Pastor’s Points of Light – April 2004

APRIL 24th –NEVER FORGET!

Governor McGreevey and the State of New Jersey

Declares April 24th “Armenian Martyr’s Day”

Is it good enough?

 

The State of New Jersey has declared by proclamation, April 24th 2004 Armenian Martyr’s Day!!!

Is this the long awaited victory that 89 years of lobby strove to achieve?  No, not even close. 

In his personal letter to me, Governor. McGreevey states that he has “taken the liberty of enclosing a message in commemoration of the 89th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide (emph. mine)”.  

GENOCIDE!!  The G-word!  Wonderful, we got it, public and official recognition by the State of New Jersey….or is it?

When I perused the language of the actual proclamation, the document about which he is referring, nowhere at all do I see the word “Genocide” used, the key point and assertion that he himself claims and the word which we as Armenians demand to hear from our elected officials who represent us and who claim to seek the highest moral ground and justice in all matters of human rights with the search for truth and justice as the guiding principle.

You will see, I hope, that while the document pays the necessary lip service, it falls woefully short of what Armenians demand of their governments.  While we understand that the federal and state governments of the United States have felt compelled to succumb to the great pressure of foreign governments in matters pertaining to the formulation of American foreign policy, with national interests being more important than justice, I feel that this proclamation today is insulting not only to us and our community, but to the collective memory of our ancestors, all 1 ½ million of them along with the hundreds of thousands of orphaned and deported survivors, 4 of which  were my grandparents.

Rather than heal, this document exacerbates the frustration of the American Armenian community by twisting the historical facts that we long to have acknowledged.  What surprises me is not the wording of the official state document, along the lines of the official position taken by our politicians, but that no one has even taken notice!!!!   There is absolutely no mention of Genocide in the document, promised by its cover letter. 

 

 

The proclamation has not only fallen short of what it promised to deliver, but its very wording ads injury to insult to the memory of our murdered ancestors.  The proclamation states that “Armenians who died in 1915,  fighting for the rights of freedom of religion and freedom of conscience.”  My ancestors did not die fighting.  They were not armed.  After having their unarmed husbands, fathers and adult brothers taken away and brutally murdered, they were, stripped of property, and dignity and driven from their ancestral homes and villages like sheep only to be finally either murdered in the Anatolian desserts, sold into slavery, or starved to death.

Without the word Genocide being used in the public and official proclamations, documents and policies of the American governments, which we help to elect, we cannot rest.  April 24th is not a day to remember for the year 2004 alone, as the document states.  It is a day that will forever symbolize the official commencement of the solution to the Armenian Question where Turkey’s government sought to destroy, eliminate and exterminate every citizen of Armenian blood and shred every evidence of Armenian identity from their history—not a skirmish among ethnic groups in the entirety of the fog of WWI, but the beginning of the Armenian Genocide that was systematically perpetrated from 1915 to 1919 by order of the Government of Turkey.

Our country’s continued failure to memorialize and proclaim April 24th as the permanent date of the commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, as have other countries among which Canada is the most recent, is unacceptable.   It behooves every one of us to accept nothing less than a proclamation stating clearly that what Turkey perpetrated was Genocide. 

 Der Shnork