Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

ATROCITIES DOCUMENTATION PROJECT
reclaim Turkish pride. Mobilizing the remnants of the old Ottoman armies into a new
fighting force, he negotiated the withdrawal of the occupying French and Italians, beat
back the Greeks amid a campaign of massive destruction and killing on both sides, and
browbeat the British into relinquishing their foothold at Chanak in September 1922. As
part of his campaign to reclaim Turkey from the Allies, however, remaining pockets of the
Armenian population were wiped out, in a continuation of the Young Turk genocide. Two
areas were hit particularly hard: the French occupation zone of Cilicia, in southern Anatolia,
and the area on the Turkish-Soviet border, in what was left of historic Armenia. Under
Kemal’s orders, Nationalist troops occupied substantial areas of what had been slated as
independent Armenia (a proposal that was watered down into a U.S.-controlled League
of Nations mandate, though this, too, failed to see the light of day), and in a last outbreak
of extreme violence the city of Smyrna, with a large Greek and Armenian population, was
razed in 1922 and its population massacred by advancing Turkish Nationalist troops. Subsequently,
Kemal turned his attention to the modernization, militarization, and industrialization
of Turkey—all goals that had been sought by the Young Turks. The one thing
that had stood in their way was an obsession with racial issues, primarily with regard to
the Armenians and the Pontic Greeks. With those populations gone, Kemal was able to
pick up where the Young Turks had left off and, in so doing, both distance himself from
the Young Turks’ actions and, at the same time, suppress national awareness of what they
had done. It was from this foundation that a Turkish culture of denial surrounding the
Armenian genocide developed, a culture of denial that has to this day been reinforced by
successive Turkish governments.
Atrocities Documentation Project (ADP). In July and August of 2004, the U.S. State
Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored an
investigation into the ongoing killing of black Africans in Darfur, Sudan. Twenty-four
investigators from around the globe interviewed over 1,100 black African refugees in some
nineteen refugee camps inside Chad, along the Chad-Sudan border. In an analysis of the
data collected, it was reported that the following percentage of interviewees (n = 1,136)
witnessed or experienced the following: killing of a family member, 61 percent; the killing
of a non—family member, 67 percent; shooting, 44 percent; death from displacement,
28 percent; abduction, 25 percent; rape (which was believed to be underreported),
16 percent; hearing racial epithets, 33 percent; village destruction, 81 percent; and aerial
bombing, 67 percent. Based on the analysis of the findings, U.S. Secretary of State Colin
Powell (b. 1937) declared, in a report to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on
September 9, 2004, that Sudan had committed genocide (and possibly still was committing
genocide) against the black Africans of Darfur.
Powell’s announcement was historic in that it was the first time one sovereign nation had
formally accused another sovereign nation of genocide. During his testimony, the United
States, via Powell’s declaration, also invoked for the first time ever by any government,
Chapter VIII of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide (UNCG), calling on the UN Security Council to take action “appropriate for the
prevention and suppression of acts of genocide.” The ADP, itself, was historic in that it was
the first official investigation by a sovereign nation of an ongoing case of mass violence for
the express purpose of determining whether the violence amounted to genocide.
Ultimately, the U.S. government referred its findings and concerns to the UN Security
Council, which, in turn, conducted its own study in December 2004 and January 2005.
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