Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 73 minister in the first post-Soviet Armenian government, his hard stance demanding genocide recognition was one of the reasons President Levon Ter-Petrosyan requested his resignation (Hovannisian, G., 2010, pp. 171-178). Thomas de Waal (2010) notes, “In October 2009, many diaspora Armenians, mostly descendants of Genocide survivors, found themselves in the awkward position of denouncing the Yerevan government for moving to normalize relations with Turkey” (p. 31). Examples like these illustrate how the continued denial has managed to cause tensions even between Armenians. Genocide and Denial: Setting Precedents It was the destruction of the Armenians by the Ottoman state – viewed as an internal affair of a sovereign entity by international laws of the time – that first inspired the Polish- born lawyer Raphael Lemkin to create a framework in international law for the concept of genocide (Power, 2007, pp. 17-19). Indeed, he created the term genocide himself. Although he began this effort in the 1930s, while warning people with a prophetic nature of the Nazi regime’s intentions, he failed to convince either the community of international lawmakers or even his own family that action needed to be taken. As a result, he lost 49 of his family members, including his parents, in the Holocaust (p. 49). He dedicated his entire life to the creation and ratification of the genocide convention, article 2 of which defines genocide as: any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Power, 2007, p. 62) Based on this definition, and perhaps on its adoption by the UN in 1948, while the Nazi atrocities of WWII remained forefront in people’s minds, the Holocaust became the defining example of what a genocide is (Akçam, 2012, p. xxix). Yet, Lemkin’s aim was to create an international law expressly forbidding and making punishable what had happened to the Armenians as well as the Jews. Scholars agree that the Armenian genocide was a direct predecessor to the Holocaust, in part because Germany, as the Ottoman ally and mentor, had German officers assisting in the genocide (Balakian, 2003, p. 167; Coloroso, 2008; Lifton, 2003). One of the most ubiquitous quotations now associated with the Armenian genocide is the rhetorical question Hitler posed