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http://slate.msn.com/id/2099328/
Can Armenians remember genocide without ignoring the future?
Every year on April 24, people of Armenian descent organize blood drives, picket Turkish embassies, and celebrate special church services to commemorate the anniversary of the 1915 arrest of several hundred prominent Armenians in Constantinople, which was the beginning of the genocide in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered by Ottoman Turks between 1915 and 1923.
The Turkish government, meanwhile, calls the loss of life "a grim story of serious inter-communal conflict, perpetrated by both Christian and Muslim irregular forces, complicated by disease, famine, and many other of war's privations." And it emphatically denies that what happened nearly nine decades ago was genocide.
What may sound like a discussion more suited to the likes of Noah Webster is a sharp stick in the eye of Turkey, and an obsession for people with roots in Armenia, a Maryland-sized country in the Caucasus at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union. The endless arguments over the implications of nomenclature contribute to heightened passions in a region that is already a geopolitical tinderbox. The debate over whether what happened was genocide or simply a series of wartime deaths that had no ethnic motivation makes American battles over, say, abortion or gun control seem by comparison like minor disagreements to be settled over tea and biscuits.