Thursday, 4/24/97 International community must recognize wrongs
Society must never let senseless slaughter happen again
By Michael S. Dukakis The Armenian Genocide was one of the most
tragic events in world history for two reasons. First, it involved
the slaughter of thousands and thousands of innocent Armenians and
the destruction of their families. That in and of itself would rank
this as one of history’s great and senseless tragedies. But there
is another reason why the Armenian Genocide is so tragic. The
international community did little or nothing about it. And we have
reaped a bitter harvest ever since. When Hitler was reported to
have asked, before he gave the orders that led directly to the
Holocaust, "Who remembers the Armenians?" he was giving voice in
the most cynical way to the world’s failure to respond to the
plight of the Armenian people just a few short decades before he
and his Nazis brutally executed millions of Jews and thousands of
non-Jews as well, including gypsies, homosexuals and mentally
disabled people of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds. That is why
it is important that all of us who value human life and human
dignity remind ourselves and our fellow citizens often and publicly
of the Armenian Genocide and vow to do all we can to make sure that
the world never again looks the other way as innocent men, women
and children are slaughtered because they happen to be members of a
particular ethnic group or religion. Sadly, however, the
international community is not responding as it should to what
happened to the Armenian people and what continues to happen to
others around the globe. Turkey refuses to recognize what it did
while at the same time seeks admission to the European Union,
terrorizes and kills Kurds, and illegally occupies one-third of
Cyprus in direct violation of numerous resolutions of the United
Nations that have condemned the occupation as a clear violation of
international law. In the meantime, we are forced to contend with a
new phenomenon: revisionist historians who now tell us that the
Armenian Genocide never happened. Nothing could be worse than that.
If we permit this kind of nonsense to go unchallenged, then we and
the world will certainly forget and that would be the worst tragedy
of all.