The Armenian Genocide Memorial: A Primer

Remember that hubbub a little while ago about the use of substandard concrete in the Big Dig tunnels? That Big Dig scandal was so five minutes ago. Today, it's all about the Rose Kennedy Greenway - the swath of park that will eventually sit atop the crumbling tunnel and brighten all of our lives. Specifically, it's about the memorial to the victims of the Armenian Genocide, which the state legislature said in 2000 should be built somewhere (they left it up to the Turnpike Authority to choose where, and the Pike chose the greenway). Yesterday, Mayor Menino joined the chorus of public officials opposed to the memorial on the theory that it's unfair to have just one memorial to just one massacred ethnic group, and it would be a nightmare if every group got a memorial on the greenway (presumably, all that granite would hasten the tunnel's collapse).

If you're like Bostonist, you're wondering, What's the big deal, exactly? There's a big Holocaust memorial by Faneuil Hall, and there hasn't been much problem with that, so why all the fuss now? The answer, it turns out, is that the Armenian Genocide, like the Holocaust, has its naysayers, foremost among whom is the government of Turkey. Perhaps because the Armenian Genocide took place from 1915 to 1922, its deniers have had more success than those who would deny the Holocaust - the matter is a hot enough topic that the Wikipedia page on the event is closed to comments. Nevertheless, the consensus among historians seems to be that the Ottoman Empire really did kill as many as a million Armenians just because they were Armenians. That hasn't stopped a local teacher, with the aide of a Turkish-American organization, from suing the Massachusetts Department of Education to require the teaching of the Turkish version of events (i.e., no massacre, just lots of inadvertent death, and the Armenians aren't nice anyway) alongside the more historically accepted version.

You might also ask, Why is all this Armenian wrangling taking place here in Massachusetts? Well, Watertown has the third-largest Armenian population in the United States, and Armenian roots and political influence in the Commonwealth are considerable.

Where is Armenia, you ask? Right there between Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.