Armenian, Palestinian and Kurdish ‘Unhealed Wounds’ Addressed at First Annual Dink Lecture

Khalidi was a certainly a captivating speaker, but also one who seemed to create some controversy. He himself noted in his opening comments that many had suggested he not say certain things.

Khalidi tried to tie together the painful experiences of the three groups, Armenians, Kurds and Palestinians, which occurred during World War I and the aftermaths of which still linger and sting. He reserved the bulk of his wrath for the British.

Khalidi said that World War I was a major event in human history, during which 15 million lives were erased. “It was in the trenches that most suffered. This awful war,” he said, toppled several ruling dynasties, including the Hapsburgs, Romanovs and the Hohenzollerns across Europe. He stressed, however, that while Europe suffered, “large swaths of Africa, the Pacific and the Middle East” also suffered.

Proportionately, he said, the Ottoman Empire lost the greatest number of its citizens. “Three million perished during World War I, which was 15 percent of its population,” he said, compared to “France and Germany [who] each lost about 4 percent of their population.”

At this juncture, Khalidi did not distinguish the 1.5 million Armenians’ deaths ordered by the Ottoman government from the wartime deaths suffered by Ottoman soldiers and civilians as a result of war and deprivation. While he qualified the Armenian deaths as genocide, his explanation of the events and their causes sounded in some ways similar to official Turkish explanations.

He noted, “The Armenian people suffered the most” and faced a “genocidal exile.” Then he added, “Wartime circumstances made the Armenians an enemy of the state,” as “Tsarist Russia treated the Armenians as pawns. And Imperial Germany did nothing to protect the Armenians.”

He immediately added that the situation did not justify systematic genocide, of course, though he blamed the British regarding the Armenians, saying that they were “being the apostles of independence at the Versailles Treaty” at the end of World War I, without any intention of keeping their promises.

In addition, he said, while France and Germany and much of the rest of Europe, including the Balkan tinderbox which had set off the war are now at peace, “there was no such sense of closure in the Middle East” and that there are still outbursts domestically or cross-border among countries who are suffering from the arbitrary borders drawn by the Western powers.

He spoke about the suffering of the Kurds, whose lands are divided between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, as well as “their cruel disappointment” when the promises given to them by the British were not kept. “Kurdish nationalism started to develop. The representative of the Kurds appealed to the British and they responded positively. They promised them some regions they had already pledged to the Armenians.” At the end, they did nothing, he said.

Added Khalidi, “Again and again they were cruelly abandoned. Thus the short-lived Kurdish Republic” in the 1940s in Iran, whose leaders were executed by the Iranian government, was one example.

In the case of the Palestinians, also, Khalidi said that pledges were made by Great Britain as well as the League of Nations, which were “flatly contradicted by the Balfour Declaration” of 1917, which led to the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands.

“They suffer as well to this day,” he said, adding that “there is systematic denial of what has happened to them.”

In the case of the Palestinians, he said, sometimes they are even denied their identity as a distinct group.

“When there is denial, when it is asserted that there is no case to complain and the victim is the aggressor,” wounds don’t heal, he said.

Khalidi concluded that the Armenians, of the three groups, have done the best, since they have managed to have an independent country, albeit one suffering economically. In addition, he said Turkish civil society is increasingly coming to terms with what happened to the Armenians.

He also touched upon the rise of the Islamic State, ISIS, which has been able to consolidate its power and use social media to its best advantage to recruit members and solicit funding.

Serving as advisors to the Hrant Dink Memorial Peace and Justice Lecture series at Harvard are Taner Akçam, Kafadar and Jirair Libaridian.