 
Professor Hovannisian speaks in London
The title of the lecture which took place at the Navasartian Centre in London on 27th February, is also the title of Professor Hovannisian's recently published book, Looking Backward, Moving Forward
.
Prof. Hovannisian is a national treasure. He is brilliant, hard working, and prolific. He is the dean, the elder statesman, and one of the founding fathers of the field of Armenian
Studies. While being a renowned professor of Armenian Studies at UCLA and writing the five definitive volumes on the 1918 Armenian Republic are notable lifetime achievements,
Professor Hovannisian is much more. He has dedicated his life to the Armenian Cause. He is a tireless worker, advocate, and lecturer on the trials and struggles of our nation from
the final years of the Ottoman Empire until now.
A brief outline of the lecture given by Professor Richard Hovhannisian on 27th February, 2005 at the Navasartian Centre, London.
In his 90th Anniversary Lecture to the Armenian Community at the Navasartian Centre in London, Prof. Hovannisian
referred to the forgotten aspects of the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Apart from mourning the lost generation of
approximately 1.5 Million victims, who were murdered in the most sadistic and inhuman methods at the instigation of
the Turkish authorities, we had failed to emphasise the loss of our Armenian Homeland and the continuity of Armenian
History. We should not forget the deprivation of land, loss of cultural heritage and the collective wealth of the Armenian people living in the Anatolian peninsula.
He said this great tragedy had not been rectified in any way yet. He said Jewish people had received a great deal of
compensation from the German Republic, (even though no amount of compensation could cover the great loss in
human terms.) However, even this had not happened in the Armenian case. No reparation, re-instatement or
recompense, not even an acknowledgement of the great physical or psychological damage done to the Genocide
victims and their descendents had yet been proferred by the Turkish Republic. Referring to the Armenian people living in the Diaspora he said, 'We are all products of the Genocide.'
He said, that collective memory was short, referring to the Cambodian Genocide during the Pol Pot regime, which had already slipped out of the consciousness of the new generation of his students.
He said that the challenge to us as Armenians was to make the Armenian Genocide a part of peoples' collective
existence and a part of human history. In order for the Armenian Genocide to have a meaning to others, the
Armenian experience must be related to everyone's experience, in other words, it must be relevant in a universal way.
The only people who had achieved this had been Jewish people in the case of the Jewish Holocaust.
The challenge was to find a way of educating young people to make the Armenian Genocide relevant to their lives.
The Armenian people in the Diaspora had found this difficult to do because the people who survived the 1915 Genocide
had been mostly involved in commerce and had worked hard to put their lives together under very difficult
circumstances. The Genocide had wiped out almost all the intellectuals in 1915 and very few of these had survived.
He said we had to find 'handles' to make the Genocide experience broader. We could draw parallels between the
oppressed and second class status of Black people in the United States to the oppressed second class status of the
Armenian population of Ottoman Turkey. Had the government of the United States not been serious about achieving
equality for all minority groups living in the U.S.A. and had they not only enshrined it in law but enforced the law, a genocide of Black people could have been plausible.
Prof. Hovannisian referred to the connection between the Hamidian massacres of the Armenian population of Ottoman
Turkey, in the last decades of the 19th Century, to the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the 'Final Solution.' He said
although there was a continuity of violence against a defenceless minority there were in fact differences between the
reasons for the violence and the intended effect. The Hamidian 'pogroms' were instigated by a traditional autocratic
Sultan, Abdul Hamid, on the Armenian Christian minority of Ottoman Turkey to suppress and subdue any expression
for a desire for reforms in order to preserve the status quo. The 1915 Genocide, 'the Final Solution', on the other
hand, was the second wave of violence unleashed by the Young Turks - after deposing the despotic Sultan - in order to
create total change in Turkey, create a homogenous Moslem Turkic population, by eliminating the entire Armenian Christian population as well as other Christian minorities such as Greeks & Assyrians.
It was important to study the Armenian Genocide, said Prof. Hovannisian, because the Armenian Genocide of 1915 had
been the 'prototype' for all mass killings of the 20th Century, a century laden with Genocides. He defined Genocide as
the act of an ideologically driven group using extreme violence to achieve their objective. The Young Turks to the
Armenian population, the Nazis to the Jewish population of Germany and beyond, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He said that the forceful and violent implementation of a belief system constituted genocide.
Prof. Hovannisian discussed the common denominators of Genocide. The economic factor was a major incentive and
central motive as well as the rape of women, which was not only physical violence but a symbolic shaming as well as actual eradication of the next generation.
Referring to the recently formed Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Committee, TARC, he expressed scepticism of any
such attempt, since he believed that the Turkish Government only used such platforms to simply deny the Armenian
Genocide at every opportunity and therefore a genuine reconciliation could not be achieved until Turkish people looked
critically and honestly at their past and distanced themselves from it by condemning the Genocide committed by the
Young Turks. Prof. Hovannisian said that there were some brave Turkish historians and writers who were trying to
grapple with Turkey's official denial of their dark history, trying to write honestly under very difficult circumstances.
However, the idea of having to face their dark genocidal history was causing the political elite in modern Turkey a
huge dilemma. This was because Ataturk, the first president of the 'modern' Turkish Republic and the great hero of
the Turkish nation state, was himself implicated in the Armenian Genocide. Apart from driving out the last remnants of
the Armenian victims towards the end of Genocide period, Ataturk's ministers and members of parliament consisted of the very people responsible for implementing the Armenian Genocide.
Finally, Prof. Hovannisian quoted his friend and colleague, Prof. Terence Des Pres, who had told him that power
destroyed everyone and everything around them and after the destruction, it sought to destroy the memory of the people themselves. In the introduction to The Armenian Genocide in Perspective
, edited by Prof. Richard G. Hovannisian, 1986 (Transaction Books,) Terence Des Pres wrote, "When modern states make way for geopolitical
power plays, they are not above removing everything - nations, cultures, homelands - in their path. Great powers
regularly demolish other peoples' claims to dignity and place and sometimes, as we know, the outcome is genocide ….
Against historical crimes we fight as best we can and a cardinal part of this engagement is 'the struggle of memory against forgetting.'
Prof. Hovannisian concluded by saying that in an uneven struggle and we do the best we can for as long as we can and the weapon is 'memory.' |
