A Hundred Years Later, Memory of Genocide Still Hurts
Story by Jeff Kim and Junie Kah
Edited by Jeff Kim
Design by Helaine Lee
Edited by Jeff Kim
Design by Helaine Lee
When one thinks of the word “genocide,” the Jewish Holocaust or the treatment of East Asians under the Japanese Empire would probably come to mind. The word “genocide,” however, was coined by a Jewish refugee from Poland in 1943 to compare their ordeal to a lesser known event in history: the systematic extermination of Greeks, Assyrians, and Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Over 1.5 million Armenians were killed in mass executions, raids and grueling death marches in the Syrian desert without food or water, while hundreds of thousands more Greeks and Assyrians were expelled from Anatolia during the Greek genocide.
April 24, 2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the start of these killings in 1915. Pope Francis held a special mass in mourning of the victims; he stated that the genocide was the first of three unprecedented tragedies of the 20th century: the other two being the Holocaust and pogroms in Stalinist Russia. To this day, however, the issue remains hotly debated. Turkey, which emerged after the War from the defeated Ottoman Empire, has refused to give proper apologies to the victims. Many Turkish sources characterise it as a “deportation” or “relocation”. The Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Dinah Shelton’s 2005 book on human rights abuses, states that “Denial of the Armenian Genocide is the most patent example of a state’s denial of its past.” Perhaps owing to this widespread denial, many people are unaware of the tragedies, though they were just as traumatizing and destructive to entire ethnicities as more well known events. Most students surveyed, including Taehoon Kim (8), said that they did not know about the Armenian Genocide before being informed of the event by Tiger News staff. Ian Lee (8) said that “Turkey should apologize to the Armenians,” adding that “It’s especially sad because our country, South Korea, went through the same thing with Japan.” Mr. Schwartz, History teacher, said that “I don’t know if Turkey needs to apologize as much as it needs to simply acknowledge it.” Last April, Lebanese magazine Audio Kultur printed their latest issue, AK12, in blood donated by the descendants of genocide victims, the cover stating: “Still Here, Still Bleeding.” One donor, photographer John Dabaghian, said, “Giving a single drop of blood for this project is nothing compared to the gallons of blood our grandfathers poured being massacred.” |