy of armeniangenocide100.org
