Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 77 example, see Bedrosyan, 2013). The Turkish government cannot maintain its denial alone if others do not agree to go along with this, particularly its own citizens. Yet others continue to go along with it. The Australian federal government, for example, has not officially recognized the Armenian genocide. Australian history writers pay little attention to their nation’s close connection to the genocide despite some suggestions that the Allied invasion of Gallipoli by British, Australian and New Zealand troops on April 25, 1915 precipitated the start of the Armenian genocide (Manne, 2011). The Allied attack likely heightened the Turkish siege- mentality and fueled a mania for ridding the empire of Armenians, according to historian Jay Winter (in Balakian, 2003, p. 178). Australia’s failure to link the two events in the national consciousness or even actively address their connection has been described as a “cult of forgetfulness on a national scale” (W.E.H. Stanner in Manne, 2011, p. 324). This suits the Turkish government’s purposes and maintains the genocide’s goals. The significance and impact of Turkish denial are complex. Beyond the points illustrated above, Henry Theriault (2003) describes four ways the denial is not only collusion of the crime against the Armenian people, but also an extension of it. Deniers are “accessories after the fact” by assisting those responsible in evading guilt (p. 242). Denial is also a form of grave desecration, in the sense that writing about the genocide serves to remember those whose graves remain unknown or whose bodies were left unburied (p. 248). Armenian identity and culture come under attack by deniers as well, because of the genocide’s essential role in contemporary Armenian identity – to deny the genocide is to deny a significant part of the Armenian historical experience (p. 247). Theriault’s analysis reflects on the denial from the Armenian point of view, but the denial has had significant impact on Turkish citizens as well. The Turkish government’s human rights abuses include incarceration and prosecution of journalists, writers and activists and excessive force on the part of the police, who are immune to accountability (Human Rights Watch, n.d.). The repression of journalists, writers and activists is the attempt to repress witnesses, alternative voices, truth, and inevitably, memory. The denial also causes psychological harm because it is a celebration of the violent destruction of Armenians and a further rubbing of “salt in their already gaping wounds” (Alayarian, 2008, p. 30). In Consequences of Denial , a psychological assessment of Armenian post-genocide trauma, Aida Alayarian details the psychological effects of the Turkish denial on Armenians. She argues that, psychologically, the Armenian history of trauma has gone largely unacknowledged and undiagnosed. Alayarian describes silence as a further kind of trauma causing acute mental distress: for decades the Armenian genocide existed largely in “a kind of

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