CONCLUSION
FORGETTING GENOCIDE
“Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
– Adolf Hitler, 19431
The stalled response to the Armenian Genocide still haunts attempts by the international community to intervene in humanitarian crises and prosecute human rights violations. Understanding why and how the attempt at prosecution failed allows for, perhaps, a final reckoning of the event which has the dubious distinction of being both the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century to have solicited an international response and the forgotten genocide.
A moral responsibility to respond to atrocity came from a Gladstonian worldview that justified intervention in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire on behalf of persecuted minorities. Out of a British imperial mandate emerged a new way of representing the premeditated killing of minority civilians during wartime as genocide to the international community. The global reach of an empire that had the resources and power to stand up to perpetrators made this response possible. Ultimately, the British Empire could not fulfill broad universal claims of the protection of vulnerable minorities in the wake of a brutal and devastating world war. This weakened the commitment to prosecute those responsible for the Armenian massacres when the empire found itself caught between humanitarian ideals, on the one hand, and the realpolitik considerations that Britain believed necessary to maintain its hegemony. From these humanitarian imaginings and imperial realities emerged the beginnings of the modern story of human rights justice.
When the US took the reins at Nuremburg for the Allies after World War II, the world witnessed the first successful prosecution of Germany for genocide during the Holocaust. The United States during the proceedings embraced the British idea that humanitarianism and human rights considerations should inform international affairs. Fear of uncertainty and postwar entanglements, as happened with the British decades earlier, shadowed the US' role in the Nuremburg proceedings.2 As a result, a wide range of accepted responses now guide independent states in matters of recognizing, intervening in and prosecuting genocidal acts. The lack of a unified approach is a problem which plagues modern-day international institutions charged with this task, including the United Nations and internationally sanctioned criminal courts. Despite the successful prosecution of the Nazis at Nuremburg, the international community today faces an uphill battle when it comes to uniting nations around stopping massacre and prosecuting perpetrators of crimes against humanity and genocide. The near-universal acceptance of the 1948 Genocide Convention has not made the task any easier. This is most dramatically illustrated by the decades-long campaign in the US to implement the Genocide Convention, which only made genocide a punishable crime under US law in 1988.
Though now it is largely national rather than imperial priorities that shape the way international institutions respond to genocide, the broad outlines remain the same. Lessons from the Armenian case continue to guide understandings of genocide and how and when to intervene. During World War I, Britain, along with the US, harbored fears over intervention as a solution to helping minority victims of state-sponsored violence. Worries over potentially inflaming Muslim/Christian intolerance at home and abroad long shadowed discussions of the Armenian case and, more recently, war crimes committed during the Balkan Wars. Finally, distrust of international institutions charged with enforcing human rights norms dating back to Lloyd George's skepticism about a League of Nation's sponsored human rights court and the US' refusal to join the League speak to concerns over ceding US sovereignty and decision making powers.
But despite the countless reasons for looking the other way, states continue to get involved in human rights crises and humanitarian interventions across the globe. UN Ambassador, Samantha Power, has written critically about US inaction on genocide.3 Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her successor John Kerry have said again and again that the US will stand up against injustice on humanitarian grounds. Though little has been done to back up these claims, the existence of a rhetoric against genocide in international law speaks to the prospect that action against acts of mass murder by states and institutions can follow. This possibility makes knowing the history of the origins of the humanitarian response to genocide that much more urgent.
An important way to understand the West's evolving response to humanitarian crises and genocide is to begin with the story of the British Empire and the Armenian Genocide. The focus today on the role of the US in leading the international community in humanitarian intervention has distorted the historical record on the origins of human rights justice regarding crimes against humanity. It is important to remember that the beginning of US military, political, and financial clout dated to the end of World War I, after it helped Allied forces, spearheaded by Britain, France and Russia, defeat Germany and Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria.
With the great land-based empires of Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary obliterated from the map after the war, a new world order with Britain and the US at the helm emerged from the ashes of World War I. Fresh from victory, a growing economy, and a perception of its elevated rank in the postwar order, the US lent money and offered advice to devastated countries across Europe. This reality created an opportunity for America to challenge Britain as the new global hegemon.
The US clearly did not completely throw off the British mantle. Instead, leaders including President Wilson remained influenced by the aims that guided the British Empire during the height of its dominance in the nineteenth century. Part of that inheritance was the insistence that intervening in the internal affairs of other nations and empires was a legitimate part of geopolitics. World War I represented the initial test for the international community, led by Britain and the US to act abroad in the name of humanitarian ideals. The response to the Armenian Genocide was crucial in defining what this new interventionism would look like.
Remembering Genocide
How should the international community view past acts of genocide and failed intervention in a world where mass killing continues to claim untold lives right now? Hitler's now infamous quote on the eve of the implementation of his “Final Solution” to eliminate Germany's long-established and well-integrated Jewish population offers a powerful reason to both remember and recognize acts of hatred and mass murder. This question is also important when considering how failures to respond to genocide have affected modern day remembrance and historical understandings of the first internationally recognized crime against humanity.
Today, the Armenian Genocide is remembered all over the globe. Memorials represent a powerful way to shape collective memory and there are hundreds of commemorative symbols located in dozens of countries. Most are quiet, unassuming remembrances such as Armenian khatchkars or crosses with inscriptions and trees dedicated to remembering the dead and memorializing the event. Other memorials are meant to teach. The Armenian Genocide museum based in Washington DC, and the Yerevan memorial in Armenia that houses the “Eternal flame,” represent a more didactic side of the story of remembrance. In Britain, the community charged with remembrance is small but increasingly engaged in discussions of the genocide. There is only one public memorial, not in England but in Wales, the home of W.E. Gladstone. A “Stone of Remembrance” in Cardiff reads “In Memory of Victims of the Armenian Genocide” and is translated in Armenian and Welsh. It was put up in 2007, desecrated the next year before Remembrance Day on April 24th, and later repaired. Other more unassuming memorials exist. In London, Armenians planted a commemorative apricot tree on Ealing Green and another memorial exists at Iverna Gardens at the Armenian Apostolic Church. There is also a khatchkar at an elementary school dedicated by school children to victims of the Armenian Genocide. Strikingly, Britain has the same number of official Armenian Genocide memorials as Germany.4
Gladstone's embrace of the idea of imperial responsibility ultimately worked against efforts to recognize, prosecute and later memorialize the Armenian Genocide. The evidence collected by men like Bryce left little doubt that this systematic, premeditated extermination of a minority population indeed constituted a crime against humanity that warranted prosecution. However, as the events of the war crimes trials reveal, a seemingly universal notion of protecting human rights during wartime came out of an imperial context that had its own internal logic and political priorities.
The centrality of Britain is crucial in this regard. The British Empire was the only body with the resources and sense of purpose capable of launching a response. The trials failed because Britain did not truly represent, or could not in the end legitimately stand in as, an international body to pressure a fading Ottoman Empire to prosecute perpetrators. Britain's historical claim to this leadership role faltered in the face of attempts to join imperial and human rights concerns under the umbrella of a diverse, tolerant Christian-led empire which increasingly came into conflict during the war. These factors stalled the momentum of the humanitarian response that had led Britain to speak out against the killings in the first place. The notion of imperial responsibility cut both ways. It posited, albeit differently, a responsibility to Christian minorities and to securing the loyalty of the British Empire's Muslim subjects and ultimately, the Empire itself.
The failure of the British Empire to live up to its self-imposed responsibility resulted from the tension between pragmatism and idealism which gradually weakened the moral imperative and humanitarian impetus that sustained the commitment to protect minority rights over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
It would be easy to conclude that the Armenian Genocide fell victim to political expediency and was forgotten as one of the unfortunate casualties of Total War. The inability to effectively pressure the Ottoman government to follow through with prosecutions initiated the cycle of remembrance and forgetting that characterizes how the event is treated today in popular culture, by politicians and some historians. However, it is also important to understand this process of forgetting as part of the larger story of how British imperial politics shaped the early practice of the enforcement of a universal notion of human rights. The uneven legacy of empire still colors how genocide is represented and functions in the collective memory of both survivors and nations.