Below is a letter addressed to the Secretary General of the
United Nations, Kim-Moon Ban , dated, April 13th, 2007. Our Chairman, Roger W.
Smith, wrote this letter in response to the closure of a Rwandan Genocide
commemorative exhibit that was suppose to be set up in the lobby of the UN
General Assembly last week. It was cancelled because the Turkish Permanent
Representative to the UN protested that, in a panel addressing the founding of
the Genocide Convention, the following lines were present: “Following World War
I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey, Polish lawyer
Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as
international crimes.”
April 13, 2007
Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary-General
United Nations
760 United Nations Plaza
New York City, NY 10017
USA
Re: Lessons from the Rwanda Genocide Exhibit
Dear Secretary-General Ban:
We have become aware of the postponement of the April 9, 2007 launch of the exhibition, “Lessons from the Rwanda Genocide.” The reason for the postponement, as we understand it from the New York Times article on April 9, is that Mr. Baki Ilkin, the Turkish Ambassador to the UN, has expressed “discomfort over the text’s making references to the Armenian issue and drawing parallels with the genocide in Rwanda.”
We regret the decision by Mr. Kiyotaka Asaka, Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information to postpone the exhibit, for the following reasons:
- An exhibit commemorating the 13th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide deserves to be held at the United Nations.
- It is very appropriate that such an exhibit, whose theme and title is to learn lessons from a past case of genocide, should make reference to other cases of genocide. It makes sense that if people are learning about the Rwandan genocide, then it is helpful to know how genocide came to be defined and the background to the UN convention.
- The exhibit’s text is perfectly accurate in stating, “Following World War I, during which one million Armenians were murdered in Turkey, Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin urged the League of Nations to recognize crimes of barbarity as international crimes.” While Lemkin’s is best known for his work subsequent to the Jewish Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide also occupied a central place in his thinking, and he saw a direct causal link between that genocide and the Holocaust. (See, for example, Steven L. Jacobs, “Rafael Lemkin and the Armenian Genocide,” in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., Looking Backward, Moving Forward, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Pub., 2003, pp. 125-135.)
- Mr. Baki Ilkin has a history of denying the Armenian Genocide and obstructing its recognition by others. In 1999, as Turkish Ambassador to the United States, he distributed a long letter to all 535 members of the US Congress in which he grossly misrepresented and outright falsified historical issues relating to a House Resolution on the Armenian Genocide while H.Res. 155 was being considered. The numerous fallacies in his letter were exposed and thoroughly discredited in the book by Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification, Cambridge, MA and Toronto: The Zoryan Institute, 1999.
- In August 1985, the UN Subcommission on Human Rights voted 14 to 1 (with 4 abstentions)—despite all Turkish efforts to the contrary—to accept the report by Special Rapporteur Benjamin Whittaker, in which he stipulated that the World War I Armenian experience at the hands of the Turks was a case of genocide as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. (U.N. ESCOR Comm. on Human Rights, Sub-Comm. on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (38th sess.) (Item 57) at 7, U.N. Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/SR.36 (1985) (summary record of 36th meeting, Aug. 29, 1985). (See Dadrian, Key Elements, p. 36.)
- There is a question of fairness here. If you were asked to remove reference to atrocities committed against Jews because Germans objected, or to Rwandans because French or Congolese objected, would you? You can not apply one rule to some and not to others.
- Many people are offended and upset by this incident: the Aegis organizers, because they feel their integrity is at stake; Armenians, because they are being victimized yet again by another case of denial of their genocide; Rwandans, because what was supposed to be a sensitive commemoration of their genocide has been suspended.
We can understand if Mr. Akasaka postponed the exhibit’s opening because he wanted time to understand the issues involved. It is not too late for him to accept a compromise solution, such as the one suggested, to omit the words “in Turkey,” and move forward.
Respectfully,
Roger W. Smith, Chair