Armenia and The Law Of Outrage

This  sadness is shared by the rest of the world, and  it happened again, during the second world war with the holocaust, leading to outrage and the phrase “never again”.  The Holocaust Museum in Washington DC has a quote from the Gospel of St. Luke at its entrance: “thou shalt be my witness”.  

by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne

( April 26, 2015, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian)  The Law Dictionary – an online service featuring Black’s Law Dictionary – defines outrage as  injurious violence, or, in general, any species of serious wrong offered to the person, feelings, or rights of another”.  Yesterday, 24th April, marked the centenary of what some call the “Armenian Genocide” – by people such as Pope Francis and countries such as Canada.   Turkey vehemently opposes the use of the term and has recalled its ambassador to the Vatican as a result of the Pope’s characterization of the massacre.  The United States has been shying away from the use of the “G” word for three decades and President Obama calls the slaughter of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire Meds Yeghern – the Armenian term for “Great Catastrophe”.  The term “genocide” was coined in 1943 by  Polish Lawyer Raphael Lemkin who cited the Armenian case as an example.  The term was subsequently adopted by the United Nations in its Genocide Convention and defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole, or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group as such”.

More than a million Armenians were killed as a result of the brutal campaign carried out that day on 24 April 1915 by the Ottoman empire which started deporting and attacking its ethnic Armenians for allegedly supporting Russia – the Empire’s enemy – during the first world war.  A hundred years on, a war of words remains  between Turkey on the one hand, and Armenia on the other, the former angrily and vehemently opposing the use of the word “Genocide”.  Turkey has condoled with the Armenians but not apologized.

The latest issue of The Economist states it is now  time to heal: “Far from being resolved, the argument over exactly what to call the death of 1m-1.5m Armenian citizens of the Ottoman empire  still spreads hatred.  This fight does nothing for Turks and Armenians – nor for the century-old memory of the victims”.  Thomas de Waal in Foreign Affairs  agrees and goes a step further:”Armenians need to be able to finally bury their grandparents and receive an acknowledgement from the Turkish state of the terrible fate they suffered.  These steps toward reconciliation will surely become more possible as a more open Turkey begins to confront its past as a whole.  If that can be made to happen,  then everything else will follow”.

Here in Montreal where I live, teenagers of Armenian origin spoke out.  A 15 year old girl studying in Grade 9 told the Montreal Gazette:”When I was a little girl I heard these awful stories about the  Armenian genocide, and I did not understand why I needed to hear such horrible things.  As I grow older, now I start to realize that…it is my story now.  And I want to be able to know these things so that I can transmit the stories and the culture and the language to future generations”.

They have tears in their eyes and sadness in their souls: a survivor who is now 103 years old told CTV News, Montreal, “my family, my children and grandchildren are all sad, sad..and the sadness will never go away”.

This  sadness is shared by the rest of the world, and  it happened again, during the second world war with the holocaust, leading to outrage and the phrase “never again”.  The Holocaust Museum in Washington DC has a quote from the Gospel of St. Luke at its entrance: “thou shalt be my witness”.

Referring to the Holocaust during World War II President Roosevelt said on October 7, 1942: “It is our intention that just and sure punishment shall be meted out to the ringleaders responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons in the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the Christian faith”.   The next year Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill vowed, through the Moscow Declaration, to bring the perpetrators to justice.  On 26 October 1943 the United Nations War Crimes Commission composed of 15 allied nations met for the first time  in London.  On March 24, 1944 President Roosevelt again issued the warning: “None who participate in these acts of savagery will go unpunished.  All who share in the guilt shall share the punishment”.   This last sentence was reiterated in a different way by Present George W. Bush in the aftermath of the events of 9/11: “Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground. If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocence, they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril”.

We are a hundred years away from punishing those who perpetrated atrocities against the Armenians.  But we are never too far away from bringing closure to an outrage committed against us. We can do this in part by acknowledging wrongs committed and taking steps to ensure that such wrongs are never committed again.  This is called precaution. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft stated that the foremost priority of the United States Justice Department was prevention.  Prevention is based on the legal principle called “the Precautionary Principle”.  This principle   was called the most important idea of 2001 by the New York Times. The Precautionary Principle asserts that the absence of empirical or scientific evidence should not preclude States from taking action to prevent  a harm before it occurs. It is   a moral and political principle which stands for the fact that   if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. This  principle is most often applied in the context of the impact of human actions on the environment and human health where the consequences of actions may be unpredictable The evolution of the principle in international law began in the early 1980s although there is evidence that it was domestically popular in Europe in the 1930s  in the German socio-legal tradition, centering on the concept of good household management. In German the concept is Vorsorgeprinzip, which translates into English as precaution principle.  In today’s political context, the Precautionary Principle enjoys a wide, unprecedented recognition and it has become of such tremendous importance because in many cases, the scientific establishment of cause and effect is a difficult task sometimes approaching a fruitless investigation of infinite series of events.

For the Precautionary Principle to apply, States must take measures according to their capabilities and they must be cost effective.  Also, threats that are responded to must be both serious and irreversible. The Precautionary Principle is usually applied through a structured approach to the analysis of risk, which comprises three elements: risk assessment; risk management; and risk communication and is particularly relevant to the management of risk. It usually applies when potentially dangerous effects from a particular process or phenomenon have been identified and scientific evaluation does not guarantee that the risk could be averted.

But first things first.  We must move on by taking responsibility and being accountable.