A Problem From Hell

On October 7, 1915 a New York Times Headline cried, "800,000 Armenians Counted Destroyed." It was one of 145 stories run by the Times on this subject in that year alone. That's nearly 3 articles per week in a single paper.

But the world was lost in the "The War to End All Wars," a conflict whose size, scope and terror shocked the modern world. At a time when people of all nationalities were dying on an unprecedented scale, it is almost understandable how the world could fail to see this crime as no different than the other sad realities of war.

But it was different. At the time, there was no name for the Ottoman Empire's strategic displacement and execution of Armenians. And while the discussion still draws great controversy - with the U.S. Congress still politically unwilling to use the term - it is clear to me that what was happening to the Armenians was genocide.

Consider the story of Soghomon Tehlirian, recounted in Samantha Power's amazing book, "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide." In 1915, when Tehlirian was 19, Ottoman soldiers marched him, his family, and 20,000 other Armenians away from their homes. At the hands of these soldiers, Tehlirian saw his sisters raped. He saw his brother's head split open by an ax. And then he saw his mother shot to death before he himself was knocked unconscious and left for dead. He awoke to find himself the sole survivor in a field of bodies.

Five years later on a Berlin sidewalk in broad daylight, Tehlirian shot and killed the man responsible for the deaths of his family and nearly 1 million Armenians.

After Tehlirian's arrest for the murder, Raphael Lemkin, a young Polish Jew studying linguistics at the University of Lvov, brought a newspaper clipping about it to his professor. Talaat, the former Ottoman interior minister whom Tehlirian assassinated had not been arrested for his crimes against the Armenians because there was no law under which he could be arrested.

Lemkin's professor explained, "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." In other words, the Ottoman Empire was a sovereign state and thus what is did with its people was its own business.

Lemkin found this inconsistent, asking, "It is a crime for Tehlirian to kill a man, but it is not a crime for his oppressor to kill more than a million men?"