Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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The forgotten Armenian genocide

I was pleased to read a letter to the editor in The GW Hatchet’s Nov. 6 issue that identified Turkey as a major violator of human rights (“China not alone, p.4). Although the letter was thorough in outlining Turkey’s major offenses, I would like to elaborate more on the forgotten 1914-18 genocide of more than 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Young Turk regime.

While countless State Department documents, congressional hearings, consular reports and missionary statements testify to the brutal massacre of Armenians between 1914-1918, seldom will you find this historical fact in any textbooks or scholarly journal. Why? For the past 80 years, the Turkish government has been trying to cover up its bloody, murderous past by sponsoring propaganda to discredit the historical truth of the genocide. Because of its strategic location between Europe and Asia, many countries, including the United States, are willing to overlook Turkey’s past for the sake of building an extra military base or securing another lucrative defense contract.

Even to this day, Turkey denies that any genocide ever took place. Instead, it insists that “Armenian nationalism,” combined with Turkey’s conflict with Russia, forced the Sublime Porte, the Ottoman Empire’s seat of power, to deport every Armenian man, woman and child from the six Turkish provinces that comprised historic Armenia.

This explanation is preposterous when one reads official U.S. documents compiled by former Turkish Ambassador Henry Morgenthau Jr. that detail how Turkish soldiers massacred entire towns, raped women in front of their husbands, virtually wiped out the entire male population of every province and threw babies into the Euphrates River as their mothers watched.

When the Holocaust Museum was in its planning phase, a memorial to the Armenian victims of Turkish atrocities was going to be built. The Turkish government protested so violently that the memorial was never erected. Similar cases of Turkish denial and outright falsification of the facts have taken place all over the world, wherever Armenian genocide memorials are to be constructed.

Even if the world does not remember, Turkey can rest assured that so long as even one Armenian remains standing on this planet, we will never let them, or the world for that matter, forget the senseless genocide of more than 1.5 million Armenians.

-The writer is a freshman majoring in economics.

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