The burning Tigris, by Peter Balakian

In The Burning Tigris, Peter Balakian presents a narrative of the massacres during the 1890's and genocide in 1915 that resulted in the annihilation of 1.5 million Armenians. Using archival documents, he shows the history of how the Young Turks government committed the first modern genocide behind the cover of World War I. The book also explores the American response to the crime through the actions of the American relief community.

The Armenian massacres that started in the 1890's during Sultan Abdul Hamid II rule was a systematized continuation of barbarism committed to the innocent civilians . The Turks, whose empire was collapsing felt threatened by Christian minorities in Anatolia and in the Balkans. Large-scale mass killings was a result of government ordering and encouraging the killings, and of individuals participate and then become socialized by them. The massacres continued throughout the Ottoman empire and culminated in 1915-1922 during the Young Turks and then Kemalist governments.

The inhuman brutality, mass deportations of helpless civilians, looting of property, execution of Armenians in public squares, raping, torture, mutilation, forced conversion to islam, continued until villages and towns were wiped out of the Armenian race, the people who had lived in that part of the world for thousands of years.The Armenian destruction was well known in America through reports by U.S. consuls throughout Turkey and newspaper reporting, protestant missionaries in the Ottoman empire, and the eyewitness accounts. Even though the headlines were screaming about the race extermination and the activists and intellectuals calling for intervention in America, there was the lack of political will in the West to intervene to stop the slaughter. It was the humanitarian assistance to refugees and survivors that would rescue those people who could be saved and help them to repatriate .

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's vision is pertinent today as it was in 1903: "National crimes demand international law, to restrain, prohibit, punish, best of all, prevent."

“In the midst of the first World War a monumental crime occurred against humanity.”

April 24, 2007 marks the 92nd Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Armenians worldwide will be commemorating the First Genocide of the 20th Century with religious and civil ceremonies. Along with the Armenian people, prominent celebrities and statesmen will be participating in this day of remembrance.

During Word War I, The Young Turk, political faction of the Ottoman Empire, sought the creation of a new Turkish state extending into Central Asia. Those promoting the ideology called “Pan Turkism” (creating a homogenous Turkish state) now saw its Armenian minority population as an obstacle to the realization of that goal.

On April 24, 1915, several hundred Armenian community leaders and intellectuals in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) were arrested, sent east, and put to death. In May, after mass deportations had already begun, Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha ordered their deportation into the Syrian desert.

The adult and teenage males were separated from the deportation caravans and killed under the direction of Young Turk functionaries. Women and children were driven for months over mountains and desert, often raped, tortured, and mutilated. Deprived of food and water and often stripped of clothing, they fell by the hundreds and thousands along the routes to the desert. Ultimately, more than half the Armenian population, 1,500,000 people were annihilated. In this manner the Armenian people were eliminated from their homeland of several millennia.

On April 29, 1915, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. United States Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire had stated that “I am confident that the whole history of human race contains no such terrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.”

In 1915, thirty-three years before UN Genocide Convention was adopted, the Armenian Genocide was condemned by the international community as a crime against humanity.

Despite Turkish contentions to the contrary, hundred of eyewitnesses, including the neutral United States and the Ottoman Empire’s own allies, Germany and Austria-Hungary, recorded and documented the Genocide.

Balakian, the author of “The Burning Tigris: The Armenian genocide and America’s response”, says the Turkish government’s efforts to stop media coverage of the Armenian issue dates back to 1935, when it pressured the U.S. State Department to shut down a Hollywood movie about the killings.

After decades of denial and silence, scholars, historians, journalists, and authors like Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak have published books that tell about the killings of Armenians. Orhan Pamuk has been indicted by a prosecutor in Istanbul on the grounds that his remarks amounted to "public denigration of the Turkish identity". Shafak’s latest novel, The Bastard of Istanbul, has caused an uproar in Turkey as it may be the first Turkish novel to explore the emotional realities of the Armenian Genocide through three generations of women in a Turkish family in Istanbul and an Armenian American family in the United States.

Books, DVD’s and videos about Armenian Genocide at Burbank Public Library will shed light on the tragedy that took place 92 years ago.