The Aftermath
Filed Under (Uncategorized) by admin on 02-07-2009
The defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its allies at the end of 1918 raised the possibility of enacting the numerous pledges concerning the punishment of the perpetrators and the rehabilitation of the Armenian survivors. After the Young Turk leaders had fled the country, the new Turkish prime minister admitted that the Turks had committed such misdeeds “as to make the conscience of mankind shudder forever.” United States General James G. Harbord, after an inspection tour of the former Armenian population centres in 1919, reported on the organise nature of the massacres and concluded: “Mutilation, violation, torture, and death have left their haunting memories in a hundred beautiful Armenian valleys, and the traveller is seldom free from the evidence of this most colossal crime of all ages.” The Paris Peace Conference declared that the lands of Armenia would never be returned to Turkish rule, and a Turkish military court martial tried and sentenced to death in absentia Enver, Talaat, Djemal and Dr. Nazim, the notorious organisers of the genocide. No attempt was made to carry out the sentence, however, and thousands of other culprits were neither tried nor even suspended, and even accused and imprisoned war criminals were freed and sent home.
The release of the perpetrators of the genocide signalled a major shift in the political winds. The former Allied Powers, having become bitter rivals over the spoils of the war, failed to act in unison in imposing peace or dealing with the stiff resistance of a Turkish nationalist movement. They concurred that the Armenians should be freed and rehabilitated but took no effective measure to achieve that objective. They hoped that the United States would extend a protectorate over the devastated Armenian regions, but the United States was recoiling from its role in the world war and turning its back on the league of Nations. Unable to quell the Turkish nationalist movement, which rejected the award of any territory for an Armenian state or even unrestricted return for the Armenian refugees, the Allied Powers in 1923 made their peace with the new Republic of Turkey. No provision was made for the rehabilitation, restitution or compensation of the Armenian survivors. Western abandonment of the Armenians was so complete that the revised peace treaties included no mention of “Armenians” or “Armenia”. It was as if no Armenians had ever existed in the Ottoman Empire. The 3,000 year presence of the Armenians in Asia Minor came to a violent end. Armenian place names were changed, Armenian cultural monuments were obliterated or allowed to fall into disrepair. Attempts to eliminate the memory of Armenia included change of the geographic expression Armenian Plateau to Eastern Anatolia . The Armenian survivors were condemned to a life of exile and dispersion, being subjected to inevitable acculturation and assimilation on five continents and facing an increasing indifferent world. With the consolidation of totalitarian regimes in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s memories of the Armenian cataclysm gradually faded, and in the aftermath of the horrors and havoc of World War II it virtuall became the “forgotten genocide”.
In recent years, growing awareness of the Holocaust and the commitment to the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide has again raised the Armenian Genocide to the level of consciousness among educators, scholars and defenders of human rights. The trans-generational trauma of the Armenian people is beginning to be understood, and various official and unofficial bodies have called on the present government of the republic of Turkey to recognise the injustice perpetrated against the Armenians by previous Turkish governments.

