Elie Wiesel has said that denial is the final phase of genocide, a second killing. Between 1915 and 1923, the Young Turks cleansed the former Ottoman Empire of 3 million Christians, including two-thirds of its Armenian population. For a little over one hundred years now, Armenians throughout the world have been living with the stress and anger created by the systematic and sometimes repulsive contortions that the Turkish state has continued to exercise in order to deny the planned mass execution of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, which included the confiscation of their goods and property. No Turkish head of state has ever properly apologized to the Armenians or indicated that he truly understands the scope of the tragedy that befell Ottoman Christians from 1915–1923 (for the record, along with 1.5 million Armenians, another 1 to 1.5 million Pontic Greeks and Assyrians were also massacred).
I can vividly remember in the early 1990s, having recently graduated from Harvard, standing in Times Square at an April 24th commemoration of the Armenian Genocide along with some 5,000 other Armenian Americans. April 24th commemorates the night that the Young Turks swept through the homes of leading Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople: the latter were led to ships in the capital’s harbor and then loaded onto carts and transferred to concentration camps in Ayash and Chankiri where they were systematically tortured and brutally murdered. As I gazed across Forty-second Street, it was hard not to notice a smaller but
