The declaration, which has been long expected, was greeted with modest enthusiasm by human rights activists who view it as symbolic, and with denunciations by the Turkish government.
The Polish Jewish Lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" in part after losing 49 family members to the Holocaust. But he was also motivated by his earlier study of the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire.
A dialogue with a historian of Armenians in the United States shows that the boundaries of the "white race" have shifted historically and been determined not by biology but by politics played out in immigration courts.
For a brief moment this fall, world interest fixed its attention to an event of the past. News that the U.S. Congress approved a formal resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide was carried as a leading story by media outlets worldwide.
In his groundbreaking new book, “Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide,” due out in March, Clark University historian Taner Akçam destroys the Turkish government’s denial strategy.
Taner Akcam, a Turkish historian at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has studied the genocide for decades by piecing together documents from around the world to establish state complicity in the killings, says he has unearthed an original telegram that confirms authorities knew what was happening.
Pope Francis waded into turbulent geopolitical waters once again on Friday during his first visit to Armenia when he made an unscripted remark referring to the World War I-era massacre.
“Today, we are all Armenian,” said U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank) as he addressed the crowd from the stage. “We have one cause and that cause is justice.”
