BALAKIAN SHARES LEMKIN PRIZE WITH TURKISH PUBLISHER

by Doris V. Cross (New York City)

Peter Balakian Shares Raphael Lemkin Prize for The Burning Tigris with Ragip Zarakolu

On November 11th the Institute for the Study of Genocide in New York City awarded Peter Balakian the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize for his book The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America��s Response. The prize is awarded for the best scholarly book in the English language in the preceding two years ��on the subject of genocide, mass killing, gross human rights violations, and the prevention of such crimes.��

Present at the ceremony, held at the City University of New York��s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, was Ragip Zarakolu, director of Belge International Publishers, in Istanbul, which had just published in Turkish Balakian��s critically-acclaimed 1997 memoir, Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past.

At the podium to accept the Lemkin Prize from Helen Fein, Director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, Balakian welcomed Mr. Zarakolu, who, he said, ��for almost 30 years has exhibited extraordinary courage by publishing books in Turkey that are about taboo subjects--many of them on the histories of the minority peoples of Turkey��the Armenians, Kurds, Greeks.��

Balakian then surprised the audience by asking Mr. Zarakolu to ��come to the podium to share this prize with me. I can��t imagine anyone more deserving of a prize named after Raphael Lemkin.�� Mr. Zarakolu responded, ��I thank you and am most honored to be here with you at this joyous occasion. You honor me greatly.��

��It was a spontaneous gesture�� Balakian said, after the ceremony. ��When I saw Zarakolu here, all these miles from Istanbul, and after all he��s done, nothing could make more sense than to share it with him. I hope it created another small bridge between Armenian and Turkish culture.��

In his formal remarks, Balakian thanked the Institute and noted that ��Scholars of genocide have created an interdisciplinary discourse that has changed the curriculum in ways that might have been unthinkable two decades ago. They have affirmed that scholarship can be meticulous and yet incorporate an ethical perspective. Had there been genocide scholarship in the 1920s and ��30s, it might have been more difficult for Adolph Hitler to say, as he did, eight days before invading Poland in 1939, ��who today, after all, speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?��

��Hitler��s statement,�� Balakian said, ��reminds us why scholarly memory is also a moral issue. As scholars of genocide have brought their own disciplines into this interdisciplinary one, they have affirmed the notion that scholarly work can have a role in the world in an active way, in a way that might affect moral values and even public policy��in order to detect early warning signals and implement prevention of the ultimate crime.��

Balakian had much to say about the character and commitment of Raphael Lemkin: ��It��s of special importance to underscore that the man who coined the very word ��genocide�� and invented the concept of genocide did so in part on the basis of what had happened to the Armenians in 1915 and what was happening to the Jews of Europe before his very eyes in the 1940s. A statement Lemkin made in 1954 underscores how deeply he felt about the relationship between the two genocides; writing to a young woman urging her to keep working for the passage of the UN Genocide Convention in the Senate in August 1954, Lemkin wrote: ��let us not forget that the heat of this month is less unbearable to us than the heat in the ovens of Auschwitz and Dachau and more lenient than the murderous heat in the desert of Aleppo which burned to death the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Christian Armenian victims of genocide in 1915.��

��No figure more fully embodies the fusion of intellectual passion with ethical commitment than Raphael Lemkin, the brilliant legal scholar whose writings brought forth the concept of genocide and in doing so started a modern paradigm for international human rights,�� Balakian observed.

In concluding, Balakian reflected on how he as a poet and scholar trained in American studies came to write about the Armenian Genocide from the American perspective: ��It was exciting to discover that the first time Americans left their own country to engage in human rights relief work was for the Armenia people in the 1890s; that no American history is now complete without understanding that the movement for Armenia was America��s first international human rights movement. . . . I wanted to recover that lost history, because no one had written about it, no one had conceptualized the human rights movement for Armenia that had evolved in the 1890s and would continue for several decades into the 1920s.��

Balakian also noted that his book demonstrates, no matter how much philanthropic and popular energy and money there was for the Armenian rescue and intervention for the Armenian Genocide, ��in the end there was nothing but gridlock��gridlock between the popular will of the nation, and the State Department and White House. The Armenian case is the beginning of what has become a familiar story. The U. S. government has no priority for dealing with international human rights catastrophes to this day.��

In closing, Balakian said that the Turkish government��s denial of its crimes against humanity in 1915 is an international scandal and has made the history of the Armenian Genocide a current topic in international politics, especially as Turkey aspires to the EU.��

The ceremony ended with prize-winning documentary filmmaker Andrew Goldberg��s introduction of rare footage of Raphael Lemkin speaking about the Armenian Genocide on a CBS television broadcast from 1949.