A black-and-white photograph of Armenians surrounding a railway boxcar sits in the archives in the Deutsche Bank in Berlin.

“These are boxcars made for 20 animals stuffed with more than 100 Armenian men, women and children,” said Peter Balakian. “They are being sent to their deaths in southeast Anatolia, to the desert. Half of them would be dead before they were dumped out in the desert of famine and disease.”

Balakian, an award-winning author and professor at Colgate University, used this photograph to show how new technology, such as railways, affected the Armenian genocide of the early 1900s in his lecture, titled “The Armenian Genocide and Modernity.” Balakian’s lecture began Syracuse University’s first Genocide Awareness Week. Balakian spoke at the Winnick Hillel Center at 4 p.m. Monday.

Though the bodies of those lost in the genocide may be gone today, Balakian said the damage inflicted on Armenian culture is still prevalent. He also spoke about the coining of the word “genocide” and compared Turkey’s then-government with today’s U.S. government.

“The buildings, the libraries, the synagogues, the churches, the books, the texts, the cultural producers themselves, the writers, the artists, the professors, the teachers, the religious leaders —all of that has been very important to our understanding as the genocidal crime,” he said.

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish scholar and lawyer who coined the term “genocide” after the crimes committed against the Armenian people by the Turkish in the early 20th century, Balakian said. He said Lemkin was adamant about calling the event genocide instead of a “crime of war.”

Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor, lost 49 family members in the tragedy. His term for mass killing, genocide, was not accepted by the U.S. government until after his death in 1959, Balakian said.

Balakian drew several comparisons between governmental acts of the Turks during the genocide and the U.S. government of today. He said security focuses after Sept. 11 were similar to Turkish government arrests, made because of the temporary law of deportation employed in 1913.

The law gave police the power to arrest ‘every Armenian citizen in his village, city and town under the pretext that Armenians were security threats,’ he said. ‘It’s under the total war environment. We saw this in our own culture with the Bush administration, the Vulcans running the State Department after 9/11. Security paranoia can become a license for other kinds of abuses.’

Today, Turkey is still feeling the effects of the Armenian genocide, he said. In 2005, the European Union said Turkey must recognize the genocide before it can be considered for admittance in the union. A year later, EU dropped the requirement because of the Turkish government haranguing the union, Balakian said.

Alan Goldberg, co-director of SU’s regional genocide and holocaust initiative, ended the lecture by saying schools should also have a hand in acknowledging the genocides. Only a handful of states, including California and New Jersey, mention the Armenian genocides in their curriculums.

“For many of us,” Goldberg said, “our hope is that states will begin to even recognize the importance of mandating or even encouraging the inclusion of the Armenian genocide in its social studies curriculum.”

Published on April 12, 2010 at 12:00 pm