Dr. Simon Adams
The centenary of the Armenian genocide will not receive
the global recognition it deserves. In Turkey just acknowledging the genocide
remains a punishable offence under Article 301 of the country’s penal code. As
a result, and with an eye on burgeoning Turkish trade and investment, many
governments will remain silent on 24 April. New Zealand should not be one of
them. Britain, France and Russia had no qualms in denouncing the massacres at
the time. In May 1915 they jointly declared, for the first time in history,
that the Turkish attempt to exterminate the Armenians constituted a “crime
against humanity.” But post-war attempts to bring the perpetrators to justice
were sacrificed for reasons of expediency.
***
As the centennial commemoration of the mass slaughter we
refer to as World War One continues, the eyes of New Zealanders and Australians
shift towards the Dardanelles. Although the Anzacs have a sacred place in
popular memory, there is much that still eludes us.
At school I was never taught, for example, that the
Gallipoli landing was connected to the Armenian genocide. But as the Allies
sailed towards Anzac Cove on the night of 24 April 2015 the arrest of Armenian
intellectuals began in Constantinople. The arrests were followed by the first
mass deportations as the Ottoman Empire systematically attempted to dispossess,
disperse and exterminate the Armenian minority whom they considered inherently
treasonous. In all, an estimated one million Armenians died.
The centenary of the Armenian genocide will not receive
the global recognition it deserves. In Turkey just acknowledging the genocide
remains a punishable offence under Article 301 of the country’s penal code. As
a result, and with an eye on burgeoning Turkish trade and investment, many
governments will remain silent on 24 April. New Zealand should not be one of
them.
Britain, France and Russia had no qualms in denouncing
the massacres at the time. In May 1915 they jointly declared, for the first
time in history, that the Turkish attempt to exterminate the Armenians
constituted a “crime against humanity.” But post-war attempts to bring the
perpetrators to justice were sacrificed for reasons of expediency.
Two decades later in August 1939, as another World War
approached, Adolf Hitler apparently asked his Generals, “Who, after all, speaks
today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Hitler was trying to steady their
nerves before invading Poland. But he was also aware that despite sublime
speeches given in Paris, London or Moscow about the mass murder of the
Armenians, most Turkish perpetrators had escaped punishment.
What is the relevance of all of this, you may well ask,
to contemporary New Zealand?
On 1 January Australia ended its two-year stint as an elected
member of the UN Security Council just as New Zealand assumed its seat.
Australia’s time on the Council is widely regarded as a diplomatic success.
Among other achievements, it got the deeply divided five permanent members
(China, France, Russia, United States, United Kingdom) to agree to a resolution
on expanded humanitarian assistance to starving civilians in Syria.
Australia also helped place North Korea’s human rights
abuses on the Council’s agenda. In doing so it ensured that future discussions
are not just limited to avoiding a nuclear confrontation on the divided
peninsula, but will also focus on crimes against humanity perpetrated by Kim
Jong-un’s regime against their own people.
The Australians played a supporting role in mandating
enhanced peacekeeping operations for Central African Republic and South Sudan.
They also helped the Council grapple with the need to recognise ISIL not just
as a terrorist menace, but as posing an existential threat to minorities in
Iraq and Syria. Overall, Australia’s term on the Council helped strengthen
human rights at the UN and advanced the international norm of the
Responsibility to Protect.
What can New Zealand learn from this? The UN remains a
twentieth-century organization struggling to deal with twenty-first century
problems. The power imbalance between the permanent and elected members means
that the system is designed for elected members to drown under its arcane
working methods and formidable agenda. But that does not mean they cannot make
a difference.
The last time New Zealand was on the Council, in 1994, it
was unable to overcome the permanent members’ resolute indifference to Rwanda’s
genocide. Twenty-one years later, Syria’s sectarian civil war has exposed the
historic anachronism of five permanent members who can veto any attempt by the
international community to stop mass atrocity crimes if doing so does not
accord with their partisan interests. But New Zealand’s election to the Council
fortuitously coincides with the best opportunity since 1945 to confront this
problem.
France recently proposed that the Council’s permanent
members sign a “statement of principles” agreeing to restrain the use of their
veto in any mass atrocity situation. New Zealand opposed veto rights for the
great powers at the UN’s founding conference seventy years ago. It should
actively support the French initiative and similarly pledge, as an elected
member, not to vote against any resolution aimed at halting the commission of
mass atrocity crimes. Such actions will increase the political cost of any Security
Council member using its vote, or veto, to protect perpetrators of atrocities.
Not least of all because the line of blood that connects
Australia and New Zealand to Gallipoli also leads to the Levant. In 1915 those
Armenians who survived the death marches and massacres eventually arrived in
the Ottoman territory of Syria. Survivors rebuilt Armenian communities around
Aleppo. An estimated 100,000 ethnic Armenians remain there today, trapped
between the atrocities of the Assad government and those of ISIL and other
extremist armed groups.
In honouring the sacrifice of the Anzacs, New Zealand
should speak up for the one million Armenian dead of 1915 and those millions of
Syrians trapped and crushed by civil war a century later. Lest we forget.
*************
Dr. Simon Adams is Executive Director of the Global
Centre for the Responsibility to Protect in New York.
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