ArmenianReview Nov2012 CorrectedFinal

Armenian Review
Volume 53 Number 1-4 (SpringWinter 2012)
The cover symbols represent the following:

The non-whites sign symbolizes Apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the US, while the chain refers to slavery in the US. The butterfly is the symbol of hope chosen by the Comfort Women. The three figures are a reference to an iconic picture of the Armenian Genocide, in which a mother and son stand next to the body of a child. The hand is a Native American symbol representing humankinds presence, our history, and legacy. The quilted rainbow is the flag of indigenous South American peoples
Editor-in-Chief
Asbed Kotchikian
Editorial Board
Managing Editor
Dikran Kaligian
Richard G. Hovannisian, Chair University Of California, Los Angeles Stephan Astourian University Of California, Berkeley Levon Chorbajian University Of Massachusetts, Lowell S. Peter Cowe University Of California, Los Angeles Vahakn N. Dadrian Conesus, New York G.M. Goshgarian University Of Burgundy Ara Khanjian Ventura College Dickran Kouymjian California State University, Fresno Marc Nichanian New York, NY Susan Pattie University Of London Ronald Grigor Suny University Of Chicago Khachig Tllyan Wesleyan University
Book Review Editor

Vartan Matiossian
Production
Betsy Sarles
Cover Design
Alik Arzoumanian
The Armenian Review is indexed in Historical Abstracts, America: History And Life, International Bibliography Of Periodical Literature, and International Bibliography Of Book Reviews. It is microfilmed by University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Copies of individual articles are available through UnCover.
2012 By The Armenian Review, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Photo from the Dennis Brutus Collection, courtesy of Worcester State University
from the editor

This special issue of the Armenian Review is dedicated to Dennis V. Brutus (1924-2009), a leading international human rights activist and gifted poet whose imprint on the global reparations movement cannot be overstated. In addition to playing a key role in the banning of Apartheid-era South Africa from the Olympics and being repeatedly imprisoned as well as shot by the Afrikaner government for his work against Apartheid, Dennis worked tirelessly on a host of issues around the world throughout his life, including protests against the World Trade Organizations devastating impact on vulnerable populations across the globe. Since the 1980s based at the University of Pittsburgh, Dennis spent two semesters as Poet in Residence at Worcester State University (Spring 2001 and Fall 2003), to which he donated the bulk of his personal documents to form the Dennis Brutus Collection. Worcester State played an important role in Dennis bid for political asylum in the United States in the early 1980s, which the Reagan administration strongly opposed, by granting him an honorary doctorate on May 29, 1982. The personal, human side of Dennis so present even in his most political poetry was evident to anyone who interacted with him. He always had time to talk with a student or community member about the issues of concern to that person, and engaged group after activist group with humility and a willingness to work equally right alongside others to make a difference. Committed throughout his life to non-violent struggle in the spirit of Thoreau, Gandhi, and King, that life is a testament to the stubborn hope he maintained throughout the most difficult of times. The articles in this special issue include a number by friends and associates of Dennis, not the least of whom is Patrick Sargent, one of Dennis last students. It is the aspiration of the guest editor that this special issue both memorialize and advance Dennis human rights spirit and legacy. For more on Dennis and the Dennis Brutus Collection, including access to a compilation of original poems found in the Collection, go to http://worcester.edu/DBrutus/default.aspx.
Henry Theriault Guest Editor
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PUBLICATION The Armenian Review (ISSN 0004-2366) is published quarterly in Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter or bi-annually in Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter by The Armenian Review, Inc., 80 Bigelow Avenue, Watertown, Massachusetts 02472-2012. Copyright by Armenian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. The Armenian Review disclaims responsibility for statements, either of fact or opinion, made by contributors. Publication difficulties resulted in suspension of the journal from 1994 to 2000. Volume numbers remain consecutive. SUBSCRIPTION Annual subscription rates payable in US funds and by check or money order drawn on a US bank, are $30 for individuals and $60 for institutions at U.S. addresses. For addresses outside the United States, subscription rates are $40 for individuals ($35 for Canada) and $70 for institutions. INQUIRIES All subscriptions, order and renewal inquiries should be addressed to the publisher, Armenian Review, Inc., 80 Bigelow Avenue, Watertown, Massachusetts 02472-2012, or at orders@armenianreview.org, or call 617-926-4037. The web address for the Armenian Review is: www.armenianreview.org BACK ISSUES Information about availability and prices of back issues may be obtained by contacting the publisher (address above). The Armenian Review web site contains price and ordering information. ADVERTISING Advertising rates may be obtained by contacting the publisher. CHANGE OF ADDRESS Six weeks advance notice must be given when notifying of address changes. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Armenian Review, Inc., 80 Bigelow Avenue, Watertown, Massachusetts 02472-2012.
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The Armenian Review welcomes article submissions dealing with topics including (but not limited to): socio-political and economic developments, foreign policy issues, historical events, art and architecture, geography and politics of the former Soviet space and the Middle East, diasporas and their relations with their home countries, sociological and anthropological issues, role of ethnography and nationalism in politics and history, ethnic conflicts and conflict resolution as well as topics dealing with literature, language, education and religion. The Armenian Review also accepts previously unpublished primary documents, memoirs, reviews, briefings, statistical charts and data, and bibliographical lists. The Armenian Review will, on occasion, consider article submissions in the Armenian language, but if the article is accepted the author should be prepared to have it professionally translated into English. SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS Manuscripts may be submitted in electronic format (preferably in Microsoft Word) as an email attachment to editor@armenianreview.org. Hard copy manuscripts can be mailed to The Editor, Armenian Review, 80 Bigelow Avenue, Watertown, MA 02472. All manuscripts submitted to the Armenian Review should be original, unpublished works and should not be under consideration for publication in any other journal at the time of submission. Submissions will be reviewed anonymously by at least two referees; therefore, authors are asked to prepare a separate cover page including their name, mailing/contact address, telephone number, e-mail address, and a 75 word biographical statement of the author(s). Each submission should also include a summary/abstract of the article, not to exceed 100 words. After the reviews are submitted by the referees, the Editor will notify the authors of the acceptance, rejection, or need for revision of the submission. MANUSCRIPT PREPARATION Manuscripts should be on 8 by 11 paper with 1 margins on all sides. The text should be double-spaced and use a size 12 font for the main text and size 10 for references. The submissions should have the following setup: title page and author(s) information; main text; endnotes; bibliography. Unless previously agreed upon with the Editor, submissions should not exceed 40 pages (including the endnotes and the bibliography).
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Armenian Review
Volume 53 Number 1-4 (SpringWinter 2012)
CONTENTS
The Global Reparations Movement
Guest Editor: Henry Theriault
Introduction: The Global Reparations Movement

Henry C. Theriault
ARTICLES
1 11 33 53 63
Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Jermaine McCalpin Kibibi Tyehimba
Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States Reparations at the National Level: Reparations and Comfort Women Victims of the Japanese Army
Haruko Shibasaki
Argentinas Constituent Genocide: Challenging the Hegemonic National Narrative and Laying the Foundation for Reparations to Indigenous Peoples
Diana Lenton, Walter Delrio, Pilar Prez, Alexis Papazin, Mariano Nagy, and Marcelo Musante
The Genocide Against the Armenians 1915-1923 and the Relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention
Alfred de Zayas
85 121 167 193 207
From Unfair to Shared Burden: The Armenian Genocides Outstanding Damage and the Complexities of Repair
Henry Theriault
The Debt to the Indebted: Reparations, Odious Debt, and Their Global Implications
M.P. Giyose
Debt Cancellation as Reparation: An Analysis of Four Cases

Patrick K. Sargent
BOOK REVIEWS
Tom Mooradian, The Repatriate: Love, Basketball, and the KGB, reviewed byAvedis Hadjian Nigoghos Sarafian, The Bois de Vincennes (Trans. Christopher Atamian), reviewed by Jennifer Manoukian Aris Janigian, Riverbig, reviewed by Sossi Essajanian Archbishop Hrant Khatchadourian, Historiography of Fifth Century Armenia, reviewed by Vartan Matiossian
CONTRIBUTORS Transliteration Guide
220 222
Introduction: The Global Reparations Movement

Henry C. Theriault
imposed on Germany for the damage done by World War I, have long been known. Some reparations were paid by the West German government to victims of the Holocaust. What is more, African Americans have pursued reparations for slavery as well as subsequent discrimination and violence for one and a half centuries. Yet, until recently, the issue of reparations has not been a central element in political, legal, or ethical engagements with past group harms. Interestingly, because it seemed to recognize that former victims had little chance of meaningful advancement toward stability without them, the granting of reparations after harms were inflicted seemed rather obvious in the past. For instance, reparations were initially granted to former US slaves and an extensive reparation plan was developed for the Armenian Genocide as part of the Paris Peace Accords. When domestic or geopolitical agendas, balances, and interests took center stage, however, reparations were just as easily set aside as a matter of course as US reparations to slaves were reversed and Armenians never received the reparations due them. As global concern at least rhetorical about civil and human rights issues has increased over the past half-century, especially in the wake of the hyper-violence of the Holocaust, the horrific excesses of Jim Crow and Apartheid, and the destructive reaction to anticolonial movements, so has the prominence of reparations as not just a legitimate issue but a possibly essential part of any post-mass violence or oppression process. Reparations are certainly not considered obvious
ARMENIAN REVIEW Volume 53 Number 1-4 (SpringWinter 2012) pp. 1-10
The concept of reparations is not new. War reparations, such as those
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today, but victim groups and others still raise them very often as a central concern and requirement for justice. An important event, as both a catalyst and a result of this shift, was the 1988 decision by the United States to compensate Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. Other reparative events have occurred as well, such as Canadas return of land to Inuit. During this time, calls for African American reparations, Native American reparations, reparations to the Comfort Women sexually enslaved by the Japanese military during the Pacific War, and many other cases have claimed major political and media attention. Reparations are now intertwined with truth and reconciliation processes, as in the case of South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions third phase was supposed to be a reparations process, though this was abandoned. This makes a good deal of sense, as reparations are very often crucial for a victim groups (partial) recovery or reconstitution and future economic viability, political security, and even cultural or physical survival. While the Armenian Revolutionary Federation maintained its demand for reparations and especially territorial claims from Turkey for the Armenian Genocide, from the period after the Genocide to the present, these claims were not prominent in the public activities of the ARF or the Armenian National Committees of various countries and regions. They have been, further, anathema to such organizations as the Armenian Assembly. But, the independence of the Armenian Republic and its precarious existence have created the space and the need for renewed attention on reparations, which reentered mainstream scholarly and political discourse on the Armenian Genocide just a decade ago. The initial reception was cool to say the least, with only a few scholars and activists pushing the issue publicly. But, reflecting a broader, and in fact global, shift, the issue has become more and more prominent. Much of the discourse on Armenian Genocide reparations is constrained within the old notions of liberal property relations and an ethnically-focused political vision. But an important strain has taken the issue in a new and productive direction. Reflecting the move toward genuine comparative genocide study and activism that has spurred organizations such as the Armenian National Committee of America to take a strong, active role in the struggle against genocide in Sudan and
Armenian Genocide scholars to integrate into study of their focal case analysis of and challenges to the denials of other genocides and cases of related mass violence or oppression, some Armenian organizations, activists, and scholars have recognized the connections among the reparations issues of different cases of mass violence and oppression. At the same time, other groups have also recognized these interconnections. A global reparations movement has coalesced. One event marking the emergence of this movement was the Whose Debt? Whose Responsibility? International Symposium on Reparations held at Worcester State University on December 10, 2005. Renowned poet and human rights activist Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) and WSU professor Henry Theriault led the organization of this symposium. It was guided from the outset by Brutus concept of reparations as at once a concrete basic right and need of victimized groups and just as much a broad force for global social and political transformation. For Brutus, all political efforts served the World Social Forums motto, Another world is possible. Reparations for different cases were not simply analogous for Brutus, they were part of a single social, ethical, and political process. To appreciate the organic connectedness of the range of outstanding reparative issues across the world, including claims against governmental but also corporate and other non-governmental actors, it is necessary to understand how the various human rights abuses to be repaired have themselves been related historically. Even where harms have been recognized as group harms going beyond a mere aggregation of violations of individual human rights and rights to property, to strike at the very core of group political legitimacy, human dignity, and material viability, prior to the emergence of the global movement toward reparations, activists and scholars have tended to treat cases in isolation rather than to appreciate them as part of a single overarching process. While it is normal to view mass human rights violations as aberrations or regressive counter steps in a progressive evolution of human social and political organization and values, as much or more than it is the product of such progress, the current global order and hierarchical human condition is the product of half a millennium and more of genocide, colonialism, imperialism, racism, chauvinist nationalism, sexism, slavery, apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, . . . homophobia,1 aggressive military
Henry C. Theriault
conquest and militarism, and economic exploitation. Hardly a state in existence does not trace some key features from economic wealth or desperate poverty to ideological uniformity or internal group conflict and violence, and so on to one or more of these forces. Rather than a simple corrective to aberrational derailments of progress and wellbeing, reparations understood as a response to this complex of forces and their consequences is a process of social transformation toward a world no longer a product of these forces. The linking of the struggles of various victim groups is not merely a matter of expediency or mutual advantage, but reflects the true commonality of the united problem each faces through its own history. The Worcester State conference brought together scholars and activists from around the world to offer insights into a range of reparations cases, including South Africans for Apartheid, African Americans for slavery and Jim Crow, Native Americans for genocide and dispossession, former Comfort Women for their sexual enslavement by the Japanese military in the 1931-45 period, and Armenians for the 1915-23 Genocide, as well as a number of cases for debt cancellation as reparations for colonialism and post-colonial debt exploitation, including Haiti, Pakistan, Indonesia, and South Africa. The conference provided a forum for cross-fertilization of ideas and recognition of common cause as well as historical connection. Through Brutus leadership, new alliances were forged that have borne significant fruit in various directions. For instance, Jermaine McCalpin, who presented on the African American and South African cases in their global context, joined an academic team organized by Theriault producing a report on Armenian Genocide reparations. What is more, Kibibi Tyehimba, co-President of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA), was invited to speak on this issue at the first Armenians and the Left symposium held at the Graduate School of the City University of New York April 7 and 8, 2006. The present special issue of the Armenian Review is the outgrowth of that original conference and its legacy. To the papers originally presented at the Worcester State conference have been added an analysis of African American reparations by Tyehimba with her 2007 testimony in front of the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties; Alfred de Zayas influential analysis of
the applicability of international law to reparations for the Armenian Genocide; and a highly innovative analysis of the current reparative process in Argentina for indigenous victims of genocide by Diana Lenton, Walter Delrio, Pilar Prez, Alexis Papazin, Mariano Nagy, and Marcelo Musante. These ground-breaking additions represent a further broadening and development of the global reparations movement envisioned by Brutus. The result is a cohesive set of articles that combine activist and scholarly work that focuses on the detailed particularities of specific cases and at the same time engages some of the core general and theoretical issues at stake. Jermaine McCalpins Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America applies his innovative truth and reparation commission model to the case of African Americans, with connections drawn to the South African, Native American, and other cases. Among the novel aspects of McCalpins approach is the recasting of societies, such as the United States, that have not dealt with sometimes centuries-old issues, as transitional societies in recognition of the deep effects of past history on the present. This turns on incisive responses to theorists who tend to dominate discussion who hold that impacts of historical wrongs weaken over time and reparations claims lose legitimacy as time passes. His refutations of prominent arguments against reparations for past injustices and the categorizational scheme he employs to contextualize them provide a strong groundwork for his argument for a truth commission approach to repair. The analysis of the concept of justice and development of a complex notion of reparations in the paper are indispensible to a meaningful discussion of any reparation case. Complementing McCalpins approach is the essay and testimony of Kibibi Tyehimba. Discussing the outlook and work of NCOBRA, Tyehimba presents a number of important ideas that advance discussion of African American reparations. Prominent among them is an analysis of the long-term and deeply embedded trauma resulting from sustained violence against and oppression of people of African descent in the United States and its predecessor colonies over four centuries. Too easily US whites assume that what for them seems to have little negative impact and emotional loading must likewise have little for African Americans, as the former ignore their profoundly
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different relationship to the history and its consequences from that of the latter. Tyehimbas attention to the symbolic aspect of reparations, beyond cash payments, resonates well with McCalpins broadening of the term reparations and offers important insights into how a comprehensive reparation process is crucial to emotional healing as much as to the socio-economic stability of African Americans. Another key element is attention to the material impact of slavery and subsequent oppression that are not washed away by, but in fact reinforced through, what appears to be a more egalitarian present. Haruko Shibasakis treatment of the emergence and issues at stake in the recent push for reparations for the former Comfort Women is especially timely and poignant as each year the group of living Comfort Women who have courageously come forward to challenge Japans denial of what happened and to demand a proper accounting becomes smaller as members pass away. Shibasaki explains the struggle in the Japanese courts and political realm in a way that elucidates both the subtle theoretical issues involved and the practical results of the process. The Comfort Women case is essential to an understanding of reparations for human rights violations because of two important differences from the other cases included in this special issue and most other cases of group reparations. First, Comfort Women were drawn from areas around Asia as well as to a lesser extent European communities in Asia. For this reason, they are not a politically unified identity group in the sense that Armenians or South African blacks are. Indeed, the political units that should represent the former Comfort Women, such as South Korea and the Philippines, are cut by gender, class, and other gaps. The former Comfort Women often were and are marginalized in their home societies and states. Political unity and political prominence have had to be built from the ground up by the remarkable women who have come forward to challenge the Japanese silence. Second, because of this marginalization as well as the physical and psychological effects and social ostracization often accompanying the brutal enslavement endured by these women typically teenage girls at the time which included such things as being raped 30 times per day 6 or 7 days a week, forced drug addition, brutal hysterectomies and abortions, violence and sexual torture by soldiers, and exposure to rampant sexually-transmitted
diseases not only are the experiences of these women typically not counted as national issues in their home countries but the women often do not have any descendants, concerned family members, or local communities willing to struggle on their behalf and whose existence ensures that even after the passing of the direct victims, an active victim community will remain. On the contrary, it requires little imagination to view the response of Japanese courts and political and academic leaders in the 1990s and 2000s to the coming forward of former Comfort Women as an attempt to stall a reparative process long enough so that these women will die off and their claims against Japan with them. A major challenge in thinking about the future of this case is who will carry it forward on the victims behalf so that Japan will eventually be required to make amends for this atrocity. Based on various projects by the authors, Diana Lenton, Walter Delrio, Pilar Prez, Alexis Papazin, Mariano Nagy, and Marcelo Musantes Argentinas Constituent Genocide: Challenging the Hegemonic National Narrative and Laying the Foundation for Reparations to Indigenous Peoples is a profoundly important and novel discussion of the dramatic shifts underway in Argentina as, in the throes of democratic transformation, the indigenous issue has returned out of the past to the foreground of Argentine political life and national identity. Central to this article is the question of how a society whose very existence depends on the genocidal dispossession of indigenous populations to make land available for European consolidation transforms itself away from this brutality and illegitimacy. Turning back time is not an option, but simply forgetting the past leaves intact both a false history (with a false sense of national identity built on it) and the material effects on indigenous Argentines in terms of political marginalization and economic exploitation and vulnerability. Advancing another innovative concept of reparations, the authors discuss the demonumentalization movement as a means of reclaiming the indigenous heritage of the land and challenging hegemonic falsifications of history. Of special noteworthiness is the articles analysis of the evolution of nationalist militarism through the Conquest of the Desert an evolution that continues through to the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. The concept of invisibilization of the indigenous peoples of Argentina historically and
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in the present adds an important dimension to understanding of this case, while the reversing visiblization introduces a novel element of reparations to the emerging global discourse. This pioneering work (pun intended) will be of significant interest for activists on, and scholars of, any case of indigenous peoples dispossessed through settler colonialism. Alfred de Zayas is likely well-known to Armenians around the world for his authoritative applications of international law to the Armenian case. An esteemed scholar of, and advocate for, human rights especially through his work as senior counsel for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, de Zayas brings to bear on the Armenian Genocide a rich and technically sophisticated understanding of relevant international law. As in his other work, this can be seen as a rehumanization of law to serve the dignity and needs of the victims of mass human rights violations. De Zayas brilliantly-argued supersessionary case for applicability of the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide to a case predating the Genocide Convention creates a model for cases around the world. One of the strengths of the case de Zayas presents is its linking of technical aspects of case law to relevant theoretical and legal principles. Henry Theriaults contribution complements de Zayas legal analysis by making the case that a reparative process must be part of any approach to addressing the Armenian Genocide. The article discusses the limitations of prominent dialogue and acknowledgment models for dealing with the contemporary impact of the Armenian Genocide. A key feature of the approach is recognition of the power and status differential produced or exacerbated by a genocidal process, a power differential that structures postgenocide victim-perpetrator relations but is ignored by most reconciliation models and all prominent models applied to the Armenian Genocide. A key requirement for meaningful conciliation between Armenians and Turks is a reparative process that mitigates the power and status differential not just materially but educationally and symbolically and thereby creates a more balanced and mutual relationship. The argument is that only if an approach includes group reparations can it address the full range of issues facing Armenians as a legacy of the Genocide. M. P. Giyoses The Debt to the Indebted: Reparations, Odious Debt, and Their Global Implications is a tour de force on the debt legacy
of Apartheid in South Africa and the broader odious debt problem debilitating much of the global South in the post-colonial era. Giyose traces the origin of the international debt now crippling South Africa that has required deep cuts to social and public medical programs. Particularly striking is the fact that the bulk of South Africas multi-billion dollar debt is the direct result of loans taken out to buy weapons and otherwise keep the Apartheid regime solvent as economic boycotts had their effect as well as money needed for pensions to government officials, including those who served Apartheid. Giyoses analysis of global debt is no less revealing. He traces out the operation of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in creating a global economic structure that imposes unpayable debts on economically vulnerable states and populations. Giyoses important contribution extends the work of Jubilee South Africa and other organizations exposing the contemporary debt problem as the newest form of imperialism. His linking of the resolution of the debt issue with the creation of a new global economic system opens up new possibilities. Patrick Sargents article extends Giyoses approach to treat four particular cases of odious debt: South Africa, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Haiti. Sargent explains the deep impacts of debt and the historical processes that produced debt in each case, and makes an argument for debt cancellation as repair for the historical injustices producing the debt today. As the size, location, and circumstances of the four cases vary greatly, Sargents four treatments offer much for a reader who hopes to understand what is really happening in one of the four or to apply a similar model to another case. His attention to the human impact of each odious debt, while on the one hand emotionally gripping, at the same time emphasizes that debt issues are not merely abstract concerns relevant to only the wealthy in a society, but instead have direct impacts on average peoples lives. It is fitting that, as this special issue begins with a dedication to Dennis Brutus, it ends with an article by one of his students, a symbolic passing of the torch and expression of hope for the future. These articles should be critically engaged as part of a much-needed open discourse on the global challenge of reparations. But this critical engagement itself should also be subjected to critical appraisal. Beyond
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the distortions introduced by denial by members of perpetrator groups, in policy circles especially but also in academia and public discourse, it is still all too common in the present age to dismiss reparations out of hand as unreasonable or fantastic. But this is due more to the fact that reparations are of necessity discussed within not just a social and political world but within an intellectual and ideological framework conditioned by genocide, colonialism, imperialism, and the other forces listed above. Reparations are at odds structurally with the world order and its intellectual superstructure as they currently exist. This is clear, for instance, in the anti-indigenous cultural, legal, political, and economic biases evident across the globe. An honest and objective engagement with the issue requires correcting for, or bracketing the pressure against, repair embedded in the very structures of thinking through which the issue must be approached.
NOTES
1 Henry C. Theriault, Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship, Genocide Studies and Prevention 7 (1): 123-44 at 140. See 140-42 for development of the point in the present paragraph.

Jermaine McCalpin
Introduction
In November 2008, the first black president in the over 200 years of the American republic was elected. Barack Obamas assumption of the presidency represented the hopes of Americans of all races. Specifically, some blacks felt that America had come full circle in its democratic development by electing a black man to the highest office in a country where blacks had been historically subjugated yet so central to the progress of the republic. Others went further to argue that for blacks the election meant that the lack of reparations after slavery ended (the forty acre and a mule) and the suffering under Jim Crow segregation had found redemption and reparations with having a black president. Opponents of reparations for slavery heralded the election of Obama for a different reason. For them it meant that if a black man had now ascended to the highest office in the country, it had muted the argument that blacks had continued to be marginalized and subjugated in America. In other words the election of a black president canceled the need for reparations for slavery. While that election was momentous for many reasons, it certainly did not mean that the legacy of over 300 years of slavery and subjugation had been redeemed through this one (albeit important) act. What has followed since that day in November 2008 is that the United States has not progressed much more in terms of race relations. In many ways, race has emerged as an even more polarizing difference that rivals and is closely related to political polarity.
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The reality of race in America is thus that while it pervades all aspects of American life, it is being shoved out of public view; in the same manner that philosopher Charles Mills argues that the racial contract was written out of formal existence.1 Nonetheless, this invisibility is not the same as non-existence or impotency. The public strategy it would seem is that race is to be avoided especially because blacks have gotten their long desideratum of a black president. We are encouraged to avoid race altogether. The complexities of race are thus however that the racism that has functioned as a dynamic institution of the American civilization will not die just by denying that it exists. To get to non-racialism will require confronting the cantankerous ethos of racism and its symbiotic equal epistemic denialism, which I define simply as the form of denial of the existence of something such as racism or patriarchy that is so pervasive that to deny can only be accepted on the basis of knowledge or a way of thinking that is supported by power and privilege. I argue that this approach leads to a politics of avoidance, and this will only intensify the need for reparations for slavery in the United States especially because the presumed salvation that was to have come through the election of a black president has not materialized. This paper considers the contentious but necessary debate on reparations and the politics of avoidance that too often prevents that debate from being a central element in mainstream political discussions and policy decisions. It will discuss the consequences of this politics of avoidance before moving more substantively into discussing my model for reparations as well as the objections to reparations and my challenge to these objections. Though primarily directed at African-American reparations, the analysis in this paper draws on my research on South Africa reparations issues. The reparations debate often prompts in its opponents a moral recalcitrance to see that the calls for adequately addressing historical injustice is not only morally justified, it is morally overdue. Institutionally, reparations legislation has suffered from a lack of political will largely caused by a lack of moral vision about how longstanding and unaddressed injustice such as slavery and its legacies of racism and racial discrimination silently (and sometimes not so silently) divide the United States into a polity of not just haves and haves not, but of those who are
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the recipients of justice and those who continue to suffer from systemic injustice. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, blacks in the South experienced the lowest point in their pursuit of social, political and economic equality. Most of the rights achieved during Reconstruction, including citizenship and suffrage, were infringed upon by a system of segregation and intimidation.2 This is not to imply that the unaddressed issues and legacies of slavery are the only contemporary injustices, but that they are grave and longstanding problems that America has not been entirely honest and introspective about. Why write about reparations for slavery? This issue is the most contentious of reparations debates on the table, and the most in need of clarity and deliberation. The truth is that the American nation has an issue to face: Do we address historical errors that have arisen out of the nations past, and if choosing to do so, how do we address those errors? The issue of reparations is not about punishing one segment of the population for ancestral crimes committed against another. Reparations represent an opportunity for growth, and can serve as a restorative tool for reconciliation, education and opportunity for all citizens. Institutionally, reparations for African-American slavery is often treated like a nagging child ignore him and he will disappear. But reparative justice requires much more attention than the issue has been given. The past requires that we render justice to the present and the present demands justice for a better future. Historical injustice cannot be treated like that child; it does not just go away if the politics of avoidance shoves it to the sidelines. The politics of avoidance typifies the reality that reparation is avoided as a political and moral necessity by relegating it to being too contentious and divisive to be worth doing. The best thing, therefore, is to avoid reparations altogether as a necessary requirement of justice for longstanding injustices such as slavery and racial discrimination. The safety from which the politics of avoidance operates is what can be termed behind the shield of epistemic ignorance. It is an ignorance that has its basis not in the lack of available information on the issue of reparations but rather a refusal to validate the justification of reparations by not responding at all. Epistemic ignorance is ignorance that is legitimated by white institutional power and privilege.
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Reparations present complex and varied aspects that require a broad understanding of the philosophy, history, law, education, economics, and politics surrounding the issue, but it also requires some understanding of problems faced by ordinary people that are affected on a day-to-day basis by slavery-induced social disparities that continue to exist in our national reality. So the question is, should descendants of American slaves receive a government check or benefit because of the wrongs whites ancestors did to the slaves? In The Debt, Randall Robinson argues that America still owes an enormous debt to Africans and African Americans for the incalculable damage that blacks have suffered and continue to suffer as a result of years of slavery and segregation.3He also argues that the racial divide will not be bridged until all Americans acknowledge the damage done. However, John McWhorter refutes these claims. According to McWhorter, Robinson had refused to mention the Africans in Africa who had sold their fellow brothers, to have profitable gains, through intertribal wars.4 Opponents of reparations claim that to grant reparations would be to open a longstanding and divisive issue. Reparations is often treated like a contagious disease: the fear is that once one touches the issue of reparations one becomes infected with some deadly contagion for which there is no cure, so one should just avoid reparations altogether and move on from the ignoble past that gives rise to calls for repair. After all, some claim that the evils of slavery and racial discrimination are found to be wrong only ex post facto. Thus, the architects of slavery had no idea it was wrong to enslave and dehumanize. Guilt is the essence of white anxiety just as inferiority is the essence of black anxiety. The problem for blacks, as Steele points out, is that blacks have not abandoned the victims role. Blacks continue to make claims for special treatment solely on the basis of skin color and historic bad treatment. But their claims fall on increasingly deaf ears and unfortunately serve to foster a corrosive atmosphere of black dependence on white largesse. A massive cash settlement would in all likelihood both assuage white guilt and buy off black victimhood.5 This transaction, no matter what kind of high toned language the actual process was dressed up in, would be exactly as crass, self-serving, and distasteful as it sounds here, essentially allowing white America to repurchase the moral high ground.6
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But even if it is true that granting reparations will be divisive, not to open the issue will only further widen an indefinite chasm between the moral justification for reparations and the politics of avoidance. We cannot move on from the injustices of the past without adequately engaging and, as much as is possible, rectifying them. I am unequivocally an advocate for reparations, but reparations not defined as some en masse disbursement of money. Reparations should comprise a more comprehensive mechanism that includes official apologies, acknowledgements, moral accountability, material compensation, memorials, and more. If reparations are the means to reach such an ambitious list of goals, the path to reparations is as important as the contents of reparations themselves. This paper advocates for a truth commission model for producing the various elements of a comprehensive reparations package that can address the effects of historical injustice. The first step in the reparations process should be an institutional apology, which can be the foundation of a truth and reparations commission process. In the case of African Americans and other major historic injustices, an apology by itself is not enough but would go far in progressing the dialogue necessary for justice to reach the countless many African Americans to whom it has been denied as a group for centuries.7 Through institutional apology, the politics of avoidance can give way to the politics of progress. Before going further, it is important to define specifically what is meant by reparations in this paper. Reparations means measures taken to make amends when we (or our antecedents) have wronged or injured others and further, that this injury or wrong persists either in actual terms or impacts on contemporary injustices. To reiterate, reparations are any acts or processes that aim to redress or make amends for some wrongs committed, especially by a state against its citizens or another country. Reparations normally take the form of monetary payments or material compensation, but as indicated above the term can have much broader application. Reparation can also be seen as an act of restoration that sets things straight or gives satisfaction . . . for redress of injury.8 Given these comments on reparations, why do I hold that reparations would work best in the United States when framed within
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the comprehensive context of a truth commission? A proposal for a truth commission for America has to be well thought out and, even then, its existence and work may cause great divisions as to what is to be presented as truth but more so what is to be done with or about the truth. My basic argument is that, apart from representing a possible actual social institution to help address the effects of racial injustice, a truth commission is a potential moral break from Americas racist and exclusivist past. Beyond just encapsulating the clarion call for reparations, it would establish a historical document that acknowledges wrongs and presents to the world that America has properly engaged its past. At its simplest, a truth commission is an official body that investigates within a limited time frame, historical wrongs meted out to groups within (or without) a society, wrongs such as slavery, that occurred over a specific period of time with an end to establishing a comprehensive record of the past as well as to suggest measures of rectification.9 This is a much-modified definition designed to fit the American context. There are a few contextual differences that make the proposal for an American Truth and Reparations Commission precedent-setting. First, truth commissions are normally used in societies in transition from authoritarianism to democracy of some sort. They have also been used in countries that have already made the transition to democracy but have some unresolved issues from its past. Brazil is May 2012 is the latest country to have established a truth commission to examine its (authoritarian-military) past. As much as Americas historical treatment of its racial minorities has been bad, this is not grounds to call it an authoritarian regime. However, the case can be made that America is a transitional society. I challenge the orthodoxy that Americas democratic revolution is complete or is nearly so. An incomplete transition is evident. Jim Crow was a historical disjuncture whose demise has not resulted in a resumption of the letter and spirit of Reconstruction and the consequent creation of a parity of status and material equality for blacks in America. In effect America is a transitional deeply divided society because the slavery and racial discrimination issue has not been satisfactorily addressed. Second, an American Truth and Reparations Commission (hereafter ATRC), even if it is a compromise solution between the federal government
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and other stakeholders, is not so in the same as the way the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) was a compromise between the new African National Congress regime and the apartheid regime. The division can and would not be as lucid. Third, the ruling American regime would be labeled a white-led regime and its institutions, commercial interests, corporations, and so forth would be the subject of claims of historical wrongs and therefore reparations claims. This would be unlike South Africa or Chile (the two most extensive examples of truth commissions), where the ruling regime had little or no such claims made against it for historical violations. Fourth, the international community has not done much in the way of commenting on the evils of slavery (apart from the World Conference Against Racism in 2002). Due in no small part to Americas global power position, it has for the most part treated the American slavery experience as a national matter. In South Africa, as much as the National Party government tried to make apartheid an internal policy of discrimination, it was felt to transcend such limitations at least to the international community. Fifth, unlike the Chilean Truth Commission and hopefully like the SATRC, an ATRC would have to name names. However, unlike all previous commissions, the principal offenders would be institutions, federal governments, and other such groups rather than individuals. Furthermore, unlike other societies that have used truth commissions, the object and subject of an ATRC would stretch farther back into history than any other before it. The longest frame of reference for any previous commission is 34 years for the SATRC. An ATRC would stretch possibly as far back as 1619 or at least 1783. Finally, some would argue most societies (with the possible exception of South Africa) have used truth commission in contexts where the polity was not founded on these exclusivist platforms that now come up for mention in terms of rectifying them exclusive platforms such as slavery. Besides these given contextual differences, what would the model of an ATRC look like in terms of its mandate, possible commissioners, committees, powers, and so on. These are crucial questions, as even the very founding of the ATRC is critical to its role in helping to address racial injustice in America. A central element is that the ATRC should look at more than just slavery, to address other key processes of mass violence and oppression in U.S. history.
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Founding
The ATRC should be founded by the passing of a bill in Congress, which might be entitled The National Truth and Reparation Act. The act should have as its expressed goal a complete examination of the institution of slavery as well as the genocide of Native Americans and broad oppression of Hispanics. It should emphasize suggestions and commitments to rectify the unaddressed injustices including contemporary discrimination that are the legacy of slavery, genocide, and oppression more generally. The ATRC should be specifically charged to work on these tasks.
Commissioners
There should be at least 22 commissioners drawn from all sectors of society, but none should have explicit ties to the government or its agencies. Native Americans have a longer standing claim to reparations, white Americans and their founding institutions would be the site of reparation claims, African Americans were explicitly dehumanized and robbed of potential and wealth, and Hispanic Americans as a minority (though not constituting a race) have a formidable claim to discrimination. These 22 commissioners would be suggested by the public over a 6-month period and then would be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. The assumption here is that there is the political will to see this founding process move as quickly as possible and with a sincere commitment to resolving the longstanding reparations claims. These commissioners should come from all sectors of non-governmental organizations, religious institutions, professional and ethnic associations, etc.
Mandate
The mandate to be given to the ATRC should be concerned with the Commission collecting information over a period of four years, having access to classified and rare documents that have pieces of the nations history enmeshed in them. The Commission should have regulated but legal access to Congressional documents. The ATRCs frame of reference should begin with the founding of the United States in 1783
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and continue up until 1991 when the latest civil rights act was passed. The Commission might need a further three years to compile its analyses and recommendations, for a total of seven years in operation. The central purpose of the ATRC would be to exhume as complete as possible a picture of Americas past, recording the institutions and policies of racial injustice as well as to make suggestions and recommendations for appropriate corrective and reparative policies to redress these historical wrongs. One may say that seven years is a long time, but in pales in comparison to how long victim groups have already waited for anything resembling an official acknowledgement of Americas past and its effects on the present and future. After the ATRCs report has been submitted to Congress, the ATRC would cease to be a standing body. The recommendations would then be tabled and appropriate steps taken to implement them.
Committees
The ATRC would divide its work among four major committees: 1. A Historical Clarification and Rectification Committee (HCRC) would be charged with ensuring that the historical components of the final report are as close to the real history of the United States as possible. It is not charged with finding an unchallengeable truth, but rather one that is more than functional and that fully acknowledges that the truth is often uncomfortable to rehearse especially given Americas past. This committee also would also function as an oversight committee, to ensure that all claims and suggestions are plausible and actual. The HCRC must also hear the testimonies of, and hold hearings for, persons who may serve as resources for the committees work, including those individuals representing culpable institutions. 2. A Symbolic Reparations Committee would be charged with making suggestions as to the possible ways in which the United States can make symbolic moves not only to preserve knowledge and understanding of the reality of the evils of slavery and discrimination for posterity but also to elevate the struggle against this institution and the persons and organizations that opposed it. They should be responsible not only for
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suggesting monuments, days of commemoration for slavery and other such timelines, but also the naming or renaming of places and similar actions that would recognize the persons who struggled against slavery and racially-motivated violence, oppression, and discrimination. 3. An Economic Reparations Committee would have the most difficult job, that of making recommendations for whether and how material compensation should be allotted to historically marginalized groups and their progeny. They would have to propose how to finance such an effort: who is to pay and who is to be paid, how much and for how long, etc. I would, however, argue that economic reparations are not that problematic if one justifies them on moral rather than just legalistic grounds. Even that, however, may face challenges. 4. Finally, an Institutional Liability Committee (ILC) might have overlapping functions with the previous committees, but is explicitly responsible for naming names, that is, identifying institutions still extant or traceable that supported (indirectly or otherwise) slavery and the other violence, oppression, and discrimination identified by the historical committee. The real difficulty is whether governmental organizations should be within the scope of this inquest. I would argue that they should be subject to it. Other societal organizations, schools, churches, etc., should also be subject to its liability claims. Universities long argued to have been funded by the slave trade should prepare for the possible suggestion of the creation of avenues or reserved places for qualified but underprivileged members of minority racial groups. The expressed aim of the ILC is to create some spiral of responsibility. As much as the ethic of the ATRC and any other such body is creating responsibility for past injustices, it should not abrogate the liability dimension. With these organs and committees it is hoped that the ATRC would accomplish its role to make as complete as possible a record of the past. The implementation of these suggestions will most certainly depend on the political will of the U.S. government and other institutions. In spite of its substantial moral and political justification, reparation as long-term justice has many objections leveled against it. In the following section, I examine the major objections and offer a rebuttal of each. In doing so, I will also address objections to reparations for South African Apartheid
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that are similar to those raised to oppose U.S. slavery reparations and will discuss at points reparations for indigenous groups. It is important to recognize that similar arguments are made against reparations in various cases and that the general responses apply to each case.
Historical Objections
Supersession of Historical Injustice/Temporal Limits/Statutes of Limitations The objection is raised by Jeremy Waldron that some entitlements, and in this case reparations, are vulnerable to the passage of time.10 Claims of justice that blacks in the United States make regarding slavery and native peoples in Australia and the United States make regarding genocide and related oppression are therefore less effective as time passes. The supersession of historical injustice by time suggests that, unfortunately, despite all our good intentions, time (with a mind of its own) absolves perpetrator societies of the responsibility to address long standing injustice. This argument appears to justify that the over five hundred years of suffering in the case of Native Americans and over three hundred years for African Americans has just faded with time. Hidden behind the benevolent facade of the American mission of civilization is the brutal reality of invasion, slavery, forced relocation, genocide, land theft, ethnocide, and forcible denial of the right to selfdetermination wholly incompatible with contemporary understandings of U.S.-Indian history and with the notions of justice informing the human rights regime. It is perhaps impossible to overstate the magnitude of the human injustice perpetrated against Indian people in denial of their right to exist, on their aboriginal land-base, as self-determining peoples.11 Indeed, the severity and duration of the harms endured by the original inhabitants of the United States may well exceed those suffered by all other groups domestic and international. Some suggest a related issue in the form of a question, what are the temporal limits of dealing with some wrongs? George Sher, a proponent of this line of reasoning, suggests that desert of compensation fades gradually over time and ancient wrongs therefore call for no significant amount of compensation.12 If we are to take Shers and Jeremy Waldrons reasoning further it would suggest that if temporal limits are applicable
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then the injustice of Apartheid is more compensable or worthy of compensation than Native American extermination, black slavery, and racial discrimination in the United States. This is a misguided conclusion. Both are worthy (on their individual merit) for compensation and ought to be compensated. Further, it is not clear what the temporal boundaries between ancient, medium term, and recent wrongs are. Beyond this is the unaddressed issue of the difference in circumstances and effects of wrongs, whether or not they happened last week or hundreds of years ago. The real issue has little to do with temporal limits and more with the effects of historical injustice. The only way in which historical injustice can be superseded is not with the passage of time, but rather with the granting of compensation for these wrongs. Apartheids antecedent of white settlerism cannot be absolved of blame in relation to the eventual racist policies under Apartheid. The statute of limitations applies only to the effect that once a wrong has been compensated, then there will be no recourse to level any allegations of wanting compensation. In other words, like the criminal law statute of double jeopardy, one cannot be compensated for a wrong twice.
Objection From Historical and Normative Progress13

The argument is made that groups that have suffered historical injustice such as some blacks in America have triumphed over these problems of historical injustice.14 This argument, prima facie, seems a convincing claim in that there is some truth to it. However, when examined carefully, it is an otiose declaration without much substance. This condition applied to blacks in the United States uses an iota of blacks to represent the countless blacks that history and opportunity have not automatically compensated. The few blacks that have been successful in terms of economics, status, etc., do not negate or outweigh the vast number for whom the effects of historical injustice were or are significant. This deterministic argument can only lead to the conclusion that, just as time heals all wounds, it will also compensate all wrongs. This is faulty reasoning because time cannot do anything by itself. This argument provides an occasion for the United States to renege on the obligation to grant compensation for slavery. In South Africa, the
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citation of the success of a few high-profile blacks cannot overcome the imperative of reparations for the countless many blacks who persist in poverty and injustice. Added to this facile thesis is the claim that blacks and others historically harmed ought to move beyond the injustices of their past and rise above their circumstances. Opponents of reparations for slavery such as John McWhorter and Shelby Steele argue that enough opportunities exist for blacks to triumph. To expect reparations is lazy and divisive. Some therefore see reparations for blacks in the United States as a crutch for the lazy to lean on without taking any responsibility for their life prospects.15 This would be credible only if it were the case that blacks have not attempted to do anything about their condition. However, if one puts forth great effort in a system that still (albeit silently) treats you with the scorn of second classness, then no amount of effort will jumpstart ones condition if there persists this recalcitrance to grant reparations on the grounds of it being a right.
Objection of Historical Complexity

History is replete with injustices and to sort out just a few of those that require compensation will always leave other justifiably compensable wrongs unaddressed. Beyond this, the reality is that both the perpetrators of these historical injustices and its victims are dead. This objection makes sense in that, if there are no perpetrators to punish, then no one exists who has the responsibility to make reparation. However, this objection belies the reality of two important issues. First, it attempts to cloud the justification for reparations by resorting to hiding the major historical injustices of slavery and Native American genocide behind the plethora of historical injustices. It is not the number of wrongs that warrants our attention, it is the nature, effect, and persistence of given wrongs. The South African case is less problematic in regards to this objection, in that Apartheid is a much more recent wrong than slavery and so is less susceptible to being dissolved into a history full of all sorts of injustices. The injustice of slavery and Native American maltreatment, dehumanization, and theft is more of a consequential wrong than, say, a feud between families in Western Kentucky in 1878 that left several persons on either side dead. Both are historical wrongs but they have manifestly different scopes and effects.
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Second, this objection fails to account for the fact that death might be the end of ones life, but there are interests, obligations, and rights that survive the decedent. In this regard even though both the original perpetrators and their victims are dead, their descendants continue to live. And, if the responsibility is believed not to fall on the direct inheritors of the wealth derived from slavery, then it must fall on the government.
Economic Objections
Objection of Competing Imperatives How do we negotiate between the competing importance of rectifying historical injustice and current economic and social imperatives such as health care, education, and employment? The United States is recovering from an economic recession, struggling employment, and other challenges. It would be burdensome to deal with reparations for slavery that has happened so long ago. There is no simple response to this question, which is legitimate and important and cannot be dismissed out of hand. Yet, although resources are often scarce, this is nonetheless no reason to discount or dismiss the justification for reparations. The way in which the question is posed suggests that reparations for historical injustice are counterproductive and not cost effective. The only buttress for supporting the implications of the question is to make the argument that the persons most likely to benefit from either policy (be it social programs or reparations) are likely to be the same persons. In deeply divided societies like South Africa, the persons most economically disadvantaged and who would therefore benefit first from monetary and material reparations are the same persons who would benefit from social and economic programs. If this is the case, then it is possible to concede that social and economic development programs should have priority over reparations. In any other case it cannot be so. However, the caveat is that reparations are a special kind of obligation that require sacrifice, so like any sacrifice something important will likely be surrendered. Objection of Redistribution/Equality of Opportunity Given the problems surrounding cost and competing imperatives, how should the costs for compensation for historical injustice be determined and who should stand them, or should there be compensation at all? The
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libertarian thesis is that, in the context of compensation, we ought to secure for individuals previously victimized by historical injustice the equality of opportunity to advance as far as their talents and merits (achievements) can take them. This is, however, all that we should do if we are unable to assign the costs to the right people. In such a case, there would be no compensation at all. The effects of past injustice must be allowed to fall wherever they happen to fall.16 This well-intentioned idea is meant to argue that this solution would guarantee that no one is unfairly treated within the framework of compensation. No one would be made worse off than he or she would have been had the injustice not taken place. There would be no intrusion into the liberty of the marketplace of talents and merits that accounts for those who are successful as well as those who are not. Robert Amdur makes a convincing counter argument in response to this libertarian line of reasoning regarding payment costs for compensation such as reparations. In the first place, the libertarian defense suggests that historical injustice will be eclipsed by time and fails to take account of the fact that injustices in one dispensation produce disadvantages in subsequent generations. This multiplying effect does not die a natural death.17 Amdur continues that formal equality of opportunity is not sufficient to eliminate the effects of past privations. If wealth was not accumulated just by the passage of time, there was an initial action (called investment) that helps to account for the present. Therefore, why should injustice be expunged with just the granting of equality of opportunity? In any event, in deeply divided societies, formal equality obfuscates the reality of lingering historical disadvantages. If we do not start from an equal position, merely giving us the same treatment in the present will not rectify the gap. Further, victims of historical injustice who do not receive compensation of some sort are likely to remain disadvantaged, despite the existence of equality of opportunity.18 A second problem with the libertarian objection concerns the arbitrariness involved in compensating some victims of injustice. The determinant in compensating victims should not be whether the wrong is recent or not (as long as it has present effects), or whether perpetrators or victims are alive. The determinant, contrary to the libertarian problem of not being able to identify perpetrators, is the nature of the injustice victims have suffered and the effects of that injustice.19
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Related to this idea of costs of compensation, libertarians and others make the concession that essentially argues that if it is not possible for perpetrators or beneficiaries of an injustice to pay, then the entire community should stand the cost of compensation. This is another apparently well-meaning argument; however, it has a key problem: the burden of compensating historic injustice ought never to fall on the shoulders of the historically harmed and their descendants. In South Africa, how would it look to ask the victims of Apartheid to stand the cost of their own compensation? Would they not already have paid with their lives, property loss, and so on? Even this concession is unacceptable. Even in the context of the United States, where in general blacks are better off than in South Africa, when compensation costs arise the government of the state ought to stand to pay. On the moral premise that they inherit the duties of doing justice towards their citizens, states should stand the primary costs of compensation. The only way a policy of victims paying for their own compensation would be acceptable is if they could be reimbursed for their initial payment for their own compensation with an adjustment for interests. Objection of Changing Circumstances and Backgrounds With the passing of time, there are changes in the social and economic circumstances both of the claims in question as well as the resources to respond to such claims for compensation. Jeremy Waldron argues that if the imperatives of justice are sensitive to circumstances such as the size of the population or the incidence of scarcity, then there is no guarantee that those requirements (and the rights they constitute) will remain constant in relation to a given resource or piece of land as the decades and generations go by.20 The implication of this thesis is that, with the changing economic circumstances, some claims will have to be denied, but not from considerations of historical injustice. The claims for lands or property, especially in the cases of Native Americans and black South Africans, are weaker because land has now become scarce and over time the people who held (albeit illegally) some claims to the land yet controlled it have passed control of the land through the generations. This has been done in such a way that it resembles the Lockean proviso of the inseparability ethic in terms of mixing land with labor: the possession
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of land and use of it over time entitles the person possessing and using the land a right to it. In response, a justice process can be mindful of the circumstances in which it operates, but should not be shackled by them. Justice operates within the ambit of an interconnectivity among past, present, and future. Even more importantly, if the original rights holders (white settlers) had stolen the rights to these lands and they or their descendants cannot compensate for it, then the land should be returned. While we must be careful about operating as if this is a simple either/ or, economic and land scarcity ought not to override the imperative of settling the debt of historic injustice. Objection to Race as a Category for Addressing Historical Injustice The Marxist emphasis on the preeminence of class as the outcome of a long history of class struggle suggests that the category of race is a weak one in addressing historical injustice. Given the above, class rather than race is considered a more comprehensive and effective category for dealing with historical injustice. To use race is to use a weaker identifier. In the context of South Africa, the apprehension is argued that although race is an important category it is not as encompassing as class or socio-economic status.21 In other words, as potent as race is, it excludes all other justifiably important qualifiers in South Africa such as rural women, unemployed township youths, and persons from historically disadvantaged regions. It is also the case that not only blacks make up the historically disadvantaged segment of South African society, even if they account for a disproportionately large part of it. This clever argument of using a more comprehensive category of class is weak, even if well-intentioned, both in South Africa and when applied in a similar way regarding slavery reparations in the United States. It is not that the categories of gender, geography, and demographics are not important in sorting out historical injustice. But this approach ignores the blatant reality that race was the primary mechanism under which persons were historically harmed and abused. The categories of woman, rural location, and urban youth were supplemental or secondary to race. In fact, their categorical relevance is only important since Apartheids demise.
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If race was the identifier for abuse and discrimination, then there ought to be no reason to delete it as the basis for exploring the justification of reparations. Further, it also happens that most of the persons of the lower socio-economic groups are predominantly blacks. This is not a coincidence, but shows that class in South Africa and to a significant extent in the United States depends on race, so race is the key concept. To use class would conceal the differences even among poor persons belonging to different races. After all, a poor white may be treated better (if even only quantitatively) than a poor black by a system of Apartheid or slavery. A similar counterargument can be made regarding slavery in the United States. Clearly the system was organized based on race and so any solution must recognize that racial difference is the key category of oppression that must be addressed.
Moral and Political Objections

Objection of Divisive Potential/Abrogation of Nonracialism Reparative justice, predisposed as it is towards focusing on the victims of historical injustice in South Africa and the United States, is said to undermine reconciliation and divide such deeply divided societies further.22 This is the effect of focusing on race in already polarized societies. Furthermore, the claim can be made that reparative justice in South Africa would only be apartheid in reverse, even if it is positive discrimination.23 Even more consequential, beyond being just potentially more divisive, policies advocating reparations that are focused on race (race-based preferential treatment) within the South African context, as promoted by this paper, are antithetical to the ideal of non-racialism.24 This objection, however, assumes that the ideal of non-racialism is meaningful to begin with. The first response to the objection is that, if race was the category used to allot and distribute benefits and burdens under an Apartheid regime, why should we now denounce it as a category in reverse for developing discriminatory justice to rectify injustice? If race was a category for which one was victimized then it ought to be a category of merit also.25 It cannot be shown that race will further divide a society that appears to have an indefeasible obsession with race. Race ought not to continue in perpetuity to dominate South African politics,
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but until the gap between white and blacks is addressed race will be a primary category in matters of economics and politics. As Michael Davis maintains, the law can only be colorblind when we have become colorblind; to this I add, justice can be color blind only when we have become colorblind, and not before. Race relations have always been an issue in the United States, especially within the political sphere. Regarding the 2008 Presidential election, Sam Roberts has emphasized the correlation between race and voting patterns. From the research it is gathered that younger blacks voted in greater proportions than whites for the first time and black women turned out at a higher rate than any other racial, ethnic and gender group. WithBarack Obamaon the ballot, the makeup of the 131 million who voted in 2008 year was markedly different. While the number of non-Hispanic white voters remained roughly the same, 2 million more blacks, 2 million more Latinos, and 600,000 more Asians turned out. Compared with 2004, the voting rate for black, Asian, and Hispanic voters increased by about four percentage points. However, the rate for whites declined by one percentage point. As a result, according to an analysis by William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, whites declined to 76 percent of all voters in 2008, from 79 percent in 2004. Turnout varied widely by state, from a high of 75 percent in Minnesota to 52 percent in Utah. In a number of states, including Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, and South Carolina, turnout among blacks surpassed 70 percent. An analysis by thePew Research Center of that said year stated that the latest findings were drawn from census surveys and interviews. In 2008 we obviously had a historic candidacy, saidPaul Taylor, executive vice president of the Pew Center. Thats certainly a plausible explanation for the spike in African-American turnout.26 Race dominated the 2008 elections and looks to dominate the 2012 elections. In 2008, 96 percent of blacks who voted voted for Obama. The real issue is whether we believe race is incidental or intrinsic to the ability to lead. Objection to Collective Responsibility This objection challenges the apparent morality of reparations on the premise that it is problematic to hold the current government,
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institutions, and citizenry morally accountable for wrongs committed by previous generations of people who acted or attempted to act in support of, or who failed to act against, a system of harm.27 This objection especially applies to the United States slavery issue as well as genocides of indigenous peoples. Regarding South Africa, the current government is drawn from the previously oppressed group and the problem this poses for reparations has already been discussed, above. This claim is one of the most popular in arguments against present generations contributing the payments for reparations. There are strong counters to it. The first problem as it relates to the United States is ably presented by J. Corlett. He contends that the foundational documents that formed the basis for the government during the atrocities of slavery and Native American extermination have persisted as the guiding documents of the United States. The continuity of these documents and therefore their ideas in directing U.S. politics strongly supports the view that present generations have an inherited obligation to address historic injustice even if they did not commit the atrocities themselves. There is something within the continuity of nation-states and their guiding documents which implies some focus be given to redressing injustice. Beyond the specific challenge to reparations, however, is the objection some have to the idea of inheriting responsibility. One argument asserts that responsibility cannot be inherited in the same way wealth can be.28 This paper takes quite the opposite position, that responsibility like wealth can be inherited. We have some obligation to address historic injustice. If time has not washed away injustice why should it wash away responsibility? Collective responsibility is what will provide a critical basis for addressing claims of reparations. In the end, if we can have intergenerational transfer of wealth then I believe there exists such a transfer of responsibility and obligation. It is not enough to argue that the present generation has not perpetrated the evils of slavery and racial discrimination when it has benefited (profited) from them.
Conclusion
Moving beyond race in America will take more than wishful thinking; it will take willful efforts to confront the reality that race relations are still in need of fixing. The call for reparations for slavery is often pejoratively
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viewed as disabled, anachronistic thinking because it will force America to reopen an ugly past. This past is often the victim of sanitization by those who argue that there now exists a post-race America. It is the committal of acts of historic injustice and inhumanity and not the present conditions of African and Native Americans that justifies reparations. Even if we argue that America is now racially an eclectic society, true to its creed of out of many one, race continues to dominate the public discourse. A truth commission approach to addressing reparations is a more formidable and comprehensive approach than just making claims about monetary disbursement. Such a model places emphasis on the need to properly confront and address the past rather than balm it with the salve of amnesia nothing happened, or if it did lets forget it and move on. While all societies for the sake of democratic sanity have to forget aspects of their histories, it is a misguided strategy when the central issue happens to be over five hundred years of genocide, domination, slavery, and racial discrimination. I argue that the democratic revolution enunciated at the founding of the American republic will not come full circle until all groups within the American republic are properly integrated (not absorbed) into the fabric of this country. The void that injustice creates leaves African Americans feeling as second class citizens, and Native Americans are even less integrated. Victimhood persists not because these groups have not attempted to transcend a history of suffering. It has persisted because their historic sufferings have been neither properly acknowledged nor properly compensated. The politics of avoidance will only lead to the economics of deepening divisions in an already divided society.
NOTES
N.B.: The author wishes to thank Henry Theriault, Dikran Kaligian, and Sarah Ann Dunn for providing feedback and information for this article. It was first presented in December 2005 as a conference paper at the International Symposium on Reparations: Whose Debt, Whose Responsibility held at Worcester State College. 1 Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, NY, 1999), pp. 73-77. 2 Roy L. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model For Black Reparation (University of California Press, Los Angeles, 2004), p. 37. 3 John McWhorter, Against Reparations, in Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, ed. by Raymond Winbush (Harper Collins Publishers: New York, 2003), p. 180.
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Ibid, p. 185. Shelby Steele, Or a Childish Illusion of Justice?: Reparations Enshrine Victimhood, Dishonouring Our Ancestors, in Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, ed. Raymond Winbush (Harper Collins Publishers: New York, 2003), p.198. 6 Ibid, p. 199. 7 Roy L. Brooks, ed., When Sorry Isnt Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice (New York University Press: NY, 1999). 8 Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in a Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 74- 75. 9 Jermaine O. McCalpin, Justice under Constraint: The Nature of Transitional Justice in Deeply Divided Societies (unpublished dissertation), Brown University, Providence, RI, 2006, pp.1-8. 10 Jeremy Waldron, Superseding Historic Injustice, Ethics 103 (1) (October 1992): 16, 20. 11 Roy. L .Brooks, Wild Redress, in When Sorry Isnt Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. by Brooks (New York University: New York, 1996), p. 233. 12 George Sher, Ancient Wrongs and Modern Rights, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10 (1) (1981). Sher argues in essence that some wrongs have temporal limits (similar to expiration dates on perishable goods) and when these pass then these wrongs are less compensable. 13 J. Angelo Corlett develops this objection as a prelude to dismissing it as inadequate in denying reparations to Native Americans. Responsibility and Punishment (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), p. 125. 14 Ibid, p. 125. 15 Ibid, pp. 125-26. 16 Robert Amdur, Compensatory Justice, Political Theory, 17 (2) (1979): 233. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid, 234. 19 Ibid. 20 Waldron, p. 16. 21 Kanya Adam, The Politics of Redress: South African Style Affirmative Action, The Journal of Modern African Studies, Volume 35 (2) (1997): 244-49. 22 Ibid., 232. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid, 233. 25 This is the argument put forward by Michael Davis in Race as Merit, Mind 92 (367) (July 1983). 26 Sam Roberts, 2008 Surge in Black Voters Nearly Erased the Racial Gap, The New York Times, July 21, 2009, A14, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/us/politics/21vote. html?_r=1 (accessed June 25, 2012). 27 Corlett, p. 123. 28 Robert Amdur, p. 233.
Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Kibibi Tyehimba
The growing attention on reparations in and among various communities in the United States and beyond reflects recognition of its great importance as well as the several common threads that run throughout the various movements for reparations. At the heart of reparations movements, no matter what group we consider, is first and foremost a commitment to the principle that all life is sacred. The lives of peoples of color are as sacred as those of whites. This is a critical issue to deal with because there is a tendency to assume that people of color were and are just an aside in the forward flow of humanity, and the atrocities that our ancestors experienced were and are of little significance. Too often history devalues the contributions of peoples of color when in fact many western societies were built on their backs. I would like to start by giving a brief history of the African descendant reparations movement in the United States so that readers can understand what has not yet taken place to make amends for the crimes against humanity suffered by African peoples during the American era of enslavement. Probably most of us were taught that the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, supposedly freed slaves in this country. Actually, it only applied to slaves in the South and only came into effect when territory came under control of the Union Army. Few are aware that in 1862 Lincoln also freed a little over 3,000 enslaved Africans in the District of Columbia.1 At the time there was no compensation provided to any of the freed men and women. However,
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three hundred dollars was given to each of the former slave owners. Only fifty dollars was offered to any of the freed Africans who wanted to repatriate back to Africa. Even this is misleading -- fifty dollars to cross an ocean and settle in a country that you have never been to, assuming that you were born into slavery in the United States, and have no knowledge of. In 1865 General William T. Shermans Field Order No. 15 was issued to provide 40 acres and a mule to emancipated slaves, but it was not implemented because there was more concern about displacing the slave owners and affecting their livelihood. So, in the dead of winter in 1865, approximately four million enslaved Africans were freed to leave the plantations that they had lived on their entire lives in many cases, with no compensation or any other assistance to enable them to be self-determining. Beyond this lack of support for freed slaves and lack of compensation for the long-term effects of slavery on them and their descendants, to this day there has been no recognition of the millions of Africans who perished during what is euphemistically referred to as the transatlantic slave trade. Nor is there any acknowledgment of the millions who were literally worked to death during slavery, since the life span of an African enslaved in this country was no more than 21 years. Little attention is given to the persisting psychological effects of slavery and subsequent oppression of people of African descent. We must think in terms of Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome. With so many soldiers suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), returning from the Middle East, it is now widely accepted that men and women who exist in war-like conditions for long periods of time return to their homes mentally and emotionally scarred to the point where often they cannot function well in their families and communities, because consciously and subconsciously they are continually reliving the traumas of war. Also, we now have sensitivity to the fact that women who are raped may not ever be capable of having good relationships with their families and with men in their lives, because that trauma stays with them. It has to be equally traumatic for men who have been raped. Now lets take those two scenarioslife in extended war-like conditions, and life where men and women could be and were sexually violated because their bodies were owned by their slave masters. Now imagine what it means when you have the ancestral memory of twelve or thirteen generations of life
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in war-like conditions, further exacerbated by rape and other forms of unimaginable brutality. The legacy of this violence is extended, as even today we live in a society where the justice system still does not punish the rapists of African American women as stringently as the rapists of white women. The legal structures still do not judge white people for taking the lives of black men and women with the severity that would be applied if a black person were to take the life of a white person. What do the layers of hundreds of years of oppression mean? How does it affect the psyche of black children? Surely the legacy of slavery and what came after it has an effect on the present day. While that does not mean that African descendants are not able to function well today in US society, we are still wounded just the same, and we must acknowledge how those wounds came about, and we must acknowledge that these wounds are festering right now for us the victims, and for the descendants of the victimizers. Something must be done to heal, repair, and restore. These matters are at the heart of our demand for reparations. The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) came about in 1987 strictly for the purpose of dealing with the issue of reparations. There were other organizations throughout the 20th century and immediately after the end of slavery that attempted to deal with this issue, but this is the only organization that is strictly dealing with the issue of reparations. In 1896, Mrs. Callie House and Reverend Isaiah Dickerson started an organization seeking a pension for formerly enslaved Africans. They were able to mobilize over 600,000 formerly enslaved Africans in support of this effort. They attempted to get legislation passed to deal with this issue, but they were not successful. With respect to the present-day reparations movement, NCOBRA has been a major player in elevating the issue to significant public awareness. Discussions are taking place in our homes, in the national media, in our schools, on college campuses, and in our churches. NCOBRA activists and those who have been supportive of NCOBRAs efforts and the issue of reparations cleared the field so that the discussion can really take place not only in this country but also internationally. The reparations movement is an example of the cross-fertilization that often takes place between liberation struggles on different shores. The 1940s and 1950s civil rights struggles in the United States energized the independence
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movements in African countries; and the successes of African countries independence struggles further energized African Americans demands for self-determination in the 1960s and 1970s. NCOBRA seeks reparations for the holocaust of enslavement and its vestiges. Not just the holocaust of enslavement which lasted for 246 years, but also the vestiges of the holocaust of enslavementJim Crow and present day social, political, and economic structures that still lock African Americans in at the bottom of the societal hierarchy. When we speak of the vestiges of slavery we are speaking, for example, of the laws on the books today that encourage racial profiling for African Americansthose laws came about during the era of enslavement and were honed during the Jim Crow era. NCOBRAs approach to the issue of reparations has six components. It is crucial to take all into full account, because the media intentionally reduces the issue and demand to simply cash payments. The first of the six components is the need for a national dialogue. We must engage in a national dialogue about the history of this country and how this country came about. Why is this country the richest country in the world? Because this country was able to build a wealth base on the backs of African descendants and because of land stolen from Native Americans. These are historical facts that must be dealt with openly and honestly. A national dialogue is important not only for African descendants, the victims of the era of enslavement, but it is also important for white America because white America must stop lying to itself and stop accepting the medias portrayal of black people as noncontributors to this countrys development. The media portrays African descendants as a liability that must be locked away out of sight because weve made no contribution. In light of how African descendants have been marginalized it shouldnt have been a surprise to witness the atrocities in New Orleans on national television when Hurricane Katrina hit. Suddenly hundreds of thousands of African descendants, primarily, were displaced all across the country, but only after they were herded into a stadium for days and days without food, water, or proper sanitation, while the media portrayed them as lawless, looting animals. We believe Congressman John Conyers H.R. 40 bill would provide one opportunity for that national dialogue to take place, as H.R. 40 seeks to
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establish a commission to study the era of enslavement and determine its present day effects on African American life. The second component is an admission that a crime has been committed. You have to admit that you committed a crime before you can issue an apology, which is the third component; the United States must issue an official apology, because without that we cannot move to the next steps of determining what has to be done to compensate the victims of the crime in order to rectify the problem. But an apology is not enough. In 1998, Congressman Tony Hall submitted a bill before Congress for an apology but there was nothing included to correct the damages done. From NCOBRAs position it is fortunate that the bill did not pass, because an apology alone would have looked like a resolution of the problem when in fact no concrete steps had been taken to address it. Without an attempt to address the problem, an apology would be meaningless. The official apology demands that the American people take a hard look at what has been done so that similar acts dont take place in the future. After the country has a national dialogue, admits that there is a crime, and issues an official apology, there must be public acknowledgement, or tangible public acts. These include more accurate portrayals of African descendents in the media, realistic and thorough portrayals of the history of what has happened in this country and the important role that the victims of the holocaust of enslavement played in the development of the country. Changes in school curricula should examine the era of enslavement so that discussion extends beyond the two paragraphs in present day textbooks that depict happy, enslaved Africans whose freedom was made possible mostly because of white abolitionists efforts. Just a few years ago we experienced an interactive, multi-media slavery exhibit that examined the history of slavery in New York and how slavery was woven into every aspect of the economy. This exhibit was very well attended and inspired a number of public forums to encourage discussion about the issue. These kinds of exhibits, the new kinds of documentaries about slavery we are seeing, and other such things are made possible because of the growing grass roots movement for reparations; and they could not or would not have taken place otherwise. But it is not enough to just lay that information out there without concrete actions on a national level to bring about change.
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Therefore, following public acknowledgement, the next stage is compensation, restitution, or reparation. This stage will include a monetary settlement. But again, when I say monetary settlement, I am not speaking just of a check, because reparations can and should take as many forms as is needed to heal, repair, and restore the lives and communities of African descendants. That means that it can and should include various components such as access to land, access to healthcare, an adequate education system, access to housing, and fully-funded repatriation for those who choose it. It should also include a monetary compensation as well but, whenever that issue is raised, there is always a ridiculous discussion about African descendants not being capable of managing their own money, with such assumptions as the unfounded belief that that all those receiving payments will run out and buy a Cadillac. Whatever the various forms of compensation are, the approach must be holistic -- it can be multifaceted and we must also understand that it must be mutigenerational, because you cannot address 246 years of enslavement and 100 years of Jim Crow with a years worth of whatever might be proposed. And we certainly do not want a replay of the affirmative action era, which many mistakenly believe was intended to address the issues being raised in the reparations debate. First and foremost, affirmative action initiatives were not funded. Secondly, if affirmative action had been intended to address African American issues those issues would have remained the primary focus, rather than legislation proposing a series of initiatives that, on an honest appraisal, ended up benefitting primarily white women more than any other group. This is why we must demand that any efforts to rectify the impact of slavery and it vestiges must clearly speak to the nature of the crimes committed, apologize for those crimes, and then identify exactly what steps are being taken to heal, repair, and restore African descendantsthe victims of the crime. The facts cannot be swept under the rug. Otherwise, members of US society will not know the history and why remedy is necessary. And without that understanding, any gains made can be eroded over time, which is what has already taken place with affirmative action attempts to completely roll back the last thirty years because Americans did not and still do not have a clear understanding of why affirmative action was needed then, is needed now, and will be needed in the future.
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The last component in NCOBRAs demand for reparations requires that US society take a really hard look at the systems and institutions that made slavery possible in the first place, because those systems and institutions are still in place today. Without that hard look, the United States, in its quest for global domination, can go into other countries, steal the peoples land and resources, enslave the people on their own land, and kill them with impunity. Without a serious look at the systems and institutions that were put in place during the era of enslavement and that are still functioning today, we have the potential of having slavery take place again. We have the potential for mass exploitation again. African descendants must be in the forefront of speaking to these injustices. We must be in the forefront now in the reparations movement because who other than us can really speak to what it means to be enslaved, taken away from our homeland to other shores where we were and are subjected to every injustice you can think of. We can speak to those things and we must make sure that as we focus on our own reparations struggle, we always acknowledge the validity of the struggles of others around the world. We must always demand justice for ourselves and for others.
NOTES
N.B.: This paper is based on remarks by the author as part of the Reparations as Justice Panel of the Armenians and the Left Conference, City University of New York Graduate Center, April 7-8, 2006. It is with great sorrow thatwe acknowledge the transitionof three of the founding members of NCOBRA,Dr. Imari Obadele (1930-2010), Baba Hannibal Afrik (19342011), and Queen Mother Dorothy Benton Lewis (1944-2012). May their spirits continue to guide the struggle for reparations for the American Holocaust of Enslavement of African Peoples, and may those following behind them walk the path to victory. The District of Columbia Emanciptation Act, United States National Archives and Records Administration, Featured Documents, http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/ featured_documents/dc_emancipation_act/ (accessed June 5, 2012).
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Kibibi Tyehimba
Testimony of Kibibi Tyehimba, NCOBRA National Co-Chair On behalf of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA)
On The Legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, The African Descendant Just Demand for Reparations, and The Need For Passage of House Resolution 40 Before The US House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 18 December 2007 Washington, DC
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I. Introduction
I am Kibibi Tyehimba, Co-Chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA). I appreciate the opportunity to testify before members of the Congress during its briefing on the Legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, as this hearing is critical to understanding the importance of House Resolution 40. Today I pay homage to my African ancestors, and give voice to the millions who perished during the so-called Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and who suffered untold atrocities during the American era of enslavement. Were it not for their strength, and perseverance we would not be here, nor would Americans be able to enjoy the standard of living for which this country is known. At the request of Dr. Imari Obadele, the founding meeting for NCOBRA was convened on September 26, 1987 here in Washington, DC, for the purpose of broadening the base of support for the long-standing reparations movement. This meeting took place following the introduction of legislation seeking reparations for Japanese Americans interned during World War II. The mission of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) is to win full Reparations for Black African Descendants residing in the United States and its territories for the genocidal war against Africans that created the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, Chattel Slavery, Jim Crow and Chattel Slaverys continuing vestiges (the Maafa). To that end, NCOBRA shall organize and mobilize all strata of these Black communities into an effective massbased reparations movement. NCOBRA shall also serve as a coordinating body for the reparations effort in the United States. Further, through its leadership role in the reparations movement within the United States and its territories, NCOBRA recognizes reparations is a just demand for all African peoples and shall join with others in building the international reparations movement. 1
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NCOBRAs primary objective, which it met, was to make reparations a household word and build support nationally and internationally. As a result, interest in the reparations debate has moved beyondthe so-called fringe groups tothe media, universities;city and state legislatures; church organizations of every denomination; and civic associations with members from various socio-economic, political, racial and ethnic backgrounds. We applaud local and national NCOBRA leaders and members too numerous to mention here today for their personal sacrifices made over these last 20 years.
II. Background
For 246 years, the US government and the prior colonies, participated in one of the greatest holocausts of human history, the holocaust of enslavement, during which, millions of African people perished and millions more endured every imaginable and some unimaginable horrors ever inflicted upon a group of people solely because of their group identity and the greed of those who committed these crimes against humanity. The US and the prior colonies sanctioned with its Constitution and enforced with covert and overt violence, the genocidal process that destroyed millions of human lives, human cultures, and the human possibility inherent in African life and culture. Millions of Africans were kidnapped, torn from their homeland, Africa, and their rich cultural heritage. Innocent women, children, and men were brutally maimed, murdered, raped, terrorized and tortured during the middle passage voyage to America. Within American shores, they were denied the right to maintain their language, spiritual practices and normal family relations. New families created during enslavement were constantly under the threat of being torn apart at the whim of the slave owner. Following the official end of slavery, racist repression continued, which further destroyed lives, and communities. However the US has yet to acknowledge this horrific destruction or to take steps to make amends for it. Following the official end of slavery, racist repression continued, which further destroyed lives, communities, and possibilities.
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While slavery impoverished Africa, and particularly West Africa, it played a crucial role in the development of the modern world economy that is presently dominated by the US. The free labor of enslaved Africans produced major consumer goods and services, and provided the stimulus for shipbuilding, banking, and insurance in both the US and England. Yet after reaping the benefits of free labor, in 1865 the federal government freed 4 million Blacks in January, no less, to wander the countryside, one of the coldest months of the winter, without a dime, with no property, and largely illiterate, leaving few choices for the freed African peoples other than to exist in virtual slavery locked in place by Black Codes, convict lease, peonage, and cleverly crafted share cropping schemes. Jim Crow laws, followed by institutionalized racism, kept African descendants locked in vicious cycles of poverty that are still evident today. Presently dual systems exist in almost every area of life including wealth, poverty, health care, education, employment, and criminal punishment. Hardwon gains, such as Affirmative Action, voting rights, the right to equal education, and equal protection under the law, are being rolled back, and the victims of generations old racism and discrimination are being blamed for their own oppression.
III. The Injuries of Slavery Defined

Informed, honest historians and social scientists acknowledge the lingering affects of slavery on present day African American life. Accordingly, in 1996 and 1997, the NCOBRA Legal Strategies Commission, chaired by Adjoa A. Aiyetoro, set out to develop an approach to reparations litigation. The commissions work led to the identification and documentation of five distinct injury areas suffered by African people during and after enslavement. The injury areas include:
Peoplehood/Nationhood
The destruction of African peoples culture, and the infringement of the larger culture upon Black people of African descent in the United States and the prior colonies. Jim Crow and ongoing discrimination have resulted in a denial of our right to openly express our culture, appropriation of our culture, and denial of the right and resources necessary to be a self-determining people. Throughout this countrys
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history African Descendants efforts to be self-determining have been met with violence and destruction, as evidenced by the untold numbers of Black townships, such as Greenwood, Oklahoma; Redwood, Florida; and Wilmington, North Carolina--townships ultimately destroyed because of the surrounding white communitys jealousy and need to suppress models that refuted their claims of white superiority.
Education
The denial of our right to an education started in slavery with criminal sanctions imposed on our enslaved ancestors who learned, and anyone who taught them to read or write. Maintenance of dual, separate but unequal systems from slavery to the present provided an inferior education in schools with predominantly Black students of African ancestry. Federal funds were often provided schools despite this dual education system-- one predominantly Caucasian and the other for predominantly Black students of African ancestry.
Criminal Punishment
The enslavement of African peoples necessitated the development of a dual punishment system that continues to exist in the U.S. This dual system punishes Black people of African descent more harshly than Caucasians for the same conduct. Examples of the dual system were found from the period of enslavement through the Jim Crow era. The ongoing discrimination is most vividly evident with the continuation of disparate punishments for crack and powder cocaine (Black people of African ancestry are more frequently charged with possession of crack and certified to the federal system where a Caucasian person would have to possess 100 times more powder cocaine than crack cocaine to receive the same punishment. The result has been a disproportionately higher number of Black people of African descent being incarcerated for violation of the drug laws). In addition, Black people of African descent are subjected to racial profilingand the disparate imposition of the death penalty where Black men are more likely to be charged and convicted of a capital offense than a similarly situated Caucasian and particularly for killing a Caucasian.
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Wealth/poverty
The wealth gap between Black people of African descent and Caucasians created during the enslavement of African peoples has been sustained; confiscation of land and other forms of wealth continue up to present day. Black people of African descent were forced into poverty through enslavement, Jim Crow and continuing discrimination in employment, housing and other economic areas.
Health
The focus is on physical and mental health. Health knowledge of enslaved Africans was appropriated and enslaved Africans functioned as nonpaid health care providers for others; the use of Black people of African descent as subjects for tortuous health experiments (Tuskegee Syphilis Study) and the denial of quality health care during and post-slavery. The health injury area also includes the continuing discrimination in the provision of health care, including the disproportionately higher rate of closures of hospitals serving Black communities; lack of access to health insurance to provide affordable access to health care; the failure to validate health care protocols for Black people of African descent; and the failure to provide the appropriate medical treatment for critical health care symptoms which have resulted in higher rates of death for Black people of African descent compared to Caucasians exhibiting these symptoms. Finally, this injury area includes an examination of post-slavery stress syndrome, a developing area of investigation by Black mental health professionals of African descent.
IV. Moral and Legal Justification for Reparations

The struggle for reparations for the Holocaust of Enslavement of African people is about fundamental issues of human freedom, human justice and the value we place on human life in the past as well as in the present and future. After 246 years of enslavement--the greatest atrocity in American history; 100 years of Jim Crow; and the ongoing affects of racial discrimination, African descendants efforts to obtain reparations are morally just, as African life is equally of value, as are the lives of other groups that have obtained reparations both inside and outside the US
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and whose causes the US has supported and continues to support, including Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust, Japanese Americans interned in WWII US concentration camps, Alaska Natives for land, labor, and resources taken, Native Americans for violations of treaty rights, political dissenters and their descendants in Argentina, and to Colombia for excising the territory of Panama for the purpose of building the Panama Canal. With such precedents of reparations to primarily nonBlack peoples, it would be sheer racism for the US to continue ignoring this brutal era in American history, and the African descendant morally just claim for Reparations. In keeping with the principles of both international human rights law and domestic law, and with a clear understanding of the factual and moral justification for our claim, we seek remedy for damages from the US government, as the dehumanization and atrocities of slavery were not isolated occurrences. Rather they were mandated by formal laws codified and even enshrined within the U.S. Constitution. The role of the federal government in supporting the institution of slavery and subsequent discrimination directed against the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans must be formally acknowledged and redressed.
V. NCOBRA Outreach to Gather and Report the Will of the People

Passing H.R. 40 is an important first step that could lead to a substantive dialogue throughout the nation on chattel slavery in the U.S. and Jim Crow and the continuing harm suffered by Black people of African descent and ways to remedy it. Since 1990, NCOBRA has hosted annual conferences around the country to provide an opportunity for African descendants to learn about the reparations movement, to voice their opinions about reparations and the components of an equitable reparations settlement: -While there is agreement that we can never place a price on our suffering and pain or wash away the blood of our ancestors shed at the hands of their enslavers, we have a solemn responsibility to seek what is rightfully due us, in keeping with domestic and international law, in order to heal, repair and restore our people.
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- There is agreement that reparations should be multi-generational, as the effects of 246 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow cannot be erased in a generation. - Reparations should improve the lives of African descendents in the US for future generations to come; foster complete economic, social and political parity; and allow for full rights of self-determination. - There are mixed feelings about the significance of an apology. The recent wave of statements of profound regret which fall short of apology, are seen as an effort to sidestep the severity of the crimes committed and the responsibility of the perpetrators to make amends. A true apology cannot be conditional, e.g., I regret the crime, but there can be no further discussion of reparations. Apology alone is disingenuous, as it requires full acknowledgement of the conduct that caused the injuries, and requires material reparations to compensate the injured parties. - Most agree that the evidence substantiating the African descendant claim for Reparations has already been sufficiently documented. However, there has generally been a willingness to support HR 40, though there are varying opinions about what should be included in an equitable remedy. African descendants continue to lobby for the passage of HR40, assuming it will set the stage for: National Public Dialogue about the era of Enslavement in the U.S. and the prior colonies; Public Admission of the crimes committed; Public Apology for the commission of the crimes; Public Recognition through institutionalization and education, i.e., national and local monuments, media programming and development of appropriate curriculum throughout public schools and university systems to remind and teach the meaning of this horrendous human loss and destruction not only to African people, but to the country and the world; Compensation awarded in as many forms as necessary to equitably address the many forms of injury caused by chattel slavery and its continuing vestiges including changes in or elimination of laws and practices that allow African descendants to be treated differently than White people; monetary compensation, land, repatriation;
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release of political prisoners wrongfully incarcerated during the COINTELPRO era of the 60s and 70s, an end to racial profiling and discrimination in the provision of health care and access to affordable housing, providing scholarship and community development funds for Black people of African descent, and supporting processes of self determination; Establishment of structures and processes to prevent reoccurrence of such massive destruction of human life, human culture and human possibility.
VI. HR 40 and the Legislative and Legal Work of NCOBRA

First of all, we acknowledge NCOBRA member Reparations Ray Jenkins of Detroit, MI who successfully lobbied Congressman John Conyers to introduce H.R. 40 in 1989, and all our members who have lobbied for its passage. NCOBRA has supported legislative strategies and initiatives, such as H.R. 40, the Reparations Study Bill at each congressional session since 1989. NCOBRA played a leading role in encouraging and supporting Congressman Conyers in developing and introducing H.R. 40. NCOBRAs Commission on Legislative Strategies was formed in 2000, under the leadership of Ms. Nkechi Taifa, who as Chair until 2005, trained activists to effectively lobby Members of the House of Representatives to sign on as co-sponsors of HR40. Of particular note are the NCOBRA A Year of Black Presence (AYBP) lobbyists, under the leadership of Philadelphia NCOBRA member Mr. Milton McGriff. In 2003 over 500 AYBP lobbyists from Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, and Washington, DC sought Congressional members co-sponsorship of HR 40. We acknowledge the 37 year history of QM Dorothy Benton Lewis for her consistent fight for reparations at the city, state, federal and international level, and her willingness to speak forcefully to this issue in any environment. We thank her for her leadership inside and outside of NCOBRA and for being and remaining on the battlefield when there were few in the room, until now when over 80% of African descendants
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support our claim for reparations. Her representation of this important discussion in the national media was critical to the forward flow of the Reparations movement. We also acknowledge the work of Reparations activists and supporters who circulated petitions and surveys informing and gauging levels of support; held forums and town hall meetings to keep H.R. 40 before the public; addressed groups of all sizes; and successfully lobbied for HR40 companion legislation in cities and states across the country. To date, 28 cities have adopted resolutions supporting passage of HR 40; 8 cities have adopted Slavery Disclosure Ordinances requiring corporations who participated in and profited from the enslavement of African peoples to disclose their or their predecessors history in order to be eligible for that citys contracts; 4 states have issued statements of profound regret for their participation in the enslavement of African people; 2 states have adopted resolutions supporting passage of HR40, and one state, Florida, found the courage to admit to and pay reparations to the victims and descendants of the massacre of the Black township of Rosewood. Lobbying efforts also extended to community based, civic, and church organizations that in turn adopted resolutions supporting reparations and the passage of HR 40. More recent passage of Slavery Disclosure Ordinances is providing evidence that present day corporations wealth is directly linked to the free labor of enslaved Africans. In light of the pivotal role of boycotts during the Anti-Apartheid movement, NCOBRA members and supporters are also organizing and participating in boycotts against Wachovia Corporation, and Aetna Insurance for their participation in and profiting from the enslavement of African peoples in the US and prior colonies. We acknowledge the Philadelphia NCOBRA Wachovia Divestment Committee, under the leadership of Minister Ari Merretezon, and Ms. Pat Swailes, who lead the charge for Blacks in Government (BIG).
VII. Recommendation
NCOBRA strongly recommends passage of HR 40 to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, and to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies. The passage of HR 40 will:
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Facilitate a national dialog about an era in US history that has largely been ignored or down-played. Demonstrate the link between chattel slavery and the current social, health, economic and political status of African descendants and therefore destroy the myth of White Supremacy. Recognize the link between chattel slavery and present day race relations, and enable the amelioration of racial discrimination in America. Acknowledge the massive human suffering and the tragic plight of millions of African descendant men, women and children during slavery to demonstrate the sacredness of African life, specifically, and all human life in general. Allow United States residents to make peace with a significant part of this countrys shameful past, and end the intergenerational trauma of its current effects. Demonstrate to the world, the United States commitment to peace and justice, and the same human rights standards to which it seeks to hold other nations.
VIII. Conclusion
On behalf of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations In America (NCOBRA) I thank the Chair of the Judiciary Committee, Congressman John Conyers, and the Chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, Congressman Jerrold Nadler, and every Member present here today for this opportunity to provide the grassroots perspective. NCOBRA recognizes that the passage of this bill is important to obtaining reparations and remains committed to this process although Congress has not yet favorably acted upon it. NCOBRA strongly urges the committee to support passage of HR 40.
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REFERENCES
Reparations and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA), An Information Sheet, May 2004 (2nd edition). Black Reparations: American Slavery & Its Vestiges, Washington, DC Metropolitan Chapter of NCOBRA, 2002. The Ethics of Reparations: Engaging the Holocaust of Enslavement, Dr. Maulana Karenga. Reparations and a New Global Order: A Comparative Overview, Doctor Chinweizu; A paper read at the second Plenary Session of the First Pan-African Conference on Reparations, Abuja, Nigeria, April 27, 1993. For Whites Only: How & Why America Became a Racist Nation, Ambrose I. Lane, Sr., 2000. My Face is Black Is True-Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations, Dr. Mary Frances Berry; Alfred A, Knopf, New York, 2005. Should America Pay?Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, edited by Raymond A. Winbush, Ph.D.; Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Atonement and ForgivenessA New Model for Black Reparations, Roy L. Brooks; University of California Press, 2004.
Reparations at the National Level:

Reparations and Comfort Women Victims of the Japanese Army
Haruko Shibasaki
Translated by Yoko Harumi with assistance by Henry Theriault
Editors Note: During its military actions in the 1931-45 period and especially from 1938 on, the Japanese military forced approximately 200,000 women and girls from occupied areas into sexual slavery. A great many were underage teenagers, with some as young as 12 and possibly younger. These so-called Comfort Women were held in small comfort stations, often near front lines, and were routinely raped day in and day out by Japanese soldiers. Evidence abounds of individual women being subject to 30 and even more incidents of forced sex per day. The largest number of girls and women were Korean and then Chinese, with girls and women from Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia (including Dutch girls and women), Malaysia, and other areas. The Comfort Women were subjected to brutal violence and abuse by the soldiers and harsh medical treatments that included forced hysterectomies and other procedures without anesthesia. Many of the women and girls were murdered or died as a result of their treatment, and survivors were left to their own devices despite typically severe physical and psychological injuries as well as stigmatization in their home countries (for those who were even able to return).
In memory of all of the Comfort Women who perished during their enslavement or after. How long do surviving Comfort Women have to wait for reparations? Sexual violence by the Japanese military government during World War II included the Comfort Women system, genocide, and
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sexual violence. Even after more than 60 years, there has not been any resolution. Every year we hear news about more victims dying of old age. This article will determine what the perpetrator government should do today to respond and the reality of what is happening in Japan in the 21st Century regarding the Comfort Women issue.
The Japanese Government And The Asian Womens Fund

The Comfort Women issue in Japan began in 1991 when Kim Hak Sun bravely went public with her story. Recognition of the scale of the victimization of the Comfort Women shook Japan and the world. People around the world advocated for the human rights of and assistance to Comfort Women survivors and the cause became a global issue. On the other hand, the Japanese government continued to deny the Japanese militarys involvement in the Comfort Women system. However, as more evidence was made public, the Japanese government could no longer ignore global public opinion on the issue. Still, the Japanese government that was supposed to take responsibility for this issue continued to claim that the issue had already been addressed by the Treaty of San Francisco. According to the Japanese government, the issue has been legally solved, but it is acceptable for Japanese citizens in their private capacity to donate money for the Comfort Women to a new fund, out of a sense of moral concern. The government created the Asian Womens Fund. The Fund is not a means for the Japanese government to compensate Comfort Women officially and does not represent official recognition of Japanese governmental responsibility. For this reason, since its creation the Fund has been criticized by Comfort Women survivor groups in various countries and by activists on the issue in Japan. As a result of creation of this fund, some victim groups, supported by some Japanese activists, wanted this money to go to former Comfort Women as they neared the end of their lives, before they died. However, other victim groups and the Japanese activists supporting them, rejected these unofficial payments. So, a split between these two views emerged in different countries, including Japan. The details of the splits varied by country and situation, but this split created mistrust and sadness among former victims as well as activists. It is difficult to see how this could properly be termed reparations, when the government of
Reparations at a National Level
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Japan was not officially connected to the payments and when the payments had the form of charity rather than compensation for harm. The South Korean and Taiwanese governments and citizen groups stepped in to provide support to Comfort Women survivors so they would not need money from the Asian Womens Fund. This was in spite of continued efforts by Fund supporters to recruit recipients. Confusion over the issue continued; in the Philippines there are three victim rights groups as a result of the split created by the Asian Womens Fund. The Japanese government insists that by creating the Asian Womens Fund, it has responded to the needs of the Comfort Women. Whenever questions arose in the Japanese Parliament or the United Nations, the Japanese government pointed to the Fund as evidence that it had settled the issue. The Japanese government has tried to give the ( false) impression that this fund has been accepted and valued by Comfort Women victim groups. The fundamental role of reparations is to respond to the actual needs and stated requests of the victims. The Japanese government has thus not given real reparations, but instead has created more suffering in the victim groups. What surviving victims expect and hope for is official reparations by the Japanese national government.
Response By The Japanese Government And Warnings From International Organizations

Since 1994, United Nations-related organizations have been warning the Japanese government about this issue. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights have warned the government to address the issues about the Comfort Women raised in the 1994 report on violence against women by UN Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur Radhika Coomaraswamy; the 1998 report on systematic rape, sexual slavery, and slavery-like practices during armed conflict by UN Commission on Human Rights Special Rapporteur Gay J. McDougall; and other international reports. Recently, Amnesty International has made public statements about the Comfort Women issue. In May 2007, the UN Committee Against Torture also made public statements about
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the issue. As of the late 2000s, various organizations were pressing the Japanese government to recognize that the Asian Womens Fund is not the appropriate response to the Comfort Women issue and to develop a proper form of reparations as soon as possible. The Japanese government consistently ignored the recommendations of these organizations and continued to maintain that the Asian Womens Fund is the proper way to deal with the issue.
The Victims Whose Issues Were Never Addressed

The issue goes beyond the contradictory points of the Asian Womens Fund however. The Fund was originally created to provide financial support to former Comfort Women in South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The Fund was later used to support 41 facilities for elderly people in Indonesia while in the Netherlands it provided medical welfare support, though some former Comfort Women in the Netherlands refused this support on principle. The Japanese government did not made any attempt however flawed to provide reparations to former Comfort Women in China, North Korea, Malaysia, East Timor, Myanmar, Thailand, Guam, Papua-New Guinea, and other countries and locations. Then, on March 31, 2007, the Asian Womens Fund was terminated. From its beginning to its end, the Fund did not meet the needs or address the problems of former Comfort Women.
Legal Struggles
From 1991 to 2007, former South Korean, Japanese-Korean, Filipina, Dutch, Chinese, and Taiwanese Comfort Women pursued nine lawsuits against the Japanese government in Japanese courts. The victims pushed hard to get the Japanese government to admit the facts of their victimization, make an official apology, and give reparations to help themselves recover from the effects of their victimization. In response, the Japanese government denied the claims of the victims and consistently refused to meet their needs in a sincere way, although the Japanese government claimed officially it was trying to meet their needs. Although the Japanese legal system slowly started to confirm the
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facts of the Comfort Womens victimization, legal technical issues such as statutes of limitations and questions about whether individuals can pursue claims using international law resulted in dismissal of the cases. By 2007, seven of the nine had been dismissed. However, in the District Court of Shimonoseki in Yamaguchi Prefecture, one of the cases was successful in its first trial on April 27, 1998 (by confirming the facts of victimization and finding that the Japanese government had acted illegally under international law regarding forced labor and manipulating the legal system to authorize its actions). This decision was groundbreaking. In another case pursued on behalf of Chinese former Comfort Women, the district and superior courts established that a legal and political process could be developed to provide reparations to former Comfort Women and encouraged the parties involved to negotiate beyond the legal arena. As of February 2007, in seven out of nine legal cases the facts of victimization were confirmed. These included the finding that the system was a form of trafficking and forced labor. These legal findings have provided helpful tools in responding to denials by politicians. For instance, some organizations cite these legal findings in their promotional material.
Legislation Movement
After the April 27, 1998 judgment in Shimonoseki, Japan, a movement emerged that focused on passing a law in Japan supporting former Comfort Womens rights. Organizations that work with victims in different countries as well as politicians made an alliance and began to pursue such a law. In January of 1999, a group of lawyers created a committee to request that a law be created giving former Comfort Women reparations. Hong Kong and the Philippines passed resolutions calling on Japan to give reparations to the Comfort Women. In 2000, Japans Democratic (Minsyu) Party, Communist Party, and Socialist Party each proposed legislation to the upper house of the Japanese Diet (Parliament). In 2001, these three parties joined together to propose a single law to resolve the Comfort Women issue. In 2002, some politicians from these parties visited Indonesia, the Philippines, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Taiwan to research the needs of former Comfort
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Women and to explain the proposed legislation in each country. The Taiwanese House of Representatives voted unanimously to support the legislation and to call on Japan to pass it as soon as possible. In 2003, the South Korean House of Representatives also voted unanimously to support the proposed legislation. In the meantime, Japanese groups supporting former Comfort Women continued to work for passage of the reparations proposal. When these groups have invited a victim to Japan, they have attempted to organize meetings with Japanese political leaders to help convince them to support a reparations law. While the legislation is regularly submitted to the House, it has not gone forward for a vote and has not been passed.
Civil Movement And Victim Recovery

Support for victims of Japans military sex trafficking (Comfort Women) began with lawsuits focused on the victims human rights. This publicized the issue not only throughout Japan but also around the world. A key element of the early work was research through collaborations of ordinary citizens committed to the issue. This work included five components. Researchers went to the places where former Comfort Women lived in order to connect directly with them. They recorded their testimony about their experiences. Based on their connections to the victims, they worked to understand and present the details and context of victimization. They then assessed relevant law that could be used on behalf of victims. Finally, they collected historical documents supporting the former Comfort Womens testimonies. As a result of these steps, knowledge of the severity of the victimization of the Comfort Women by Japanese military men and the seriousness of the long-term effects on them, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, increased greatly. The daily lives of many former Comfort Women in their home countries include activities such as going to court to pursue cases, public protests, receiving mental health services, drawing pictures, dancing, and going on picnics. Even court cases have an important role in victim recovery, as they provide a means to overcome the emotional effects of victimization. A very important event in the process of recovery was the Womens International War Crimes Tribunal on Japans Military
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Sexual Slavery. Organizations from South Korea, North Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Japan came together to organize this landmark process that took place from December 8 to 12, 2000. This event provided a major forum for bearing witness to the testimonies and experiences of former Comfort Women and confirmed that it was a crime against humanity for which Emperor Hirohito, the head of the eras Japanese military government, was guilty. Yet, the continuing disrespect towards the Comfort Women by Japanese leaders was clear, for instance, when the former Secretary of Defense Shinzo Abe said that the women who cheered this finding were like a cult group. One of the results of the Womens International War Crimes Tribunal was the Womens Active Museum on War and Peace created by Japanese women seeing engagement with the issue as a Japanese responsibility. As part of their healing process, many former Comfort Women have visited this institute. Japanese citizens deepen their connection to former Comfort Women through the institute. The museum lends many materials on the Comfort Women to citizens and has played an important role in bringing awareness of the issue to Japanese society.
More Recent Developments

By the late 2000s, if a Japanese politician said that there were no Comfort Women or that he/she believed that it is good that the issues are not in Japanese school textbooks any more, he/she did not have to resign or face significant consequences. After Secretary of Defense Shinzo Abe (see above) became Prime Minister in 2006, the situation got worse. In March of 2007, Prime Minister Abe said that there was no force used on Comfort Women, a statement that caused significant emotional pain to former Comfort Women across Asia and the world. What is more, some Japanese lawmakers took out a full-page advertisement in the Washington Post that denied the victimization of the Comfort Women. This led to United States House of Representatives Resolution H.R. 121, which called on the Japanese government to acknowledge, apologize for, and accept responsibility
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for the sexual enslavement of the Comfort Women. In September of 2005, after the election for the upper house of the Japanese Parliament, the number of members supportive of Comfort Women legislation decreased. It became more difficult to resolve the Comfort Women issue through legislation. But, in July 2007, the number of Democratic Party parliament members increased, as did the number of members from small parties. As a result, these groups were the majority in the upper house. Around this time, the US House passed H.R. 121, which gave a great deal of encouragement to victims. On the day of passage, Japanese activists held a press conference for international journalists welcoming the congressional decision. With the July 2007 change of the Japanese Parliaments make-up, the Comfort Women issue was expected to move toward a resolution. Groups continue to work to get Japan to take national responsibility for reparations to former Comfort Women as well as to bring the issue to the Japanese public. Many groups work with former Comfort Women in the locations where they now live. There are public hearings and study groups about the issue, the production of documentary films, exhibitions of photographs and artwork on the issue, and other approaches to raising public awareness and understanding. In Japan, it is clear that it is necessary to work with many different groups and individuals to build a strong enough alliance to convince the government to take proper responsibility. During the period of transition in the mid-2000s, governmental work was paralleled by citizen organizations. The Seventh Asian Alliance Meeting on Japanese Responsibility for the Comfort Women was held in Tokyo in February of 2005. In August of 2005, there were coordinated protests around the world on the issue, which connected activists in different areas. In addition, members of younger generations have been having national-level meetings in several locations in Japan. The Eighth Asian Alliance Meeting was held in Seoul, South Korea, in May of 2007. At the meeting, a resolution passed giving the Alliances support to initiatives in each affected country to resolve the Comfort Women issue. In Los Angeles in October of 2007, there was an international comfort women issue conference that drew participants from the United States, European Union, Australia, and Canada. This meeting also passed a
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resolution supporting initiatives to resolve the issue in various countries. In addition, participants decided to work with Japanese members of parliament and citizens to resolve the issue and to support one anothers activities to get resolution. The Violence Against Women in War Network (VAWW-NET Japan), a leading organization in the struggle for Japanese governmental responsibility, has pledged to continue to focus on grass-roots work as well as efforts with Japanese members of parliament and other groups who are concerned about the issue, such as peace groups, textbook reform groups, and war reparations groups locally and around the world. VAWW-NET will support emerging youth efforts toward a resolution. Ultimately, the most important part of self-recovery of the Comfort Women victims of Japanese military sexual slavery is the perpetrator group accepting its responsibility as a means of earning forgiveness from victims. Editors Note: While to date the Japanese government has not accepted its responsibility through the granting of reparations to former Comfort Women and related actions, concerned activists and organizations continue to advocate for justice. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Committee called on the government of Japan to accept full responsibility for the Comfort Women system, apologize to former Comfort Women, compensate victims with official government funds, and ensure that the issue is accurately portrayed in Japanese school textbooks (see Amnesty International, Japan Urged to Restore Dignity to WWII Comfort Women, November 8, 2008, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/ good-news/japan-urged-restore-dignity-wwii-comfort-women-20081103 [accessed October 29, 2012]). Amnesty International itself made a similar call for justice on November 25, 2010 (see Japan: Amnesty Calls for Justice for Comfort Women, http://www.amnesty.org.uk/news_details. asp?NewsID=19106 [accessed October 29, 2012]).
Hegemonic National Narrative and Laying the Foundation for Reparations to Indigenous Peoples
Diana Lenton, Walter Delrio, Pilar Prez, Alexis Papazin, Mariano Nagy, and Marcelo Musante
Argentinas Constituent Genocide: Challenging the
Introduction
For more than a century, there has been little discussion of the Argentinean genocide perpetrated against indigenous peoples. As a result, presently a majority of Argentines perceive their identity and society as the outcome of a European melting pot process, not the result of genocide. In this view, sixteenth century European colonization of a territory imagined as a desert and the expansion of the nation-state by the late 19th Century are the historical processes that account for this melting pot. This article deals with the events and effects of the last period of territorial annexation and subjugation of the indigenous peoples perpetrated by the Argentinean national armed forces between 1876 and 1917, focusing on the states genocidal policies and the support from civil society. Paradoxically, these actions as a whole have been named in the hegemonic national history of Argentinas Campaigns to the Desert.1 This formulation and the national narratives it names minimize or deny completely the existence of indigenous peoples in the areas annexed. The aim of this paper is to examine the construction and effects of the genocide of the indigenous population as an event excluded from the national narrative and literally unthinkable by average Argentines.
64 Alexis Papazin, Mariano Nagy, and Marcelo Musante

In the present, different groups such as indigenous peoples organizations, academic researchers, and alternative media have started to make visible this genocidal process that is constitutive of the Argentinean nation state. The exposure of the facts of history has generated a growing debate on the historical processes. In this context, a series of specific but related processes of violence and conquest can be identified and described. We term these genocide-prints, through which we will consider not only the genocide but also the current debates on reparations to indigenous peoples.
Diana Lenton, Walter Delrio, Pil ar Prez ,
Genocide-Prints
A paradox has become a structural tension in the construction of social imaginaries over the last years in Argentina. In effect, the metaphor of the Conquest of the Desert, which for more than a century has been part of the invisibilization dispositif2 that has operated over indigenous peoples, has coexisted for the last few decades (since the return of democracy in 1983) with a growing visibilization of the societys multiculturalism. The strong activism of indigenous organizations and communities has managed to push onto the human rights agenda the situation of the large indigenous sectors of society that have long been outside the field of visibility. Thus, the presence of numerous different indigenous communities, organizations, and families in Argentina has started to become visible. This paradox becomes a conflict when the excluded topic of indigenous presence begins to be voiced to challenge the historical silence on the issue. What is more, it is not only what is being said, but also who is speaking in opposition to certain long term naturalized historical assertions that claim public attention. Consequently, the terms genocide,3 ethnocide,4 and excesses5 of the state are part of the debate when the previously unthinkable6 becomes a possible narrative. The resulting public debate on history is a consequence of existing conflicts within Argentinean society that are rooted in the implementation of state policies through its process of consolidation as a modern nation-state territory, a process in which the genocide of indigenous peoples was central. The next section describes the different conflicts involved.
Argentina's Constituent Genocide
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Conflicts Over Territory In recent years, indigenous communities have made a number of demands for the return of territory as a repair for the previous genocidal policies of the Argentinean state and society. According to some media descriptions, attempts to reclaim land taken through genocide are presented as occupations of land by some groups self-defined as indigenous. On the one hand, this interpretation acknowledges that the indigenous survivors of the conquest (considered an exceptional and minimal group) are the product of a political process that reduced their numbers and that land was central to that process. While their status as historical remnants might be acknowledged, however, this formulation denies their contemporary sociopolitical legitimacy, especially to pursue land claims. What is more, the media tend to attribute dangerousness to the indigenous population through the stereotype of indio malonero,7 which has been exploited since the 19th Century to depict those Indians who lived in the desert before the states conquest. As in the 19th Century, this term undercuts the justified presence and demands of indigenous people by misrepresenting them as a threat to private property. Indeed, for the target audience of such language in Argentina, the term makes indigenous people an incarnation of the threat to private property. Over the last three decades, there have been a number of legislative changes so that national and provincial laws now recognize the preexistence and rights of indigenous peoples.8 These changes were driven by indigenous agency in a context of change regarding the relations between the Argentinean state and civil society as well as changes in international focus on indigenous issues have not only brought the issue into focus but have transformed historical demands for territory into legal demands. This has been and still is read as a multiplication of cases. This last point of view asserts that the possibility generated by new legal developments has encouraged an indigenous identity rising with an instrumentalist interest to achieve something that they do not deserve, namely land. The conflicts over territory encompass a series of problems. To begin with, they reveal the mechanisms of territorialization through which the indigenous population has been subjugated.9 In fact, the geographical spaces inhabited nowadays by different indigenous groups do not

coincide with the ones historically inhabited. What they represent is the outcome of consecutive concentrations, deportations, and fragmentations during the military campaigns and in their aftermath. Thus, the current indigenous demands are generally discredited because they cannot prove their ancestral occupation judged through the Western criteria of lodging of the lands they inhabit presently. After the massive deportations into the late nineteenth century, the communities that managed to access some land in general far from their ancestral lands were nonetheless subject to continuous expropriations throughout the 20th Century at the hands of local, regional, and national power factions. This has been possible and implemented through a complex network of power that has connected landowners, business interests, and the state bureaucracy (the police, judiciary, political authorities) who have alternately and arbitrarily revealed and concealed the indigenous inhabitants of public lands. There is also a second issue: for more than a century the demands of the communities and indigenous people in general have not reached the legal system. Moreover, in the few cases in which it has intervened, the outcome has favored the expropriation of indigenous lands,10 Presently, most of the conflicts are mediated by the juridical system. In every case there is documentation of judicial constraint or violence by former authorities or legal procedures. There are forged and coerced signatures, contradictions within the testimony of police agents, and compulsory transferring of rights over lands and goods, all clearly systematic violations of the rights of indigenous citizens. Thirdly, the reaction to the current demands has been to delegitimize the sociopolitical organizations of the indigenous peoples. On the one hand, it is assumed that they have disappeared with the Conquest of the Desert and that current demands are motivated by newly and therefore illegitimate and non-traditional forms of organization. This is often construed as the presence of dark foreign interests over the land operating behind the indigenous demands. These conspiracy theories, on the other hand, show that the state has actually developed policies aimed at the disappearance of the indigenous sociopolitical organizations. Some of these policies seek to alter group and family structures through the distribution of children or the division of age
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and sex groups, for example. These readings systematically deny the ways in which indigenous agency has constructed their own forms of organization and representation, while at the same time normalizing the states desired forms of indigenous organization as, for example, when indigenous people are forced to work at sugar factories to fill labor needs. In that context, the state instituted official criteria for tribe and the role of the chiefs are imposed. The national and provincial states determine whether an indigenous community is legitimate. There are official records of the communities that have legal status as such after undergoing an administrative process designed by the state. Fourthly, the demands for territory provoke once again the stereotype of the indio malonero, which is exploited to advance the interests of the landowners affected by these demands. This stereotype attributes an innate violence to the indigenous people. During the 19th Century, Indians were stereotyped as a threat to private property and to the lives of the creoles, not only for their ancestral defect as indigenous persons but also as foreigners invading from elsewhere. Since the 19th Century the idea that the original indigenous peoples of the Pampa had been replaced by those arriving from Chile has been predominant. From then on, the idea that Indians are planning a raid has been explicit in the press and official discourse every time that the collective demands of indigenous peoples were violently suppressed by the state, as in Napalp (Chaco 1924)11 and La Bomba (Formosa 1947).12 Nowadays, dangerousness is attributed to those who seize lands, allegedly related to the Basque ETA and the Colombian FARC, due to the ways in which they think and construct violent actions and for their presumed bonds to foreign interests.13 Finally, it is important to focus on the mechanisms and voices assumed as legitimate or that legitimize everything that is circumscribed as the indigenous issue. What the current conflicts bring to light is that the arena is crossed not only by demands for land but also by the way in which the conflict is defined whether it is occupation, recuperation, restitution, or reparation and by who is entitled to define it. This represents a power-dispute over the meaning of every conflict for land or struggle for territory. Within this dispute, not only do well-known stereotypes resurface but also voices considered authoritative. In this

way, certain landowners appeal to the scientific legitimacy of some hegemonic ethnologies and history that have over the 20th Century supported and reproduced as academic discourse the premises that allege foreignness to certain indigenous peoples (especially the Mapuche People). These premises, in fact, derive from the political discourses of the late 19th Century and are distilled into the stereotype of the indio malonero.14 The national and provincial media appeal to these expert voices in order to question the origins, and thus the legitimacy, of the activists and to present them as coming from somewhere else (another country or province). They claim that the organizations are not a product or representative of traditional communities and represent them as a threat to private property, as in the 19th Century. Conflicts Over the Representation of History In recent times, it has become public and relatively widespread in certain sectors of Argentina, especially in urban areas and the middle class, to debate the responsibility of former President and General Julio A. Roca (1843-1914) for the genocide and the social and material subjugation of indigenous peoples in Argentina. There is a related debate around commemorative monuments of Roca and the use of his name to label public places around the country. One of the most important activists is the well known historian, journalist, and writer Osvaldo Bayer, who is author of a regional law analysis written some years ago. Bayer has been leading the effort to demonumentalize Roca. This proposal aims to become a political trigger for an ideological change to ethically re-evaluate history and construct a fairer society. In opposition are various social sectors generally related to conservative intellectual institutions and enterprises who fear that revision of the nation-state constitution might destabilize not only national institutions but also Argentinean national identity and morality. The historiographic debate between those who favor the demonumentalization of Roca and those who oppose it has two aspects, one centered on Julio A. Roca as a person and the other on what he symbolizes in the monuments that society has fetishized.15 In this context, we consider it indispensible to problematize the limits
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and potentialities of this debate. Beyond its particular results in the short term, how would it affect the Argentinean understanding of the relationship between the national collective memory and the sanction and prevention of genocide? Rocas most famous monument is sited in Argentinas capital, Buenos Aires. It consists of a sculpture of three pieces on a huge pedestal built by the Uruguayan sculptor Jos Zorrilla de San Martn, one of the most important South American artists. The law ordering its construction was passed in 1935. In 1941 the state expropriated a tract of land in the heart of the city for its placement16 and a commission for the General Roca monument was created. In few years, many other cities in Argentina built monuments based on the same inspiration. The construction of monuments and other means of honoring former President Roca go beyond even biographical exaggerations of his character, to transform him into a hegemonic representation in a particular sociopolitical context. Paying tribute to Roca, the national and provincial governments sought to establish and reproduce based on the pedagogy of monuments, a highly valuated characteristic of conservative tendencies the recovery of a key figure of the liberalism of the 19th Century. This was a project of the conservative and military nationalism in the first decades of the 20th Century. This nationalist approach turned the Conquest of the Desert into an epic event that was isolated from its particular interests and presented as an enterprise of the Argentinean state and society as a whole, which could even be compared to the struggle for national independence. The dispute over interpretations of the historical past and the selective operations of memory are located at the center of the hegemonic struggle for Argentina today.17 Though we can analyze the meaning of the monuments in the social context in which they are built,18 it is important to point out that their presence in Argentinean cities transcends the place and time of their actual context. They create a context and consolidate elements and ideological resources that persist in citizens imagination, regardless of the different interpretations they elicit. Nonetheless, it should be remarked that under certain circumstances, the tensions among the different senses provoked by the monuments and the current discourses trigger the rise of movements that react against them.

In this particular case, these social movements call themselves counter-hegemonic, and cover a broad spectrum. They range from those groups that limit themselves to proposing the removal of one or several monuments or Rocas name from public spaces or his picture from common objects such as the 100 peso bill,19 to those who combine these actions with deep critiques of official history. The latter relate the indigenous genocide to the experience of Argentinas last dictatorship and current processes of social exclusion and economic and/or political violence. Generally, these groups have already gone through processes of internal debate and have assumed a definite position about the genocidal nature of contested facts and individuals the campaign to the desert and Roca. Many members of these groups are also involved in other initiatives and social movements that have in common the counterhegemonic trend. They also join non-governmental organizations, intellectual sectors, professional groups especially teachers, communications workers, and state workers and activist organizations linked to indigenous peoples and new peasant movements. These counter-hegemonic movements manifest beyond their explicit targets, in the effect that they produce on much broader sectors of citizenship than those who engage in the anti-monument campaign. Initiatives for removal of monuments and the removal from streets, towns, places, schools, bills, etc., of the names of people associated with military campaigns against indigenous peoples are discussed in mass media. The movements provoke passionate discussions among the supporters of the most traditional nationalist iconography and those who propose a transformation to a new social face for the national community. So far no monument of Roca has been removed from its place, notwithstanding the existence of several projects submitted to the Legislative Chambers in different provinces. The best-known project is the one signed by Osvaldo Bayer, presented in 2004 to the Buenos Aires Municipal Legislature, which proposes to remove the Boca monument located a few meters from the headquarters of the legislature and replace it with another that represents the women who populated these lands, . . . Aboriginal women . . . and Immigrant women.20 From 2004 until today, however, public demonstrations in favor of the removal of dozens of monuments to Roca, have multiplied in different
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cities of the country. There have also been spontaneous interventions expressing dissatisfaction with what is considered monumentalization of certain political ideology and subverting the historical narrative that the monuments convey. These interventions sometimes consist of red spots, resembling blood, applied to the monuments as well as graffiti challenging what the monuments convey or presenting libertarian expressions, etc. These sometimes appear at random times, by anonymous hands, or more commonly during the marches on key dates ( for example, October 12th). In some cases stickers or paint are used to place alternative names on public signage. Changing Roca Avenue in Buenos Aires, for instance, to the name Native Peoples Avenue has achieved a kind of consensus in these interventions. In Buenos Aires these graphic interventions, spontaneous and more or less clandestine, are periodically cleaned away by the local government. Leaflets and posters through which some of the intervening groups express slogans and provide detailed information on the history debate are often put on the fence surrounding the Buenos Aires Roca monument. These posters are often quickly ruined by exposure to bad weather or are torn, so this is an ephemeral form of intervention. In a similar manner, for a number of years Osvaldo Bayer made statements every other Thursday after the traditional demonstration of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, some 300 meters from the monument, to explain to citizens the meaning of the demonumentalization proposal. In Bariloche, a town in Patagonia, the target of the protest is the Monument to Roca located in the towns main square, close to the coast of Lake Nahuel Huapi and the headquarters of the Patagonian museum Perito Moreno. This equestrian sculpture, much more austere than the one in Buenos Aires, is also more targeted, partly because of its physical structure, which allows the protesters to climb on it. Marichi Wew (Ten times we shall beat, a well-known slogan in Mapuzugun language) and We are still alive are some of the statements applied to the monument to construct an implicit dialogue with the genocidal general. Unlike interventions in Buenos Aires, which offer an anti-genocidal challenge on a more abstract level, in Bariloche the graffiti recalls the persistence of the victims, who are still alive in spite of all and demonstrate actively and defiantly the truth held in their collective memory. For several years, this

Patagonian city has held a popular demonstration called kultrunazo. Once a year, and without notice, urban Mapuche organizations accompanied by supporting groups from across the social spectrum march to the towns main square and cover the sculpture of General Roca with a large handcrafted panel, which resembles the traditional kultrun.21 This intervention, like those discussed above, seem also to be ephemeral since this structure is not meant to last. To assemble the kultruns sculpture requires a high level of organization and coordination, as the kultrun must be constructed just before the march to avoid being destroyed. This is possible thanks to the leadership of organizations. This leadership role is also evident in the graffiti painting that takes place during the operation, in which there are slogans against Roca and its metonymic extensions Conquest of the Desert, the armed forces, genocide, dictatorship, oligarchy, racism, fascism, Nazism but there are also other slogans and symbols that are intelligible only to the youth sectors belonging to different trends within the Mapuche urban movement.22 Eventually, the destruction of the scenery must not be interpreted as a failure of the movement, since, thanks to the high integration of the Mapuche in the new information and communication technologies, photographs and videos of the monument covered by the kultrun and the mass march, along with the cultural expressions that they give rise to, travel throughout the world in a few hours. These various kinds of interventions are related to many efforts around the country concentrated on renaming sites of remembrance. Consequently, a large proportion of political mobilization regarding the historical debate aims to eliminate the name of Roca from streets, squares, cities, and schools. The symbolism of the act of re-naming is not a minor one, because these names exceed the simple function of memorialization, to canonize, limit, and standardize a common national historical narrative.23 An early case was in El Huec, a town in the Province of Neuquen, where in early 2005 the Deliberative Council changed the name of Roca Avenue and renamed it for Lonko Make Cayucal, a native leader from the area. A recent case is the proposal submitted to the Legislature of Santa Fe Province, which calls for renaming Provincial School Number 869, currently Julio A. Roca, for its first headmaster Lionilda Avila.24
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Perhaps the most significant of the initiatives is the one that proposes renaming an entire city. The current name of the city in the Patagonian Province of Ro Negro is General Roca. The proposal is to return to the original place name, Fiske Menuko. Little by little since 2001 various social groups in the city have been abandoning the imposed name and incorporating the Mapuche name into daily life, de facto renaming the city. The political growth and re-education that the debate on Bayer`s draft has produced faces, however, some difficulties that are important to note. On the one hand, the protest concentrates almost exclusively on Julio A. Roca as an individual,25 thus obscuring the complexity of a historical process that obviously exceeds Rocas activities. Through the involvement of other players in the army and political realm whose complicity was denounced in their own era by Senator Aristobulo del Valle,26 the structural racism that drove genocide does not come into view. In this sense, the success of Bayers legislative proposal to remove the monument of Roca would not really transform the nature of citizenship in Argentina if this removal were taken to be the ultimate solution to the problem in a way that prevents thorough exposure and public discussion of the general issue of genocide against indigenous Argentines. Moreover, the proposal to remove monuments bypasses many chances for spontaneous activity, ideologically more congenial to the values of egalitarianism, pluralism, and multiculturalism, promoted by groups who support these processes, than the erection of new monuments in the place of Rocas. Conflicts Over the Representation of Argentine Genotype The draft submitted by Osvaldo Bayer to the Legislature of Buenos Aires proposes to remove the Roca monument from its current location and to send it, along with all the other monuments that are eventually removed by similar initiatives across the country, to Rocas descendants cattle ranches, and to erect new monuments in the vacated site. The subject of these would be decided by an appeal to the public. In addition, Roca Avenue would be renamed Pueblos Originarios Avenue.27 Thus, the drafts author anticipates possible criticism that could arise from the destruction of the Roca monument, such as viewing it as barbaric or as damage to the collective artistic heritage, which would reflect negatively

on those pursuing the change. It also avoids the creation of an empty space that could catalyze the nostalgia for the glorious past of certain social sectors. But more importantly, the relative consensus for demonumentalizing Roca faces a new challenge related to the very definition of remonumentalization: what could physically and symbolically replace the current monument with some degree of effectiveness. As already mentioned, Bayers original project aims at the construction of a double monument to indigenous women, who gave birth to the native Creole comprising up to 56 percent of Argentinas current population,28 and to immigrant women, who suffered the endless sacrifices of arrival and adaptation to a new land. Thus, the project aims to work against the myth of origin of modern Argentina, decentering the focus from the militarily-imposed racial blending through genocide and the exclusion of diversity, towards a maternalbased racial hybridism, the metaphor for good social integration. This project has surpassed its initial limits and taken on the meaning of the general opposition to the simple-minded glamorization of, and apologia for, violence that is the official national history, to function as the epitome of protest against the violent formation of Argentinean society. That the project has been adopted by a range of supporting groups suggests that it has generated debates leading to further consensus and historical recognition. One additional direction has been an improved understanding of the close relationship between political and military violence and gender violence. This had been part of the nationalist narrative, figuring mainly as captive white women abused by indigenous savages. Their redemption from the savages was a significant leitmotif celebrated in national literature Esteban Echeverra, Felix Luna, etc. and in the visual arts Angel Della Valle. The challenge to the national narrative that has been occurring includes the start of questioning the fate of indigenous women who were taken prisoner by the Argentinean army. Previous work has raised concerns about certain aspects of the lauding of mestizaje29 that underlies the project to replace the monument to General Roca by a monument to indigenous women as the origin of the Argentine mestizo, as articulated by some of the organizations supporting this project.30 Even when its explicit aim is to refute the
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hegemonic ideology that grounds more than a century of privileging of the European element in Argentina, the deification of the 56 percent of Argentines of mixed origins is still problematic because it does not question the conditions under which this crossbreeding occurred. The replacement project thus perpetuates the concealment of violence and gender politics that accompanied the Desert Campaign and gave rise to a significant proportion of these mixed births. In many cases the same groups that support to Rocas demonumentalization have expressed support for another public enterprise, led by another historian, Hugo Chumbita. This initiative proposes that DNA testing should be made on the remains of Jos de San Martn, in order to show that the Padre de la Patria and therefore of all Argentines, even those who are descended from the boats31 was mestizo. Leaflets and brochures produced to support this claim fall into a strong affirmation and exaltation of the mestizo origin of certain heroes such as San Martn, Pern, and Yrigoyen who are special objects of popular affection. But these approaches maintain the notion of the alleged shortage of white women coming with Europeans that is claimed to have driven the process of miscegenation and thus coverup and even deny the reality of racial and gender violence that were its actual form and foundation. What is more, notwithstanding the positive aspects of claims about mixed origins such as the case of San Martn, which opposes the racism and the shadiness of the official history, it is crucial to avoid uncritical glorification of miscegenation because it links biological traits with psychological characteristics, political ideology, and ethical inclinations.
The Constituent Genocide and Emerging Approaches to Reparation

Beyond these considerations of the demonumentalization movement and its challenge to the national narrative of Argentina, it is important to consider other ways of engaging the history of genocide that can produce deep social change aimed at dismantling the patriarchal ideology associated with the advocacy of violence32 that lies at the base not only of the Conquest of the Desert but also of the gender violence and

militaristic discourse that has left us the monuments in question. Only in that way can the most important objective of the demonumentalizing Roca project radical transformation of the thought structures that led to institutional violence begin to be accomplished. Specifically, what each of the conflicts mentioned above exposes is a profound need for change in the structures of meaning. They demonstrate that even the factual grounds of the genocide are unknown to Argentinean society as a whole and show the tremendous difficulty of conceiving other national historical narratives in the face of the performative power possessed by hegemonic stereotypes and narratives. The invisibilization of indigenous Argentines and their history is the result of a long process that began alongside the 19th Century military campaigns of occupation, during which developed a whole machinery of information control. The narratives of invisibilization represented the late 19th Century as a period in which a generation of Argentines, led by President General Roca, consolidated and modernized the national state. The relations with the Indians, including the Campaigns to the Desert. were defined by their official chronicler, Estanislao Zeballos, as a crusade for civilization.33 The metaphor of the desert would paradoxically contribute to an understanding of the events as a cruel and yet civilizing military campaign over a wild and scarcely inhabited territory. 34 In this way, the actual events that followed the military campaigns were rendered inconsistent with the hegemonic national narrative and thus literally unthinkable especially those events at the core of the experience of indigenous peoples, the concentration camps, the massive deportations, and the transformation of the people into an enslaved work force. The deportations included the dismembering of families the separation of children from parents and the reclusion of the elderly and the torture and death suffered during the long marches on foot across hundreds of kilometers of steppe. The social memory of MapucheTehuelche communities in Patagonia preserves the recollections of these social experiences inherited from their grandparents days. These memories include the places of imprisonment where many were killed or shipped off, never to return. They told us how they tied them up, how they herded them, they herded the people. The women who gave birth were left behind and they
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cut the childrens throats, they killed them. They walked bare-footed, with dumb leather shoes, my grandmother used to say. They took them to the place where everyone was killed, people from different places. The ones that escaped came here. May God keep us from seeing anything like that ever again.35 In the new social space that resulted from this process, new experiences awaited. Some indigenous populations were annexed to the armed forces as auxiliary forces. Others, as a collective considered tribes were used as elements of territorial demarcation and therefore were located in key areas as watch-guards or as auxiliary troops.36 Most of the indigenous people were deprived of their goods and deported from their areas in order to be used as domestic servants, police agents, or forced labor for state-supported industries such as the sugar cane plantations in Tucuman and the wine plantations in Cuyo. Thousands of indigenous prisoners coming from the national territories of Chubut, Ro Negro, La Pampa, Neuqun, and the southern area of the province of Mendoza were, during the 1870s and 1880s, forcibly transferred to different areas of Argentina. Current current research projects have been reconstructing the itineraries and modalities of the concentration, deportation, distribution, and utilization of the indigenous population as an enslaved workforce. Starting with Mases work on the deportations and distributions of the subjugated population, 37 a series of studies have been produced. For instance, Nagy and Papazian have focused on the organization of these activities on Martn Garcia Island.38 This island operated as a prison where indigenous people were compelled to work, but also as a discipline center where people were distributed to the different facilities on the island including a regular prison, a school, a pest-house, quarries, an army post, a marine base, a church, and a hospital. Lenton and Sosa have studied the fate of the people deported to Tucumn and their use as slave labor.39 Similarly, Escolar focuses on those who were sent to work in Mendoza in the wine industry.40 In all these studies the division of families, appropriation of children, and identity erasure have been central. There are other lines of investigation oriented towards the reconstruction of the organization and functioning of the concentration

camps in Pampa and Patagonia, the structures mobility in the new social space,41 the role of missionaries,42 and the activities of the armed forces during the campaigns and afterwards. As of the writing of this article, these projects and lines of research are still in progress. Nonetheless, some general points of agreement are clear. To begin with, these studies in general focus on state policies towards the indigenous population and the need to expose processes that have been hidden or obscured by the hegemonic narratives that have constructed the Campaign to the Desert as an epitomic event in the process of the states consolidation.43 Second, with the definition of genocide codified in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, we agree on the applicability of the term genocide to the subjugation and incorporation of the indigenous peoples and the usefulness of this term as a conceptual instrument for research. The utility of this legal term supports new insights into the relation between collective memory and archival records, at the same time as serious engagement of the archival record and collective memory of victim groups strongly supports the application of the term genocide to the relevant processes. Even though the full damage done by these processes, inflicted on indigenous peoples, has yet to be assessed, there are some contemporary attempts at reparation for these harms. First, as a consequence of the promulgation of Law 26160, the Argentinean national government has begun a territorial survey of the lands inhabited by indigenous communities with the aim of returning to their communities all their property. This survey is being carried out by local technical teams with the participation of the indigenous communities and organizations. It represents an attempt to acknowledge indigenous peoples current reality and legitimacy in Argentina. But there are serious problems with this initiative and indigenous participation is uneven. One of the main problems is that the law only considers land that indigenous communities presently inhabit. Therefore, ancestral territory that was taken from indigenous peoples and from which they were deported and that are now claimed by indigenous groups are excluded from the survey. Thus, this process of guaranteeing indigenous land rights does not work
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as reparations for the genocidal process on ancestral lands, however it might help legitimize the current indigenous presence in Argentina. Second, there is continual pressure to incorporate intercultural education in the education system a system that varies greatly among the provinces of Argentina. The national Ministry of Education, however, has remained noticeably (and notoriously) absent from this process, providing no guidance on what an intercultural educational practice means and how it should relate to the national education system. At present, changes in this area have been limited to creation of afterhours courses on indigenous language and culture, which include a few indigenous teachers, only in those areas that the government recognizes as indigenous. Third, judicial cases brought by indigenous groups concerning genocidal practices perpetrated by the state have been denied by national tribunals. In particular, the cases of la Bomba (1947) and Napalp (1924) in the northern provinces of Formosa and Chaco that involve the massacres against the Pilag and Toba peoples have been rejected based on the claim that the killings occurred under popular democratic regimes. Finally, different museums have returned human remains to their original indigenous communities. This has had a significant impact in Argentinean society. In some cases the restitution of remains was followed by the building of a memorial, such as the Inacayals mausoleum in the province of Chubut (1994) or the Panghitruz Guor Mausoleum in the province of La Pampa (2001). There are other related cases, such as the recent restitution to the family of Damiana, an Ache girl who was studied and photographed naked by anthropologists while she was still alive and dissected after her death in 1907 at the age of 14. These have sparked an important debate not only about what should be returned or repaired or who is to receive it, but also about the reasons why reparations should be made. This debate and the reparative measures it can produce are the new stage emerging on the foundation of the challenge of the hegemonic historical narrative that invisibilized the genocide of indigenous peoples in Argentina.44

NOTES
1 This is the label used for the set of military actions against Indians, especially those conducted between the sanctioning of Law 947 in 1878 and the surrender of Sayhueque in 1885. By extension, the former and latter actions are named in the same way. The campaigns in the north of the country, especially in Chaco, are also included. However, the trope of the Campaigns to the Desert that capitalizes this representation as a vernacular orientalism takes as its object all territories previously not annexed to the state and the national economy that were conquered and nationalized in this era. Argentines tend to see these campaigns as the function of General Rocas individual agency. The metaphor is used in nationalist narratives to refer to the crucial event in the construction not only of the modern Argentinean state but also of a nation with no Indians without questioning the reasons why there would be no Indians. Walter Delrio, Memorias de Expropiacin. Sometimiento e incorporacin indgena en la Patagonia (1872-1943), (Buenos Aires: Editorial de la Universidad de Quilmes, 2005); Diana Lenton, De centauros a protegidos: La construccin del sujeto de la poltica indigenista argentina a travs de los debates parlamentarios, (Doctoral Dissertation, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2005). The omission of genocide from the hegemonic Argentinean national narrative as a non-event that is in fact not even conceivable or thinkable within the discussion of national history. The UNs Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) of 1948 states in its eleventh article: Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. In Raphael Lemkins first proposal to define a crime against humanity, the concept of ethnocide was included in the general notion of genocide. It was only subsequently that political forces separated ethnocide into what is typically termed cultural genocide, an issue generally considered not to be covered by the UN Genocide Convention. In our approach to genocidal process against indigenous peoples, we support the original proposal in which a cultural genocide is also genocide. In Argentina, the idea of excesses is, nowadays, related to those who explain and justify the last military dictatorship as a dirty war in which there would have been only excesses and by no means a genocide or state terrorism. This notion is thus readily available in political discourse in Argentina and applied to the genocide of indigenous people as well. M.R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). This is the label used for Indians that raided for cattle on the borders of the state. Generalized to all indigenous people regardless of whether they engaged in such activity, this expression combines the dangerousness attributed to the indigenous population in Argentina both because of their alleged innate violence and because of their alleged foreignness (coming from Chile).
2 3
6 7

8 9
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10
11 12
13
14
15 Diana Lenton Prceres genocidas: una indagacin en el debate pblico sobre la figura de Julio A. Roca y la Campaa del Desierto, in Anne Huffschmid
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The National Constitution was reformed in 1994. Article 75 establishes not only the pre-existence of indigenous peoples but also the right to suitable and sufficient lands for their development. Claudia Briones and Walter Delrio, The Conquest of the Desert as trope and enactment of Argentinas Manifest Destiny, in David Maybury-Lewis, Theodore MacDonald, and Biorn Maybury-Lewis (eds.), Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 51-84. Ana Ramos and Walter Delrio, (Trayectorias de oposicin: Los mapuche y tehuelche frente a la hegemona en Chubut, in C. Briones (ed.), Cartografas Argentinas: Polticas indigenistas y formaciones provinciales de alteridad, (Buenos Aires: Editorial Antropofagia, 2005). Nicols Iigo Carrera, Campaas militares y clase obrera: Chaco, 18701930, (Buenos Aires: C.E.A.L., Coleccin Historia Testimonial, 1984). Valeria Mapelman and Marcelo Musante, Campaas militares, reducciones y masacres: Las prcticas estatales sobre los pueblos originarios del Chaco, in Bayer, Osvaldo (coord.), Diana Lenton (ed.), Walter Delrio et al., Historia de la crueldad argentina, Julio A. Roca y el genocidio de los Pueblos Originarios (Buenos Aires: Ed. El Tugurio, 2010). Walter Delrio, Diana Lenton, and Alexis Papazin, Agencia y poltica en tres conflictos sobre territorio Mapuche: Pulmar/Santa Rosa Leleque/Lonko Purrn, Sociedades de Paisajes ridos y semi-ridos. Revista Cientfica del Laboratorio de Arqueologa y Etnohistoria de la Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional de Ro Cuarto, Ro Cuarto, Ao II, Volumen II (June 2010), 125-146. Axel Lazzari and Diana Lenton, Araucanization, Nation: A Century Inscribing Indians in the Pampas, in C. Briones and J.L. Lanata (eds.), Contemporary Perspectives on the Native Peoples of Pampa, Bergin Garvey Series in Anthropology, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002).
17 18 19 20 21 22
(ed.), Topografas conflictivas, Memorias, Espacios y Ciudades en disputa, (Berlin: Instituto de Estudios Latinoamericanos, Freie Universitt Berlin, 2010). Law 12697, passed on September 25, 1941, proclaimed the public need for a tract of land at the intersection of Peru Street, Alsina Street, and Julio A. Roca Avenue. This land faces such things as the Buenos Aires Legislature and reflects the colonial past epitomized in the so-called Manzana de las Luces. James Brow, Notes on Community, Hegemony, and the Uses of the Past, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 63 (1), (1990), 1-6 at 3. Phillip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). A draft law submitted to the Chamber of Deputies in June 2008 proposes to replace Rocas picture on the highest denomination banknote by that of Juana Azurduy, a well-known Warrior of Independence. Bayer, Historia de la crueldad argentina. More than a simple percussion instrument, the kultrun, because of its shape, the materials with which it is built, and its decoration, unifies multiple cosmological, religious, ecological, territorial and political meanings. Laura Kropff, Mapurbe: jvenes mapuche urbanos, Revista Kairs 8 (14) ( 2004). http://www.revistakairos.org/k14-archivos/laura%20kropff.pdf (accessed June 4, 2012).

23 Elizabeth Jelin and Victoria Langland, Introduccin. Las marcas territoriales como nexo entre pasado y presente, in Elizabeth Jelin and Victoria Langland (comps.), Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales, Vol. 5, (Madrid: Siglo XXI Editores, Coleccion Memorias de la Represion, 2003). 24 Draft prepared by Deputies Marcelo Brignoni, Alicia Gutierrez, Antonio Riestra, and Jos Mara Tessa for the Legislative Chamber of Santa Fe, October 15, 2010. 25 With the exception of the campaign initiated by Bayer himself to change the name of the town of Rauchnamed after a Conquest of the Desert Warriorand the much broader move towards the clarification and mass dissemination of information about the massacres held at Napalp in1924 and La Bomba in 1947. Both the latter were events that took place in Chaco and Formosa, in the north of the country. Red de Investigadores en Genocidio y Poltica Indgena, Rincn Bomba y Napalp: debates sobre los lmites de la justicia, Publicacin audiovisual en formato CD/ DVD, 2008; Walter Delrio, Diana Lenton, Marcelo Musante, Mariano Nagy, Alexis Papazian, and Pilar Prez, Del silencio al ruido en la Historia: Prcticas genocidas y Pueblos Originarios en Argentina, III Seminario Internacional Polticas de la Memoria Recordando a Walter Benjamin: Justicia, Historia y Verdad. Escrituras de la Memoria, (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti, October 28-30, 2010). 26 On August 19, 1884, in the National Congress, Senator Del Valle stated, We have reproduced the barbaric scenes they do not have another name to which the world has been stage while the civil trade of slaves has existed. We have taken out families from the wild Indians, we have brought them to this civilization center, where all their rights should be guaranteed, and we have not observed for these families any of the rights that belong not only to the civilized man, but to the human being. We have enslaved the men, we have prostituted the women, we have pulled children out of the wombs of their mothers, we have sent the old men to be used as slaves . . . In a word, we have disowned and violated all the laws that govern mans moral actions . . . Each new campaign makes of women and children the spoils of war . . . Lenton, Diana. De centauros a protegidos. La construccin del sujeto de la poltica indigenista argentina a travs de los debates parlamentarios. Ph.D. Dissertation. Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2005. 27 Bayer, Historia de la crueldad argentina; Osvaldo Bayer (coord.), Alberto Salas et al., Historia de la crueldad argentina, Vol. 1, (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de la Cooperacin, 2007). 28 Reference is made to a sample research on Argentinean citizens mitochondrial DNA, which received relatively significant attention in mass media. Daniel Corach, Andrea Sala, and Miguel Marino, Contribucin amerindia a la poblacin actual de Argentina, Revista Argentina de Antropologa Biolgica, Vol. 7 (1), (2005) AABRA. 29 Mixed blood, epitomized in Argentina by the union between a Spanish man and Indian woman. 30 Lenton Diana, Prceres genocidas: una indagacin en el debate pblico sobre la figura de Julio A. Roca y la Campaa del Desierto, in Anne Huffschmid (ed.), Topografas conflictivas. Memorias, Espacios y Ciudades en disputa (Berlin: Institute for Latin American Studies, Free University of Berlin, 2010). 31 A well-known aphorism states that, while Peruvians descend from the Incas and Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Argentines descend from the boats, alluding to the official narrative that claims a purely European origin for this South American group.
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32 See Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers. Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001) on a similar structure in Rwandas mixed marriages and their relationship with the narrative of genocide. 33 Estanislao Zeballos, La conquista de quince mil leguas, (Buenos Aires, Hyspamrica, [1878] 1986). 34 For example, a memoir published by Eduardo Ramayon, who was a military commander in this process, is entitled, Warrior Army, to Settle and Civilize. 35 Statement in 2005 by Catalina Antilef of Futahuao, Chubut Province, Argentina. 36 As, for example, the Curruhuinca tribe at Lake Lacar. 37 Enrique Mases, Estado y cuestin indgena. El destino final de los indios sometidos en el sur del territorio (1878-1910), (Buenos Aires: Prometeo libros/ Entrepasados, 2002). 38 Mariano Nagy and Alexis Papazin, De la Isla como Campo: Prcticas de disciplinamiento indgena en la Isla Martn Garca hacia fines s. XIX, Paper presented at the XII Jornadas Interescuelas-Departamentos de Historia, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Facultad de Humanidades, Centro Regional Universitario Bariloche, October 28-31, 2009. 39 Diana Lenton, and Jorge Sosa, La expatriacin delos pampas y su incorporacin forzada en la sociedad tucumana de finales del siglo XIX, Paper presented at the 1eras Jornadas de Estudios Indgenas y Coloniales C.E.I.C. Jujuy, 2009. 40 Diego Escolar Los Dones tnicos de la Nacin. Identidades huarpe y modos de produccin de soberana en Argentina, (Buenos Aires, Prometeo, 2007); Diego Escolar, El repartimiento de prisioneros indgenas en Mendoza durante y despus de la Campaa del Desierto, paper presented at III Jornadas de Historia de la Patagonia. Universidad Nacional del Comahue, San Carlos de Bariloche, November 6-8, 2008. 41 Pilar Prez, Las policas fronterizas: mecanismos de control y espacializacin en los territorios nacionales del sur a principios del siglo XX, Paper presented at the XII Jornadas Interescuelas-Departamentos de Historia, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Facultad de Humanidades, Centro Regional Universitario Bariloche, October 28-31, 2009; Claudia Salomn Tarquini, Construir y conservar un territorio: la familia Cabral-Carripiln en los reclamos de tierras de la Comunidad Epumer, Emilio Mitre (LP), Paper presented at the XII Jornadas InterescuelasDepartamentos de Historia, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Facultad de Humanidades, Centro Regional Universitario Bariloche, October 28-31, 2009. 42 Marisa Malvestitti, and Mara Andrea Nicoletti, amnwerinpeym/Para borrar los pecados: los Confesionarios para la evangelizacin en territorio mapuche, Paper presented at the XII Jornadas Interescuelas-Departamentos de Historia, Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Facultad de Humanidades, Centro Regional Universitario Bariloche, October 28-31, 2009. 43 Briones, Claudia, and Walter Delrio, The Conquest of the Desert as trope and enactment of Argentinas Manifest Destiny, in David Maybury-Lewis, Theodore MacDonald, and Biorn Maybury-Lewis (eds.), Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 51-84. 44 Other works referenced for this article are the following: Lorena Cauqueo, El Kultrunazo: el tratamiento en los medios, paper presented at Jornadas El Pueblo Mapuche y la comunicacin Trawvnlein Fvske Menuko Meu, Fiske Menuko, Ro Negro, September 3-4, 2010.

Axel Lazzari, Aboriginal Recognition, Freedom, and Phantoms: The Vanishing of the Ranquel and the Return of the Ranklche in La Pampa, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 8(3) (2003): 59-83. Diana Lenton, La imagen en el discurso oficial sobre el indgena de pampa y Patagonia y sus variaciones a lo largo del proceso histrico de relacionamiento: 1880-1930, Licensure Thesis, FFyL-UBA, 1994. Marisa Malvestitti, Despus del aukan: el poblamiento mapuche de la Lnea Sur, paper presented at Jornadas de Historia de Ro Negro, Universidad Fasta, Bariloche, 1999. Ana Ramos, Cuando la casa escondida apareci a la vista. Memorias en y de desplazamiento, paper presented at 4as Jornadas de Historia de la Patagonia. UNLPam, Santa Rosa, September 20-22, 2010. Ana Ramos and Walter Delrio, Reunidos en Fta Trawn Agencias polticas y alianzas identitarias desde los parlamentos mapuche-tehuelche, paper presented at VIII Congreso Argentino de Antropologa Social. Universidad Nacional de Salta, September 19-22, 2006.
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1. Historical Introduction
For centuries, the Armenian population of the Ottoman Turkish Empire was subjected to mistreatment and despotism, particularly in the Armenian homeland. As a community, the Armenians maintained a precarious existence almost everywhere in the Empire and were able to survive and maintain their culture, at great sacrifice, through a variety of institutional and class-related accommodations and adjustments. Despite these difficult conditions, the Armenian experience varied with time and geography. Especially in the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, many Armenians were elevated to the ranks of the Empires privileged and were recognized and rewarded for their talents in government administration and finance. Thus, institutionalized forms of ethnic discrimination and selective class favoritism existed side by side in the Empire for a long time, setting the stage, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for the last and the most tragic phase of the Armenian experience in Ottoman Turkish history. The rivalries among European powers and Russia toward the end of the 19th Century, the accession to the Ottoman throne of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and the resulting ethnic and religious fanaticism deliberately fuelled by the Sultans policies led to the persecution of all Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians in particular were subjected to various forms of discrimination and abuse, culminating in
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many massacres and eventually in a mass-scale slaughter, in 1896, in the course of which more than 150,000 Armenians were killed. This trend continued even after the Young Turks came to power in 1908, deposing the Sultan and promising an era of freedom and equality. The massacres of Adana and other towns of Cilicia in 1909, presumably beyond the control of the Young Turk government, claimed the lives of some 30,000 Armenians in the course of a few days.1 But it was under the cover of the First World War that the genocide of the Armenian communities in Turkey was to take place, a complex of massacres and deportations that took the lives of some 1.5 million Armenians, 800,000 Pontus and Smyrna Greeks and 300,000 Assyro-Chaldeans.
2. International Norms on Genocide

The punishment of the crime of genocide whether called exterminations, evacuations, mass atrocities, annihilation, liquidations, or massacres as well as the obligation to make restitution to the survivors of the victims, were envisaged by the victorious Allies of the First World War and included in the text of the Peace Treaty of Svres of August 10, 1920 between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire.2 This Treaty contained not only a commitment to try Turkish officials for war crimes committed by Ottoman Turkey against Allied nationals,3 but also for crimes committed by Turkish authorities against subjects of the Ottoman Empire of different ethnic origin, in particular the Armenians, crimes which today would be termed genocide and would also fall under the more broadly generic term crimes against humanity. Pursuant to Article 230 of the Treaty of Svres:
The Turkish Government undertakes to hand over to the Allied Powers the persons whose surrender may be required by the latter as being responsible for the massacres committed during the continuance of the state of war on territory which formed part of the Turkish Empire on the 1st August 1914. The Allied Powers reserve to themselves the right to designate the Tribunal which shall try the persons so accused and the Turkish Government undertakes to recognize such Tribunal . . .4
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The principle of just restitution for the victims also existed and was reflected in Article 144 of the Treaty of Svres:
The Turkish Government recognizes the injustice of the law of 1915 relating to Abandoned Properties (Emval-I-Metroukeh), and of the supplementary provisions thereof, and declares them to be null and void, in the past as in the future. The Turkish Government solemnly undertakes to facilitate to the greatest possible extent the return to their homes and reestablishment in their businesses of the Turkish subjects of nonTurkish race who have been forcibly driven from their homes by fear of massacre or any other form of pressure since January 1, 1914. It recognises that any immovable or movable property of the said Turkish subjects or of the communities to which they belong, which can be recovered, must be restored to them as soon as possible, in whatever hands it may be found . . . The Turkish Government agrees that arbitral commissions shall be appointed by the Council of the League of Nations wherever found necessary . . . These arbitral commissions shall hear all claims covered by this Article and decide them by summary procedure.5
Although Turkey signed the Treaty of Svres, formal ratification never followed, and the Allies did not apply the necessary political and economic pressure on Turkey to ensure its implementation.6 Such failure was attributable to the international political disarray following the First World War, the rise of Soviet Russia, the withdrawal of British military presence from Turkey,7 the isolationist policies of the United States,8 the demise of the Young Turk regime, and the rise of Kemalism in Turkey. No international criminal tribunal as envisaged in Article 230 was ever established. No arbitral commissions as stipulated for in Article 144 were ever set up. A new peace treaty eventually emerged between Kemalist Turkey and the Allies (British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania, and the Serbo-Croat-Slovene state). The Treaty of Lausanne of July 24, 1923 abandoned the Allied demand for international trial and punishment of the Ottoman Turks for the genocide against the Armenians, the commitment to grant reparations to the survivors of the genocide, and the Svres recognition of a free Armenian state (Section VI, Articles 88-93), which had declared its independence on May 28, 1918.In the
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end however, the Armenian state lost Western Armenia to Turkey and Eastern Armenia to a communist takeover (backed by Soviet Red Army units), which would ultimately lead to incorporation of the new Republic of Armenia into the Soviet Union as a Soviet Republic. Notwithstanding the fact that the Treaty of Svres never entered into force, the text of the Treaty remains eloquent evidence of the international recognition of the crime of massacres against the Armenian population of Turkey. Prior to the drafting and negotiation of the Treaty of Svres, on May 28, 1915, the Governments of France, Great Britain, and Russia had issued a joint declaration denouncing the Ottoman Governments massacre of the Armenians as constituting crimes against humanity and civilization for which all the members of the Turkish Government would be held responsible together with its agents implicated in the massacres.9 After the war, on January 18, 1919, the British High Commissioner, Admiral Arthur Calthorpe, informed the Turkish Foreign Minister that His Majestys Government are resolved to have proper punishment inflicted on those responsible for the Armenian massacres.10 In this context, the High Commissioner drew up a list of 142 persons whose surrender would be demanded from the Sultan once the peace treaty went into effect, 130 of whom were specifically charged with massacring Armenians.11 For nearly two years Great Britain held some 120 Turkish prisoners at Malta, awaiting trial, but the British government was ultimately blackmailed into releasing them in 1921-22 in exchange for British officers and men who had been taken hostage by the new Kemalist Turkish government. However, a few trials did take place before Turkish courts martial in Istanbul, on the basis of Articles 45 and 170 of the Ottoman Penal Code. Several ministers in the wartime Turkish cabinet and leaders of the Ittihad party, including the main architects of the genocide, the Young Turk leaders Talt Pasha, Minister of the Interior,12 and Enver Pasha, Minister of War,13 were tried in absentia and convicted. The trials provide further evidence of the various aspects of the genocide against the Armenians. The accused were found guilty, in the judgment of July 5, 1919, of the organization and execution of the crime of massacre against the Armenian population.14 Further trials were conducted before other Ottoman courts, partly on the basis of Article 171 of the Ottoman
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military code concerning the offence of plunder of goods and invocation of the sublime precepts of Islam as well as of humanity and civilization to condemn the crimes of massacre, pillage and plunder.15 These trials resulted in the conviction and execution of three of the perpetrators, Mehmed Kemal, county executive of Bogazhyan, Abdullah Avni of the Erzincan gendarmerie, and Behramzade Nusret, Bayburt county executive and District Commissioner of Ergani and Urfa (Edessa).16 Although the first tentative step toward the creation of an international criminal tribunal to punish genocide failed because of Turkish nationalism and Allied indifference, consensus on the reality of the genocide had been largely achieved. Of all the failures to punish the war criminals of the First World War, this one was the most regrettable and it would have terrible consequences.17
3. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide does not create a new offence in international criminal law, but is declaratory of pre-existing international law
As reflected in the relevant provisions of the Treaty of Svres, the doctrine of state responsibility for genocide and crimes against humanity already existed at the time of the Ottoman massacres against the Armenians. Such state responsibility entailed both an obligation to provide restitution and/or compensation18 and the personal criminal liability of the perpetrators. The norms were clear. Non-compliance with said norms by Turkey does not mean that the norms were meaningless. It only means that effective international enforcement machinery did not exist yet. Even today international law is violated with impunity, because the enforcement mechanisms remain largely ineffective. At the end of the Second World War, the victorious Allies, pursuant to the London Agreement of August 8, 1945,19 adopted the Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which provided in Article 6 (c) for the prosecution of the crime of genocide (murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population) as international crimes within the newly formulated offence of crimes against humanity.
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In the three-volume History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, we discover that the genocide against the Armenians was very much in the minds of the drafters of the London Agreement:
The provisions of Article 230 of the Peace Treaty of Svres were obviously intended to cover, in conformity with the Allied note of 1915 . . . offences which had been committed on Turkish territory against persons of Turkish citizenship, though of Armenian . . . race. This article constitutes, therefore, a precedent for Articles 6 c) and 5 c) of the Nuremberg and Tokyo Charters, and offers an example of one of the categories of crimes against humanity as understood by these enactments.20
The term genocide itself was officially used in the Nuremberg indictment of October 18, 1945, charging under Count 3 that the defendants had committed murder and ill-treatment of civilian populations, and, in particular,
conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial or religious groups . . .21
In his concluding statement, the British Prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, stated that:
Genocide was not restricted to extermination of the Jewish people or of the Gypsies. It was applied in different forms to Yugoslavia, to the non-German inhabitants of Alsace-Lorraine, people of the Low Countries and of Norway. The techniques varied from nation to nation, from people to people. The long-term aim was the same in all cases . . .22
By virtue of Resolution 95(1) of December 11, 1946, the General Assembly affirms the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nrnberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal, and in Resolution 96(1) of the same date, it confirmed:
that genocide is a crime in international law, which the civilized world condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices whether private individuals, public officials or statesmen, and whether the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other grounds are punishable.23
On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly
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adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in which the parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish (emphasis added).24 In the classic Oppenheim/Lauterpacht treatise on international law, Professor Hersch Lauterpacht noted that the Convention was not only forward-looking but that it had a primary retrospective significance:
It is apparent that, to a considerable extent, the Convention amounts to a registration of protest against past misdeed of individual or collective savagery rather than to an effective instrument of their prevention or repression. Thus, as the punishment of acts of genocide is entrusted primarily to the municipal courts of the countries concerned, it is clear that such acts, if perpetrated in obedience to national legislation, must remain unpunished unless penalized by way of retroactive laws. On the other hand, the Convention obliges the Parties to enact and keep in force legislation intended to prevent and suppress such acts, and any failure to measure up to that obligation is made subject to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and of the United Nations. With regard to the latter, the result of the provision in question is that acts of commission or omission in respect of genocide are no longer, on any interpretation of the Charter, considered to be a matter exclusively within the domestic jurisdiction of the States concerned. For the Parties expressly concede to the United Nations the right of intervention in this sphere. This aspect of the situation constitutes a conspicuous feature of the Genocide Conventiona feature which probably outweighs, in its legal and moral significance, the gaps, artificialities and possible dangers of the Convention.25
In this context, it is useful to look once again at the language of the Convention, which does not purport to create a new crime, but recognizes in the preamble that at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity and in Article 1, The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law . . . It is important to note that the contracting parties do not declare or proclaim for the future, but confirm that genocide is already an international crime. Moreover, in the view of leading publicists in public international law, the Genocide Convention of 1948 was not constitutive of a new offence in international law termed genocide, but was declaratory of the pre-existing crime;26 in other words, the Convention merely codified
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the prohibition of massacres, which was already binding international law. In this sense, the Convention is necessarily both retrospective and future-oriented. What the Genocide Convention added to the existing body of international law was an affirmative obligation on states parties to make provision in domestic law for effective penalties for all acts punishable under the Convention (Article V) and a duty to prosecute (Article VI) by a competent national tribunal or by an international criminal court to be established. The Convention also created a preventive mechanism by urging states to call upon organs of the United Nations to take appropriate measures (Article VIII) and confers jurisdiction on the International Court of Justice in all matters relating to the Genocide Convention, including determination of the responsibility of a state for genocide (Article IX). In its 1951 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice stated that the principles underlying the Convention are principles which are recognized by civilized nations as binding on all States, even without any conventional obligation.27 Also in this sense, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights noted in 1969 that:
It is therefore taken for granted that as a codification of existing international law the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide did neither extend nor restrain the notion genocide, but that it only defined it more precisely.28
Even though the Genocide Convention has not been universally ratified, the prohibition of genocide must be deemed to be jus cogens.29 As of December 2010, 141 of the 192 member states of the United Nations had ratified the Convention. Moreover, as the International Court of Justice elaborated in the Barcelona Traction Case (Second Phase), there are distinctions to be drawn between state obligations arising vis--vis another state and obligations erga omnes, or towards the international community as a whole. The Court stated:
By its very nature, the outlawing of genocide, aggression, slavery and racial discrimination are the concern of all States. In view of the importance of the rights involved, all States can be held to have a legal interest in their protection; they are obligations erga omnes . . .30
It is precisely because of its erga omnes quality that the crime of
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genocide cannot be subject to prescription, and that state responsibility for the crime, i.e., the obligation of the genocidal state to make reparation, does not lapse with time. This is independent of a determination whether or not the Genocide Convention applies retroactively to the Holocaust or to the genocide against the Armenians.
4. Non-Prescription of the Crime of Genocide

When the United Nations drafted the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity (adopted November 26, 1968; entered into force November 11, 1970), it clearly and deliberately pronounced its retroactive application. In Article 1 it stipulated No statutory limitation shall apply to the following crimes, irrespective of the date of their commission . . . the crime of genocide as defined in the 1948 Convention . . . (emphasis added) The principle of nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege praevia (no crime without law, no penalty without previous law), laid out in Paragraph 1 of Article 15 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, is conditioned as follows in Paragraph 2:
Nothing in this article shall prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal according to the general principles of law recognized by the community of nations.
Similarly, Article 11, Paragraph 2, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948 stipulates that the prohibition of ex post facto penal sanctions does not apply if the offence was an offence under national or international law. In this context it is relevant to recall the double vocation of the Genocide Convention, namely to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide. In order to prevent genocide, it is important to deter future offenders by ensuring the punishment of prior offenders. Indeed, the punishment of Nazi officials for participation in the crime of genocide has made the horrible reality of genocide visible and concrete, so that genocide can be perceived by all to be a heinous crime. One consequence of the universal recognition that genocide is a crime is that the criminal, besides being condemned and punished for the crime, is not allowed to
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keep the fruits of the crime. Confiscated Jewish properties have thus been returned to the survivors or to their heirs, or appropriate compensation has been paid. This illustrates the principle that, together with the recognition of genocide as a crime under international law, there is also an international duty to undo its effects and to grant restitution and compensation to the victims and their heirs. Although Turkey is not a state party to the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, international law is clear on the subject: there is no prescription on the prosecution of the crime of genocide, regardless of when the genocide occurred, and the obligation of the responsible state to make restitution or pay compensation for properties obtained in relation to a genocide does not lapse with time.31 In its judgment of October 6, 1983, in the case concerning Klaus Barbie, the French Cour de Cassation rejected the jurisdictional objections of the defense and stated that the prohibition on statutory limitations for crimes against humanity is now part of customary international law.32 France also enacted a law on December 26, 1964 dealing with crimes against humanity as imprescriptibles by nature (Nouveau Code penal de 1994, Arts. 211-1 to 213-5).33
5. International and National Prosecution of Genocide

The crime of genocide was one of the charges against the accused in three of the twelve successor trials held at Nuremberg pursuant to Control Council Law No. 10, before U.S. military tribunals following the international military tribunal proceedings, prior to the entry into force of the Genocide Convention. In United States v. Alsttter, the Court made repeated reference to General Assembly Resolution 96(I):
The General Assembly is not an international legislature, but it is the most authoritative organ in existence for the interpretation of world opinion. Its recognition of genocide as an international crime [in Resolution 96(I)] is persuasive evidence of the fact. We approve and adopt its conclusion . . . [We] find no injustice to persons tried for such crimes. They are chargeable with knowledge that such acts were wrong and were punishable when committed.34
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In the Einsatzgruppen trial, the defendants were charged with participation in a systematic program of genocide, aimed at the destruction of foreign nations and ethnic groups, in part by murderous extermination, and in part by elimination and suppression of national characteristics.35 The first national prosecutions specifically on the crime of genocide, but without reference to the Genocide Convention, which had not yet been adopted, were carried out by Polish courts. Thus, in July 1946, Artur Greiser was charged with and convicted of genocide.36 The leading prosecution by a national court, with reference to the Genocide Convention, was carried out by the State of Israel. In 1960 Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official in World War II, was abducted from Argentina and taken to Israel for trial under Israeli law for his involvement in the genocide against the Jews during the war. Eichmann was prosecuted under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1951, which was modeled on the genocide provision of the 1948 Genocide Convention.37 He was charged on four counts of genocide corresponding to the first four subparagraphs of Article 2 of the Convention: killing Jews, causing serious physical and mental harm, placing Jews in living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction, and imposing measures intended to prevent births among Jews.38 Eichmann challenged the jurisdiction of the Israeli Court with reference to Article 6 of the Genocide Convention, which stipulates:
Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction.
In rejecting Eichmanns objections, the Israeli District Court stated its position:
We must . . . draw a clear distinction between the first part of Article 1, which lays down that the Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law a general provision which confirms a principle of customary international law as binding on States, even without any conventional obligation and Article 6, which comprises a special provision undertaken by the contracting parties with regard to the trial of crimes that may be committed in the future.
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Specifically on the issue of retroactivity, the Supreme Court of Israel endorsed the view of the District Court concerning the customary nature of the crime of genocide, and noted that:
the enactment of the Law was not from the point of view of international law a legislative act which conflicted with the principle nulla poena [no penalty without previous law] or the operation of which was retroactive, but rather one by which the Knesset gave effect to international law and its objectives.39
A number of courts in the United States have dealt with the question of ex post facto legislation by relying on the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to the effect that the Nuremberg Charter was declarative of international law and was not new law. In allowing the extradition to Israel of John Demjanjuk, the United States District Court for Ohio and the Circuit Court for the Sixth Circuit held:
The Nuremberg International Military Tribunal provided a new forum in which to prosecute persons accused of war crimes committed during World War II pursuant to an agreement of the wartime Allies, see The Nuremberg Tribunal, 6 F.R.D. 69. That tribunal consistently rejected defendants claims that they were being tried under ex post facto laws. Id.; . . . the statute is not retroactive because it is jurisdictional and does not create a new crime. Thus, Israel has not violated any prohibition against the ex post facto applications of criminal laws which may exist in international law.40
There are many other precedents of retrospective application of international law in other countries in matters concerning genocide. For instance, in the case of Regina v. Imre Finta in Canada, a trial for crimes against humanity was carried out on the basis of a 1987 Canadian statute that permits retrospective application of international law. In its judgment the Court recognized the existence of crimes against humanity under international law before 1945.41 The practice of courts in other countries also vindicates the validity of the principles contained in the Genocide Convention. Although prosecution has not been based on the Genocide Convention itself but rather on German penal law, the Federal Republic of Germany has prosecuted more than 60,000 Germans and other nationals for war crimes and complicity in the crime of genocide committed during World War
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II, prior to the entry into force of the Genocide Convention, and many judgments make reference to the Genocide Convention. The German Government has similarly recognized its international obligation to make restitution of property stolen from victims of genocide and to grant compensation to the survivors of the victims.42 It is important to note, moreover, that whether or not the Genocide Convention itself applies in a concrete situation, state practice and, in particular, the Eichmann case show that the crime of genocide can be prosecuted on the basis of national law enacted following the commission of the offence. A fortiori civil liability for genocide can also be imposed on the basis of ex post facto jurisdictional legislation.
6. The Competent Tribunal: universal jurisdiction and protective principle43

In the Eichmann case the Israeli Court took the view that crimes against humanity constitute delicta juris gentium (crimes against the law of nations), to which the principle of universal jurisdiction has at all times been generally applicable. In rejecting Eichmanns jurisdictional challenge, the District Court held:
The abhorrent crimes defined in this Law are not crimes under Israel law alone. These crimes, which struck at the whole of mankind and shocked the conscience of nations, are grave offences against the law of nations itself (delicta juris gentium). Therefore, so far from international law negating or limiting the jurisdiction of countries with respect to such crimes, international law is, in the absence of an International Court, in need of the judicial and legislative organs of every country to give effect to its criminal interdictions and to bring the criminals to trial. The jurisdiction to try crimes under international law is universal.
The Court relied upon Article 6 of the Genocide Convention to explain that the purpose of the Convention could not be to limit prosecution only to the states where the offence had been perpetrated:
Moreover, even with regard to the conventional application of the Convention, it is not to be assumed that Article 6 is designed to limit the jurisdiction of countries to try crimes of genocide by the principle of territoriality . . . Had Article 6 meant to provide that those
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Alfred de Zayas accused of genocide shall be tried only by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed (or by an international court which has not been constituted), then that article would have foiled the very object of the Convention to prevent genocide and inflict punishment therefor . . .
Accordingly, the District Court took the view that it was entitled to exercise jurisdiction under the protective principle, which gives the victim nation the right to try any who assault its existence. The Court cited Hugo Grotius and other authorities:
The State of Israel, the sovereign State of the Jewish people, performs through its legislation the task of carrying into effect the right of the Jewish people to punish the criminals who killed its sons with intent to put an end to the survival of this people. We are convinced that this power conforms to the subsisting principles of nations.44
The Eichmann precedent illustrates the possibility for a state that did not exist at the time of the crime (Israel) to try and punish a foreign citizen for genocide, when it has a legitimate and fundamental link to the victims. Similarly, a state that did not exist at the time of the genocide against the Armenians (the Republic of Armenia established in 1991) could represent the rights of the victims of the genocide against the Armenians and their survivors. Moreover, based on the theory of legitimate and fundamental links to the victims, other states such as France, Canada, and the United States could represent the rights of the descendants of the survivors of the genocide against the Armenians, who have become citizens of or currently reside in France, Canada, and the United States.
7. The Doctrine of State Responsibility for Wrongful Acts

A general principle of international law stipulates that a state is responsible for injuries caused by its wrongful acts and bound to provide reparation for such injury.45 The Permanent Court of International Justice enunciated this principle in the Chorzow Factory Case as follows: It is a principle of international law, and even a general conception of law, that any breach of an engagement involves an obligation to make reparation.46
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It should be stressed that the wrong in question is not just a mere violation of international law engaging interstate responsibility, but the gravest criminal violation of international law engaging, as the International Court of Justice has determined, international responsibility erga omnes an obligation of the state toward the international community as a whole. Thus, the international crime of genocide imposes obligations not only on the state that perpetrated the genocide, but also on the entire international community (a) not to recognize as legal a situation created by an international crime, (b) not to assist the author of an international crime in maintaining the illegal situation, and (c) to assist other states in the implementation of the aforementioned obligations.47 In a very real sense, the legal impact of the erga omnes nature of the crime of genocide goes far beyond the mere retroactivity of application of the Genocide Convention. It imposes an affirmative obligation on the international community not to recognize an illegal situation resulting from genocide. The mechanism of international mediation and conciliation can be called upon to design appropriate schemes to redress the wrong.
8. Continuation of the Crime of Genocide: the destruction of historical monuments

A further argument against the notion of prescription with regard to the genocide against the Armenians is that whereas the killing stopped around 1923, after most of the Armenians in Turkey had been murdered or forced into exile, the destruction of their property and the destruction of their historical memory continued. Such acts were intended to perpetuate and secure the work of genocide by destroying memory the historical proof of the presence of 30 centuries of Armenians in Asia Minor. Their churches and monasteries were burned by arson and destroyed by explosion. In all, 1036 churches or monasteries were destroyed. The Khtzkonk monastery (11th Century) was destroyed by dynamite after the Second World War. The Cathedral of Urfa was converted into a museum. The building of the Church of Christ the Savior at Ani was cut in two. The Church of Ordu was transformed into a prison and the inscriptions in Armenian were erased. The Armenian inscriptions were removed from
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the Central School in Constantinople. Besides the deliberate destruction, the Turkish government has allowed the decay and destruction of Armenian buildings by denying building permits needed to carry out repairs.48 The scale of destruction of the Armenian cultural heritage has been so widespread and systematic over the decades that these few examples should not be misinterpreted as minimizing the severity and thoroughness of the continuation of the genocide. Among the Turkish acts of memory-destruction can be listed the suppression of the name Armenia from official maps and the changing of the names of Armenian villages and towns in Asia Minor, which continued late into the 1950s. As University of California Professor Dikran Kouymjian elaborated to the Tribunal Permanent des Peuples in Paris in 1984, 90 percent of historical Armenian names have been modified.49 Inscriptions in the Armenian language continue to be removed from buildings and monuments. This happened in contravention of Articles 38 to 44 of the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which was intended to protect the rights of minorities, including the cultural rights of the small surviving Armenian minority in Turkey. The absurdity of the prevailing situation with regard to the non-restitution of Armenian properties can be illustrated by the following hypothetical situation: what would the reaction of the international community be if the post-war German government had converted Jewish synagogues into Christian churches and kept the lands and houses of the victims of the Holocaust? Another form of continuing the genocide is by rehabilitating the murderers. In March 1943 the mortal remains of the principal architect of the genocide, Ittihad Interior Minister Talt Pasha, were ceremonially repatriated from Germany to Turkey, where they were re-interred on the Hill of Liberty in Istanbul.50 Subsequently at least two streets have been named after Talt. Yet another form of continuing the genocide is the negation its historical reality, as if the 1.5 million Armenians of Anatolia had never existed. Negationism entails a denial of the right to ones identity and the right to ones history. Particularly outrageous is Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which is being frequently used to prosecute human rights defenders, journalists, and other members of civil society who peacefully
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express their dissenting opinion on historical or other issues. Article 301, on the denigration of Turkishness, the Republic, and the foundation and institutions of the State, was introduced with the legislative reforms of June 1, 2005 and replaced Article 159 of the old penal code. Amnesty International has repeatedly opposed the use of Article 159 to prosecute non-violent critical opinion and called on the Turkish authorities to abolish the article.51 More specifically, Article 305 of the Turkish Penal Code criminalizes acts against the fundamental national interest. The written explanation attached to the draft, when the law passed through Parliament, provided as examples of such acts making propaganda for the withdrawal of Turkish soldiers from Cyprus or for the acceptance of a settlement in this issue detrimental to Turkey . . . or, contrary to historical truths, that the Armenians suffered a genocide after the First World War. Besides being an insult to the memory of the victims of the genocide, Turkish negationism entails a gross violation of Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees the right to seek and impart information.
9. Doctrine of State Succession

In the report of the independent expert on the right to restitution, compensation, and rehabilitation for victims of grave violations of human rights, Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni reiterated a basic principle of succession:
In international law, the doctrine of legal continuity and principles of State responsibility make a successor Government liable in respect of claims arising from a former governments violations.52
This applies a fortiori, in the case of genocide and its consequences for the survivors and their descendants, because state responsibility necessarily attaches to the state itself and does not allow for tabula rasa. Thus, it was consistent with international law for the Federal Republic of Germany to assume full responsibility for the crimes committed by the Third Reich. This has also been the case with regard to the responsibility of France to repair the wrongs committed by the Vichy government during the German occupation and of Norway to grant restitution for confiscations and other injuries perpetrated on Jewish persons during the
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Quisling regime.53 Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts of April 8, 198354 provides that a succession of states does not as such affect the rights and obligations of creditors. Thus, the claims of the Armenians for their wrongfully confiscated properties did not disappear with the change from the Sultanate to the regime of Mustafa Kemal.55 The principle of responsibility of successor states has been held to apply even when the state and government that committed the wrong were not that of the successor state. This principle was formulated, inter alia, by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Lighthouse Arbitration case.56 There France claimed that Greece was responsible for a breach of state concessions to its citizens by the autonomous State of Crete, committed before Greeces assumption of sovereignty over Crete. The Permanent Court of Arbitration held that Greece was obligated to compensate for Cretes breaches, because Greece was the successor state. The principle of state succession undoubtedly applies to the Eastern European states, and, in particular, to Serbia for the crimes committed by the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.57 State practice, decisions of international tribunals, and decisions of domestic courts support this conclusion. This is exemplified inter alia in the judgment of the International Court of Justice in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which addresses the issue of succession of States and holds Serbia and Montenegro responsible for events that occurred during the rule of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. State practice, decisions of international tribunals, and the decisions of domestic courts support this conclusion.
10. The remedy of restitution has not lapsed because of prescription

Because of the continuing character of the crime of genocide in factual and legal terms, the remedy of restitution has not been foreclosed by the passage of time.58 Thus, the survivors of the genocide against the Armenians, both individually and collectively, have standing to advance a claim for restitution. This has been also the case with the Jewish survivors
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of the Holocaust, who have successfully claimed restitution against many states where their property had been confiscated.59 Whenever possible restitutio in integrum (complete restitution, restoration to the previous condition) should be granted, so as to re-establish the situation that existed before the violation occurred. But where restitutio in integrum is not possible, compensation may be substituted as a remedy. Restitution remains a continuing state responsibility also because of Turkeys current human rights obligations under international treaty law, particularly the corpus of international human rights law. The United Nations Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law provide in part:
Reparation may be claimed individually and where appropriate collectively, by the direct victims of violations of human rights and international humanitarian law, the immediate family, dependants or other persons or groups of persons closely connected with the direct victims.
Particularly important are Principle 9:

Statutes of limitations shall not apply in respect of periods during which no effective remedies exist for violations of human rights or international humanitarian law. Civil claims relating to reparations for gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law shall not be subject to statutes of limitations.
and Principle 12:

Restitution shall be provided to re-establish the situation that existed prior to the violations of human rights or international humanitarian law. Restitution requires, inter alia, . . . return to ones place of residence and restoration of . . . property.60
U.N. sub-commission member Mr. Louis Joinet presented two reports containing comparable language: Any human rights violation gives rise to a right to reparation on the part of the victim or his beneficiaries, implying a duty on the part of the State to make reparation and the possibility of seeking redress from the perpetrator.61 Although the International Criminal Court, established in July 2002, does not have jurisdiction to examine instances of genocide
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having occurred prior to the entry into force of the Rome Statute, it does reaffirm the international law obligation of providing reparation to victims. Article 75, Paragraph 1, of the statute stipulates, The Court shall establish principles relating to reparations, which it defines as restitution, compensation, and rehabilitation. In the context of reparation for gross violations of human rights, two other general principles are relevant, the principle ex injuria non oritur jus ( from a wrong no right arises), that is, that no state should be allowed to profit from its own violations of law, and the principle of unjust enrichment.62 It is a general principle of law that the criminal cannot keep the fruits of the crime.63 The lands, buildings, bank accounts, and other property of the Armenian communities in Turkey were systematically confiscated. Should there be no restitution for this act of mass theft, accompanying, as it did, the ultimate crime of genocide? A particularly macabre chapter of the massacres against the Armenians concerns the title to life insurances of the victims of the genocide. The United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, noted in his memoirs a most revealing incident:
One day Talt made what was perhaps the most astonishing request I had ever heard. The New York Life Insurance company and the Equitable Life of New York had for years done considerable business among the Armenians. The extent to which this people insured their lives was merely another indication of their thrifty habits. I wish Talt now said, that you would get the American life insurance companies to send us a complete list of their Armenian policy holders. They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs to collect the money. It of course all escheats to the State. The Government is the beneficiary now.64
Ambassador Morgenthau did not comply with Talts request. In denying the applicability of statutes of limitation to restitution claims by survivors of the Holocaust, Professor Irwin Cotler argues:
The paradigm here is not that of restitution in a domestic civil action involving principles of civil and property law, or restitution in an international context involving state responsibility in matters of appropriation of property of aliens; rather, the paradigm if there can be such a paradigm in so abhorrent a crime is that of restitution
The Genocide Against the Armenians 1915-1923 and the Relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention for Nuremberg crimes, which is something dramatically different in precedent and principles . . . Nuremberg crimes are imprescribable [sic. - imprescriptible or indefeasible] or Nuremberg law or international laws anchored in Nuremberg Principles does not recognize the applicability of statutes of limitations, as set froth in the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.65
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The same argument applies with respect to the survivors of the genocide against the Armenians and their descendents. It is an enduring challenge to international morality that Turkey continues to benefit from Armenian lands and buildings. In this context it is important to recall the obligations of states parties under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ratified by Turkey on 23 September 2003; entered into force 23 December 2003), in particular the obligations that result from Article 1, which stipulates the rights of peoples to self-determination and their right to their natural wealth and resources, as well as the obligations resulting from Article 27, which provides for special treatment of ethnic and cultural minorities. It would follow that historical inequities should be redressed and that the Armenian people are entitled, under both Article 1 and Article 27 of the Covenant, to the return of their cultural heritage. Pertinent in this context is the decision of the U. N. Human Rights Committee in case no. 167/1984, Lubicon Lake Band v. Canada, where the Committee determined that there had been a violation of Article 27 and commented: Historical inequities, to which the State party refers, and certain more recent developments threaten the way of life and culture of the Lubicon Lake Band, and constitute a violation of article 27 so long as they continue. 66
11. A Recurring Red Herring: The Genocide Convention and the principle of non-retroactivity
Recently the debate on the genocide against the Armenians has experienced a new variant: It is argued that even if the Armenians were subjected to genocide, there is little that can be done about it today, because the Genocide Convention cannot be applied retroactively. This theory contains two fallacies: (1) that the Armenian claims are derived
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from the Genocide Convention, and (2) that the Convention cannot be applied retroactively. It is clear from the above that the Armenian claims derive from the doctrine of state responsibility for crimes against humanity, and that this international liability pre-dated the entry into force of the Genocide Convention. As shown above, the Turkish liability for genocide was internationally recognized in Articles 230 and 144 of the Treaty of Svres of 1920, which was signed by the representatives of Sultan Mehmed VI but never ratified because of the coup dtat by General Mustafa Kemal and the war conducted by him against the British, French and Greeks to complete the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim minorities. The German liability for the Holocaust was not based on the Genocide Convention, but on general principles of law reflected in Nuremberg Statute contained in the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, both predating the Genocide Convention. As to the general principle of non-retroactivity of treaties, however, it is important to note that this principle admits of many exceptions and, in any event, is not a peremptory norm of international law.67 Admittedly, the positivist approach to international law relies on a presumption of non-retroactivity, as noted by Professor Charles Rousseau: International law appears to be determined by the principle of non-retroactivity. This principle is the result of treaty, diplomatic and judicial practice.68 Moreover, Article 28 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties provides that, Unless a different intention appears from the treaty or is otherwise established, its provisions do not bind a party in relation to any act or fact which took place or any situation which ceased to exist before the date of the entry into force of the treaty with respect to that party. Yet, in his commentary on the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Sir Ian Sinclair refers to the commentary of the International Law Commission on the opening phrase of Article 28, which explains that such language (instead of the more usual wording unless the treaty otherwise provides) was used in order to allow for cases where the very nature of the treaty rather than its specific provisions indicates that it is intended to have certain retroactive effects.69 Sinclair goes on to refer
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to the famous Mavrommatis Palestine Concessions case, in which the United Kingdom had contested the jurisdiction of the Permanent Court of International Justice on the ground that the acts complained of had taken place before Protocol XII the Treaty of Lausanne had come into force. In rejecting this submission, the Court stated:
Protocol XII was drawn up in order to fix the conditions governing the recognition and treatment by the contracting parties of certain concessions granted by the Ottoman authorities before the conclusion of the Protocol. An essential characteristic therefore of Protocol XII is that its effects extend to legal situations dating from a time previous to its own existence. If provision were not made in the clauses of the Protocol for the protection of the rights recognised therein as against infringements before the coming into force of that instrument, the Protocol would be ineffective as regards the very period at which the rights in question are most in need of protection. The Court therefore considers that the Protocol guarantees the rights recognised in it against any violation regardless of the date at which it may have taken place.70
Sinclair also addressed the debate that accompanied the retention of the words in relation to any . . . situation which ceased to exist before the date of entry into force of the treaty. Whereas the United States delegation unsuccessfully argued for deletion, the majority of the delegations insisted that a treaty may well apply to situations that continued, even if the facts giving rise to the situation had punctually occurred prior to the entry into force of the treaty.71 Among the many exceptions known to the principle of nonretroactivity is the inclusion in the London Agreement of August 8, 1945 of the new crime against peace, formulated ex post facto, and applied by the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals. In this connection Professor Hans Kelsen commented:
The rule against retroactive legislation is a principle of justice. Individual criminal responsibility represents certainly a higher degree of justice than collective responsibility, the typical technique of primitive law. Since the internationally illegal acts for which the London Agreement established individual criminal responsibility were certainly also morally most objectionable, and the persons who committed these acts were certainly aware of their immoral character,
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Alfred de Zayas the retroactivity of the law applied to them can hardly be considered as absolutely incompatible with justice. In case two postulates of justice are in conflict with each other, the higher one prevails; and to punish those who were morally responsible for the international crime of the Second World War may certainly be considered as more important than to comply with the rather relative rule against ex post facto laws, open to so many exceptions.72
The general rule of non-retroactivity of treaties and conventions, which was abandoned in Nuremberg in connection with the new concept of crimes against peace,73 is not, however, of relevance in the context of the crime of genocide, which has always been a crime under national penal laws, as a manifestation of multiple murder, and which, moreover, must be seen as an international crime under general principles of law.74 Reference to the general principles of law is found, for instance, in the famous Martens Clause, contained in the preamble of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Convention on Land Warfare:
Until a more complete code of the laws of war has been issued, the High Contracting Parties deem it expedient to declare that, in cases not included in the Regulations adopted by them, the inhabitants and the belligerents remain under the protection and the rule of the principles of the law of nations as they result from the usages established among civilized peoples, from the laws of humanity, and the dictates of the public conscience.
Thus, the Genocide Convention of 1948 can be applied retroactively, because it is declarative of pre-existing international law. Among several precedents for the retroactive application of treaties, the following are particularly relevant in the context of genocide: the London Agreement of August 8, 1945 (Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal), the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutes of Limitation to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity of 1968, and precedents for the ex post facto drafting and adoption of international penal charters by the United Nations Security Council under its Chapter VII jurisdiction, such as the Statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,75 the International
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Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,76 and the International Tribunal for Sierra Leone. The language of the Genocide Convention neither excludes nor requires its retroactive application. In other words, there is nothing in the language of the Convention that would prohibit its retroactive application. By contrast, there are numerous international treaties that specifically state that they will not apply retroactively. For example, Article 11 of the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Court specifies that the Court has jurisdiction only with respect to crimes committed after the entry into force of this Statute. Moreover, there are treaties that purportedly do not apply retrospectively, but in practice are so applied, as is the case with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969, Article 4 of which stipulates, the Convention applies only to treaties which are concluded by States after the entry into force of the present Convention. Ever since the adoption of the Convention, however, international courts and tribunals have made reference to its provisions as being declarative of pre-existing law and practice, thus reflecting the customary international rules on treaties and the prevailing opinio juris.77 It is significant that the drafters of the Genocide Convention did not stipulate that it should apply only in the future, although they could easily have done so, had they intended to limit its scope of application. Thus, the question arises as to the object and purpose of the Genocide Convention. Pursuant to Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the principal rule of interpretation is the ordinary meaning given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose. The retroactive application of the Genocide Convention is compatible with the ordinary meaning of terms in the light of the object and purpose of the Convention. Further, such retroactive application appears necessary in order to serve the important object of deterring future acts of genocide (prevention) by way of establishing the precedent of punishing acts of genocide that occurred prior to its entry into force (suppression). According to Article 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the use of the travaux prparatoires of any treaty or
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convention is deemed only a supplementary means of interpretation. The travaux prparatoires of the Genocide Convention, however, are inconclusive with regard to the issue of retroactive application. Whereas several delegations were future-oriented, others saw the problem more broadly, in the light of the retroactive application of the London Charter of August 8, 1945 to the Nazi crimes of genocide that had preceded it, e.g., the Polish representative, Professor Manfred Lachs, and the United Kingdom Representative, Sir Hartley Shawcross.78 While non-retroactivity is a principle that has pragmatic value, it is frequently abandoned in international treaties and in national legislation concerning intellectual property, copyright, and taxation. Bearing in mind that there exists a higher legal regime for human rights and a jus cogens obligation to refrain from genocide, retroactivity is not only appropriate but also just and necessary as a matter of international ordre public. In regard to private property confiscated in the context of the Holocaust, U.S. jurisdictions have not hesitated to apply laws retroactively. Thus, for instance, in affirming its jurisdiction in Altman v. Republic of Austria, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided on December 12, 2002 that the 1976 Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) applied retroactively to the events of the late 1930s and 1940s. The U.S. Court took jurisdiction and found that the property of Mrs. Altmann had been wrongfully and discriminatorily appropriated in violation of international law.79 Similarly, with regard to the restitution of Armenian property, it is conceivable that in an action brought by Armenians against Turkey before a U. S. federal court, jurisdiction could be established pursuant to the U. S. Alien Tort Claims Act, which states that the district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. 80
12. Conclusion: Bringing the genocide against the Armenians before the International Court of Justice
Since both Turkey (July 31, 1950) and Armenia (June 23, 1993)81 are states parties to the Genocide Convention, it would be possible to invoke
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Article 8, which provides that any contracting party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action as they consider appropriate for the suppression of genocide. Suppression must mean more than just retributive justice. In order to suppress the crime, it is necessary to suppress, as far as possible, its consequences. This entails, besides punishing the guilty, providing restitution and compensation to the surviving generations. Armenia may also invoke Article 9 of the Convention, which provides that:
Disputes between the Contracting Parties relating to the interpretation, application, or fulfillment of the present Convention, including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide or for any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3, shall be submitted to the International Court of Justice at the request of any of the parties to the dispute.
Admittedly, the criminal law aspects of the Genocide Convention are of lesser relevance in the Armenian context, since none of the perpetrators of the genocide against the Armenians are still alive. On the other hand, the Armenian properties that were wrongfully confiscated have not been returned to the survivors of the genocide, to their descendents, or to the Armenian Church, nor has compensation been paid to the survivors of the genocide or to their descendants. In this context it is worth noting the important restitution of many churches and monasteries in the exSoviet republics, including Armenia, restitution that was effected in the 1990s for confiscations that had occurred 70 years earlier following the Bolshevik revolution.82 Based on this precedent, restitution of Armenian churches and monasteries would appear not just morally mandated, but also entirely implementable in practice. A determination of the crime of genocide by the International Court of Justice would facilitate the settlement of claims for restitution, including the identification of cultural and other properties confiscated and/or destroyed, such as churches, monasteries, and other assets of historic and cultural significance to the Armenian people, that should be returned to their legal owners, the Armenian people and the Armenian Church. An objection on the part of Turkey about the standing of Armenia to represent the rights of the descendants of the survivors of the genocide is countered by the fact that many descendants are citizens of Armenia;
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reference to the protective principle enunciated by the District Court of Israel in the Eichmann case (see section 5, above) can also be made in this context. Moreover, Armenia could offer Armenian citizenship to all Armenians in the diaspora, as Russia has done with respect to former citizens of the Soviet Union residing in the Baltic States and other former republics of the Soviet Union. The most recent international prosecutions with regard to the crime of genocide have been conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The indictments against Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic, and Ratko Mladic charge the accused not only with war crimes and crimes against humanity, but also with genocide. In the ICTY Judgment on General Radislav Krstic, the Tribunal found that genocide had been committed in the context of the massacre of Srebenica (Prosecutor v. Krstic, IT-98-33-T, Judgment of August 2, 2001). In its judgment concerning the case Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia (Case 91, Judgment of February 26, 2007), the International Court of Justice confirmed that genocide had been committed in Srebenica. If a single massacre satisfies the criterion of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention, certainly many of the Ottoman massacres against the Armenian population during the First World War would qualify as genocide. But, far more than the individual massacres, it was the policy of exclusion, deportation, and extermination that constituted the crime of genocide against the Armenians. By contrast, in the context of the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the U. N. General Assembly in its Resolution No. 47/121 of December 18, 1992 found that the Serbian policy of ethnic cleansing constituted a form of genocide. This resolution was confirmed in General Assembly Resolutions 48/143, 49/205, 50/192, 51/115, and so on. Thus, the concept of genocide as currently interpreted and understood by the International Court of Justice and by the United Nations General Assembly is clearly applicable in the context of the Armenian genocide 1915-23. Besides the possibility of seizing the ICJ by way of a contentious case based on the Genocide Convention, it would further be possible to engage the ICJ jurisdiction by way of a request for an advisory opinion. Pursuant to article 96 of the UN Charter, the General Assembly or
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the Security Council could ask the International Court of Justice to formulate an advisory opinion on the legal question of the Application of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to the Armenian Massacres of 1915-1923 on the legal question: Legal consequences of the continued possession of Armenian lands, properties, and cultural heritage by the Turkish State, and/or on the legal question: State Responsibility of Turkey to make reparation to the descendants of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Whereas a request for an advisory opinion would presumably not be forthcoming from the Security Council, it would appear entirely feasible to obtain a majority for such a request in the General Assembly. Yet another important issue that the ICJ could pronounce itself on would be on the erga omnes obligation of States not to recognize the consequences of acts that violate international law, in particular the direct and indirect consequences of genocide. In this context it is pertinent to cite article 10 of the Al Khasawneh Declaration on the illegality of forced population transfers (1997):
Where acts or omissions prohibited in the present Declaration are committed, the international community as a whole and individual States, are under an obligation: (a) not to recognize as legal the situation created by such acts; (b) in ongoing situations, to ensure the immediate cessation of the act and the reversal of the harmful consequences; (c) not to render aid, assistance or support, financial or otherwise, to the State which has committed or is committing such act in the maintaining or strengthening of the situation created by such act.83
According to this doctrine, the world community has an obligation not to recognize the financial and territorial consequences of the genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and is entitled to demand that the cultural heritage of the Armenian people be returned to the Armenian people and to the Armenian Church, and that adequate compensation be paid to the descendants of the victims of the genocide. For this purpose an International Fund could be established, which could be administered by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, which has ample experience in the administration of funds for victims of gross violations of human rights.
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NOTES
1 Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Causasus (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1995), and Dadrian, Armenians in Ottoman Turkey and the Armenian Genocide, in Dinah Shelton, editor, Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2004), pp. 67-76. [1920] UKTS 11, Martens, Recueil gnral des traits, 99, 3e srie 12, 1924, p. 720. Particularly for violations of the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare, appended to the IV Hague Convention of 1907. American Journal of International Law, Vol. 15, Supplement, 1921, Official Documents, p. 235. Ibid., p. 210. Andr Mandelstam, La Societ des Nations et les puissances devant le Problme Armnien, 2d. ed. (Paris: Pdone, 1926; reissued Imprimerie Hamaskane, 1970). Paul Helmreich, From Paris to Svres (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), pp. 131ff. Although U.S. diplomats had condemned the genocide as early as 1915, the U.S. Government did not take any action after the war to redress the injustices. It is worth remembering that U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Sr., had called the massacres race murder and that on 10 July 1915 he had cabled Washington with the following description of the Ottoman policy: Persecution of Armenians assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and through arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations from one end of the empire to the other accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. These measures are not in response to popular or fanatical demand but are purely arbitrary and directed from Constantinople in the name of military necessity, often in districts where no military operations are likely to take place. (Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide [New York: Basic Books, 2002], p. 6). Egon Schwelb, Crimes Against Humanity, 23 British Yearbook of International Law (1946), 178-226 at 181. FO 371/4174/118377 ( folio 253), cited in Vahakn N. Dadrian, Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law: The World War I Armenian Case and Its Contemporary Legal Ramifications, (1989) 14 Yale Journal of International Law, pp. 221-334 at 282. James F. Willis, Prologue to Nuremberg: The Politics and Diplomacy of Punishing War Criminals of the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1982), p. 158. Dadrian, Talaat, in Shelton, editor, Encyclopedia of Genocide, op. cit., Vol. III, pp. 1019-20. Alfred de Zayas, Ismail Enver, in Shelton, editor, Encyclopedia of Genocide, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 289. William Schabas, Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000),
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10
11 12 13 14
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p. 21. See also the revised and updated report on the question of the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, prepared by Special Rapporteur Ben Whitaker (E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/6): At least 1 million, and possibly well over half of the Armenian population, are reliably estimated by independent authorities and eye-witnesses to have been killed or death-marched. This is corroborated by reports in United States, German and British archives and of contemporary diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, including those of its ally Germany. The German Ambassador, Baron Hans von Wangenheim, for example, on 7 July 1915 wrote the government is indeed pursuing its goal of exterminating the Armenian race in the Ottoman Empire (Wilhelmstrasse Archives). Though the successor Turkish government helped to institute trials of a few of those responsible for the massacres and some were found guilty, the present official Turkish governmental contention is that genocide did not take place although there were many casualties and dispersals in the war period and that all the evidence to the contrary is forged or misinterpreted. See, inter alia, Viscount Bryce and A. Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-16 (London: HMSO, 1916); G. Chaliand and Y. Ternon, Gnocide des Armniens 1915-16 (Brussels: Complexe, 1980); Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthaus Story (New York: Doubleday, 1918; reissue Reading, England: Taderon Press, 2000); J. Lepsius, Deutschland und Armenien (Potsdam, 1921), p. 9, footnote 13; and Power, op. cit., pp. 1-16. 15 Trabzon Verdict, Takvimi Vekayi, No. 3616, 6 August, 1919, 1-3, and No. 3617, 7 August, 1919, 2, cited in Dadrian, Genocide as a Problem of National and International Law, op. cit., 221-334 at 308. 16 Ibid., 309. 17 Willis, op. cit., p. 163. 18 For instance, in the context of international armed conflict, Article III of the 1907 Hague Convention IV on Land Warfare stipulates: A belligerent party which violates the provisions of the said Regulations shall, if the case demands, be liable to pay compensation. It shall be responsible for all acts committed by persons forming part of its armed forces. 19 8 U.N.T.S. 279, as reprinted in 39 American Journal of International Law, 257 (1945) (Supp). 20 United Nations War Crimes Commission, History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Development of the Laws of War (London, 1948), p. 45. 21 Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1945 1 October 1946, Vol. I (Nuremberg, 1947), pp. 43-44. 22 Ibid., Vol. XIX, pp. 497-498. 23 Official Records of the First Session of the General Assembly, 55th Plenary Meeting, 11 December 1946, pp. 188-189. See also the preamble of the U.N. Genocide Convention. 24 General Assembly Resolution 260 A (III) of 9 December 1948; entered into force 12 January 1951. 25 Lassa Oppenheim, International Law, Vol. I, 8th ed., edited by H. Lauterpacht (London: Longman, Greens & Co., 1955), p. 751. The author adds: It is clear that as a matter of law the Genocide Convention cannot impair the effectiveness of existing international obligations. 26 Nehemiah Robinson, The Genocide Convention: A Commentary (New York: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1960); Leo Kuper, International Action Against Genocide (London:
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Minority Rights Group, 1984); Hans Heinrich Jescheck, Genocide, in Rudolf Bernhardt, editor, Encyclopaedia of Public International Law , Vol. 4 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2000), pp. 541-544; Dieter Blumenwitz, Rechtsgutachten ber die Verbrechen an den Deutschen in Jugoslawien 1944-48, Juristische Studien (Mnchen: Verlag der Donauschwbischen Kulturstiftung, 2002), pp. 26-27, where Professor Blumenwitz affirms the retroactive application of the Genocide Convention to the killing of some 200,000 civilians, members of the ethnic German minority in Yugoslavia, by Tito partisans and militia in 1944-45; Christian Tomuschat, Die Vertreibung der Sudetendeutschen. Zur Frage des Bestehens von Rechtsansprchen nach Vlkerrecht und deutschem Recht, Zeitschrift fr Auslndisches ffentliches Recht und Vlkerrecht, Vol. 56 (1996), 1-69; and Felix Ermacora, Die Sudetendeutschen Fragen (Munich: Langen Muller, 1992), p. 178, where Professor Ermacora affirms the retroactive application of the Genocide Convention to the killing of some 250,000 civilians, members of the German ethnic minority of Czechoslovakia, in 1945-46. 27 Reservations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Advisory Opinion, ICJ Reports, 1951, pp. 15-69. See Diane F. Orentlicher, Genocide, in Roy Gutman and David Rieff, editors, Crimes of War (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 153-157, and Joe Verhoeven, Le Crime de Gnocide, Revue belge de droit international, Vol. XXIV (1991), 5-26 at 13. 28 Report of the ad hoc working group of experts established under Resolution 2(XXIII) and 2(XXIV) of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Doc. E/CN.4/984/Add.18. 29 Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, 4th edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 513. 30 Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Co., Ltd (Belgium v. Spain), ICJ Reports (1970) 3, p. 32. 31 General Assembly Resolutions 2538 (XXIV) of 15 December 1968, 2583 (XXIV) of 15 December 1969, 2712 (XXV) of 15 December 1970, 2840 (XXVI) of 18 December 1971, 3029 (XXVII) of 18 December 1972, 3074 (XXVIII) of 3 December 1973, etc. 32 Fdration nationale des deports et interns et patriots et al v. Barbie, 78 International Law Reports 125, p. 135. See Doman, Aftermath of Nuremberg: The Trial of Klaus Barbie, 60 Colorado Law Review 449 (1989). 33 Jacques Francillon, Aspects juridiques des crimes contre lhumanit, in Lactualit du Gnocide des Armniens (Paris: Edipol, 1999), pp. 397-404 at 398. 34 United States of America v. Alsttter et al (1948) 6 LRTWC 1, 3TWC 1, p. 983. 35 United States of America v. Greifeldt et al (1948) 13 LRTWC 1, p. 2. 36 Poland v. Greiser (1948) 13 LRTWC 70 (Supreme National Tribunal of Poland). 37 Attorney General (Israel) v. Eichmann (1968) 36 ILR 5 (District Court of Jerusalem), paras. 20-22, and District Court Jerusalem, 11 December 1961, The Attorney General of the Government of Isral v. Eichmann (case no. 40/61), American Journal of International Law, 1962, p. 814. 38 Schabas, op. cit., p. 387. 39 Attorney General (Israel) v. Eichmann (1968) 36 ILR 277, para. 11. 40 In the Matter of the Extradition of John Demjanjuk, 612 F. Supp. 544 (District Court Ohio 1985), pp. 554-8. 41 Regina v. Finta , 50 C.C.C. (3d) 247 and 61 D.L.R. 85 (4th 1989). See also L. C. Green, Canadian Law, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, 59 British Yearbook of International Law 217 (1988), and Cherif Bassiouni, Crimes Against Humanity (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992), pp. 144, 226-227.
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42 William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 443. 43 Cherif Bassiouni, Univesal Jurisdiction for International Crimes: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Practice,42 Virginia Journal of International Law (2001), pp. 81- 160. 44 Attorney General (Israel) v. Eichmann (1968) 36 ILR 277, para. 38. 45 Malcolm Shaw, International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), p. 481: A breach of an international obligation gives rise to a requirement for reparation; Wladyslaw Czaplinski, State Succession and State Responsibility, Canadian Yearbook of International Law 339 (1991): State responsibility is a legal relationship created through the violation of an international legal obligation by a State; that violation gives rise to the duty to compensate for any resulting damage, one of the oldest principles of international law and universally recognized in international practice; Karl Zemanek, Responsibility of States: General Principles, in Bernhardt, editor, Encyclopaedia, op. cit., Vol. 4, pp. 219-229; Mohammed Bedjaoui, Responsibility of States: Fault and Strict Liability, in ibid., pp. 212-216; and Irwin Cotler, Confiscated Jewish Property: The Holocaust, Thefticide and Restitution: A Legal Perspective, 20 Cardozo Law Review (December 1998), 601-624 at 610. 46 Chorzow Factory Case (Germany v. Poland), 1928 P.C.I..J. (ser.A) No. 17, p. 29, and Ignaz Seidl-Hohenveldern, German Interests in Polish Upper Silesia Cases, Bernhardt, editor, Encyclopaedia, op. cit., Vol. 2 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1995), pp, 550-553. 47 Karl Zemanek, op.cit., p. 226. 48 Christopher J. Walker, editor, Armenia and Karabagh, (London: Minority Rights Group, 1991), pp. 38-39. 49 Dikran Kouymjian, Destruction des Monuments historiques Armniens, poursuite de la politique turque de genocide, in Tribunal Permanent des Peuples, le Crime de Silence, (Paris: Flammarion, 1984), pp. 295ff., and La Confiscation des biens et la destruction des monuments historiques comme manifestation du processus gnocidaire, in, LActualit du Gnocide des Armniens, op. cit., pp. 219-230. See also David Marshall Lang and Christopher J. Walker, The Armenians, Minority Rights Report No. 32 (London: Minority Rights Group, 1976). 50 Walker, editor, Armenia and Karabagh, op. cit., p. 37. In The Armenians: A People in Exile (London: Allen and Unwin, 1981), p. 27, David Marshall Lang quotes from the telegraph that Taltaddressed to the Governor of Aleppo on 15 September 1915: You have already been informed that the Government has decided to exterminate entirely all the Armenians living in Turkey. No-one opposed to this order can any longer hold an administrative position. Without pity for women, children and invalids, however, tragic the methods of extermination may be, without heeding any scruples of conscience, their existence must be terminated, as reported in the London Daily Telegraph, 29 May 1922. 51 Amnesty International, public statement, http://www.amnestyusa.org/document. php?lang=e&id=ENGEUR440352005 (accessed 2 April 2011). 52 U.N. Commission on Human Rights, Document E/CN.4/1999/65. 53 Bjrn Westlie, Coming to Terms with the Past: The Process of Restitution of Jewish Property in Norway (Institute of the World Jewish Congress, Policy Forum No. 12, 1996). 54 U.N. Document A/Conf.117/14. 55 Kevork K. Baghdjian, La confiscation, par le gouvernement turc, des bien armniens . . . dits abandonns (Montral: self-published,1987).
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56 Lighthouses Arbitration between France and Greece, 23 International Law Reports, pp. 659-676; C. Rousseau, Laffaire franco-hellnique des phares et la sentence arbitrale du 24 juillet 1956, Rvue Gnrale due Droit International Public, Vol. 63 (1959), 248-292; and J.P. Monnier, La succession dEtats en matire de responsabilit internationale, AFDI, Vol. 8 (1962), 65-90 at 80-85. 57 For the question of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavias status vis--vis the Genocide Convention, see Matthew Craven, The Genocide Case, the Law of Treaties and State Succession, British Yearbook of International Law (1977), pp. 127-163. 58 A leading international law expert in Europe, Professor Felix Ermacora, member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee, member of the European Commission on Human Rights, and Special Rapporteur for Afghanistan and Chile for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, has maintained this view. In a legal opinion on the continuing obligation to grant restitution to the expelled Germans from Czechoslovakia, some 250,000 of whom had perished in the course of their ethnic cleansing 1945-46, Ermacora wrote: Ist die Konfiskation von Privatvermgen Teil eines Vlkermordes, so ist auch ihre Rechtsnatur Teil eines Rechtsganzen. D.h. der Vermgensentzug hatte fr sich selbst im vorliegenden Gesamtzusammenhang Vlkermordcharakter . Er unterliegt auch der Beurteilung aufgrund der Vlkeremordkonvention, deren Partner sowohl die BRD als auch die Tschechoslowakei ist. Entsprechend den Regeln internationalen Rechts sind die Akte des Vlkermordes so auch die Vernichtung von Lebensbedingungen, wie sie durch einen totalen Vermgensentzug stattgefunden haben und mit der Vertreibung kombiniert waren, zumindest nach der Konvention ber die Nichtverjhrbarkeit von Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit nicht verjhrbar. (Ermacora, op. cit., p. 178.) 59 Cotler, op. cit., p. 609; Cotler, Nuremberg 50 years later: The restitution of Jewish Property and Norwegian Justice, Nordic Journal of International Law, Vol. 67 (1998), No. 3, 275-287; and Sabine Thomsen, Restitution, in Bernhardt, editor, Encyclopaedia, op. cit., Vol. 4, pp. 229-32. 60 U.N. Commission on Human Rights, 53rd Session, Doc. E/CN.4/1997/104. Compare this with the first report by Professor Theo van Boven C/CH.4/Sub.2/1993/8 of 2 July 1993, Section IX, and the second report C/CN.4/Sub.2/1996/7 of 24 May 1996. 61 Special Rapporteur Louis Joinet, Principle 36 in Document E/CN.4/Sub.23/1997/20 of 26 June 1997 and Principle 33 in Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/20/Rev.1 of 2 October 1997. 62 Peter D. Maddaugh and John D. McCamus, Law of Restitution (Ontario: Aurora, 1990), pp. 484-493. Even in the Old Testament we find an admonition against unjust enrichment, King James Version, 1 Kings, Chapter 21, Verse 19: Thus saith the Lord, Hast thou killed, and also taken possession? The story is that Naboth, a man from Jezreel, had a vineyard on the outskirts of the city near King Ahabs palace. The King coveted the land, because it was convenient to his palace, but Naboth did not want to sell, because the vineyard had been in his family for generations. Jezebel, Ahabs wife, persuaded the King to have Naboth falsely accused of blasphemy and stoned to death. When King Ahab went to take possession of the vineyard, Elijah came to him and admonished the King: Isnt killing Naboth bad enough? Must you rob him, too? Because you have done this, dogs shall lick your blood outside the city just as they licked the blood of Naboth! The Living Bible (new translation) (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971). 63 J.W. Wade, Acquisition of Property by Wilfully Killing Another A Statutory Solution, 49 Harvard Law Review (1936), 715ff., and W.M. McGovern, Homicide and
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Succession to Property, 68 Michigan Law Review (1969), 65ff. There is ample caselaw stating that it is against public policy for a person who is guilty of feloniously killing another to take any benefit in that other persons estate, Re Johnson (1950) 2 D.L.R. 69, at pp. 75-6 D.L.R., 1 W.W.R. 263. J. Lepsius estimated in 1919 that the profits accruing to the Young Turk oligarchy and its hangers-on from the expropriation of the Armenians amounted to not less than a thousand million German marks (op. cit., p. 277). David Marshall Lang stated that The Ottoman Bank President showed bank-notes soaked with blood and stuck through with dagger holes. Some torn ones had evidently been ripped from the clothing of murdered . . . (op. cit., p. 28). 64 Morgenthau, op. cit., p. 225. 65 Cotler, op. cit., p. 621. 66 Selected Decisions of the Human Rights Committee under the Optional Protocol, Vol. III, p. 78 (U.N. Document CCPR/C/OP/3). 67 Ian Sinclair, The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 2nd ed., Melland Schill Monographs in International Law (Manchester, England: Manchester UP, 1984), p. 85; Vahakn N. Dadrian, The Armenian Genocide and the Legal and Political Issues in the Failure to Prevent or Punish the Crime, 29 U. West. L.A. L. Rev . 43 (1998); and John Shamsey, Comment: 80 Years Too Late: The International Criminal Court and the 20th Centurys First Genocide, 11 Journal of Transnational Law & Policy 327 (Spring 2002). 68 Charles Rousseau, 1 Principes Gnraux du droit international public 486 (1944). 69 Yearbook of the International Law Commission (1966-II), pp. 212-13. 70 (1924) P.C.I.J., Ser. A, No. 2, p. 34. 71 Sinclair, op. cit., p. 86. The U.S. proposal was defeated by a vote of 47 to 23, with 17 abstentions. 72 Hans Kelsen, Will the Judgment in the Nuremberg Trial Constitute a Precedent in International Law? 1 International Law Quarterly, 153, 164-65 (1947). See also Kelsen, The Rule Against Ex Post Facto Law and the Prosecution of the Axis War Criminals, 2 The Judge Advocate Journal 8 (1945). 73 Alfred de Zayas, Aggression, in Shelton, editor, Encyclopedia of Genocide, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 11-16. 74 In his opening statement at the International Military Tribunal, the British Chief Prosecutor Lord Hartley Shawcross stated: There is thus no substantial retroactivity in the provisions of the Charter. It merely fixes the responsibility for a crime already clearly established as such by positive law upon its actual perpetrators. It fills a gap in international criminal procedure. There is all the difference between saying to a man, You will now be punished for what was not a crime at all at the time you committed it, and in saying to him, You will now pay the penalty for conduct which was contrary to law and a crime when you executed it, although, owing to the imperfection of the international machinery, there was at that time no court competent to pronounce judgment against you. 75 William A. Schabas, Sentencing by International Tribunals: A Human Rights Approach, 7 Duke Journal ofComparative and International Law, No. 2 (Spring 1997), 461-517. 76 Requel Cross, Issue 1: The Relevance of the Eichmann, Barbie and Finta Trials for the ICTR, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Memorandum for the Office of the Prosecutor, International War Crimes Project, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Spring 2003.
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77 Bernhardt, Treaties, in Bernhardt, editor, Encyclopaedia, op. cit., Vol. 4, pp. 926-932. 78 Official Records of the Third Session of the General Assembly, 6th Committee, 64th Meeting, Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 1 October 1948, pp. 17-20. See also the statements of the Czechoslovak representative, Mr. Prochazka, stressing the need to connect the convention directly to the historical events which had proved the necessity for its existence and to stress the relationship between genocide and the doctrines of Nazism, fascism, and Japanese imperialism (66th Meeting, 4 October 1948, pp. 29-30). 79 United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Altmann v. Republic of Austria, No. 01-56003 (December 12, 2002). Affirmed on writ of certiorari, 7 June 2004, United States Supreme Court, 541 U.S. 677 (2004). 80 Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. 1350 (2004). For a discussion of the Act, see Jordan J. Paust, the History, Nature, and Reach of the Alien Tort Claims Act, 16 Florida Journal of International Law, No. 2 (June 2004), 249-266. 81 Armenia used to be a Soviet Republic. Thus, by principles of succession, the application of the Convention actually goes back to the date when the Soviet Union became a State party to the Genocide Convention, on May 3, 1954. 82 Dikran Kouymjian, La confiscation, op. cit., p. 227. 83 E/CN.4/Sub.2/1997/23, Annex II. In theory the doctrine of the erga omnes obligation of non-recognition has been gaining acceptance for decades, but the concrete application of this doctrine leaves a lot to be desired. See Article 41 of the Report of the International Law Commission on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, adopted in 2001, which provides in paragraph 2 No State shall recognize as lawful a situation created by a serious breach within the meaning of article 40, nor render aid or assistance in maintaining that situation. The Commissions report and commentary are reproduced in the annex to General Assembly resolution 56/83 of 12 December 2001 A/56/49 (Vol. I). See also Stefan Talmon The Duty not to Recognize as Lawful a Situation Created by the Illegal Use of Force or other Serious Breaches of a Jus Cogens Obligation: An Obligation without Real Substance? Chapter VI, in Jean-Marc Thouvenin and Christian Tomuschat (eds.), The Fundamental Rules of the International Legal Order: Jus Cogens and Obligations Erga Omnes. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Leiden, 2006, pp. 99-125.
The Armenian Genocides Outstanding Damage and the Complexities of Repair
From Unfair to Shared Burden:
Henry C. Theriault
Beginning Caveats
This discussion of the proper resolution of the outstanding issues of the Armenian Genocide begins with five caveats. First, the focus on Armenians does not mean that the outstanding issues for Assyrians and Greeks are any less important or resolutions of their cases any less imperative. There are two reasons for this papers focus on the Armenian part of the broader Ottoman Turkish Genocide of Minority Groups of the World War I era. The author is part of a community of scholars who have done scholarly research on the Armenian Genocide, and questions of long-term justice are an important element of the overall scholarly approach to this genocide case. In addition, based on previous work by the author, he has been invited repeatedly to offer philosophical analyses of the issue of repair of the harm done to Armenians, and this paper has grown out of that previous work. Second, there have long been two1 competing political orientations in Turkey, even at points at which an extremist homogenizing, militarist, and violent nationalism has been dominant. They were demonstrably present in 1908, one tending toward authoritarianism and the other toward some level of pluralistic tolerance coupled with equal legal and political treatment for all Ottomans, regardless of religion or ethnicity. The 1915-23 Genocide helped embed the former in the political, military,
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police, economic, and social culture of Turkey,2 but its democratic alternative has remained to challenge, generating within the crucible of a militarist, imperial society political insights and innovations that should be studied not just by Armenians and others victimized by Turkish governments, but more broadly with lessons for the global struggle for human rights. Any blanket condemnation of Turks misses the important resistance and potential of this second element and insults the sacrifices and moral decency of those who have comprised it. The pluralistic, humanity-respecting orientation is clear in the many Turks who resisted the Genocide and even risked and sacrificed to shield Armenians, Assyrians, and/or Greeks and, more recently, Kurds.3 Third, there is a laudable focus by progressive Turks on the Armenian Genocide as well as other instances of oppression by the Ottoman Empire and the successor Turkish Republic. This seems evidence of a refusal to relativize these processes in the face of aggressive denial and a refusal to shield the Turkish state and society from scrutiny. Unfortunately, when coupled with a global lack of awareness of the history of genocide that affects Turkey as most other societies, this could leave Turkish people feeling that they are being singled out for genocide culpability and bear an exceptional shame. It is crucial that the Ottoman genocidal process always be presented in its historical and global context. This does not mean claiming that the process of genocide was just an episode in a Christian-Muslim conflict across the Balkans, Russia, and more, with earlier anti-Muslim mass violence producing refugee-victims who later reacted against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. The targets of the Ottoman Turkish Genocide of Minority Groups had nothing to do with this other anti-Muslim violence, nor did the intent of the Genocide derive from these other cases; the suffering of Muslim refugees was a pressure on the Young Turks that they inverted to exploit many refugees as a tool of genocide. To claim such a historical relativization is akin to arguing that the extermination of Native American groups in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s was the result of the genocidal Great Famine and US Slavery, because some Irish refugees and former slaves participated in genocide of indigenous American groups. Treating the Armenian Genocide in its historical context is, on the contrary, to recognize that Turkey is one genocide perpetrator among, unfortunately, all too many. Indeed, Turkey is facing a history
From Unfair to Shared Burden
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that it holds in common with countries covering a significant portion of the globe. The quest for reparations for the Armenian Genocide neither singles Turkey out nor asks of it more than should be asked of these many other countries with their bloody histories.4 The unfortunate truth about humanity is that genocide, mass rape, colonialism, aggressive war, and slavery have been so prevalent that one could trace out the main contours of human history through the sequence of these horrors. Genocide has been a constant in human history, from even before the destruction of Melos by the Athenian democracy proclaimed as the font of Western culture, to Darfur and the Nuba Mountains in Sudan today. The past 520 years have seen a level of bloodshed and societal destruction that belies hackneyed Western claims of social, political, cultural, and ethical progress. For instance, through the genocidal activities of Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and most if not all post-colonial states in the Western Hemisphere, led by the United States, the pre-Columbian population of indigenous Americans went from approximately 100 million, featuring many advanced and stable societies, to less than 10 million today, with many individuals in abject poverty and facing great human rights abuse and even genocide still.5 The pre-European conquest population of the continental United States was reduced from 10 million to less than 250,000 by 1900, a destruction rate of approximately 97 percent6 all the more stunning when what should have been typical population growth over this multi-century period is factored in. We can add to the genocide and related mass killing roll-call the Europe-wide Holocaust driven by the Nazis of Germany but also Imperial Germanys 1904 genocide of the Herero in Southwest Africa, Britain and Australias genocides of the Tasmanians and Aboriginal peoples, Japans Nanjing Massacre, the mass killing in Britains colonial exploits in Africa and South Asia, the Great Famine in Ireland, Belgium in the Congo, France in Algeria, Stalins Ukraine Famine and other mass killings, Communist Chinas destruction of millions of political enemies as well as the Tibet Genocide, Indonesias 1965 genocide of 500,000 opposition political activists, Iraqs genocide of Kurds, Croatias World War II genocide of Serbs, and the genocides in Bangladesh, Cambodia, East Timor, Guatemala, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Chechnya, to name just some from the past two centuries alone.7
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Political scientist R. J. Rummel estimates that from 1900 to 1987 alone, governments murdered almost 170 million [innocent, non-combatant] men, women, and children. They were shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hanged, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. Depending on whether one uses high or more conservative estimates, the [death count from this period] could conceivably be nearly 360 million people.8 Historian A. Dirk Moses offers a tremendously important framework for understanding genocide that does not exclude, as Rummel would appear to, for instance, those who resisted colonialism through armed struggle and were subjected to genocide as a result.9 This inclusive understanding of genocide goes beyond the important insight of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which the author has argued is the first explicit recognition and ethical condemnation of the phenomenon of genocide in the Western intellectual and political tradition.10 In Book I, Chapter IV, On Slavery, of On the Social Contract, Rousseau demonstrates that the killing of a vanquished enemy is ethically wrong, because there is no longer a state of war between killer and killed. Moses appears to argue that even if there is a state of war, in the sense that there is armed conflict, if that conflict is the result of a colonial or imperial system of domination, then the violence against those resisting that order is genocidal if it seeks to destroy their group in whole or part. This expands the body count yet further, even as it invites us to understand genocide as much more than body counts, but the destruction of cultures and societies through longterm processes of domination. Fourth, an acceptable resolution of the Armenian Genocide issue must be just, that is, respect the basic rights of Armenians and be a reasonably fair settlement. A solution imposed unfairly on Armenians, either by force or coercive circumstances, or one that disadvantages Armenians even if they accept it out of negotiative necessity, is thus not a proper resolution of the issue. It is interesting to consider just how normalized ignoring the elements of this criterion has become, even among those who oppose denial of the Armenian Genocide, for instance. Finally, the concept reparation is a quite complex one, which can refer to anything from symbolic acts such as apologies to substantial
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material forms such as territorial restitution. Indeed, it can overlap with acts that are often associated with non-reparative resolutions of the Armenian Genocide or some other mass human rights violation. For instance, truth-telling and education of the perpetrator society might in some discussions be considered reparative, but in others not. In this article, the author strives to be concrete in uses of the term, with a clear indication of what it means in the instances it is used.
Recognition
The most heavily pursued effort by Armenians and others to address the Armenian Genocide has been the attempt to gain broad and official recognition of the veracity and wrongness of this genocide. This has been advanced through political initiatives, such as lobbying governments outside of Turkey to pass resolutions recognizing the Genocide, but also through (1) academic research and teaching that disseminates the facts to a broad global audience as well as (2) non-governmental dialogue and social organizing aimed at changing public opinion in Turkey. The latter approaches are as much undertaken by Turks and other nonArmenians as Armenians. Many pursuing recognition see it as the key to overcoming the legacy of the Genocide. They view truth telling and broad dissemination of truth as the resolution of the Genocide. The view that a public truth-telling and dissemination process is the best approach to addressing many cases of past mass violence is prevalent in considerations of truth commissions applied to a range of past violence and human rights violations.11 Recognition by governments, international political institutions and non-governmental organizations, and/or the Turkish state and/or society in itself is clearly a good thing.12 It might even be an essential component of any just resolution of the Armenian Genocide. But the question is not whether it is necessary, but if it is sufficient. Many Armenians have come to believe that it is. This is based on a conflation of the genocide in itself and its subsequent denial. While denial is typically a part of a genocidal process, as the Young Turks claims in 1915 and thereafter that Armenians were not being massacred exemplify, the bulk of denial efforts come after often long after the direct destruction phase of a genocide has wound down.
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Recognition primarily functions as a response to denial, by reversing it, not to the effects of a genocide itself. After decades of denial, the conceptual framework of many Armenians, as well as concerned outsiders and Turks, has become skewed. The struggle against denial has been daunting and denigrating for Armenians. It has come to require greater and greater effort, resources, and sacrifices. In this sense, it has actually come to distract Armenians from focus on the Genocide itself. In this skewed framework, defeating denial comes to be mistaken for a resolution of the Genocide issue. But defeating denial only gets us to the point at which we can begin to see the Genocide itself. It is not the endpoint of a resolution process, but merely a possible beginning point.13 Because denial typically resurfaces again and again even after some of the major issues of a genocide are resolved, as in the case of the Holocaust and thus denial can persist through all stages of a genocidal process and long after, the defeat of denial is not a necessary condition for addressing a genocide, a substantial undercutting of the impact of denial makes it possible to begin to address the outstanding impacts and continuing harms done by the Genocide as they affect Armenians today and as they are issues of historical justice. Denial is not the final stage of genocide, such that defeating it ends the impact of a genocide. Denial is present at every stage of genocide. Consolidation, that is, the normalization and rendering permanent of the political, economic, and other gains of the perpetrators through genocide, is the final stage.14 It is this stage that the Armenian Genocide is in. Defeating denial merely clears the field to focus on this final stage. This counter-argument even applies to the position that truth telling is important but not sufficient for overcoming the legacy of a genocide.15 Even in such a limited sense, this approach mistakes a resolution of denial for a resolution of the denied genocide. While the act of public presentation and witnessing of the suffering due to a genocide is likely to have some salutary psychological benefits for victims, the focus on truth and truth commissions is precisely in contexts of denial by act or omission. Truth telling as reparation mainly repairs denial, not the related genocide itself. That Armenians might experience relief at global and/or Turkish recognition of the Genocide and thus subjectively accept it as a resolution
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of the Genocide does not make it an actual or objective resolution. The relief would be the function of the struggle against denial, which takes its toll economically, politically, and psychologically on Armenians as individuals and as a community. As explained above, in the skewed situation of aggressive denial, ending denial necessarily becomes an exclusive focus. But the relief or even happiness experienced by Armenians at ending denial is the manipulated result of Turkish denial. As James Rachels explains in a critique of classic Utilitarianism, merely because a source of unhappiness is eliminated does not mean that the rights of those involved have been respected or justice has been achieved.16 This is particularly true when the conditions of not feeling that unhappiness are manipulated, that is, the feeling itself is a kind of manipulation. At the risk of making light of a serious issue, when asked why a man is hitting his head with a hammer, he replies that he is doing so because it feels so good when he stops. Just because the end of denial would represent an improvement over the situation of aggressive denial and Armenians would feel good about it, does not make that situational feeling an objective measure of Genocide resolution. Armenians would feel good precisely because they feel so bad about denial now and have lost sight of the impact of the Genocide itself. Stopping the ball-peen hammer blows of denial does not mean that the limbs and skull crushed by the sledge hammer of genocide are suddenly healed; the bones need to be set and, where the damage is permanent, physical therapy, braces, wheel chairs, alternate transportation, and more need to be provided.17
Dialogue
Although there have been a number of dialogue conceptualizations and initiatives, they generally share similar problem analyses, assumptions, and projections, and call for similar processes. Two theoretical treatments of the dialogue approach to resolution of the Armenian Genocide, one from Taner Akam18 and the other from Elazar Barkan,19 offer characteristic and detailed arguments for the dialogue model and share many features, while David Phillips historical and conceptual treatment of the Turkish Armenian Reconciliation Commission20 process offers similar justifications and analyses. Because these three are developed in written works and thus can be evaluated directly, other
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approaches appear similar, so a treatment of these three has implications for the others. For instance, as explained in the introduction to a recent work growing out of this project, the Workshop for Armenian/Turkish Scholarship has emphasized such features as the relativistic equalizing of Turkish and Armenian nationalisms, the claim that Turks have trauma from the historical past that equates to Armenian trauma, and the development of a shared history.21 In addition, from the limited public statements available, Pamela Steiners dialogue approach appears consistent with at least the general features of the Akam model.22 With these specific approaches before us, it is possible to develop an account of a generic dialogue model. According to the model, there is a current Turkish-Armenian conflict over past history that affects even poisons relations today. One of two approaches is called for. By changing the orientation toward that past history for instance, by considering the past to be fully past, not a present concern the contemporary attitudes can be changed. Or, by changing contemporary attitudes through various initiatives for instance, by fostering personal friendships between Armenians and Turks that create bonds that trump negative stereotypes and attitudes toward members of the other group that appear to derive from the past the relationship to the past can be changed so that it no longer determines or informs contemporary relations between the groups. Either way, Turks can come to regard the past as they understand it without fear and shame, while Armenians can be released from the past and their perceived fixation on the Armenian Genocide. In theory, the endpoint of dialogue could be genuine acknowledgment of the Genocide by the Turkish state and society, coupled with active measures designed to mitigate its continuing effects. But this possibility is foreclosed by the concept of the problem all of the particular approaches referenced above share. An audience member at a 2009 panel discussion of Armenian-Kurdish-Turkish relations23 represented this position well, by insisting that, while Kurdish-Turkish relations have material implications today, the issue of 1915 between Armenians and Turks exists purely on the level of discourse. The Armenian Genocide itself is a past event with no material consequences today and any Armenian-Turkish tension has no basis in material reality
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but is the function of purely discursive forces, that is, contingent attitudes and narratives that have no material basis. Only when contemporary individuals act based on perceptions of the past does the past have force today. Thus, the Genocides impact is through the animosities between Armenians and Turks that historical memory that is, subjective attitudes about the past as perceived by those holding the attitudes fosters animosities that are a matter of attitudes and statements. The solution then lies in a dialogue process that will change those statements and ultimately the attitudes connected to them so that the interlocutors orientation toward and feelings about what they view as the relevant history do not produce negative impacts today. This view of the Genocide as purely discursive is readily apparent in Phillips work, which does at certain points seem to acknowledge the fact of genocide but mostly avoids the issue of whether it even happened and treats the relevant history as purely discursive. Yet, even for Barkan, who does admit an Armenian Genocide and especially for Akam, who is admirably adamant about its veracity, the representation of the Genocide as a discursive issue allows separation of the attitudes today regarding it from the material facts of its perpetration. Even where concrete consequences of the Genocide are recognized Turkey closing the Armenia-Turkey border, the impact of the French decision to recognize the Armenian Genocide, discrimination against Armenians in Turkey, and so forth these are considered the outcomes of current attitudes toward the history and not a function of the history itself. Thus, material facts have given way to discourse that breaks from those facts but that produces material consequences of its own. The goal of the dialogue model is to mitigate or stop those consequences. The consequences of discourse not the Genocide itself are viewed as the primary negative impacts of the Genocide today, and so mitigation or supersession of them is resolving the Genocide. This conception of the problem grounds a perceived equivalence relation between the two parties to that which each dialogue model presents as a conflict over history. Whatever might be said about who was at fault nearly a century ago Barkan does not take up this issue beyond recognition of the Genocide, Akam understands it correctly, and Phillips countenances Gunduz Aktans denialist position that goes
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so far as to claim Armenians committed genocide against Turks these approaches render the current situation to be a mutual conflict between parties equally insensitive to the other,24 prejudiced against the other in a rigid manner,25 and guilty of essentializing the Other that is, seeing the other group as monolithic and fixed and of portraying the Other in negative, usually stereotypical, terms.26 Phillips especially emphasizes the role of extremists on both sides27 (though he focuses much more on Armenians28) who maintain counterproductive hostility toward the other group and engage in political maneuvers and ideologicallydriven activities, such as Turkish governmental and other denial of the Genocide29 and Armenian efforts to gain recognition by legislative bodies in political states and subunits in various regions of the world.30 Note that this view of a Turkish-Armenian conflict does not vary across these three approaches, even as the treatment of the veracity of the Armenian Genocide does vary. This approach allows one other feature common to the accounts that has central prominence in Phillips approach and significant presence in the other two. Each employs a similar notion of trauma that he applies to both Armenians and Turks.31 They see the trauma deriving from events of the past as a contemporary psychological result of the orientation toward events in the past. At its most basic, this approach maintains that the loss of empire for Turks, ill treatment of Muslims in the Russian Empire and other areas, including former Ottoman territories, and other such historical facts have fostered in Turks a sense of loss and victimization that impedes empathy for the suffering of Armenians through the events of 1915.32 In turn, Armenian suffering, whether genocidal or not, has prevented empathy for Turkish suffering, which remains unrecognized in a similar way to Turkish lack of recognition of Armenian suffering.33 Phillips takes this further, by valorizing the initial participation of Vamik Volkan in TARC. Volkan employed the notion of chosen trauma to characterize Armenian concerns about a genocide and Turkish concerns about a loss of empire. This concept is logically dependent on the separation of the actual materiality of past events from the discourse through which they are engaged now. In Volkans view, Armenians and Turks deliberately embrace these traumas as a way of perpetuating a sense of themselves as victims. Instead of moving beyond the past as
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healthy groups and individuals do, they keep themselves in it, stagnant, as if the past is still present when it is not. They refuse to live in the present, a world removed from these past traumas. The route to improved relations lies in giving up these chosen traumas and establishing contemporary relations based on present considerations only.34 One approach to breaking down essentialist notions of the Other and fixation on the past as an intractable conflict is to recast past events as a shared history. For Phillips, for instance, this means recognizing the purportedly35 harmonious centuries of Turkish-Armenian relations before the tensions of the late 19th Century and beyond, as well as the shared suffering by both groups in the paroxysms of late 19th and early 20th Century regional and global violence.36 For Akam, this means recognizing these issues as well as the role of righteous Turks in the Genocide.37 Barkan especially supports a historical commission that will produce a unified and unifying history of the period that both constituencies can accept and that can serve as the basis of positive relations going forward.38 More generally, all three approaches see dialogue as a negotiative process that allows Armenians and Turks to freely accept an understanding of the history and the other group that they actively participated in producing and are thus invested in and comfortable with. Akam and Barkan are particularly committed to an optimistic position that if dialogue is engaged sincerely, the truth about the Genocide will ultimately be arrived at and accepted reflecting something like a J. S. Millian faith in discursive progress.39 Phillips optimism is less specific; for him, dialogue will lead to better relations between Armenians and Turks, with various advantages that will obviate the Genocide issue. The autonomy of both Turks and Armenians in dialogue is the key factor guaranteeing their investment in the resulting state of the relationship between these groups. A further benefit especially anticipated by Akam is the role this dialogue will have in breaking apart the monolithic state ideology of Turkey that includes denial of the Armenian Genocide. This in turn is at least necessary for, or will lead to, democratization of Turkey and greater respect for minority rights, including the rights of the residual Armenian community there.40
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While the dialogue approachs promise of a harmonious future within grasp and dependent on purely rhetorical shifts that do not require material sacrifice is quite appealing, the promise is problematic both for its actual unlikelihood and for its content, that is, what will actually be the result if it succeeds. Both turn on a misunderstanding of the situation. First, historical events are causal forces that can shape and change group identities, social structures, economic foundations, and every other aspect of individual and group existence. An event as cataclysmic as the Armenian Genocidewhich not only destroyed in its home area a population and its religious, cultural, social, political, economic, etc., foundations, life, relations, etc., and dispersed the residual globally clearly is not over when the direct violence stops. The end of the killing phase of the Genocide in 1923 meant an end to further damage, but by this point the Genocide itself that is, the set of actions and events comprising it, in all their complexity had already dramatically affected all Armenians in Turkey and contiguous areas as well as the relatively few Armenians already in other places around the world. Despite the efforts made by survivors to address the various material, social, and psychological impacts of the genocide and with these great efforts as evidence of the damage done without a decisive addressing of the causal forces operating through the Genocide, the impacts persist in the long-term. Contrary to the trite saying, time does not heal all wounds; wounds are healed by active steps to address them, and when they are left untreated they fester, become infected, and, if serious, become even more debilitating over time. Indeed, many harms are permanent, in the way that the loss of a leg in an automobile accident is though that does not mean that nothing can be done to mitigate the impact of the damage. Given the foregoing, the assumption or claim that the Genocide today is merely a rhetorical matter and the damage done is solely the result of continued negative discourse about it requires a radical philosophical idealism that is clearly untenable. One does not need to be a strict material determinist to recognize that events in history have concrete consequences that persist through time: significant destructive forces have material impacts. Indeed, this is the whole basis for committing a genocide. Perpetrators understand that they are permanently damaging the victim group, if not wiping out every aspect of the targeted groups existence
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completely. Perpetrators act intentionally to alter the material reality of the world in a radical manner. Their actions are not merely rhetorical, such that they can be addressed or reversed by rhetorical exercises. This does not mean that shifts in the discourse will not alter perceptions by Armenians and Turks of the situation. For instance, if they enter into new kinds of relationships with Turks, Armenians might stop feeling as aggrieved as many do now. Indeed, this is all the more likely because so many Armenians have felt the pain of Turkish denial and the indignation of injustice countenanced by the descendants of the perpetrator community as well as others around the globe.41 Better relations even if predicated on non-recognition of the Genocide might well be a welcome relief for many Armenians, as they will surely be for most Turks. But, the mere fact that Armenians feel less bad or even happy about the history does not mean that the Genocide issue has been addressed: the Genocide will not be resolved by this change in attitudes and discourse. On the contrary, this kind of dialogic shift will represent a sweeping under the rug the history of the Genocide and its relegation to a perpetually maintained injustice, the material impact of which will be forever unaddressed. The devastating material consequences of the Genocide will continue to have their effects, even if those harmed by them do not see them or smile through them. In a similar way, it is true that a pill that suppresses the sensation of hunger will allow someone who is starving to avoid feeling bad, but the pill will not change the material facts of the situation; in order to survive, the person will still need food that he/she does not have. The pill will merely keep the starvation process from being subjectively unpleasant. What is more, the psychological pain masked by feel-good dialogue is likely to be manifested in other ways, especially as the material harms of the Genocide continue to have bad effects on Armenians today. It is just that some Armenians will fail to realize that their psychological pain and material deficits result from the Genocide. Relegation of the Genocide issue to the discursive realm and belief that its solution lies in the discursive realm as well yields results that are inherently unstable. Mere rhetorical shifts are not anchored to any concrete state of affairs and exist only so long as other equally easy to generate rhetorical shifts do not occur. Indeed, once taken, they can easily be reversed with
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little effort: as the history of recognition and non-recognition of Pacific War atrocities by Japanese governmental and other interests shows, recognition one year can give way to denial the next.42 Contrary to Barkans characterization of another well-know case,43 the Australian government and society have not slowly progressed in a positive direction on aboriginal issues, especially since the 1997 publication of Bringing Them Home,44 the report detailing the genocidal removal of indigenous children from their families. Embrace of the 1997 governmental report calling the systematic removal of Aboriginal homes from their families genocide was followed by a partial retreat by the government45 and a right-wing backlash rejecting characterization of the treatment of Aboriginal peoples as genocide.46 In the history of admissions and other rhetorical resolutions of major human rights abuses, the absence of a fundamental concrete foundation of, or correlate to, the rhetorical change means that rhetorical shifts are too often followed by reversals or backlashes. If the Armenian Genocide is in fact an outstanding harm with real effects in the present that impact Armenians regardless of their attitude toward, or even awareness of, the history in question, then the dialogue model is incorrect in so far as it depends on the view that present attitudes and discourses drive any material impacts and that these attitudes and discourses are reproduced out of present forces and even agendas. Attitudes reflect the continuing impact of the Genocide and can only be genuinely addressed rather than manipulated by ameliorating those impacts. This is true just as much of Turkish attitudes such as denial as it is of an Armenian sense of victimization, because nothing of substance was ever done to address the Turkish perpetration of the Genocide. In fact, many perpetrators and the institutions, economic structures, social practices, and attitudes toward Armenians driving or formed through the Genocide became foundationally entrenched in Turkish political, military, and business culture and society more generally. One of the central impacts of the Genocide was to maximize a preexisting power and status relation of Turks over Armenians47 that was central to the very structure of the Ottoman Empire from its initial reach onto indigenous Armenian territory up to the time of the Genocide itself. The original military conquest of Armenians by Turks was frozen into the millet system, a static hierarchy in which Turks and other Muslims had
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significantly higher status than subject peoples including Armenians. As second class members of Ottoman society, members of subject groups lacked basic political and legal protections and rights and were barred from political, military, and other power in the Ottoman Empire. The static nature of the system should not be misunderstood, however: it represented a suspension of violence against Armenians based on Armenian subjugation. The system was held together by violence as the force forming all social arrangements historically and as a perpetually present potential ready to be reactivated at any moment. The violence was static, not nonexistent or superseded, and the system depended on the constant application of violence as a potential. This is made clear in the fact that any challenge to the hierarchy triggered the actualization of violence implicit in the system. In the case of the late 19th Century, Armenian civil rights activism coupled with a range of factors and attitudes outside their control (the weakening geopolitical, military, and economic position of the Ottoman Empire, for instance) released the static violence in various episodes of violent domination, the most significant of which was the massacre process of the 1890s that claimed at least 100,000 Armenian lives.48 The Genocide simply maximized the domination relation, as the Turkish nationalist Ottoman Empire came to impose near total destruction on Armenians. Genocide was the following out of the logic of conquest to its destructive telos, that is, an actualization of the violent destruction implicit and held as a suspended potential in the imperial domination structure another confirmation of the inherently genocidal potential of internal imperialism.49 The point most relevant to the present paper is that the end of direct genocide did not mean an end to that domination relation. On the contrary, because nothing was done to address the impact of genocide, the result was a yet stronger domination relation than existed before the Genocide. The untenable position of the residual Armenian community within Turkey is the tip of the iceberg there are few bounds on Turkeys relative power over Armenians today, from its impunity in imposing a blockade on the Republic of Armenia to its ability to prevent general recognition of the Armenian Genocide in countries, organizations, educational systems, and local communities around the world. The Genocide ended not because attitudes had
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changed but because the perpetrators goals were largely met an end to the substantial presence of Armenians in Ottoman society on what was perceived through nationalist extremism as Turkish territory and expropriation of almost all of the land and other resources of the victims. The post-Genocide Armenian-Turkish relation has two salient features. First, to the extent that Armenians still exist and pose a conceptual and political problem for a Turkish state based on an exclusivist Turkish nationalism, by resisting subjugation, that is, by insisting on their basic equality and rights, including the right to bear witness to their history, they are met with an aggressive denial campaign and even violence, as demonstrated by the 2007 assassination of Hrant Dink. Second, in so far as the relationship has been one of relative disengagement by Turkey of Armenians outside the Turkish Republic, this disengagement actually supports the Genocide by freezing the gains made through it. This second feature is crucial, as the persisting legacy of the Genocide. Even if Turkey ends its denial and other political acts against Armenians, this will merely prevent further harm from being done, a net increase in the level of Turkish dominance over Armenians. It will not mitigate the already accomplished damage done through the 1915 Genocide nor the status and power asymmetry based on it. Given these various impacts, Vamik Volkans concept of chosen trauma fails utterly to apply. It might be the case that in certain instances, particularly when an event is more mythologized legend than impactful history the 1389 Battle of Kosovo has this feature, but so too for Armenians does the lost battle at Avarayr in 45150 this concept applies. But when dealing with events with clear causal impact on the present, the term is nothing short of denialist: to the extent it accepts the veracity of historical events, it misrepresents them in a fundamental way by covering up their long-range consequences and trajectories. In other words, it falsifies the basic metaphysical/material nature of such events. What is more, the concept of trauma employed by Akam, Barkan, and Phillips is vague, imprecise, and clinically inaccurate. They seem to view historical trauma as any bad feeling about the past, rather than the correct idea of trauma as a specific psychological reaction to a cataclysmic external harm that does not depend on the subjective perception of the individual. For instance, just because Turks believed in their inherent right to imperial domination
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over others in the Ottoman Empire does not mean that the loss of empire was traumatic, even if Turks felt very bad about it. This kind of bad feeling cannot in any way be equated with, used to balance, or otherwise linked to the kind of true trauma inflicted by genocide.51 Indeed, Turks had no right to feel an inherent right to dominate in the first place, so violation of that feeling is not a harm in any sense. The asymmetrical domination relation of Turkey/Turks over Armenia/Armenian diaspora/Armenians means the dialogue model is deeply flawed in another way. Each specific approach discussed above assumes that Armenian and Turkish dialoguers have an equal role and status and in fact form an ideal discussion group. This assumption is so powerful in Phillips case that in practice he took no steps to balance the power of the two Turkish members of five total Turks ( four Armenians were in the group) tied directly to the power and resources of the Turkish government. In any dialogue context where no balancing force is applied against the power and status differential that remains as a legacy of the Armenian Genocide, Armenians and Turks do not enter dialogue in equal positions, they enter as oppressed and oppressor, regardless of their individual attitudes.52 If interlocutors are treated as equal in such a context, then in fact the perpetrator side retains its advantage in the dialogue process, which can be the basis of yet further gains against the victim group. In this way, dialogue treated as a mutual, equal negotiative process not only fails to engage the core issues of the tensions between Armenians and Turks the Genocide, its impact (positive benefits for Turkey and negative harms for Armenians), and the asymmetrical domination relation of Turks over Armenians but it can be a tool for increasing the advantage of Turks over Armenians. This is true because the power advantage allows it to impose unfair conditions for continued dialogue and, as the 2009-10 Turkish-Armenian diplomatic protocol process demonstrated, extract guarantees giving up claims related to the Genocide. 53 Without external balancing force, genuine dialogue or balanced negotiation is possible only between parties of roughly equal power. In cases of significant asymmetry, an external force must be applied to balance the domination of the perpetrator group, but it is precisely this that is excluded from each specific dialogue approach discussed here. On the contrary, Phillips and Akam especially go to
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great lengths to stress the harm done to Armenian-Turkish relations when external groups intervene, for instance, by legislative recognitions in other countries.54 But they have it exactly backwards. The danger that dialogue will increase the domination is especially present where the dominant party is unrepentant about its past use of mass violence and aggression in dealings with the weaker but no external force intervenes to mitigate the power of the dominant group. The Obama administrations apparently progressive choice to leave Armenians and Turks free from outside influence to work out their problems55 a bitter pill for Armenians to swallow after so many years of U.S. interference on behalf of Turkey and crucial U.S. role in increasing Turkish power leaves the weaker at the mercy of the stronger.56 The asymmetry exists not only in terms of real power political, military, economic, and identity but also in the structural advantages any perpetrator group has over its victim group(s). The result of the Genocide process long frozen through refusal by any Turkish government or society to take on its burden, consolidated by the refusal of Turkey to grant any kind of justice to Armenians, to engage the Genocide in any kind of meaningful way, with denial as the key mechanism for this avoidance, this freezing of the results of genocide was a new status quo, a normalized state of Armenian loss, destruction, and weakness and of Turkish entitlement, re-emerged imperial domination and benefit, status, and power. Dominant Turkish interests of state and society have only to maintain that status quo, while Armenians pursuing justice or even simply an end to current and future victimization of Armenians, such as deadly discrimination within Turkey and aggressive disruption and prevention of genocide memorialization and global recognition, must radically overturn this status quo and push for a restructuring of the Armenian-Turkish relationship and measures that will rectify at least some of the impacts of the Genocide. In this sense, Turks in dialogue with Armenians can even concede some things and yet preserve their desired status quo which is to say, preserve the legacy of harms of the Genocide. Dialogue for Armenians on the other hand is counterproductive unless it produces fundamental change; Turkey could allow substantial negotiative gains for Armenians and yet still leave the bulk of the damage of the Genocide intact. When the current genocide-
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produced and entrenched status quo is viewed as neutral and this is clearly the foundation of each approach treated here and guaranteed by Volkans ahistoricism then Armenians have already lost as soon as they engage in such dialogue. For, short of a complete rejection of all starting Turkish positions, that is, all gains through the Genocide, any negotiated compromise functions to legitimize gains made through the Genocide, even if at the trivial potential cost of giving up some small portion of those gains. Dialogue without balancing intervention at its conceptual core, conceived as a mutual interaction, is completely inappropriate for postgenocide (and post-Apartheid, post-colonial, etc.) situations. Regardless of the outcome, in fact, the very process itself reinforces the power of perpetrators over victims, as representatives of the victim group are in the position of petitioning representatives of the perpetrator group for each positive step, each concession. This status and power relation allows Turks and others to demonize Armenians who challenge the post-genocide status quo as nationalists. Nationalist in this context, in fact, functions similarly as the term uppity did during the U.S.s Jim Crow era to marginalize and target African Americans who refused to adopt a subservient persona in their dealings with whites. This is not to say that there are no Armenians properly criticized as extreme nationalists or chauvinists, who maintain problematic notions of Armenian identity and relations to other groups. But it is to say that, in a twisted inversion, legitimate, even laudable scholars and activists who challenge the presumption of their imperial subjugation are misrepresented as just like such ultranationalists and chauvinists and just like extreme Turkish nationalists who deny or embrace Turkeys genocidal past out of a pathological sense of Turkish superiority.57 Phillips goes even further, to direct at some elements of the Armenian diaspora with whom he disagrees politically a sustained, emotional, insulting attack, while no Turkish individual is subjected to more than mild, dispassionate criticism. It is interesting that Phillips produces the same type of us versus them account of Armenian diasporan political discourse around TARC that he claims TARC is supposed to help Armenians and Turks overcome. For instance, he presents an inaccurate history of the roles of the Armenian Assembly of America (good guys)
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and of the Armenian National Committee of America (bad guys) in activism on Armenian issues and an extended, strong, and uniformly negative characterization of the Armenian Revolution Federations work regarding the Armenian Genocide,58 including its opposition to TARC, revealed in such statements as First and foremost, Dashnaks use genocide recognition to solicit money from the Armenian Diaspora, They also use their campaign to acquire political and economic power, and Dashnaks believe that struggle is an end, not a means.59 Gunduz Aktan, an unrepentant Armenian Genocide denier cynically acting as a proxy for the Turkish Foreign Ministry throughout the TARC process, is treated much more sympathetically than, for instance, the highly respected George Aghjayan who, because he published comments critical of the TARC process, is dismissed without any factual evidence at all or any engagement with or response to his critical arguments, as a Dashnag mouthpiece.60 The range of Armenian nationalisms that have their origins in the pre-Genocide struggle to protect the general Ottoman Armenian population from violence and oppression61 is equated with the aggressive, racist, genocidal Turkish ultra-nationalism that drove the Genocide and that persists in its current denial and the anti-Armenian attitudes that continue to be present in Turkish politics and society. Quite different from extreme versions of Turkish nationalism,62 the main63 Armenian nationalisms, however imperfect, realistically respond to the continuing post-Genocide oppression and danger of Turkish anti-Armenianism and promote not the harm of other groups or superiority of Armenians to others, but rather the simple fundamental right of Armenians to exist as free, equal, and self-determining human beings with basic security of life, which entails addressing the outstanding concrete and conceptual harms of the Genocide. If both are kinds of nationalism, they are fundamentally different kinds. Why should these legitimate Armenian political efforts be condemned and even vilified because of a false association with the genocidal sins of Turkish extremist nationalism or worse? The power asymmetry is thus a problem for the notion of a shared history. If the two parties enter into a negotiation over the history of 1915 and prior, the resulting unitary narrative will reflect the power imbalance of those producing it unless specific steps are taken to create
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a properly balanced context. One can see this domination relation in the resistance against using genocide to characterize the events of 1915 in the official narrative; even at least one Turkish scholar who has used the term publically in certain contexts has criticized insistence on it as evidence of a regressive, simplistic political outlook or agenda.64 The reasons range from misapplications of anti-essentialism to historical events (the term genocide is supposed to suggest a unified, cohesive, intentional act that does not fit the complexities of any truly represented historical event)65 to a concern that the term will alienate otherwise good-hearted Turks. The latter point shows just how skewed the dialogue context is, when people refusing to recognize basic facts of history are able to veto elements of a shared narrative and their suffering is seen to outweigh the real pain caused in the victim group by continued denial. The power asymmetry structurally compromises the shared history, in fact, as each meaningful element must be proposed by Armenians and approved by Turks, or the situation devolves back to the status quo of no agreed-upon narrative. What is more, the power imbalance was a fact of the history in question as well. If Armenians and Turks shared history, they shared it as imperial power and subject, victimizer and victim, dominator and dominated. Only Akam is sensitive to this point,66 while the others ignore it, seeing the sharing itself as a means of fostering improved relations. Even for Akam, recognizing this imbalance is a matter of explaining the unfairness of Turkish reactions to Armenian Genocide claims and setting the historical record straight, but does not have an explicit practical impact on the notion of dialogue he develops. Ignoring or not taking account of this differential discounts the crucial dimension of present Turkish-Armenian relations: the very tensions that are the problem now between Armenians and Turks are confirmed in the history of violence and domination that they have shared quite differently. Whatever pleasant elements existed in the pre-Genocide relationship and there surely were some existed only within the context of this overarching victimization. The problem today between Armenians and Turks is, mainly, caused by a refusal of the perpetrator group to engage in a responsible way the history of domination and destruction. It is unclear how a shared writing of that history would be more comfortable
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for contemporary Turks, unless the details were altered and softened away from the brutal reality of the facts. In other words, an honestly produced mutual narrative would seem to reassert the very points resisted by so many even progressive Turks. If Akams recognition of the imbalance of power and harms is taken into account in the history, that history itself cannot do the work Akam and the others believe it can independently, that is, of changes in the attitudes of Turks toward that history. To change the content of the history, on the other hand, to satisfy Turkish desires is not to solve the problem of tension, but to leave intact the Turkish attitudes that are the problem in the first place. It seems that the solution to the problem of these attitudes is far beyond the power of shared history. Beyond this is a deeper problem with this notion of shared history. The very concept of a history that is somehow the mutual property of two (essentialized) ethnic groups begs two important questions. First, what is a Turkish view of history, and what is an Armenian one? Surely there are many such views within each group, and the group identities themselves are so complex that any essentialist claims about perspectives are doomed to failure. To approach history through an ethnic lens like this is a nonstarter. Though it is true that victim community members might have much greater insight into the history based on their experience of its effects and its denial,67 there is nothing natural or cultural about such insights. They are available to anyone who is willing to engage them. The facts of a genocide do not depend on ones ethnic perspective, even if the perspectives might vary based on interests. Either 1 million-plus Armenians were killed in a certain period through a process that conforms to the United Nations Genocide Convention definition of genocide or this did not happen, and the only meaningful history of this period will represent its facts. While it is possible that Armenians and Turks discussing the implications of this and working together to do further research could be beneficial, success of this is predicated on accepting the basics of the situation as they have already been articulated through extensive, reliable research. A revision of that narrative, beyond its details and clarifications of legitimate uncertainties, is merely an exercise in the imposition of ethnic attitudes and agendas onto concepts of history and the projection of those agendas back in time. It is precisely that which
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TARC called for. This ethnic view of history transforms history into a kind of property of contemporary ethnic groups. The big advance of the shared history model is to impose joint ownership on that history, as a means of ending the exclusivist competition of two ethnic groups. Of course, this joint ownership, even if it were otherwise acceptable, would yet be compromised by the power differential between the two partners. Another dimension of the issue of power concerns the claim that recognition of the Genocide, produced through dialogue, will result in democratization of Turkey. It might well be that discussion of the Armenian Genocide can weaken or fracture the dominant ideological discourse in Turkey, exposing its foundation as gross falsification not just of the fate of Armenians but of the construction of the Turkish Republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Recognition that the Turkish Republic was founded through genocide in two crucial dimensions the economic base was largely comprised of expropriated Armenian land, moveable wealth, businesses, etc.,68 and the perpetrators eliminated genuine ethno-religious diversity within Asia Minor that stood in the way of false homogenization of various Muslim groups and thus produced a nationalist homogeneity that could ground a cohesive nation-state in place of a rambling empire could weaken the legitimacy of that state for a population that itself has felt the pressure of military control and elite exploitation. But that engagement of the Armenian Genocide would occasion weakening of the dominant ideology and elites does not necessarily mean that this process will then fundamentally improve the treatment of minorities. How the Armenian Genocide is engaged is crucial. If it is done in a reluctant way that emphasizes its pastness and overemphasizes initial steps of progress by some Turks in a manner that lets Turkish society off the hook for more substantial change in attitudes and the social structures, then the positive benefits will pass by Armenians and other victims of genocide and other mass violence, such as Kurds. A democratic Turkey is completely consistent with a Turkey that maintains anti-Armenian attitudes and practices. Certainly this has been the case in other circumstances, for instance, in the way that the United States under slavery and especially Jim Crow celebrated a growing democracy at the same time that it maintained the most profound and brutally violent domination and denial of basic rights to African Americans. Democracy
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for whites simply made the management of the outrage of slavery more participatory and egalitarian wonderful democratic features that had no benefit for blacks. One could in fact go further, to note that genocide of Native Americans was all the more effective precisely because of the burgeoning democratization of white America.69 After all, this genocide process depended greatly on local, private initiative that operated more broadly than a centralized military could over so great an expanse of land. Democratization for the majority is completely consistent with continued oppression of the minorities, so long as embedded attitudes remain the same. Simply opening discourse, as we know from the level of hate speech in the United States, does not guarantee an improvement in attitudes, but in fact can work in the reverse manner. If exclusion of Armenians and other victim groups from Turkeys democratization is a real possibility, stipulating extension of democratic inclusion to Armenians and other victim groups does not appear to be a solution, or at least one Armenians and others would be rational to try. After all, it was precisely the extension of liberal democratic rights to Armenians and other minority members of the Ottoman Empire that produced an ideological and material backlash that was a major factor producing the Armenian Genocide.70 Understanding the implications of this point depends on understanding the depth and nature of anti-Armenian attitudes all too pronounced in Turkey today. While extreme nationalists display prejudice, which is not hidden, that is not the most insidious form. Beneath even kindness often lurks a resilient imperialism molded over centuries. Such attitudes are easily consistent with a formal democratic structure. Even more extreme, public prejudice is not necessarily mitigated by a liberal democratic approach, which can protect expressions of ethnic hatred as free speech. Evidence of the pervasive, deep-seated underlying imperial mentality in Turkey is clear from popular culture, various nationalist attitudes, and more, but it is also evident in the dealings of a good many progressive anti-nationalists who decry the extremes of Turkish militarism and internal oppression. Even in progressive circles, power over Armenians, Kurds, and others is normalized and assumed. For instance, as mentioned already, it is a running issue that many progressives avoid the term genocide to characterize the facts of what happened in the 1915
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era. They do so for two reasons. First, they themselves reject the notion that their society, however guilty it might have been for human rights abuses, should be put in the same category as Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Milosevics former Yugoslavia, etc. In a kind of bad faith, they are able to confront only part of the truth, not all of it. But, because recognition depends on them as much as other Turks, they have the power to withhold it, almost as a psychosocial negotiating tactic. Second, they claim that, whatever their own views, public labeling of these events as genocide will alienate well-intentioned Turks who are not ready to accept such a harsh appraisal of a history they have learned to valorize.71 The problem here should be clear but generally is not. Unless the anti-Armenian attitudes themselves are exposed by Turks and others and subjected to unflinching criticism, they will persist. Genocidal attitudes do not just fade away over time. On the contrary, in a context like Turkey, whose state and society were formed in very practical as well as ideological ways through the Armenian Genocide, whose military and political institutions were developed by many former perpetrators, whose economy was constituted with the expropriated wealth of genocide victims, and which has never gone through even a partial process of selfanalysis and rehabilitation, these attitudes and structural forces remain intact and powerful. A simple change of governmental form that does not directly address these attitudes and forces will leave them intact far into the future. As Kibibi Tyehimba has argued, if peace between victims and perpetrators depends on victims avoiding factual characterizations of history, all they are doing is letting sleeping dogs lie.72 What is more, it will take little to wake those dogs, which the victims have to worry about perpetually. This is not a resolution, but rather a perpetuation of victimization in which victims must curtail exercise of their basic rights to truth and security enjoyed by members of the perpetrator group in order to avoid further suffering. Another way in which this imperial domination persists is in a kind of condescending treatment of Armenians, Kurds, and other formerly or presently subject peoples. This has been discussed in reference to Turkish progressive scholar Halil Berktay, who appears to be quite accommodating to Armenians who accept his approach and primacy
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on their history but who has reacted belligerently to those who offer different viewpoints, especially those who point out the above problems with the approaches of some progressive Turks and the fact that their progressivism does not necessarily correspond to a genuine engagement with history or a genuine post-genocidal egalitarianism.73 In simple terms, there are all too many progressive Turks who cannot handle genuine equality with Armenians but seek to retain control in all contexts. A second form consists of attempts to regulate discourse about the Genocide. This can, but need not, mean avoiding the term. It often means appropriating discourse developed by victim group members to address persisting injustices. One example is the way in which the past decade of progress on the question of comprehensive reparations for the Armenian Genocide is currently being redefined with a change in the key terms referent. While those pushing for real reparations for the Genocide have been clear that this must include the land depopulated and stolen through genocide, as well as a range of other restorative and rehabilitative measures, some in the Turkish community have seized on marginal attempts by some Armenian interests to recover individual property, insurance rights, etc., in an attempt to redefine Armenian Genocide reparations as primarily or only that, and to impose a kind of control on the discourse that attacks the notion of land reparations or enforces silence about it. The result is an exclusion of more substantial concepts of reparation and a molding of the push for justice into individual and relatively trivial forms that sidestep the core legacies of the Armenian Genocide and thus do not address it.74 This phenomenon of normalized imperial power is not merely discursive, as those committed to the disconnect between the Genocide history and the material realities of today claim. The power is grounded in a concrete structure of imperial domination. One need only look at the small, weak Armenian Republic facing off against the regional militarist giant of Turkey. To understand the current relationship between Armenians and Turks requires recognizing that it is the legacy of the Armenian Genocide, which itself is part of an overarching Armenian-Turkish historically-evolving relationship with its roots far earlier than the Armenian Genocide. It is a common assumption generally so assumed as to be unstated that the end of
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a genocide is the end of the hostile relation of perpetrator to victim. In one sense, this seems tautological. With the victim group destroyed and expelled, the perpetrator group is no longer connected to them. But looking at real genocides where an outside power has not come in to break the relationship, punish the perpetrators and destroy their capacity to continue to afflict victims, and support rehabilitation of the victims, a genocide produces a long-term relationship of a specific kind an asymmetrical dominance relation of perpetrators over victims. The situation of the residual Armenian community in Turkey is a prime example, but examination of post-1890 relations of the United States and its society with Native Americans, the similar relations of those of European descent to those of indigenous descent throughout the other countries of the Western Hemisphere, the French and British to former colonies, and so forth confirm this as an empirical law of the impact of genocide. Genocide is a kind of hyperdomination that produces a very long-term, very asymmetrical power and status relation.75
Repair
Addressing the Armenian Genocide requires engaging the issue on a material level, that is, effecting material change that (1) mitigates the actual harms done as they still affect Armenians today and (2) spurs genuine anti-genocidal transformation in Turkey. Where recognition and dialogue, as has been shown, are inadequate to produce positive material change and have the potential to reinforce the status quo or even extend the damage to the victim group what is typically understood as reparation can. Reparations address the various harms done by genocide. In understanding what reparations should mean in the Armenian case, it is important to consider the specific harms done and to understand to what extent and how these initial harms still impact the victim group. Appreciating the concrete reality of these harms and their often significant impacts in the present is crucial to appreciating the sometimes passionate or indignant responses of victim group members to attempts to relegate the harms to past history. Typically, when a past genocide has not been adequately addressed, it causes yet more substantial harm today.
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Irreversible harms include the Armenians killed as well as Armenians coerced by the situation into committing suicide to avoid rape or other forms of hyper-violence76; Armenian fetuses prevented from birth through direct violence or the killing of women carrying them; the vast number of potential Armenians who would have been born had those who would have been their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents not been murdered or otherwise physically or psychologically limited in child-bearing ability; victims physical suffering from rape and other tortures, starvation, thirst, disease, and so on; the pain and suffering of psychological trauma for those who died and those who lived at the violence, profound degradation, and torment they experienced and that they witnessed loved ones, community members, and total strangers experiencing; losses of family and community members, including children; and losses of social and family networks, personal security, and religious and cultural identity. Material damages include loss of land, buildings, businesses, products, crops and animals, money, valuables, household goods, clothes, and so on virtually every public and private possession of Armenians down to undergarments and pots and pans.77 Structural losses include social, political, religious, and cultural formations and institutions; economic networks and systems; and so on. A further loss is all that would have been built with the labor of those who were killed, enslaved, disabled, and/or never born. On top of all these material damages are the passive increases in the values of the stolen land, jewelry, etc., and the active losses of all that would have been produced with the expropriated land and other resources and through the functioning of businesses, political structures, and so on which it appears some Turkish individuals and the Turkish state have used to generate further wealth and other benefits.78 Finally, there is the on-going economic, political, social, cultural, and religious harm done to the residual Armenian community in Turkey through oppressive policies and practices and the anti-Armenian attitudes of the Turkish state and society.79 Resulting from these losses have been greatly reduced Armenian political status, power, stability, and global and regional influence. As Richard Hovannisian has commented, even if the Genocide had occurred but the first Armenian Republic had not been subjected to conquest,
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renewed killings, and long-term subjugation by Kemalist forces, there might exist today a secure, economically vibrant regional power with a population of on the order of 20 million people.80 These losses for Armenians were and are mirrored by Turkish gains and benefits, in terms of territory, political consolidation and status, military power, global and regional relevance, security and prominence of national existence and identity, cultural cohesion and dominance, and especially economic gains.81 One can argue in fact that contemporary Turkey is built more than anything else on the material, political, military, and other gains made through the Armenian Genocide82 and benefits from the dramatically reduced size and power of the neighboring Armenian state compared to what would have existed as a minority within Turkey or neighboring state had the Genocide not occurred. Compounding these various harms has been a relentless set of denial campaigns often orchestrated, funded, and staffed by the state, but also involving non-governmental academics inside and outside of Turkey. Not only has this denialism succeeded in preventing meaningful resolution of the Genocide issue, but it has added layers of harms to Armenian political and cultural life, interfering for instance with memorialization and commemoration processes as well as demeaning Armenians in successive generations by dismissing the testimony of survivors and denigrating the memories of survivors and those who were killed in the Genocide. As Israel Charny has explained, denial of past genocide is a further attack on the victim group that traumatizes them even long after the genocide occurred.83 While it should go without saying that nothing can ever make up for the killings, rapes, and other tortures or the cultural, social, and other such losses, certainly something can be done, something significant, at least partially to balance their devastating, continuing effects. And, as material losses can be calculated along with their interest, clearly compensation should be made. Of course, to address the Genocide in a comprehensive manner, reparations should go beyond compensation, to active promotion of the well-being of the victim group. Only in this way can the present effects of the material, social, political, and psychological harms of the Genocide be mitigated. This is not simply a matter of abstract justice, though such justice is clearly warranted for the victim group. The direct effect of the
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Genocide was widespread and deep destruction of not simply individual Armenian lives, but the social structures both binding people together and providing a basis for their individual existences. The destruction of the material and relational aspects of Armenian peoplehood continues to undermine the long-term viability of Armenians as a group. Given just how devastating the Genocide was and is for the Armenian nation, understood as the current republic, the territory of Karabakh, and the global Armenian diaspora, reparations can be seen as essential to preventing an otherwise quite probable collapse of Armenian identity and group existence. In this sense, the moral justification for reparations is quite simple: the perpetrator group that sought the destruction of the victim group imposes on itself and its heirs the responsibility to guarantee the survival and reasonable viability of the victim group. Understood this way, reparations are not an abstract moral or legal imperative but a necessary and the most appropriate response to the destructiveness of genocide. Of course, one might also cite international law84 or appeal to general ethical principles (such as the Aristotelian view that an unjust harm must be balanced by restorative measures meant to return the state of affairs as much as possible to the conditions before the harm was inflicted, a Utilitarian calculation that would find the great suffering of the victims in every dimension of their existence as it continues today to far outweigh any inconvenience or indeed more significant loss reparations would mean for the perpetrator community, or a rights-based theory that holds that, for instance, stolen property remains illegitimately held until it is restored to its original owners).85 These supplement and serve to support the basic argument from responsibility made here. This argument might be understood to combine rights-based and Utilitarian elements, but underlying it is more of a feminist ethical theory which holds that oppression, domination, and violent harm based on social categorization is a pervasive and substantial part of the human condition in its present and most past forms, and that ending oppression and supporting victim groups human rights and equality of access to the material and mental resources of a decent existence is a fundamental ethical value.86 As noted, a Utilitarian approach also takes account of the benefits and harms that a reparations process has on the perpetrator group. For
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instance, if a reparations package were to entail imposing on members of the perpetrator group conditions that would result in deaths, while the benefits to victims would not prevent deaths, the package would be morally unacceptable as compared to the status quo or some other package that would not have deadly impact. Too often, however, the negative effects on the perpetrator group are misunderstood in two key ways. First, it is assumed that improvement in the situation of victims inevitably corresponds to a calamitous worsening of the situation of members of the perpetrator group. Indeed, in the United States, for instance, the idea of land reparations to Native American groups is treated as an existential disaster that is too terrible even to be discussed, let alone acted on. But giving reparations is not necessarily a net loss for perpetrator groups. In the case under discussion, for example, a reparative process can result in a democratic and human rights transformation of Turkey. Whereas recognition and dialogue leave untouched the basic problem in Turkey, reparation requires direct acknowledgment of the depth of the harms done to Armenians and the real responsibility of Turkey for addressing them. It is predicated on recognition that Turks today benefit from the genocide, often in gross material terms, such as family fortunes, houses, and businesses that were originally taken by participants in the Genocide.87 Educational and political reparations will reflect Turkish recognition of the depth to which contemporary Turkish military and political culture were influenced and even formed through the process of genocide, and how many particular direct perpetrators had a role in shaping the Turkey that emerged from the ashes of World War I.88 It finally gives the Turkish populace the tools to understand the roots of human rights abuses against Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and even fellow Turks today. Second, it treats as neutral the current genocide-produced status quo. If it is true that some or many perpetrator group members would experience land reparations to Armenians, for instance, as a profound and unfair loss, this is due to the fact that these individuals treat the issue ahistorically. Perpetrator group members do not have a right to the status quo, which was produced through genocide. Making reparations is not a harm and certainly not unjust, even if it means a relative loss for some contemporary Turks.89
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It should also be emphasized that the present argument concerns group, not individual reparations. It is the future viability of Armenians as an identity group that is at stake for reparations, just as it was the destruction of Armenians as a group presence within the Ottoman Turkish state and society that was the goal of the genocide. While the genocidal destruction has of course affected dramatically individual Armenians, genocide is a group harm, not an individual one, and reparations for genocide should be group reparations, not individual ones. Within Armenian circles in the past few years there has emerged a certain confusion about this, and most discussion of Armenian Genocide reparations has focused on individual reparations pursued through lawsuits often class action or group lawsuits, but that does not change the nature of the reparations sought. The distinction here is crucial. Individual reparations push for compensation or return of property to individuals based on their family members losses. They are often discussed as reparations for the Armenian Genocide, and it is true that the losses occurred as part of the Genocide, but they are not actually Genocide reparations. This is true in two ways. First, while an infusion of funds to individual Armenians might have some positive indirect benefits for the community as a whole, such individual compensation/ return is not intended or marked for community benefit.90 Second, such claims are based on losses incurred through the Genocide and not on the Genocide as a harm itself. Thus, these reparations are not for the Genocide itself but for specific components of the Genocide that would have been wrong if done unjustly regardless of whether a genocide occurred or not. Putting these losses in the context of the Genocide certainly helps the plaintiffs cases by making the harms seem especially unjust, but this is in essence a use of the Genocide for other purposes than to address it as a whole. This is not meant in any way to disparage those who pursue such reparations, as plaintiffs appear to understand their actions as pursuit of justice for the Genocide given that other avenues have been blocked, while it is also true that the harms addressed by such reparations are true harms and should be addressed. But in the end such efforts reduce the Genocide to component acts and undermine engagement of the Genocide as a mass human rights violation requiring repair itself. Furthermore, such lawsuits also have little to no impact
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on Turkey and the Armenian-Turkish relationship. It is only when substantial reparations that are explicitly reparations for the wrong of genocide are made that this relationship is addressed. A specific set of reparations for the Armenian Genocide should include the following. First, Turkey must return or compensate for all expropriated property. It should return land and other wealth, when that wealth has been preserved. It should also compensate for (1) all destroyed property and wealth that is otherwise no longer accessible, (2) the interest that can be calculated on the original material losses, (3) slave labor, (4) the pain and suffering of those who died and all who survived, (5) the loss of 1.5 million people in general and as specific family and community members, and (6) the loss of cultural, religious, and educational institutions and opportunities. Second, Turkey must take active steps to support in the Armenian Republic, Turkey, and the Genocide-produced Diaspora the redevelopment of Armenian social, political, economic, etc., structures, institutions, and capacities toward fuller reconstruction of the victim group than has been possible under the pressure of Turkish domination and given uncompensated Armenian losses. This should include economic support, in the forms of investment and trade. Third, the Turkish government must fully admit all aspects of the Genocide, ensure meaningful knowledge of and engagement with that history by the Turkish population, and promote broad global awareness and understanding of the Armenian Genocide. Fourth, the Turkish state and society must go through a rehabilitative process which will be aided by the giving of material reparations to Armenians finally to extirpate all elements of genocidal ideology, institutional practices, traditions, and forms, and to transform prejudicial Turkish attitudes toward Armenians, including elements of the dominant Turkish national identity built on a sense of entitled imperial superiority to Armenians and other groups. This process should address domination over and violence against women and girls universally in connection to the rape and sexual enslavement central to the Armenian Genocide, which must be seen as having targeted Armenian women as women as well as Armenians. Finally, in view of its Genocide-augmented strength and political position and the weakening of Armenians, Turkey must assume responsibility for the security of the two current Armenian states until such time as the effects of the Genocide
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no longer undermine their security and they are free from external threats and post-imperial domination by other powers. To be effective, however, the process must be participatory, rather than imposed91: if it is merely imposed on Turkey, it will not achieve or reflect internal change, but in fact will reinforce anti-Armenian attitudes and support an increased sense of entitlement relative to Armenians. But that does not mean that external pressure both political pressure and moral condemnation will not help push a critical mass of Turks toward embrace of meaningful engagement with the Armenian Genocide. If the current ethos of Turkish society, as well as governmental agenda, is to find a way of resolving a growing disquiet and even guilt over the history with an underlying desire to maintain the post-genocidal status quo without questioning the gains that still accrue from the Genocide, then the question of reparations is crucial. While dialogue and recognition will leave the problem untouched, in such a case an Armenian push for reparations at the very least can expose the real issue at stake, a desire to be let off the hook without meaningful steps. From there, internal and external forces could drive a reparative process. It is worth noting that a genuine, internally-embraced process is historically rare if it has occurred at all. Here the possibility of tapping Turkish national pride and transforming it in a positive direction emerges: Turkey can move to the cutting-edge of moral legitimacy in a new age of repair, offering it a chance to leap to the front of the global ethical hierarchy, rather than to continue to languish near the bottom with other blatantly unrepentant perpetrators whose abuses continue. The granting of reparations to Armenians will not be the end of Turkey or a crisis for its national identity, but on the contrary will ground a stronger and globally-respected national identity. The benefits for Turkish state and society should not, however, be its motive for reparation. Too frequently anti-oppression arguments are made by appeal to the self-interest of perpetrators, as for instance when appeals are made to US corporations to stop discriminating explicitly or implicitly against women and racial minorities, because in so doing they deprive themselves of many employees more talented and capable than some of those they are actually hiring, which means they harm their own profit margins. While this might be true, oppression must be opposed
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because it is wrong even if it were to benefit the perpetrators. Otherwise, the principle in play will be that one should not oppress racial, gender, etc., groups whenever it is against ones interest to do so, the implication being that it is fine to do so when it is in ones interest to do so. Genocide itself is pursued quite often because it is in the interests of those who gain land and wealth, political power and apparent moral legitimacy, through it. And reparations are right not only when they benefit the perpetrator community, but under all circumstances of unjustified mass harm. In this sense, a genocide can only be resolved through sacrifice which is precisely what dialogue and recognition seek to avoid. This is the fact that confronts Turkey today. It is true that this sacrifice is unfairly imposed on Turks today, except for active deniers. Even some who benefit financially, for instance, by living on a formerly Armenian plot of land that they paid hard-earned money to purchase from previous Turkish owners, face an unfair burden in this way. But, the burden imposed by a genocide is unfair for both the victim group and those in the perpetrator group who are not direct perpetrators, either at the time of genocide or because they are from later generations. Given the status quo, it is easy to understand resistance by Turks today to taking responsibility for a past harm that they had no hand in. It is unfair that they should have to pay a price for what their ancestors did, even if much of that price will be paid from the long-term proceeds of ill-gotten gain from genocide. One of the long-term tragedies of genocide is the forcing of later generations of perpetrator group members into complicity by integrating the gains of genocide into the very economic, political, and cultural structures of the perpetrator group. Yet, this unfairness is not imposed by Armenians and Armenians pushing for reparations today are not harming Turks. On the contrary, it is their own ancestors who have imposed any contemporary harm on todays Turks. What is more, the burden of the past that would be unfairly borne by Turks today if a comprehensive set of reparations were made is miniscule compared to the burden that has been and continues to be borne by Armenians.92 Armenians, moreover, have no say in bearing this burden it is imposed on them. Turks do have a choice, which means that they have a genuine chance to demonstrate moral righteousness in addressing the Genocide issue. While reparations might be seen as an expression or result of a
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changed attitude in Turkey, they can also change attitudes. If a critical mass in Turkey can push enough to begin a process of reparations, the transformative power might feed on itself and produce a full reparative process. If this is not possible, then however much the concerned parties might cover up this fact through dialogue and other rhetorical methods, the fact will be that the Armenian Genocide is not resolvable. At least this should be understood, and the responsibility for the failure of ArmenianTurkish relations placed squarely on contemporary Turkey. With the foregoing in mind, it comes to appear strange that those promoting dialogue never see reparations as the key component of any dialogue process. It is only through reparation that the impact of the past and the domination relation it has produced can be balanced. It is true that, even with comprehensive repair, just in sheer numbers as well as by most other indicators, the Turkish state and society will continue to enjoy a significant power differential relative to Armenians. But precisely through actions that intentionally sacrifice elements of that relative power that is, material and political reparations Turks will show a kind of good will that sets aside and balances that power differential in Armenian-Turkish relations. Mere claims that the power is being set aside (which, tellingly, are not part of any of the dialogue models discussed above) are only rhetorical and ring false precisely when the material conditions of the dominance in question are maintained unabashedly and forcefully. Through genuine reparation, Turks themselves will set the differential aside, rather than insisting that nothing that is said or done reach down to affect it. Indeed, they will use that differential to help Armenians economically, in terms of security, etc. rather than maintain power over them. Meaningful dialogue honest, mutual interactions and relationship building between the former perpetrator and victim groups, between dominant and dominated group, is only possible in such a context. In this sense, the symbolic value of reparations includes admission and education. It is with this in mind that the concern about the backlash against a push for reparations can be correctly understood. To the extent that the expectation is correct and it is evident even in the reactions of many progressive Turks93 it is not a demonstration of the inappropriateness of reparations, but rather of the depth of the problem reparations are being called upon to address. If reparations (1) are objectively right and fair, (2) should be embraced by
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Turks truly committed to doing the right thing and respecting Armenian rights, and (3) are necessary for the long-term viability of Armenians that is the only way that the Genocide will not be completely successful, then this kind of resistance actually demonstrates that those resisting hold deep antiArmenian attitudes and approve of the Genocide implicitly if not explicitly. If harmonious relations with Turks depend on Armenians not asking for basic justice and respect for their rights, then this means that nothing will have changed in the Turkish-Armenian domination relationship. It will just be that, so long as Armenians remain subservient and deferential and forego assertion of their basic historical rights and thus of their humanity, Turks will have no need to demonstrate their true attitudes toward Armenians and to expose the true nature of the Turkish-Armenian relation by asserting their dominant power. Indeed, if this is what progress through dialogue means, Armenian-Turkish dialogue will hide and leave intact the anti-Armenian prejudice present in Turkish culture and politics. As long as Armenians defer to Turkish interests, power, and insecurities there will be no tensions. However, as soon as Armenians expect to be treated as real human beings whose rights are respected, the anti-Armenianism lurking beneath the surface of Turkish society will emerge, as it did in the 2007 assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, whether it was a calculated message to Armenians or a spontaneous assertion of destructiveness and dominance. The refusal by many Turks to entertain the notion of land reparations is a particularly telling example of the persisting attitudes that are the true obstacle to meaningful progress in Turkish-Armenian relations. Those who hold the view that Turkish territorial integrity is sacrosanct such that even lands taken from Armenians through genocide are now perceived to be inherently and inalienably Turkish in fact maintain the same genocidal ideology that motivated and justified violent Turkification of these lands. To view Armenian lands as Turkish is to embrace the results of the Genocide.
A Pipe-Dream?
Of course, there are many in Turkey, the Armenian community, and the broader world who see reparations as hopelessly naive and idealistic. I counter that reparations are the reaction to the 1915 Genocide that is the most bluntly realistic of all options. First, in
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recent years, a new global reparations movement has coalesced, with various groups participating, from African Americans and Native Americans to former Comfort Women victimized as sexual slaves by Japan during the Pacific War and South Africans victimized by Apartheid. Reparations for genocide, colonialism, slavery, mass rape, corporate harm and exploitation, and more could well be one of the central global political issues of the 21st Century and the movement for reparative justice the greatest transformative force of the next 90 years. The global reparations movement is the cornerstone of new visions of social, political, and economic progress and justice emerging and gaining momentum today. Armenian reparation efforts can and should be considered part of this global movement. Second, Armenians must realize that any apparent improvement in Armenian-Turkish relations made by setting aside reparation claims is illusory. So long as Turkey refuses reparations, the reality of Turkish unwillingness to reject the fruits of genocide and hence the Genocide itself will be clear. If a deal is struck that sets reparations aside, then any apparent improvement in relations will soon enough give way to the resurfacing of the same old attitudes and facts of domination by Turkey over Armenians only then with the further loss to Armenians of damaged legal and political rights to pursue justice for the Genocide and challenge the post-Genocide status quo. Turkey will finally have finished the Genocide by getting completely away with it. This is the underlying meaning of the current push toward rapprochement through the Armenia-Turkey diplomatic protocols: Turkeys final genocidal success. Insisting on reparations, on the contrary, is the only way to confirm that real changes in Turkish attitudes and the Armenian-Turkish power imbalance are occurring.
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NOTES
N.B.: The overall argument and various components of this article are an expansion of Henry Theriault, Land-based Reparations: The Case of the Armenian Genocide and Its Comparison to Native American Land Claims, paper presented at the Whose Debt? Whose Responsibility? International Symposium on Reparations, Worcester State University, December 10, 2005, and remarks given on the Reparations as Justice panel, Armenians and the Left symposium (April 7-9, 2006), City University of New York Graduate Center, April 8, 2006 an expansion that incorporates elements of the authors work for the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group as well as the following presented papers and publications: (1) The Challenge of the Armenian Genocide for 21st Century Turkey: Responsibility and Reparation Toward Resolution, paper presented at the 1915 Within Its Pre- and Post- Historical Periods: Denial and Confrontation symposium (April 24-25, 2010), Ankara, Turkey, April 25, 2010, (2) Restorative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide, paper presented at the Armenian Genocide and International Law Conference, Haigazian University, Beirut, Lebanon, September 4, 2009, (3) Reinstating the Rights of the Armenian People and Armenian-Turkish Relations, paper presented at the PanArmenian Conference for the Discussion of Armenian-Turkish Relations and the Artsakh Conflict, Stepanakert, Republic of Mountainous Karabakh, July 10, 2009, (4) Post-Genocide Imperial Domination, in Controversy and Debate: Special Armenian Genocide Issue of the Armenian Weekly, April 24, 2007: 6-8, 26, and (5) Justice or Peace? The Meanings, Potentials, and Pitfalls of Armenian-Turkish Dialogue, paper presented at the International Association of Genocide Scholars 5th Biennial Conference (June 7-10, 2003), Irish Human Rights Center, National University of Ireland, June 8, 2003. 1 Obviously, this is a crude framework in identifying a binary opposition of political positions. The detailed picture is more complex, with various subcategories as well as political tendencies that do not fit neatly into one or the other main tendency, while there are also present trends such as Islamic movements that are broader than Turkey. 2 See, for instance, Taner Akam, Dialogue Across an International Divide: Essays Toward a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue (Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 2001), pp. 94-96. All subsequent references to Akam are to this work unless otherwise indicated. 3 See, for instance, Esra Elmas, Interview with K.M. Greg Sarkissian, President of the Zoryan Institute, Agos, August 10-15, 2011, http://www.zoryaninstitute. org/Announcements/Agos%20interview%20with%20Greg%20Sarkissian%20 August%2015,%202011-English.pdf (accessed September 3, 2011). 4 The current issue of The Armenian Review has been conceived with this in mind, extending the cases even beyond different genocides, to include processes of slavery, mass rape, and apartheid. 5 See, for example, Robert K. Hitchcock and Tara M. Twedt, Chapter 13: Physical and Cultural Genocide of Indigenous Peoples, in Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accountsd, 3rd ed., edited by Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 413-58; Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). 6 See, for example, Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights, 1997).
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8 9 10 11 12
13 14
15 16 17
To get a sense of the history of genocide and many of the cases that are parts of it, see for instance, Israel Charny, editor, The Encyclopedia of Genocide, Vols. 1 and 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1999); Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, editors, Centuries of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 4th edition (New York: Routledge, 2013 [actual release 2012]). R. J. Rummel, The New Concept of Democide, in The Encyclopedia of Genocide, Vol. 1, edited by Israel Charny (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1999), pp. 18-23. See, for instance, A. Dirk Moses, Moving the Genocide Debate Beyond the History Wars, Australian Journal of Politics and History 54 (2) (2008): 248-70. Henry C. Theriault, Rousseau, Plato, and Western Philosophys Anti-Genocidal Strain, in Metacide: In the Pursuit of Excellence, Value Inquiry Book Series, Vol. 216, edited by James R. Watson (New York: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 193-210 at 199-201. See, for example, Martha Minow, The Hope for Healing: What Can Truth Commissions Do?, in Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions (Princeton: Princeton, 2000): pp. 235-60. Some argue that attempts to achieve recognition through political means produce a defensive backlash by Turks (see, for instance, Akam 13-14 and David L. Phillips, Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation [New York: Berghahn, 2005], pp. 31, 36, 48). While the point is not addressed in the present paper, the argument later in this paper regarding the backlash that reparation claims are supposed to invite applies as readily to recognition efforts. See Theriault, Genocide, Denial, and Domination: Armenian-Turkish Relations From Conflict Resolution to Just Transformation, Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies 1 (2) (September 2009): 82-96 at 93-95. Theriault, Prevention, Intervention, and the Obstacle of Genocide Denial, in Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, Vol. 8: Impediments to the Prevention of and Intervention Against Genocide, edited by Samuel Totten (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, forthcoming). As, for instance, argued by Margaret Urban Walker in her nuanced Truth Telling as Reparations, Metaphilosophy 41 (4) (July 2010): 525-45. James Rachels, The Argument From Mercy, in Ethical Theory and Social Issues: Historical Texts and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed., edited by David Theo Goldberg (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace, 1995), pp. 476-77. While for Armenians outside of the Turkish Republic, the Armenian Republic, and the Republic of Mountainous Karabakh denial represents the most apparent ongoing form of oppression, the point here applies more generally to other cases and beyond denial, to any ending of prejudicial attitudes and other features of oppression in the aftermath of a central harm or sequence of harms. For instance, as Jermaine McCalpin points out in his contribution to this journal issue, Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America, Armenian Review, Volume 53, no. 1-4 (SpringWinter, 2012), just because broad personal racially prejudicial attitudes against African Americans have been challenged enough to allow a half African American to become U.S. President does not mean that the centuries of mass damage inflicted on people of African descent in the United States have suddenly been addressed or the contemporary impacts of that damage substantially mitigated. Similarly, just because the 1934 Wheeler-Howard Act appeared to grant real religious freedom to Native Americans does not mean that they actually had religious freedom following
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18 19
20 21
22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33 34 35
its passage or that the effects of centuries of religious suppression were suddenly erased (Maureen E. Smith, Crippling the Spirit, Wounding the Soul: Native American Spiritual and Religious Suppression, in American Indian Thought, edited by Anne Waters [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004], pp. 116-29 at 124-28). Taner Akcam, op. cit. Elazar Barkan, Can Memory of Genocide Lead to Reconciliation?, in The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, edited by Richard Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), pp. 389-408. All subsequent references to Barkan are to this work unless otherwise indicated. David L. Phillips, op. cit. Ronald Grigor Suny and Fatma Mge Gek, Introduction: Leaving It to the Historians, in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Mge Gek, and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford, 2011), pp. 3-11. For a highly insightful analysis of the approach explained in this introduction, see Marc Mamigonian, A Question of Genocide . . . and More Questions, The Armenian Weekly Magazine, April 2011: 33-36. Harut Sassounian, Cemal Pashas Grandson Says Genocide, Morgenthaus Great Granddaughter Doesnt, Armenian Weekly Online, April 5, 2011, http://www. armenianweekly.com/2011/04/05/cemal-pasha/ (accessed September 14, 2012). A crucial contrast between Steiner and Akam, however, is that in public statements Steiner has indicated reluctance to insist on the characterization of what happened in 1915 as a genocide up front, while Akam shows no hesitation. Subjects & Citizens: (Un)even Relations between Turks, Kurds, and Armenians panel, Bentley University, Waltham, Massachusetts, April 20, 2009. See, for instance, Phillips, pp. 1-5, 30. Akam, pp. 11-16, 21-23. Akam, p. 37; Barkan, p. 390. See also Akam, From Empire to Republic: Turkish Nationalism & the Armenian Genocide (London: Zed, 2004), pp. 244-250; Suny and Gek, pp. 6, 11. Phillips, p. 3. See especially Phillips, pp. 61-62. Phillips, p. 43. Phillips, pp. 27-36. While Akam is alone in pointing out that there could be a problem applying the term to Armenians and Turks in the same way (Akam, p. 33), elsewhere he does just that. For instance, he states that he feels that, despite the incidence of diverse features and attributes, both societies, i.e., Turkish and Armenian, experienced great traumas in their respective histories. The only way for them to extricate themselves from the ordeals of these trauma [sic.] is to come face to face with the events that helped create these traumas in the first place . . . To put it bluntly, Turks and Armenians have serious psychological problems. (Akam, pp. 22-23) Akam, pp. 22-23, 80-82; Barkan, p. 390; Phillips, pp. 41-42, 136-37. Akam, pp. 22-23, 33; Barkan, p. 390; Phillips, p. 30, 136-37. Phillips, pp. 45-46. See also Theriault, Universal Social Theory and the Denial of Genocide Norman Itzkowitz Revisited, Journal of Genocide Research 3 (2) (June 2001): 241-56. While the author is attempting to present these approaches in the best possible light and in neutral terms regardless of the views he will present below, he cannot go so
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far as to present as apparently factual that which is not. 36 See, for instance, Phillips, p. 44. 37 Akam, pp. 24, 29-30. 38 Barkan, 389-90, 406-07. See also Timothy W. Ryback and Elazar Barkan, A 12 Billion Dollar History Lesson, The New York Times, February 25, 2008, http://www.nytimes. com/2008/02/25/opinion/25iht-edryback.1.10369406.html (accessed September 16, 2012). 39 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, edited by Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), pp. 15-52. 40 Akam, p. 19, 29. This has been repeated and even amplified in public remarks by Akam, for instance, those made on the Armenia-Turkey Protocols: Challenges and Opportunities panel, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Clark University, December 4, 2009. 41 This paragraph follows for dialogue a similar point above made in reference to the ending of denial. 42 Takashi Yoshida, A Battle over History: The Nanjing Massacre in Japan, in Joshua A. Fogel (Ed.) The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, ed. Joshua A. Fogel (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2000), pp. 70-132. 43 Barkan, Amnesia, Truth, Reconciliation, After Nine Decades: The Enduring Legacy of the Armenian Genocide conference (April 1-3, 2005), University of California at Los Angeles, April 3, 2005. See also Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2000): pp. 232-61. 44 Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (Australia), April 1997, http://www.hreoc.gov.au/social_ justice/bth_report/report/index.html (accessed September 16, 2012). 45 See, for instance, Anne Davies, Apology Was a Mistake, Says Feisty Howard, The Age, http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/03/11/1205125911264.html (accessed September 16, 2012), and Germaine Greer, Worlds Apart, The Guardian, July 2, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jul/03/australia (accessed September 16, 2012). 46 See, for example, Moses, op. cit. Barkan does include discussion of the regressions and backlash in his overall history of this issue. Rather than taking seriously the negatives and recognizing a back-and-forth process whereby gains are consistently negated by regressions, he emphasizes the positive steps and tends to downplay the negatives, for instance seeing increased use of Aboriginal art as a positive celebration of Aborigines rather than an exploitation of the Aboriginal heritage for tourism and public image purposes that benefits non-Aborigines and not Aborigines (Barkan, The Guilt of Nations, pp. 236-37). 47 This notion was introduced in Theriault, Toward a New Conceptual Framework for Resolution: The Necessity of Recognizing the Perpetrator-Victim Dominance Relation in the Aftermath of Genocide, paper given at the International Association of Genocide Scholars 6th Biennial Conference (June 4-7), Boca Raton, FL, June 7, 2005. For more detailed analyses of elements of this issue, see Rethinking Dehumanization in Genocide, in The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, edited by Richard Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 2007), pp. 27-40; Post-Genocide Imperial Domination,; and From Past Genocide to Present Perpetrator-Victim Group Relations, in Commemorating Genocide: Images, Perspectives, Research (special Armenian Genocide issue of the Armenian
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Weekly, April 26, 2008), pp. 2-6. 48 On the massacres, see for instance George N. Shirinian, The Armenian Massacres of 1894-97, The Armenian Review 47 (1-2) (2001): 113-64. 49 See, for instance, Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, edited by Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2008), pp. 3-54; John Docker, Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-reading Lemkin, in Empire, Colony, Genocide, pp. 81-101. 50 On the battle, see Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (New York: St. Martins Press, 1980), p. 26. 51 Henry C. Theriault, Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship, Genocide Studies and Prevention 7 (1): 123-44 at 131-32. 52 It is strange that Ronald Suny, one of the originators and guides of WATS, has consistently failed to bring a material or structural power analysis to bear on the Armenian-Turkish relations, despite being sympathetic at the least to Marxian as well as other socialist ideas (see, for example, Ronald Grigor Suny, Back and Beyond: Reversing the Cultural Turn?, The American Historical Review 107 (5) (December 2002): 1476-79, http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.5/ ah0502001476.html (accessed September 16, 2012). Recognition of material hierarchies is central to Marxian thought, even if these are typically reduced to class relations. 53 The protocols include two key elements in this regard, a reconfirm[ation] of Armenias and Turkeys territorial integrity and inviolability of frontiers, and the creation of a joint Turkish-Armenian sub-commission on the historical dimension charged with yet again discussing whether there was a genocide, regardless of the mass of evidence already accumulated. See Protocol on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations Between the Republic of Turkey and the Republic of Armenia and Protocol on Development of Relations Between the Republic of Turkey and the Republic of Armenia, respectively, http://www.europarl.europa. eu/meetdocs/2009_2014/documents/d-tr/dv/1006_10_/1006_10_en.pdf (accessed September 16, 2012). 54 Akam, pp. 11-15; Phillips, pp. 27-36, especially p. 36. 55 On the Obama administrations position, see Michael Doyle, Will House Pass Armenian Genocide Resolution This Time?, McClatchy Newspapers, March 3, 2010, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/03/89796/will-house-pass-armeniangenocide.html (accessed September 16, 2012). 56 This follows feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnons analysis of the relegation of reproduction and sexuality to the private realm through the Roe v. Wade decision and other elements of U. S. political and legal structures and practices. When the government does not intervene in the private realm, it merely allows those who have power in that realm ( for MacKinnon, men) to assert that power over those who do not (women) without interference. MacKinnon, Abortion: On Public and Private, in Living With Contradictions: Controversies in Feminist Social Ethics, edited by Allison M. Jaggar (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), pp. 275-80. 57 A good example is Suny and Gek, pp. 5, 7, 8. 58 Phillips, pp. 61-69. 59 Phillips, pp. 61-62. 60 Phillips, p. 61. 61 See Richard G. Hovannisian, The Historical Dimensions of the Armenian
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Question, 1978-1923, in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1986). 62 It is crucial to recognize that not all Turkish nationalisms are these kinds of ultranationalism. Those alternative forms that promote human rights are not. 63 In any group, of course, there are a variety of nationalisms and almost inevitably some are extreme. But the main Armenian nationalisms are not, while the main Turkish nationalisms are extensions of the ideologies that produced genocide or the legacies of the Genocide. 64 Halil Berktay, A Genocide, Three Constituencies, Thoughts for the Future, paper given at the Armenians and the Left symposium, Harvard University, March 31, 2007. The video of the paper and the subsequent discussion is available at http://www. armeniansandtheleft.com/AATL2007/index.htm (accessed September 18, 2012). 65 Ibid. 66 Akam, p. 34. 67 For a compelling contemporary argument in this regard, see Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell, 1998), pp. 21-39. 68 Temel Derirer, remarks presented on the Reparations panel at the 1915 Within Its Pre- and Post-historical Periods: Denial and Confrontation symposium (April 24-25, 2010), Ankara, Turkey, April 25, 2010. 69 Theriault, Genocidal Mutation and the Challenge of Definition, Metaphilosophy 41 (4) (July 2010): 481-524 at 503-04. 70 See Theriault, Rethinking Dehumanization in Genocide. 71 Berktay, op. cit. 72 Kibibi Tyehimba, remarks given on the Reparations as Justice panel, Armenians and the Left symposium (April 7-9, 2006), City University of New York Graduate Center, April 8, 2006. 73 Theriault, Post-Genocide Imperial Domination. 74 Theriault, Reparational Efforts for Lost Armenian Properties, paper delivered at The Armenian Genocide: From Recognition to Reparation symposium (February 23-25, 2012), Antelias, Lebanon, February 25, 2012. To be very clear, this is not a matter of mere disagreement. It is not only perfectly acceptable but in fact advantageous to all parties for scholars and activists of Turkish or any other descent who disagree with land reparations to argue for their points publically and vigorously. The author has had very productive discussions on the issue with tremendously insightful and open-minded scholars such as Uur mit ngr, who has argued against land reparations for the Armenian Genocide on carefully thought out, rational grounds. The phenomenon explained here is something different where, without deliberation or debate, reparations is reduced conceptually to have an individual focus. 75 Theriault, Post-Genocide Imperial Domination. 76 See, for instance, Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 103-05. 77 A noteworthy example of the extensive evidence of these material losses is Grigoris Balakian, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918, translated by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), especially Chapter 22, Confessions of a Slayer Captain, pp. 139-50. 78 Uur mit ngr, The Economic Aspect of the Armenian Genocide in the Diyarbaker Region, paper given at Haigazian University, Beirut, Lebanon, September 4, 2009. 79 See, for example, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom,
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USCIRF Annual Report 2012 Countries of Particular Concern: Turkey, March 20, 2012, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4f71a67011.html (accessed September 18, 2012); Amnesty International, Turkey Fails to Deliver Justice for Murdered Armenian Journalist as Trial Ends, January 16, 2012, http://www. amnesty.org/en/news/turkey-fails-deliver-justice-murdered-armenian-journalisttrial-ends-2012-01-16 (accessed September 18, 2012); Minority Rights Group International, State of the Worlds Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2012 Turkey, June 28, 2012, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,MRGI,,TUR,4562d8 b62,4fedb3eb3c,0.html (accessed September 18, 2012). 80 Public lecture, Armenian Relief Society Armenian Summer Studies Program, Amherst College, July 1991. 81 The importance of economic expropriation is highlighted by Akam, who states that through the Genocide was created a new class of wealthy men in Anatolia who had enriched themselves thanks to the genocide. Even Turks point to the fact that the economic motive played an important role in the Armenian Genocide (Akam, pp. 93-94). See also Uur mit ngr and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum, 2011). 82 Demirer, op. cit. 83 Israel W. Charny, A Contribution to the Psychology of Denial of Genocide, Genocide & Human Rights: Lessons from the Armenian Experience, special issue of Journal of Armenian Studies 4 (1-2) (1992): 289-306 at 293-94, 299-301. 84 As Alfred de Zayas does in his contribution to this special issue, The Genocide Against the Armenians 1915-1923 and the Relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention, The Armenian Review, Volume 53, no. 1-4 (Spring-Winter, 2012). 85 For detailed applications of these ethical theories to the Armenian Genocide reparations case, see Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group, Resolution With Justice: Reparations for the Armenian Genocide, unpublished draft, November 2011, pp. 47-55. 86 Hilde Lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), pp. 11-12, 15-16. Note that Lindemanns and many other approaches to feminist ethics situate the oppression of women in relation to other forms of oppression, domination, and mass harm as also deserving moral challenge and rectification (see, for instance, Lindemann, pp. 30-38). 87 As treated, for instance, by ngr, The Economic Aspect of the Armenian Genocide in the Diyarbaker Region. 88 Akam, From Empire to Republic, pp. 10, 23. 89 This exposes an interesting limitation of Utilitarian ethics. While the method is overly flexible and an argument for a properly historical approach to the Armenian Genocide could be made on Utilitarian grounds as an argument for just about anything could be the most obvious application of the method to the issue would hold that nothing can be done to address the suffering that has already occurred and if Turks will suffer more today from reparations than Armenians will gain then reparations are not justified. Given that many Armenians have adjusted to their situation of subjugation and loss and that Armenians are far less numerous than Turks, the total subjective pain felt by all Armenians if no repair is made is significantly less than that Turks will experience if the status quo is changed through reparations. Indeed, the fact that there are relatively few Armenians compared to many times as many Turks means that Turks will outweigh Armenians in a Utility
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calculation precisely as an effect of the genocidal reduction of the Armenian population. It is true that some individuals would donate what they receive to Armenian organizations and unclaimed funds might be given to Armenian organizations, and it is also true that the New York Life settlement included $3 million for 9 Armenian civic organizations (Henry Weinstein, Insurer Settles Armenian Genocide Suit, Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2004, http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/29/local/ me-genocide29 [accessed September 18, 2012]). None of this should be downplayed, but the very nature of such cases still turns on individual claims and individual recipients. McCalpin, Beyond the Protocols: The Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group Report and the Future of Armenian-Turkish Relations panel, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, May 14, 2010; Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group, Resolution With Justice, p. 77. Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group, Resolution With Justice, p. 68. This is especially widespread in reference to land reparations. For instance, Akam rejects without any meaningful engagement reparative land claims, holding them to be solely a means of psychological agitation and that those who do not want this problem [the Armenian-Turkish tension] solved deliberately put forward an issue that they themselves know not to be there. He continues that the subject of land and borders, as a rule, falls in the domain of war and power relations and cannot be discussed under the heading of rights and justice despite routine inclusion of land issues in works on reparative justice in the area of philosophical ethics. (Akam, p. 26) Another example is Baskin Orans comments from the audience suggesting the nonsensicality of Armenian land claims in response to Theriault, The Challenge of the Armenian Genocide for 21st Century Turkey.
Reparations, Odious Debt, and Their Global Implications

M.P. Giyose
The Debt to the Indebted:
The General Problem: Colonialisms Unpayable Debt

If the scale and deep outstanding injustice of the range of harms done globally by colonialism and its attendant slavery, genocide, etc., are taken seriously and thus reparations are recognized as legitimate, a difficult question emerges: how can the North discharge the settlement of so monumental a debt to societies of the South? Is such a discharge practicable? The question has to be posed quite regardless of the lies and deliberate promises given in mendacity by such ruling classes as those in the United States, when they pretended restorative programs of uplift to the slaves whom they took out of the plantation economy of the U. S. South. Can the global North truly work out a program of reparations for the global South in the emerging economy of our times? Taken on a world scale and extending from 1400 to 2000, the claims of the countries of the South are literally both astronomical and immeasurable, stupendous and beyond calculation. On this basis it is perhaps not too difficult to conclude that current Northern societies do not possess the capacity, in spite of their incredible wealth, to repay the debt that they owe the South. In a punitive understanding of reparations equal to that of European powers in the 19th Century, the combined capacities of all Northern societies would not be able to satisfy a dollar for dollar repayment of all that they owe the South. This is not only a measure of the gargantuan proportions of the Northern debt; it is an indicator of the unimaginable degree of conspicuous consumption that has become the hallmark of Northern societies in the last six hundred
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years. The wanton wastefulness of their system of producing and distributing wealth cannot now in any way be repaid by the children of Northern societies, even if the sins of their forefathers were visited unto the seventh generation. Clearly, a rational method has to be designed and adopted so that the scales of history should be re-weighted in a manner that would enable the sustained survival of human civilization in terms of obligations admitted by all sides in current society.
The Continuing Impact of Apartheid

The harms of Apartheid can be divided into three broad categories. First is the system itself, with its normalized regimentation of labor ( forced labor) in farming areas, mines, and elsewhere. Workers were subjected to the most savage methods of producing goods and carrying out instructions. To this might be added such harms as human rightsviolating medical experimentation. Second is the governmental response to the inevitable resistance to the violence and injustice of the Apartheid system. In the course of the anti-Apartheid struggle a great many of the partisans were slaughtered by those in power. These were various forms of what we have now come to term extra-judicial killings. The criminal killings happened in police cells, in the streets, in the townships, in the prisons, in the Bantustans, and in all manner of other places. In the police cells and/ or prisons, at the same time, people who had sometimes been rounded up indiscriminately were subjected to various forms of torture in order for them to make confessions of one type or another. Others, primarily females, were raped by their incarcerators either indiscriminately or as an even more barbaric form of torture. Many families lost loved ones who just disappeared. In some areas in the country, murder squads operated and turned those places into no-go areas, bombing or burning down residences. In the Bantustans, property was seized and cattle and sheep confiscated and used as booty for the fascist gangs to feed on or carry away as the spoils of war. These are some of the more extreme forms of human rights violations on record. The technology employed in all these types of activities, including civil actions, was produced and supplied by civilized companies that
The Debt to the Indebted
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are still doing business even today on a South African nexus both at home and abroad. The technology itself translated into machines and forms of power. This is a narrower establishment of the connections between violations of human rights and corporate behaviour. Seen in its broader proportions, the system was comprehensive and boiled down to a very particular form of racial capitalism. In their broader proportions these human rights violations also included a great assortment of deprivations endured by the oppressed. It is important to consider the role of these deprivations as part of the content of the oppressive system because the new human rights culture which South Africa today wants to be part of, cannot be conceived in the continuing presence of deprivations in water, power, housing, education, health, sanitation, and transport facilities. Both of these general harms continue to impact South African society today, in the form of individual physical injuries and psychological trauma, lost loved ones, and lost economic production and accumulation. A third harm also dramatically affects South Africa even years after the fall of the Apartheid system. This is the harm of debt. Apartheid debt is a historical debt that first grew in South Africa in the period between the two world wars of the Twentieth Century. This debt was designed to provide for the building of the South African economy. As such, it was a debt designed to support national oppression and economic exploitation of the racially-designated toiling masses in South Africa. It also financed and under-girded racial, class, and gender differentiation. In the later years of the system of racial capitalism, it became a specific instrument for the brutalization of the working people as they became more and more locked into mortal combat with the forces of social repression. It thus fashioned itself into an instrument of those same types, groups, and modes of human rights violations already referred to. Apartheid debt financed extra-judicial killings, mass murders, many forms of human torture, rape as a condition of oppression and repression, kidnappings of militants, disappearances of the fighters and other associated persons, and so forth. This debt was increased in 1985 when the South African Government first failed to honor its debt to the external creditors of the country. Divestment had affected the South African economy and government revenues. While no banks were supposed to be giving loans to South
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Africa at this time, the Botha Government began to negotiate with a committee of South Africas creditors led by a Swiss banker. The Botha Government was ostensibly negotiating for a rescheduling of earlier debt payments, but secretly looking for avenues to open up new credit lines. Indeed, these bankers aided the Botha Government in both its public and its secret purposes. Debt payments were rescheduled in 1989 for 15 years. In the meantime new debts were created with overseas creditor companies in four strategic areas, all critical in the extension of a life-line to the Apartheid government in the face of embargo and divestment. These credit lines were in: arms and ammunition, military transportation vehicles, oil supplies, and new money. While the credits in the first three cost centers went directly to service the needs of the Apartheid army and police force, credits for the fourth have been traced principally to those Apartheid parastate organizations that developed the Apartheid infrastructure. Some of this money was used to finance the roll-over of credit from the due date to a rescheduled time. These credits have been traced to overseas suppliers and their local collaborators. The suppliers of overseas credits have been found to include a group of some twenty-two corporations operating from Switzerland, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Netherlands. It should be remembered that this all was happening at a time when the United Nations General Assembly had declared Apartheid to be a crime against humanity.
South African Reparations

The losses imposed by the system of Apartheid on its victims are extensive. Apartheid represented a massive forced labor campaign that extracted tremendous wealth from the target communities in the form of their labor, which enriched the white minority. Given the illegitimacy of the racist Apartheid system that was confirmed by the moral arguments and political steps against it across the world and the clear opportunity white South Africans had to recognize Apartheids wrongness, reparations are clearly owed for what was expropriated through Apartheid. Similarly, reparations are warranted for the harms done by the governmental human rights violations that protected the Apartheid system from the legitimate protests against it.
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These two forms of, and justifications for, reparations are perhaps legally and even politically uncontroversial, even if various power and political considerations have prevented them from being realized through the Truth and Reconciliation or any other process in postApartheid South Africa. But a third type of reparation is not so easily recognized even when the first two are: reparation as cancellation of Apartheid-era debt. Apartheid debt can be classified as odious debt, that is, illegitimate debt. Through this the two questions of Human Rights and Reparations and Debt and Reparations are joined by the dynamics of social struggle. We have to pay attention to the way in which these questions also become linked to kindred social issues in the wider segments of the exploited masses in South Africa. In addition to Afrikaner governments, a number of multinational corporations profited from and supported Aparheid, including through the provision of loans. They have uniformly refused to pay reparations or cancel debts. These include Barclays National Bank, British Petroleum, Citigroup, Chevron Texaco, Commerzbank, Credit Suisse, Daimler Chrysler, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Fluor Corporation, Ford Motor Company, Fujitsu, General Motors, International Business Machines, JP Morgan Chase, Rheinmetall, Rio Tinto, Royal Dutch Shell, Total Fina Elf, and UBS.
Understanding Debt as Oppression

The long history of debt in modern society goes through slavery, capitalism, and colonialism. History books have depicted colonial history as studies in the spread of Western Civilization. In that way they were able to mask a history in the South built around slavery and the colonial character of capitalism across the seas. This went on in the manner of ecological pillage, brutal subjugation of peoples and their environments, the spoliation of their natural resources, the carting of the same as loot back to European metropoles, the conversion of their lands to the production of commercial agricultural products that fed European industries, etc. Presentation of this as incremental progress in human culture thus avoids the principle question: culture borne on whose backs? The clear answer is, on the backs of slaves, peasants, and
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working people. We now know that at the end of the colonial period, in Africa alone the claimed colonial debt in bookkeeping terms added up to some 27 million pounds sterling owed to the colonizers. That is to say, far from recognizing the true debt owed by the rulers and imperialists to the colonized people of Africa, this continent was saddled with a monetary deficit in favor of Europe to the tune of the sum above. The current phase of the third world debt problem in capitalism began around 1970 with the colossal collapse in commodity prices on the international market. Goods from former colonies lost heavily in trade, and the lost revenues could only be replaced via huge borrowings from the countries that possessed surpluses in money. Now as an industry, Western finance opened a vast trade in financial stocks. Overnight the loans simply broke the back of colonial economies. Instead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) coming to the aid of the countries of the South whose trade crisis was becoming a warring phenomenon, the revenue gap was filled rather by means of new loan agreements with Southern governments. This occurred at the same time that liberalization policies were also being extended to the trade arena. The catastrophe for Southern economies has only translated to an even more monumental growth in debt bills. Thus the equation was completed, which is to say, debt plus trade equals more debt. The deteriorating terms of trade were only worsened when conditions for trading were loaded further against the Southern countries. To the long line of historical illegitimate debts was now added a new generation the effect of which was to create poverty in the Third World on a scale never reached before in the annals of human history. These debts then grew dramatically, without new borrowing. A key factor was that the crisis that built up around the U. S. economy from about 1970 onwards was addressed by the method of de-linking the U. S. dollar from gold. In the Bretton Woods system, established after World War II, the value of currency was tied to the value of the stock of goods produced by the economy. This, in turn, was tied to the value of gold stocks available in the country at that time. This was known as the gold standard and particularly governed the relation of the US dollar in economic transactions. However, there were vast pressures under which the dollar fell at the end of the 1960s. The political turmoil in Africa was
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leading every territory on that continent into independence. Economic crises in Europe had led to the students uprisings of 1968. The wars in Indo-China, led by anti-colonial military victories in Vietnam that were achieved in spite of the huge financial and military outlay committed by the United States to that war, brought about an unprecedented drain on American resources. By 1971, the United States was ready to unilaterally break with the Bretton Woods system. It delinked the dollar from gold, thus ushering in a new era of financial liberalization. The immediate consequence was the dollar assuming the status of international currency of choice in international trade and other financial relations. And this immediately put all other currencies in the world on notice in the matter of developing a relationship with the dollar. It was in dollar terms, therefore that the debt, especially of Third World countries, was now to be computed. In 1977, when the United States economy was faced with rising inflation and unemployment, the US Federal Reserve raised the interest rate primarily to beat down inflation. This also served to bring in higher revenues from US debts and dollar exchanges in foreign lands. The US change spurred a broader liberalization of currency, which always works in the favor of countries with the strongest economies at any given time. A regime of financial inequality was therefore introduced whose effect was a continual build up of debts in all the countries of the world whose economies, and therefore currencies, were weakening in relation to the dollar on a progressive scale. This again was driving Southern countries into debt by means of financial subterfuge. This is why, for instance, an Argentine debt that stood at a modest $7 billion in 1972 was catapulted to sums many more times its original size by the end of that decade, without the country taking any new loans. In particular, the Mexican debt that burst upon the world in 1982 was caused by the inability of Mexico to pay back what originally had been modest borrowing that mushroomed with this fundamental shift in currency value. A pulsating interest rate in circumstances of either low growth or stagnation in the internal means of satisfying it has been the greatest source of financial indebtedness in the South during our time.
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Horace Campbell explains the general effect beautifully in his Restructuring the World Economy (Ben Turok, 1991):
In the 1980s interest rates such as the London Interbank Offer Rate (LIBOR), to which the service charges on Third World debt were fixed, rose with the fluctuating rates in the USA. LIBOR rose from 6 percent in the mid-1970s to an average of 16.5 per cent in 1981, peaking at no less than 19 per cent in 1983. It was estimated that each rise of one percent in interest rates added over US$6 Billion to the debt bills of the less-developed countries (LDCs). (page 23)
The consequences of this situation were dire. The problem of debt was put into even clearer relief when, at about this time and linked to the recession in the United States and other countries of the North, a colossal collapse occurred in the value of commodity prices on the world markets. Primary products from the Third World were failing to fetch the expected amounts of revenue in world trade, and the social changes that had been inaugurated in their post-independence budgets were deeply compromised. Since the question of the trade and management of debt was now becoming part and parcel of the broader restructuring of the world economy, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were brought onto the scene. They bailed out the US banks by taking over the Third World debt and, in so doing, gained control over the economies of the Third World countries. They extended loans so that countries could pay their debt, but only on condition that the countries concerned adopted their structural adjustment programs. Other financial institutions took their cue from the IMF and World Bank: if Third World countries did not toe the line, they were increasingly unable to obtain financial resources. During the 1980s, African scholars such as Bade Onimode developed their critiques of the structural adjustment role being played by these two organizations in respect to the African debt. Austerity measures dictated by the Bretton Woods organizations did not help, but rather threw into even greater crisis the social conditions in these countries economies. Debt, which was growing to frightening proportions, was at the center of the medicine offered. A graphic picture of the tragic circumstances that were wrought on African societies
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is painted again by Horace Campbell. After indicating a sad review of the emerging conditions in 1988 in as wide an assortment of African countries as Ghana, Nigeria, Algeria, Madagascar, Malawi, and others, he takes out a leaf depicting the character of the Ugandan budget of that year, with the following breakdown: Debt servicing 50 percent Import of petroleum products 20 percent Military spending 20 percent Simple reproduction and administration 5 percent Services 2 percent Agriculture 2 percent Miscellaneous 1 percent (Ibid., page 29) It is obvious from this picture that well over 90 percent of expenditure was being consumed by things that had nothing to do with the reproduction of new value in the economy of the country. The terrible thing is that the Uganda example was not the exception, but rather a representative feature of the emerging trend throughout the continent, save one or two countries. By the middle of the 1990s, the African debt had risen to a sum of US$290 billion. From the middle of the 1980s, when stagflation in the United States caused policy makers to raise interest rates significantly, the role of these two institutions changed somewhat. Quite apart from the trickery that was introduced where these two institutions began to play interchangeable roles, the effects of their loans on the lives of communities in South American countries was becoming exposed. This forced them to bear new progeny in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the form of development banks bearing local continental names. The methods which had so ingloriously enhanced the power of these institutions were so telling that the big commercial banks in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan soon followed their example, by means of a variety of specific artifices. And since the market all these financial organs were gunning for was the underdeveloped/developing countries of the South, their profiteering activities directly led to a frightening
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growth in Southern indebtedness. A simple act such as the devaluation of a Southern countrys currency directly translated to larger debt in Southern books in one fell swoop. When these activities are considered in the context of profit repatriations by Northern corporations operating in the South, it soon turns out that debt becomes a great fundraiser for the economies of the North. It should not surprise us therefore that in the year 2004, a transfer of US$340 billion left Southern shores heading north, all of which was in satisfaction of a plethora of Southern debts owed to Northern creditors. In 1996, the World Bank and IMF introduced the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) program, which they claimed was a mechanism for debt relief. The near total lack of relief in the first years of implementation of this initiative led to increasing pressure and, at the meeting of the presidents of the G7 in Cologne in 1999, a new strategy of dealing with debt was announced. The World Bank and IMF would make debt relief available on the basis of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). A stated purpose behind these was to ensure that debt relief funding be used to bring about profitability in the economy. Indeed, it was the profitability itself that would act as the lever, through multiplication of wealth, for raising new revenue in the economy. New debts are therefore provided to the impoverished country, and it is the profitable deployment of these that would gradually reduce the old debts on an incremental basis. In that way, the old debt would gradually be wiped out and be replaced by the new debt. Ostensibly, the regime of profitability introduced by the new money would have other effects in regenerating the economy at large. The new debts therefore would take their place at the bottom of the debt pyramid in a situation where debt sustainability will have been introduced and the country has developed a built-in capability, not only to continue to repay debts, but also to broaden and heighten economic activity. That is the theory advanced by these institutions to encourage growth and reduce poverty. In practice, the HIPC program was introduced to some 41 speciallydesignated countries in the Third World, a large number of which were in Africa, with none of the claimed benefits. The PRSP element, which has been nicknamed HIPC II, was proposed in order to introduce participation by civil society organizations, including NGOs in the
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HIPCs. In short, the latter was introduced by the Bretton Woods institutions, which were changing their language of engagement by replacing their previous top-down posture with a participatory wording. In proper political language, this is nothing other than seeking collaboration. What is obvious, even in the face of the simple words marketing these two policies, is that they are but a measure of debt recycling. None of the fundamental factors that impart illegitimacy to debt are in any way altered. What is mediated is the simple question of debt sustainability on a basis where all the old and totally obnoxious principles are upheld. So striking are these aspects of the problem that it was impossible at the end of the last millennium to come to any other conclusion but the following (as argued previously by the author):
Perhaps the greatest expansion in the financial power of capital has been in the area of debt. Ever since the IMF established its debt management program, the impetus appears to have been given to the financial sector of capitalism to convert debt into a tradable good. So great has been the advance of financial capital on the debt front, that in the last two decades, with 1980 as our year mark, the debts of the poor countries have grown by a factor of three, at the same time debt payments by poor countries have over the same period been multiplied by three. The amazing result is that at the end of this period, poor countries remained owing three times as much as they owed in 1980.
According to mid-decade figures prepared by the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, each year Africa spends about US$15 billion on debt repayments but gets only US$12.7 billion in aid. The New Partnership for Africas Development secretariats summary position is that, as of 2002, total African debt stood at over US$300 billion. These figures from official circles might be suitably conservative. Even so, once more the medicine administered by the multilateral system appears set to kill the patient. The foregoing shows that the debt problem of the South was not an unfortunate product of differential development or some other natural process, but a response by the North to the crisis in capitalism it faced. When the system had proved itself incapable of carrying itself forward by its own boot straps within the frontiers of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, it shifted its own difficulties elsewhere. In general
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terms, it employed manifold stratagems to transfer its burdens to the countries of the South. It multiplied the tentacles of oppression and exploitation. It intensified the rate of reproduction of capital through primary operations in the Southern lands using the revenues generated there as the platform for capital reproduction at home. The essence of accumulation on a world scale expressed itself in a deepened exploitation of all the countries of the South. This is being developed in such a way that every avenue for revenue collection in the Southern countries is opened up, so to say laid bare, in order for it to act as a foundry for new generations of capital all of which are headed back home. Debt is a key component of this exploitative expropriation. What this debt burden implies in real economic development in Southern countries is not hard to imagine. Recurrent expenditure on social services has been dropping every year, leaving people without such imperative social services as education, health, sanitation, housing, power, and transport support. This on its own throws the cultural life of Southern societies back to the Middle Ages. Furthermore, capitalization around critical areas that will grow wealth in the economy regresses all the time. This is what leaves Southern policy makers open to Northern pressures for unbridled privatization and cost recovery drive in all Southern economies. So single-minded and merciless has this general process become during this period that the economies of some African, Asian, and Latin American countries are being forced to break down at many places. Where these economies still retain a central pole around which a national economy can cohere, they have been able to survive. Where the integrative central links have been weak and feeble, however, such nations have collapsed. In these countries it has been virtually impossible to retain and run a state apparatus. Twentieth century nations have thus been thrown back into a virtual state of nature where warlords abound and rule the roost. Tragically this has been the case in Somalia as well as in some of the vast expanses of the Western Sudan and, threateningly enough even in such a bountiful country as the Congo. Capitalisms wholesale pillage of national resources has brought to the brink of collapse some other countries, such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Angola. In rather desperate, if pathetic, efforts to retain
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the power of the state, the rulers of this group of countries have turned to naked dictatorship. The ruling cliques, with or without the veneer of a Machiavellian parliamentarism, have re-fashioned themselves into local despots. The citizens of these countries survive in grinding poverty beyond the tip of their swords. It must be emphasized here again and again, before an ahistorical blame game is deployed by Northern rulers to place the responsibility for this state of affairs solely in the hands of the local rulers, that the center of the problem can only be traced back to imperialism. Here debt becomes a central feature. Clutching at straws, the local despots run out of ideas. They fall back on the one unfailing source of power their barren minds can think of, the fleshpots of credit in the vaults of the IMF, the World Bank, and other debt purveyors. In a national situation where a dictatorial government is in power often the regime, because it operates within the world economy, feels constrained by inevitable breakdowns in its economy to raise credit abroad. Such despots are motivated by a desire not to sustain economic activities, but rather by the villainous objectives of carrying out military style repressions of their populations. Perhaps the most notable example of this bizarre spectacle right before our eyes now is President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. Other similar despots exist in the form of military juntas in such countries as Burma and Colombia. Such despots overload their national budgets with huge military and para-military bills; they provide for huge secret police agencies roaming around using slush funds in acts of suppression; they organize death squads for the purpose of killing, kidnapping, or causing some of their fellow citizens to disappear; they run cross border actions violating the territories of their neighbours; and so forth. Credit raised from foreign sources is often employed to satisfy these types of needs. The question always arises: how can a government go out to foreign markets and raise money in the name of its citizens and yet use that same money for the purpose of maiming and killing those citizens? Clearly such debts were illegitimate ab initio. Their status as sovereign debts is vitiated fundamentally. The nation cannot conceivably be made to accept them as any of its obligations, because the nation never opted to commit a policy of national suicide through debt. As such they are both illegal and illegitimate.
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The South African Debt Picture

The quantum of the odious debt of Apartheid has been a matter of great controversy. First, what was the residual debt that the P. W. Botha government could not pay in 1985? The World Bank loaned US$100 million to Eskom from 1951 to 1967 to provide electricity to the white population and the military. The IMF loaned the Apartheid government more than US$2 billion between 1976, the year of the student uprising in Soweto, and 1983, when the U. S. Congress, under pressure from the international community, instructed the IMF to put a halt to further loans. Various private banks collectively made loans to a far greater extent than these two institutions. What is the sum of the credits raised from the various overseas sources cited above after 1985? In many instances the private banks continued their lending and, in the case of the Swiss banks, escalated their lending until 1989. When South Africa was moving towards its first democratic elections, they dramatically cut further lending. The end of Apartheid did not mean relief from the debt incurred to extend Apartheid. Our government was forced by our enemies, at home and abroad, to recognize Apartheid debts and make them the first port of call for remittances from the national budget. Payments devoted to the servicing of the Apartheid debt constitute up to one-fifth of the South African annual budget. The repayments on debt are actually part of an outlook towards public finance which legislates austerity in every other section of the budget, whilst debt repayment itself remains firm and robust. Particularly segregated and marginalized are those sections of the budget that relate to the social infrastructure: housing, health, water, education, transport, and sanitation. And since the democratic government came to power on a special ticket to bring about a better life for the impoverished section of the citizenry, it is obvious that debt repayment has been allowed to stand in the way of achieving this objective. The debt is indeed a form of national tax, falling heavily on the shoulders of the poor, through which the impoverished section of the population is made to finance its own marginalization. It is another way of recycling poverty.
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It needs to be indicated clearly that the Kempton Park agreements were akin to an unequal treaty, that is to say signed between adversaries of unequal strength. The imperialist powers that stand behind the multinational corporations forced the most grievous conditions on our national leadership in the years 1990 to 1993. Maintaining this compelled debt payment process is a high priority of former Apartheid beneficiaries. A few years ago, F. W. De Klerk visited Switzerland on two occasions. In speeches he openly sought to legitimize the business exchanges that were carried out between the Apartheid governments and multinational corporations in the very teeth of a United Nationsimposed embargo on such collaboration with the Pretoria regime. Others have followed suit. There is a crucial domestic addition to make to the South African debt picture. In the last years of Apartheid, the government also pumped money into the Government Employees Pension Fund, which transferred the funds to the Public Investment Commissioners (PIC). PIC in turn lent some of this money back to the government, resulting in a ballooning government debt. Government bureaucrats, unsure of what the future would hold for them, had an interest in ensuring that their sizable pensions would be secure and received support for their scam by arguing that they were moving towards a fully-funded public service pension fund. This is of course not necessary, as a pay-asyou-go system is adequate to meet the pension needs of retiring civil servants. Today PIC holds an asset portfolio in excess of R300 billion, largely representing money that has been denied to the government for desperately needed social expenditures. What do all these elements of Apartheid debt amount to? A figure of some US$25.7 billion has been identified in relation to the external portion of this debt. This debt is owed by the para-statals, private sector, and government. An amount of some R254 billion was acknowledged by Trevor Manuel as the Apartheid debt owed by the government. This includes primarily debt owed internally to PIC, banks, and insurance companies as well as a portion owed to foreign banks.
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The Ultimate Stakes of Reparations in South Africa

This paper has already discussed the three key harms to which reparations for Apartheid should respond: economic exploitation and theft, human rights violations through mass oppression and violence, and illegitimate debt. The question now is: what is the meaning of reparations in the context of the democratic overturn which is now under way in South Africa? Does the reparations struggle in South Africa have any significance on a world scale? The issue here is simple and profound. It is one thing to conceive of reparations as simply a payment or balancing act to offset harms done, but quite another to see reparations as a means of not just mitigating the harms but also of transforming the relevant society/ies and the world in such a way that the harms are both recognized as absolutely unacceptable and the various powers that be in the world come to reject causing such harm. Put simply, the reparations movement in South Africa, led by Jubilee South Africa, desires to put the impoverished classes of the country in that social condition where they would have been had their aspirations or their reality not been thwarted by particularly pernicious acts by other social groups. Such groups were of course resident, either in South Africa in the form of the government and business corporations, or in foreign countries in the form of banks and others providing financial backing to the Apartheid regime, especially supporting its military expenditures, and corporations profiting from Apartheid. There is a school of thought in the country which would require such adversaries of the poor as companies and the Apartheid-era governments to merely confess their guilt and publicly ask for forgiveness. On that basis reconciliation would become possible. Jubilee South Africa and others do not agree with this school. We do accept that a public admission of guilt is a requirement on the road towards catharsis. We insist, however, that a primary precondition for forgiveness is the performance of justice, willingly undertaken by all the parties. A cornerstone in the performance of justice is the development of an economic process that will rapidly move the poor out of their present squalor imposed by Apartheid towards a civilized existence. Furthermore, it is absolutely essential that such performance should be enshrined in human rights law and
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a definitive human rights culture. In the realm of relations between corporations and the broad citizenry, such human rights law has to extend to the areas of both socially responsible investment practices and labor relations. Investment must not only generate jobs and living wages, but also have the broader effect of stimulating greater upward movement in the economy as a whole. These are the types of conquests which have been won by the social reform movement in the most civilized countries of the world. In that way reparations do not signify the slaying of corporate capacity but rather its civilizing. Apartheid was a set of acts by governments and corporations that stood beyond the pale of acceptable human behavior. In medieval times, already, seafaring pirates were wont to commit horrendous acts against their opponents on the high seas. A progressive codification of human rights law soon came to define some of the most barbaric of their deeds as crimes against humanity and in that way they were outlawed. The most outstanding landmark in the progression of human rights law was registered after World War II. The German Nazis had not only carted into naked slavery whole populations of youth in occupied Europe, but indeed they had gone on to open up gas chambers and the most frightening laboratories of experimentation with the use of humans. A landmark achievement coming out of the Nuremburg trials was a similar classification of such deeds. If the forward march of the democratic transformation in South Africa is to have the universal significance that it deserves, it is absolutely imperative that we not fear to do the same in relation to some of the more heinous actions of the Apartheid era. They need to go down as part of a legacy that is outlawed, not just in this country, but throughout the world especially throughout that portion of the world where colonial barbarism had pushed humanity into a state of de-development to the level of millennia long past and almost forgotten. Such are the terms of political justice through reparations.
Reparations as National and Global Social Transformation

The problem of South African reparations should not be looked at in isolation. It is part of a global problem of colonialism and neo-colonialist odious debt. The role of illegitimate debt in Apartheid in South Africa
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and neo-colonial oppression and exploitation globally helps us see the link between the global economic system of capitalism and the need for reparations. Reparations need to be addressed in such a way that addressing them also addresses the broader forces that have produced the problems to which reparations are a solution. Unfortunately, for South Africans and others, even once the view is accepted that reparations are correct, pursuit is typically premised on the integrative forces in the current world situation. That situation consists of three parts. We are presented with a single world political system. This undergirds one economic system that exists on the basis of, and in turn should feed, one ecological system. The three parts make one total world system. Primarily, these have been gathered together and knitted into one whole, by the capitalist system of production and distribution. Although there is much in capitalism that atomizes and alienates in the same way that it marginalizes and excludes a large body of factors in its internal organization, the overwhelming power of the entire system is universally integrative. This has been an underlying tendency in this mode. During the imperialist epoch, especially that of late capitalism, the power of integration is decisive. Of course one of the principle vectors of the exploitation immanent in the system is the nation-state. Whole nations are carved out which are increasingly being converted into a species of excluded and discarded nations. What is actually being marginalized is not any of the co-existing factors within the national boundaries of the country, other than the human factor, that is to say, those sections of the population that are gradually recognized by capitalism as a class of surplus people. That regardless, all the other resources within that national territory which can be defined as essential for a socially necessary labor process to be sustained are all integrated in the productive effort of the system. In that contradictory manner, where the factors of disintegration co-exist with and are overcome by the factors of cohesion, integration takes place. And one world system becomes the essence of current reality. It is no longer possible therefore, for us to offer any solutions to the problems of the nations of the South, if these are segregated and can only be expressed through division. A cardinal tenet of an integrated world consists in an understanding that separation and separate means with their own institutions can only lead to inequality.
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Within nation-states of the South there is another problem, one which contributed to odious debt and has so far prevented an accounting for the harms of colonialism while at the same time it has extended them. Given these circumstances, measures working in favor of reparations can only be based on the building and sustaining of one world economy not several pieces thereof. Egalitarian features within the building of the nation will actually express themselves at their very best when they work in conformity with other expressions of the same principle on a world scale. This is what makes it so critical in our reorganization of the world that all the political and social movements working in both the South and the North have purposefully to declare war on all those rules in current social and economic institutions that work for the reproduction of capitalism. Reparations cannot be applied within the capitalist system. Any attempt to unleash a truly ambitious reparations process on the basis of capitalism can only lead to further divisions in the political organization of the world, which in turn leads to war and the possible elimination of life forms as we know them today. A consistent policy of inter-imperialist war will be an urge for the extinguishing both of life and of civilization, as we know them today. It is an unacceptable political option. We therefore come to the conclusion that the reorganization of the world has to occur on the basis of new social foundations the foundations of a post-capitalist society. This is a society where the forces of equality are universal; they have become the very life force of economics, of ecology, and of politics. Historically, a society of this kind has been classified under the generic term of socialism. The social experience has been great and highly instructive in which people constructed a number of global political and economic institutions after World War II. In that period a great many lessons, most of them negative, were learned in the organizing and running of global institutions. What will now be required will be a total rejection of all the internal ideological and policy orientations of those institutions. The fundamental orientation now will have to be exclusively egalitarian, both in conception and in driving power. This is what is meant by the oftrepeated phrase the building of a new architecture for planning and running a new world economic system. The institutional base has to run
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along three parallel but interlinking lines of equal strength. A favored construction of the picture would consist of a number of concentric figures ultimately describing a closed circle. While each of the circular arms would represent an economic, an ecological, or a political path, it will be necessary for the circular arms to be united with intersecting vectors that spell out actual programmatic work along each of them. This is a giant institution of world reorganization, which can no longer be dispensed with. The central building of these institutions is of course meaningless if it is not translated to, and interlinked with, national agencies penetrating every corner of the globe where communities, neighborhoods, villages, towns, and cities have recreated interlinking departmental agencies. We need to remember that the actual work of producing goods and disbursing them throughout every social configuration takes place in these locales, villages, towns, cities, etc. Writ on a large canvas this is the manner in which a new world human society needs to construct itself. Does this mean that such a reconstruction of the world can be created deus ex machina, so to say, readymade? Not at all. What has been indicated above is an ultimate representation; sometimes this is called a blueprint. One of the most critical programmatic factors in the new economic infrastructure is a financial center. That is to say, a center from which all enterprise receives allocations and disbursements in terms of the plans it develops on a recurrent basis, year by year: season by season, cycle by cycle. Currently, that center is the centers of power in the global North, which as discussed above both owes a huge debt to the South for colonialism and continues its economic exploitation today, including through debt. In a new and re-planned world financial system, the foundations of new finance must consist of a fund that is contributed on a pro-rata basis by all the imperialist countries of the world. The proportion of contributions has to be thoroughly negotiated by all participating countries. In the course of this, proper representation has to be agreed upon, each standing for the quantum of expropriation and exploitation owed by each imperialist country. As indicated before, the scales thereof will have to be re-weighted in a realistic manner so that the deposits are both feasible and sustainable. At the same time the quantum of deposits for each imperialist country cannot be the same in
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every case. They too will have to be rationalized appropriately from year to year. Finally, the countries of the South, too, need to advance their own legitimate deposits into the common pool at levels appropriate to their resourcing means. The process of deposits has to be run on a recurrent basis from year to year. Naturally, adjustments to the same might need to be made on an annual basis, depending on sustainability features in each case. A critical factor in this process is the appropriations method per country. Naturally the appropriations of countries of the South will have to be exceedingly high relative to their deposits for a prolonged historical period. The social deficits of history will take a long time to be overcome in such a manner that the economic relationship between all countries is brought to an approximate level of equality. It should be borne in mind that from the same financial pool, appropriations are also maintained in full by former imperialist countries for purposes of running their own national economies on a sustainable basis. Sustainability here is defined to mean an ability to run an economy on the basis of requisite ecological resources in a manner that refuels the continued longevity of each factor of production. In that way the privilege of conquest and backwardness currently enjoyed by countries of the South entitles them historically to the future privilege of being taken in tow by the more advanced economic organizations of societies of the North. The outcome of this all-around reorganization of social activity around the world will be the generation of equality and the creation of an egalitarian society on a world scale. The needs of people as well as of all other renewable sources of life will be uppermost in maintaining the balance among appropriation, investment, and use. Between this long-term vision and the realities of today there lies an even more interesting, if also complex, historical process. All the immediate demands of movements such as Jubilee South and the trade demands of organizations like Third World Network are of practical interest. These go hand-in-glove with unremitting demands made by, or on behalf of, nation-states for measures that may be of short-term importance in the life of the nation. Again, these may be inter-linked with the struggles of debt cartels as well as those sections within our
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nations which, if triumphant at any given moment, may call for a process of de-linking Southern economies strategically from the North. All these are legitimate weapons of struggle, but should never be understood as ends in themselves. They are but a means to an end. Reparations therefore can be understood to be a means by which social life in nations as we know them today can be transformed. In that way they could be seen as an agent for creating a better life for impoverished sections of humanity. The need for reparations of this kind is most urgently felt in the countries of the South. In the longer view of human history, reparations cannot be viewed as purely ameliorative measures even if they are seen in terms of restorative justice. There is an inbuilt system of diminishing returns in this method of sustaining reparations. In the longer view of historical development, reparations should be seen as an agency for restoring and sustaining human civilization. And in this manner they cannot be a purely national issue. They are an international phenomenon encompassing the combined fortunes of all humankind and all the fauna and flora that keep pace with us in our natural domain.
Advocacy by Governments and Societies of the South

The obvious vehicle of reparations would appear to be the governments of the South actively engaging with the current forces of world government and advancing a firm position on reparations. Therein lies the Achilles heel of this practical solution. Some people, who are given to an inordinate amount of sentimentality, do not have the means of understanding governments of the South for what they are. Societies in Latin America, Africa and Asia are human societies. As such, the human beings who inhabit these territories are not just an emotional group of Africans, Latin Americans, and Asians cast in undefinable and ahistorical roles. The class societies who exist there are in some cases riddled with the additional bane of caste divisions. As a result, political struggles which have occured here followed clear class patterns. For example, in the struggle against imperialism a national bourgeoisie actually arose in certain specific cases and pursued vigorously a program of struggle. This was designed to negotiate an accommodation within the social system of capitalism for that class as junior partners to dominant imperialist classes in the North.
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That program was expressive of the economic interests of an organic petty bourgeois layer native to those societies. In a few cases, such as India and Brazil, the colonial petty bourgeoisie had previously developed some definite integrity as a putative capitalist formation in their native lands. As such they were prone to systemic co-optation as client underlings of imperialism in foreign countries. In other cases, a bunch of local intellectuals who had great aspirations for capitalism had simply been converted into a ruling clique whose exact class position was still at a formative level. They would straddle various places in local political, cultural, and social life and would thus grab at anything that would enable them to cross an imaginary line to become real capitalists. Indeed in some other countries where internal class differentiation was as yet more primitive at the time when anti imperialist struggle entered the national agenda, there existed no proper national bourgeois class of economic aspirants. Nonetheless, intellectually, the local learned classes culturally associated their aspiration for governance with their own accommodation within the world imperialist system. In real terms, therefore, what we have come to know as the colonial anti-imperialist movement was a nationalist spur that sought the incorporation of this variegated group of aspirants into world capitalism. Phlegmatic, lacking a real political spine, inveterate deal makers at the core, they had no qualms with the capitalist system so long as it turned to them as its local hirelings. All the celebrated intellectuals of the nationalist movement excelled themselves, each by finding a special formula for subordinating themselves to the capitalist system. In India, a great man like Jawaharlal Nehru found a convenient formula in Non-alignment. In Africa, the most militant Africanist intellectual Kwame Nkrumah became content with the political kingdom. None was willing to have anything to do with a struggle against capitalism. This fault line in the strategy for colonial revolution has to be emphasized in spite of the fact that the social democratic content in post-World War II politics tended to incorporate quite a few social reform elements in the politics of the triumphant national bourgeoisie. This insistence can only be qualified by the fact that some of these leaderships, especially in the southern Africa theater, came to adopt an anti-imperialist position more consistently influenced by the geopolitics of the Moscow/Washington divide.
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Given their symbolic roles and their role in reinforcing the problems and impacts of colonialism and neo-colonial odious debt, governments of the South have a moral duty to advocate debt cancellation and other reparations and to embark on unilateral repudiation of their particular debts. Yet, their interest in the capitalist order has made this an infrequent occurrence at best. The case of South Africa post-Apartheid is a graphic example. After 1994, the new leaders denied not only the conception of debt in the hands of Jubilee South formations, but indeed they wished to conceal the very fact that the country was indebted. They regarded the cause of their financial and political masters as being no less than their own. They shared an essential consanguinity with the general political economy of capitalism. As a result it was impossible to rely on their initiative. It was only under the most unexpected, exceptional conditions that any of them would show some readiness to act in a manner more or less cooperative with the strategic position of the debt movement in their own countries. Even then, such indications were an ephemeral affair calculated to serve some temporary motive. From their point of view it was actually desirable that the debt campaigners should never become a mass movement in their own countries. At the same time, recognition of the connections to other countries of the South is crucial. The growing consciousness in a debt movement in any such country enables the masses of the people to begin to understand the international dimensions of their struggle. They see the connections between indebtedness in South Africa and the similar situation of poor people in Zambia, Namibia, Angola, etc. They begin to recognize their class cousins in other countries of the South overseas. Thanks to this self-recognition and a clearer understanding of the international situation, debt movements benefit from the emergence on the international stage of advocates on the debt issue. It is this broader sweep which enables our movement to see and distinguish between the roles of such nations as Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and probably China. These are the terms in which the strategy of debt repudiation can begin to be conceptualized through the action of debt cartels. This was once proposed by the Cuban leadership. This is a far-reaching strategy, which contains the most dynamic, political, and economic considerations for all countries that come
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together for the purpose of defying imperialism for a prolonged historical period. In the short-term, such a strategy in the hands of radical Southern governments and their peoples has the capacity to help our mass movement to apply pressure on intermediate countries like Brazil, South Africa, and India. Although these countries take a political position which is completely servile to Washington, the sheer specific weight of the mass movement in their lands together with the political authority of radical countries could drive them into conjunctural compliance with the demands of the masses of the people. Therein lies the power of the strategy for debt repudiation throughout the Southern world. It is crucial to understand that debt cancellation as reparations is at once recognition of the wrongness of the debt and part of a broader social, economic, and political transformation. It is not a matter of charity for those less fortunate, but a challenge to the injustice they have faced in the past and face in the present and has as its goal elimination of the reproduction of such injustices in the future for all human beings. The difference between these two ways of seeing the debt problem has led to a tension between Northern organizations and individuals advocating for debt forgiveness and debt relief based on Biblical notions, and Southern organizations, such as Jubilee South Africa, and individuals advocating for debt cancellation as justice.
NOTES
N.B.: This article is drawn from the following five papers by M.P. Giyose: International ADR Campaign: A Situational Report, report delivered to Apartheid Debt and Reparations Task Team, Jubilee South Africa, Port Alfred, April 13, 2005; The Reparations Movement in South Africa, Opening Address to the Jubilee South Africa Workshop, Technikon, South Africa, July 18, 2003; Perspectives on Reparations (unpublished manuscript), Port Alfred, November 22, 2005; Dynamics of Unity in the South-North Debt Alliance (unpublished manuscript), Port Alfred, November 14, 2005; General Strategy Underpinning the International Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign (unpublished manuscript), Port Alfred, September 13, 2004.
An Analysis of Four Cases
Debt Cancellation as Reparation:

Patrick K. Sargent
n South Africa, a black girl is staring outside the window of her dilapidated shack. From there she can see the improvements to her town. Soweto, an area in southwest Johannesburg, is one of the poorest townships in the country. However, it now has an entertainment district and nightlife. During the day, tourists pass by her home, take pictures, and then return to their extravagant hotels only a few blocks away. On the island of Java, in Indonesia, a child suffers from malaria and starvation. He will not be fed because his family cannot afford to feed the dying. They are in unfamiliar territory and cannot find the means to get by. In Pakistan, a man sits in the dark of his one-room home. He cannot work because he cannot read and the country has handed its industries over to private corporations. The smell of sewage that covers the ground outside makes him nauseous. He is without water, and believes he will soon die of thirst. In Haiti, a small girl sits beside the bedside of her sick mother. Dying from AIDS and tuberculosis, her mother cannot leave the home to seek treatment. However, it would not make any difference. The nearest treatment facility is several miles away and there is no transportation available. The little girl is too young to walk there alone as the streets are too dangerous. She gives her mother the rest of the clean water and watches her sleep. Although these are fictionalized vignettes, they capture the reality of multitudes of human beings across the globe whose lives are deeply impacted and structured by the effects of the contemporary debt crisis of
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the global South. Although they are many miles apart, found on different continents, and with their own unique histories, the four societies mentioned have all similarly felt the burden of debt. The people that inhabit these third world countries are living among ruins and poverty due to debt incurred by their former governments and dictators debt that this paper argues should be cancelled. These inhabitants who are not true citizens because they are living in a society not created by them but by global financial institutions and larger nations should be provided reparative compensation for debt that has funded corruptive influence, forced migration, genocide, apartheid, and numerous other atrocities. An analysis of these four cases will offer readers insight into the particulars each of these specific cases as well as into the similar cases of the many other countries of the global South. Debt cancellation as reparations focuses on the harms inflicted on an entire country, not a specific people or culture, by its own governments past unethical or misguided borrowing policies and by debilitating foreign involvement in creating and benefiting from national debts, typically through deception, manipulation, and/or coercion, as well as structuring control of the global economy that forces Southern countries to accept Northern terms for entry even as exploited partners. It seeks cancellation of national debts because of the wrongness of the debts incurred. These are often referred to as odious debts, debts incurred wrongly by a government such that later, particularly after a change of government, the people of the nation-state in question should not be held accountable to pay the debts. According to the Odious Debt Doctrine of 1927, Odious debts . . . are contrary to the needs and the interests of the nation [and] are not binding on the nation when it succeeds in overthrowing the government that contracted them . . . The lenders [of such funds] have committed a hostile act against the people; they cannot expect a nation, which has freed itself of a despotic regime, to assume these odious debts, which are the personal debts of the ruler.1 While odious debt sometimes now refers to such illegitimate debts more broadly, when a government is not properly representative of its countrys population and does not act in their interests, for the purposes of the four cases treated in this paper, the narrower definition also applies.
Debt Cancell ation as Reparation
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Debt cancellation and reparations stand together as core human rights issues. The mainstream discourse calls for debt relief in order to help ease the burden of poverty in indebted nations and to stimulate economic growth. The growing call by Jubilee South and other organizations for debt cancellation as a form of reparations has a different ethical foundation. This movement wants reparations to come in the form of cancellation of debt and for the suffering caused by the kinds of illegitimate (odious) debt former colonies typically carry. For example, in South Africa, debt cancellation would serve in part as reparations for the atrocities committed by Apartheid governments. Instead of individual reparations in the form of monetary compensation, debt cancellation serves the needs of both individuals as well as the country as a whole. Although the cancellation of odious debts will not change the past, it will help clear a path to the future by freeing up funds for necessary social services and social investment. Much of the national debt of countries around the world can be considered external because it is owed to the major G8 powers and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The call for cancellation of debt challenges these institutions for funding and directing projects and programs that increased debt and then addressed that debt by providing new loans, resulting in yet increased debt. This debt generates investment income for these institutions and functions as an instrument of supremacy for the wealthier industrialized and developed countries (especially the United States), while it is highly problematic for and strains the poorer part of the world. For countries in the global South, debt puts a stranglehold on economies. This debt hinders progress and limits trade options of underdeveloped and developing countries. The spread of disease and large unemployment rates can often be traced back to a countrys external debt problem due to lack of economic aid and healthcare, and a coerced increase in privatization. Much of the worlds debt is put on the shoulders of the poor when it should be accounted for by poorly-run governments, barbaric dictators, and numerous other human rights violators. Indonesia, Pakistan, Haiti, and South Africa have all had their own share of hostile acts and insatiable leaders and
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are saddled under the strain of debt. Where necessary, this debt should be called as it is and deemed odious, never having to be repaid. Most countries with such debts accrued them during the Cold War. Rich governments loaned money to deprived countries as a strategy of control. The large countries passed these loans over without caring about how they were being used. Most of the money fell into the hands of cruel dictators and poorly-run governments, like those found in Haiti and South Africa, whose leaders manipulated these funds and used them for personal expenses and abuse of power and/or nefarious political oppression. By the 1970s, a recession had taken place, and the interest rates on these loans skyrocketed. The countries had no other choice but to borrow more money to pay the interest on the earlier loans. By the mid-2000s, third-world countries owed the World Bank and IMF nearly US$300 billion. In fact, debtor nations contribute 75 percent of the IMFs own income.2 Many developing countries had functioning economies before the World Bank started investing money in them. According to Kevin Danaher, the structural adjustment policies attached to IMF and World Bank loans may help countries make payments on their old debts and may create some millionaires but the majority of the population suffers low wages, reduced social services, and less democratic access to the policy making progress.3 Using debt as a tool of control, the World Bank and the IMF have provided commercial banks with an opportunity to exploit people and natural resources. By way of loaning money to countries in need, the World Bank successfully controls the debt payment consistency of each country and the people that inhabit them through privatization, interest costs, and the promotion of further loans. Although the World Bank and IMF play large roles in nearly every country in the world, they have played an especially large part in the current debt situations of Indonesia and Pakistan. Indonesia has been under the influence of the World Bank since 1968. Since that time, the World Bank has loaned Indonesia more than US$25 billion. The most noteworthy aspect of the Banks involvement is its funding and support of the Indonesian Transmigration Project. The World Bank loaned US$630 million to General Haji Mohammad Suhartos government project that forcefully resettled 3.6 million people away
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from the inner island of Java to the countrys minimally inhabited outer islands. Due to Suhartos greed and the World Banks outrageously large loan, other countries and banks stepped in and offered economic aid in the form of several millions of dollars in loans.4 According to the World Bank Group, the program granted housing, farmland, and a subsistence and production package during their early settlement years to the people affected by the migration.5 However, many of these people were of indigenous tribes who relied on the land and agriculture of their home in Java. The Transmigration Project resulted in the resettlement of millions of the countrys indigenous people and minorities and the ravaging of the countrys environment and natural resources. The Transmigration Project was followed by a financial crisis in 1997. Due to corrupt tax collection and the failure to correctly manage loan proceeds, Indonesias debt repayments far exceeded the amount of funds being distributed. The World Bank and the IMF stepped in and offered new loans, even though they were aware of the corruption that was taking place. On November 1, 1997, the IMF forced Indonesia to close 16 banks. The IMF has admitted that this was a mistake on its part, yet the cost of the mistake is the majority of Indonesias domestic debt burden of US$80 billion. Before this incident, Indonesia did not have a significant domestic debt burden.6 In 1998, the IMF gave Suhartos government a US$40 billion loan package.7 As soon as the IMF loans registered, the debt rose to US$144 billion.8 That same year, protests erupted in Indonesia calling for the resignation of Suharto and the elimination of agricultural and petroleum subsidies. By the time Suharto resigned in May 1998, the protests had taken more than 12,000 lives. Suharto held office from 1967 to 1998 and is primarily known for his anti-communist position (which resulted in major support from Western powers and the World Bank and IMF) and the hundreds of thousands to millions of Indonesian communist and Chinese-Indonesian deaths as well as East Timorese deaths that resulted because of it. Due to these deaths, there have been numerous credible allegations of genocide against Suharto; however, he has not been tried under Indonesian or international law. Transparency International estimated Suharto to have stolen US$15-35 billion during his regime.9 The World Bank has admitted that nearly 30 percent of the money loaned to Suhartos government was
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taken through criminal activity,10 and evidence has been advanced that the World Bank was well aware of this corrupt handling of its loans.11 On December 26, 2004, Indonesia was devastated by a tsunami. More than 113,000 people died while 570,000 were displaced. Yet, this tragedy is just the tip of the iceberg. Roughly 100 million Indonesians live below the international poverty line of US$2 a day.12 Across the country there is a high risk of infectious diseases including malaria, hepatitis, and typhoid fever. Indonesia has major human trafficking and illicit drug production networks. The countrys external debt problem contributes significantly to these problems. In the 2000s, the post-Suharto Indonesian government was forced by the IMF to prioritize repayment to rich countries and banks over payments for education, health care, and environmental issues. Indonesias external debt remains significantly over US$100 billion, a significant percentage of the countrys gross domestic product (GDP).13 Given the circumstances under which debt was accrued and the corruption association with it, the debt owed by Indonesia to the World Bank and the IMF should be considered odious and the people of the country be given reparations in the form of debt cancellation. Indonesias debt needs to be cancelled in order to stimulate economic growth. Furthermore, more aid must be given without any strings attached. Public spending must increase to ensure the health and education of Indonesias future. Pakistan, with one of the fastest growing populations in the world, has more than 170 million people today, with a median age of 21. In 2009, the adult unemployment rate was estimated at 14 percent, with substantial underemployment, while only about half of its people are literate (one of the lowest literacy rates in the world). The average life expectancy is 65 years.14 Combined with lack of social services, the high population growth has contributed to excessive poverty and unequal income distribution. Like Indonesia, Pakistan has also suffered greatly from natural disaster. On October 8, 2005, an earthquake in Pakistan left 73,000 people dead and more than 3 million homeless. World Bank lending continued in June of 2006, in response to the earthquake, in the form of a four-year aid strategy totaling to US$6.5 billion.15
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By 2009, Pakistans external debt was more than US$50 billion,16 the result of two decades of poor economic decisions. The debt grew more than five times from about 1980 to this period. For much of the 1980s, Pakistan received a substantial amount of foreign aid thanks to its role in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. However, at the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, the aid to Pakistan declined abruptly, creating an economic crisis. Pakistan resorted to IMF- and World Bank-led programs to deal with this debt crisis. From 1988 to 1998, Pakistan arranged three programs with the IMF, but due to changes in government and political corruption, no program was carried through. For fiscal years of 1997 and 1998, Pakistan, alongside India and Bangladesh, ranked as one of the largest borrowers from the World Bank.17 In 1998, economic sanctions resulted in the collapse of the exchange rate and the beginning of a complete economic crisis. Pakistan currently pays about 30 percent of its annual budget for debt principle and interest payments. This includes payments on domestic debt, which stands at about the same amount total as the foreign debt.18 According to Dr. Qais Aslam of Jubilee Research, Pakistan is a nation that is spending only 2.2 percent of its budget on education, 0.5 per cent on its health . . . [a]nd where 80 per cent of its villages are without clean drinking water, sewerage, hygiene facilities, and 60 per cent are without electricity.19 Pakistans debt load is devastating for the country, and directly undermines the health and well-being of the bulk of its population. Its high illiteracy rate is, for instance, directly related to the lack of funding available for education, and has clear implications for Pakistans economy. Debt cancellation is crucial for improvement of the desperate conditions of much of its population. In addition, given the level of corruption reported in Pakistan, new restrictions on the incurring and use of foreign loans must be put in place. Haiti has a long history of poverty and debt issues, prior to the January 2010 earthquake. Before and after the earthquake, Haiti was and remained the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.20 It also had a high debt load, much of which was incurred under the Duvalier dictatorships. During their 29-year reign, Duvalier and his son Baby Doc accepted loans totaling more than US$900 million. Following the 1991 coup against Haitis government, an economic embargo imposed
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by the international community, primarily the United States, prompted the collapse of an already precarious economy, widespread, social dislocation, and an intensification of environmental devastation.21 In January 2005, Haiti paid US$53 million in back payments to the World Bank.22 Both before and after the earthquake, approximately 65 percent of Haitis state budget came/comes from international aid.23 Haitis foreign payment challenge has a long history. After the successful revolution of Haiti to overthrow slavery and French colonialism, Haiti was forced to pay France 90 million gold francs in reparations. This was not just a perverse reversal of obvious justice, where the enslaving colonial power forces compensation for the loss of illegitimately held land and human beings from the victims of its slavery, it was also a devastating economic imposition that some experts hold played a large part in the Caribbean countrys subsequent descent into stark poverty and under-development.24 Currently, 80 percent of Haitis population lives under the poverty line, with more than 50 percent in abject poverty and more than two-thirds of the employable population have no formal jobs, similar to the pre-earthquake situation. Like Pakistan, approximately half of the population is illiterate.25 Other problems abound. For instance, a significant percentage of the population did not have access to clean water even prior to the earthquake. About 120,000 people (of about 9 million) have HIV/AIDS (CIA, 2010b),26 while even before the earthquake, in 2006 as an example, there were almost 14,000 tuberculosis cases, with 7 percent of the tuberculosis cases testing HIV positive.27 However, there were very limited resources and facilities that could help prevent or control the spread of these diseases even prior to the earthquake. In April of 2006, Haiti was added to the list of the World Banks Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Program (HIPC). This program, created in 1996, is the World Bank and IMFs response to the growing debt crisis and universal plea for debt cancellation. According to the World Bank, the HIPC is a comprehensive program geared to reducing the external debt of the worlds most heavily indebted poor countries.28 However, this approach demands that governments privatize their services, disabling the governments ability to raise revenues to help support funding for social services. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the promise of this
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debt cancellation program was partially fulfilled, with relief for US$1.2 billion of Haitis external debt.29 But this is inadequate, because Haiti still has more than US$1 billion in foreign debt from loans made after 2004 and thus not covered by HIPC. Coupled with a dramatic increase in need due to the earthquake, the result appears to be little positive gain relative to debt for Haiti. Just as desperately as before the earthquake and subsequent HIPC cancellation, Haiti needs a comprehensive debt cancellation program. South Africa cannot enroll in HIPC because the World Bank and the IMF have viewed the countrys debt as similar to other developed countries and because South Africas average annual income of US$11,000 per year is substantially higher than the countries in the program. What this neglects is the dramatic skewing of the income figure by the wealth of the minority white population enriched through a long history of settler colonialism and Apartheid, averaged with a large segment of the majority black population that was forced into poverty through colonialism and Apartheid. The result is a wealth-poverty divide that has not been addressed and persists in the post-Apartheidera, making the poor population comparable to the populations of many HIPC-eligible countries. As Dennis Brutus explains, the post-apartheid era is an economic apartheid. Brutus believes that even though the government is no longer exclusively white, the wealth is still in the hands of a minority and for the mass of the people, its still poverty. Theyre still living in shacks in the townships.30 In fact, Osei Boateng contends that the economic situation for black South Africans has actually worsened since the formal end of political Apartheid nearly two decades ago: While average white household income has risen by 15 percent since black majority rule, according to government statistics, average black household income has fallen by 19 percent.31 Even though the new government stresses their more diverse leadership, the poorest 40 percent of the population is typically black, female, and rural. From the late 1940s to the early 1990s, the National Partys Apartheid government reigned. According to the Jubilee USA Network, the National Party forced land removals, rape, killings, kidnappings, and banned political parties.32 In its November 30, 1973, International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, the United
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Nations General Assembly declared Apartheid to be a crime against humanity. As a result of this and other international pressure, including economic embargoes, as much as US$16.5 billion of South Africas total debt of more than US$20 billion was accrued by Apartheid governments to support the continuation of their oppressive system. Unlike the other three cases treated in this paper, however, South Africas foreign debt is not owed to the IMF or World Bank but to private creditors, including foreign banks. Although early financers of the Apartheid regime, the World Bank and the IMF ended their relations with South Africa because the United Nations deemed Apartheid a crime against humanity.33 In 1999, Jubilee 2000 South Africa sent a letter to the president of the Swiss Confederation, because of Switzerlands role as a leading creditor of the Apartheid regime. The letter contends that the people of South Africa should not pay twice for apartheid by having to pay off the debt incurred by the Apartheid regime to support Apartheid once the embargoes began. The coalition explains its mission to renew the call for the cancellation of all outstanding apartheid debt, compensation from apartheids creditors for the immoral profits that were made, and reparation for the destruction caused by apartheid. The group estimated that the real economic cost to the entire South African region, not including the direct suffering of the victims of Apartheid, was US$115 billion. The staggering debt of South Africa has forced the government to pull funding away from desperate health and social service needs. In South Africa, 20 percent of adults (an estimated 5 million) are infected with the HIV/AIDS virus.34 As of the mid-2000s, the prevalence rate was 10.8 percent.35 According to Jeffrey Herbst, roughly 45 percent of South Africas 44 million people are impoverished and unemployment is at 40 percent and the unemployment roll has grown by more than 3 million since 1994.36 With full debt cancellation and much-deserved reparations, funding for health services to assist those with the HIV/AIDS virus, education for the unemployed, and adequate housing for the poor will become available. As the foregoing case studies support, the call for the cancellation of the debts of these four countries as an act of reparation has two aspects. First, debt identified as illegitimate for instance, that incurred by the Apartheid regime to perpetrate Apartheid or by the Duvaliers for
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personal gain should be cancelled on simple principle. An oppressive regime has no right to forcibly commit its victims to payment of a debt at all, let alone when the debt has funded their victimization or been mainly used to fill the bank accounts of leaders and their associates. The general populations of these countries, as well as many others around the world, should not be held responsible for the debt burden left to them by those who grew wealthy off the loans and the governments that abused their power. Second, for their role in creation of the persistently desperate conditions in each of these countries, any remaining debt should be cancelled and new foreign aid should be made available with no interest. Financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, private forprofit creditors, and developed countries should relieve these debtburdened nations and hand the reigns of fiscal control to the people. Through full debt cancellation, an increase in foreign aid without strings attached, and further reparations in the form of creating stable environments, rebuilding basic social services, and providing work opportunities, the creditor institutions and countries have the power to mitigate or end poverty, control the spread of disease, and fight back against oppression.
NOTES
1 2 3 4 5 Robert Howse, The Concept of Odious Debt in Public International Law, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Discussion Paper No. 185, July 2007. http://unctad.org/en/docs/osgdp20074_en.pdf (accessed June 8, 2012). Osei Boateng, Apartheid did not die, New African, 459 (February 2007). Kevin Danaher, 10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank, Open Media Pamphlet Series, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001). Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Independent Evaluation Group, Transmigration in Indonesia, The World Bank Group, Report No. 72, September 1, 1994. http://lnweb90.worldbank.org/oed/ oeddoclib.nsf/DocUNIDViewForJavaSearch/4B8B0E01445D8351852567F5005D87B 8?opendocument (accessed June 8, 2012). Ann Pettifor, Indonesia Pays Price of IMF Blunder, The Guardian, July 9, 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2001/jul/09/socialsciences.highereducation (accessed June 8, 2012). Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO, (New York: Zed Books, 2003). Binny Buchori and Sugeng Bahagijo, The Case for Debt Relief, Inside Indonesia, 61, (Jan Mar 2000). http://www.insideindonesia.org/edition-61-jan-mar-2000/thecase-for-debt-relief-3007580 (accessed June 8, 2012).
6 7 8
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Joseph Hanlon, Wolfowitz, the World Bank, and Illegitimate Lending, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 13 (2), (Spring/Summer 2007), 41-54. http://www.open. ac.uk/personalpages/j.hanlon/brown.pdf (accessed June 8, 2012). 10 Anthony Deutsch, Disgraced and Vilified, Suharto Dies Aged 86, The Independent, January 27, 2008. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/disgraced-andvilified-suharto-dies-aged-86-774734.html (accessed June 8, 2012). 11 Hanlon, op cit. 12 Indonesias Poverty Line: To Make a Million People Unpoor, The Economists Banyan Blog, August 3, 2011. http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/08/ indonesias-poverty-line (accessed June 8, 2012). 13 The World Bank and Bank Dunia, Indonesia Economic Quarterly: Enhancing Preparedness, Ensuring Resilience, December 2011. http://www-wds.worldbank. org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2012/01/12/000333038_2012 0112001745/Rendered/PDF/659780revised000FINAL0revised0Jan12.pdf (accessed June 8, 2012). 14 Central Intelligence Agency, South Asia: Pakistan, CIA World Factbook, 2010. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/pk.html (accessed September 30, 2010). 15 P. Parameswaran, World Bank Plans 6.5 Billion Dollar Lending to Pakistan, AFP on Yahoo! Finance, June 2, 2006. http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/02062006/323/world-bankplans-6-5-billion-dollar-lending-pakistan... (accessed January 14, 2008). 16 CIA, South Asia: Pakistan. 17 Qais Aslam, Pakistans Debt Position and the Question of Debt Retirement, The Lahore Journal of Economics, 6 (2), (2001), 137-61. http://www.scribd.com/ doc/51028895/6/Pakistan%E2%80%99s-Debt-Position-and-the-Question-of-DebtRetirement (accessed June 9, 2012). 18 Ismat Sabir, Pakistan Sinking in Debt, Daily Times, August 4, 2010. http://www. dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010%5C08%5C04%5Cstory_4-8-2010_ pg5_12 (accessed September 30, 2010). 19 Aslam, op cit. 20 Central Intelligence Agency, Central America and Caribbean: Haiti, CIA World Factbook. 2010. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/ geos/ha.html (accessed September 30, 2010). 21 Beverly Keene, Haiti Needs Freedom from Debt Now, Buenos Aires: Jubilee South/ Amricas, April 14, 2005. http://www.cadtm.org/spip.php?page=imprimer&id_ article=1352 (accessed June 9, 2012). 22 We are the Creditors! Manila: Jubilee South, July 2005. 23 Simon Roughneen, Aid Failure Bodes Ill for Haiti, ISN Security Watch, February 2, 2010. http://worldpress.org/Americas/3491.cfm (accessed June 9, 2012); Dan Coughlin, WikiLeaks Haiti: Embassy Warned of Earthquake Vulnerability, The Nation, June 15, 2011. http://www.thenation.com/article/161470/wikileaks-haitiembassy-warned-earthquake-vulnerability (accessed June 9, 2012). 24 Dionne Jackson Miller, Aristides Call for Reparations from France Unlikely to Die, IPS, March 12, 2004. http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=22828 (accessed September 30, 2010). 25 CIA, Central America and Caribbean: Haiti. 26 Ibid. 27 Joan Mangan, Haiti: Cultural Competency and Tuberculosis Control: A Practical Guide for Health Professionals Working with Foreign-born Clients, Southeastern
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National Tuberculosis Center, January 30, 2009. http://sntc.medicine.ufl.edu/Files/ Products/Country%20Guide%20-%20Haiti.pdf (accessed June 8, 2012). 28 The World Bank, World Bank Development Approaches and Initiatives, March 2007. http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/CSO/0,,contentM DK:20109146~menuPK:220468~pagePK:220503~piPK:220476~theSitePK:228717,00. html (accessed June 9, 2012). 29 Jubilee USA Network, Haiti Resources and Background: Haitis Debt Cancellation, 2010. http://www.jubileeusa.org/jubilee-act/haiti-debt-cancellation-resolution/ resources-on-haitis-debt.html (accessed September 30, 2010). 30 Dennis Brutus, South African Activist Dennis Brutus Calls on Barclays Bank to Pay Reparations for Apartheid Profits, Democracy Now! Interview with Amy Goodman, Recorded June 16, 2005. Aired December 20, 2006. www.democracynow.org/print. pl?sid=05/06/16/1356201 (accessed January 14, 2008). 31 Boateng, op cit. 32 Jubilee USA Network, Odious Debt Case Studies Series: South Africa, January 6, 2007. www.jubileeusa.org (accessed January 14, 2008) 33 Ibid. 34 Peet, op cit. 35 Anokhi Parikh and Alan Whiteside, Twenty-five Years of HIV/AIDS: South Africas Policy Challenge, The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 31 (2), (2007), 61-73. 36 Jeffrey Herbst, Mbekis South Africa, Foreign Affairs, (Nov./Dec. 2005), 93-105.
Book Reviews
Tom Mooradian The Repatriate: Love, Basketball, and the KGB. Seattle: Moreradiant Publishing, 2008. 459 pages.
You can never read the same book twice. Unlike Heraclituss proverbial river, all words in a book are cast in type. It would be safe to assume that printed words are as good as dead. Or are they? Most words die slow deaths, going through several mutations over lifetimes that span centuries, if not longer. Thats because words are in permanent transformation, and so are readers, ultimate judges on the meaning of words. Therefore, yes, its the same words and the same letters: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The waters of the Nile are still the same waters except that they arent, and St. Johns God and Word are certainly as immutable as life can be. This introduction may be a little excessive to introduce readers to a book written with little pretense about a footnote in the history of a country that is sometimes not even a footnote in history books of its own neighbors. This is the story of Tom Mooradian, a young American of Armenian descent from Detroit who repatriates to Soviet Armenia in 1947, drawn into the wave of patriotic enthusiasm that swept through Armenian communities around the world, most especially in the Middle East but also France, Greece and the United States (even from the tiny community in Cuba, like a repatriate Mooradian encounters on the ship), as well as in other countries. This resulted in the repatriation of one hundred thousand Armenians, many of them genocide survivors and their children, into Soviet Armenia under Stalin. For much of the twentieth century, words and names like homeland, freedom, Armenia, Soviet Union, Communism, God, had exactly opposite
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meanings for Armenians, who were roughly divided into anti-Soviet and pro-Soviet camps, or pro-A.R.F. and anti-A.R.F. camps. The Armenian microcosm reproduced the rivalries of the Great Powers and the Cold War with an intensity and hatred that only enmities between brothers can stir up. Mooradians book seems to be an attempt at coming to terms with these bitter contradictions. The repatriation the nerkaght became a tragedy in its own right, as the repatriates were unwelcome by local Armenians and the mutual resentment grew over time between both groups even well into the mid-1990s it was not unusual to hear conversations in Armenia in which the 1940s settlers from the Diaspora were described, with no discernible intent to offend, as newcomers (norek). Mooradian is the naf, idealist son of a left-leaning father and a Presbyterian mother, both genocide survivors. As a teenager, Mooradian proudly absorbed the ideals embraced by his father, a foundry worker and Communist union member who had lost three coffee shops in southwest Detroit in the Great Depression and believed that time was running out on capitalism. Hence, when the opportunity came to go back to the homeland, seventeen-year-old Tom Mooradian plunged into the adventure, much to the shock of family members and friends, one of whom even warned him, But Tommy, there are no bananas in Armenia. Shortly after boarding ship on his way to Armenia truth starts to sink in, dragging down with it ideals and dreams, turning them into bitterness and anger. Onboard the Rossiya (misspelled Rossia in the book), Mooradian had been deferential to Dr. Panoughni no first name provided, head of the Repatriation Committee, right up until the moment when he approaches him to ask for his U.S. passport in order to disembark at the Marseilles port, only to be told that he had actually given his American citizenship up. He was now a Soviet citizen. Had he not understood that when he had decided to repatriate? Things begin to sour then. He feels cheated and soon enough begins to hatch a plan to run away from the ship in Marseilles and find a way back to the States. This falls through when the passengers are unable to disembark due to a national strike in France, and longshoremen arent moving a thing.
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His second chance at escape is spoiled when they disembark in Naples, only to find out that the United States does not have a consulate there, that he needs to go to the American embassy in Rome, but he barely has the money for a train ticket and that would be futile anyway, as he does not have a U.S. passport. His stroll through the streets of Naples provides a harrowing glimpse into this corner of postwar Europe, of Italians asking for chewing gum from the Americano and Yiddishspeaking death camp survivors wandering aimlessly in rags. This, and a love adventure in Naples with a fellow passenger in the Rossiya, Kiva, a Jewish beauty repatriating to Palestine, is the last he will see of the world this side of the Volga for more than a decade. That is, if we dont include Constantinople, or Istanbul, as part of the free world. It is telling, both about Armenian history in the 20th century and the book itself, that one of the most poignant scenes, in a story about the big and little tragedies involved in the repatriation of Armenians, is a little incident that occurs on the ship. A Turkish captain and his crew boarded the Rossiya to guide the ships passage through the Dardanelles and into the Black Sea. The mood among the Armenian travelers, including genocide survivors, unsurprisingly turns black. As the Turks get ready to disembark after they enter the Black Sea, someone from the Armenian crowd utters a curse in Turkish at the Turkish crew, which is followed by a rain of loaves of bread fired at them. The Turks did not respond. As the final crewman was disembarking, a loaf hit him in the back:
He turned, picked it up, and looked at the crowd. Then he tossed it onto the deck, and it rolled toward the crowd. He uttered something, turned, and left the ship. I asked Simonian to translate. It is nothing, he said. There is no need to translate. I asked another of the elders and was told in a whisper that the Turk had suggested that we save the bread, for where we were going, there was none.
As it turns out, the Turkish crewman was right. As Mooradian finds out, not only bread was missing, but also food and other basic necessities that would make life challenging for anybody, let alone an American: There was no running water in the building, and the outhouses reflected neglect. This is followed by Mooradians description of the Rossiyas
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arrival in Batumi and his hearing the cries of the seagulls, who mocked him as he envied them their freedom. The book is awash in lines like that, self-defeating in a narrative of this nature, as such hamming undercuts the effectiveness of the gripping story Tom Mooradian, who went on to become a young and famous basketball player in the Soviet Union, has to tell. They shed light on unexplored corners of life behind the Iron Curtain at the peak of Stalinism, of fierce chauvinism in sports competitions among Soviet republics, of Georgians and Azeris cheating in order to beat the Armenians (who refrain from making a fuss about it, in a Pavlovian reaction to history lessons they have learnt only too well), and Latvians stoning the Armenian players after they mistake them for Georgians, who encountered only the wrong kind of warmth in the Baltic republics after Stalin, a Georgian, forced them into the USSR. As a minor celebrity, Mooradian got glimpses of life of the high and mighty too, of a banquet at a mansion in Tbilisi at a time when most people were starving, of sexual licentiousness you are surprised to see there and then if Mooradians juicy stories of affairs are to be believed. There is also a fair amount of humor, one of those scarce goods in the stodgy narrative of Soviet life. Before a match against the Azeri basketball team, the Armenian coach tells Mooradian that they have to concentrate on beating Baku, adding: If we can come out with a victory, I am sure that it would put smiles on the faces of the commissars at the Ministry. Impossible, replies Mooradian. What? To beat Baku? the coach asks. No, Mooradian says. To see a smile on any of the commissars faces. Still, a few things are missing in this book, other than bread and butter. Editing comes first: almost no single foreign word, be that Armenian or Russian, is rendered correctly in the Latin alphabet. Anahid or Anahit, one of the most common Armenian female names, is invariably written, over and over, Anahaid. Other Armenian names are invariably misspelled, such as Momigon (a clumsy rendering from the Russian of Mamigon or Mamikon) or Haratoun ( for Harutyun or several other alternative spellings but the one employed in the book). And this is not easy to understand because Tom Mooradian is a retired journalist, whom a reader would expect to go with a fine comb through his writing.
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The second thing missing in this book is a hero. For all his yearning and his fascinating stories, which make this book worth reading as the tales stay with you for a long time, Tom Mooradian is not the hero of his own story. Mooradian has all the charm of a bragging American kid who confesses he thought everybody in the world should speak English, and goes to one of those foreign countries with evil rulers, smelly people and no running water, much like the US soldiers derided in wartime Britain as being overpaid, oversexed and over here. Yes, he did suffer, but as an admired sportsman he had it better than most Soviet citizens who were more undeserving of that fate than himno matter how misguided or cheated, Mooradian chose to go there, and finally managed to get out and, like him and everybody but one person in the Soviet Union at the time, struggled through sleepless nights not only in Erevan but throughout the Soviet Union, because one man had the power of life and death over each and every citizen. He can hardly be the hero of his own story, as this book is as much about his 13-year stay in Soviet Armenia as is about his affirmation of himself as an American by denial of an Armenian identity, which Mooradian acknowledges in a perfunctory manner, paying little more than lip service to the Genocide and extermination, not unlike a foreign visitor listening to the tales of sorrow of an alien people America, is my country or wrong and by a lack of sympathy for the people who suffered through the long Stalinist night. The mature Tom Mooradian has written this book in the voice of the Detroit kid who was cheated into spending a good part of his youth under Communism in a barren land. This lends the book the fresh tone that makes for absorbing reading. It also keeps alive the bitterness of the fooled boy, selfish and incurious, who admits to dozing off during the long lectures on Armenian history by his repatriate roommate and mentor of sorts, Haratoun Simonian. As often happens in books, movies and life, a secondary hero turns out to be the real hero. Mr. Simonian is an enigmatic barber, an old friend of Mooradians father who is repatriating in the same ship. Mr. Simonian, of obvious Communist convictions yet clear-eyed about what the Soviet regime was, takes Mooradian under his wing, becoming a substitute
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father to this 17-year-old Detroiter in his miserable existence in Soviet Armenia, protecting him with understated fierceness. He is travelling to the homeland for untold reasons, as if resigned to his fate, even though by all appearances all people who repatriated did so willingly. Mr. Simonian is coming to the homeland to die, which he does in a lonely hospital room in Erevan, not before advising, as many good fathers do, Tom Mooradian to get married. No bell tolled for Mr. Simonian as we carried his crude wooden coffin to its final resting place among the volcanic rocks and stones on the hillside cemetery called Tokhmakhquel, Mooradian writes. There was no church service, he adds. No priests sang the hymns of the ancient Armenian church, beseeching the Lord to accept and welcome one of his children into his kingdom. In the end, however, hero or not, Mooradian will always have an ace up his sleeve against any criticism: Been there, done that. And he has a story worth its weight in gold, as good as any of our teenager adventures, a thousand times enlarged by his fateful decision to embark on the Rossiya at age 17 and the choices history imposed on Armenians in the twentieth century, even though it is a matter of debate whether Armenians had any choice. But thats a different story. Avedis Hadjian
Nigoghos Sarafian The Bois de Vincennes (Trans. Christopher Atamian). Dearborn, Mich.: Armenian Research Center, University of Michigan-Dearborn, 2011. 77 pages.
As fewer and fewer diasporan Armenians achieve proficiency in their ancestral language, translations play a more vital role than ever before in ensuring that the Western Armenian literary canon is made more accessible to younger generations. Despite the glaring language shift in the Diaspora, there has nevertheless been a troubling absence of English translations in recent years, specifically translations of literature written after 1915. If literature is understood as offering insight into the inner workings of the society that produced it and providing
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an alternative approach to the dominant historical narrative, this loss becomes even more profound for a diasporan people. Understanding the precarious state of Western Armenian and fearing the threat that it poses for literature, Christopher Atamian undertook the translation of Nigoghos Sarafians The Bois de Vincennes with the hope of awakening a newfound appreciation for Western Armenian literature and, as so elegantly expressed in the translators introduction, inspiring a renaissance of the Western Armenian language, people and culture. Atamians translation marks the first time any of Nigoghos Sarafians prose has appeared in English.1 Originally published in the pages of Nayiri monthly in 1947, The Bois de Vincennes is the product of one of the most innovative literary minds of the Armenian Diaspora. Born in 1902 to Armenian parents and raised in Bulgaria, Sarafians itinerant childhood and adolescence undoubtedly instilled in him an early understanding of exile, a theme that would later permeate his writing. As detailed in Marc Nichanians extensive introduction, Sarafian left Bulgaria for Crimea at the onset of World War I and traveled to Constantinople to study after the armistice in 1918. It was during this period that Sarafians lasting love for language and literature was first kindled, thanks in part to the encouragement of distinguished teachers like writers Hagop Oshagan and Vahan Tekeyan. With the arrival of Kemalist forces in 1922, Sarafian fled Constantinople and settled in Paris where he lived and wrote until his passing in 1972. During the interwar period, Paris assumed the role that Constantinople had previously held as the Western Armenian literary and cultural capital; it also provided Sarafian and his fellow writers with an environment in which to congregate and collectively reflect on their new, seemingly permanent exilic state. In an attempt to more clearly define their literary objectives, Sarafian, along with writers like Shahan Shahnour and Zareh Vorpouni, formed a group and a shortlived literary journal called Menk in 1931; this group strived to forge a diasporan identity with a new kind of literature, breaking sharply and deliberately with the literary style of the previous generation. Through their writing they explored issues of assimilation and acculturation and indirectly approached the enduring psychological trauma of the Aghed (Catastrophe) on the survivors and their children living in Diaspora.
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Western Armenian, their sole medium of expression, served a very precise function in their work: anchoring them in their past while also providing a vehicle for a new conceptualization of Armenian identity. Although the Menk group had dissolved more than a decade before the publication of The Bois de Vincennes, certain themes from the group still feature very prominently in the text.2 The Bois de Vincennes represents a style entirely unparalleled in the entire span of Armenian literature. Even the genre escapes conventional classification; accustomed to writing primarily poetry and novels, Sarafian fused these two genres to create something thoroughly unique: the lyrical, meditative essay. The fusion continues as Sarafian draws on French literary movements to explore Armenian issues; strongly influenced by the surrealist notion of automatism in writing and existentialist notions of alienation, Sarafian freely reflects on a series of seemingly unrelated ideas in this essay set in the Bois de Vincennes, a sprawling park on the outskirts of Paris. The park is an equally prominent figure in the essay, helping to evoke repressed memories in the writer and serving as a source of literary inspiration:
Deep inside the Bois de Vincennes lies a small restless, ever-flowing waterfall. Whenever I go there, the face of a passport-office worker I once met comes back to haunt me. He had a bloody nose and didnt realize at the time that the simple No he uttered would unleash a storm within my young head. And this man with a bloodstained mustache and glasses saw a red flag when he looked at this adolescent, who seemed suspect because he was wearing a soldiers uniform which hed dirtied sleeping outdoors and in train stations. A deserter, perhaps? Red also was the notebook in which he wrote a list of strange names as he cursed out loud. Foreigners, cowards all of them! 38
Throughout the essay, Sarafian seamlessly weaves Armenian historical and literary allusions into the modern backdrop of occupied Paris, and in the process, comments on the future of the Diaspora and his place in it. The first-person narrative also allows the reader an intimate look into Sarafians own conception of his Armenian identity and the complications that arise out of living far from the homeland:
Book Reviews Sometimes I walk slowly under the arched trees as if I were afraid of the man I might become with each new step I take. I change with every waking moment until I become a stranger even to myself. Who am I? What nation and what country do I belong to? I turn away from the world bitter. Unfortunately, I dont do so out of some praiseworthy revolt meant to preserve an identity that comes from my own people, even if I do carry deep within me the cruel destiny of that people. Im all alone. My mind has made the mistake of reaching that place where all beliefs fall, like so many illusions and false idols. There comes a time of self-abnegation in ones life when one believes that one can build the most just and magnificent edifice. We take an entire lifetime in order to become this terrified architect who cant find his way out of his own building. Who am I, who didnt inherit a single iota of my fathers reverence or of my mothers faith? I am ashamed to open the Narek, which my father would often read from at night. Im ashamed to enter a church, fearing that I might have to feign religious sentiments that I dont possess. A desire overcomes me to fall to my knees and cry, and at the same time, pride overwhelms me, and I want to rail against and attack those people who are able to genuflect before God. 52
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Largely marginalized by his peers, especially by those in the postwar literary hub of Beirut, for his attitude towards religion and nationalism, Sarafian and his work may likely be more appreciated by and relevant to contemporary readers confronting similar issues of diasporan Armenian identity and the role of Armenian institutions in its perpetuation. Compared to Armenian novelists from the pre-1915 period in whose winding, paragraph-long sentences readers can easily lose themselves, Sarafians prose may appear simplistic at first glance. But in Sarafians short, concise sentences lay complex ideas that have been skillfully conveyed to English readers through Atamians translation. Sarafians embellished style occasionally expressed through rather arcane vocabulary undoubtedly required much research on the part of the translator whose meticulous eye has helped the translation to read naturally and fluidly. Over the past two decades, Armenians in France have been tremendously diligent in translating Western Armenian literature, opening up the works of Yervant Odian, Zabel Yessayan, Krikor Zohrab and many others to a much larger audience. These translations have facilitated the entry of Armenian literature into non-Armenian circles,
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shattering cultural isolation by allowing Armenians to share their work with the larger literary community. This recent flurry of translations in France has coincided with a sharp decline in English translations by Armenian-Americans, a group that had been very active in the 1970s and 1980s in publishing translations that spanned both genre and era. It is my sincere hope that Christopher Atamians English rendering of The Bois de Vincennes will reawaken an interest in translation among Armenians in the United States to ensure that the greatest number of readers can appreciate the wisdom that Armenian literature has to offer.
Jennifer Manoukian NOTES

1 There is, however, a French translation of The Bois de Vincennes: Nicolas Sarafian, Le Bois de Vincennes, trans. Anahid Drzian, Marseille: ditions Parenthses, 1993. English translations of Sarafians poems have also appeared in Diana Der Hovanessian and Marzbed Margossian, Anthology of Armenian Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Pp. 236-241 and Diana Der Hovanessian, Armenian Poetry of Our Time. Fresno: California State University, Fresno, 2011. Pp. 89-91. Kevork Bardakjians A Reference Guide to Modern Armenian Literature, 1500-1920 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000, p. 465), however, lists no English translations of Sarafians work. For a more detailed history of the Menk generation, see Krikor Beledian, Cinquante ans de littrature armnienne en France. Paris: CNRS ditions, 2001. Pp. 105-129.
Aris Janigian Riverbig. Berkeley, Ca.: Heyday Books, 2009. 256 pages.
Aris Janigians Riverbig is the story of a man and his choices, about renewal and a drive forward for something bigger than just oneself. The novel is a follow-up to Janigians 2003 book Bloodvine that chronicles the life of Fresno farmer Andy Demerjian and his half-brother Abe who inherit their fathers land in Californias Central Valley but let suspicion and misunderstanding tear them apart. In Riverbig, the reader follows Andy as he struggles with his economic, social, and moral choices that have been influenced by those he made
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in the past. The story, set in Fresno, begins with an introduction to an Armenian (Chamichian) and a Japanese (Takahashi) farmer, whose lives intertwine as neighbors and friends. When Takahashi and his family are taken to a Japanese internment camp during World War II, it is his neighbor Chamichian who takes care of their land until they return. The understanding between these two farmers, who also share their ethnic experience with each other, rises above these differences and settles on their mutual drive to farm and sustain their families. Five years later, Demerjian is late for an appointment with Chamichians widow who is looking for someone to farm her land and make a profit. He manages to convince her that he can plant, harvest, and sell tomatoes on this land and sets to work. Later, he runs into some Italian high school friends who offer him the opportunity to manage a crop of corn on their vast expanse of land. The reader then travels with Andy on a journey of managing the success of these two jobs, step by step, decision by decision. The unfolding of this story is, however, written in a way that proves confusing and in turn detaches the reader from the writers intent and story. For example, although the story is punctuated by events and interactions that are described in vast detail, they are either left unexplained or not connected to the story at large or the part that follows. Also, the use of the Fresno vernacular is beautifully imitated but difficult to understand unless the reader has had previous exposure to it or knowledge of it, despite the fact that often the more something is read, the more one gains an understanding of the context. But in this case the more it is read, the less clear the meanings seem to get. The lack of clarity about the storys time period also inhibits a sense of grounding in the story. Although in many narratives the time period may not be a useful tool for the writer while telling a story, in this case a time framing might have provided more of a context for certain events (such as the arrival of his brother-in-law from Egypt or worker conditions in the packing house), which could in turn help provide some clarification to the confusing actions and events described above. Also, character perspective changes are used by the author as a tool to tell the story. But in this case the perspective changes provide confusion as it is not clear who is making the statements and when, as they jump from present to past and person to person.
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Through the life of Andy, this story reveals the many economic, social, and ethnic layers that make up life in Fresno. Andys dealing with his Italian bosses, his interactions with Takahashis son, and the Armenians in his family and community provide a glimpse into a layered past. However, the authors use of the historic events in Andys Armenian family does not seem to be realistic or clear: they are described by those whom Andy meets in the Armenian community, but they are not explained how such knowledge/events drive Andys actions or decision (besides just being some interesting information about the Armenian past). At times, it is exciting that Andy remembers things about his past as they give the reader a bit of information that might explain possible behaviors, thoughts, and motivations, but then the author seems to leave the memory or realization incomplete and disconnected from Andys worries and actions about his livelihood, family, and friends. In Riverbig, Janigian provides a glimpse into the little-known corner of the world known as Fresno, showing its complexity and diversity. Despite its shortcomings, the book traces the intricate details of Andys life and economic survival as the symbol of struggle for many children of immigrants who came to the United States of America looking for safety and peace.
Sossi Essajanian
Archbishop Hrant Khatchadourian Historiography of Fifth Century Armenia. New York: Sis Publications, 2006. 164 pages
Archbishop Hrant Khatchadourian (1926-1980) was the first head of the Prelacy of North America, dependent of the Catholicate of the Holy See of Cilicia, from 1959-1973. After the end of his tenure, he pursued academic studies and obtained a Ph.D. in history from Providence College (Rhode Island) in May 1979. Faced away with a serious medical condition, he passed away eight months later. The dissertation has been published by the Eastern Prelacy through the efforts of his family.
Book Reviews
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The book deals with the six Armenian historians of the fifth century: Koriun, Agatangeghos, Pavsdos Buzand (the traditional name of the author of the Buzandaran Patmutiunk), Movses Khorenatsi, Yeghishe, and Ghazar Parpetsi. Its introduction (pp. 21-37), which offers a historical context and a brief characterization of each historian, unfortunately does not delve into the intent of the author. As Archbishop Oshagan Choloyan perceptively notes in his short foreword, Archbishop Hrants audience is not the scholar, but rather the reader who is seeking to become familiar with the rich foundation of Armenian Literature. The Golden Age (5th century A.D.) had been discussed with more or less depth in English works directed to a general readership, such as A. A. Bedikians The Golden Age in Armenian Literature (1963). Khatchadourian chose a narrower scope, but a wider perspective. While fulfilling the requirements of scholarly research and presentation, his purpose was to prepare a sort of manual about that seminal period of Armenian written culture. To that aim, he devoted one chapter to each author on the grounds of an extensive research of the relevant bibliography in Armenian, Russian, French, German, and English until 1978 (see pp. 127-164). In every case, he introduced the biography, the works, and the main problems of scholarship. The discussion, while thorough in its immediate results, did not include the consideration of finer points in philological or historical questions. Quite readable despite the abundance of details, the book is useful both for the general reader and the undergraduate student who looks for a guide to the subject, as well as for a bibliographical orientation. It may also useful as a first approach to the scholar who may not be familiar with Armenian and Russian sources. It is interesting to mention that the edition has retained the transliteration system adopted by the author, who followed Western Armenian pronunciation with the French pattern of spelling. While this does not follow standard consensus when it comes to scholarly works and it may create various problems to the specialized reader, it seems to have reflected Archbishop Khatchadourians ultimate purpose: to inspire the Armenian American reader of his time with the knowledge of the fifth century historians [who] bequeathed national pride and spirit to the coming generations of Armenia . . . (p. 126).
Vartan Matiossian
Contributors
Alfred de Zayas received his J.D. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from Gttingen. He is a member of the New York and Florida bars. He was recently named the United Nations Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democractic and Equitable International Order. He is former senior lawyer with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Geneva; former Secretary of the UN Human Rights Committee; and former Chief of the Human Rights Petitions Department. He has been President of PEN International, Centre Suisse Romand since 2006.He is author of Nemesis at Potsdam (Routledge) and A Terrible Revenge (Palgrave/Macmillan); co-author with Justice Jakob Mller of The Case-Law of the UN Human Rights Committee 1977-2008 (N.P. Engel, Kehl); and co-author and co-editor of International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms (Kluwer). Publications by and more information about Dr. de Zayas can be found at his website, www.alfreddezayas.com. Mallet Pumelele Giyose is a stalwart of the Liberation Movement in South Africa. To the end of eradicating the oppression and exploitation of person by person, he devoted all his years to this cause both inside Apartheid South Africa and internationally. Through participation in Jubilee South Africa (which he continues to lead), in national and local associations opposed to the current modes of mining, and as part of a number of rural movements demanding land and liberty, M.P. Giyose is an ardent ally of the poor man, of women, of youth, and of other classes in oppressed society who are clear that the demand for reparations permeates all historical and current struggles of the working people throughout the colonial world. Jermaine McCalpin, B.S. Hons., M.S. (UWI), M.A., Ph.D. (Brown University) is an Associate Director of the Center for Caribbean Thought and lecturer of Transitional Justice in the Department of Government, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.His research interests include truth commissions and political accountability, as well as reparations for slavery, Native American extermination and the Armenian genocide. He has written on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its development of a restorative justice approach to South Africas transitional justice issues as well as the moral justification for reparations for slavery as well as the Armenian genocide. He has just completed a study sponsored by the UNDP in Jamaica and the Jamaica Council of Churches on the Prospects for a Truth Commission in Jamaica. Patrick K. Sargent earned his B.A. in English with a specialization in journalism from Worcester State University. In addition to independent scholarly work with Dennis Brutus and Henry Theriault on human rights issues, he was the first student assistant for development of the Dennis Brutus Collection and helped create the organizational framework for the collection.
Haruko Shibasaki is a Japanese activist on the Comfort Women issue whose work has sought justice for former Comfort Women. She is a member of the Violence Against Women in War Network of Japan (VAWW-NET) and has focused especially on Filipina former Comfort Women. She has spoken internationally on this issue, including at the December 10, 2005, International Symposium on Reparations at Worcester State University and the October 4 6, 2007, UCLA global conference on the Comfort Women following the July 2007 passage of US House Resolution 121 calling on Japan to apologize formally for the Comfort Women atrocity. Henry C. Theriault is Professor in and Chair of the Philosophy Department of Worcester State University, where he coordinated the Center for the Study of Human Rights from 1999 to 2007. His work focuses on reparations for genocide, victim-perpetrator relations, genocide denial, prevention and intervention, and mass violence against women. He has lectured around the world and published numerous scholarly articles, including the forthcoming Denial of Ongoing Atrocities as a Rationale for Not Attempting to Prevent or Intervene, in The Prevention and Intervention of Genocide (edited by Samuel Totten, Transaction, 2012). From 2007 to 2012, he was co-editor of Genocide Studies and Prevention and is currently chair of the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts in 1999. Kibibi Tyehimba served as FemaleCo-Chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) from 2004 through 2008. She was also a Co-Chair of the NCOBRA Legislative Commission which significantly increased Federal, State, and Local lobbying efforts in supportof Reparations for the descendants of Africans enslaved in America, and female Co-Chair of the District of Columbia Chapter of NCOBRA. Diana Lenton is an Argentinean social anthropologist who received a Ph.D. from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), where she is a faculty member and researcher. Walter Delrio received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the UBA. He is a professor at the National University of Ro Negro and adjunct researcher of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina. Pilar Perez is a professor of history at the National University of Ro Negro. She is a grant holder of theNational Scientific and Technical Research Council and a Ph.D. candidate at the UBA. Alexis Papazian is a professor of history in the Philosophy and Literature Faculty at the UBA, where he is currently an assistant professor anda Ph.D. studenton anthropologic social sciences. Mariano Nagy received a Ph.D. in History from the Philosophyand Literature Faculty of the UBA where he is a professor teaching undergraduate seminars which are organized and dictated by the Human Rights faculty for different courses of studies within the university. Marcelo Musante is a sociologist at the UBA and a PhD candidate in anthropology at the same university. As a result of this work, this network of people is preparing a book to be published in 2013.
The Armenian Review Transliteration Key is based on the phonetic values of Eastern and Classical Armenian andis omits the use of diacritics. The transliteration of Armenian The Armenian The Review Armenian Review Transliteration Review Transliteration Transliteration Key Key based is Key on based the is on based phonetic the on phonetic the values phonetic values of Eastern values of Eastern and of Classic Easter and C menian Armenian and Armenian omits and the omits and use the omits of vary use diacritics. the of use diacritics. The of diacritics. transliteration Thebecause transliteration The transliteration of proper of proper names of proper names mayusage. vary names may from vary may this fro va proper names may from this system of the widely accepted emsystem because system because of the because of widely the of widely accepted the widely accepted usage. accepted usage. The transliteration usage. The transliteration The transliteration of diphthongs of diphthongs ofis diphthongs also is specified. also is speci als ARMENIAN REVIEW TRANLITARATION GUIDE
ARMENIAN ARMENIAN ARMENIAN REVIEW REVIEW TRANLITARATION REVIEW TRANLITARATION TRANLITARATION GUIDE GUIDE GUIDE
transliteration guide
A a Pp C c T t Yy Z z Ee Uu : ; + = Ii Ll Q q
Ppb pb b C cg cg g T t d t d A a a d 1 P p b1 e, ye1 Yye, ye ye, ye C Z zz c zz g z T Ee e t ee d e1 Y y e, ye Uue z ue z e Z : ;t e ;t e t E + U =zh u =zh e zh : Iii ; ii t i + L l l = l l zh l I Q qkh i q kh i kh

L Q l q l kh
The Armenian Review Transliteration Key is based on the phonetic values of Eastern and Classical Armenian and of diacritics. transliteration of names } may / The } ]j A a a a a omits a the use? ? ? /tz /tz tz proper} ] vary ]from j this system because of the widely accepted usage. The transliteration of diphthongs is also specified.
G H @ > J M # N < O { B
Gg Hh 2 @ ? G . > H j J @ m M > 3 # J N n M < , # N O o < { [ O B b

{ B
Ggk gk k _ Hhh hh h S dz @ 2 2 dz dz W} / tz g k > .gh .gh gh D_ h h Jjch jch ch RS 2 dz M mm mm m XW . 1 gh2 1 2 1 2 D # 3 y, h ,ch 3_y, h , _y, h , _ V R j X N n n n n m mn 1 2 KV < , sh , sh sh 3 y, h , _ 1 1 1 n O oo, von oo, vo o, vo ) , FK { [ ch sh [ ch 1 ch ) o o, vo B b p b p p
[ b ch p
_ Ss W w ] Dd Rrs w Xx d Vvr x K k v )0 k F f
0 f
_ -r Sss W wjv rt Dd Rrsr Xxv ts t Vv rv p ts K kv k ) 0p o k F f f

o f
-r ss wv d t rr xts vv p kk 0o ff
ov u, v3 u, v3 u, v3 ov 3 3 32 ov u, v o3 ui, oy o3 ,ui, o2 oy ,ui, o oy3, o2 2 3 2 3 2 3, o a3 ai, ayo3 a3 ay3 , ai, a ayui, , ai, aoy , a2 3 2 4 4 ay , a4 iv iu, iva3 iv iu, ivai, iu, 4iv
iv iu, iv
3ov ya 3a
3ov iu5 iu5 iu5 3ov 6 5 6 3ov iu ya ia, ya ya ia, ya ia, ya6 6 5,6 5 5 5,6 5 ya ia, ya 3a ia , ya3a ia ia , ya5,6 , ya 5 5,6
3a ia , ya
1 11 In the initial position only.only. the In initial the position In initial the position initial only. position only. 22 2 The letter 3 is3not transliterated inthe the final position. he letter The33 letter is The not 3 letter transliterated is not transliterated is not transliterated in the final in position. final in the position. final position. 3 3When followed by a vowel. hen When followed followed by a followed vowel. by a vowel. by a vowel. 4 When 4 4In the final position or when followed by a vowel. the In final the In final the position final or when position or followed when or followed when by a followed vowel. by a vowel. by a vowel. 5 position 5 5In Soviet Armenian orthography only. 6 In Soviet Soviet In Soviet Armenian Armenian orthography Armenian orthography orthography only. only. only. When preceded by a vowel. 6 6 hen When preceded When preceded by a preceded vowel. by a vowel. by a vowel.

ArmenianReview Nov2012 CorrectedFinal

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Armenian Review

Volume 53 Number 1-4 (SpringWinter 2012)

The cover symbols represent the following:

Book Review Editor

2012 By The Armenian Review, Inc. All Rights Reserved

from the editor

information for sub s criber s

information for au thor s

Introduction: The Global Reparations Movement

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

85 121 167 193 207

Debt Cancellation as Reparation: An Analysis of Four Cases

CONTRIBUTORS Transliteration Guide

Introduction: The Global Reparations Movement

The concept of reparations is not new. War reparations, such as those

The Global Reparations Movement

The Global Reparations Movement

The Global Reparations Movement

The Global Reparations Movement

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Objection From Historical and Normative Progress13

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Objection of Historical Complexity

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Moral and Political Objections

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations and the Politics of Avoidance in America

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

III. The Injuries of Slavery Defined

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

IV. Moral and Legal Justification for Reparations

V. NCOBRA Outreach to Gather and Report the Will of the People

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

VI. HR 40 and the Legislative and Legal Work of NCOBRA

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Reparations to People of African Descent in the United States

Reparations at the National Level:

The Japanese Government And The Asian Womens Fund

Reparations at a National Level

Response By The Japanese Government And Warnings From International Organizations

The Victims Whose Issues Were Never Addressed

Reparations at a National Level

Civil Movement And Victim Recovery

Reparations at a National Level

More Recent Developments

Reparations at a National Level

Argentinas Constituent Genocide: Challenging the

64 Alexis Papazin, Mariano Nagy, and Marcelo Musante

Diana Lenton, Walter Delrio, Pil ar Prez ,

Argentina's Constituent Genocide

66 Alexis Papazin, Mariano Nagy, and Marcelo Musante