In this keynote address to the Toronto Armenian Community on the 90th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, Gerald Caplan explores the ‘solidarity of sorrow’ between the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides. What these three genocides have in common transcend their differences and all people who believe in justice should work together for genocide prevention, he writes.

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots in the spring rain.

T. S. Eliot wrote these haunting, unforgettable words in his epic poem The Waste Land. This was 7 years before the Armenian genocide, which we commemorate on April 24 and which we have no evidence Eliot was touched by. It was 21 years before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising during the 2nd World War, during the black heart of the Holocaust, which we commemorate on April 19 and which Eliot could hardly have conceived only 2 decades later. And it was 72 years before the genocide in Rwanda, the great genocide of the late 20th century, occurring almost exactly half a century after the world, emerging from the nightmare of Hitler, vowed Never Again. April, when the lilacs bloom again.

The 20th century has gone down in historical infamy as the Century of Genocide. I'm sorry I don't know whether the 1904 genocide by the German army of the Herero people of south-west Africa (now Namibia), the first genocide of the last century, also took place in April. But we do know that the near-genocide of the Fur people of western Sudan has now entered its 3rd April with little respite and no adequate international intervention. We also know from Rwanda and Darfur that Never Again has been trivialized as so much rhetorical bombast by public figures on public occasions, sound and fury signifying little. We now know that unless major strategic or economic interests are at play, if nothing is at stake beyond mere human life, on however massive a scale, then the accurate description of the state of our times is Again and Again and Again.

What we also know, I'm afraid—and this is an equally dismaying observation---is that for a very large number of those descended from victims and survivors of the genocides of our time, the precise concept is in any event NOT Never Again. It's that never again will OUR people be the victims of such a calamity.

I am honored and humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address on this historic occasion. But I also feel outraged and almost morally defeated—as you all must surely be--- that the central message of this 90th anniversary remains the relentless effort to persuade our own government in Ottawa, the Government of the United States, and—I single it out for reasons that I'll try to make clear---the government of Israel, to perform a simple act of justice. We must continue to insist that each of them officially recognizes that in 1915, a classic genocide, wholly consistent with the definition set down 35 years later in the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, was deliberately inflicted upon the Armenian people living in Turkey by the Turkish government and army and their proxies.

It happens to be among the several terrible ironies of this humiliating situation that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-born Jewish lawyer who coined the word genocide and almost single-handedly pressured the United Nations into adopting the Convention in 1948, cited the annihilation of the Armenians as a seminal example of genocide.

I have asked myself why I was selected for this role today. I assume my good friend Aris Babikian, well-known to you all as a community representative, played a key role in this decision. I'm very sorry family matters have prevented Aris from being here today. For those who may not know, I want to tell you that in my view, Aris Babikian is the best single ambassador that the Canadian Armenian community has. NOT because he never stops lobbying anyone with the slightest power and influence about the injustice of non-recognition, although that is true. But because he is THIS community's link to OTHER communities who have shared comparable tragedies. In fact, I regret to say frankly, in my experience Aris is one of only few Armenian Canadians who have shown a genuine interest and who has reached out to such other communities.

And that's why I believe I'm here. Because like Aris, I believe in the solidarity of sorrow and the solidarity of victims.

My own special focus is Rwanda. For various reasons, I came to write a long report, a history, in effect, of the Rwanda genocide. Called "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," it documents the organized slaughter in 1994 of perhaps 800,000, perhaps a million - no one yet knows for sure - Rwandan Tutsi and thousands of pro-democracy Rwanda Hutu, and the complicity in or indifference to this genocide by members of the international community. When the report was published, I found myself unable simply to walk away and begin new and unrelated pursuits. I feared that the memory of the genocide, only 6 years after the tragedy, had already almost vanished, assuming any but a bare minority ever knew the truth about it in the first place beyond a few horrific TV images.

Working from my home, I founded an international voluntary movement called Remembering Rwanda, dedicated to commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the genocide. (The 11th anniversary, on April 7, passed with barely a murmur; I doubt many outside Rwanda knew of it at all.) From the start, I particularly sought out the support and cooperation of Jewish and Armenian organizations.

I had two reasons. I instinctively believed that the solidarity of victims would be obvious to these two communities above all, so that the simple fact of shared victimhood would lead their survivors and descendants to rush to support each other. And I believed (as someone who has always been involved in political action for social change) that for good practical reasons of increased influence, the more of us that we could unite in a common cause, the better for us all.

Despite my long years in the political trenches, I seem to have been stunningly naïve. Of course we found some support. A number of prominent Jews in North America, Europe and Israel lent us their names. A few prominent Armenians did the same. Aris managed to get the agreement of several international Armenian organizations to use their names as well, but I believe that I only ever spoke to a couple of their members in total. During last year's three-day commemoration in Toronto for the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, Aris alone showed up on behalf of the Armenian community. I can tell you how gratified the Rwandans were by his presence. In the dozens of other cities throughout North America and western Europe where commemorations took place, sometimes a few known Armenians were involved, sometimes none at all. Why should this be? I asked a number of people. The bottom line always seemed to be a preoccupation with the Armenian genocide to the exclusion of any other.

This is of course understandable. We naturally all feel most strongly the loss of our own family and kin. But beyond that, the Armenian people, like the Rwandans in certain ways, still must cope with the special burden of official denial. They are assaulted by the harsh reality that the Turkish government to this day refuses to acknowledge the crime that was committed and lobbies incessantly against recognition of the genocide by other governments. I know that this insult continues to drive the Armenian community.

Nevertheless, I must tell you frankly that I found the general disinterest of Armenians in the Rwandan genocide to be not only morally disappointing but from your own point of view, politically short-sighted.

As for the Jewish communities of the western world and the government of Israel, with notable honorable exceptions they failed to respond in a positive manner. I believe that most of the western Jewish and Israeli establishments were more or less indifferent to the Rwandan genocide.

In regard to the Armenian genocide, I must report that these same elements were in the vanguard of denial.

I fully understand that these are very sensitive and delicate matters, and it's much easier not to raise them at all. But that would be running away from uncomfortable truths carrying important lessons. I want instead to try to talk about them as carefully as possible. I'm sure the fact that I'm Jewish- wholly non-religious, even anti-religious, but yet Jewish to my core - complicates the issue considerably. These are thoughts I have tried to work out for several years. Today seems to be an appropriate forum for articulating them.

On the walls of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, are inscribed one of Hitler's more intriguing statements. In 1939, just before he launched his aggression against Poland, triggering the Second World War, Hitler explained that he was dispatching special death squads to Poland that would deliberately slaughter large numbers of Polish men, women and children. But he wasn't remotely concerned about the reaction. "Who, after all," he asked, "speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" In other words, he was saying, with sufficient shamelessness, you could literally get away with murder, even murder of the ultimate kind. For the past eight decades, a series of Turkish governments and their supporters have largely confirmed Hitler's cynical insight, as they have denied the very existence of the genocide and attempted to undermine all attempts to have it recognized.

As it happens, in recent years their bullying and intimidation tactics have increasingly failed, as a growing number of countries have officially recognized the genocide. But to our shame, Canada has not, the United States has not, and Israel has not.

One year ago, the House of Commons in Ottawa voted to recognize the genocide by a large margin, 153 votes to 68. But the entire cabinet voted against the resolution, citing the need to maintain good relations with Turkey. So the bizarre situation in our own country is that the Canadian House of Commons recognizes the genocide of the Armenians, but the government of Canada officially does not.

In the United States, although George Bush promised recognition in his first presidential campaign, he soon enough reneged in the face of joint pressure from both Turkish officials and significant Jewish-American organizations, such as the highly influential American Israeli Public Affairs Committee. This is not often widely discussed publicly. But it's perfectly familiar in American political circles since Congress too has been convinced by this same tenacious lobby to reject resolutions calling for recognition. This lobbying effort was hardly unknown, having been documented last year by the Israeli daily Haaretz among other sources.

I should also stress that on the other hand, and as one would have hoped and expected, prominent among those publicly calling for American government recognition of the genocide were a significant number of Jewish Americans. They included Holocaust scholars, rabbis and community leaders, all of whom had concluded from the evidence that there was absolutely no question that a classic genocide had been inflicted on Turkey's Armenians.

The cooperation between Turkish officials and these Jewish American organizations naturally reflects Israel's own position on the question. That position is an adamant refusal to acknowledge the 1915 genocide, regardless of the evidence. In fact so strongly has this policy been maintained by a series of Israeli governments that it is, unfortunately, fair to say that rather than indifference, rather than the passivity of the bystander, Israelis, with a few notably courageous exceptions, have taken active measures to undermine attempts to safeguard the memory of the Armenian genocide. One of these, I'm afraid, has been to deny that a genocide ever occurred. Here we have the most appalling irony of them all: that those who consider that denial of the Holocaust is tantamount almost to a 2nd Holocaust, have now become deniers of the genocide of the Armenians.

The motives of this almost Orwellian stance are, however, clear enough. There are two.

The first, and the better-known, is based on Israel's determination to maintain a strategic alliance between itself and Turkey in the Middle East. Israel's vital interests are deemed to be at stake here, not to say it's very survival. This is an understandable and easily defended position. But it's a position that places realpolitik and national strategic interests ahead of ethics, ahead of the solidarity of genocide victims, and ahead of Israel's self-declared claim to be a different kind of nation, indeed a "light unto the nations". This is a position that says that even the common fate of genocide cannot take priority over Israel's perceived self-interest.

But this leads to the 2nd reason for Israel's refusal to recognize the genocide, one that I find far more difficult to understand or to share. It is precisely the refusal to accept that the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, or the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, or the Holocaust and any other human catastrophe, can be equated in any way.

As the Jerusalem Post editorialized a decade ago: "There is nothing in history like the Holocaust. It was not even JUST a genocide." The Holocaust must be seen as transcendent, as being in a separate category, from all other presumably "ordinary" genocides like the Armenians'.

I want to say again that these are remarkably sensitive issues, frankly uncomfortable and difficult to discuss. They are felt passionately and unforgivingly by many. For many Jews, both in Israel and the western world, recognizing other genocides somehow diminishes the singularity, the uniqueness, of what Hitler did to the Jews of Europe, and on this uniqueness they are uncompromising. Nothing, they declare, can compare to the Holocaust. It is incomparable. It is unprecedented. It is unique. It is even, in the actual words of two scholars determined to end any possibility of further debate, "uniquely unique".

The significance of this debate has been described by one Israeli scholar this way: "From Auschwitz came two people: a minority that insists it will never happen again, and a majority that insists it will never happen to US again."

This is a helpful way to frame the debate. It points out that the lesson of the Holocaust, or at least the implication, can be seen as either particularistic or universalistic, as either a unique episode in human history applicable only to the Jewish people or a grotesque reflection of the potential capacity of human nature for depravity. Of course every event in history is unique and unprecedented in certain ways, and beyond question some aspects of the Holocaust are literally unique, that is to say, nothing else like them had ever happened before or indeed since. But the same, alas, can be said of aspects of both the Armenian and Rwandan genocides.

I believe that what the Armenian, Jewish and Rwandan genocides have in common transcend their differences.

For what all three have in common is that in each case, a cabal of conspirators set out explicitly and deliberately to exterminate all the members of the target group for the simple reason of WHO they were, not what they did. What all have in common is a demonstration that whether Turks in the circumstances prevailing in 1915, or Germans in the context of Nazi Germany and World War 2, or Rwandan Hutu in the ambience of the 100 days after April 7, 1994 - in each of these circumstances, ordinary Turks and ordinary Germans and ordinary Rwandans perpetrated crimes that no one would have thought them - or any other human being - capable of. I believe that in advance, few of them would have believed themselves capable of such a descent into barbarism.

For that reason, I consider that I too am capable - under unfathomable but feasible circumstances - of perpetrating similar crimes. For that reason, I see in the Holocaust a universal and not a particular lesson.

I see that any people anywhere may suddenly become the victims of unspeakable atrocities.

I see the solidarity of sorrow, not the competition of victims.

I see that all racism, all bigotry, all hatred, all anti-democratic behaviour must be opposed without compromise.

I see the need to fight for the rights of the oppressed and the victimized wherever in the world they may be.

Let me conclude with a quote from an article written in 1918 by a man named Shmuel Tolkowsky. Tolkowsky mattered. He was secretary to Chaim Weizmann, then the leader of the world Zionist movement and later the 1st president of the State of Israel. The article, written only three years after the genocide of the Armenians, was called "The Armenian Question from the Zionist Point of View". It is reproduced in a recent book given to me by Aris Babikian called The Banality of Denial: Israel and the Armenian Genocide, written by an Israeli, Yair Auron.

"We Zionists look upon the fate of the Armenian people with a deep and sincere sympathy," Tolkowsky wrote. "We do so as men [he meant humans], as Jews, and as Zionists. As men our motto is…'I am a human being. Whatever affects another human being affects me.' As Jews, our exile from our ancestral home and our centuries of suffering in all parts of the globe have made us, I would fain to say, specialists in martyrdom; our humanitarian feelings have been refined to an incomparable degree, so much so that the sufferings of other people - even alien to us in blood and remote from us in distance - cannot but strike the deeper chords of our soul and weave between us and our fellow sufferers that deep bond of sympathy which one might call the solidarity of sorrow. And among all those who suffer around us, is there a people whose record of martyrdom is more akin to ours than that of the Armenians?"

Today I would add: "Or that of the Rwandans?"

So I hope that Armenians, Rwandans and Jews, and all women and men who believe in justice and a better, more equitable world, will work together for genocide prevention, will work together to end the terrible calamity in Darfur, and will work together to ensure that when we meet again 10 years from now, we will commemorate together the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, mildly comforted that, at long last, the entire world will finally have come to acknowledge the terrible, indisputable reality of your history.

* Please send comments to