Letter to Nikol Pashinyan

· February 5, 2025

Peter Balakian reading at University of Madrid (photo Jorge Rosenvinge)

Letter to Nikol Pashinyan

The following is a letter dated February 3 to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan from Peter Balakian, the author of The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response, which was a New York Times Best Seller and winner of the Raphael Lemkin Prize. Balakian is the recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He teaches at Colgate University.

Dear Prime Minister Pashinyan:

Having read your remarks as they are quoted in the Armenian American and diasporan press, I would like to offer an answer to the question you asked: “How is it that in 1939 there was no Armenian genocide [recognition] agenda and how is it that in 1950 the Armenian genocide agenda emerged?”

The Armenian Genocide as a historic event evolved into a more public presence after World War II because of the evolution of a global culture of human rights. Raphael Lemkin developed the concept of genocide as a crime in international law and coined the term “genocide,” around 1943. He used the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe and the Turkish genocide of the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey as foundational events for his thinking. It was the great legal scholar Lemkin who coined the term Armenian Genocide at that time.

After the war, the Nuremberg Trials did a great deal to impress in public consciousness the concept of genocide as an international crime. In the post war decades, the emergence of a human rights culture evolved rapidly. The decolonization movements across the globe were crucial, and in the United States a human rights culture was accelerated because of the African American Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the second wave of feminism, and a new awareness about Nazi concentration camps and the Holocaust. In this new environment the Armenian Genocide became a more prominent history, and Armenians worldwide responded to that with their own necessary movements for acknowledgement and justice.1965 was a crucial year for this.

In the face of the continued full-scale Turkish government propaganda that sought to erase this history, blame the victims, and coerce global opinion, Armenian communities were challenged, and the trauma of the event was exacerbated. Genocide scholars have studied Turkish denialism as an extreme and virulent case and have noted the following: “the denial of genocide is the final stage of genocide because it seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators and because it sends the message that genocide can be carried out without consequence and demands no accountability.”

As the first case of genocide carried out in a modern modality, the Armenian Genocide is taught as an important history in the curricula in the US and in other nations around the world. Scholars continue to study the impact of Turkish denialism and the necessary Armenian quest for some forms of justice and they regard this as a significant ethical issue with many ramifications for many cultures and ethnic groups who have been subjected to such violence.

Mr. Pashinyan, it would be useful for you to acquaint yourself with some of the major scholarship on the Armenian Genocide including scholarship that deals with the social and psychological impact of denialism on both Armenians and Turks today. It might be more helpful if you asked Armenians, in the Republic and in the diaspora, what kinds of creative and constructive responses they might formulate in response to the continued violence of the Turkish government’s propaganda campaign of denial. I understand that you are trying to find ways to deal with Turkey in this very fraught moment. And, I can imagine how difficult this is. But, situating the Armenian Genocide in a broader human rights context and challenging Armenians to think creatively about this predicament might be a good place to start. As you know well, the voices of the people matter.

Sincerely,

Peter Balakian