The Armenian Genocide: It happened

NY Times: A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate.

It is impossible to debate a subject like genocide without giving offense. PBS is supposed to give offense responsibly.

And that was the idea behind a panel discussion that PBS planned to show after tonight's broadcast of "The Armenian Genocide," a documentary about the extermination of more than one million Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The powerful hourlong film will be shown on most of the 348 PBS affiliate stations. But nearly a third of those stations decided to cancel the follow-up discussion after an intense lobbying campaign by Armenian groups and some members of Congress.

The protesters complained that the panel of four experts, moderated by Scott Simon, host of "Weekend Edition Saturday" on NPR, included two scholars who defend the Turkish government's claim that a genocide never took place. The outrage over their inclusion was an indication of how passionately Armenians feel about the issue; they have battled for decades to draw attention to the genocide.

[In] the discussion program "Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues," [i]t turns out that there is only one articulate voice arguing that Armenians died not in a genocide but in a civil war between Christians and Muslims — that of Justin A. McCarthy, a history professor at the University of Louisville. His Turkish counterpart, Omer Turan, an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, tries ardently to back him up, but his English is not good enough to make a dent. And the two other experts, Peter Balakian, a humanities professor at Colgate University, and Taner Akcam, a visiting professor of history at the University of Minnesota and a well-known defender of human rights in Turkey, lucidly pick Mr. McCarthy's points apart.

Mr. Balakian, who is one of the experts cited in the documentary, gets the last word. "If we are going to pretend that a stateless Christian minority population, unarmed, is somehow in a capacity to kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, or civil war," Mr. Balakian says, "we're living in the realm of the absurd." ...

To some, this is an issue of history about a relatively obscure topic. But to those of us who have met and discussed the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire with actual survivors, there is no question that it was indeed a genocide, that the Turks and Kurds were responsible, and that it continues to haunt generations of Armenian-Americans.

Here are some heart-wrenching articles I wrote on the subject when I was still with the Sacramento Bee:

• The forgotten ones: The boy who was sold for a silver coin and other Armenian stories of survival

• A backgrounder: Witnesses to genocide

• Gov. George Deukmejian on the Armenian genocide

Today, 19 years after I wrote those articles, I still get emails from relatives of survivors of the Armenian Genocide, who express exasperation at the Turkish government's refusal to come clean about the events in the Ottoman desert 91 years ago.