John Eibner at the Armenian Genocide memorial in Yerevan in 2021. csi
Text of Dr. Eibner’s speech
Your Excellency, the Most Reverend Bishop Isakhanyan; Madam Mayor of the City of Frankfurt, Ms. Eskandari-Grünberg; distinguished members of the City Council; distinguished religious leaders; Mr. Spangenberg, Chairman; and ladies and gentlemen.
I must begin by thanking the President of the Central Council of Armenians in Germany, Jonathan Spangenberg, and the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Germany, Bishop Serovpé Isakhanyan, for the kind invitation to speak today.
It is a great honor to have the opportunity to share some thoughts as we commemorate collectively on this solemn occasion the victims of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire—the first of Europe’s great and grisly genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The honor is all the greater since many distinguished speakers of diverse religious and secular world views and political perspectives have preceded us on the platform over the decades of Armenian Genocide commemoration.
It is particularly appropriate that we should be holding the commemoration here at St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. This wonderful church is so full of symbolism of the German nation’s long struggle for unity on the basis of liberal constitutionalism.
It was a struggle sometimes plagued by catastrophically violent intervals, including the greatest genocide in the history of mankind. The struggle for national unity and sovereign statehood is one in which the Armenian nation is still engaged today.
Today we remember and honor in the first place the multitude—far exceeding a million Armenian Christians—who were shot, hacked or starved to death during the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Turkish Caliphate during an officially declared jihad.
We likewise remember and honor those Armenian Christians who managed to survive by trekking under the most dangerous and difficult conditions to Syria or to the Russian Caucasus.
We must also not forget those who managed to survive by converting to Islam. This was one of the very few ways in which an Armenian Christian could save one’s life. It was especially the fate of many captured Armenian women.
Armenian women were forced to serve as wives or concubines of Kurdish or Turkish Muslim men. They were stripped of their religious and ethnic identity in the process. Their offspring were also denied their Armenian Christian birthright. Many live today in Turkey completely unaware of their Armenian Christian heritage.
Yet another set of victims of this genocidal epoch must not be forgotten. They are the Syriac—Assyrian—Aramean Christians and the Greeks. These communities suffered much the same genocidal fate, at roughly the same time, in the same Ottoman space and for essentially the same reasons—reasons that we will come to.
These memories are painful. They are painful first for the victims and their descendants. They are also painful for that part of the broader humanity that believes such crimes against humanity should have no place on this planet.
Memorials to the Genocide are also inconvenient. They are inconvenient for the many unrepentant, genocide-denying successors of the perpetrators. They are also inconvenient for their geopolitical and economic partners.
Many of these powers speak habitually about human rights, religious freedom and European values. “Never again” has become a mantra.
The inconvenience of remembering the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire persists. It does so because it is not simply one of many fossilized historical events. It is not buried deep under the weight of early 20th century history.
The fact is the spirit of the Armenian Genocide lives on. It transcends time and space. It transcends the territory of the Ottoman Caliphate. It transcends the years of the First World War.
From hindsight we can see the spirit of what would become the Armenian Genocide raising its head in the Bulgarian and Hamidian massacres of the late 19th century.
We also know that the Armenian Genocide spilled over from Ottoman territory into the Caucasus in the shape of anti-Armenian massacres and pogroms. Enver Pasha’s Islamic Army of the Caucasus was in the vanguard of these proceedings.
The subsequent unbroken chain of such violence has over the years produced the ethno-religious cleansing of Armenian Christians from the whole of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Two of the most dreadful links in that chain were the Sumgait and Baku massacres of Armenians.
It reached a climax a mere three years ago when Azerbaijan militarily attacked Nagorno Karabakh following a dehumanizing nine-month blockade. It was indeed a genocide, as [first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court] Luis Moreno Ocampo confirmed two years ago here at St. Paul’s Church.
This act of genocide shamefully belongs not to a bygone age, but to the annals of our times. The shame of such a crime against humanity taking place within the sphere of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe is compounded by the deliberation inaction of its members to fulfill their obligation of genocide prevention.
There are many other examples that can be cited of the spirit of the Armenian Genocide transcending the time and space of the grisly events in the Ottoman Caliphate during the First World War.
Among them are Hitler’s extermination of Jews and others during the Second World War and Turkey’s military expulsion of the Greek Christians from northern Cyprus.
Anyone familiar with the decimation of the Armenian Christian community of Aleppo will understand that its spirit is alive and well today in Turkey’s Syrian sphere of influence.
When I speak of the spirit of the Armenian Genocide, I am not referring to hocus-pocus. Any secular political scientist can examine the phenomenon by studying the ideology that drives it.
It is an ideology that rejects western democratic norms. It combines time-honored Muslim supremacism rooted in the Ottoman tradition with a more modern pan-Turkic ultranationalism.
This is the ideology of what I call the Turkish-Azeri condominium. It operates on the basis of what the presidents of Turkey and Azerbaijan call the policy of “one nation, two states”.
As with all religious and ethnic supremacist ideologies, genocidal potential is given free reign at times of war or great political instability.
According to this ideology, non-Muslim and non-Turkic communities in the Turkish-Azeri spheres of influence cannot possess two rights. One is any political right that could lead to self-determination. The other is the right to ancestral territory within the Muslim-Turkic sphere.
Exercise of these rights challenges Muslim and Turkic supremacy.
It was this ideology that animated the ultranationalist, dictatorial Young Turks to commit the Armenian Genocide in the context of a declared jihad. It is this ideology that is embraced and promoted by the rulers of modern-day Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Today, Nagorno Karabakh stands empty of its Armenian Christian inhabitants. Now Turkey and Azerbaijan have set their sights on the Republic of Armenia or Western Azerbaijan, as it is called by the dictatorial president of Azerbaijan. It has placed the tiny Republic of Armenia under threat of war.
The Armenian prime minister says this war could come as early as this September.
Turkey and Azerbaijan demand conditions for peace that would render the Republic of Armenia incapable of fulfilling its raison d’etre—that is as a safe haven for the victims of the Armenian Genocide and their descendants.
Among the many demands the Armenian government must fulfill to forestall fresh military aggression two are particularly relevant to today’s commemoration.
The first is to prevent public discussion of the ethno-religious cleansing of Nagorno Karabakh. The second is to wind down its support for international recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
The Armenian authorities meet these demands. In doing so they sometimes abuse the system of justice by using the coercive instruments of the state, much like what happens in Turkey and Azerbaijan.
The Armenian authorities today, like Turkey and Azerbaijan, find the Armenian Genocide politically inconvenient. This recently became visible to the public when the Armenian prime minister failed to accompany the American vice-president to the Armenian Genocide Memorial.
It was also visible in the firing of the Genocide Museum’s director, Dr. Edita Gzoyan. Her offense was to provide Vice-President Vance with documentation about the Genocide outside the scope of the Ottoman Caliphate, including its manifestations in Nagorno Karabakh.
We can also see the extent of the inconvenience of the Armenian Genocide from the American vice-president’s famous deletion of an X tweet in which he paid tribute to the victims of the Armenian Genocide.
The deleted X tweet is a confirmation of the extent to which the mightiest nation on earth is prepared to self censor to accommodate itself to an extremist ideology of geopolitical and economic partners.
We should expect to find European leaders early next month in Yerevan similarly downplaying or altogether ignoring the Armenian Genocide and its recent manifestation in Nagorno Karabakh.
The once fashionable slogan “Never again” is not likely to be uttered in public by the European leadership while in Yerevan for the EU-Armenia Summit and the European Political Community, including the Turkish-Azeri condominium meet early next month in Yerevan.
Recalling the Armenian Genocide is inconvenient in this quarter too.
I mention these recent developments, not with the aim of stirring a boiling pot. But the fact is the pot is boiling and is beginning to spill over.
We live in times when the Turkish-Azeri condominium—animated by a religiously and ethnically extremist ideology—threatens Armenia with further military aggression. We also live in times when Germany and the rest of Europe are deeply involved in the still escalating war over Ukraine.
European governments from the United Kingdom in the West to Russia in the East are ramping up militarization. All are yielding to a revival of a ‘might is right’ political culture. It is a culture that sees the international human rights instruments as no more than tools to be used selectively against adversaries and forgotten when it comes to strategic and economic partners.
It is in times like these that the spirit of genocide is given free reign.
Upon the conclusion of his visit to Armenia, the genocide-tweet-deleting vice-president pointedly declare: “Peace is not made by people who are too focused on the past. Peace is made by people focused on the future.”
Such pronouncements should remind us of a truth uttered by the Prophet Jeremiah in such troubled times: “They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 6:14)
The genocidal wounds of the Armenian nation are indeed treated carelessly by those in power as they proclaim “peace, peace”.
I would put more stock in the time-honored wisdom of Shakespeare than in the remarks of a contemporary politician. Shakespeare famously and simply stated “past is prologue”. In other words, the past is the gateway and guide to the future. Failure to focus on the past, to analyze it, to understand it repeatedly leads to avoidable catastrophes.
This truth underscores the importance of public remembrance of the Armenian Genocide in all its manifestation. It is a great responsibility. Failure to do so opens the door for fresh manifestations of the spirit of the Armenian Genocide and other diabolical kindred spirits. They haunt today not only the Armenian nation but all of humanity.
